Creamy Bullets (8 page)

I found my station and started my shift, slipping in the inserts and advertisements. I felt like I was in a trance and wondered if this was a “life experience.” When it was time for my break I didn’t really want to stop. But the guy taking my spot just stood there waiting. Finally, he tapped me on the back, hard. I went outside and looked around, almost expecting to see Kristi, but also wondering if I could see Maureen in these surroundings. I looked out at the empty parking lot, squinting into the dark, and tried to see the future.

Headache

E
very time I put the big truck into reverse it made that awful sounding BEEP BEEEEP BEEEEP— like an alarm clock that you hit the snooze button on. I woke up knowing that something horrible had just occurred.

My head tapped the steering wheel as I stomped on the brake. I heard the little girl crying, sounding far away. The truck was too loud and so I cut the engine and squeezed my head awake. I was always falling asleep lately and I knew it was getting dangerous.

I always thought the beeping sound would make people move out of the way quickly. But some people do not move quickly. I set the parking brake and climbed out of the cab. She was already dead.

The little girl said—”Grandma?”

I didn’t want to make a scene. I got down on the ground and leaned toward the old lady’s tight, broken mouth. I could simultaneously feel the final breaths and the stiffening bones of the corpse.

“It’s okay,” I told the little girl. “She’s just asleep.”

The girl continued to weep and I looked around to see if anyone noticed. What the Hell were they doing on the site anyway? All sorts of cement mixers, cranes and metal girders everywhere. No place for little girls and old ladies. I saw a bag of groceries under there by her feet. I had a couple dozen 20-foot steel beams on the truck bed and it felt like I’d been maneuvering a jet before I dozed off.

“I’ll take care of you,” I told the girl. “Your grandma needs to sleep for a while. I think I gave her a headache.”

I left the job site without clocking out. The little girl and the stiff old lady were in my Regal Town car and I was driving us to my retarded brother’s house. I guessed that the girl was four, five or six years old. The old lady made strange sounds and I told the little girl not to worry, sometimes people speak Russian when they get really bad headaches. I tried to sound calm as I apologized to the corpse for running her over. The girl sorted through the crushed groceries and found a good banana.

At my brother’s house, no one was home. There was a baseball game that afternoon and I knew he would be at the stadium selling and throwing peanuts. I opened up a sleeping bag on the floor and zipped the old lady inside. “She just has to take a nap,” I told the granddaughter. “Do you want to take a nap too?” I felt a blanket of exhaustion starting to overtake me again.

When I woke up I was lying on the floor next to the old lady and I thought I heard a beeping sound. I instinctively flung my hand toward the sound and pressed down on the stiff lady’s breast. The beeping stopped. Some spit bubbles were seen on her lips.

I heard the little girl playing in the bathtub. My brother appeared, entering through the front door with a handful of mail and a baseball bat. The little girl called out: “Are you awake? Hey guys, are you awake!?”

I stood up and put an ignorant look on my face. “Walter—” I started. The little girl skipped out of the bathroom, half wet and half naked. Walter gave me an impatient expression, one he often used when I visited him unannounced. I tried not to stutter as I introduced the body. “This…is…” I shot the girl a Please-help-me look.

“Grandma,” she announced.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s, uh, Margaret. She has a…uh, she’s sleeping.”

Walter gave the body a good look-over. The old lady seemed to say something briefly in Russian. Walter leaned down to check her breathing.

“Margaret’s not breathing too well,” Walter told us. “What’s your name?” he asked the little girl.

“Janey,” she stated.

Walter lead Janey to the exotic fish room and told her to name all the fish while he made some coffee for his sleepy visitors. Of course, Walter knew the old lady was dead. He was retarded but he wasn’t dumb.

I was taking the body out of the sleeping bag when Walter came back into the room. He picked up the baseball bat and delivered three sharp blows to the raggedy body. I tackled Walter to the ground and pried the bat from his hands. “What the Hell do you think you’re doing?” I questioned.

Walter shook himself from his violent spell and looked at me shyly. “I just always wanted to beat someone with my bat before. To see what it felt like. I mean she’s already dead.”

A strange musty smell started to make its presence known. We helped each other off the floor.

Janey came hopping into the room announcing the names of the exotic swimming pets- “Otis is the fat green one. Jojo is the long skinny orange one. The one that looks like a raccoon is Captain Jones. Rodman is the weird-looking black one. The shiny blue one is—Grandma, your headache is better!”

Walter and I spun around to catch sight of the old lady’s body suddenly sitting upright and opened eyes looking dazed. She wheezed and coughed and spread her arms in front of her as if to say,
What in God’s name happened to my body?

“Grandma, talk like a Russian again. That was neat.”

“I just got back from the promised land,” the lady said. “And you there- the touched one,” she pointed at Walter and smiled, “You were there, wearing a tuxedo.”

Walter looked down at his body, making sure he wasn’t dead or wearing a tux.

“Janey dear, come help me up honey.”

The little girl went and held the old lady’s hand.

“Oh my,” said the grandmother, “I do believe my legs are crushed.”

Right at that moment I began to think of ways to get the lady to the hospital anonymously. My head started to hurt and a loud beeping sound filled my ears. I felt a heavy pain going through my own legs. I reached down and my hands were quickly smashed. My vision cleared and I found myself underneath a large truck of some kind. I knew something horrible had happened. There were vegetables, a gallon of milk, toothpaste, and a bag of Doritos in disarray where my body splayed on the gravely ground.

I heard footsteps coming toward me. My throat choked out dark blood and dry, clumsy chunks of language. There was a little girl’s voice calling my name. A headache filled my body.

Outside of This Place

L
ast week, I noticed my hair was falling out in unusual fashion. As in the location of my body of the falling out. As in my arm pits and crotch.

I began to suspect our upstairs neighbor. We saw her once washing the concrete steps with chicken blood. Some kind of voodoo routine.

This lady got unpleasantly pissed off at my wife and I when we first moved in and couldn’t produce a corkscrew for her. She seemed agitated while watching me annihilate the wine cork with a Philip’s screwdriver.

My wife has not noticed a change in the health of her hair. She shaves her whole body anyway. Except her head of course.

Another tenant recently told us that she has seen the inside of Voodoo Lady’s apartment. There was construction paper laid out everywhere with all sorts of chicken parts spread out on top. At least it looked like chicken. There was a bucket of blood on the dining room table, placed neatly between the salt and pepper shakers. This tenant told us she only saw the place that once, while borrowing the telephone.

I am in bed, crawling over my wife, trying to locate her left nipple in the dark. Her right foot is gently massaging my groin. I become large. She says in a concerned voice: “Fuzzy.”

I nearly lose my concentration but keep on licking. Her body so hard and smooth.

“Stubble,” she says, under her breath. My body starts to numb and I look at the glowing numbers of the clock: 4:12 am.

“I need a drink,” she tells me as her fingers click on the bedside lamp. Standing beside the bed, she pauses. Her body is spotted with three dark hairs in the shapes of an S, a 6, and a C. She lightly brushes them off. She looks a little concerned.

She exits the bedroom and I stare at the bed and the floor beside it, the troublesome nests of hairs.

My wife comes back in with a glass of Kool-aid that we share. Upstairs, we hear the lady turn her vacuum cleaner on.

I go upstairs the next afternoon and offer her a ribbon-wrapped corkscrew. She opens the door with some kind of strange robe on. The bottom half is some kind of red velvet, but above the waist is more like a see-through pink chiffon. Her large brown breasts rest just above her deep belly button, which looks about the size of a bathtub drain.

I look at her nose when I talk to her. “I got you a present so you don’t have to use my Philip’s screwdriver again.”

“And where’s the wine, sweet man?” She tests the sharp point of the corkscrew with her index finger.

“Sorry,” I lie to her. “I have to go to work.”

“I thought you worked at nights,” she says.

I wonder how she might know when I work. I hardly spoke to her until now.

“I can hear you working come night time down there.”

I start to understand what she’s getting at, and she smiles like a psychic.

After she burrows around in a kitchen cabinet for a few minutes, she brings out a bottle of dark red wine.

I sit in an overstuffed chair in the living room and watch a soap opera I have never heard of.

“I think this will be adequate for starters,” she says, rubbing the bottle against her chest. By this time, I have surveyed the area and find nothing too unusual about her place. There are some lurid Aztec-looking pictures on the wall and a crowded bookshelf with all sorts of religious books. Everything from Buddhism to Mormonism. Her vacuum cleaner is leaning in the corner but the carpet still looks dirty. We drink and she tells me her name is Brenda.

She sits on the couch and opens a photo album in her lap. “Come look at this picture over here,” she tells me. I sit beside her and see a photograph of her standing in front of a familiar building.

“That’s what the outside of this place looked like ten years ago,” she says. “It’s a nicer shade of blue and the shrubs look a good dose livelier.” She puts the heavy album on my legs and then straightens her posture, holding her breasts up for a second. “It’s funny how ten years can wear shit down.”

In the photo, Brenda looks almost like a teen-ager; 20 pounds lighter, skin darker, her back straight as a board. On the opposite page there is a photo, taken more recently it looks like, of her holding a snake.

“How old are you?” I ask.

“I’ll be 40 next year,” is her answer. “Look some more if you want.”

I turn a few pages, seeing photos of her at beaches, at parties, at formal gatherings, with relatives. There was one that showed a white guy with a big mustache kissing her neck from behind and pushing up on her breasts with his hands. It embarrasses me for some reason, arouses me maybe.

An hour later, a tall young girl comes out of one of the bedrooms. She looks part Hispanic and has a word or something tattooed on the side of her neck. She makes a deep sound in her gut as she sits down in the chair I sat in earlier.

“What kind of shit-juice is that?” she asks right off the bat, indicating my wine glass.

“Some kind of red wine,” I say, trying to sound friendly but tough.

She stares at it with a grimace, looks in the kitchen at Brenda, who is looking for more wine, then looks at my shoes. “I don’t drink,” she says. “I got a job.”

I start to lean forward for my glass, but catch myself and pretend to wipe dust off the table instead. “Where do you work?”

“Safeway,” she says, in a tone of voice suggesting I should already know. “I take groceries out to your car.”

“Doesn’t it get boring?”

“I do lots of shit there. It’s cool. We play the radio loud at nights when we’re stockin’ the shelves.”

It makes me feel intrusive, but I ask her anyway: “Do you live here?” I drink the last drops of my wine and Brenda comes up behind me with another bottle.

“I’m just staying for a little longer,” she says. “M makes me feel safe.”

“M?”

“That’s what she calls me,” Brenda explains.

“What do you mean by safe?”

The girl looks at the clock and yawns before answering. “A couple of weeks ago this big fat guy raped me in the back of a van after I took his groceries out. He was a guy I remember because he tried to pick up on one of my friends the week before at a party. I didn’t want to go to the police, so I came to M. She can fix guys without even touching them.”

I don’t know what to say. Sometimes I get the feeling that sympathy is useless. I start to feel uncomfortable and wonder if my wife is home from work yet, if she is wondering where I am.

“I want romance,” the girl says, somewhat out of the blue. “Guys don’t seem to understand the general idea of being decent. I think they can be decent without waving a gun around, don’t you?”

“Nice guys don’t feel exciting to some women,” I concede. “We have to capture your attention with bravado and physical violence.”

Brenda pours more wine in my glass and hers, then shakes her head. “That’s why magic is on our side. That’s why feminine power is everywhere. Maybe invisible to some, but everywhere—like some think God is.”

“Men are forgettable; they don’t linger,” says the young girl. I notice that her tattoo says:
Hybrid
or maybe
Heartbreak
. The letters are written in a leaning, Victorian-style cursive.

Brenda intervenes on the subject: “I’d like to see what men would do if the tables were turned, if we were in the position of physical power and they had to walk scared at night.”

My head starts to feel light and I rub my scalp instinctively; it seems to shuffle around like a wig. I subtly scan the room for a phone, but don’t see one. I hear the sound of a shower turning on. The young girl is gone from the room in what seems to be a split moment, stretched out like taffy. I notice Brenda by the door, fastening the latch, and then locking the door.

“She still doesn’t feel clean,” Brenda says as she walks toward me. “I hope the shower doesn’t bother you downstairs.” Her hand squeezes my shoulder and then relaxes. Her fingers fall down my arms like water. “Does it bother you?” she says in more of a whisper.

My throat feels scratchy and paralyzed. I look at her and want to say, “Fix me. Fix me.”