Just a test run of something I think might have a longer work in it.
This is a little bit ugly. You might not ought to hop straight from Jayne Eyre to this.
EDIT: This is fiction. Loosely based on some real people, but fiction. Just for explicit clarity.
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Break Your Bones
A girl tells you something horrible, there’s only so many things you can do.
You don’t do the things for her, because that’s not how it’s going to go down. You do them for you. So you can stay you, ya’know?
And if she doesn’t like it, she shouldn’t have told you.
Javier was a burned out old cholo.
He played pool all day, most days. Hustled a little. One of my boys, Juan, is a shark, and he’d been frequenting the man’s haunts for a few weeks. Last few days, he’d started talking to the older man.
Yesterday, he invited Javier to a private game. At our place.
Our place is a warehouse ten blocks off the water. We bought it for a song and built it up from nothing. It’s like a city inside. There’s a garden on the roof, where the mute girls I call Flora and Fauna live with their tomato plants and pigeons. Underneath, our place connects to the sewers. Psilo’s down there, growing his crops. In between, dozens of us live, plotting and scheming, with me and my friend Sticks living in the Penthouse, our name for the catwalks and platforms over the main floor.
Me and Sticks, we’re kind of the bosses. But it’s more like a pack then an army. Some of the kids didn’t want to help out tonight, and some of them I didn’t want to help out, so they were up on Capitol Hill driving the legitimate patrons out of a coffee shop with an owner that owed me a favor.
I sat up the cameras. I sat up the pool table.
A few hours went by, and Juan got here with our man.
He walked Javier through the rows and rows of cars. The old man looked them over pretty hard. My cars are always impressive, but tonight, that’s what they were there for.
As they arrived at the back of the warehouse, I stepped into the circle of light around the pool table. I’m dressed up in my Sunday best, black linen, black leather, silver jewelry. We run the rap by the gangster, tell him we want to rig a big money pool thing and we need some participants with . . . diversity. He accepted the offered drink while we strung him along with sugared specifics, and he was out before he hit the bottom of it.
When he woke up, he was in the sub-basement, and we’d done the preliminary work already. He was gagged and naked, wrists and chest tied to a kitchen chair, yellow light from naked bulbs revealing a lean body covered in out-of-date gang tattoos. Psilo was ready, on the catwalk over the pit. I pointed at him, and he rolled camera.
I bent down in front of him, drawing my face level with his. His eyes were rolling, his jaws were clenched around the shop rag we’d gagged him with, and his body was tense and jerking. Total panic.
I slowly opened one hand in front of him, like waving royalty, and then I slapped him hard across the face. His eyes focused on me, and he quieted down a bit. I stood, fully, inhaling as if to speak, and when he looked up at me as if listening, I kicked him in the chest as hard as I could. I leg press around fifteen hundred pounds, so that’s pretty fucking hard. He went over backward fast, chair and all, hitting his head on the concrete with a dull thud. Juan picked him back up. He was conscious and still, looking right at me, showing no fear. He knew he’d die, right here, right now, if I got a nose full of that stink.
I looked at him, met his eyes, and punched him in the face, as hard as I could. I bench press four hundred pounds, so that’s pretty fucking hard. This time, I put a hand on his knee to keep him from tipping. I waited another moment or two, letting him come back around. He was making a bad noise around his gag now, and his left eye was red with broken vessels. I cupped the back of his head in my left hand, drew my right back, and smashed my open palm into his injured eye socket. I felt the bones around his eye splinter and shift. I held my palm against his eye, turned it left and then right. He screamed against the gag, a kind of “Hrrrrrrrrrrrr,” sound that went on for a while, then he heaved and little trickles of vomit came out of the corners of his mouth, around his gag. He was starting to choke, so I started saying what I needed to say.
“Imagine you are a secretary at a law firm, named Janice. You meet this girl in foster care, working on a case. Turns out she works at the coffee shop across the street. You are twenty and she is seventeen, and you become like an older sister to her. One night she breaks down, and tells you why she’s in foster care, why she can’t sleep, why she can’t have a boyfriend, or even a date without breaking down.”
I fought to keep my voice level. Javier had swallowed several times. Blood and aqueous humor were running down his cheek. He wasn’t choking anymore.
“ Seems she had this father.”
Javier looked up at me. For a moment, he looked beaten. He’d just realized this wasn’t about money, drugs, respect, or pool, and I was going to kill him in a few minutes. He sagged. Then he snapped his head up, eyes wide, and lashed his upper body forward, and flexed his legs, lurching toward me chair and all. I stepped out of the way and he landed on his face. I stood him back up. Then I reached behind the chair and broke three of his fingers.
“As I was saying,” I continued, “She had a father. This man was a monster. He kept her locked in her bedroom. He barely fed her. He kept her handcuffed to the radiator. He beat her. And he made movies with her.”
“He sold the movies.”
He was sweating in the cold sewer. This was going to plan.
“Normally, women bear this kind of thing alone, Javier. They take care of it and live with it in their own ways. But Janice told her boyfriend. And Janice’s boyfriend is a monster named Stone.”
When he heard my name, he flipped again. He puked again, and started to rock back and forth, keening rhythmically the whole time.
“And Stone,” I said, ducking down to look him in the face, “Is a hood. For lack of a better term. A very mean man. He’s got a lot of friends. He has this pal named Psilo – as in psilocybin – who grows pot and mushrooms under the streets.”
“I’m going to share a little horticultural secret with you, Javier. Pig shit is the best fertilizer, so we keep pigs. And I am about to toss you into a pit full of them, alive and bleeding, and then videotape them eating you alive.”
I stood up, walked behind him, grabbed the back of the chair, and threw him into the pit. Psilo tipped the camera down. After a few minutes went by, he puked, said, “Fuck this,” and headed upstairs.
I walked over to the tripod and fixed the camera’s vector. I could have locked the tripod and left, but made myself watch the whole thing, until he stopped twitching. It took about twenty minutes. I stopped the tape and took it out of the camera. Then I walked up after Psilo.
Later tonight, I would show Anita the tape once, and then I would burn it. Hopefully, she would sleep. Or at least have a nightmare about something new.
Author’s note: Anita is based on a real person I know.
Her dad died of liver failure in 2001, too quickly and too gently.
Lyric for the day:
“I can hear you talking in the real world; But I’m happy here in hell with my heroin girl”
