Phoenix Noir (10 page)

Then the flash of judgment in those rummy eyes, the same smug look on the old man’s face that had chased Eddie out of childhood. And bitter realization. His father hadn’t come to make peace. He was making a point. Like a miser arranging bundles of cash in the bottom of his coffin. Preparation. Telling Eddie death didn’t change anything.
I own you.

Eddie felt the hurt, fresh. Which made zero sense. The old man was five years dead and gone. Cancer had done a bang-up job. Turned his body into a busted stack pipe that kept leaking until the guy in the unit below complained about raw sewage dripping from his ceiling.

So, anyone care to explain how the old man could be waiting to talk with him?

Slowly, Eddie swiveled back to the mirror. The face—stripped of its hardest time and wounds—was his. Only years younger. And Eddie knew he hadn’t been remembering events. He’d been reliving them.

Growing backwards.

“C’mon, Keane,” the guard pressed. “Enough preening. Let’s go.”

Eddie wanted to scream in protest. He could already hear the old man’s voice, the leathery gloat roughing its way past Redman chaw.

“See you got yourself branded. Didn’t take long.”

“Thought you of all people would understand.”

“I understand fine, boyo. Skinheads made you their punch.”

“I’m nobody’s—”

“You’re everybody’s punch, Eddie. Always been, always be.”

Eddie shook his head against his father’s words. Told himself that if he refused to leave his cell, his father would stay a memory, stay dead. The face in the mirror told him different. Against his own volition, Eddie let the guard take him—to what?

His past.

The dark cord of memory dragged Eddie toward its umbilicus. Time warped as his life played out in reverse. Days and weeks compressed into emotions, tight fistfuls of grief and rage that pummeled Eddie with savage intensity. Single events stretched out in slow-second madness, suspending him in acts of cruelty and degradation. He fought to reassert his indifference, tap into the Fury’s narcotic rage. But Old Granddad had left the building. And Eddie fell victim to his own torment.

Zip.

There was the kid’s face, fear flushed with betrayal and begging Eddie not to let it happen. Eddie backed out of the showers as the crew of Level 5 meat packers moved in. He had sold the kid’s drug debt to the faggots for pennies on the dollar. Call it a refinancing plan. Watching the attack, the men throwing themselves at the quivering and mewling flesh, Eddie got a hard-on. He imagined his dick as a knife. Not fucking. Cutting.

Zip.

DT demons whispered in Eddie’s ears. He was in the hole. A sensory-deprivation chamber where the Arizona Department of Corrections turned out snitches and bitches. Eddie fought the voices. He talked over them, yelled, sang, recited goddamn Motörhead lyrics until he ran out of words and gushed gibberish. They had dropped him cold turkey into an SMU II isolation cell. All Eddie needed to do was renounce the brotherhood. Roll over. Three days later the detox demons came, ripping his insides, twisting his spine, loosening his bowels. He blew chunks, gagged air, shouted at the walls. Then he beat on them, hitting the concrete as if working a heavy bag. Each blow accompanied by the mash of gristle and Eddie’s roar. “You!”
CRUNCH.
“Don’t!”
CRUNCH.
“Own me!”

Zip.

Flesh burned, sizzled, and popped. His skin came off in searing layers, filling the cell with a burnt-onion stench. It took two of them to hold Eddie down as the heated metal blade worked a dollar-sized patch on his neck. “Cross’s got six sides,” the knife-man said. “We’re three down.” From the corner of his eye, Eddie saw the knife pass through a guttering flame. He sucked in a lungful of the crispy air. He was kindred now. Full-fledged AB. Silently he repeated the pledge that he’d just said aloud.
My life is this and this is for life.

The car baked in the dirty sunrise, a primer oven. Eddie sat behind the wheel, windows down, stewing in sweat. He could taste the grit trapped in the heat haze rising above the rows of battered single-wides. The vial of crystal death lay on the passenger seat, all sparkle and sunshine. Eddie cranked up the radio on some rage metal and tried to stave off the shakes. He didn’t want to be here. Scrunching his eyes shut, he fiercely tried to make believe this backwards bullshit was part of a monstrous bad trip. But Jackyl’s hammer-jammer guitar clash—“Mental Masturbation!”
—
removed any doubt about where he was or who would soon come stumbling out of the mud-colored trailer.

Here was the Wagon Wheel Mobile Home Park, another artifact of Apache Junction’s dismal Western heritage. The city had tried everything to cash in on cowboys short of issuing Stetsons and spurs to the hookers on its greasy main drag. Probably would have if the hookers had been willing to stick around.

You could still find actual Indians on the Apache Trail, usually pulling all-nighters in stop-and-robs or passed out in bars named Rooster Cogburn’s. The redman Eddie sought operated an auto salvage yard to front a methamphetamine distributorship. He was too glazed on his own product to care that Eddie greeted him as “Tonto” or ask why Eddie dropped twenty extra for a corroded car battery.

Eddie spent the next hour scraping the terminals onto a sheet of butcher paper and cutting the acid into the crystal, creating the ultimate shot of high test. He spent the rest of the night sick over what he planned.

Still wasn’t sure he could go through with it.

But he knew that he would. Because, let’s face it, this was the past. He saw the trailer’s door swing open. At the same time, a hand drew back a piece of foil blocking the front window and a familiar wedge of blond hair appeared. Her eyes found his. She nodded. A second later, Wade Gramble stuck his face through the side window of Eddie’s car, his greeting stretching all the way back to grade school: “Edddieeeeee Spaghetti!”

Eddie once again saw his best friend for the last time. Knockoff Ray-Bans over that fuck-a-duck grin, undiminished by a junkie-thin frame and the chemicals oozing from his pores and soaking his Doctor Who T-shirt.

“Got us a caper, bro,” Wade said, dropping beside Eddie and extending his fist for a bump. “Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. Scoping VIN numbers off junkers, waiting in line at the DMV. Dude I know, his sister’s into some Armenians who’re tossing out serious Franklins for bogus registrations.”

Eddie had gone schizophrenic. He had become two people. Inside Eddie wanted to grab Wade by the shoulders, bust the remaining Chiclets out of his grille, and scream at him to run. But Outside Eddie was doing the talking. Cool and laid back, an actor ghosting through lines perfected in a single performance six years ago.

“Maybe I got something better,” Eddie said.

“Better how? That’s like free money, bro.”

Eddie opened his hand on the vial. “This do?”

“Dude! Beats waiting in line every time.”

She straddled his lap, backlit by purple neon, grinding as the Red Hot Chili Peppers caterwauled about Californication. Her face was so close he could taste butterscotch from the candies she chain-popped between sets. They were in a private VIP booth, their love lounge.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Cheryl said, voice husky. “You can make me yours, for all of the time.”

“You don’t belong to me,” Eddie said. “You’re Wade’s. He loves you.”

“Wade ain’t like you, Eddie. He’s weak.” Cheryl arched her back. “I hear things. I’m afraid he’s going to get you busted. Or worse. He’s not the friend you think he is.”

It would take Eddie years to wise up to Cheryl’s lies and manipulations. He couldn’t see his hands in the dark. But he knew how his fists would one day smash her face.

“You always get what you want?” he said.

“What I deserve, you mean.” She stroked him.

Eddie closed his eyes.

“Open your goddamn eyes, boyo!” the old man barked. “You owe her that much.”

Eddie obeyed, blinking into focus a cheap pine casket atop a floral-strewn dais. Inside, rose-colored satin framed his mother’s deflated features, rouged and painted into a plastic sheen. He and the old man were alone in the mortuary. “She looks pretty much the same as the last time you beat her,” Eddie said. “Only happier.”

“Is that why you came here? To lay blame?”

Eddie really couldn’t say. He wanted to mourn her, but the only genuine sentiment he’d been able to summon for his mother was conflict. A fitting eulogy. “Guess I wanted to make sure she was finally safe from you.”

“Jesus, but you’re a weak sister.” Eddie could hear the alcohol burn in his father’s pitiless voice. “No way you came from me. I knew the moment she spat you outta her cunny lips I wasn’t your father. But I gave you my name anyway. Know what they call that? A legacy.”

“Swell legacy, Dad. Look what you did for her.”

“What about what you did, Eddie? The shame you put her through. The way you took advantage of her. You forget about that? Need me to remind you?”

“Shut up!” Eddie swung at the old man, who deflected the punch and clamped Eddie’s jaw in one meaty hand. Squeezing, he pushed Eddie against the casket, crashing over vases, toppling arrangements, and scattering blossoms across his mother’s body.

“Let me clue you in, boyo. I gave your mother what she wanted. You call it battery. She called it love. We made our peace a long time ago. How about you?” The old man pushed Eddie’s head toward his mother’s, crushing his face onto her lipstick-encrusted mouth. “Here’s your chance, Eddie. Tell her you’re sorry. Kiss her goodbye.”

Pink underwear kept Eddie from escaping America’s toughest jail. Well, maybe escape was overblowing it. Security was so loose he could’ve walked out the front gate.

But then he wouldn’t have access to pink underwear. He couldn’t believe the money he was making off the things. Hell, he was wearing three pairs at a time just to keep up with demand. And supply? Eddie was kicking back to the laundry crew so they’d keep quiet on the count.

Putting inmates in pink underwear was the brainchild of the Maricopa County Sheriff, who thought degrading men by forcing them to eat green bologna sandwiches, watch the Disney Channel, and work on chain gangs made him America’s Toughest Sheriff.

Of course, the sadistic fuck also built a jail out of tents on the floor of the goddamn Gila Desert. And on that one, Eddie had to give the sheriff props. Satan’s front porch had nothing on a thousand men crammed ten to a tent in 120-degree summers.

Eddie processed into Tent City a couple of months after his nineteenth birthday, which he’d celebrated by racking up a misdemeanor assault charge and causing a near riot at a Mesa bar. Charges would have been worse except when police arrived Eddie was being stomped into the ground by a group of seriously pissed off
vatos
. Seems Eddie had inflicted a grievous insult to their culture when he cold-cocked one of their homies then shoved his hat under the
pachuco’s
ass and asked if that was where the candy came out.

Eddie thought he should send the greasers a complimentary pair of pinks. He’d gotten the idea for his underwear caper from a stroke rag, some freak of nature writing about how she got off when her boyfriend gave her the Dirty Sanchez. If chicks were willing to brag about licking their own shit, what would they be willing to shell out for an inmate’s dirty drawers?

Anybody could sell clean boxers. In fact, Eddie was pretty sure the sheriff had a side business doing just that. What he offered was lived-in stuff. Pissed in, shit on, cum-filled and bloody, the messier the better. He had Wade set it up with a classified and a post box. First week, they got a dozen orders. Doubled it the next week. Finally had to bribe a couple of deputies to get the boxers out.

Eddie felt like a captain of friggin’ industry. Escape. Are you kidding?

“Knuckles, bro? Fury. That some kind of promise?”

“A reminder. Finally stood down the old man.”

“Righteous. He back off?”

“Nah. Kicked the shit outta me.”

They were barreling west on U.S. 60 in a Lexus that Wade had boosted from a movie theater parking lot, where they had just seen
Starship Troopers
for the upteenth time. Wade geeked over science fiction. Eddie didn’t mind. It gave them somewhere they could go together and disconnect. For them, sci-fi wasn’t a theme. It was a place.