What we reckon, p.9
What We Reckon, page 9
“I ain’t got time for your bullshit tonight,” she snapped. “Shut the hell up and fork it over.”
The Muslim furrowed his dark brow and looked her over once or twice. His eyes shone like rubies. He had a snowy beard and he rubbed his palm into it.
“Satan’s plan is to excite enmity and hatred within you,” he said. “With intoxicants. To hinder you from remembrance of God and prayer.” He put both hands on the counter. “Will ye refrain?”
“Just give me the goddamn bath salts,” she spat. She turned her back to the counter and watched his reflection in the beer cooler glass down the aisle. She waited until he collected her purchase and rang up her order. She paid and left.
She didn’t care how she found them as she kicked open the door of the Light House trailer. Should they be fucking in some corner of a room or cooking their damn meal or canoodling out on the goddamn back stoop…she didn’t care in the slightest. She had a mission. She would not be sated.
Summer found them at the dinner table, supping by candlelight.
Bless their fucking hearts.
Jack stood from the table, a paper napkin still tucked into his belt. He raised out both hands like maybe Summer carried a scattergun, instead of two fresh-rolled joints.
“Summer,” he said, “please don’t start nothing. We’re having a nice, quiet dinner, and we—”
“Jackie, how dare you?” Summer smiled best she could, but this settled Lindsay none the better. She gathered what possessions she could and quarried them into her lap. “You always think the worst of me.”
“Well…I—”
“I’ve turned over a whole new leaf, Jackie.” She held out the two joints. “I meant to give you these earlier. Just something to help the two of you relax on your wonderful date.”
Jack cocked his head to the side. “What are you up to, Summer?”
“You hurt my feelings, Jackie,” she said. Through clenched teeth, she added, “Sometimes I think that’s all we do: hurt each other. This is where I put my foot down and end the cycle.”
She stole a look toward Lindsay, frightened in the corner. Her big eyes threatened to melt even Summer’s angry heart. Her grip on the twin joints weakened. She closed her eyes and swallowed at the nothing in her throat, and when she opened them again, she shoved the joints into Jack’s outstretched hand.
“And when you smoke them,” she said, “I want only that you should think of me.”
“Thanks, Summer,” said Jack.
Summer said not another word, simply went out the way she’d come. She drove directly to Matt and Kathy’s apartment, but did not get out of the car. Instead, she sat in the parking lot and rolled everything over and over in her mind. She could barely sit still, her ass shifting about and covering every inch of the driver’s seat. She squeezed her hands around the steering wheel and wished to the devil she could rip it directly from the dash. She thought of every message she’d ever received in life and weighed it against her own actions.
“Luther?”
She said it to an empty car. Her voice sounded alone and quiet, like a whisper in a cavern stretching from the very bowels of the earth to the first kiss of fresh air. It sounded like the last thing man would hear before the world was brushed into the dustpan.
“If you’re there, Luther…”
What are you doing?
Summer rubbed her eyes with her fists. She ran her fingers through the tangles in her hair and wished to tug it from her head in tufts. She lowered her face to the steering wheel and thought more than once about driving until she reached the ocean, then driving yet even further.
There is no Luther. That’s a story you make up for the tourists. That’s something you tell the kids. You don’t believe it because it’s another of your lies. It’s a fun lie, but a lie all the same, and the second you start to believe in it is the second you are no better than…
…Jack.
She felt it deep within her heart. She sat upright. It was like a voice had come from somewhere within the car—not a voice inside herself, mind you—but somewhere like the backseat or the hatchback or perhaps even from the air vents, but it was a voice tried and true and it said the words echoing through her brain like a thoughtless ricochet.
Jack is in trouble.
Summer did not stop to think. She nearly broke the key turning it in the ignition. She released the parking brake with all her might and thrust the car into drive. She aimed to kill any and all bystanders should they stand in her way as she careened down one street and then the other, and in no time whipped the car around the hairpins of the switchback then saw all she needed to see to make herself sick.
The front door of the Light House trailer stood wide open. The front windows were broken and the window shades had been pushed through the shattered glass.
Inside was dark, save for the flickering blue light from an overturned television set. They had been watching a sit-com with a laugh track, though Summer could find nothing funny as she crept on the balls of her feet toward the front door.
“Jack?” she called into the room. The only response was canned laughter from the television.
Summer did not realize until she stepped completely inside the trailer that she had yet to breathe since leaving the car. Glass crunched beneath her feet. The wood-paneled walls of the living room had been marked by hands and fingers with something a dull shade of red. Jack’s easy chair had been tossed aside.
“Jack? Dammit, Jack, if you two are funning with me…”
It was blood. The drops on the floor were blood. That which ran led to the kitchen was blood, and from the pale light of the TV, she could see a pool of it. So was that which smeared its way upstairs.
He’s up there.
In the kitchen, she heard a drawer slam shut. She heard another ripped from the counter, followed by a shower of forks and spoons and…
You’d better get upstairs.
She bounded up the steps on all fours.
“Jack! Say something if you’re okay!”
From Jack’s bedroom: “Summer?” He sounded weak. “Summer, please…”
More canned laughter from the television set.
“Jackie, hold on!” She reached the top of the stairs. “I’ll save you!”
Summer, behind you…
She spun and nearly fell. There was no use trying to keep air inside her throat. Below her, at the foot of the steps, was Lindsay. Or what Summer reckoned used to be Lindsay. Already a whip of a thing, she looked twenty pounds slighter soaking wet. Soaking wet with what was anyone’s guess, but if Summer had to put money on it, she’d suspect it was blood. Whatever it was, there was lots of it. It streaked her hair down the sides of her muck-spattered face. It drenched her shirt straight through to the skin. It dripped and puddled upon their linoleum floor.
Lindsay cast down her head, so that her eyes looked up with hate-fire. She carried something in her hand that caught the light of the TV screen. She showed teeth in her smile and it was with a voice summoned from the nethers that she grumbled:
“I’m a stupid, fat whore.”
Summer steadied herself by placing a hand on each wall of the stairwell.
“Come again, honey?”
Said the demon Lindsay, “I’m a fat, fat whore.”
“That’s no strike against you, girl.” Summer gulped. “With proper diet and exercise, you’ll clear that right up. You can have any man you want.”
Lindsay pointed toward the top of the stairs with that thing she held in her hand.
“What if the man I want,” she said, “got himself bled out like a pig?”
Summer bit down hard on her own tongue. The water in her eyes boiled hot.
“He was trying to control me,” the girl growled like a dog. “He was fattening me up so I would do what he commands.”
Summer swallowed. “That’s not true. Jack would never do that.”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
The mirror cracked on the wall beside Summer. The power flickered, causing the television to strobe. Summer closed tight her eyes and curled into a tiny ball. She remained as such until she heard the demon Lindsay slough away through broken glass and debris.
She’s gone.
Summer took no time rushing the length of the tiny hallway and hurtling herself through the particle board door of Jack’s bedroom. It was dark, so she had to feel her way through the room, but it wasn’t long before she laid a hand upon his boot, then his leg, then for the love of all things holy, upon his sticky, slick midsection from which he bled like the dickens.
“She stabbed me, Summer.” He didn’t sound well. Jack’s voice trembled out his throat. “I don’t know what happened.”
“Jackie, I need you to hold still.” She put two fingers to his throat. His pulse ran races. “I got you.”
“I don’t know what I said.” He began to sob. “She just flipped out.”
All around them, the carpet grew sticky. She cradled his head against her chest. She stroked his hair. She hummed the melody to “Brokedown Palace.”
Mountains instead of beaches, blues music by black guys instead of white ones, guitar solos instead of drums, cherry-flavored lip balm, cherry-flavored sno-cones, cherry-flavored cough syrup, horror movies, breakfast sausage, driving through Kentucky because everything looks like a postcard, going fast, fast, fast…so fast…
“You have to help me,” Jack moaned. “You have to make it all better.”
“Summer’s got you,” she whispered between verses. “And I’m not going to let anything hurt you ever again.”
Tweekers were all the same.
In every town, Jack Jordan noticed no difference. He believed there only were variations of the same behavior. Whether in Lake Castor, Charlottesville, New Orleans, Columbia…Lufkin… Someone would invariably stand vigil at the window blinds. Would thumb upward a single slat to watch what lie behind the smudged glass. Dear god, someone would forever pace. There’d be a guy who couldn’t shut his mouth, would just jabber, well into the morning sun. Something—an earlobe, a nipple—inevitably would get pierced. A tweeker’s apartment remained clean.
And without fail, there was a guy holding out. Looking to the future. Thinking of words like coming down or the cries well beyond the dawn of why didn’t they get more, oh, where could they score some more?
More often than not, Jack was that guy. He had a slippery side to him. All across the South, he’d sneak a little out of each rail, whittling them thinner throughout the night. He told himself they would thank him later. When he stood proud before them as day threatened to break and held high the remnants of his embezzlement, they would cheer his foresight.
But things were rarely thus. As day turned to night and night again to day, someone eventually would offer him a slight. Someone, particularly in a room full of hopped up boys or men, would call someone else a pussy or insult their mother and Jack would find it ample grounds to excuse him from his pillaged booty. And then another would barrage his taste in music or film, and they too would be excised. Before the last whip-poor-will, Jack would stand alone in his victory and carry it to the bathroom, lock the door, then quiet as a mouse, suck it into his face.
Much the same was JoJo’s tiny apartment in Nacogdoches. Jack hadn’t moved much from the futon in the corner while he waited with the others for JoJo to return with more shit. All night he’d been up to his old tricks—cutting open a straw to scrape clean the residue; cleaning the mirror with his driver’s license, then cleaning the license with a razor—and amassed a solid quarter gram for the long day that lay ahead. JoJo’s girl constantly clacked her tongue ring against her teeth and offered a couple times to show Jack the other places she’d been pierced.
Their friend Gabe: “…why I’m voting for the Third Amendment. Listen. To. Me. They can’t take away our guns, bro. They can’t. You ever listened to the Constitution? It’s in there. I’ve seen it. Scroll down under Amendments. The Third One. Thou shalt not impede the right to bear arms. But the president doesn’t care about the Constitution. He cares more for preserving a bipartisan system of government that spends more time coming up with new ways to stop good, law-abiding citizens like myself from protecting themselves. Like my man Jack here. My man Jack gets attacked in his home by a bunch of Mexicans and can’t nobody do nothing about it.”
JoJo’s girl put a hand to Jack’s arm. In the corner, the dude named Sam turned dark in the face. A hate had taken hold of him and wouldn’t let go. He was a man who needed something small to beat on or else things might get broken.
“That was bullshit what happened to you,” he said.
Jack nodded. Not his favorite topic of conversation. None of it, of course, was true. However, he did not feel like the good people of East Texas needed the truth when it came to what happened in the Light House trailer that night Lindsay had gone ape shit. Had he told them it had been a ninety-nine-pound coed who had thrown their sofa through the window, they never would have returned to work the next day. Forever they’d try, same as him, to make heads or tails of it, when there was no heads or tails to be made. So instead, he told them all a bunch of Mexicans had broken in as he slept, tore the place asunder in search of contraband, then stabbed him in the gut with a dinner knife.
In fact, Jack did quite a job of convincing himself Mexicans had done the deed that perhaps the only person who knew any semblance of truth was Summer. Summer, who’d cradled him like the Virgin and poured her special jar of clear liquor—she called it her Jerry Water because she swore someone or another in the Grateful Dead had drank from it—onto his wound until she insisted it was clean.
“I need to go to the hospital,” he’d told her over and over. “I’m going to fucking die.”
“You’re not going to die,” Summer had told him throughout the night. “You always think you’re going to die and what do I always tell you? Huh? Every time you get like this, don’t I tell you that you’re being ridiculous?”
“I think this time is different.”
“It’s no different. We only have two rules, you and me. That’s why life is so simple. Two rules. Do you remember what they are?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me. What’s Rule Number One?”
Jack had licked his lips and looked her in the eye. “Cops are the bad guys.”
“That’s right. Cops are the bad guys and we never tell them shit.” Summer wiped most of the blood clear from his face with the tatters of his shirt. “And what is Rule Number Two?”
“No hospitals.”
“That’s right.”
“But, Summer—”
“To go to the emergency room is to go to jail.” Summer applied a touch of pressure to his gut and pain had shot through him like a bolt. “Under no circumstances are we to ever take the other to the hospital.”
Jack could feel infection settling into the jagged hole in his belly.
“Not even if I’m dying,” Summer had said in a more than firm tone. “We never take each other to the emergency room.”
So instead, Jack treated his injuries with her Mason jar of Jerry Water. He changed his bandages often as he could. When he felt the fidgets threaten to deliver him to his knees in an itching fit of panic, he fought it off and said to himself that pain was only his body healing itself. It would all pass in time. Soon, he would again be whole.
In the apartment, Gabe showed no sign of letting up: “I personally come from a time and place where if you don’t care for someone’s conduct—specifically how it pertains to you—then you may invite said person to step into the street. But we live amongst those who would freak out at such noble behavior, and that, my friend, explains more than half the messes we as a people find ourselves in.”
It had been Summer, of all people, who’d suggested he take up methamphetamine. Again.
“If any one human being on this planet can keep his shit together while tooting ice,” she’d told him, “it would be my Jackie boy.”
“I don’t know, Summer,” Jack had countered. “You know how things get when I’m on that shit.”
“It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry…”
Summer had let her voice trail. She didn’t need to finish the sentence. Anything else that needed to be said was between the pages of the hollowed-out King James beneath the steps. What had once been a mighty kilo of cocaine had been whittled down to baggies. Quantities of marijuana had come and gone, but the profit margins were shit, mostly because everybody and their dog had an out-of-state medical hookup that was supposed to be the bomb. All that remained of the sheet of blotter acid was a couple ten-strips, and Jack had no plans of crossing paths with Ben Matlin ever again.
“Meth is the rage these days,” Summer had said. “Haven’t you seen Breaking Bad?”
Which dropped him flat into the lair of JoJo Randall. A good time for the past two or three days, whichever, but as of late suffered from a sort of comeuppance, as they found themselves with only mirrors licked clean and tiny baggies turned inside out. A feral energy had taken hold of the room. The circles under the bug-eyes had grown darker. Their fangs, longer. JoJo stepped out to talk to his guy about getting more.
“He’s been gone three hours,” said Sam. “Where the hell is he?”
He’d been gone not fifteen minutes, but Jack didn’t bother to correct him. Jack hit some of the refuse in his pocket, planned to hit it again in a couple minutes. He could keep the panic at bay at least until JoJo returned, then he could start the process all over again. This stuff kept him on his toes. Why did he ever quit doing it to begin with? Maybe he’d gotten in a little over his head in New Orleans with it, but he had three years’ experience since those days. He was a completely new person with a different outlook on life. Those days only made him stronger. Smarter. He looked around the room and couldn’t find a single equivalent, not a peer among them, and his pride soon gave way to resentment.
Yes, resentment. For two, three days—whichever—he sat and watched them do stupid things, things like finish a sack before they had another in hand or starve themselves or maybe pick for hours at a scab they shouldn’t be picking at. And he took comfort in saying he was smarter than all of them because he fancied himself the smartest guy in the room. Any room, for that matter. Even a room full of Harvard graduates because fuck them, they were a type. They were types and they didn’t know it. Sure, they were East Coast, pseudo-feminist uber-liberal pain-in-the-ass hyprocrite types, but they were types all the same. Stock characters. Caricatures. And what got Jack the most was that the Harvard grads didn’t know it, but he did, which made him smarter than the Harvard types and therefore he was the smartest guy in the room.
