Love and Other Wounds Read online

  Carter came up from the truck bed. He was bleeding from a bad chest gash. His big-ass pistol barked. The bullet took John high in the chest, a through-and-through wound. It burned. Now John was cooking on the inside too. Blood bubbled in pink foam from the entrance wound. John knew that meant a lung shot. He was dying. For the first time in a long time, he didn’t want to die.

  Carter fumbled for a reload. Bullets dripped through bloody fingers. They bounced on the gravel. Carter raised the unloaded pistol. John stared down the barrel at nothing. Carter dry-fired an empty gun. He said something John would never know. He smiled as John put the shotgun to his head. The buckshot made Carter’s head go away.

  John walked down the road. The fire sang and sang. Helicopters flew overhead, covered in cop emblems and news team logos. The animals of the high desert moved with John down the road, down the mountain. A coyote ran past him. Rattlesnakes slithered down the road, ignoring the mice and lizards that ran with it. No predators or prey anymore. John moved slowly. He saw things that might have been Gila monsters or just flashes of smoke madness. He trudged as if the pebbles at his feet were snowbanks. He hunched over himself, too weak to lift his head off his blood-bubbling chest. He knew he wasn’t going to make it.

  A longhorn with burnt flesh pink like a baby’s skin trotted out of the smoke. Sparks shook off its hooves. John grabbed a horn. He slumped over its back. He rode the steer down, down. He would never be sure what happened on that ride, what was real and what was smoke dreams. At the bottom of the mountain he came out of the smoke on the back of the bull like something out of a Greek myth, like a man who went down to hell to fetch not his bride but himself.

  Around him, the animals of the mountain fled from the fire into the streets of Agua Dulce. They swarmed among the fire trucks and cop cars. People filmed them with their phones. John clung to the bull as it clopped down a store-lined street. Finally a fireman spotted John and pulled him off the steer’s back.

  “Johnny,” John said through fire-cracked lips as someone strapped a plastic mask over his mouth. The mask blasted him off to pure-oxygen heaven.

  “Somebody go fetch Johnny,” he said. “Somebody go fetch my boy.”

  PROVE IT ALL NIGHT

  No future, no past.

  Just that animal now. All the fears and doubts and memories are gone and there’s nothing left but me and the single moment that flows around me.

  I don’t find peace in some ashram or on a therapist’s couch. It’s here in this gun and this car, and through that glass door. It’s inside the gas station as I burst through the door. It’s pouring like tears from the terrified eyes of the clerk. It’s inside that cash register. It’s under the counter as the scared man’s hands go out of view. It’s in that moment when maybe it’s money he’s going for or maybe it’s a shotgun to silly string my guts on the chip rack behind me. I tell you that moment lasts forever and blinks by like it’s nothing.

  It’s money. He fills a plastic bag with shaking hands.

  My ears fill with blood so that the Muzak turns itself down and all I can hear is my heartbeat and the click of the hammer as I thumb it back to show the man I mean business. I hear the jagged hiss of his breath and he’s right here in the moment with me. He’s not thinking of next month’s rent or the way he thought life would be when he was back in high school. No. He is here with me, and only me. I tell him to throw in a carton of Camel Wides.

  In front of the gas station comes a honk, Mark telling me the clock is running. Time is still passing after all, the honk says, so move along little lady. I scoop up the cash and the cartons of Camels and I run to the car. Mark’s got the passenger side door waiting open for me and I slide in and the back tires spit gravel until they sink their teeth into the asphalt beneath and we rocket out onto the road.

  Mark likes that loud deep heavy metal as his getaway music so that’s what pours through the speakers as we head down the road. The wind whips his hair—it grows like the rain forest, and I can’t keep my hands out of it—and that devil’s smile splits his face and I know now how he looks so animal and alive. He’s found the magic elixir: armed robbery.

  I crash back into myself like one of those old-timey trick divers who’d jump off a roof into a kiddie pool. Time isn’t timeless anymore, the world isn’t infinite. It’s 1994 and we’re someplace in the middle of Missouri, on some curvy old road that used to be Route 66.

  “How’d we do?” he asks me.

  I show him fistfuls of money and dump the carton of smokes in the backseat. There’s four other cartons back there already. They’re sort of like the scalps we’ve been taking all night. But that fifth one was the first one for me, the first one with the gun in my hands instead of his.

  “Oh my god,” I say. I can feel the strings of my flesh all individual rubbing against each other inside me.

  “I toldja,” he says.

  “I want to do another one,” I say.

  My mom pierced my ears when I was four years old. She took an ice cube from the freezer and cracked it in two with her molar. She made a sandwich of them with my left lobe as the meat. She held the ice there until the lobe froze into numbness and a dull ache. Then she took a sewing needle in her right hand and the heel of a potato in the other. She held the potato behind my ear. She pushed the needle through my frozen lobe and into the potato backstop. And I screamed as the needle found the center of the lobe where the nerves weren’t dead and pain pushed through the cold.

  The day I meet Mark I am seventeen and just as full of nothing but cold ache and numbness. And Mark—twenty-one and on parole, with a car bought on credit from a stupid man—is the needle through the heart of me.

  “Where are you going?” he asks me.

  “You tell me,” I say.

  And he smiles. Sometimes it really is that easy.

  We drive for days. We drive across the state. We eat road burgers and sausage biscuits. We fuck in the front seat and sleep in the back. We buy cassettes in small-town record stores and gas stations. We listen to doo-wop, gangsta rap, drug-fueled weirdness. We crank it all up loud. We blow the speakers three days in. We blow all our money in four.

  Mark won’t let me fret. He points out people driving next to us. He tells me that most of them—most everybody—is screaming almost all of the time.

  “They’re just screaming real quiet,” he says. “It’s true, you know. Look around at the faces on the bus. Look at the guy taking your order and pushing the plastic tray, the plastic-wrapped burger with plastic cheese, look at the face he’s wearing under the smile. You listen and tell me he’s not screaming.

  “It’s part of the human condition,” Mark says. “Humans went and built their own cages, and they didn’t fucking build a door. We are the result of unnaturalness. You ever see a dog chew up his own leg? I mean chew it until it bled, just out of plain worry?”

  I nod.

  “No animal out in the wild ever chewed its own leg into hamburger for no reason. No, it’s only cages, real or in the mind, that make an animal chew at itself.”

  He takes my hand in his—the touch causes my heart to double-time—and turns it so I can see my own fingers. The nail tips arc out just over the tips of my fingers. They aren’t chewed ragged the way I’d kept them since I was ten years old.

  “You stopped chewing at your leg. You feeling free?”

  I answer without words. My hand in the crotch of his jeans finds him half hard already. I feel his devil’s smile on my own face as I fish his cock out into the night air.

  “Drive straight,” I say. “Drive slow. You crash into something or slam on the brakes, I won’t be responsible for my reactions.” I click my teeth so he gets the picture. And then I swallow him all the way down. He drives straight, but not slow. The wind whips and roars around us as he pushes his foot down on the gas and his hand down on my head. I can feel what I’m doing to him in the throbbing hardness in my mouth and the jerks of his stomach muscles. As his hips buck and he shoots down my throa
t I realize both his hands hold my head, not the wheel, and the car roars pilotless down the road as I drink him in.

  We start our spree an hour later.

  One two three four five gas stations and liquor stores before 4 A.M.

  After I take down my first one, I want one more. He thinks it over, nods. “One more and we steer the ship to Florida,” he said. “I heard the coffee in Miami is stronger than the coke. I say let’s have them both and give it the old Pepsi challenge.”

  We find a gas station that meets our needs. Close to a highway junction, empty of customers, in good enough repair to suggest the robbery will be worth our time. We park in front of it, a few spots down from the door so the clerk won’t be able to see our car.

  “Can I go again?” I ask him, taking the revolver from the glove box.

  “Fortune favors the bold,” he says back. Then he steals a kiss and the pistol from my hand. “But you’re not yet bold enough.”

  He yanks the ski mask down. He heads into the gas station and I shift over to the driver’s seat just as the cop car pulls in next to me. The world turns down the volume again. There’s two of them. The cop sitting shotgun gets out carrying a plastic mug with a logo of the gas station on it, like he always comes here for refills. My hand inches up to the horn, to give two short blasts like we planned, to let Mark know to come out shooting.

  But I don’t do it.

  My hand drifts over to the gearshift and I put the car in reverse. That’s about the moment Mark comes out the door of the gas station with a bag full of cash in one hand and the pistol in the other. He sees the cop and the cop sees him and the plastic cup drops out of view as the cop goes for his gun and Mark pulls the trigger and then the cop drops from sight as well. The other cop dumps out the door and takes cover behind his car and draws down. And Mark looks to me for a split second and his eyes say everything: Put it in drive. Slam on the gas. Smoosh this motherfucker like the mosquito he is. And we’ll ride this moment on out till it ends, and maybe we’ll die but we’ll live every moment until we do. And I understand it all in that split second.

  But I don’t do it.

  I turn the wheel the other way. I pull out toward the highway. I can still see his eyes in the rearview as the cop comes up shooting and Mark fires back, five times, putting that cop down on the gravel. When I read about it in the papers later, the coroner says said Mark must have pulled the trigger those last few times on some animal instinct, cause the cop’s first and only shot went through Mark’s skull and cleaned his brainpan straight out.

  I drive and drive and although once I hear sirens that make me freeze like a rabbit in the desert they fade away after a while and I keep driving. I leave the car up in North St. Louis with the keys sitting on the driver’s seat. I leave everything but enough money to get me home.

  After that there’s not much to tell you. My life has gone the way it was supposed to go. I work in an office. I married a good enough man with a job and scared eyes and we never went bust and we never went boom. Yesterday I watched my mother, hollowed out, with tubes jammed in her and thousand-dollar pills that could keep her on just this side of the shadow for another week, and on the ride home my husband and I held hands and I told him don’t you ever let that be me. And he lied to me and told me he wouldn’t and I lied to him and told him the same.

  Sometimes I hear Mark laugh, and some days in the car the right song will come on the satellite radio and I’ll feel him there tingling like a phantom limb. Like he’s sitting there next to me in the dark. But I know that’s not so. And I know that when you die there’s not even darkness, and I know Mark and me won’t meet on some cloud or in some pit of fire. And I guess that’s a good thing. I couldn’t take those eyes seeing what’s become of me, those eyes looking down at my hands and my chewed-up ragged nails.

  LUCY IN THE PIT

  If she pisses, she lives.

  Lucy’s gums are bone white, whiter than the teeth set into them. It is a sign of shock. Her body is shutting down, one system at a time. Kidneys close shop first. If she pisses, it means her body is starting up again. If she doesn’t, her blood will fill with poisons and she will die.

  If Lucy was my dog I would not have matched her against Tuna. Four pounds is a serious advantage for a sixty-pound dog. It should have been a forfeit. But Jesse needed the money. I told myself that I let him get his way because he is Lucy’s owner and I am just her handler.

  Icy wind off Lake Erie rocks the truck, making me swerve. I pull my hand back from Lucy’s mouth and put it back on the wheel. I must drive steady. I must not speed. I cannot risk the police pulling us over. Lucy would die on the side of the road while I sat helpless in handcuffs.

  Lucy’s fur is the color of a bad day. Deep gray turned to black where the blood soaks her. Her blood is everywhere. There is gauze over a bad bleeder on the thick muscles of her neck where Tuna savaged her. I wanted to end the fight then, pick Lucy up and declare Tuna the victor. But Jesse said no. Again I let him win. And Lucy scratched the floor trying to get back in the fight.

  Tough little bitch. Proud little warrior.

  She cannot fight again. Her front leg will never be the same. After tonight she can retire, she can breed, she can heal. But she isn’t done yet. We both have a fight waiting for us in the hotel room.

  I am a dogman. I breed fighting dogs. I train fighting dogs to fight better. I take fighting dogs to their fights and I handle them in the pit. This is what I do. It may not be your way but it is an old way. My father was a dogman. He learned the trade from my grandfather, and he taught it to me. I have seen dogs fight and bleed and die. I have cheered them on as they fought. It can be cruel.

  There are dogfighters who beat their dogs, who whip them and starve them thinking to make the dogs savage. There’s those who kill their curs, who drown them or shock them and then burn their bodies in the backyard. Some men fight their dogs to the death every time, no quarter asked for or given. Some men fight their dogs in garbage-strewn alleys with rats watching on greedily, the rats knowing they’ll get to feed on the corpse of the loser.

  There is another way. In a real dog match, the kind that still draws its rules from old issues of the Police Gazette, there’s a ring about fourteen feet square. Each side has a line in the dirt, a scratch line. You set the dogs behind their scratch lines and hold on to their collars good and tight. You let them go. Each time there’s a break in the action you pull those dogs apart and put them back behind their scratch lines. If one of the dogs doesn’t scratch the earth, running in place to get back into it, the fight is over. No dog fights that doesn’t want it. It has to more than want it: it has to claw for it, it has to want it like the fight was a chunk of steak or a piece of pussy.

  When a dog doesn’t scratch, the fight is over. A dog that gives up, you call that a cur. Dogs that don’t have any cur in them, we call them game dogs. Dogs that scratch even when they’re close to death, who’d rather die than give up, you call those dogs dead game.

  But you don’t let them die, not if you’re a real dogman. A dead-game dog is the goal, the pinnacle of a pit dog. That needs to breed. To make more dead-game dogs. To breed more warrior stock. You’ve got to be the quit for a dog that doesn’t have quit in it. A man who lets a dead-game dog fight to the death is both cruel and foolish.

  My employer is a cruel and foolish man.

  You may think that I am cruel and foolish too. Maybe you want to think I’m the villain of this story. And maybe I am. But now I’m going to tell you about Lucy. And hers is a story worth telling.

  The hotel where I have built my emergency room sits in one of those Detroit neighborhoods where it looks like a slow-motion bomb has been exploding for the last thirty years. Even the people are torn apart. I see crutches, wheelchairs, missing limbs. Nothing and no one are complete.

  I pull off of Van Dyke into the lot of the Coral Court. Hookers, tricks, and pimps scatter like chickens. The tires crunch on asphalt chunks and broken glass. I park as clos
e to the room as I can.

  I leave Lucy in the cab of the truck and open the door to the room I have rented. It is just how I left it. One of the double beds has been stripped down, a fresh sheet of my own laid across it. I crank the thermostat up to max. Lucy will need the heat.

  I wrap Lucy in a towel and carry her across the lot. She is so small and so cold. As we cross the lot, a fat man drinking from a brown paper bag shoots me a look.

  “Goddamn, what’d you do to that dog?”

  “Put your eyes back in your head, motherfucker,” I tell him. He looks away. So cur he can’t even see I’m bluffing.

  I take Lucy inside. I place her on the sheet. The white sheet blushes as it soaks up her blood. I open up the tackle box that serves as my mobile medical kit. I change the gauze on her neck. I tape it on tight. I take out a long loop of bootlace. I tourniquet the front leg, the one with the most bleeders. I take out a brown plastic bottle of hydrogen peroxide. I yank out the marlinspike on my knife and stab through the lid. I wash out the wounds. Dozens of punctures, tears, jaw-shaped rings all over the front of her.

  They say that Vlad the Impaler walked through the hospitals after battle, inspecting the wounded. Those with wounds to the front of them got promoted. Those with wounds in their backs, like they’d been fleeing, Vlad had those men killed. Vlad would have made Lucy a general. Her back and haunches are unmarred. She’d fought every second she’d been in the bout.

  Tough little bitch. Proud little warrior.

  The match had been in an abandoned warehouse—no shortage of those here. The ring had been built in the morning out of a two-foot-tall square of wood filled up halfway with dirt. Around the ring stood gangbangers, bikers, cholos, and mobbed-up types. Dog matches in Detroit are like those ads by that one clothes company that always have the black guy and the white guy holding hands, except at the dog match the other hand is filled with blood money or a gun.