Polite Fictions

Relief flooded over Slick. This is what happens when you make a deal with the devil you don't know, thought Slick. You ... well, you really don't know, do you?

Jesus Christ, that was profound, he scolded himself. But also, not entirely untrue.

"So!" He tried to sound confident. "What's the plan?"

"The plan is that we figure out how to keep this operation going without anyone finding out about this asshole," said Euri. "And make sure we get every last penny for this shit, including his share." He pointed to Doug's bloody head with the butt of his gun.  "But first, I have to decide if we kill him. I'm all for makin' shit work any way we know how, but I ain't pleased with the body count -- it's gettin' harder to manage, and people are gonna start asking questions. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to keep him quiet without it."

Well, this was just great, Slick rubbed his sore, bloody temples. This morning, he hadn't killed anyone. A murder virgin, if you will. By nightfall, he was sure he'd have a track record equal to that of a serial killer, and for what? At this point, he wasn't even sure where he was, much less what he was in so deep for. And he was also pretty sure Doug was already dead, but hell if he was going to point that out to Euri.

"What did he mean about the letter?" Slick braced himself. "I thought we agreed to keep her out of this?

He was in over his head. And there wasn't anything he could do about it.

Euri sneered. "Now, who promised you such a silly little thing? That girl of yours -- she's everything. And you know it."

In the room, in that room, it always seemed like a dream.

When was it you decided that you could no longer do this? The woman’s voice cold, metallic. At least she had come away from her training with something that allowed her inside of people without having to put a bullet or blade in them first. This insight elicited a giggle from something deep within Charlie’s brain. It was the sort of something that is best left to slumber.

“I dunno,” Charlie intoned, edge starting to creep up on reason, “One day or one-thousand….the when of it doesn’t especially matter, does it?”

The room, so white, everything in its sparseness blending near-seamlessly, soft around the edges. The old Vaseline-on-the-lens trick, smudged there by a trickster divine being looking for some laughs.

The ruffling of pages. Let’s see…

Yes, here were are. Your recruitment interview.

“It wasn’t a recruitment interview. It was two guys throwing back a fair bit of Sheep Dip Scotch and trying to get over.”

The silences often stretched on into huge caverns that she could fall into were she not paying close attention. Charlie knew the woman would be carefully instructed on the observation of those changes in breathing, of the slightest movement by a fingertip; it was in these places that a shift in thought patterns was betrayed and a careful(ly prepared) stranger might be able to step into their stream.

Charlie, then, had learned a phenomenal awareness of her thoughts and every conscious movement her body offered. She had her own flavor of conditioning altogether.

He didn't want to cry. Squeezing his eyes shut, Slick pushed aside the memory of his mother and her sweet dreams and waited for the fortune cookie wisdom of his father to emerge. "Tears are for pussies," he'd say every time Slick's tear ducts betrayed him. "And I ain't talkin' 'bout no goddamn kitty cats, you understand?" Of course he didn't understand. "He's only 8, for heaven's sake!" his mother would sigh, adding a number every year until Slick was 12 and actually started to grasp the difference. It would be another four before he clumsily grasped it for good. So, no, Slick didn't want to cry. A man already caked with the blood of everyone who'd come before him - not to mention a key lime pie pilfering bastard - ought to be able to hold onto a sliver of dignity. Here's a tip, dumb ass. You should have thought of that before you opted to marinate yourself in the heady broth of coffee and temporary stupidity your bladder served up, he thought, as once again the toxic perfume of the day's events wafted up and danced under his nose.

Not the way Charlie could dance atop bars. Her body swirled like light reflected through fragments of broken glass. A beautiful thing to take in. No. This was the last call, flop sweat dance of someone who should've left the stage long ago. Charlie. She's going to be pissed, Slick thought, his eyes still closed, the back of his head intimate with the pleather interior. So what. What's done is done. That's what she'd said in her letter. It was one of those tasty little life cliches his father liked to serve up, too. "Don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining!" was another. The irony of it made Slick smirk, and as his lips crept up, he felt the thick, warm liquid slide down his cheek and hug the curve of his face before stopping at his upper lip. For a man who'd turned his back on tears years ago, he was suitably irritated by their return. "Dad would be so proud," he thought. "So much for what doesn't kill you making you stronger." Goddamn cliches.

How about this one - Absence makes the heart grow fonder. He'd told Charlie more times than he could count that it would serve her well to forget their arrangement, but he missed the perks it entailed. A woman who can stick a landing like Charlie wasn't one you declined to do business with if the deal was good. "If I had a nickel for every..." he could hear his father say, but Slick lifted the needle off the worn out mental track before the song was over. "Just shut up and let me miss her."

"Miss her? What? Open your damn eyes," Euri demanded. "What the fuck? You think this is nap time? You think I'm your goddamn chauffeur now? Open your damn eyes!" Slick rolled his head back to center, cracked the lid of one eye, and through a crimson veil ("I bleed from the eyes now? This fuckin' day just keeps getting better," he mistakenly assumed)("You know what they say about assumptions, don'tcha, kid?" his father would've said) he stared at the hulking Greek behind the wheel. So much for thinking he'd been crying, Slick thought. And so much for Doug, who was slumped down in the passenger seat like a lover's cast off dress, the crater in his left temple a gift from the butt of Euri's gun and incredible upper body strength. It's true what they say, Slick thought as he wiped Doug's blood from his own face. A metal napkin holder won't do shit for you in a fight, and head wounds really do bleed like a bitch. "It was a nice touch the way you threw out that whole 'Are we still going to headquarters?' line," chuckled Slick.

He shoved his tongue through the place where his tooth had been. It was smooth and cavernous, a hole not so different than the one when he was eight -- a puck to the face. He and his brother knelt on the pond ice and swept through puddles of freezing blood to find the thing. They figured if they had to go home like that, all fucked up like that, at least they better have it. His mother packed his face in ice, gave him some baby aspirin and took a picture. She put the tooth in a tiny baggy and shoved it under his pillow, her lips to his forehead, her fingers through his hair. Sweet dreams, she whispered, like always.

He shoved his tongue through the gap and wondered if he might be able to whistle through it. He could never make grass blades sing like his brother; maybe this would be his trick? He was always scrawnier than that dude, but now? Damn man, he looked tough, all toothless and shot up. With piss on his pants.

With piss on his pants.

It's always something different that breaks the sweet bubble of shock. Like fear and adrenaline, shock's a tender gift and it always breaks. I pissed my pants, he thought, which was the pin prick.

No more baby aspirin sweet dreams, he was suddenly a beast, twisting his neck and his torso, the only parts of his body he could move, but for his eyes, bloodshot and literally burning, darting, and also his teeth which he snarled and chomped in vain. His thighs chafed now from urine, from denim, from fatigue, his ankles raw from rope or wire or what was it? He couldn't run; he couldn't fight back. He was never so good at that anyway so this was it: he was a goner, just done for, just a bawling baby in the back seat of a car and why, he screamed. Maybe out loud, maybe not, he wasn't sure. Someone laughed and there were voices. A crack of something and then, blood getting caught in his lashes.

His mother with a kind ice pack above him. His brother with a sob and a puck. Her sugar-dusted pants, her backward glance, the letter in her hand then in his hand. Her walking away. 

Sweet dreams, someone whispered. 

Charlie rested her hand along the top of the bar - her fingers momentarily tracing the well-past worn grooves and scars, as intimate and familiar as her own fingerprint swirl - then with a practised grace and a sense of muscle memory she thought she'd long forgotten and left behind she arced her body up and over the top, her hand as pivot, her motion smooth and quiet, her legs slicing through the smoke-heavy air like a blade through water. Her feet came to rest on the thin rubber mat behind the bar as they always had and always would: toes pointed, feet perfectly aligned, muscles coiled and elegant and perfect.

"You nailed the landing, baby girl" said Claudette, her tone lost somewhere in the limbo between admiration and weary derision. Her eyes drifted over to the man in glasses, slowly, taking her time as she shifted focus. Charlie watched the long ash tracking like a gun sight, the reflection growing long and surreal in the convex reflection of his eyewear. "She was always good with landings."

Without looking, Charlie reached into the shelving beneath the bar. Muscle memory gave way to sense memory, as her fingers danced across forgotten keys and loose change, wrenches and screwdrivers, a box of condoms "ribbed, for my pleasure," as her mother liked to say, and then - in the back corner to which it always retreated - a thick roll of duct tape. She knew without looking it would be a flat, industrial gray. As her long fingers wrapped around the roll and pulled it toward what passed for daylight in this stagnant, half-lit corner of the world, she felt something brush against her wrist and fall onto the floor, pressed out and down into the welcoming grasp of gravity by the onrushing wall of tape. Without thinking, she looked away from her mother and the man with glasses and reached down.

It was folded in half. A piece of paper, she thought at first, and then she felt the smooth, glossy stock of the paper against her skin and she knew: a photo. She lifted it to chest level and pulled it open with her thumb and ring finger. Two people. Standing in front of what looked like a fenced park, or baseball diamond. A man, wearing an untucked white shirt and... Vans? She hadn't thought of Vans since Spicoli days. And a woman, full-bodied, with glasses or sunglasses and something like a bridesmaid's dress hugging her frame tight, taut, tender.

She shift the photo around in her fingers, facing it outwards. "What's this?" she asked her mother.

"Never you mind," her mother responded, her tone growing harder. "You just wrap up Mr. Man here for me, nice and clean, onto that chair. Just like I taught you."

This time, Charlie walked around the end of the bar. She tucked the photo into the back pocket of her pants, and then pulled free a great ribbon of tape from the roll. It came loose with a tearing and a high-pitched scream and an eagerness to find purchase and purpose around the wrists and ankles of the man with the glasses. To fulfill a long-awaited destiny. Charlie leaned forward and grabbed the tape between her teeth, and tore a first section off. "Sit," she commanded her erstwhile predator.

"Do indeed," echoed Claudette. A miasma of tar and burnt nicotine drifted over her yellowed teeth like some rotten fog fleeing the mouth of a bay. "You're not so bad-lookin', f'r a limp-dick cocksucker want to hurt my baby girl."

Charlie tracked a lone bead of sweat as it swam up from the man's thick and curly hairline, then cut a ragged path across and down the ridges of his forehead. Something awful inside of her wanted to smile.  "Maybe we can even have us some fun, 'fore we get through," her mother said, and as she smiled the ash quivered, and Charlie cast down her eyes and tore free another piece of tape.

Slick heaved himself into the van, using his knees to go the distance from the running board to the seat. He felt plastic sheeting give as he settled into the seat, and a momentary spike of fear punched through his throat.

Doug stepped in, caught the look in Slick’s eye. He shook his head. “Not what you think".

“What is it, then?” Slick croaked out.  Little points of sweat were forming along his neck where the plastic gripped at his skin.

Doug gave a dismissive wave. “That’s for another thing”.

Euri twisted his neck around and studied Slick a moment. “Who’s this guy?”

“This," Doug said, "is a prize fucking asshole.  I won him at the State Asshole Fair”.

Euri sniffed the air. “Holy shit, what happened to him?”

“Stavi shot him”.

“Where the fuck’s Stavi then?”

“Stavi’s back in the diner cleaning up the mess.”

Euri considered this. “So what, we’re meeting him later?”

“Sorry, did I say I won the prize asshole? I want my ticket back now”.

The driver barked out a laugh.

Euri forced a mouthful of air through his teeth. “Are we still going to headquarters?”

“Yes, Euri. We are going to headquarters to show off a man with a bullet in his shoulder and piss all down his pants. Then when they’re done pinning medals to us, we’re taking him out for a night of karaoke and pork-on-a-fucking-bun. No, Euri. We’re taking Asshole Number One here to Ferguson to get him fixed up”.

Euri cranked down the window and lit one of his black little cigarettes. “That’s way outside the plan, Doug”.

Doug grimaced and began rubbing his forehead with a methodical index finger. “Euri, you are so correct. This is way, way outside the plan. That is because the original plan did not include some piss-soaked fuckface bleeding all over my vehicle.” Doug released his finger from his forehead and some of the tension in his body seemed to escape. “In the original plan, Stavi is still breathing and we’re halfway to being rich. So let’s drive to fucking Ferguson and make sure Stinky here doesn’t force us to use the plastic sheeting prematurely”.

Euri cranked the window back up.  Dark cinnamon-tinted smoke boiled off the end of his cigarette and soaked into the van's interior. “Why the hell are we keeping this guy alive?” He cast a glance to Slick. “You know, no offense”.

“Because," Doug said, "he’s better than what we wanted, Euri. The letter was just a means. He’s the letter and the envelope all in one. And if we don’t fuck this up abysmally, which I am not ruling out just yet, we're going to return it to sender.”

Doug looked on at Slick with an expression that could almost be called beatific. "And when she comes to pick it up, we’ll be there. And then, friends, we’ll be even better than rich”.

He leaned in close to Slick’s ear.

“We’ll be heroes”.

Sometimes, with a cigarette, you can take a paperclip and straighten it out.  Somewhat straight, and ram that fucker down the shaft of a cigarette and the Ash won't fall and you can walk around a Party with it, threatening the cocktails of fellow party attendees.  The host's new swede furniture.  The cat.  She'd seen this maneuver before and was fairly certain that Claudette was on the level.

Charlie wondered when that Ash would break and deafen the Room with it's silent explosion on the Oak bar top.  Foolish, she thought to herself, Claudette never misses.  Ever.

"Thought you wasn't comin' in Here no more," Claudette said, smiling.  Her teeth, yellow.  The way piss looks when it dries up.

"Dad's dead."  Charlie said.  Never taking her eye off that ash.

"When?"  

Charlie wanted to scream, 'The fuck you care, you mean old bitch!  You and your perfect ash and your dried up piss-stained teeth.  When did you give a Damn about anything other than your Bottle and Beethoven.'  Mom always had a soft spot for the Classics.

Charlie wanted to say all this.  Maybe clean the slate and start fresh from the New.  She wanted to say all this.  But something in her periphery made her hold.  Some shadow she new would catch up, eventually.  Like shadows always do.

"Well, well, well.  Thought I'd find you here, Charlie.  Fuck all but you got shit for Brains, girl.  Wait 'till Aloysius get his hands on you.  You stupid bitch.  You'll be his fucking Masterpiece!"

It was shit-or-go-Blind time.  Charlie thought about bolting for the back.  Out the hidden service door.  Out into the alley.  Back into oblivion.  She thought about letting go and taking her Medicine.  She thought about all of this as time slowed. 

The sound of the 0-0 shell being racked into the 12 gauge, pump action Remington was unmistakable.  Any fools that knows anything knows that sound and it filled Charlie with Joy.

"Aint nobody come in my place and call my Baby-Girl stupid.  You limp-dick Cocksucker."

Charlie could see the barrel of the Remington in the reflection of the Shadows eyeglasses.  You could drop quarters, flat-ways, down that nasty fucker and sometimes Claudette did.  Drop quarters flat ways in it.  She always had a soft spot for the Classics.

"I love you, Mom."

"I love you to, Baby.  Now, be a good girl and fetch Mama the Duct Tape.  You remember where we keep it?"

How could she forget.

The sky in front of him was brilliant and blue and so damn bright that he could see his reflection in it.  He had never known that was possible.

Slick stood in a puddle of his own pending demise - blood and urine and something that resembled a tooth.  When had that come out?  The red of his shoulder looked black against the blueness.

"Get in the back, dickwad.  The seats are pleather."

Then the sky was gone.  It had slid open to reveal the inside of a van and a sunlit Doug looking disgusted.

Slick got in the van and sat on the floor. 

"You smell like piss and candy," Doug said. "You and Euri were made for each other."

The train station was a block away.

************************************

The air in front of her was dark and thick and swirled with smoke.

Charlie stood there in the stale, canned twilight and let her eyes adjust.  Nobody got any prettier.

The top of the bar was as empty as the last time she danced upon it.  She bet the register was even more so.  The only Cash this place knew was on the jukebox. He was singing there now.

The taste of love is sweet
When hearts like ours meet
I fell for you like a child
Oh, but the fire went wild...

The woman buried in a bottle and a newspaper looked up from the bar. Her mouth puckered tightly around an inch of surprisingly sturdy ash as she pulled another cigarette from the pack.

Charlie took a confident breath and a shaky step towards the lone stool across from the smoker.

"Hello, Mom," she whispered.  Somewhere in the distance a pin dropped.

And it burns, burns, burns, the ring of fire.

Her mother smiled.  The ash was perfect.

Euri checked his knockoff Tag Heuer Grand Carrera for the seventeen time.

Three minutes.

Three motherfucking, never-ending, keep praying they show or its your hairy Greek ass with the rest of the spittle-and-ketchup-stained scattered-and-smothereds in the Waffle House Dumpster. Euri didn't want to be seagull food on a river barge. He also didn't want to piss his pants, but draining the last of the bitter church-pot coffee out of his kidneys meant he could miss the drop.

Euri needs to urinate. Euri the Urinator, he heard the schoolyard catcalls bounce through his brain.  Thanks a fuckload, Pops.

Pops had named him Euripides because he hoped to predestine his son to be the writer he had failed become in the old country, back before the war took Pops index fingers and a thumb while leaving in its place a dullness in his eyes and an ever-present taste of silver in his mouth.

But Euri, rather than studying his sentence diagrams, fashioned himself to be a football player. He saw himself as Rip. Rip the Greek Tragedy Maker. The centerpiece of a new Steel Curtain Defense. But then came the meniscus tears. Then the cartilage scrapings. The arthritis. Now, he was still Euri the Urinator, the first-grader crying under the slides from the taunts, but with two achy knees, a lopsided hairpiece and a need to get back in the good graces of The Sanitizer with this job.

He walked the platform, eying the local as it rattled toward him for a quick pause before heading on its way to another meaningless commuter destination. I could jump it and be gone, Euri thought, or I could jump in front of it and be gone quicker.

Instead, he lit one of the little black cigarettes his cousin had rolled for him that morning. Euri knew it wasn't to be his last one when he caught sight of the van with the twinkling blue Christmas lights in its battered grill screech across two handicapped spaces.

“Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ!”’

The intruder forgot himself as he gaped stupidly at the upturned recliner, the smashed glass, the blood. Slick stumbled as another wave of nausea hit. Focus. Focus. Focus. Pants you’d call slacks, a permanent crease. Sensible shoes. Hands on hips. The face? Unknown. Treat all as though contaminated.

“A fuckin’ fork? A fork. You can’t be for real. A fork? Jesus Christ.”

Slick spat on the floor, swaying from one foot to the other.

“Who the hell kills a dude with a fork?” The man answered his own question. “Your mother. Dammit, I fuckin’ knew he’d come up here after you. Had to break cover but not because I thought you’d stick a fuckin’ fork in his head. Jesus Christ.”

His shoulder was on fire, the metal cool in his hand. The man, still gaping, put one foot into a puddle of fresh vomit and recoiled, diverted. Slick felt an electricity rise through his feet, a rush up through his chest that urged now now now and he wound up, hurling the tin as hard as he could at the man’s head. His tenderized shoulder shrieked. Everything collapsed at once. The dispenser, with a crack. The visitor, with a yeowl. And all that was left of whatever had kept him upright. Done. Done. No more.

“Dickwad!” the man howled, bracing himself on a table with one hand and pressing his other palm to his eye.

Dickwad? The visitor’s apparent menace shrank. Slick backed up until he felt a chair bump the back of his knees and sat down, resigned, his head in his hands.

“I come up here to keep this… this…” the man gestured redundantly to the corner. “…sorry-ass forked fucker from goin’ after all we got and… christ, you hit me in the eye with a fuckin’… what the hell was that?”

The man cursed and rubbed his temple, pacing between his assignment and the dead man in the zoot suit.

“You go chuckin’ shit at me and—” he winced and knuckled the hole of his eye. “Alright. Fine. So you’re an asshole. And you look like fuckin’ ground beef. But if we don’t show up at the station in ten minutes in his place, they’ll know somethin’s up.”

The visitor paused, his eyes narrowed in assessment. What was he looking for? Remorse? Affiliation? Readiness. The man nodded to himself, his mind set. Slick faded into fog, blur, spinning. He felt himself propped up on his feet, pushed towards the door.

“Sorry,” Slick leaned drunkenly as they stepped through the doorway and into the dimly-lit hall. ‘They told me someone’d meet me here but that guy… I couldn’t…”

“Yeah. You’re an asshole. And I’m Doug. And I don’t give a shit about that letter in your pocket.”

“What…”

“Yeah. I know all about it already," the man sniffed. "That girl ‘o yours, she’s been bakin’ more than buns.”

My pants are wet. My pants are wet? Jesus Christ.

“They say she did it for you,” he added, as they broke into blinding light. “Fucked if I know why.”

"What the fuck?" The man's voice called into the dark with a menacing echo. Shit. Slick's cavalier attitude dissolved, replaced by uncharacteristic panic. He collected himself with a start, regarding his forked companion with more amusement than the situation warranted. "Fuckity fuck fuck FUCK," he whispered, suddenly frantic.

His eyes darted around the room, searching for an appropriate exit for himself and, he was sickened to realize, his deceased companion, for he'd made no effort to cover his tracks. It was, after all, the first time he'd killed anyone, and of course, it could be tied back to Charlie. Of fucking course.

He was overwhelmed with what felt like hatred, but couldn't possibly be -- hatred was what he only wished for when it came to Charlie. You bitch, he thought. I do everything for you, and you give me nothing, over and over again. Nothing. You ... bitch. His hands were shaking.

"What the FUCK, man?" The voice again -- louder this time -- breaking his furious reverie. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the man edge closer. Fuck it, thought Slick. Fuck it. He fingered the knife in his pocket before reaching for the napkin dispenser, comforted by the weight of it in his hand. A weapon.

Charlie's laugh echoed in his ears.

    The day was just beginning but Charlie thought only of endings. She hit her cigarette and exhaled a cloud of unformed dough. This was her curse, a life lived inside a web of baking metaphors. She ached for more expansive meaning, a new cake rising - dammit - but it seemed to her that all her oven's timers were buzzing all at the same time. Everything was done. Her father's last words in the hospital, just three weeks ago, sounded through her head. "There's no light, Charlie. No tunnel. The end. It's just a laughing whore." She yearned for a clearer recipe. "I love you" maybe. Or "You were a good girl." But her father was never a man of simplicity nor clarity and this, no doubt, informed her taste in men.

    She kept her head down as she passed the corner boys peddling crack and smack and screaming "It's the blast!" A laughing whore crossed the street and Charlie winced in the presence of such a luminous coincidence. The whore laughed. Everything was done. The money they won in Vegas was gone. She had quit drinking again. The seasons ended on all the TV shows. And she had written the letter.

    A blackbird cawed and she imagined sticking a fork in its head. The image startled her. She had no special hatred for birds. Actually, she liked birds. The blackbird's caw was ominous but it certainly didn't call for a fork in the head. Was slick OK? Oh, who cares? He didn't love her the way she needed to be loved. She was no key lime pie. If that bastard cared at all, he would've called by now. She could hear his excuses now. "I couldn't get a signal." "I lost track of time." "Someone shot me in the shoulder." Shot in the shoulder? Charlie marveled at the strange yeast in the thoughts that kept rising, unbidden, in the oven of her mind.

    She paused in front of the bar and thought again about her father. He was dead. But where did he go? Maybe the letter didn't need to mean the end. What if, hidden in the letters and words, a new beginning lingered? It occurred to her that life was a doughnut. She entered the bar. Sobriety, like words, was a fragile thing. Very fragile.

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.

There was no warm greeting to ease him into the letter. The time for such things had passed them long ago. Perhaps it had been the moment she noticed he hadn't flinched when she'd confessed to him what she'd done. It's amazing just how loose the body becomes when lubricated with the type of elixirs they liked to commiserate - and sometimes celebrate -  in. Sometimes I think I'm still capable of such a thing, she'd said, her words perhaps a bit too loud for the sentiment. Or maybe it had been the morning she dropped a plate of day-old pastries in front of him and turned away before their gazes synched up. Nice buns, he'd said, his voice giving away the smirk without much fight, and in that instant before turning back toward him, Charlie wrestled with the idea of either roundhouse kicking it off his face or tackling him to the ground in a move that wasn't so much about tackling as it was about taking. Yeah, she thought, the retirement plan at the bakery was for shit, but the perks actually did pay off from time to time.

So she simply began. Christ, I had no idea you mattered that much. She hadn't wanted to write the letter. Didn't want to present him with such tangible, perhaps damning, evidence of just how much he mattered. Had mattered, Charlie. Had mattered, she thought. "It would serve you well to start realizing that," she could hear him say. She kicked at the ground like a petulant child, wondering just how long his words would chase her own as they raced around her cranium. Forget chase. His usual won with very little margin of error. Hell, sometimes it was like his thoughts took a victory lap when she actually heard herself saying something she knew he'd say. So, while it may have served her well, she couldn't stop herself from writing the letter. When she finished, she felt like a mosquito that had been invited to feast upon a gifted vein, then thanked for her company with a slap that sent her guts and blood and matter exploding across the host's skin. Her words were smeared and splattered across the pale sheets of paper, and as she began to re-read them, she hoped to see Fuck you written in a continuous loop. But such was not the case.

********************

No signal. He loved words, the way they could play nicely with one another one moment and suddenly be capable of such insane violence against the other the next, but seeing the simple sentence that prevented him from calling Charlie made him question such a romance. He didn't have time to question it long, though. The pain searing across his body made it difficult to think at all, and he wondered when he could start a running tab on that cocktail of endorphins and adrenaline he was hoping would be served up soon. He didn't think it was possible, but he slumped even further down. How low can you go? he thought. "Pretty damn low," he muttered. "How 'bout you?" he asked his lifeless cohort, giving him a moment to consider an answer. "Oh, I see how you are," he chuckled. "The strong and silent type, huh? Well, you're silent, anyway, which, I gotta say, pisses me off because I'd sure as hell like to know what the fuck's up with the zoot suit, brother."

He flipped his phone closed, took a deep breath (Mmmmm! Minty fresh!) and began the painful task of slipping the pointless device back into his pocket. As he did, his fingers brushed against Charlie's letter. Everywhere he went, it was his sidekick. Its once sharp edges had softened with regular readings, though, if he was being honest, he didn't even need to open it to read it anymore. He could recite it so perfectly it was like auditioning for a play. He wanted the lead, dammit. He'd even sing and dance if he had to (though he hoped he didn't have to). He was running a thumb across a corner of her words when the door chimes fluttered, sending ironically cheery theme music across the macabre opening scene that had just been staged. Taking a page from the lesson on Make No Sudden Movements from the School of Unfortunate Circumstances (unaccredited, naturally) he found himself matriculating in at the moment, he focused his gaze once again on the fork protruding from the temple of the questionably hip corpse slumped nearby and caught the inverted reflection of a man on the section of tines that had been spared making friends with the dead man's brain.

"What the fuck?" whispered the guest star, interrupting an admittedly ill-timed moment of self congratulations on the full-blown, all-purpose MacGyver moment that damn fork had afforded him.

"What the fuck, indeed," he thought.