Roman was having a bad time.

The muscles in his lower back had started to tense thirty minutes ago.  Now his legs were spontaneously cramping, as if someone were trying to pull his toes out through his ass.  The taste in his duct-taped mouth had gone from cheeseburger-sour to rancid, and his nose felt unaccountably hot.

The nose thing, he decided, was definitely the worst part of the situation.

Then he craned his neck to the left, where Claudette sat, shotgun on her lap and a fresh cylinder of ash hanging from her mouth, and realized there were far worse things than a burning nose.

Claudette leaned forward and patted his cheek.  Her hand smelt of Pall Mall tobacco and menthol.

"You're pretty," she croaked out. "But you're not my type".

"Thirty years your junior and tied to a chair? Mom, he's exactly your type".

Claudette snorted.  The perfect cylinder of ash dropped neatly onto her shawl and disintegrated.

"You mind your manners, baby girl," she said.  "You brought this thing here into my house, this little" - and here she grabbed Roman's chin and yanked his face close to hers - "piece of trash krasniya mafiya shithead". She let go of his face and shoved him out of arm's reach. "Whatever the fuck he is".

Charlie had nothing to say. She leaned her body against the bar and wished she were back in the bakery, or just outside the bakery door, taking a drag of a smoke in the day's first light, tongues of warmth from the bakery door lapping at her neck while the cold dawn teased goosebumps from her bare arms.

"What we do now, Mom?"

"Claudette checked the pocket of her sweater for shells. "Baby girl, we wait".

Charlie pulled at a lock of hair that had somehow ended up in her mouth.

"Mom, don't call me that. What are we waiting for?"

"Whatever you say, Charlotte.  We're waiting for Aloysius".

"What's that? Allah wishes?"

"Pretty much.  Aloysius is a Russian with a nice Irish Catholic name.  If he shows up, get his name right.  He's sensitive about it".

"I don't want to talk to that shithead".

Claudette shrugged. "He's not much for talk. Not like your friend Slick.  But I figure if Ivan here has come for you, then Slick isn't talking to anyone.  Except for Aloysius, maybe".

Charlie looked up, caught by a change in the light from the doorway. A shadow was filling it up, growing until it filled the entire doorway, until there was nothing but a corona outlining the bull-like shape of some grotesquely outsized human being. Then the shadow stepped politely over the threshold, and the absence of light took on muscle, blood and bone, a broken fist in the skin of a man.  The thing nodded his massive head in her direction.  Is that courtesy? wondered Charlie.  Suddenly her legs had no strength. It reminded her absently of falling in love.

"Hello Claudette," Aloysius said.  He held his hands at his sternum as if he had just removed a hat.  "I am here for my man."

He nodded again.  This time, Charlie realized, he really was bowing.

"And I am here for your daughter".

She almost missed the figures behind Aloysius: a man in a dirty suit holding up someone else, a blood-soaked scarecrow with a drained face and matted hair.

Slick, she thought.  She saw one pain-crazed eye roll around and settle on her face.  And she was running to him before she even knew what her legs were doing.

Comments

[TwoBusy]

1) Thank you for reconciling the Aloysius/accent thing.

2) Thank you for "pulling his toes out through his ass," as well as for the subsequent conversation in which I tried to explain to my 4yo daughters why I was laughing so hard.

3) But most of all, thank you for that last line.

[ms picket to you]

Second on the last line.

Really: lovely.