In Nine Kinds of Pain Read online

  Dante, he likes to scare her. He likes to watch her throw her arms in the air in fright and make that squealing noise. He likes the terror to take her away and weaken her. She looks down at her thin wrist to a watch that her mother gave her that she pawned then got back then pawned then got back again and, after standing vigil as the second hand pushed past the one, remembers that there’s no reason for her to look down at her watch, because she has nowhere else to go. She has whatever time she has before Dante decides that he wants to leave, unless he wants to stay and then she’ll stay. Or have sex again. Like the sex they had that bruised her, that made her chocolate smooth skin dark and blotchy. And swelled her up, and made her have to pee before giving Dante sex again. Or whatever. Whatever Dante wants to do.

  “Dante-honey?”

  “Yeah, Baby?”

  “How come you never asked me once about my eye?” As if reminding him where it is in conjunction with her face, she reaches up and strokes the purple marshmallow that hangs over her eye.

  “W-w-what I care?” he responds.

  “You mean you don’t?”

  Dante continues to stare at her. “You goin’ to-to the store foe me, Baby, or what? I n-need some moe squares. And pick me up a f-forty. Or a deuce-deuce. And a got-damn new lighter. This one ain’t f-foe shit.”

  “Did you Tivo Glee?” she asks.

  “What?” he says.

  “I thought when I got back from the store we could watch Glee.”

  “You and that got-damn Glee! F-fuck Glee!” he replies. “Just go to the got-damn store!”

  She stands before him for only a few seconds more, watching as his engines begin to rev, then pulls on her jeans and picks her heart off the floor and leaves the apartment to Dante and his anger and his coldness and whatever it is that’s behind the bathroom door.

  Dallas and Liz

  The withdrawals Dallas Sharper feels from Liz’s absence are real, he knows. They’re physical, like the DTs. There are the sure-fire headaches, and the ants running along the sides of his neck and his upper arms and his back, and the spasms that play his gut like a Thelonious Monk tune . If not for the fact that he is used to DT-caliber symptoms, he probably would have ridden the mattress train to Sadville for the next few days, this time with stops at Dumpsburg and Loser City. But he needs her. And even though she hurts him, he wants her. And he knows it’s time to get her back.

  She has been staying at the convent of St. Judas’ since she packed her stuff and left the house last week, staying up there with one of the nuns who Dallas is sure is mowing her rug. Liz was like that—she left him to stay at the convent, getting her rug mowed, while at the same time fucking that little Latino Chico-and-the-Man-looking muther fucker Hermanio. He knows that Liz doesn’t feel badly about that shit either, that she doesn’t feel peculiar in her deviancy. She doesn’t care that the convent is considered holy ground, like the whole parish property. As much of a shithole as the neighborhood is, no one ever touches the parish property, because there is still some respect for the bearded swimmer nailed to the cross. But Dallas knows the bitch is having nasty sex on that holy ground with everything and everyone and that she likes it, and that she doesn’t care.

  As soon as Dallas gets out of his car he feels as though all eyes are on him. That’s the way it is in this neighborhood. Cops are pegged within three-tenths of one-and-one-half seconds of their arrival here. Like those punks used to chant as he walked a beat on the East Side: “Umm, umm bacon. I smell bacon.” Dallas thinks that it’s very possible that he does give off some kind of a cop smell, that maybe over the years a biological change happened in his system: sweat mixed with Intolerance mixed with a dash of Firepower mixed with T (Tin). How else could his occupation be so noticeably obvious, even to the ignorant?

  There is a child, maybe two-years-old?, playing in the heap of furniture in the street. First of all, the grubby little thing is only in a diaper, which is

  A.) Gray, and

  B.) practically down to her knees . She is crawling in the space between the yellow velour couch, which probably went in and out of style a half-dozen times through the years, and the boxspring which lies over top of it. There are all kinds of good things to explore as a child in that heap, it appears, like a broken lamp (extension chord still attached) and a litter box and a large cooler and part of a pressed-board desk. Luckily this is a busy street, because what is eviction trash to some is Spanish gold to others, and most of the people in this neighborhood feast or famine based on the number of evictions in a single week. Dallas wishes he could put the baby out of its misery; pull his Glock out and, with his medal-winning marksmanship, put two shots into the child’s skull, and save her the trouble of growing up a crack whore like her mother probably is.

  Dallas thinks it strange that the young guy who owns the house next to the convent (he looks like a dark-skinned Puerto Rican) is wasting his time up on a ladder trying to patch the dry-rot in his siding. The house is terminal; pull the plug already. Only a match and about two gallons of lighter fluid can improve it. He gives the Puerto Rican credit, though—he is up there trying to fix that mess knowing it’s a mess that isn’t worth fixing. Dallas wouldn’t be up there, though, if anything because he hates ladders. If he liked ladders and heights he would have been a firefighter instead of a cop. He ciphers Bx ¹ (L + H)d, where B represents the bullets he dodges daily multiplied by the unknown variable of ignorantly wanting to be in the line of fire x, (L and H = ladders and heights) while d stands for the inevitable, unmitigated and fire-filled death of a firefighter. Dallas wonders if the little girl in the furniture heap is related to the Puerto Rican on the ladder and, if she is, Dallas wants to shoot them both.

  He slowly walks into the convent’s front door and stands in the foyer. He can hear Liz upstairs talking to somebody. From the baby-talking dick-begging tonality of her voice, he knows she’s probably up there with Chico (and probably the Man, too). Dallas walks up the stairs to the hallway, and waits until he feels comfortable enough to interrupt the fun.

  “Where you off to so early?” Liz asks Hermanio, apparently. Dallas can see from when he stands that she is still locked in Hermanio’s hands, which clamp around her ass, a finger on each of his hands still probing her, lifting her off the floor.

  “I’m outta here, Lizzie,” he says. Hermanio kisses her hard again, then allows her feet to drop to the floor. He walks over to the chair, reaches for a towel, wipes it over his face and under his arms, then throws it at her. It misses her, hitting the wall instead.

  “Where you off to, Herman-baby? Why can’t you tell me?”

  “Mind your own business, bitch,” he says. “What I gotta do don’t concern you.”

  She works a smile across her face then saunters over to him, her gait broken by her leg brace, and stands before him, loving him, she thinks. “You don’t have to leave out the back like you did last time, you know. We don’t have to be sneaky about this, baby. I don’t care what people say.”

  “Well maybe I do,” he replies, pulling on his boot. “I don’t want the boys to know I’m fucking some broken-down old bitch.”

  “Old? I’m only twenty-eight!”

  “Well I’m only sixteen,” he says. He stands and wraps his arms around her neck. “Look, don’t put no pressure on me. I like you, but no pressure. You hear me, mamacita?” He kisses her cheek. She is slightly taller than him. “Now, how ’bout if I make this shit up to you, huh? What you wan’ me to do? You wan’ me to drink your bathwater? I’ll drink your bathwater if you forgive me.”

  She smiles. “Drink my bathwater? You want to drink my bathwater? Oh, would you please? Pretty please? Cherry on top?”

  “You the cherry?”

  “Me the cherry?” she says, laughing. She snorts when she laughs.

  “Yeah, you the cherry!”

  “Me the cherry then! Just call me . . . Lizzie Maraschino then! Get it?”


  “Yeah, I get it.”

  “Get it?” she says.

  They kiss again, smothering, and don’t appear to notice the man in the hallway watching them. Liz knows someone is there, though, knows the person has been standing there for a while—Dallas Sharper, her alleged husband, as it turns out to be—so she kisses the man Hermanio who isn’t her husband even harder, because she wants Dallas to suffer, watching.

  “A-hemm!” Dallas clears his throat so loudly that the A-hemm echoes down the hallway until it flushes into many smaller echoes. The fucking door wide open like this, he thinks, and she’s giving him a fucking tongue-sucking that would make a street whore blush!

  “I see you, dumbass,” she says, her lips still locked with her Herman-baby’s. “And I can smell you all the way over here. You stink.” She has seen him standing there for a while, but Dallas’ presence doesn’t startle her the way it still startles Hermanio—Hermanio releases her, then walks out of the room, eyes down, passes Dallas, crossing the hallway to the stairs, down, and out the door.

  “Why’d you have to scare him off like that?”

  “He was leaving anyways,” Dallas says. “Besides, I didn’t know how Emily Post would handle this situation. You know, should the husband stand over here while the wife is kissing her lover, or should he stand over by the —”

  “All right, already. You and your obsession with Emily Post.” She brushes her hand across her slip; she is wearing only a slip (a damp slip, sex-damp). She pushes it back down her ass that was just in another man’s hands. Dallas observes this, the way she tries to pretty herself up in his presence, the way she keeps the slip on, as if to say, “See what we did?”, making an attempt to stand before him looking like Maggie the Cat to his Brick, although Maggie the Cat didn’t have a gimp leg in a brace. Dallas always liked her breasts, though, those pert little lemons, and he likes her shapely shoulders and her long thin black hair and the way she can give a blowjob and the way she cooks pancakes. But Dallas can also see how a person, can see how he, feels pity for her.

  “What’s that you got?” she asks, motioning to the large object wrapped in brown paper that he holds.

  “Oh this? Well . . . you took off with your things last week and you forgot this and, I don’t know, I thought you might need it.”

  She carefully lifts the package from his hands, takes it to her small dining table by the windows that face the alley, and cautiously tears it open. “My Remington? Is this my Remington, or another one?” She squints and studies the barrel, which was in his mouth only two hours earlier.

  “That’s yours,” he says. “Mother Angelica won’t mind you having a Remington in here, will she?”

  “I don’t think so,” she replies. “Why’d you bring me my Remington?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know. Hey, hunting season’s right around the corner and you need to clean that thing before you can take it up north with you. And the stock needs a new—”

  “Hunting season’s four months away, Dallas! And you bring me my Remington like it’s a gift or something? And you don’t even clean the fucking thing for me before you bring it?”

  His brain: Rubik’s Cube. Arranged in defense mode to stave off her impending rant.

  “Typical,” she says. “That’s typical of you, Dallas. That’s so fucking typical, I swear to God.” She props the rifle up behind the door and walks to her dresser, lights a cigarette and sits on her bed, legs crossed, elbow-to-thigh, staring at him.

  “But I don’t know how you like the sights adjusted.”

  “Enough!” she yells, the word propelling her off the bed and back to the window. “Please, enough with the rifle! I don’t want to hear anymore! I’m tired of this! I’m tired of us going ’round and ’round and never saying anything! You really come here to give me my fucking rifle? No! It’s just a way for you to come over here without actually having to say you’re sorry!”

  Scolded, he looks out the window past her, down the alley. “Okay, sure, that may be true. It’s hard for me to say sorry. You know that about me. It’s hard for me, hard for my dad, for every one of us.” For no reason in particular he thinks about the dry cleaning that needs to be picked up, and about their dog Mr. Barkles who got hit by a car last month, and about the overdue phone bill, and about IHOP pancakes.

  “Geez”—she rolls her head—“so you’re gonna say it’s a Sharper family trait? Gimme a break! So I should just accept your lack of apology, right?”

  “Then, I’m sorry, okay?” he says. “There, I said it.”

  “He said it!” She flails her arms in the air, ashes snowing on her head from the cigarette. “He said it! Hooray! Break out the fucking band! He finally said it! Maybe I should call the paper, tell ’em to stop the presses! Where’s the phone?” When she is angry, and not paying much attention to it, her limp is very noticeable. She bolts across the room once more, only this time she struggles and appears to be in discomfort. When she catches her balance fully and takes a deep breath, she says, “I’m leaving here.”

  “Good,” he says. “A convent’s no place for a married woman anyway. When you coming back home?”

  “No. I mean I’m leaving here, this city.”

  “You leaving Detroit?” he asks. He didn’t think her leaving the city was ever a consideration. “With who, that Latino punk?”

  “Yes, with that Latino punk,” she mimics, her voice childish, her eyes leaving his and going out the window, following the alley down to the cross-street. “He treats me good.”

  Dallas frowns. “Wait a minute, Lizzie. How can that little punk treat you better than me? I treated you pretty damn good!”

  “He’s considerate,” she says.

  “How so?” Dallas asks. “Name one thing he done that was more considerate than anything I done.”

  “Well, he likes to do it doggie-style,” she replies.

  “Doggie-style? What? How is doggie-style something considerate?”

  “Well, when we do it doggie-style we both get to watch TV,” she replies. “And besides, it saves me a headache from the headboard.”

  Her mind’s snapped, Dallas thinks. Yet he nods as if her response makes sense. “Okay, so where you two lovebirds off to?”

  “Well,” she says, “we’re leaving this shithole and going somewheres great. Somewheres far away.”

  He continues to nod and begins to pace in a small circle. “Okay. Interesting. I guess I expected this. Okay, I asked where you two lovebirds off to? The suburbs?”

  “No, not the suburbs, Dallas, you dumbass. We’re going to Athens!”

  He stops. “Athens . . . Georgia? What’s in Georgia? Your family’s from Tennessee.”

  “Athens, Greece, you idiot! Not Athens, Georgia.” She slides her right hand over her eyes and begins to laugh. “Georgia.”

  He watches her cover her face and thinks, for the briefest of seconds, that she is crying, but a longer glance tells him that she is actually giggling irreverently at him. He pauses for a , he wants to hit her, right across her fucking whore cunt fucking face. With that thought, with that thought almost becoming a reality, he decides that it is his cue to leave. “Good, well, have a nice time, honey. Okay? You have a real nice time in Greece. Tell the little Latino fuck I said goodbye.”

  He walks out of the room, eyes down, crosses the hallway to the stairs and almost out the door. He pauses in the foyer when he hears her at the top of the stairs.

  “Oh yeah?” she screams. Her words miss their target, hitting two nuns as they walk up the stairs. She hastily limps down the stairs toward him, he still in the foyer, looking up at her. “Oh yeah! We’ll have us a good time, all right! I’m gonna suck his dick like it’s the last dick on earth! So go fuck yourself, you bastard!”

  “Young lady!” one of the nuns begins. “You —”

  “Fuck off, sister!” Liz replies.

  Dallas walks out the door and across the street to his car. He drives thinking about all that he had j
ust seen and heard, and decides that that is the sign he has been waiting for, the sign that prompts him to explore his true strength and true manhood and climb up on the ledge of the church, the burnt-out skeleton of a church on West Avenue, and jump the fuck off, flipping Liz the bird as he plummets to the earth, and praying to God he lands on his head, but hoping to stay alive for that fleeting nanosecond so that he can experience the sweet fulfilling abortion of his own dreadful life.

  Baby and Dallas

  In more pain now, Baby has made up her mind—she’ll pawn her mother’s watch again. That’s the only reasonable/(yet reluctant) solution. She has nothing else of any value to pawn. She decides to go to a different pawn shop this time, though, to shop around, market her one and only note-worthy possession.

  “So how much for it?” Baby asks, leaning in straight on the counter as to (at least) give an impression that everything is fine in her world.