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Authors: Ed Kurtz

BOOK: Nausea
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Fucking nerves, Nicky?

“I just need something to eat,” he said aloud, glancing in the rearview mirror at his own eyes. They stared back at him, narrowed and vaguely accusatory.

Nick jerked the transmission into gear and rolled slowly over the eroded dirt road, only switching on the lights when he reached the access road. Night came on quick and the grabbing yellow lights that stabbed out in pairs from every approaching car, truck, and semi irritated him to no end. He merged onto the freeway, switched on the radio. It was doo-wop all the way to the Howard Johnson’s just off Exit 24.

* * *

“Settle,” Nick said, scuttling back like a startled crustacean. “I just pulled you out of the street, that’s all.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Glad you’re all right.”

“Do I look all right to you?”

She raised her broken wing, gestured at it with her chin. Her eyes were wide, wild. The one with the shiner looked mean.

“Well,” Nick said, trailing off as he stared dumbly at the cars idling at the red light. “Have a good night, anyway.”

“Yeah,” she groused. She planted a nylon-stockinged knee on the sidewalk and hefted herself up. Her purse slipped from her shoulder, dangled from her elbow. She didn’t seem to notice.

Nick gave a weak nod and headed back the other way. It was a long walk to the motor court he called home in those days.

“Hey.”

He paused, pursed his lips. Turned around, slowly, like he was getting mugged. She just stood there, the purse still swaying from her elbow, her knees turned in at each other. He noticed she’d broken the one heel, so her stance was all catawampus.

She said, “Get me the hell outta here, would you?”

Nick knitted his brow, glanced back at the gridlock. He raised a hand and shouted for the first hack he saw.

* * *

“Sorry about the fare,” he said with genuine contrition.

“That’s all right. I’d have had to pay it without you along.”

“I guess so.”

They stood in a largely vacant parking lot, the macadam old and run through with breaks like nervous systems. Dandelions sprouted from the cracks. It was here that the cab dropped them off, per her instructions—
LANAI APARTMENTS
, according to the chipped and fading sign facing the street.

“What’s a lanai?” he asked, eyeballing the sign.

“Like a veranda.”

He turned back toward the building, which was nothing more than an old motor court a lot like the one he called home, only repurposed for more long-term living. Nary a veranda in sight.

“Might as well come up,” she said in a hopeless sort of way.

She made for a flight of metal steps leading to the second level. They didn’t much look like they could take the weight, and she didn’t look like she weighed more than a buck and a quarter at most. Nick followed, and they both reached the landing of the second level without incident. She stepped gingerly over a plastic toy bulldozer and he tripped over it, barely regaining his footing before taking a tumble.

“Careful, now,” she said.

Her place was the last door at the end of the mezzanine, number 6B. The second to last, 5B, was lit up inside and blaring rap music.

“Must get old,” Nick commented as she jammed a key into the lock. She shrugged, opened the door. Went inside. Nick followed.

The place was musty but clean. Her furnishings were Spartan: just a pink loveseat and a wicker stool. There was no television and the walls were bare. She dropped her keys on the short kitchen counter and pulled a pair of clinking bottles from the half-sized fridge.

“Beer?”

“Sure.”

She cracked them open with a rusty-looking bottle opener that was screwed into the wall and painted over. Nick sat on the loveseat and she sat beside him. They sipped their beers quietly. The pounding bass from next door rattled Nick’s skull.

“Misty,” she said matter-of-factly after a while.

“What?”

“My name, I figured you’d want to know it.”

“Oh.”

Sip.
Thump, thump, thump.
Sip.

“You got one?”

“Got one what?”

“A name.”

“Sure, of course.”

“You want me to guess?”

Nick smiled, his cheeks a little red. “Nah. It’s Nick.”

“Woulda guessed Pete. Not sure why.”

Nick shrugged.

“Anyone ever call you Nicky?” she asked.

“Not to my face.”

“You want another beer? I’m having one.”

He glanced at her bottle, which was drained to the last. His was still three-quarters full. He nodded, and as she rose to go back to the fridge he chugged what remained in three enormous gulps. He was gasping when she came back, just one bottle in her hand.

“You okay?”

“Fine.”

“Only got the one left,” she said, handing it over.

“We’ll split it, then.”

Misty smiled. Her eyes smiled, too, so he knew it was genuine.

She drew a long gulp from the bottle and swallowed as she passed it to Nick. He followed suit, savoring what tasted like piss a few minutes earlier but seemed like champagne now. The bottle was empty in no time at all. Nick patted the cushion beside him. Misty wiggled out of her jacket, careful not to jostle her slinged arm, and walked coyly out of the room. She disappeared into the single room in the back.

Nick rose, narrowed his eyes, and went after her.

* * *

Though the eggs were much too runny the toast went down all right and Nick was mostly content to simply drink cup after cup of coffee and smoke one Pall Mall after another. The waitress—a down-home sort of middle-aged woman with a brown bouffant and a name tag that read
LORETTA
—came by to warm up his coffee every ten minutes or so and otherwise let him alone. The only words she uttered to him, apart from taking his initial order, came the second time she emptied his ashtray. She asked if he was all right. He didn’t answer, largely because he didn’t know.

Nick lighted a fresh cigarette with the smoldering end of the last one and took the smoke deep into his lungs. He held it for a half a minute, then exhaled through his nose. The blue-white vapor twirled out, licking up the sides of his nose and burning his eyes. The sound system softly spewed an easy listening tune, the sort of thing the clientele wasn’t really supposed to notice, and he glanced up at the dining area, which was mostly vacant save for an elderly black man reading a maimed paperback copy of
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
and a couple of kids with dyed black hair and eyeliner to match, sullenly poking at their pancakes and reveling in their faux-apathy.

And Nick did what he almost always did when he found himself sitting quiet and alone in a public place like that—he wondered what his next steps would be if someone had paid him to kill any of the complete strangers he was watching. The old man would be a cinch, he decided, a simple matter of hand over nose and mouth and tossing the hoary old gent into the trunk or backseat for a ride to someplace dark and unpopulated. He might wail and caterwaul all the way there, but that wasn’t usually a problem, just an irritation. Once there—
there
being either someplace new or at least unused for a good long while—Nick would almost certainly use the garrote. Or he could likely snap the poor bastard’s neck without much trouble, or simply push him down a flight of stairs. Worst-case scenario, he’d pinch the man’s nose shut and cover his mouth and wait a few minutes for the victim to suffocate. Easy peasy. He’d had a handful of aged marks over the years, and they never gave up much of a struggle. Whether that was because they were tired of living Nick didn’t know; he’d never asked. They
were
weaker, usually, the exception being the USMC lance corporal who’d kept up his exercise regimen so that even at seventy-eight he was a formidable son of a bitch. Nick had shot that one, right in the neck. Died badly. But that hadn’t bothered Nick in the least. Not then.

He shifted his gaze from the old man to the kids. Disaffected, like every generation of teenagers and young adults since the species slithered out of the primordial muck. The girl wore retro butterfly glasses she probably didn’t need and the boy smoked clove cigarettes that he pinched between his forefinger and thumb like a Nazi villain in an old WWII movie. Promise them drugs, he guessed, and they’d follow him into the mouth of hell. Then again, they might just as likely call the cops on the skeezy older guy offering the pleasures of altered consciousness to impressionable youth. He’d have to stake them out a bit, gather some intel before he knew best how to proceed. Maybe he’d wait in the car until they came out of the restaurant, follow them and hope for the best. Might end up clumsy, even messy like Lou something-or-other, but the bottom line was he always finished a job and it never got connected to whoever forked over the bread for it. To at least that degree, Nick was a professional.

As he mused on the possible outcomes of targeting the black-garbed kids for cold-blooded murder, they rose and took their bill to the cash register. Nick snapped back to reality, tipped his coffee cup to his mouth only to find it empty. His pack of Pall Malls was just as empty, which meant his stay at the Howard Johnson’s just off Exit 24 had reached its natural conclusion. He waited in line behind the kids and paid his bill as they went morosely out to the parking lot, to their car and on with their lives, never once considering themselves fortunate that the murderer across the room from them would probably never be paid to rub them out.

She was already sitting in the passenger seat of the early ‘90s model Ford as her beau was sliding behind the wheel. Nick floated by them on the way back to his Benz, kept his eyes to himself but didn’t outright ignore them. He couldn’t help it: now that he’d given them the consideration, they were more or less in his sights.

And when the Ford stuttered to life and puttered out of the parking lot to the access road, Nick kept a respectable distance as he followed it.

And when his guts started to quiver again, he considered the extreme unlikelihood of bad eggs twice in twenty-four hours.

* * *

“I’m not suicidal,” Misty said. “It’s not like that.”

They were lying side by side on her twin mattress that had neither frame nor box spring. She was smoking an Eve 120, which seemed to Nick about as thick as a toothpick. He didn’t smoke yet. They were both naked, save for the sling on her busted arm.

“You just wish you’d never been born,” he said.

“Yeah. See, I wasn’t ever given a choice in the matter, was I? I mean, let’s say I’m up in heaven, or wherever souls hang out before they slip into a newborn baby.”

“Okay.”

“And so there I am, and God or whoever, he says to me, he says, ‘Misty, how about it? Do you wanta get born and be alive and live a life like ordinary people do?’ And me, I’m the sorta gal wants to know what I’m getting into before I jump into something, so I says, ‘Well, what’s the deal?’ You know? ‘What’s it all about? What can I expect once I’ve signed on the dotted line or whatever?’ So he shows me.”

“Shows you what?”

“Life, Nicky.” She’d taken to the nickname like a drowning victim takes to oxygen. There was no talking her out of it. “Everything, the good and the bad. Mostly bad, from where I’m sitting, but I’m just being honest about that. You get hurt a lot, you work your ass off for nothing, people stab you in the back every chance they get. That sorta shit. And then at the end of it you’re laid up in some hospital room smells like bleach and throw-up and you got tubes coming out of every hole and you ask yourself, ‘What was the whole goddamn point?’ No, thanks. After all that, I’d say no. I’ll not be born, but thanks all the same.”

She took a long drag from the skinny cigarette and exhaled it like she was being photographed for a magazine. Nick crumpled his brow, trying to suss it out.

“Why’s it got to have a point?” he asked at some length.

“You don’t think it should?”

“Never thought about it.”

Misty tamped the Eve out in a glass ashtray on the floor beside the mattress and scooted back until she was sitting up against the wall. The low-wattage bulb in the lamp cast a long, awkward shadow diagonally across the ceiling.

“Well, I have. I think about shit like that all the time. Too much time on my hands, I guess. It’s how come I’ll never have a baby.”

“Because it might have a crummy life?”

“Because life itself is pretty damn crummy, if you think about it. The way I see it, life is kinda like hard time.”

“You mean prison?”

“That’s right. My old man spent most of his life in the pen, so I know what I’m talking about here. See, Pop wasn’t really all that angry the way a lot of the guys in there were. It was just the way things turned out, his lot in life and that sort of thing. He read a lot, worked out all the time. Got his high school diploma when he was forty-two, though I’ll be damned if I know why he bothered. Point is, he focused on all the things he could do to make it through so he wouldn’t lose his mind or just get bitter and mean. That wasn’t much, but he buried himself in whatever he could get.”

“And you’re saying it’s that way for everybody.”

“Yeah, pretty much. I mean, hey, that was a pretty good lay we just had, wasn’t it?”

Nick flushed pink, but he nodded.

“I’m glad for that. That’s a good thing. But it’s a high school diploma for a cat who’s stuck in the joint for the rest of his life. It’s like drinking an imported beer while you’re in a plane about to crash into the side of a mountain. Maybe all you’re thinking about is how much you’re digging that beer, but me? I can’t take my eyes off that fucking mountain.”

Nick’s cheeks blanched back to white. “Jesus,” was all he could think to say.

Misty smoked another Eve and when she was done, some ten minutes later, rolled awkwardly on top of Nick, all lashing tongue and scrabbling, exploring hands. Round two lasted considerably longer than their first go. Neither of them came this time.

Afterward he washed up in the tiny bathroom and stepped back into his blue jeans and set to thinking about supper. While he dressed, Misty studied his taped ribs and bruised torso in the dim lamplight.

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