The Shining Girls

  He collects the girls from the station and they walk up La Salle in the snow, past the new soup kitchen where the line extends halfway down the block. The men are so deep in their shame they can’t raise their eyes above their shoes, stamping their feet against the cold and shuffling forward. A pity, Harper thinks. He’s hoping that miserable wretch Klayton will look up and see him, a girl on each arm, in a new suit, with a roll of money in his pocket, along with his knife. But Klayton keeps his gaze on the ground, as they walk right past him, gray and shriveled up into himself like a cock with the drip.

  Harper could come back and kill him. Find him sleeping rough in a doorway. Invite him back to the house to get warm. No hard feelings. Put a glass of whiskey in his hand in front of the fire, and then beat him to death with the claw end of a hammer, like Klayton wanted to do to Harper. Start by knocking out his teeth.

  ‘Tsk,’ Etta clucks. ‘It’s just getting worse.’

  ‘You think they got it bad?’ her friend says. ‘The school board is talking about putting us all on scrips. We gotta get paid in vouchers now instead of real money?’

  ‘Rather be paid in booze. All that stuff they’re confiscating. No use to anyone. That would keep you warm and toasty.’ Etta squeezes Harper’s arm, distracting him from the fantasy he’s wrapped himself up in. He glances back to see Klayton staring after him, hat in his hands, mouth hanging open to catch flies.

  Harper spins the girls around. ‘Give my friend a hello,’ he says. Molly complies with a flirtatious wriggle of her fingers, but Etta frowns. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Someone who tried to undo me. He’s getting a taste of that remedy now.’

  ‘Speaking of remedies…’ Molly prods Etta, and she fumbles in her purse and pulls out a small glass bottle with a label that reads ‘rubbing alcohol’.

  ‘Yes, yes, I got us a nip.’ She takes a swig and hands it to Harper first, who wipes the rim on his coat before letting it touch his lips.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s not actual rubbing alcohol. The factory that supplies the hospital has a side-trade.’

  The booze is potent and Molly is greedy with it, so that by the time they get to Mme Galli’s on East Illinois, the lambkin is well on her way to being shit-faced.

  Inside the restaurant, there is a large caricature of an Italian opera singer and photographs of various theater people from downtown hung on the walls, their signatures scrawled across beaming faces. This doesn’t mean anything to Harper, but the girls coo appreciatively and, for his part, the waiter does not comment on the shabbiness of the coats that he takes to be hung up on the hooks beside the door.

  The establishment is half-full already, lawyers and bohemians and actor types. The converted double parlor is warm from the fireplaces on either side, and the hubbub of people as it starts to fill up.

  The waiter shows them to a table near the window, Harper on one side and the girls roosted next to each other opposite, looking over the cheery fruit bowl that forms the centerpiece. Evidently, Mme Galli has the law in her pocket because the waiter brings them a bottle of Chianti from a bookcase especially converted into a liquor cabinet without any special fuss.

  Harper orders lamb chops for the entrée and Etta follows suit, but Molly orders the filet with a defiant sparkle in her eye. Harper doesn’t care. It’s all the same to him, $1.50 per mouth for five courses, so the conniving wench can have whatever she wants.

  The girls eat the spaghetti with gusto, twirling their forks like they were born to it. But Harper finds the pasta slippery to handle, and the taste of garlic is overwhelming. The curtains are grubby from smoke. At the next table, the young woman who smokes cigarettes between every course, aiming for cosmopolitan, is as vacuous as her companions, who talk too loudly. Every cocksucker in here, all putting on a show, dressed up in their clothes and manners.

  It’s been too long, he realizes. He hasn’t killed anyone in almost a month. Not since Willie. The world becomes washed out in the gaps. He can feel the tug of the House like string tied between each vertebrae. He’s been trying to avoid the room, sleeping downstairs on the couch, but lately he’s found himself going up the stairs as if dreaming, to stand in the doorway and watch the objects. He will need to go again soon.

  And in the meantime the livestock across the table from him are batting their eyelashes and trying to out-simper each other.

  Etta excuses herself to ‘touch up her lipstick’, and the Irish girl slides round the table to sit beside him. She presses her knee against his.

  ‘You’re quite a find, Mr Curtis. I want to hear all about you.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Where you grew up. Your family. Were you ever married or engaged? How you made your money. The usual.’

  He can’t deny that he’s intrigued by how bald her enquiry is. ‘I have a House.’ He’s feeling reckless, and she is so deep in her cups, she’ll be lucky if she can remember her own name tomorrow, never mind his strange declarations.

  ‘A property owner,’ she trills.

  ‘It opens on to other times.’

  She looks confused. ‘What does?’

  ‘The House, sweetheart. It means I know the future.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ she purrs, not believing him in the slightest, but letting him know she’s willing to play along. With much more than a story, if he’s inclined. ‘So, tell me something amazing.’

  ‘There’s another big war coming.’

  ‘Oh really? Should I be worried? Can you tell my future?’

  ‘Only if I open you up.’

  She takes it the wrong way, as he knew she would, slightly flustered, but excited too. It is so predictable. She brushes her finger back and forth over her lower lip and the half-smile dwelling there. ‘Well, Mr Curtis, I might be amenable to that. Or can I call you Harper?’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Etta interrupts, blotchy with anger.

  ‘We’re just talking, sweetie,’ Molly smirks. ‘About the war.’

  ‘You hussy,’ Etta says, and dumps her bowl of spaghetti over the lady teacher’s head. It glops down into her eyes, chunks of tomato and ground beef congealed in her hair with damp strands of spaghetti. Harper laughs in surprise at the slapstick violence.

  The waiter rushes over with napkins and helps wipe Molly off. ‘Caspita! Is everything all right?’

  The girl is shaking in rage and humiliation. ‘Are you going to let her do that?’

  ‘Looks to me like it’s already done,’ Harper says. He tosses the linen napkin at her. ‘Go clean yourself up. You’re a joke.’ He presses a five-dollar bill into the waiter’s hand before he can ask them to leave, tipping because his mood is brightened. He holds out his arm for Etta to take. She smiles with smug triumph, and Molly bursts into tears, as Harper and Etta breeze out of the restaurant into the night.

  The streetlamps form greasy spotlights along the street, and it seems natural to walk down to the lake, despite the cold. The pavements are thick with snow, the bare branches of the trees like lace against the sky. The low buildings shoulder together along the shore in a brace against the water. The tiers of Buckingham Fountain are white-crusted, the huge bronze seahorses striving against the ice, going nowhere.

  ‘It’s like icing,’ Etta says. ‘Looks like a wedding cake.’

  ‘You’re just sour that we skipped out before dessert,’ Harper replies, trying for banter.

  Her face darkens at the reminder of Molly. ‘She had it coming.’

  ‘Of course she did. I could kill her for you.’ He is testing her.

  ‘I’d like to kill her myself. Hussy.’ She rubs her bare hands together and blows on her chapped fingers. Then she reaches out to take his hand. Harper startles, but she’s only using him for leverage to climb onto the fountain.

  ‘Come with me,’ she says. And after a moment’s hesitation, he clambers up after her. She picks her way across the snow, skidding on the ice, to one of the verdigris seahorses and leans against it, posing. ‘Want a ride?’ she says
, girlishly, and he sees that she is even more devious than her friend. But she intrigues him. There’s something marvelous about her greed. A woman of selfish appetites who sets herself above the rest of miserable humanity, deservedly or not.

  He kisses her then, surprising himself. Her tongue is quick and slippery in his mouth, a warm little amphibian. He pushes her back against the horse, one hand groping up under her skirt.

  ‘We can’t go back to my apartment,’ she pulls back. ‘There are rules. And Molly.’

  ‘Here?’ he says, trying to turn her round, fumbling with his flies.

  ‘No! It’s freezing. Take me home with you.’

  His erection caves in and he lets her go abruptly.

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘What is it?’ she calls after him, hurt, as he jumps down off the fountain, hobbling back towards Michigan Avenue. ‘What did I do? Hey! Don’t you walk away! I’m not some whore, you know! Screw you, buddy!’

  He doesn’t respond, not even when she takes off her shoe and throws it at his back. It falls woefully short. She will have to go hopping across the snow to retrieve it. The idea of her humiliation pleases him.

  ‘Screw you!’ she screams again.

  Kirby

  23 MARCH 1989

  There are clouds scudding low over the lake like puffy boats in the gray light of morning. Barely 7 a.m. There’s no way Kirby would be up at this time normally, if not for the Damn Dog.

  Before she’s even managed to turn off the car, Tokyo is climbing over from the back seat of her fourth-hand Datsun, crushing her arm with his big galumphing paws as she reaches to pull up the handbrake.

  ‘Ooof, you galoot,’ Kirby says, shoving him off her and onto the seat, a service he rewards by farting in her face. He has the decency to look guilty for all of one second before he starts pawing at the door and whining to be let out, his tail thumping against the sheepskin cover that hides how badly cracked the seat is.

  Kirby reaches past him and manages to flick the catch. Tokyo barges the door open with his head and slips through the gap into the parking lot. He bounds round to her side of the car and jumps up with both paws against the window, tongue-lolling, his breath fogging up the window, as she’s trying to get out.

  ‘Hopeless, you know that?’ Kirby grunts, shoving the door open against his weight. He gives a bark of delight and runs to the grassy verge and back again, urging her to hurry up, in case the beach ups and leaves. The way she’s about to bail on him.

  She’s feeling pretty cut up about it. But she’s been been saving so she can move out of Rachel’s house, and the junior dorms are gestapo-strict on the no furry roommates clause. She tells herself that she’ll be only a few hops away on the El. She’ll be able to take him for walks on the weekends and she’s persuaded the kid across the road to take him round the block once a day for a dollar. Still, that’s five bucks a week, twenty a month. That’s a lot of Ramen.

  Kirby follows Tokyo down the path to the beach through the rustling corridor of overgrown grass. She should have parked closer to the actual beach, but she’s used to coming here at weekend lunchtimes, when you can’t find an empty bay for money or love. It’s a totally different place without the crowds. Ominous even, with mist and a cold wind off the lake scything through the grass. The chill will have put off all but the most dedicated joggers.

  She takes the grimy tennis ball out of her pocket. It’s cracked and balding and squidgy from being chewed on. She sends it arcing in a high parabola over the skyline across the lake, aiming for the Sears Tower, as if she could knock it over.

  Tokyo has been waiting for this, ears pricked, mouth snapped shut in concentration. He turns and pelts after the ball, anticipating its trajectory with mathematical precision and snatching it out of the air on its way down.

  And this is the thing that drives her nuts, when he gets all coy with the ball. Skipping forward like he’s going to drop it into her hand and then ducking to one side as she reaches for it, with a delighted rumble in the back of his throat.

  ‘Dog! I’m warning you.’

  Tokyo hunches down, butt in the air, tail thwacking from side to side. ‘Owwwwrrrr,’ he says.

  ‘Give me that ball or I’ll … have you turned into a rug.’ She feints at him and he bounds away two steps, just out of range, and assumes the position again. His tail is helicoptering wildly.

  ‘It’s all the rage, you know,’ she says, ambling down the beach, thumbs in the pockets of her jeans, playing it cool, definitely not aiming for him. ‘Polar bears and tigers are so passé. But a dog-skin rug – especially a troublesome dog? That’s class, baby.’

  She lunges for him, but he’s been wise to her all along. He yips in excitement, the sounds muffled by the ball clamped between his teeth, and bolts down the beach. Kirby lands on one knee on the damp sand as he bounds into the freezing surf, with a doggy grin so big she can see it from here.

  ‘No! Bad dog! Tokyo Speedracer Mazrachi! You get back here, now!’ He doesn’t listen. He never does. Wet dog in the car. One of her favorite things.

  ‘Come on, boy.’ She whistles for him, five sharp notes. He obeys, sort-of. He wades out of the water at least and drops the ball onto the bleached sand, shaking himself out like a doggy sprinkler. He barks once, happily, still playing.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Kirby says, her purple sneakers sinking into the mud. ‘When I catch you—’

  Tokyo suddenly whips his head in the other direction, barks once and races across the grass near the pier.

  A man in a yellow fisherman’s weatherproof is standing at the water’s edge, beside a cart contraption with a bucket and a fire extinguisher. Some kind of weird fishing technique, she realizes, as he pops his sinker into a metal pipe and then uses the pressure of the extinguisher to send it flying out into the lake further than he could have ever cast it.

  ‘Hey! No dogs!’ he shouts agreeably, pointing at the faded sign in the overgrown grass. As if whatever he’s doing with that fire extinguisher is legal.

  ‘No! Really? Well, you’ll be glad to know it’s not a dog anyway, it’s a rug-in-waiting!’ Her mother calls it her sarcasm force field, keeping boys at bay since 1984 – if only she knew. Kirby scoops up the scuffed tennis ball and shoves it in her pocket. Infernal animal.

  She will be glad to move into the dorms, she thinks, fiercely. The neighbor is welcome to the dog. She’ll do weekends if she has time: inclination. But who knows? She might be stuck in the library. She might be hungover. Or have a hot boy to entertain to sweet/awkward morning-after breakfast now that Fred has gone off to NYU and film school, as if that wasn’t her dream that he kind of acquired and ran with, and worst of all, was able to pay for. Even if she’d been accepted (and she should have been, dammit – she has more talent in her left earlobe than he has in his whole central nervous system), there’s no way she could have paid for it. So she’s doing English and history at DePaul, two years and a lifetime of debt to go, assuming she can get a job after graduating. Of course, Rachel has been nothing but encouraging. Kirby almost considered doing accounting or business sciences to spite her.

  ‘Tokyoooooooo!’ Kirby yells into the brush. She whistles again. ‘Stop messing around.’ The wind nips through her clothes, bringing goose-bumps up on her arms all the way to the back of her neck – she should have worn a proper jacket. Of course he’s gone into the bird sanctuary, where he can snag her a really stiff fine for letting him off the leash. Fifty dollars or two weeks’ worth of walking fees. Twenty-five packets of Ramen. ‘Decor, dog!’ Kirby yells down the empty beach. ‘That’s what you’re gonna be when I’m done with you.’

  She sits on a bench carved with names – ‘Jenna + Christo 4eva’ – by the entrance to the sanctuary and pulls her shoes back on. The sand chafes in her socks, wedged between her toes. There is a Peewee calling in the bushes somewhere. Rachel was always into birds. She knew all their names. It took Kirby years to figure out that she was making them up, that there was no such thing as a Ri
ding Hood Woodpecker or a Crystal Rainbow Malachite. They were just words Rachel liked to put together.

  She stomps into the sanctuary. The birds have stopped singing. Silenced, no doubt, by the presence of a wet and troublesome dog blundering around here somewhere. Even the wind has died, and the waves are a dull shushing in the background, like traffic. ‘Come on, damn dog.’ She whistles again, five notes, ascending.

  Someone whistles back, exactly the same.

  ‘Oh, that’s really cute,’ Kirby says.

  The whistle comes again, mocking.

  ‘Hello? Jerkwad?’ She ups the sarcasm in proportion to how badly unnerved she is. ‘Have you seen a dog?’ She hesitates for a second before she steps off the path, pushing through the dense underbrush towards the general vicinity of the whistler. ‘You know, furry animal, teeth to rip your throat out?’

  There’s no reply, save for a rasping, hacking noise. A cat with a hairball.

  She has time to yelp in surprise as a man steps out from the shrubs, grabs her arm and swings her to the ground with quick and incontestable force. She wrenches her wrist as she automatically sticks it out to catch herself. Her knee hammers into a rock so hard that her vision goes briefly white. When it clears, it’s to see Tokyo lying heaving on his side in the bushes.

  Someone has wrapped a wire coathanger round his neck so that it cuts into his throat, leaving the fur around it soaked with blood. He’s twisting his head, squirming his shoulders, trying to get away, because the wire is looped to a branch sticking out of a fallen tree. Every time he moves, it cuts in deeper. The hacking sound is him trying to bark with his vocal cords severed. At something behind her.

  She forces herself up on to her elbows, in time for the man to swing the crutch into her face. The impact shatters her cheekbone in an explosion of pain that arcs through her skull. She crumples onto the damp earth. And then he’s on top of her, his knee in her back. She writhes and kicks under him, as he wrests her arms behind her, grunting while he wires her wrists together. ‘Fuckyougetoffme’ she spits into the mulch of dirt and leaves. It tastes of damply rotting things, soft and gritty between her teeth.