Caught in the lie, Travis goes blank.
“Shit, it don’t matter,” Q says. He removes a hand from his coat pocket and gestures toward the car. “You left him in there already.”
“At least let me check on him first.”
Q nods to go ahead, and his boys release Travis’s arms.
He opens the back door and leans in. Cody hasn’t budged. He kisses the top of his son’s head, checks to make sure he’s covered and warm. “I’ll be right back, buddy,” he says. Cody lets out a soft sigh. Travis thinks, I’m so sorry, then shuts the door and bites back the tears.
They get into the Escalade that’s parked a few spots down. The drive across the street seems to stretch out forever. Travis feels caged, wedged between two of them in the back seat. No one speaks.
When they pull up beside the ATM and let him out, Q gets out with him. He stands with his hands still sunk into the pockets of his puffy coat. Travis puts his bank card into the machine.
At the fifty-cents-on-the-dollar rate Q always charged him on his fronts, the three hundred Travis had been into him for automatically doubled.
“So it’s six, right?” Travis says before punching in the numbers.
“Plus interest.”
Shit. He hasn’t accounted for what Q might tack on for him being MIA all this time. In the corporate world it’s called “delinquency.” In Q’s world it’s called “lucky you’re still breathing.”
“Yeah,” Travis says. “So where’s that put me?”
Q takes a moment to consider it. “I always liked you, Travis. Let’s make it a straight G and we good.”
Travis feels himself wince. As good of a liar as he can be, he’ll never be able to explain such a large withdrawal to Emma. He’ll have to come clean with her.
“I can do that,” Travis says.
As he starts typing in the amount, Q says, “You look like you got your shit together, Trav. Joint musta done you some good . . . if you went to the joint.”
Travis is about to respond when the words appear on the screen: CANNOT EXCEED $300 WITHDRAWAL FROM ATM IN 24-HOUR PERIOD.
His heart seizes in his chest. His stomach jumps and falls flat.
No. No no no.
He turns to Q. “It won’t let me take out more than three hundred. I have to go into the bank. And it’s closed till the morning.”
“Travis, Travis, that’s no good.” Q’s hand moves in his pocket, and Travis thinks, It’s all over.
His thoughts grope one another, trying to construct a solution, a way out of this. He’s about to give up when he remembers—a kid named Mickey. Young. New to it and going hard like he had something to prove. Lifted his old man’s card. They ran into the same problem and discovered by sheer chance they could go to multiple ATMs and take out more money. They skated around town hitting different machines. Three days and three grand later, the account was frozen. Fun while it lasted.
“Wait, wait,” Travis says. “I can hit a few more ATMs and get the rest. I’ve done it before.”
Q looks at him with that cocked, incredulous eye, then motions for Travis to get in the truck.
There are two other banks and a corner store within eyeshot of Popeyes. As they drive him to each one, Travis feels his phone blowing up in his pocket. Emma. He ignores it and keeps his eyes on the Honda. He pictures Cody inside and prays he’s still asleep.
He pays Q his $1,000, and they drive him back to his car. Only when they get there, they keep going. Toward the back of the restaurant. They’ve barely said a word the entire time, which unsettles him. They stop next to the dumpster. This part of the lot is in the building’s shadow, and he can no longer see the Honda. They let him out.
“Look, Q,” Travis says, standing outside the SUV’s passenger window, still holding his bag of chicken and fries. “I never meant to do you like that. I was just out of commission, you know?”
“We cool,” Q says. He smiles again, flashing platinum.
Travis nods and turns to walk back. He gets within sight of the car, then hears, “Yo, Travis.”
He turns around and sees the pistol in Q’s hand. Smile gone.
Everything stops.
Travis steps outside himself, watches from beside himself yet somehow still inside himself as the Glock chamber glides and snaps back and the muzzle blooming spits whipcracks of light—and the him he stepped out of takes them one-two sledgehammers and a wrecking ball in a chest flood of molten feeling . . .
Smell of gunpowder and scorched rubber.
Taillights.
Ears ringing and body . . .
. . . falling.
The cold pavement reaches through his back and steals his breath. Sounds swim through his head—voices, distant cars. Is that Cody? He can’t move his body. He thinks again, You fucked up, kid.
Thinks, It won’t take but a minute. Thinks, I’m so sorry. He sees the car, a blur with windows of reflected light. He moves his lips to speak, but only gasps. There’s no one there to hear him anyway. In the dark. His pounding heart is the only sound now. He turns his head, watches his breath rise like smoke. A moment or a lifetime, he doesn’t know which, and the stars begin to come unglued. No, not stars, he thinks as they melt against his face. Snow.
He sees this all before returning to himself, no longer both inside and outside but only inside himself. He stares into the barrel of the gun, several feet away yet gaping with its cold finality. He has time, Q has given him that much. Time to think of all he’ll miss, of all he wishes he would have said and done and done differently. So many things, differently.
He closes his eyes and sees Cody’s face.
Please forgive me.
Then there’s the dry-fire click of an empty chamber. Travis opens his eyes.
Q still has the gun raised, but again he’s smiling. A chrome flicker. “Bang,” he says, and he and his boys begin to laugh. When the laughing stops, Q says, “You,” and wags the Glock at him. “You better remember this.”
The window of the Escalade goes up, and they drive off.
On the way back to the car, Travis stops, bends over, and dry heaves, but nothing comes out. He realizes he’s still clutching the bag of food and drops it on the ground behind the car.
When he opens the passenger-side rear door to check on Cody, the boy is awake and looking up at him, his chin spittle-slick. He looks happy. Travis unbuckles him, holds him, presses his numb face against his son’s warm one, kisses him on the eyes. Cody says, “Da-dee,” and pats Travis on the cheek with his soft little hand. “Da-dee da-dee.” It’s not the first time Cody has spoken, but it could be for all it makes him feel.
When his phone goes off again, he hesitates before answering.
Don’t say anything.
What about the money? I’ll have to explain.
You’ll think of something.
He thumbs the screen. He hears Emma’s voice but not her words.
You’ll think of something.
“It’s all over now,” he says. “We’re on our way.”
He hangs up and puts Cody back in his car seat. As he backs the car out of the parking spot, he feels the tires crunch over the greasy sack of chicken and fries. Driving out of the lot, he sees it there in the side-view mirror, and for a brief moment he sees himself lying on the cold ground beside it.
PETER STRAUB
The Process Is a Process All Its Own
FROM Conjunctions
I have this thing I do because the thing reminds me of you know. You use these little deals, like the hearing-aid batteries that go into that thing deaf guys put in their shirt pockets, the thing with the wires that come out. You dump these batteries out of the pack and swish them around in three to four inches of water. Little bubbles begin to come up: in fact, little bubbles show up almost immediately. Why, I don’t know, but they do. Maybe for reasons we will get into later. The batteries rest like little machine turds down there on the bottom of your ashtray or whatever. (I use an ashtray mainly.) Then what you
do is, you sniff the bubbles.
Huh.
If you push your head right down next to the water, the bubbles open up right under your nose. Which is the point here, O Unseen. They give off this strange little smell. Those bubbles from Rayovac hearing-aid batteries smell like what happens when you shove your nose right into the middle of an old dictionary, the gutter where the two pages come together, and inhale. That’s the smell you get from the bubbles out of hearing-aid batteries.
If the odor you get from the bubbles from hearing-aid batteries has anything in common with the odor you get from thrusting your nose deep into the seam of an open dictionary, particularly a dictionary of some vintage, then it cannot be inaccurate to say that the odor must be that of words. One comes across the odors of words in many, many contexts, and the odors of words are usually the same from one context to another. Only the strongest, most distinctly individuated, if that’s a word, of individuals can control the colorations of the words that pass through them.
Nothing in this situation is odd, actually, odd given that we are dealing with words. Words are produced within the medium of air, and balloons and other empty spaces that produce bubbles do so because they themselves are filled with air. Air itself must be thought to be laden with words, to be word packed, word jammed. In fact, words tumble out of every orifice, panting to be born, screaming against the resistant membrane, trying their best to . . . Here’s the deal. Words have plans. Ambitions. Goals. They are always trying to veer around us & zoom away. They wish to leave us in an abysmal darkness. You can think what you like about this.
Try the following experiment. Choose any old balloon you happen to see lying by the side of the path in a public park, even a balloon that may have been blown up for a child’s birthday. (But make sure it’s a balloon balloon, or you might not like the results!) When you thrust these poor old things underwater, pierce their hides with your knife, your hatpin, whatever, and then inhale the fragrance of the hazy penumbra substance that escapes into the water and bursts above it in bubble form, nine times out of ten, five out of six anyhow, there may be heard the off-key delivery of birthday songs, the chanting of inane good wishes, on top of these frequent invocations of the birthday child’s name, and distributed through all of the intermediate spaces the names of his wretched friends and, guess what, lists of the silly birthday presents given and acquired on this date. And this tired, tired smell. All this verbal information can be detected within the exhalations to be had from these semideflated pastel-colored balloons. Once you really commit to this process, pretty much the same goes for gadgets like tape recorders, typewriters, old over-under cameras, headphones, microphones, everything like that. Once they have been plunged underwater and agitated crushed berated abused destroyed, one can detect beneath the more prominent odors of distressed metal, rubber, and plastic the ambitious stench of words that once passed through these various windows.
To a casual observer, dear little friend, all of the above may seem overspecialized, in fact obsessive. I can scarcely pretend that I am a casual onlooker. To illustrate the exact nature of my function, which at the moment I am perhaps a bit reluctant to do, I might allude to the properties of another set of bubbles and the nature of the inhalations contained within, which is to say, getting at last to the point, well, one of my points, the bubbles found in blood. Blood is particularly given to the formation of bubbles. Those with the stomach to lean over bubbles of blood and inhale their messages will find that they have in the process acquired a complex detailed subtle record of the life from which that blood emerged. It is one of the most delicate and moving instances of information transmission that I can imagine. It is certainly one of the most beautiful experiences that I have ever known—the catching of the deep, particular inflections within the bubbles of blood that issue from the human throat. Voices contain smells: all human structures carry—on their backs sides bellies feet cocks pussies scalps—stinks and perfumes. We cannot escape into any goddamn odor-free realm. Any such realm should scare us right out of our you know. Odors fasten us to our common world. Rot, fragrance, bud, and bloom exude the physical aura of the process that animates them. It does not take a scientist to detect a verbal motion, a verbal smell, within the bubbles of blood of a recently deceased beast or human. There is, however, perhaps only one given my particular history who may with a reasonably good assurance of being believed claim that when words are detected within the blood of human beings they generally have an English smell. It is the odor, and I understand that what I am telling you might seem arbitrary, of fish-and-chip shops on barren High Streets, of overcooked roast beefs, of limp, glistening “chips,” of blank-eyed mackerel reeking on the departing tide, of dull seaweed and wet wool, of humid beards, of crap Virginia tobacco, of damp hair, likewise of cheap cologne and hair oil, also of flowers sold three days past their prime in Covent Garden, also of similar flowers wilting in the hair of neglected women—all of these structures are to be detected in the bubbles that form when blood is released from any human being, cart man, prince regent, or vicious greedy poxy trollop.
Those kinds of people I was talking about before, they do not produce these English smells. With them, it’s all different, you don’t know what you’re going to hear. Fortunately they are very few in number.
Am I being fanciful? All right, perhaps I’m being fanciful. And yet what I tell you is on the nose. Most of the time, an English accent is what you get. What’s more, it’s usually a Cockney accent—turns out words are blue-collar guys.
I don’t want you to think that I mess around smelling blood bubbles, for God’s sake. Nobody has that much time. Time is a luxury. And what human beings do with luxuries is very much their own business, thank you very much.
—T.H., June 1958
A man named Tillman Hayward wrote these words in a Hardy & Badgett leather-bound notebook, five by four inches, with pale-blue lined paper. He had purchased the notebook, along with three others like it, on sale for $9.95 at Ballantine and Scarneccia, a high-end stationery store in Columbus, Ohio. He “lived” in Columbus. His real life took place elsewhere.
Tillman Hayward, “Tilly,” did not work in Columbus. He earned his reasonably substantial salary as a property manager in Columbus, but his real work—his “work”—was done elsewhere. This separation was self-protective.
He was writing with a German-made mechanical pencil purchased for $8.99 at the same store. Faber-Castell, its manufacturer, described it as a “propelling pencil.” He liked the word “propelling”: to propel sounded madly up-to-date. A propeller-pencil. (It, the word, not the pencil, smelled a great deal of Elmer’s Glue.)
Tilly Hayward had been married for nine years to a blond woman named Charlotte, née Sullivan. Tilly and Charlotte had produced three blond daughters, each of them the replica of both her mother and her sisters. They looked like triplicates born in different years. These perfect girls were named Edith, Hannah, and Faith. The Hayward family lived in one of the apartment buildings owned by Charlotte’s father, Daniel Sullivan, a flinty Irish immigrant in a flat cap, who had never known a moment’s warmth or sentimentality. Tilly’s job was to oversee the properties, keep them in satisfactory condition, check out whatever new might come on the market, and to make sure the rents came in. He deployed a full range of subcontractors to deal with the tenants’ demands. With his father-in-law’s approval, Tilly also had taken it upon himself to search for other properties to add to his holdings. He had convinced his father-in-law that the city of Milwaukee, his birthplace, was an excellent location for the long-planned expansion of the Sullivan company. Six or seven times a year, sometimes way more than that, Tilly either drove, took the train, or flew to Milwaukee (the handsome General Mitchell Field, where his tricky old dad used to take the kids to watch the planes take off and land). There, he sometimes stayed with his brother, Bobby, and Bobby’s wife, Mags, in the old brown-and-yellow duplex on West Forty-Fourth Street, where Bobby, Tilly, and their sister, Margaret (later Mar
got), had been born and raised. At other times he planted himself in hotels, not always under his real name. “Jesse Unruh” and “Joe Ball” spent a few days at the Pfister, “Leslie Ervin” at the funkier, less expensive Plaza. Although Tilly appeared to be, and sometimes actually was, dedicated in his search for commercial properties, he had as yet to purchase a single one of these buildings for the Sullivan real estate empire.
It was in Milwaukee and under conditions of rigorous secrecy that Tilly’s real “work” was carried out.
Tilly Hayward was one of those men in possession of two lives. Either he was a dark, disturbing criminal sociopath who wore a more conventional person around him like a perfectly fitted suit of clothing, or he was a conventional person who within himself concealed a being like a wild animal. Tillman’s response to his duality was not simple. He wondered sometimes if he were really a person at all. Perhaps he had originated on some faraway star—or in some other, far-distant time. Often, he felt other.
Many of the words whose odors Tillman caught as they emerged reeked of death and corruption. There were some words that almost always stank of the graveyard, of death and corpses. (These were words such as “happiness,” “fulfillment,” “satisfaction,” “pleasure,” also “joy.”) Tillman understood that these words smelled foul because the things they referred to were false.
In Tilly’s sensitive nostrils, the word “job” often smelled like fresh vomit. People who spoke of their jobs evoked entire butcher shops filled with rotting meat. Tilly knew that if he ever permitted himself to speak in mixed company, away from his family, of the job he did for Sullivan Real Estate Holdings, the same terrible stench would attach itself to his vocabulary. Therefore he never did speak of these matters except to his wife, who either did not notice the stinks that accompanied these words or, having grown accustomed to them during childhood, pretended that she did not. Words like “sorrow,” “unhappiness,” “grief,” these words that should have carried perhaps the worst stenches of all, did not actually smell so bad—more like rotting flowers than rotting meat, as though what had once been fresh about them was not so very distant. When Tilly went out in search of the people whom he dealt with as part of his real “work,” he deliberately sought women who uttered the foulest words of all. He had an unerring instinct for women whose vocabularies betrayed a deep intrinsic falsity. He often thought that other people could do the same. He thought that a kind of politeness kept other people from speaking of this power, so out of uncharacteristic politeness he himself remained silent about it. There were times when he wondered if he alone could detect the odors that clung to the spoken words, but if that were true, and the power only his, he could never figure out what to do with it. Apart from being perhaps another indication of his status as an alien from a sphere far different, the power seemed a mere frivolity: like so much else, it had no relevance beyond its own borders.