Short Ride to Nowhere (8 page)

Jenks could feel the fight coming.

It took shape in his mind even as the tension between him and the man grew.
 
He knew it was somehow his fault, but he didn’t know what he was doing wrong.
 
Everything right from the moment he’d met the cops had been askew, he’d handled everybody wrong, but there was no way to correct it now.
 
He had to see it through to the end.
 

The guy started to raise his hands.
 
It was like there was a crowd around them, cheering them on, wanting blood.
 
Managers, money on the line, Vegas odds, promises to keep, sons at home watching the television.
 
The roar of the crowd got louder and louder.
 
Introductions were made, rules explained, no below the belt, now shake hands and go to your corner and wait for the sound of the bell.
 
You lived your entire life with a movie soundtrack playing, with an audience perched behind your eyes.
 

“Are you her father?” he asked.

“Who are you, fucker?”

“I told you, my name’s Jenks.”

“You still haven’t told me shit.
 
What do you want?”

“Are you her father?
 
Her husband?
 
Boyfriend?”

The crowd roared.
 
They wanted blood.
 
They were drunk, pouring the beer back, even the announcers sounded wasted.
 
The card had been weak tonight, the featherweight outmatched, the champion welterweight taking out his opponent in the first minute of the second round.
 
The odds were in the shitter. Vegas was losing its shirt.
 
Something had to turn around.
 
Now, the main event.
 

The guy flexed his shoulders, loosening up.
 
Cracked his neck, his hands trembling at his sides.
 
He was plugging in to his hate, his pain.
 
“I’m Mikey.
 
I’m her son.”

“Look, there’s no reason to–” Jenks said, but it was already way too late.
 

And it had been since the moment he stepped up and knocked.
 
Somewhere he’d been hoping for this just as badly as the other guy.
 
One voice in the crowd seemed to slice through all the din.
 

A woman shrieking, Kill da bum.
 

Mikey turned his head as if he could hear it too, and his hands rose and balled into fists and he let out a growl that had in it all the agony he’d suffered today, yesterday, maybe his entire life.
 
The tiny knives that flicked against your skin, the hardly heard insults, the decimated fantasies, the missed opportunities and nyeah nyeahs of beautiful girls belittling smiles as they ripped down the boulevard with the slicks and hustlers and rich boys.
 
You never got over anything.
 
You never put aside any affront.
 
Every barb stayed under your saddle.
 
You collected your skinned knees and your skinned elbows and your skinned chins and gathered them one by one in a closet, and at the end of one year or ten or thirty you had fifty bodies worth of torment.
 

Your father never did this.
 
Your brothers never did this.
 
Your friends, all of them except Hale, didn’t do this.
 
So how did it happen to you?
 

Ask Mikey.
 
He’s in the same boat.
 
He’s waltzing into the ring and throwing a left hook now, catching you flush on the cheek because, Christ, your hands aren’t even up.
 
Where’s the rage now?
 
The sports’ columnists are typing out the story, flashbulbs are going off, everyone’s expecting something special from you today, kid, but it looks like the syndicate paid you off to take a dive.
 

Kill da bum, she screams again.
 
The mayor’s in the audience with a hooker in each arm.

“Mikey, there’s no reason to–”

As if hearing his name is going to make a difference to him now.
 
Of course it won’t.
 
It can’t.
 
It’s not his name.
 
Not his secret name, which is the only one he can hear right now.
 
Who knows what it might be.
 
Captain Power maybe.
 
Lord Wellus of Planet Fromfox.
 
Jungle Kid.
 
We all have our secret selves waiting to burst through.
 

Get your hands up.
 
Defend yourself.
 
Draw the blade.
 
Cram it into his gut.
 
Your mind is loud.
 
You’re on your way to the Tombs or maybe Sojourner.
 
It happened to Hale.
 
What happened to Hale will happen to you.

Jenks got his hands up, blocked the next two left hooks that Mikey threw, and then flicked off two short jabs into his face.
 
Not all that different from how he’d laid out Angela.
 
He flicked another, just a quick bap, but he caught Mikey just right on the nose and the guy’s eyes began to well.
 
Tears flowed down his face and he was blind for an instant.
 
Jenks thought about the crowd in his head wanting blood.
 
It kept roaring.
 
It wanted a long, prolonged fight that left both men in bleeding heaps.
 
Fuck that.
 
End it now.
 
Jenks hauled off and chopped Mikey in the throat.

It was enough.
 
Mikey dropped to his knees gagging.
 
Jenks let him flop around like a fish for a minute and then grabbed the guy by the ankle and dragged him back inside his own apartment.
 
Jenks shut the door and locked it.

The place was small.
 
Two bedrooms.
 
Even on 210
^th
Street it probably cost sixteen hundred a month.
 
More than Jenks could have paid even back when he had a steady job.
 
There was something to be said about people who could bust out the rent month after month.
 
He suddenly felt ashamed for having hit the guy.

Mikey had stopped coughing and was just sucking air deeply through his teeth, staring at Jenks wondering what the hell was coming next.
 
Good question.
 
Jenks had no idea.
 
He looked around the place.
 
He needed to see a photo of Trina Beck.
 
He checked the walls, the coffee table, the end tables, the top of the television, and there was nothing.
 
No pictures of any kind.
 
Just like Angela’s office.
 
The fuck was wrong with these people.

Then he spotted it.
 
Above the doorway to the kitchen.
 
Some kind of a poem: GOD BLESS MOTHER’S KITCHEN.
 
And a tiny photo of Mikey, when he was about ten, and a beautiful raven-haired woman.

Then Mikey crawled to the couch, managed to heave himself up and flopped down on it still gasping.
 
Jenks sat down next to him and said, “I’m sorry.
 
I didn’t want to fight.
 
I’m just trying to find Katrina Beck because she might know something about my friend Hale.
 
He’s dead.
 
I’m trying to find out what happened to him.”

A few more minutes passed before Mikey was breathing regularly again.
 
He turned to Jenks, hacked once more, and said in a lifeless monotone, “You can try the Queens side of the 59
^th
Street Bridge.
 
Sometimes she pulls tricks there.”

Saying thanks probably wasn’t the best thing to do, so Jenks just hiked off the couch, went to the door, and reconfirmed, “I won’t hurt her.
 
I just want to ask her a question about my friend.”

The slow deranged smile that we all hide slipped out of Mikey’s soul and smeared itself across his face.
 
“I hope you cut her into pieces.”

Jenks knows exactly where the whores hung out on the Queens side of the 59
^th
Street Bridge.
 
He and his high school friends used to drive out from eastern Long Island and come down this way in an attempt to fire up their courage and enter the world of manhood via the skeeviest, slipperiest, most unhealthy and chancy way possible.
 
As Jenks remembered it, no one ever got out of the car back then.
 
Twelve, thirteen years later, one of his buddies became a regular whoremonger, wound up spending an unbelievable amount of his weekly paycheck on redlight ladies.
 
The buddy called himself a sex addict, went into rehab and everything, came home looking for his wife and two toddlers and found an empty house and divorce papers.

A few months after that, Jenks and his old crew were drinking beer in a local pub when one of the other guys asked the sex addict why he didn’t just find himself some young gold digger.
 
Put her up in an apartment, give her an allowance.
 
It would’ve been cheaper than driving all the way out to the Bridge to give all his money away to skanky, toothless, Christ knows what the fuck-disease-they-got hookers.
 
The sex addict shrugged and said, “A girlfriend would’ve wanted to talk just as much as my wife.”
 

Everybody nodded like something had just been put into perspective, but nobody wanted to say exactly what it was.

Jenks found a donut shop.
 
He got something to eat and tried to figure out what he should do with the rest of the day.
 
It wasn’t even noon yet and the prostitutes wouldn’t be out until midnight.
 
He had twelve hours to kill.
 
He looked towards Sojourner and wondered if he should brace the shrink, see what else he might be able to find out about Hale.
 
The doc and his socks would talk a bit more freely without the cops there putting Jenks under the microscope.

He checked back over his shoulder and stared off over the bridge towards Manhattan.
 
His ex-wife was less than ten minutes away.
 
He’d driven right past her block on the east side.
 
Jenks had never gotten a look at the boyfriend.
 
He didn’t want to see the guy now, but there was a strange draw that wanted him to go to the front door of their fancy apartment and introduce himself.
 
Tell them both, “Hey, here I am.
 
How’s it all going, eh?”
 
Announce himself, explain himself.
 
Show her he wasn’t dead yet.
 
As if that might matter.

He drank his milk and ate his donuts.
 
Working men on their lunch hour were sucking sugar down hoping to find the energy to get through the rest of the day.
 
A construction crew, a furniture delivery crew, and the girl at the counter plucking donuts and croissants and crullers out and putting them in napkins, bags, or flimsy pink boxes.
 
All of it seemed so normal.
 
It connected him back to his father, his brothers, his uncles, his friends.
 
It brought him back to his wife.
 
Sunday morning treat every couple of months, chocolate glaze, strawberry with rainbow sprinkles.
 
He’d watch her eat, humming to herself, the sprinkles snapping against the Sunday paper and bouncing onto the floor where the dog would lick them up.
 

“I think it’s time for you to move along, buddy.”

Jenks looked up.
 
The owner, the chef, whoever the hell it was, stood in the kitchen doorway staring at Jenks.
 
Another one who wouldn’t let a man down on his luck just relax for ten minutes.
 
You always had to be forking money over; you always had to smell like cash.
 
Jenks knew he was a little rank, he hadn’t showered in a few days, hadn’t changed his clothes.
 
He wasn’t at his best, but who the fuck would be in a donut shop at noon?
 
Guys like this chef, they’d sniff out your weakness and then lash you to death with it.