Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (8 page)

Take Arms Against a Sea

by
Mark Jaskowski

Getting hired at Movie Land secured for me free movie rentals, what my college degree failed to deliver. The pay’s atrocious but I think of the money I save on films as the check from a second job. I trot out of here every evening not much closer to making rent but with a B-grade horror flick or grainy forgotten detective story tucked under one arm, ready to pass the time with bourbon instead of popcorn until I fall asleep or Stephanie gets home. She thinks it’s a sign that I should go back to grad school. She doesn’t get that pulp enthusiasts are generally regarded as poor film theorists. I try to explain it to her but there’s no talking to someone with convictions.

Andy got me the job when Stephanie called in one favor or other, which means I try to be civil and wait for him to tell me I owe him. He was vaguely apologetic about the piss test and rolled his eyes when I told him I didn’t use anything. I’m trying hard not to count my blessings, stocking the romantic-comedy shelves much too far before noon.

———

Andy’s house is ancient. He doesn’t try to hide it. Powder-blue paint flakes off on my finger when I press the doorbell. He comes to the door, sleepy or stoned and wearing a bathrobe.

“Wow, Jim. It’s late, man.”

“We need to talk. About Stephanie.”

He nods, yawning. “Sure, sure. Come in.” He closes the door behind me. The place is about what I expected inside, with magazines and envelopes strewn around and a digital scale conspicuously alone on a coffee table. “How’s she doing, Jim? Haven’t seen her in a while. I was just going to call.”

I nod, pacing around the room. “You haven’t seen her?”

“No. Shit, what time is it?” I follow him into the kitchen. “You want a cup of coffee?”

He reaches for the pot and, following his movement, I see it. Set upright against the microwave. Stephanie’s waitress pad. She had it yesterday.

“You haven’t seen her.”

He starts to shake his head, concentrating on pouring coffee. I swing, wildly and with all my weight behind it. A child could dodge the punch but Andy’s not paying attention. The coffee pot shatters on the floor. Cold sloshing coffee under my feet. The mug rolls around on the countertop and I pick it up. It doesn’t quite break against his jaw so I swing it again.

He crumples to the floor, fetal, and spits blood. He tries to form words but gets out nothing but bubbles. I lean down, forearm to his throat and staring him in the face. 

“You haven’t seen her. Fuck you.”

I drag him across the kitchen, through a side door to the garage. He sputters and kicks but can’t find his footing. I let him fall to the ground and shut the handcuffs tight around his wrists.

“What . . .”

“‘Easier with the bitch gone,’ right?”

Andy gives me a gurgling cough and spits. “What?”

I raise my eyebrows and let him work through it.

His face falls. “You dumb bastard—”

I bring my elbow across his cheek. Spatter against the walls, on his face. “Careful now.”

“Jim, come on. It’s not that. It’s . . .”

He’s scooting backward, away from me. I kick him in the ribs until he goes fetal again. “It’s what?”

He whines. “It’s just business, okay? A little scare. Hell, you think she’s never threatened me?” He flinches back, waiting, but I don’t hit him. “I just talked to her, okay. That’s all I was going to do.”

“Or else you break her nose.”

His hands go up in defense. “No, man, it’s not like that. I never, I’d never . . .”

My fist comes away from his nose dripping. He moans on the floor. I’m thinking scheduling and work and his cocky fucking smile and I grit my teeth with guilt and focus on Stephanie’s bruised face instead. I rummage around and find a length of rubber hose and a power drill. I use the hose to lash the cuffs to the water heater. He’s half-prone and struggling. I switch on the drill in front of his face. He bucks forward. He’s writhing hard enough that the cuffs break skin. Trickle of blood. He lunges again and lets out a little moan and goes a little more still.

The power drill has a nice loud motor. The bit looks expensive, durable. I move the drill in circles in front of his face, letting him get the picture. His eyes go wide. He pushes himself back as far as he can.

I start with the feet.

———

Andy’s stove is old and gas-powered. I turn everything on and toss my bloody clothes inside. There’s an extra set in the trunk of the car. I leave his sink stained red from washing my hands, but if I understand pilot lights correctly, it shouldn’t matter. I light a candle and nab three thousand dollars in crumpled bills from a drawer before walking out to the car nude but for my boots.

I roll the window down to the cool night. My clothes smell like dryer sheets. Stephanie’s touch. She finds it funny, I suspect, to be all domestic sometimes. My heart tugs at my stomach and my head threatens to spin off and I tell myself to breathe, breathe. You did the right thing, Jim. I pull the threads all toward each other, piecing it together while trying to keep my eyes on the yellow line. It seems rather suspect. Overheard conversation, a good bit of assumption, the sneaking suspicion that I maybe flew off the handle a little bit there. Like maybe my head got muddied up. It does that sometimes.

But it didn’t feel muddied when I left home. Two hours ago, the whole situation was all kinds of clear. Stephanie came home with a broken nose and a story, a story about the door to the kitchen at the diner where she works and how she’d been telling them to fix it for months, but I’d heard Andy talking to his druggie lackeys. I’d quoted it to his face back there and I saw the reaction all over him. And when your girlfriend has a dealer partner who’s threatening things all over the place, so you can hear them, maybe there’s only one thing to do if you want to keep looking in the mirror.

Running through it, it sounds pretty thin. I take a cigarette from Stephanie’s pack in the cupholder. I quit years ago but it helps. I focus on the road, on the smell of my shirt, on the smoke. Have to get home. Need to get near Stephanie. She’s calming. She’s waiting for me, asleep, at the center of the world and all I have to do is drive.

———

I scrub the handcuffs clean with an old toothbrush. Pink foam collecting in the drain. I rinse them down and let the water take care of the sink before I tiptoe in the bedroom and clip the cuffs back to the headboard, slow and easy so the clicking doesn’t wake her. She’s wrapped herself in the entire blanket and spread out to take over the whole damn bed. She the-opposite-of-snores. Some nights I wake sweating and wonder if she’s even breathing. She always is.

Her leg’s sticking through the blanket, the only exposed skin on the bed. I can see the tattoo wrapping around her ankle, script doubling back on itself, but it’s too dark to make out the “Don’t mourn; Organize!” that she covers with her slacks or boots before going to work every day. She explained it to me once, but I don’t quite remember what it means. Something about being the only communist around and without her organization when we moved to this town, she felt like she had to get it. She explained the dialectics of drug dealing to me, too, and though I’m a poor study at such things, I detected the sarcasm.

She’s got the bed pretty well staked out, so I take the couch in the living room. I lie back and close my eyes but there’s this restlessness I can’t shake. My mind’s clear now, empty, but there’s this twitching feeling in my legs and I feel like I have to move. I feel alert, in control. Assertive. It’ll fade tomorrow at work but for now I lie still and enjoy it.

———

The lack of sleep clings in a film to my eyes and I’m blinking too much. It’s just the new guy and me this morning. When I told him to take the register, he didn’t argue. It’s a bit less work than stocking shelves if we’re not too busy, which is always. He took a look at my face and decided not to ask questions.

I’m feeling good, all told, but I don’t feel like dealing with customers, especially if one knows Andy, asks why he’s not here. And it took me a bit to fall asleep last night, so I look worse than I am. The trick here is going to be to sink into stocking shelves, like I’m blocking out everything I’m thinking and just going through the motions. It shouldn’t be too hard.

I get seven DVDs into the bin of new releases I’m working on, to which of course my free-movie perk doesn’t apply, before a haggard, salt-and-pepper bastard hauls two young boys in and unleashes them on the children’s section. I take one look over at the new guy at the counter and try not to grin to myself. The kids have voices like razor blades. The dad’s face is resigned and tired and there’s no damn way that he’s getting the kids out of here in less than an hour. After a couple of seconds indulged watching the new guy sweat, I turn back to the bin of movies. Company protocol is to ask if you can help him every twelve minutes. I glance to the clock, not that I want to call the kid on it. I just want to see. He called old Andy “sir” when he first started a couple weeks ago, and though my stomach did a little tap dance, it set Andy anew on his rising-up-the-ranks, by-your-own-bootstraps kick, the fading of which I’d enjoyed. I try not to think about what happened next and focus on the shelves.

While the new guy handles the poor dad I slip a gory little slasher flick behind an animated children’s film. I’m seeing a manicured mother storming in with fire and brimstone and offense taken at little Jimmy seeing such things, the new guy’s flustered face as he calls the boss in to handle it, the other customers trying not to look like they’re watching. It’s beautiful and I’ll be long gone by then. It’s a pathetic form of rebellion, but here I am.

My last shift ends in twenty minutes.

———

I walk the thirteen blocks to Stephanie’s diner after work and take a table in the far corner. It’s like walking into a cloud of grease and disinfectant. Incandescent lights burn themselves low before anyone thinks of replacing them, so the place feels like a relic, a museum representation of a long-dead breed of greasy spoon. It’s a charming little hole, run by an old married couple who probably remember sharecropping and treat their employees accordingly.

I don’t recognize Stephanie at first, as usual. Her hair is tied in a loose, functional ponytail and she plays up the Southern-waitress charm angle, calling everyone at the table next to me “hun” or “sweetie” as she gives them their receipts. I watch the transaction as discreetly as I can, by the reflection of the participants in the dirty window, and I still almost miss it. The leather booklet she hands them, filled as it is with four people’s separate checks and credit cards, barely shows the extra bulge of a carefully-placed baggie. I smile to myself, masking it as best I can with the menu. She’s at least better than Andy.

Andy’s code was never particularly subtle. The customer came in, picked out a movie, and brought it to the register, making the joke about how his girlfriend or wife or buddy told him that, out of five stars, they’d give it ten, or twenty, or, on a lucrative day, fifty. I kept waiting for one of them to slip up and say “grams” instead of “stars,” but Andy catered to a young, hip clientele, and they seemed to get off on the spy-film kitsch. He’d stuff a baggie, the large kind, so the shit was sufficiently spread out, into the movie case, under the counter where the well-accounted-for security cameras couldn’t see it, and gave the customer far too little change before sliding the movie to them with a warning about the due date.

I catch her eye and she glides over. “How’r’ya doin’ today, darlin’?”

“The accent is flawless.”

“Why, thank you.”

“Just brilliant caricature.” 

She pulls out a new waitress pad, without the worn edges or phone numbers in the back, borrowed, and flips to an empty page. “Getcha somethin’?”

“Coffee. How’s business?”

She casts her eyes around. “Look at the place.”

“Yeah. How’s business?”

“Oh. It pays the bills.” She nudges my leg with her foot. “It’s a better system than Andy’s got, anyway.” I’m glad that the poor lighting has my face in shadows. I’ve decided I won’t tell her. Just let it ride. She leans in a little, like she’s asking me to repeat an order or explaining what’s in a menu item in case anyone’s watching, stalling for a little break.

The makeup she never wears anywhere but work is caked on a little more today so the bruises under her eyes just look like she’s tired. I wonder how she manages the charm angle, sometimes, with how much she clearly hates doing this. The way I ride the movie rentals at work, though, she provides us with groceries lifted from the kitchen a few times a week. This is a bit more useful than my contribution, I suppose. I’m not saying that we wouldn’t get by without petty theft, but it would be a damned sight harder.

She mock-scribbles in her pad. “You’re heading home, yeah? Off work?”

I nod. “Slow day. I kinda like that job sometimes.”

She snorts. “Yeah, I’m sure it’s peaches.” She’s turning the Southern thing back on. “Coffee’ll be up in a sec, darlin’.”

She closes her pad and heads for the kitchen. I fold the napkin into smaller and smaller squares on the table, watching her go. She leans in through the order window and shouts something. Someone yells back, because she has to turn around and repeat herself. She touches her fingers to her temple, briefly, and I can only imagine what goes on in her head all day. She used to talk to me all the time about her coworkers, like a grand army just waiting to be mobilized. Maybe she’s right, but in this town, when you talk about a union you’re talking about the Civil War, and she left her organization behind when we left the city. She hasn’t really talked to me about it since, but it seems like she forces it down when she goes to work and plasters that smile on her face. I wonder if it’s something like schizophrenia for her, working.

———

Waiting for Stephanie to get home, I realize that I didn’t tell her at the diner that I’d quit my job. It takes me a minute to process. I don’t have any plan, and I suppose it’ll raise a couple eyebrows with the cops, if they bother to look, that I quit right after Andy died. This should trouble me, I know, but it just glides into the mess of the last few days, another point I can’t quite make sense of, and I’m starting to get those too-late second thoughts, the feeling the suicide case gets the moment after his feet leave the bridge. My breathing picks up a little bit and I can feel the sweat beading on the back of my neck until I turn on the television and flip to a movie channel. A diversion. I’m already missing the free rentals, but it’s a third-tier horror film. The channel’s got my number.