Nothing Down Read online

  NOTHING DOWN

  Steve Vernon

  Published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2011 Steve Vernon

  Copy-edited by Paulo Monteiro

  Cover Design by David Dodd

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  OTHER BOOKS BY STEVE VERNON

  NOVELS:

  Devil Tree

  Gypsy Blood

  NOVELLAS:

  Long Horn, Big Shaggy

  Nothing To Lose

  Buy Direct From Crossroad Press & Save

  Try any title from CROSSROAD PRESS – use the Coupon Code FIRSTBOOK for a onetime 20% savings! We have a wide variety of eBook and Audiobook titles available.

  Find us at: http://store.crossroadpress.com

  Dedicated

  To those fine folks at Crossroad Press

  And to Keith Blackmore, for buying my books when he was broke

  And

  As always

  To my wife Belinda

  God knows how you put up with everything that needs to be put up with!

  Table of Contents

  The Indelible Skivvy Stains of Unbleached Regret

  Some of Us Make It

  Don’t Bet on a Wet Horse

  Saint Valentine’s Massacre

  The Tracks We Leave Behind

  Afterword

  The Indelible Skivvy Stains of Unbleached Regret

  There are very few things in this life as irreplaceably essential as a pair of clean bleached skivvies. They hide the funk and the sorry residue that is generally considered somewhat socially unacceptable. Back through the ages even the most primitive of savages would quite often find themselves an excuse to wrap their ugly in a tatter of freshly skinned breechcloth.

  Oh sure.

  You can always rinse the old pair of underwear out, but sooner or later there are some stains that never really fade. They begin to develop their own personality. They cling to your underfuzzies and whisper dark puckered secrets to the coral reefs of hemorrhoids that barnacle and cling to the evacuation of your rectum.

  Worse yet, you begin to smell funny.

  Some braver souls might talk of going commando, but for me – tough superhero or not, I tend to chafe. So sooner or later I find myself in the thick of a milling herd of Target shoppers, smack dab in the heart of the pre-apocalyptic bull’s-eye, mulling casually through the underwear section.

  Which is where I first saw her – shoplifting skivvies.

  I really like shopping at the Target.

  Not because of the prices, you understand.

  I like shopping here, because even with a stitched-on superhero Lone Ranger mask stating boldly to all who would bother to look that I am quite possibly both dangerous and a few green peas short of a tuna casserole – I fit right in.

  Just take a look around you.

  That woman in the too-tiny tube top, wearing enough cigarette ash and vodka tattoos to populate a galaxy of freak shows?

  She fits in.

  That old walrus mustached dude wearing that leprechaun green Mad Hatter top hat, with a pair of Elton John clown glasses perched on his nose?

  He fits in.

  That three hundred pound hormonally-frenzied pre-crap mid-op she-male in the bright orange sweatshirt and sweat pants with built-in plumber’s crack and peek-a-boo knee caps?

  That fits in too.

  You see, stores like this are where the bread and circuses come to play. All of the so-called normal people – they don’t shop anywhere that doesn’t reek of boutique, physique and etiquette. The Dollar Stores and the Wal-Marts and the Target outlets don’t attract that kind of high-rolling clientele.

  Stores like this are built for guys like me.

  I’m Captain Nothing.

  Remember that, would you?

  Memories are funny things.

  As a person gets older their memories kind of melt and render down, like a body that has been lying for too long in a mildew-ridden swamp.

  You gloss over details.

  You defecate upon the facts.

  You start to think of yourself as possibly being somebody different.

  You tell yourself that at one time you might have had another name. You might have used to be somebody else. For a while you might have even had a home that you had once lived in. There might have almost been a girlfriend for a while. You might even almost remember having a wife or a husband.

  You remember a dog that wagged his tail and never tried to bite you.

  You remember a porch light that constantly burned and beaconed through the long lonely night as you walked home from work.

  Oh yes, you might even have had a job as well.

  You might even remember having kids. You might remember two smallish shapes cut out of my memory where maybe a son and a daughter might fit – but for all you really know those shapes that you are remembering might be nothing more significant than a microwave and an electric can opener.

  Speaking for myself I try hard not to remember those sorts of memories. Memories like that can lead to dreaming and people who live too long in a dream miss out on all of that wonderful reality that is floating past, like the aroma of freshly-crapped dog turds plunked down smack-dab in the middle of a jogging path.

  Memories will fool you.

  They have a way of evolving and changing as time slowly erodes them away.

  Sometimes it is best that way.

  Sometimes a body just wants to forget.

  It was the hair I saw first. It was too blonde to be real – all buttercups and sunshine and pints of lemonade piss.

  She got a little closer and I could see her figure now.

  It was a figure that spoke of one too many boxes of Kraft Dinner. Cottage cheese and lipid sweat and a distinct lean towards wallow. A worn pant suit that fit her like she had been poured into it twice.

  Not fat, you understand. Just soft around the edges, vaguely swollen - she would have looked a whole lot prettier if I had been drunk.

  Except I wasn’t drunk.

  And, she was a thief.

  Now there’s nothing wrong with stealing, you understand. Sometimes we all have to put aside our ethics and make do with a little petty larceny.

  Only she wasn’t a very good thief.

  I spotted her right away, tucking the pack of men’s underwear under her blouse.

  Who in the hell steals underwear?

  The store security floor walker spotted her right away as well.

  Mind you, store security is usually pretty easy to spot in situations like this. This guy was dressed just a little too intentionally street-gangster. It was like he was trying too hard to look disreputable. That backward baseball cap just didn’t look to be angled quite right sitting there on the top of his head.

  Yes, he fit here as well.

  Nine times out of ten he would have just followed her around for a while until she had tried to make it out the door. Then he would have quietly collared her just outside the store. You had to wait that long if you wanted to make it a good one. If you tried to collect a shoplifter inside the store they could just say something like – “I was just carrying it under my shirt up to the cash register” – and you couldn’t really prove otherwise.

  So it happened out in the parking lot.

  I didn’t really need to do anything a
bout it. She had broken the law. She was stealing. That was an indisputable fact - but there was something in that tired outlook of that woman that I liked.

  Besides, the floor walker looked as if he might be just a bit too comfortable with the whole act of strong arming a woman. Sometimes you just can tell and I wasn’t going to let him get away with that. It was stupid, I know, but every now and then I feel the urge to do something completely and utterly futile.

  Never mind making sense.

  So I followed the two of them out of the store.

  Now you would think that being followed by a two hundred and fifty pound man in an unwashed leather Lone Ranger style mask might trigger some primordial survival instinct – but the floor walker must have been fresh out of primordial.

  Maybe the particular quality was on back order.

  Or maybe they just didn’t make it any more.

  The three of us stepped outside and it happened like domino action. He put a big hand on her shoulder.

  I put a big hand on his, fully expecting trouble.

  I didn’t have long to wait.

  He turned around.

  “She’s with me,” I said.

  “Great,” he replied. “Then I’ll arrest you both.”

  I could have pointed out that he was nothing but a floor-walking security guard and that any arresting would generally have to be left up to the inevitable squad car that someone would call but I thought my logic might be lost on the man.

  So I stepped in and turned, bringing my elbow across his cheek, bringing the point of my elbow down in a hard arc that broke flesh. Bring on the red, right? That is the key to winning any fight without actually turning it into a fight. If you shed just a little of your opponent’s blood, odds are he will quickly lose heart.

  Only this guy hadn’t heard of that theory.

  He blinked the blood out of his eyes and exploded two very hard hooks into my ribcage that nearly took my wind away. In hindsight, I imagine he was a mixed martial art fan who took up boxing as a way to compensate for his shitty job – but at that point in the game I’d left hindsight somewhere back in the dirt.

  I made a sound like a body-slammed concertina, and threw a sloppy right at him. He laughed at its sloppiness, which was the point of the whole maneuver. While he was laughing I countered with an equally sloppy left, I wrapped the left around the back of his neck, pulled his head and neck down towards me as I brought my left knee up hard into his face.

  Then I pulled him closer and threw three or four punishing right hooks into his jaw bone, after which he lost interest in everything else besides lying on the pavement covering his face with his hands. I suppose I could have kicked him a few times but I hadn’t really wanted to hurt him that badly.

  After all, he was just doing his job.

  “Do you have a car?” she asked. “We need to get out of here.”

  So I found a car and we did just that.

  We left the car in a gravel parking lot – the kind that wasn’t likely to have much in the way of security cameras.

  Or witnesses.

  “Car theft is hot work,” I pointed out. “So is assault and battery – not to mention rescuing larcenous women.”

  “I know a liquor store,” she said. “They sell cool by the bottle.”

  So we picked up a bottle of something cheap and cold and guaranteed to blast the brain cells. I had already decided that this would wind up in a bed somewhere down the road. I figured she would feel gratitude and there was always that theory of how much women truly enjoyed watching a man shed another man’s blood in their name.

  I wasn’t so certain about the veracity of that theory but I knew I hadn’t been laid in a while. In fact it had been so long that my testicles were beginning to remember the burden of futile virginity.

  Besides, she didn’t look all that fussy and neither was I.

  Mind you, I wasn’t foolish enough to point that lack of fussiness out to her just yet. That would be an unkind thing to say and besides it really had been a very long while since I had got lucky.

  I just rolled with it.

  It happened in her room.

  It played out just the way that I thought it would.

  She led me to a three floor walk-up.

  To an apartment where the roaches made room for a bed. To two dirty glasses and a fumble with mutual flies.

  Afterwards, when the bottle had evaporated half-past empty and the sky had muddied up into the bruise of midnight and hard need had softened into wet sticky satisfaction – we began to talk.

  Actually, she did most of the talking.

  I just tried my hardest not to listen.

  “Look at me,” she said. “You wouldn’t know that I used to be a good girl.”

  I nodded.

  “I haven’t met too many bad ones,” I said.

  She snorted a laugh that was almost pretty. Just for a half of an eye blink I could see the trace of the promising little girl she had grown up from peeking out from the cellulite and cigarette smoke.

  “You know what I mean, smartass,” she told me. “I used to have a real kind of life. Even tried going to college, once.”

  I knew better, but I bit just the same.

  “So what happened?” I asked, knowing that my curiosity was expected of me.

  “It didn’t,” she said. “Like everything else in this life. Nothing but a flash in the pan. There were a few courses l liked, a few that I didn’t. A professor who thought I’d go along with what he wanted to. Whether I wanted to or not.”

  Then her voice trailed off.

  I could see the story between the lines. See that this master-asshole of a professor had figured that it was reasonable to trade a high mark for a good time in a cheap hotel room. I could see that she hadn’t gone along with his thinking. I could see that her reticence had not discouraged him one bit.

  I could see the whole story, written out between the lines, and for just a half of a half a minute I wanted to go and beat the over-educated shit out of every college professor on the face of this planet.

  And then it was gone.

  We smoked another cigarette.

  We drained the bottle down a bit more.

  I turned on the radio.

  It didn’t work.

  “Do you want to dance?” she asked.

  “There’s no music,” I said.

  “There’s always music.”

  She leaned against me. I could feel her heaviness. Not an ounce of grace or style, but I was no Fred Astaire, either. She leaned her forehead against my shoulder bone and we just kind of swayed together.

  If you squinted it was a kind of dance.

  “I remember dancing with this one guy back in college,” she told me, like she was talking to somebody else a long way away from here. “He was such a dreamer. He didn’t have any idea what life was really like.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  I just stood there and swayed.

  Balance is everything.

  “I remember him getting down on one knee, like he thought we were in some kind of movie,” she went on. “I remember him asking me to marry him.”

  She leaned back and looked up into my eyes with those watery pale pools of remembrance. A few tears wiggled in the corner of her eyes, like the ghosts of slow lonesome tadpoles.

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  She laughed.

  It wasn’t a nice laugh.

  Like a rose stem being snapped.

  “Are you kidding?” she asked. “Come on, look at me, are you kidding?”

  I felt something welling up inside her.

  I let her lean back a bit and I eased her back onto the bed.

  She cried a little.

  She dragged one heavy arm across her face, wiping the snot and tears and loneliness away.

  “He didn’t know what life was really like,” she went on. “He was so good. He was so very good to me.”

  And then she stopped talking.

 
She lay there for a while.

  Eventually she began to snore.

  Soft, gentle, somewhat off key.

  I stood above her, a million miles away on some other galaxy where dance floors are nothing more than a battlefield.

  The room seemed to almost inhale and for just an instant I felt as if I could rip this mask off and tell her who I really used to be. I felt as if somehow she and I might save ourselves for just a little bit.

  Only it’s too late.

  She’s asleep.

  She’s dreaming.

  I stand up and put on my pants.

  Shirt and jacket.

  I inhaled a little strength.

  I left her what was left in the bottle and I opened the door slowly.

  I stepped out into the hall and walked down the stairs.

  Down three flights of stairs and a doorway.

  There was rummy, squatting in an alley, singing softly to himself.

  “Row, row, row your boat.”

  He was almost on key.

  “Gently down the stream.”

  “You’re dead right,” I told him.

  I still needed a fresh pair of shorts.

  Some of Us Make It

  Some of us make it.

  You know the ones.

  The ones that are blessed by certain angels. The ones who sat upon carefully pressed horseshoe diapers and never really learned how to spit out the silver spoon.

  The lucky ones.

  There’s this one guy. He had wings, big frilly yellow things, not really much as super powers go. I think he called himself the Canary or some such foolishness.

  Whatever.

  It seems he pulled the right kid out of a burning building. He damn near killed himself in the heat spiralling cross currents.

  “His wings caught on fire,” one of the rescue workers told a reporter. “It was something to see, like a bright canary comet lighting up the sky. A long streak of flame trailing out behind him and he just kept on going like he was trying to outrun his own personal funeral bonfire.”