ey. Let me ask you a question." The old man turned away from the baseball game. "How come a young fella like you has got all this time to sit around on a Tuesday afternoon, and drink ... and watch TV ... I mean, not for nothin' ... but there's a time and a place. How come you ain't working?"

Marco's backside slid forward on the barstool. His leather pants slid on the vinyl and made an embarrassing sound. The question itself did not matter. But if the old man got worked up, and the bartender found out Marco was not the old man's nephew, Marco would have to come up with a way to pay for three Wild Turkeys.

"I'm kinda between jobs now. You know how it is." Look him in the eye. But not too long. The longer you look, the more likely the mark will know it's a ruse. The man leaned back, unsatisfied. Marco faced the bar, and worked another Camel out of the half-empty pack beside his drink.

"What kinda work you in?"

"Construction. A buddy of mine knows a guy that's got a site in Venice ... starting next week." Keep the answers short. The mark's got to believe them and you've got to remember them.

"Bull shit. What's a half-pint stick boy like you gonna construct—gingerbread houses?" He faced the bar and planted both hands on the counter for balance. "Steady as she goes," he winked at Marco and ambled toward the back of the bar.

The old man disappeared down a narrow hall. Marco felt his own heart beating. Racing as it can only when you are sober. 'Christ,' he thought, 'all this effort to hustle drinks, and I'm not even buzzed.' He unwrapped his feet from the barstool and placed them on the floor. His own knees began to buckle. The fear in his own face stared back at Marco from the long mirror behind the bar. 'You're on boy, make it good,' Marco thought, searching for a mask of confidence.

The bartender left them alone. That was good. At 2:15, there were three live bodies in the Catalina Lounge: Marco, the old man, and the bartender, at the front of the bar, working on a crossword puzzle. Marco was halfway down the bar, when the bartender raised his head. He put the newspaper on the counter, between two large fists. Hope you enjoyed yourself, and hope we'll see you back soon. Just one bit of business, though, before you leave. The bartender's pleasant expression belied the awesome power in those coiled hands.

"I gotta be somewhere, but my uncle," Marco motioned his thumb toward the back of the bar," he's gonna get ya for the drinks."

The benign expression drained from the bartender's face, and fists tightened to the point where Marco saw the man's knuckles turn white from a lack of circulation.

"Your uncle?" The hands left the counter, and the bartender crossed his arms across his massive chest. Tucking his hands into his armpits, his biceps became taught and stretched the short-sleeves of his pale blue sport shirt. A snake, painted black and green on the man's arm, ran up and under the sleeve.

'Fuck,' Marco thought, 'there'll be two sounds: him hitting me... me hitting the ground, and I'll only hear the first.' The old man finished his business. From the far end of the bar, he made his way back with the uneven shuffle of worn shoes across the dusty floor.

"Hey pop," the bartender uncoiled his arms, placed his left fist on the counter, and pointed a long accusatory finger at Marco, "this guy says he's your nephew. Any truth?"

The old man stopped.

"Nephew? That punk's been talking shit all afternoon." He paused at the stool, and placed both palms on the seat, preparing to reclaim the same position he had held for the better part of the afternoon. "I've never seen him before in my life," he murmured, half to himself.

"Hey pop," the bartender's voice thundered from beneath the bar, "do me a favor and shut the door." The bartender emerged from behind the counter and placed a long blunt shaft of oak on the counter.

Marco was a pathetic con man. He had spent enough time hustling in bars that, by now, he should have known how to do it right. But he knew what the man behind the bar could do with that piece of oak, and what that oak would do to his insides. Any more time looking at the bartender was time viewed through the eyes of a soon-to-be-dead man. Marco's feet hit the ground. It was not the distance that doomed him; it was the path he took. Halfway to the door, his right knee hit the thick wooden leg of one of the chairs parked under the table closest to the bar. Doubled over and howling, Marco felt the hit all the way to his toes.

"I told you to get off your ass and lock that damn door." The bartender was on the counter, ready to pounce. Now, he straightened up. Marco's knee swelled. The bartender's urgency was gone, but his anger spoke through the old man's buzz. The clarity impressed the old man to the point that he didn't take time to balance himself when he got off the stool. He found himself on the floor, a few feet behind Marco.

"Fucking lush," the bartender said to himself. He jumped off the bar. Landing smoothly on both feet, he reached back to pick up the shaft of wood. Marco watched him walk toward the door. He was surprised at the bartender's graceful gait. This guy queer? Marco wondered. The man locked the door. He turned around and slapped the oak shaft into the palm of his left hand.

"Now …" the bartender's voice punctured the stuffy haze of the bar, ringing above another smack of the shaft against the inside of his hand, "You drank three Wild Turkeys, and that old man ain't your uncle. That's fifteen dollars. So if you got it, pay and get the hell outta my place," His voice was softer now. On two good legs, with a lethal piece of wood, looming over a man sprawled on his floor with one bum knee, the bartender could afford to speak softly.

Marco slid his hands behind his back. He steadied himself, and began to rise. "I ain't ... I don't have it. I've got maybe eight. But that's all. I swear."

The bartender stepped back. He held the shaft perpendicular to the table. "Get up."

Working with two arms and one good leg, Marco obeyed. Once vertical, he tried to place some of his weight on his right knee. Face to face, the bartender was no taller than Marco. From the neck down, though, they were not even close. The irony of this massive individual, dressed in a shirt that was almost two sizes too small was the last amusing thought Marco would have for a long time. He had managed to steady himself, when the shaft slammed into the softest space of his stomach. So hard that hitting the chair must have felt like a love tap. It was the second time in five years in Los Angeles that Marco had taken a whack in his gut from the blunt head of a piece of wood. He placed his hands on his stomach, expecting to find a hole they could burrow into, and fell to his knees. When his right knee hit the hard pavement of the bar, Marco howled again.

The bartender stepped back, and turned toward the door. Still speaking in that slow, almost benign tone, he continued, "I don't want your eight dollars. What you're gonna do now is ... crawl if you have to ... get your lying hustling ass to the bus station. When you get there, you spend that eight dollars. Spend it all. Get yourself as far from here as you can..." After he unlocked the door, the bartender burrowed his hands into his eyes. A moment later, he looked down at Marco. "...'Cause if I see you again, you're gonna eat that stick. The bartender pointed to the shaft, lying on one of the tables, and stepped away from the door.

 

utside it was raining. Marco didn't think about closing the window. The cool air soothed his throbbing knee and bruised stomach. The sound of rain hitting asphalt, seven floors below, and the endless stream of cars driving over that fallen rain dissolved into the low, steady drone of the Los Angeles night.

 

he sergeant passed the pack of Marlboros to Ralph. He lit the one he'd kept for himself, and spoke slowly. "Smythe, what is this? I mean, how many times have we pulled your useless ass in here for one bullshit rap or another. Six months ago, you're in here with your friend, Hardy. It's his bad luck and you're good, that he was carrying it. O.K., they're his prints, so he goes away. Dumb luck." The cop took a long drag off his cigarette and faced the boy for the first time. "Now you're not stupid enough to think it was anything else... huh? Like you actually put something over on us?"

The boy wrapped his feet around the legs of the chair and stared at the black floor. Benny stole the car. The boy had nothing to do with it. No reason to speak. If the cop wanted to send Benny away, then he should get off his ass and figure it out for himself.

"O.K. So, six months go by, and you're back again. This time your friend steals a car, and when he's pulled over, it's your bad luck that you're in the passenger seat." The sergeant stood and paced to the wall. He murmured something that the boy could not understand. A moment later, he turned - his face flushed, and paced back to the table, pulling the chair out and turning it, back facing front.

"So this is your life? Twenty-two, twenty-three years old. No education. No prospects. Just every couple' a months you get picked up with one of your loser white trash buddies. And every time, you come this close to going away with them." The sergeant held the thumb and forefinger of his right hand less than an inch apart. For no reason, the boy equated this gesture from the paunchy, middle aged, armchair Dirty Harry as a confession of the size of his organ.

"You think that's funny?" The boy's smirk evaporated. After stubbing out the last ember of his cigarette, the sergeant rubbed his tired brow and softened his voice. "So if that's all you've got in Jacksonville—and all you're ever gonna have—then maybe the writing's on the wall and you should get outta here..." He placed his hands flat on the square metallic table, straightened his back, and added, "...before your dumb luck runs out and your ass lands in Raiford."

A week later, the same boy, who hadn't heard from his father since he was three and whose mother had been dead for a year, bought a one-way ticket on a Greyhound for Los Angeles. When a priest, who was traveling on the same bus to Santa Fe, asked for his name, the boy answered 'Marco.' He liked the way it sounded and thought it would fit well in Los Angeles.

Five years in Los Angeles. Marco had been falling hard and long before he hit that blunt shaft of oak. Sleep brought peace to his stomach. The blunt end of the bartender's long hard shaft waited at the end of his dream.Marco shuddered, and a tear followed the sudden jolt into consciousness from somewhere deep and tender inside his stomach.

Marco held his breath. Lying flat on his bed, like a corpse on a slab, he exhaled slowly. So slow that he barely felt the hit that time. 'I'll put some ice on now,' he thought, 'it's got to be ready.' Rising slowly from his bed, the pain stung Marco again. Like a long, horrible dagger, it went deeper with each degree of bend in his torso. Two steps away from his bed, the floor was the closest plain of refuge.

 

mall quick steps. High-heeled shoes on the tiles of the hall beyond were audible. Their echo penetrated the thin walls of the apartment. Reeling with nausea, Marco sat down and his ears tracked the path of the shoes. They stopped just beyond the door of Marco's apartment. Daisy had come home. The walls shook when she slammed the door to her apartment shut. Six aspirin did nothing to settle Marco's stomach. Ice. It must be ready. In an eerie replay of his ascent from the floor of the bar, earlier that afternoon, Marco let his arms do the work of lifting his body from the hardwood floor of his apartment. His knee still throbbed. Worse now than before his nap. Someone was at the door.

The pounding at the door could have been the bartender. So angry at Marco—enraged at even the prospect of being take for a sucker—that he followed Marco home. Then he'd spent five or six hours drinking black coffee at Mona's, on the corner across the street. Waiting for the cover of night to conceal his final act of vengeance. A few hours pass, and the bartender sees the light go on. That scrawny little fucker was awake. He'd open the door, and the last thing he'd see would be that same shaft of oak, just before it landed right between his eyes.

"Hey Marco. Open up," Daisy yammered from the other side of the door. "Ah see the light commin' from unduh the doh. Whacha got, a gihl in thah? If yah a gentleman, tuhn off thah laghts, or else let me in, for fuck's sake." Marco hobbled to the door. The effect of the peephole on Daisy's features unnerved Marco. Her pleasant, comely face was now unnaturally large. Rounded, with a forehead that seemed to stretch for miles across pale, anemic skin. Her fingers—distant and chubby in this grotesque distortion—twiddled an exaggerated greeting.

"C'mon Marco. I'll make it worth your while." Facing opposite sides of the door, they both giggled. Marco unlocked the door. "Jezus. Boy, you're white as a sheet. What's wrong?" Marco didn't speak and motioned for Daisy to enter. He closed the door, and walked past her, heading for the refrigerator.

"It's nothing. I went down to Long Beach this afternoon, and I had a burrito that ain't sitting right. That's all."

"Bull shit, Marco. Yur walkin' crooked, and ya look like death. Bad Mexican, my ass." He hadn't reached the refrigerator when the tender clasp of Daisy's long thin arms touched his back. "Honey, I don't wanna be sharp with ya, but ya look bad, and I'm worried," she whispered as her palms slid forward over his hips. She clasped her hands when they met, on his stomach. Her slight, gentle squeeze touched the same spot where the bartender's shaft landed. Marco screamed as the squeeze gored deeper into his stomach.

Daisy didn't say a word. She jumped back, covered her gaping mouth with both hands, and watched, helpless as Marco broke from her grasp and fell to the floor. "It's all right. It's just the bad food." Writhing on the floor, Marco tried to lift himself. Placing his weight on his arms, the muscles of his torso stretched. They stretched to the point that he felt the tearing, and he collapsed again. Daisy knelt to the floor and wrapped her arms underneath Marco's armpits.

"C'mon, put your weight on me. I'll get ya to the bed." Marco straightened his legs and his feet found the floor.

"Thanks. It's O.K. I'll make it from here." Again, he left her gentle grasp, and made his way to the bed. "There should be ice in the freezer. Do me a favor, hon, and put some in one of those plastic bags under the sink and bring it here."

"Yar gonna catch cold laying there bare with that window open. Let me get ya a shirt," she offered, as she filled the bag with ice.

"In the closet. There's an old blue one on one of the hangers. Don't bring me anything I gotta pull over." The rain had let up some. Flat on his back, Marco felt the breeze and imagined his wound beginning to heal.

"Are ya gonna tell me true what happened, or are ya stickin' with that fool lie about the burrito?" Daisy closed the bag of ice with a twist-tie and sauntered toward the open window. Marco leaned on his side, facing Daisy, careful not to pressure his stomach. Her slow walk across the floor and the sly smile curling on her lips reminded Marco what Daisy did to pay the rent. She slept with strange men. Not all the time. She made that clear in the beginning, and Marco believed her.

Daisy landed in Los Angeles about a year before, from her hometown in Tennessee. Marco figured her circumstances were similar to those that drove him from Jacksonville, three years before that. She never went into particulars, and Marco never asked. Daisy went for stretches—a few weeks to a month at a time or a little longer—when she did not hook. But she always came back.

"It's the way ah tahk, Marco," she drawled after her last attempt to walk the straight and narrow—three days at a customer service call center in the Valley. "Nobody wants a crackah anserin' their phone or bothern' them, try'n to sell thum a credit card." Marco never questioned, but guessed that Daisy's inevitable return had more to do with the simple fact that when she hooked she was the boss.

He faced the ceiling and exhaled. "O.K. The burrito was a lie. I was hustlin' drinks at a place in Hollywood, and... it didn't work out." He grinned at the understatement. Marco never pressed Daisy on the details when things didn't happen the right way. Now, he hoped she would reciprocate that courtesy.

Daisy motioned Marco to make room on the edge of the bed. Movement was still painful, but Daisy was the only friend he had in Los Angeles. He slid over just far enough to allow her small, well-toned buttocks a place on his bed. Her sly smile hardened. Daisy knew Marco wasn't telling the whole story, but it was a start.

"Where'd ya want this ice, Marco," she cooed, brushing his cropped black hair with the back of her hand.

"X marks the spot."

"Ohh, Marco. Honey, what happened?" The knowing smile dissolved, and Daisy gasped in horror and awe at the hideous blotch. As much to relieve Marco's pain as to put the ugliness out of sight, Daisy wrapped the frigid, dripping bag of half-dissolved ice in a towel she took from the counter and laid it on the wound.

"Ahhhh." Marco's stomach tightened. He leaned up on his elbows and folded the towel so there was another layer to buffer the shock of ice to his aching flesh. "Better," he grimaced at Daisy, and leaned back. Slow. Careful not to pull the tender fibers of his stomach too far. "Thanks babe." On his back, Marco felt the first sense of relief. The dripping shell of cold water and ice soothed the dull, burning ache. Marco exhaled slowly, and told Daisy what happened that afternoon at the Catalina Lounge.

 

hen he finished, Daisy leaned back and stared at the wall. "That's the second tahm ya got hit in the guts, ain't it Marco?"

"Yeah." Embarrassed, he turned away. "I suppose I should be used to it," he grinned and turned back, facing the ceiling, "but I didn't take it any better this afternoon that I did four years ago."

The grave expression hung on Daisy's face. She lit one of the cigarettes from a pack of Lucky Strikes, which seemed to always be tattered and always on her person.

"Got one for me, partner?" Marco asked, lifting his hand toward the smoldering Lucky.

"Ah don't think it's good, in yer cundishin'." She stared at the cigarette, clasped in her fingers. "...And I don't want ta make ya jealous," she smiled and held the cigarette half an arm's length away, before she got up to find an ashtray. Marco closed his eyes, and listened to the sounds of cabinet doors, being opened and closed with a growing sense of frustration. Daisy's search for an ashtray touched him. It was the first act of kindness to come his way since he walked into the Catalina Lounge.

"At the top of the last cabinet ... on the left," he offered in a calm, helpful voice. After the cabinet shut, a sudden burst of water ran from the faucet, ringing Marco's ears. Daisy dried the ashtray, and the cabinet door opened and shut one last time as Daisy returned the ashtray to the cabinet. She returned to the bed with the confidence of a friend. No trace of the slow, sensual glide which first brought her across the floor of the apartment.

"Is yer tummy any bettuh?" She took the same place on the edge of the bed, and brought her hand halfway to the plastic bag, now lying like a clear, perspiring jellyfish on top of Marco's wound. "Ahl just let the ice work on its own." Daisy patted Marco twice and produced another Lucky from that tattered pack. The whoosh of her lighter turned Marco's head. He smiled and placed his hand on her knee. A gentle pat to remind Daisy of the cigarette she had just put out. "No," the drawl of her voice was almost incomprehensible as the words formed around the unlit cigarette that dangled from her lips. "These fuckin' things don't do anybody any good."

Daisy tore the Lucky from her lips and threw it across the room. The better part of a year spent on her back, coupled with a steady diet of Taco Bell and Dr. Pepper had been as kind to Daisy as possible. The cigarette hit the pale white-washed walls, and left two small ugly stains; evidence of an arm which once earned Daisy an All-Hardin County softball selection.

"Damn." Marco leaned forward and appraised the pitch with a mix of amusement, admiration and fear. "If you want one that bad, go ahead. It won't bother me," he chuckled.

"Naw," she placed her palm on the plastic bag, and pressed it gently. "They're bad." She leaned back halfway, and moved her hand up his torso. "Just like this place... Los Angeles. Ah came here to git away from a whole lotta bad stuff back home." Her hand laid still, fingers entwined through the thick hair on Marco's chest. Marco recoiled from the tickling sensation, but relaxed immediately in the comfort of common ground. He knew what it meant to be driven from your home, and to fall back into the same bad habits in a new place.

Daisy's fingers stopped wandering across Marco's chest. They stopped, and her index finger began tapping, as though something she had always misunderstood had suddenly come into focus.

"Marco? You were once talkin' about goin' sum where... and gettin' a farm. It was Montana... or..."

"Oregon. I want to get outta here and buy a farm... Oregon would be a nice place." Marco's displeasure rose and then faded as it bled into his picture of blue skies, green fields dotted with frame houses and full, flowering trees. A few months before he met Daisy, Marco had been on a job—cashing bogus disability checks—when he first thought about an escape to Oregon. Sitting in the bank lobby, his throat dry with fear, Marco tried to calm his nerves with a magazine. Marco may never had heard of Oregon before his clammy fingers thumbed to an article about a banker and his wife, a surgeon, who left Los Angeles to buy a farm in the Willamette Valley. For a long time after, Marco believed the information in that magazine was the most valuable item he took from the bank that afternoon.

"That's it... Oregon." She remembered, and knew it was important. Now, more than ever. "What does it take? Ah mean, two pokes in the stomach, Marco... Honey, Your luck's runnin' out."

"It takes money... which I don't have." Ashamed to admit defeat, Marco turned to the open window, faced the cool, wet breeze and the night beyond. Fine drops of rain swept through the open window and landed on his face. Beyond the window, stretching towards the Pacific, were seven million strangers. People who did not think twice about busting your stomach wide open over the price of a drink. People whose path Marco could never cross again because he had swindled them for two hundred dollars with the promise of millions from a development of worthless scrubland outside Phoenix.

Facing the window strained Marco's wound. When he turned, now flat on his back, Daisy was closer than she had ever been.

"Wull, how much would it take just to get away for a few days ... kinda drive 'round and see if we like it?"

"I don't think that would take much at all," Marco whispered. Cold water rose from the bag and Marco flinched as it splashed across his stomach.

"Shit," Daisy exclaimed when the same splash blotched her white cotton tank top. "Mahnd if ah take this off," Daisy giggled. She straightened her back and peeled off the top. Gazing down at her own slightly paunchy, yet well-tanned torso, Daisy straightened her head and held Marco in her bright green eyes. "Yeh like?" she giggled.

"Yeah. But I'm wonderin why now? And what's your attraction to Oregon?" Five years, alone and friendless, scratching a living from the selection of odd jobs and petty con games that the city offered, left Marco suspicious. His voice betrayed the first hint of paranoia.

"It's lahk I said...," she descended onto him, spreading her arms across his chest, like a swimmer taking her first wide stroke off the wall. "Everything about L.A.... hooking... you gettin' beat up... it's just bad, and I wanna get out." Her steely gaze of anger and frustration melted into a look of comfort and hope. "And yur the first person I've met that's decent. The first person that's lookin' for something bettah." She paused and slowly took her hands from his chest. "Jezus, Marco, I don't know Oregon from... from nuthin', but..." She felt free to speak what had been churning inside her for months. Free, because she knew her audience—lying flat on his back, reeling from a hard blow to the stomach, in a city that did not care—must feel the same.

"It's O.K...." Leaning forward still hurt, but Marco brought himself up and put his hand on Daisy's knee. "But I'm tired, and my stomach still hurts. So let's talk about it in the morning."

"Da ya mind if ah spend the night?"

Marco moved his hand up her leg, and Daisy came back to him. So close that her face blurred in the dim light of the apartment.

The high-pitched blast jarred them both. "Shit... Shit..." Daisy hissed, unclasping the beeper from her pocket. Her eyes squinted when she held it towards the window. The glow from the neon and streetlights below illuminated the number, and her eyes widened with excitement. "Marco, I gotta make a call." She was off the bed now. Her voice was hurried and far away, sliding the tank top over her head.

"Go ahead. Make it here."

"No. That's O.K," she said, almost breathless, adjusting the sandal strap around her ankle She came back to the bed, picked up her cigarettes, and put her hand on Marco's cheek. "Ah just have to go see a frahnd for a little while. You giht some rest."

Marco knew why Daisy would not make her call in his apartment. Ten minutes after she left, Marco heard the door of Daisy's apartment close shut. The quick steps of high-heeled shoes grew faint as they moved further down the hallway, until all Marco heard was the steady groan of traffic below and the rain, which seemed to coming down harder than before.

[END]

© Andrew Wallace 2001

[index] [archive] [spotlight] [guidelines] [editor] [subscribe]