morning early, and not too much drinking, and my head was feeling cleared out a little, but then stuff kind of started going downhill after the thing with that family and their garden. Or maybe it was the thing with the girl, I don’t know.
Manny and me start drinking early at the skatepark, getting all sloppy. I take a bad slam on my elbow. I lie there for a while, looking at the underside of the bridge, all black and sooty and painted with pigeon shit, like an old cathedral. My elbow turns into a swellbow, the size of a baseball, the way it always does. And then these art school girls who Manny knows show up with some bottles of champagne, and we decide to celebrate my swellbow, and we’re all drinking out of the bottle at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday, and it’s good, you know, the way freedom can be good.
Then these art school girls want to hit the strip clubs, which is just fine with Manny and me, and we end up at Magic Gardens, where the ceilings are low, and one of the strippers swings her hair around all crazy and gets it stuck in the heating vent above the stage. I’m embarrassed for her a little, all naked and hanging there by the hair, but that doesn’t keep me and Manny from looking and laughing. Then the bartender, this fat Asian, comes out with a pair of scissors.
“You cut that girl’s hair and I’ll fucking knock your teeth out,” I say. “Bring me a screwdriver and I’ll get it done right.”
But the bartender isn’t having that, so I slap the scissors out of his fat hand, and then I’m in a headlock and the bouncer and the bartender are dragging me out. They’re sorry they let me go out on the sidewalk, though, because now the bartender needs some dental work, as promised.
So then we hit Mary’s, where I wash my bloody knuckles in the sink while Manny looks at his crushed face in the mirror. The bathrooms at Mary’s are tiny and filthy, post-lap dance come stains on the wall next to the urinal.
“Sometimes I think I should’ve gone ahead and died,” Manny says, tracing the scar line up around his eye.
“You know what the smell of blood does to me,” I say. “Right now I could kill you with one punch.”
He turns away from the mirror and looks at me. “You’d do that for me?” I’m surprised to see that he’s serious.
“Come on, man,” I say. “You don’t really want to die.”
His face turns disappointed. “I’m supposed to die so I can come back as an angel.” Then he walks out. Like I said, something’s not right with him.
What happens next is better than Christmas morning, or winning the lottery, or the resurrection of Jesus, or any of that miraculous shit. I finish washing my knuckles, and in through the swinging door comes that sketchy fucker from Burnside, carrying a bent spoon, eyes all red.
“Fancy meeting you here,” I say, grinning. This isn’t something I usually say, but using the word “fancy” here in this bathroom strikes me as fucking hilarious.
It takes a few seconds for him to recognize me, and then I can see the fear in his eyes. I smack the spoon out of his hand. He goes down on the piss-sticky floor, crawling around like a dog, looking for it.
“Just give me a couple minutes,” he says. “Just let me take care of something and then we can-”
I kick him straight in the mouth.
I thought that would do the trick, but then he’s up and on me, and stronger than I thought, or not stronger but more desperate maybe. I’m fighting for fun, for the girl; he’s fighting for his life, for his next fix. But still, I’m not the right person to fuck with, not ever. I bear hug him, crack his forehead open with a head butt, then break the bathroom door open with his body and we spill out into the bar, me on top the entire time. Blood: there’s a lot of it. I think Manny even got a few shots in, or maybe it was Manny who pulled me off him, it’s hard to remember.
12) Manny figures it might not be the best idea for me to sleep at Burnside, but I don’t give a fuck. Right now this place belongs to me.
Sketchy and the girl are nowhere to be found. My best guess is the hospital. I sleep sound, until there’s another knock on my van.
The girl again.
She looks scared. A fresh purple bruise under her left eye.
“Is he okay?” I ask, yawning.
“No, he’s not fucking okay,” she says, climbing into the van. She smells like sweat again, and like something burning. Incense, maybe. Or charcoal.
“I just gave him a friendly beat down. He got what he deserved.”
“It’s not what you did,” she says. “It’s something else.”
“What, the bouncers rough him up after I finished?”
She looks around nervously. “You have any more beers?”
I reach back into the cooler and grab a couple. When I turn around she kisses me hard, and I can feel that she already has her shirt half off. The way she smells does something to me, like the smell of blood does something to me. But this is different. She smells like the ocean and like fire, and the way she’s all over me and hungry is like being out on a big day in Hawaii, when you bail hard and get tumbled all over the fuck-ing place, held under a thousand gallons of seawater, churned around like a dirty sock in a washing machine. Then you finally come up for air and you know you’re probably not going to drown and it feels so good to breathe that you thank God, whether or not you’ve ever set foot in church, and this girl all over me with her hot mouth and her soft tits is like that but better. And then it’s my turn to be on top, and I keep asking to make sure I’m not hurting her, because I’m big-I make girls cry in a good way, most of the time-and the girl promises me it’s in a good way, her crying, and then she begs me to come in her mouth so that I know for sure.
When it’s over she lies totally still, almost like she’s dead. Or catatonic. But she’s breathing, and she’s soft, and I kind of like her all quiet like this. I fall asleep with my hand on her stomach.
She shakes me awake. Half an hour later? Three hours? I have no fucking clue.
She has that strung-out look again, like the first time she got in my van. I ask her what’s the matter, and she just sits there shivering until I touch her cheek.
“It’s okay,” I say. “You don’t have to worry about him anymore. I’ll take care of you.”
She shakes her head. “I know,” she says. “I trust you.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“I killed him,” she says.
“You what?”
“I killed him. I really did. He came back here after you beat him up and he punched me in the face, so I took his knife and killed him.”
I rub my face and try to let this sink in, the fact that I just fucked a murderer.
“Okay, so you killed him. What the fuck did you do with his body?”
“That’s what I need your help with,” she says.
13) She leads me up the dirt path to the upper parking lot. She holds my hand the whole way. Sobbing. “He’s up here,” she says. “I pulled the mattress over him.”
We climb further up to the spot, and sure enough, there’s the mattress, all covered in bloodstains, and there’s a big long lump underneath that looks a lot like a body. The girl falls to her knees and starts sobbing again. “I’m sorry,” she says, looking up at me with pleading eyes. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. Fucker had it coming.”
And then from out of nowhere something bashes me on the back of the head, dropping me straight to my knees, my vision crackling with little white fireworks. Then a hard kick to my ribs that knocks the wind out of me.
I don’t even have to look up, I know who it is. But I do look up, and he’s got a gun and I can see that he’s pretty serious about wanting to use it. I laugh. “I know a guy who’ll pay you to shoot him,” I say.
“You stupid motherfucker,” he rasps, the gun trained right on my eye socket.
But then the girl is on his back, still crying, begging him not to.
He shoves her away and I make a move for him, but he stomps on my face. And again. And then again. Somewhere between the time I pounded on him at Mary’s and now he found a pair of heavy boots.
14) I wake up on the mattress, my pulse punching from inside my head. What looked like the shape of a body
