‘Oof,’ Kirby says. ‘I don’t know—’
‘That’s a terrible fucking idea,’ Dan jumps in.
‘Sorry – remind me what your qualifications on filmmaking were again?’ Fred says.
‘I know criminal justice. Kirby’s case is still open. If they ever catch the guy, the film could be prejudicial in court.’
‘Right, maybe I should do a film about baseball instead. Why it’s such a big deal. Maybe you can tell me, Dan?’
And because he’s tired and irritated and not interested in playing alpha male, Dan rolls out the glib answers. ‘Apple pie. Fireworks on the Fourth of July. Playing catch with your old man. It’s part of what makes this country.’
‘Nostalgia. The great American pastime,’ Fred sneers. ‘What about capitalism, greed and CIA assassination hit squads?’
‘That’s the other part,’ Dan agrees, refusing to let this boy with the dumb facial hair rile him. God, how could she have had sex with him?
But Fred is still spoiling for a fight, trying to prove something. ‘Sports is like religion. An opiate for the masses.’
‘Except you don’t have to pretend to be a good person to be a sports fanatic. Which makes it a lot more powerful. It’s the club anyone can join, the great unifier, and the only hell is when your team is losing.’
Fred is barely listening. ‘And so predictable. Don’t you get bored to death writing about the same thing over and over? Man hits ball. Man runs. Man gets caught out.’
‘Yeah, but it’s the same as movies or books,’ Kirby says. ‘There are only so many plots in the world. It’s how they unfold that makes them interesting.’
‘Exactly.’ Dan is unreasonably pleased that she’s come out on his side. ‘A game can play out any way. You’ve got heroes and villains. You’re living through the protagonists, loathing the enemy. People extend the stories to themselves. They live and die by their team, friends and strangers right there with them on this mass scale. You ever watch guys getting emotional about sports in public?’
‘It’s pathetic.’
‘It’s grown men having fun. Getting caught up in something. Like being a kid again.’
‘That’s a sad indictment of masculinity,’ Fred says.
Dan manages to restrain himself from saying, ‘Your face is a sad indictment,’ because he’s supposed to be the grown-up here. ‘All right. How about it’s because there’s a science and a music to it? The strike zone changes every game and you have to use every bit of intuition and experience to predict what’s coming at you. But what I really like? It’s that failure is built in. The greatest hitter in the world is only ever going to succeed, what, thirty-five per cent of the time?’
‘Lame,’ Fred complains. ‘Is that all? Best hitters of all time can’t even hit the ball?’
‘I appreciate that,’ Kirby says. ‘It means it’s okay to fuck out.’
‘As long as you’re having fun.’ Dan toasts her with a forkful of refried beans.
Maybe it means he’s in with a chance. Maybe it means the least he can do is try.
Kirby
24 JULY 1992
It feels really good to have someone’s warm breath on her neck, someone’s hands under her shirt. It’s sweet teenage fumbling, making out in his car. The safety of familiarity. Nostalgia, the national pastime. ‘You’ve come a long way, Fred Tucker,’ Kirby whispers, arching her back to make it easier for him to unclip her bra.
‘Hey! That’s not fair,’ he says, pulling away at the reminder of that first long-ago akward attempt at sex. It must be nice to have the space for small humiliations to hurt so much, she thinks, and immediately rebukes herself for being ungenerous.
‘Stupid joke, I’m sorry. Come back.’ She draws his mouth to hers. She can tell he’s still a little cross, but the bulge in his jeans doesn’t give a damn about his once-upon-a-time wounded pride. He leans over the handbrake to kiss her again and slips his hands under the loosened cups of her bra to graze his thumb over her nipple. She gasps against his mouth. His other hand slips down her stomach, exploratory, heading towards her jeans, and she feels him freeze at the raised spiderweb of scars.
‘Did you forget?’ It’s her turn to pull back. Every time. The rest of her life. Talking someone through it.
‘No. I guess I wasn’t expecting it to be so … dramatic.’
‘Do you want to see?’
She raises her shirt to show him, leaning back so that the streetlight catches on her skin and the network of angry pink ridges across her stomach. He traces them with his fingers.
‘It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful, I mean.’ He kisses her again. They make out for a long time, which feels really fucking nice and uncomplicated.
‘Do you want to come up?’ she says. ‘Let’s do that now.’
He hesitates as she is reaching for the car door handle. His mom’s, while he is in town.
‘If you want to,’ she says, more cautious.
‘I do.’
‘There’s a but there.’ She is already on the defensive. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not looking for a relationship, Fred. That whole thing about taking a girl’s virginity and she’ll love you forever? I don’t even know you. But I used to. And this feels good, and that’s really all I want.’
‘I’d like that too.’
‘There’s still a but.’ A spike of impatience pierces up through what has been, up until now, some very lovely and all-consuming lust.
‘I need to get something out the trunk.’
‘I have condoms. I bought them earlier. In case.’
He laughs, softly. ‘You bought them the last time too. It’s not that. It’s my camera.’
‘No one’s going to break in for it. My neighborhood’s not that rough. If you left it in full view lying on the back seat, maybe.’
He kisses her again. ‘Because I want to film you. For the documentary.’
‘We can talk about that later.’
‘No, I mean, while we’re…’
She shoves him away. ‘Fuck off.’
‘Not in a bad way! You won’t even notice.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. Maybe I misunderstood. I thought you said you wanted to film me while we were having sex.’
‘I do. To show how beautiful you are. Confident and sexy and strong. It’s about reclaiming what happened to you. What’s more powerful and vulnerable than showing you naked?’
‘Are you even hearing yourself?’
‘It’s not exploitative. You’ll have full agency. That’s the whole point. It’ll be as much your film as mine.’
‘That’s so thoughtful.’
‘You’ll obviously have to get the stuff with your mother, at first, till I can win her over, but I’ll help you. I’ll come back for a few months to do the filming.’
‘Isn’t this unethical? Sleeping with your documentary subject?’
‘Not if that’s part of the film. All filmmakers are complicit anyway. There’s no such thing as objectivity.’
‘Oh my God. You are such an asshole. You had this planned the whole time.’
‘No, I just wanted to propose it to you, as an idea. It would be astounding. Award-winning.
‘And you happened to bring the camera in your car.’
‘You seemed open to the idea at the Mexican place.’
‘We didn’t even start to get into it. And you definitely didn’t mention making a home porno.’
‘Is this about the sports guy?’ Fred whines, turning it around.
‘Dan? No. It’s about you being a colossal insensitive moron who is no longer getting laid, which is a tragedy, because I thought, maybe, for once, I could have uncomplicated sex with someone I kinda liked.’
‘We can still have sex.’
‘If I still kinda liked you.’ She slams out the car, gets halfway to the door and then turns back to lean in the window. ‘Hot tip, stud: next time bring up the stupid movie idea that’s pretty much guaranteed to piss off your date after you’ve been to bed with her.
’
Mal
16 JULY 1991
Getting clean is easy. You fuck off for a few months to somewhere you haven’t burned anyone yet, where they might take you in and look after you, feed you up some, maybe even put you to work. Mal has a second cousin or step-aunt in Greensboro, North Carolina, he forgets which. Families are messy to deal with anyways, even before you start getting into that twice-removed shit. But blood calls to blood.
Aunt Patty, however she fits in, cuts the boy some slack. ‘Only on account of your mama,’ she is at pains to remind him regularly. Same mama who introduced him to dope and checked out at the ripe old age of thirty-four with a bad hit in her arm, but he knows better than to bring that up. And maybe that’s why she’s helping him in the first place. Guilt is a great human motivator.
The first few weeks are recurring death. He gets the sweats and the shakes and begs Aunt Patty to get him to the hospital for methadone. She takes him to church instead, and he sits and shivers in the pews and she drags him to his feet every time there’s a hymn. But it feels better than he could have imagined to have a whole bunch of people praying for you. Really invested in your future and calling out to God on your behalf for you to be healed of the sickness, praise Jesus.
Maybe it’s divine intervention or maybe he’s still young enough to be able to shrug off the bad shit or maybe the dope was cut so much it wasn’t that bad in the first place, but he gets through the withdrawal and pulls himself together.
He gets a job packing groceries at the Piggly Wiggly. He’s sharp and friendly and people like him. This comes as a surprise. He upgrades to working the cash register. He even starts dating a nice girl, a coworker, Diyana, who already has a baby by another man, and is working hard and studying part-time so she can move up to manager or maybe even head office, and make a better life for her child.
It doesn’t bother Mal. ‘Long as we don’t make one of our own,’ he tells her, making sure they always have protection. Because he’s done with stupid mistakes.
‘Not yet,’ she says, all smug, like she knows she has him hooked. And he don’t mind that either, because maybe she does. And that wouldn’t be a bad life at all. Him and her and a family, working their way up. They could open up their own franchise.
Staying clean? That’s another thing. You don’t even have to go looking.
Trouble calls out its own. The corner finds you, even in Greensboro.
One bump for old times’ sake.
Shortchanging old Mr Hansen, who is half blind and can’t make out the numbers anyway. ‘I was sure it was a fifty, Malcolm,’ he says in that quavering voice.
‘No, sir.’ Mal is full of good-natured concern. ‘Definitely a twenty. Want me to pop the register and show you?’
It’s too easy. Old habits mix up with new ones, and next thing you know you’re on the next Greyhound back to Chitown with nothing but bad feelings behind and a $5,000 banknote burning in your pocket.
He took the bill to a pawn shop two years ago, just to find out. The man behind the counter told him it was worthless, Monopoly money, but offered to buy it off him for $20 (for ‘novelty value’), which tells Mal it’s worth a lot more than that.
Walking back through Englewood without a cent to his name and boys calling out Red Spiders, Yellow Caps, twenty bucks is looking mighty fine right now. Mighty fine. But the only thing worse than not getting a hit is getting taken for a ride, and Mal ain’t getting swindled by no pawn dealer.
It takes him a couple of weeks to settle back in and get something going. He hits up his boy Raddisson, who still owes him, and puts out feelers for his Mr Prospect.
He gets reports now and again from the tweakers who know he has an interest, and demand a dollar, or a bump, for the intel. Which Mal will happily pony up if they can prove that they ain’t just inventing it. He wants the details. How the guy limps, which side his crutch is on, what it looks like. Soon as they describe metal, he knows they lying. But he’s sneaky enough not to tell them when they getting it wrong. You can’t hustle a hustler.
Mainly, he watches the house. He thinks he’s got it figured out which one. He knows there’s something inside. Even though he’s prowled past those houses up and down, looking in the windows at the wreckage inside, already plundered to shit. But he figures his guy is clever. He’ll have hidden his stash. Drugs or money. Maybe under a floorboard or inside the walls. Somethin’ like that.
But what’s that other great human motivator? Oh yeah. Greed. He sets up in one of the houses across the way. Drags in an old mattress and tries to make sure he’s high enough by the time he goes to sleep so’s that the rat bites won’t bother him none.
And one rainy day he sees him come out. Yes, he does. Mr Prospect limps out, no crutch today, although he still dresses funny. He checks out the scene, left and right and left again, like crossing the street. He thinks no one’s looking, but Mal is. He’s been waiting for him for months. Keep the house in your head, he thinks. Keep it locked in.
The moment his mark is round the corner, Mal is out of his rat-infested bolthole with an empty backpack, darting across the street and up the porch stairs of that rotten old wooden tenement. He tries the door, but it’s locked, the boards nailed across the front just for show. He skips round the back and picks his way over the barbed wire across the stairs that’s supposed to keep people like him out, and through the broken window into the house.
There is some Vegas-level David Copperfield shit going on in here. Must be mirrors and shit. Because what looks like a picked-over ruin from the outside is a decked-out crib when you get in. Old-fashioned, though, like something out of a museum. But who cares, long as it’s worth something. Mal pushes away the thought that maybe it’s hoodoo for real. And maybe the $5,000 bill in his pocket is a one-way ticket. Junkie Paranoia.
He starts stuffing his backpack with everything he can find. Candlesticks, silverware, a bundle of banknotes lying on the kitchen counter. He does a quick mental calculation as he shoves it into his backpack: $50 bills, thick as a pack of cards. Gotta be an easy 2k.
He’ll have to make a plan with the bigger items. It’s decrepit shit, but some of it has to be worth real dough, like that gramophone or the couch with the claw feet. He’ll have to make a few enquiries with genuine antiques dealers. And then figure a way to get it out. It’s ripe for the picking.
He’s about to venture upstairs, when he hears footsteps on the front porch and reconsiders. He’s had about all the fun he can take for one day. And truth is, the place gives him the dreads.
Someone is at the front door. Mal goes for the window. But his heart is skipping like he’s had a bad hit because what if he can’t get out? The devil comes for his own. Sweet Jesus take me home, he thinks even though he doesn’t believe in that church crap.
But he scrambles out into summer 1991, just the way he left it. Rain pourin’ down, so he has to dash across the road for shelter. He looks back at the house, which is a dead wreck. He’d think he was trippin’ if he didn’t have the bag of goodies as evidence. Fuck me, he breathes, looking back. It’s trickery and special effects. Hollywood shit. Stupid to get so worked up about it.
But he ain’t going back. Not for nothing, he tells himself. Knowing already that of course he will.
Soon as he’s spare again. Soon as he’s jonesing again. Dope don’t have no sympathy, not for love or family, definitely not for fear. Put dope and the devil up against each other in the ring, and dope will win out. Every single time.
Kirby
22 NOVEMBER 1931
She doesn’t know what she is looking at. A monument, of sorts. A shrine that takes up the whole room. There are mementoes in incomprehensible configurations pinned to the walls, lined up on the mantel above the fireplace, on the dresser with its cracked mirror, the windowsill, arranged on the exposed metal frame of the bed (the mattress is on the floor, a dark stain showing through the sheet). They’ve been circled with chalk or black pen or the tip of a knife gouged into the
wallpaper. There are names written beside them. Some of them she knows by heart. The others are strangers to her. She wonders who they were. If they managed to fight back. She must try to remember. If only she could hold on to the words long enough to read them. If only she had a fucking camera. It’s hard to concentrate. Everything has a hazy quality, flickering in and out of focus like a strobe.
Kirby trails her hand through the air, not quite able to bring herself to touch the costume butterfly wings dangling from the bedpost or the white plastic ID badge with a barcode for Milkwood Pharmaceuticals.
Of course, she thinks, the pony is here. Which means the lighter will be too. She’s clinging to cold rationality, trying to take in the details. Just the facts, ma’am. But the tennis ball undoes all that. It drops her into freefall like an elevator with its cables cut. It’s hooked onto a nail by its split seam. Her name is written in chalk on the wallpaper next to it. She can make out the shape of the letters. He has spelled it wrong: Kirby Mazrackey.
She feels numb. The worst has already happened. Isn’t this what she was looking for? Doesn’t this prove everything? But her hands start shaking so hard that she has to press them against her stomach. The old scars ache reflexively under her T-shirt. And then a key jiggles in the lock downstairs.
Jesusfuckshit. Kirby looks round the room. There is no other exit, no potential weapon. She yanks at the sash window to climb out on to the staircase that runs up the back of the house, but it’s wedged shut.
She could make a break for it, try to barge past him as he comes in. If she can get downstairs, she could hit him with the kettle.
Or hide.
The key stops scrabbling. She takes the coward’s way out. She shoves aside the hanging shirts and identical pairs of jeans, and clambers into the wardrobe, tucking her legs in under her, perched on top of his shoes. It’s cramped, but at least it’s solid walnut. She can kick the door so it smashes into his face if he tries to open it.