Ian was playing the last few
songs of the night, sitting in on guitar with his friend Will’s cover band. It
was really Jim’s band, the frontman and guitarist. Most people there were
drinking and watching football. There was very dim lighting and lots of
picnic-type tables, sticky from old beer. The band played on a small raised
stage that had a worn, colorless carpet stapled to it. They played “That
Smell,” by Lynard Skynard to close their set, and a server turned the lights on
and people started to leave. Some people stayed to talk to the band. Ian wanted a cigarette. He went outside to help Will with his
drums.
Ian smoked and talked with Will,
who had hand-rolled cigarettes, as they packed his car. Will was talking about
Jim.
“Music is like fucking, you
know? Jim’s got bad rhythm. He can’t fucking keep time.”
Ian didn’t think that music was like fucking. He said he
thought that it was cerebral. Will got Ian talking about sex, which he didn’t
usually talk about. He had only had sex a small number of times with a small number of women. He was telling
Will that. Ian thought Will was looking at him differently for some
reason. Like he had broken some basic
requirement of being a man. Ian laughed
and looked at his phone. Will put more
drums in his car, then drove Ian to the subway while they listened to classic
rock on the radio.
Ian
took the subway to his apartment in Brooklyn and unlocked the front door. The
old guy who lived on the floor, whose name Ian forgot, had his door open. His
apartment was lit up only by a red neon sign the man had gotten from a bar. He
was drinking cheap vodka out of a shot glass; shoulders raised and bunched up
as he leaned on his table, with his two cats, Asshole and Numbnuts, lying
around his legs. Ian saw this almost every night and the whole picture always
looked insane to him. He put up his hand in a lazy wave at the man, who nodded
back with a solemn look.
In his apartment, Ian put his
guitar under his futon bed, then went back downstairs and to the bodega on the
corner. The bodego was lit with about two-thirds of its fluorescent light
fixtures and smelled like mildew. The brown tile floor was never washed, but
the deli section was clean. Ian walked up and ordered a roast beef sandwich. He
ordered the same sandwich almost every night, sometimes twice in one day. A
little jingle had developed in his head about it over time:
roast
beef
swiss
cheese
lettuce
to-ma-to
may-o-naise
It felt absurd. The guy who worked the deli grinned at
Ian and Ian grinned back while thinking of the jingle.
Ian went back upstairs and sat
down at the card table in the middle of his room to eat. His room was a studio
apartment that had his bed, a small desk by it that faced the wall, a small tv
in one corner by the bed, shelves with poetry books, a dresser in the middle of
the room instead of a closet, and the card table. The kitchen was a sink and a
microwave. The bathroom was a sliver of a space that you couldn’t really turn
around in but had a toilet and a small shower. The apartment’s one window
looked out on the small garden, and the sunlight or moonlight came in through
trees.
At this point, Ian noticed that
the jacket he had been wearing smelled strongly of sweat. He got up and took it
off, humming “That Smell,” and continued eating the sandwich.
He stared at a box of Emergen-C
brand vitamin C powder he had bought. There were at least fifty packets of
powders in the box. Ian rarely got a cold and couldn’t remember why he had
bought them, but was putting them in his tap water anyway because they sort of
tasted good.
Ian looked at the box and
thought of the powders and how he used them were a good analogy for something,
like how circumstances and what a person has available at a given time
determine a lot. Ian had a great immune system.
He finished his meal and tried
to think of something to do. He took his notebook, went downstairs and sat on the
building’s steps, lighting a cigarette. He tried to think of something to
write, and wrote down a poem he had already written to see if he remembered it.
He figured if he remembered all the lines then they were all good enough, and
if he didn’t remember one it should be replaced.
A woman walked up to him and
stopped, standing about a foot from him. The light from the streetlamp across
the street was yellow and the street was recently redone, and was a deep black.
The woman just looked at Ian. She was in her forties, he guessed, and her dark,
dry hair was lit up from behind by the lamp.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi… how ya doin?”
“Oh, you’re nice,” she said,
mainly talking to herself. She was in some sort of elevated mood.
“Do you think I could bum a
cigarette from you?” she asked.
“Sure.” Ian handed her one.
“What are you writing?”
Ian didn’t like to talk about his writing. He shrugged
his shoulders and said it was nothing.
“It’s
nothing?”
Ian asked her how her night was.
“I
had a crazy night. I was just dancing with this woman.” She looked up and away
for a second.
“This-
scorpion bit me- and I think I’m in love.”
Ian watched her as she looked off into some direction.
“Cool.”
She looked at Ian with a slightly glazed or maybe spacey
expression for a few seconds. It seemed like she wasn’t looking at him.
“Let me write something for
you.”
Ian handed her the notebook and a pen. She dropped the
cigarette and held the notebook in one hand to the side, and leaned over to
write on it, bending one knee to put her hips at an angle. She tilted her head
and didn’t seem to be looking at the notebook as she wrote in it. Ian thought it
looked romantic.
She handed him back the notebook
and pen. It said ‘I love life / life is love.’ She gave him a little half
smile, still sort of unsure of herself, and thanked him for the cigarette.
Before she went he wished her a nice night.
It was about 3 AM at this point
and Ian kept smoking on his stoop, not wanting to go to sleep since he had that
day off.
Two people, a guy and a girl in
their twenties, came up to him and asked for cigarettes. They decided Ian was
nice and started talking.
They were friends on vacation in
New York from Tampa, Florida. Ian told them that he was from Miami. They told
him he should come with them to a bar called the Levee in Williamsburg. Ian
went upstairs for a clean jacket. The only jacket he had was a suit jacket, a
thin-striped grey thing. They made fun of him when he came downstairs, and
walked to the subway, riding it to the Bedford stop.
They went to the bar with Ian
wearing his suit jacket, and he didn’t fit in, so he stuck out. There was a big
buck arcade game behind them.
They all drank Stellas and
talked. John was a manager at whole foods and Jamie was a psychologist and
legal assistant. They talked about Florida and how they liked New York. Jamie
told Ian she had some friends in New York and that they were coming to join
them.
After a few beers went by, a
girl and her friends came in. She had a black t-shirt with big holes around her
shoulders so that you could easily see her bra. They joined the group, ordered
beers, and they all ate cheese balls.
The group, about six of them at
this point, got pretty drunk and walked outside on the sidewalks. Three of them
took cabs home, leaving Ian, John, Jamie, and the girl with the black shirt,
who had introduced herself to Ian once, but he hadn’t heard her and didn’t ask
her again.
The girl found a fake pink
feather on the sidewalk. She bent down, with one foot on the ground, as the
other went up at a 90-degree angle as if she was a ballet dancer. She put one
hand on her hip as she bent and her pinky and ring finger slid into the pocket
of her jeans. A car went by and lit her from the front for a second as she
looked at the feather and tossed her hair back to tuck it behind her ear. She
looked at everyone.
“That’s
a nice… pinion,” Ian said, and grinned.
After a while Ian tossed his keys as high into the air as
he could. When he almost caught them they cut his palm and for some reason he
was thinking of the word, Jessica- not the name, the word, although
he knew a few Jessicas. He thought, “Hey, I’m bleeding, Jessica,” and laughed
to himself because it was so strange.
It was about 4 AM at this point in
rural New York where there was warm blackness, black wheat blooming in bending
with wind fields, small sounds of rocks kicked by wandering kids, all of the
sounds outside the city. A man was in his wood-sided home counting the hairs on
his bed, letting them go with a sick feeling to the floor. Birds, dark ones,
outside, flew down and wet their wings in the leaking spigot on the side of his
house, their feet not quite pressing into the grey mud. The man’s three
fluorescent light fixtures were going off and on- they had been going off and
on for a few days or months. He looked up at them from his bed. He was out of
cash and restless, and decided to drive into the city.
In Brooklyn they continued
walking down the sidewalks, finding most of the bars closing now. They were
having a good time and felt as familiar with each other as they could for
having hung out for a few hours. John stopped and walked into an alley to piss.
The other three watched and
yelled encouraging words.
“Hey like… write your name into
the wall,” Ian said.
“Ok yeah… I’ll try.” John
sincerely tried to write his name on the wall with his urine.
The man driving in from rural
New York had decided to drive through Manhattan where the majority of cops were
and cross the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. He drove very slowly down
Wythe Avenue and saw a couple young people standing a few feet into an alley.
He parked his car and opened his glove box to pull out a long flip knife. He strode
into the narrow alley and stood there for a few moments.
“Hey
kids.”
John finished pissing and zipped up, “Sup, shithead.”
The man laughed quietly and took the knife out of his
pocket and flipped it open.
Ian looked at the others. The girl with the
black shirt put her hands in her pockets and tilted her head to one side, her
hips becoming angled. Jamie froze on her feet.
The
man laughed.
“Alright,
this is pretty easy. Wallets and purses.”
The four got together.
The girl with the feather behind
her ear had a glint in her eye. Jamie put her hand on her shoulder and looked
at her. The girl batted her hand away and looked back at the man.
Jamie’s heart beat so fast that
it hurt her. The man laughed and lowered the knife to his hips, thrusting them
forward. John took a step toward him:
“If
you try anything else we’ll wake up everyone in these buildings.”
“You
could try that if you want this to get ugly. I’m not interested in anything
else. I think rich boy here can cough up enough to get me a pro.” He winked at them.
“Fine,”
John said, and tossed his wallet to the man’s feet. Everyone did the same with
their wallets or purses. The girl had slipped her phone into her pocket.
Jamie’s phone was still in her purse. He put the wallets in his pockets and the
purses on his shoulders, smiled a shit-eating grin at them and turned around
180 degrees to walk away.
The girl had seen some
cinderblocks to her side and was holding one. She crept behind the man with
light steps. The others didn’t dare say anything. A breeze came in from
somewhere and reflected a few times off the walls of the alley, making the leaves
form a circle. Ian noticed it and thought it felt nice. The girl swung the
narrow part of the cinderblock into the back of the man’s head. She didn’t hit
him with force. But the cinderblock connected with his cerebellum and the man’s
legs went to nothing. He collapsed and his face fell onto a fire hydrant. His nose
bones snapped off from their base and moved into his brain. He died instantly.
Jamie,
in a delayed reaction said, “What are you doing, Cadence?” very quietly. Her
back and shoulders were slouched forward and her short hair was floating in the
breeze.
John had rushed over to the man
and picked up his knife, not sure of what he would do, when he noticed that the
man was motionless. John cautiously took the man’s pulse, his hands shaking
against the corpse’s neck. Cadence looked at Jamie as she continued to stare
into some other place and Ian watched Cadence watching her.
There was a lot of quick
discussion afterward. They thought they might drag the body into the alley to
make sure no cars would see it, but didn’t want to leave a trail of blood. They
stood in a line to block the body from views from the street. There weren’t any
people on the sidewalk, but the sun would be rising in an hour or so. There was
a faint green light spreading where you could see between the buildings, in
arching figures like broken sections of wings someone was trying to put
together. At this point they had learned from checking the man’s wallet that
his name was Joseph McGinnon, and that he lived in the Hudson Valley. They were
afraid that even though killing him had been an accident, that they could still
be convicted of some form of murder. There had been lights on in the apartments
overhead, and it wasn’t unreasonable to them that someone had seen them assault
an unarmed man and had already called the police. John said plainly that they
had to get rid of the body.
Four young people on Wythe
Avenue in Brooklyn had blood running on their hands and wrists as they carried
Joe to his car. The trunk was full of heavy metal tools and parts, so they
opened the backseat and arranged him into a fetal position, his head drooping
onto the leather seats at an acute angle from his long neck. All four of them
slipped into the front, which was one long continuous seat, in an unspoken
agreement that they should all be together for now.
John sat in the driver’s seat,
Jamie next to him, Cadence next to her, and Ian was against the window.
“Well,” Cadence said, “where are
we going.”
“You seem to have all the
plans,” John said and shrugged.
“That wasn’t planned.”
Ian caught her gaze. “It’s a
good thing that wind kicked up in our direction or he might have heard you
coming after him.”
“I’m made for all directions of
the wind,” she said, settling back into her seat and looking out the
windshield, moving her eyebrows up and down, like she had just told a joke, for
anyone who might be watching her face.
“Why don’t we take him home?”
Ian said.
Cadence lolled her head over to Ian.
“What?” John hadn’t started the
car yet.
“There’s no way this guy lived
with anyone. Let’s take him to the address on his license. It’ll look like a
suicide.”
Jamie had become more
uncomfortable and was shivering into her seat until now. At this point, she sat
up.
“I want
us to get out of the city. I say we do that.”
Cadence took Joe’s wallet from John and found the
driver’s license, noticing that it was expired by two years. She put the
address into the GPS application on her phone.
“There’s
a chance this guy has been homeless for a few years,” Cadence said with her
eyes on her phone.
“Then
we’ll just check the place out and find someplace else if need be. Let’s go,”
Jamie said.
“How
are we going to get back?” John asked.
“There’s
a train station close to his place, look. We’ll just have to walk like two miles.”
Cadence passed the phone to John.
“Jesus,
I’m exhausted” John said.
“We’ll
deal with it.” Jamie was breathing easier.
They
started out and were following the directions from Cadence’s phone. A light
rain had begun falling and spotted the car’s windows, and made the streetlights
into elongated rays against the dirty windshield. John noticed that the breaks
were old, or maybe that there was no breaking fluid, and sat stiffly on the
seat, his body using up most of his adrenaline at this point. They sat in silence.
They had an hour to go.
“Look
at the sunrise,” Cadence turned around and took a picture out of the back
windshield.
Cadence
passed the phone to Ian.
The photo showed a yellowing horizon set behind the
highway with telephone poles and birds landing or flying away from the wires. A
bit of Joe’s blood was on the top of the backseat toward the bottom of the
photo. Ian passed back the phone.
“Shit,
I accidentally closed the navigation,” Cadence said.
“Great.
Wasn’t there a turn coming up in a mile?” John said.
“Just
pull over for a minute.”
John edged the car on to the sloping grass on the side of
the road. Jamie suggested they all get out for some fresh air, since Joe and
his blood, and the shit he had expelled when he died, were starting to stink
despite the open windows. They all got out and shared cigarettes as Cadence
entered Joe’s address into her phone again. John was asking Jamie if she was
ok. She was still a little shaken. John handed her some pills of something and
she swallowed them dry. Ian stood with his arms crossed and watched them, then
looked at Cadence working with her phone. Jamie gazed in a distracted way at
the car, then at everyone. She felt lonely.
“Who
are we?” she said to no one in particular. Ian wasn’t sure if she was asking a
question. He looked back at the city behind them, then down the road and back
at Jamie.
“I’d
say we’re just about anyone here,” John said.
Cadence had the navigation working again and they got
into the car in the same order as before.
They
arrived at Joe’s house and pulled up slowly. They were relieved when they saw
that he had only one neighbor about 100 yards up the road. Ian got out to knock
on the door, feeling obligated by his having the idea first that they should come
here. He slid out of his seat and walked across the dirt road. He looked behind
him at the others and the wheat fields behind the car.
He felt assured by the fact that
there were no other cars in the driveway. When he knocked, the door creaked
open, and he could see everything in the house but the bedroom. He slowly
walked in and glanced into the bedroom, everything being well lit by a few
flickering fluorescent lights. The floor was carpeted by a thin material that
used to be blue, but was worn to brown in most places. In every corner there
were balls, sometimes mounds, of dust and hair. The kitchen stove held a pot
half filled with baked beans that flies were enjoying.
Ian went back outside and nodded
at the others as he crossed the dirt road. All that was left to do was deposit
Joe, move the car, and walk the two miles to the train station. They carried
the body in and placed it face-down on the floor next to his bed, then parked the
car in the wet gravel next to the house, with its spigot where the birds had
been trying to bathe their wings.
