- Polite Fictions

His father had exhibited a hint of prophetic leanings in naming him Slick. People questioned it all the time, looked at him with suspicion even as the earnestness he was forever fighting so hard to tamp down bubbled to the surface in his answer, “My daddy had them put it down right there on the birth certificate. Hell, he stood over my momma while she signed the paperwork to make sure she didn’t birddog him and change it.”

Slick was his first and only given name; there was no middle name to qualify it or overshadow it or to even try and prop it up. There are an abundance of catch phrases to sum up the notion ‘Some Things Just Are’; Slick had a sickly blue piece of paper signed by four people to wave around as illustration. He had been willing to let Zoot be on his merry way with that birth certificate, which he had lifted from the motel room last week along with Slick’s favorite knife. Stealing the last piece of key lime pie (as it would turn out, the last piece of key lime pie Zoot would ever cram down his ingrateful gullet) Slick’d had the money to splurge on was actually the most grating offense of all. An empty fridge is what tipped the scales on Slick’s anger and set him off on the hunt for the interloper: He fucking haaated an empty refrigerator. It would be a lie to not acknowledge the fact that he was sick of being another man’s prey, as well.

He might have let Zoot off without a fork to the head, though; hell, truth be known, he probably could have talked his way out of there and done the man the courtesy of being allowed to live another ten-fifteen years. Words were his fucking gift, the thing he carried about effortlessly, the thing that never left him no matter his fortunes or failings. He was able to flick them through his fingers cleanly, he could push them into places of want that people weren't aware they even possessed, leaving them panting and bewildered. He most often let the words wander off his tongue without regard to anyone’s entertainment but his own and that of whatever entity had chanced to make the language and him heady, indiscreet lovers.

Yeah….he would have been okay with Zoot keeping the spoils from the motel room and all of the flotsam he had willingly (well, the flavor of ‘willingly’ that is elicited when you have knowledge of a firearm being trained unflinchingly at your center mass, anyway) pulled from his person, too. There was the knife that was unsentimentally trustworthy (not to mention effective), the pocket rosary that was more decoration of a past life than a relic, the last bus pass he had to Anywhere, a terribly battered military I.D. card. Zoot would have been welcome to those. He had pressed for the phone, and might have been given that also except that he chanced to notice the letter. That letter would probably be the death of more than one man before it was all said and done, but Zoot was the first because he had the terrible misfortune of noting a corner of it jutting rebelliously out of the pocket that housed it. Charlie’s words had accompanied Slick everywhere since the day that he’d first been gutpunched by them, and he wasn’t going to surrender their tangibility lightly.

Heartily defying the music that the doorchimes had sent twirling and skittering like so much broken glass, the part of Slick that was purposefully cruel danced forward there in the dim overtaking the room. “I told you, you stupid chucklefuck, I told you that you had no business with my letter and that I didn’t have much incentive to let you live.” He regarded once more the man’s clownishly startled face with its whatthefuck?? countenance; it was like some pulp illustration come to life and Slick could not help it: He began to howl with laughter, trying between gulps of air to remember something matter-of-fact to keep him lucid and sane. He began –in vain-- to calculate just how many pieces of key lime pie those twenty-three dollars might afford a man should said man chance to do something foolish like ‘survive’. Every time he got to monetary double digits, though, the hilarity shoved those damned numbers away roughly, drunkenly, without regard to the future.