Why, with everything prime, would I answer the goddamn phone?
In the Ten it’s just me and my restaurant. A narrow world of one-way streets and alleyways, black hot concrete and steel. Not much room for the natural things. Hell, there’s barely air that’s fit to breathe. Roses live in tacky plastic pots, vegetables come wrapped in neon gumbands stamped with smiling company mascots. But I like life that way, small and predictable, a locked box with the key in my pocket.
So why answer the phone?
I’ll leap and guess the thing jangled at the peak of noontime rush. About that time, the fry cook would’ve been neck-deep in grease, the waitress playing frisbee with plates of half-eaten grits and runny eggs—leaving me and me alone to stop the clamor.
The warden’s voice was oily, just barely masking an awful strain. I could tell my prime day was marching for a rotten turn.
“Norman Walker’s made parole. He worked for you, didn’t he?”
Norman. The old Suitcase. Heavy, reliable, square. Might go out of style, but keeps its shape.
Impossible to throw away, even when you want to.
They would keep Norman sixty miles from nowhere. Somewhere the warden could kick back and plan his press.
“He’s been an absolutely model prisoner. Day one to day last, a real ramrod.”
I pass windowless bookstores where men with half moon eyes crawl through splintered wooden doors and clutch brown paper bags to their chest.
“Board passed him on his very first shot. Knew they would. Had to. Big news, mister, er, Taste. Good news.”
I play the car pedals like an organ, braking hard for sharp turns and gassing quick to put space between me and the low life All-American hooked to my tail. Unlit restaurant signs blur beside unmowed fields of rusty cars.
“Worked for you, didn’t he? Think you’d have him back?”
I get out far enough, the trees cast unfamiliar shadows. Clouds hang too low on the horizon. The Ten’s long forgotten.
“It’s just that, well, he’s been awfully particular. Needs an employer –that’s for the parole of course—only he wouldn’t sit with our usual contacts. Not sure I blame him, but—”
Here comes the warden, bobbling through the prison’s front gate, looking like the family pig rushing out to greet a long-lost cousin. I heard the oily voice, figured him for a soft touch, but the warden’s got bulk. Leans on a cane and could use something bigger.
“Well, you’re gonna find this funny,” he says, steering me past the first of many scowling guards.
“Know I felt my chin drop a few times on its account.”
It’s scant hours from sunset, but the prison bakes. I smile for a few security cameras, zigzag with the warden past stone walls and razor wire, breathe truck exhaust, road kill, and dust.
“Until we threw your name in the mix, Norman didn’t want to leave at all. Said it’d be better off for all concerned if we kept him sewed up. Inside, I mean.”
I don’t need a private reunion, but the warden insists. The cell door screeches behind me. Bolts clank into place, the echo fleeing down the distant hallway.
“Norman?” I sound like a coward, and know it, but it’s enough to break the silence.
There’s a rustle in the darkness. It’s followed by a tiny rip in the air, a tearing of fabric, and then a crooked blur leaps for my throat. It’s grinning, the mouth toothless and wide, red gums a tunnel stretching miles. It could swallow a thousand men and stay hungry, ravage a thousand bodies and leave the husks for scrap. Bones and cobs and seeds.
Reason never wins a one-round fight. I’m seized with a sudden mania for survival, a desire to spring for the door, pound on the bars, do anything I can to escape the pitch.
And then a dangling bulb sparks alive, and the blur is gone. Norman Walker, the old Suitcase who’s lost none of his shape, holds out his hand and blinks his eyes against the scattered light.
“Hello, Taste. It’s been awhile.”
When it comes to the Suitcase, I don’t have one bad word. Not one.
Plucked the “Wanted” sign from the window one minute, let him loose the next. None of the usual whip cracking, no cuts about snagging tips or doling extra napkins.
Regulars liked him, too. Went easy on the barfront drunks, let them off with a word here or there about getting back to the missus or grabbing a peanut bar for the kids. Real hands off with the ladies. Had his share of followers—clingy types, lookers with slits in their skirts—but the Suitcase toed a gentlemanly line.
Come Sunday, Suitcase tidied the till, snatched candy for kids in highchairs, played ringmaster with college kids, night-shifters, and families fresh from noon service. Almost had me pondering a day off.
I tell all this to the warden in maybe one breath: figure I’ll spill the whole drink before anyone can right my hand. Get it out and get back to the Ten before sunset.
After my prattle, the warden just nods—not so easy for a man without a neck. “That’s our Norman, yes it is. I’ll lay it out flat for you, mister…Taste, just like I’ve told Norman.”
The subject at hand is making a bit slow with the paperwork. I slide a few signed docs to the warden and shuffle through the remaining stack for the next red X. Suitcase is lacking in gung-ho, his hand working a stranglehold on the tiny ballpoint.
“Norman’s clean. Got a good face and a charming tale I figure’s well-worth the telling. Upright boy, one mistake, hard work and time served, back out into the waiting arms of the world. You give the word, Norman, I’ll have the boys from Channel 5, the Scout—”
“I said no. My answer’s the same, warden. Every time you ask.” There’s something off about the Suitcase, something I can’t quite grab, but Norman never was so much of an easy read. I look at him and see a kind of fuzz around the edges, like the borders of his body aren’t quite locked down. The skin of his right arm, the one throttling the ballpoint, ripples. I mark a train of lumps under the skin, a colony of invisible ants trailing up toward his shoulder.
A surge of something worth spitting hits the back of my throat, but I just gulp hard and tune back in. Can’t have been long: Suitcase and the warden are still locked in a back and forth.
“We’ve done well by you, Norman. What’s one favor on the way out?” The warden’s come to the end of the menu, and knows it. His mouth clamps shut, teeth grinding behind jowly layers of skin.
Norman races through the final stack, inking like a one-man press. “I wanted a favor, too. It was important.” He caps the ballpoint, flicks it across the table to the pink-faced warden, and stands up, pressing his wrists together in front of him as if asking to be cuffed.
“You shouldn’t let me out.” Not sure who the Suitcase is talking to now, but I figure he knows I’m somewhere in the audience. The warden, his dreams of the spotlight scraped off at the welcome mat, radiates ill will.
“It’s not safe.”
In the Ten, we don’t get too many guys like the Suitcase. We’re used to addicts with empty pockets and scarred arms, barrel-chested boys legging it up the hill from the riverside paper mills, fat families playing nomad in the summer sunshine, when rats scatter and things feel safe. We’re not so used to genuine smiles and helpful hands and clean shoes. Knocks us out of sorts, clears cobwebs from shelves that’ll only stay empty.
Starts to feel like nature creeping in, things growing where they don’t belong.
I can’t mark the exact day, but it was no great stretch. Maybe a month or two after he showed up.
Drunks tired of hearing about their wife and kids, wanted a few less pep talks and a few more shots of their favorite serum. Ladies figured he’d played upright long enough, put on a nice show. Thought it was time for him to toss a few free appetizers: let a hand stray, spice up the running commentary with a lewd compliment or loose joke. At least pay notice to all the nice things that came in pairs.
And me? I was wearing a rut in my favorite stool, watching the action in my own restaurant like a curbside vagrant. Gritting my teeth, watching the Suitcase, I was radiating ill will just like the drunks and the ladies and all the others, knowing I had no reason but trying hard as I could to think up a bad word.
But I couldn’t find a bad word. Not one.
“You don’t have to take me back.” The Suitcase fills the passenger seat, his body barely swaying as I skid around a long curve and drift into the oncoming lane.
I try to plaster a smile, but it slides right off my face. “Left my name on a few docs that say otherwise.”
“Do you think I’d do it again?” No change in his voice. Like asking if I need a refill.
No All-American on my tail this time, but I’m playing the organ just the same. Can’t get back to the Ten fast enough.
“Still don’t see how it happened. Not like you, Norman, not at all.”
“But it is my fault.”
Don’t know what to say to that, so I just nod, swearing as we hit traffic. It’s some small town: blinking yellow stoplights, a few diners and body shops.
The Suitcase leans up in his seat, eyes drifting over the meager scenery. “I made the mistake. It was my weakness, my cut. It was me that let it in.”
I pretend to listen, but the words trickle by like counterside patter. Ahead, the horizon is black, storm clouds trampling the purple dusk. My breath mists the front windshield, so I turn the dial for heat. I was sweating this afternoon.
“We need to get you back to The Ten.” I say we, but I’m thinking selfish. Thinking I’d give anything to be back where the world’s nice and narrow.
“Don’t worry. You don’t have to lie. It doesn’t want me there either.”
The first stone flies in from my left, cracking the driver’s side window. The second, this one the size of a baseball, looks to cave in the roof. After that, the barrage is too heavy to pick one from another.
I gun it, hoping to speed through, but soon realize I can’t see where I’m going. The air buzzing with the swarm of hailstones, I quickly jam the brakes to avoid plowing through the front door of a dank roadside inn.
The Suitcase cocks a square finger, points it straight ahead.
“It wants me here.”
In the weeks before the killing I’d been glued to Norman. Dried syrup. Just looking for a reason, one bad word to clip to his last week’s pay.
That one bad word was a loose nickel. Close by, but impossible to find.
Then, one night, it showed up. Large and loud. Blasted from loudspeakers, etched in fire on the night sky.
It was near close, just me, the Suitcase, and a trio of late-night drunks. Bertie was blinking off a stupor, staring rather suspiciously at his ale-side reflection. The other two, they weren’t regulars, and they sure as hell weren’t looking to make friends. They’d swallowed a few jigs and plucked the steak knives from some napkin rolls behind the counter, were flicking their spoils at the dartboard one at a time, laughing and stomping their muddy boots on the white tile.
I figured to let them play out: get bored, go stir up trouble somewhere there’d be lookers in the audience.
The Suitcase thought different. Frowning, he inspected the wounded dartboard. “You guys know we have darts,” he said, like he was dropping a hot tip. “Why don’t you throw them?”
“No damage,” one replied.
The other laughed, whipped his knife into the board, and spoke in a voice much higher-pitched than his companion’s. “No damage.”
I was rolling coin, marking figures at the far end of the counter. Missed everything.
The account is Bertie’s. The kind you take with a shakerful of salt.
“One minute, the knife’s an inch from bullseye. Next, knife’s ripping through Rennie’s back, all red-washed.”
Had to be the Suitcase. Who else?
Not me. Not Bertie. Not Rennie’s friend, who leapt into Deputy Anderson’s arms the minute he burst in and nearly got buckled for the effort.
Suitcase himself offered it up, pressed his wrists together to be cuffed, went off calm and quiet. Had to be the Suitcase. Only Bertie said it wasn’t.
“Not Norman. Telling ya, not Norman. It came out, ripping. Did the cut. Ripping through Rennie’s back, red-washed. Not Norman.”
Not Norman.
Hightailing from the prison, I wasn’t lending the Suitcase much ear. Now that I hear the full broadcast, I’m losing more than a little sweat.
He’s working his cackle. Rubber-room stuff.
It starts as we check in. Our proprietor’s mustache sprouts from his nose, room keys dangling from rings on his wiry fingers. I ask for two singles, but he slides just one ring from his left index.
“Horse show,” he says, like that explains everything.
I’m good to go, but Suitcase hangs back.
“Can I get a room in the attic?” he asks, our proprietor already shaking his head. “Away from the other guests?”
On our way to the walk-up we pass the lounge. Smell alone tells the story: the reek of smoke, the sour stick of unwashed stools. I could coast on that, but professional curiosity gets the best of me.
I grasp it in seconds—sure enough, it’s a lousy operation—but by the time I turn around, the Suitcase is offering assistance to a looker in a fur coat. The gal is long-term money: I can see it flashing in her dental work, peering up from her patent leather heels.
Suitcase wants to play an old favorite from back at the restaurant. Offer a kind hand and a kinder word, shrug off the resulting compliment.
This looker don’t know the rules. She slaps away his hand, scans the name-brand luggage for injury. “Thanks,” she says, her lips bubbling with ill will, “but I’ll call the bellman.”
It’s a flash: the snap of a bulb, a picture drawn by lightning. Too brief for details. Just an impression, that’s all it is, but it’s more than enough. Norman’s profile expands, crackles, flickers and falls away.
There’s a pathetic sound, an animal whimper. The looker tries to run backward, hits the wall, gets tangled up in her fur coat.
With a jangle of keys, our proprietor snaps up the looker’s bags. “Employment’s hard to come by,” he says, taking a mental note, “but we ain’t hiring.”
In our room, I watch hail batter the window. Suitcase hangs an unworn suit in the closet, loads a dresser with stacks of reading material.
“Moving in?” I ask.
Suitcase cracks a book, scuttles to the foot of his bed. “Don’t know when it’ll let me leave.”
I catch that one word—it—and I reach the door in seconds. “Stay as long as you want.”
“Taste?”
I turn back. Don’t know how he got there, but Suitcase is crouching in the far corner of the room, fifteen feet from the bed and the book. The window’s open, hail blowing in and rolling across the threadbare carpet. There’s not much light, but I could swear there’s something in the corner with him. It rustles like dry paper, mingles with the silhouettes of hailstones in the hollows of his face.
“It was my fault. I know that. But they shouldn’t have let me out.”
The warden’s assistant answers on the third ring.
“Warden’s gone for the day,” she says. I can hear her fingernails clacking across a keyboard.
“Perhaps I can relay something for you?”
Sure. I’d like to relay that the warden unleashed a total nut, that his model prisoner’s been spouting incoherent from the second we left today.
And what else? That there’s something with him, something he’s afraid of, something I might have seen or just cooked up with nerves and imagination? I could sketch it for you, but you really need to scope it out for yourself. It’s the kind of thing that summons hail.
“It’s not gonna work out. Let the Suitcase—uh, Norman—peddle somewhere else. Better yet, bring him back. You tell the warden Norman was right, if he doesn’t know already.”
My last line sounds like an echo.
“It’s not safe.”
Don’t know how many hours it’s been since the sun set. I do know that four hours in the lobby with our proprietor is enough to make anyone weigh the long odds. Now I’m listening to the hail from my bed, imagining the steady rhythm is the sound of footsteps in the parking lot, the sizzle of the grill and murmur of boothfront conversations.
The Suitcase isn’t sleeping either. I hear him rolling across the bed, burrowing between layers of unwashed sheets. After some number of hours he clears his throat and speaks. For the moment he sounds sane.
“I’m sorry, Taste. I didn’t think it would come on like this. So bad so fast.”
Maybe it’s the time of night, that hour when the moon goes dark and the best of us go a little sideways. Maybe I’m half asleep and don’t know it, giving my mind a rest from nightmares full of shadows and hail.
Maybe it’s the familiar clunk of Norman’s voice. The Suitcase, old and reliable. Impossible to throw away.
“What would you go for?” I hear myself ask, “if it was your order?”
“That’s the thing, I guess. Don’t know.”
It seems like the Suitcase will leave it at that. There’s a long pause, and the world gets blacker. I’m about to dive through the pillow when his voice jolts me awake.
“I did pretty well at the restaurant, don’t you think? Do well at most things. Seems like I do pretty well. Get along fine, people like me. People do like me.”
I flash to drunks biting their tongues, lookers grumbling under their breath. The warden and the old money, radiating ill will.
And a man on a barfront stool, or counting coin at the till. A man looking for one bad word.
I keep quiet.
“But for some reason, things just feel off. I know it’s me. I just…I guess I must make mistakes. That must be it. I open myself up and—”
There’s a sudden edge to his voice. Razor sharp.
“That’s what let it in.”
The phone clangs metallic. I sit up too fast, rattle my organs as they struggle to play catch-up. It must be the warden.
I race for words, roll a few dice. There’s a part of me that’s thinking I should let things simmer a bit, see how the dish plays out. Would it be so bad to have the Suitcase back a few weeks, give a guy a chance?
“Room 44?” Not the warden: our proprietor, sounding like he’s reading from a notebook.
“Complaints. Screaming. Thrashing. Sounds of pain.”
“You’re wrong,” I reply. “We’ve been quiet.” It feels like I’m telling the truth, but I can’t even convince myself.
There’s a brief pause. “You keep it down.” And then, back to his notes: “Loud enough to wake the dead. God knows what they’re doing in there. Is everyone all right?”
I flip the blanket, don my shoes, and realize I’m still wearing the rest of my clothes. I won’t be sleeping tonight, so there’s no reason to spend my idle hours crushed with the Suitcase.
Three steps from the door and I get one of those urges that only comes on post-close, when sleep is long overdue. I pluck a random wad from my fold, toss it at the foot of the bed. The Suitcase fumbles through the darkness, hits the bills. I hear the question before it leaves his throat.
“One week’s pay, Norman. I’m sorry, but you’re fucking crazy, and you’re fired.”
My god, what a lousy operation.
The clock reads 4 a.m., but if you run twenty-four, you run twenty-four. Things should be prime whether you’ve got a line out the door or crickets counterside. Here we’ve got a dirty rag hanging limp at the edge of a bucket, a pile of unwashed steak knives loose on the counter, a pair of plates where an amateur sculptor has gone to work on some mashed potatoes and an open-faced beef in a brown gravy shell.
Our proprietor doubles as an umbrella stand, his right leg up on a stool, his left arm—remote in hand—saluting a murky TV hung in the corner.
I sip some coffee that was born luke, eye the hail that won’t quit falling. I’ll give it twenty minutes, then take my chances.
That old saying should be sent back: sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you. No, sometimes you know everything you need and it serves nothing, not one bit, that’s good.
I know I’ve been pitched wild, flung far too far from the Ten. I know if I turn coward and try to drive through this hailstorm, I’m likely to end up playing demo derby with the oncoming traffic.
And, most recently discovered, I know that I shouldn’t have stirred up the Suitcase.
That’s looking more and more like a mistake.
You see, Norman’s at the other end of the counter now, gnawing the air for an audience of one, a bleary-eyed trucker with a sweating bottle of brew in his hairy hand.
“I think it could have happened to anyone,” Norman says, sweat pouring down his face. “But it took me.”
It’s dark in this place: one bulb over the can, some scattered bar lights, and the flicker of the TV screen.
“It doesn’t speak to me, but sometimes I know what it’s thinking. I don’t want to, I don’t want to know, but it’s like we’re sharing the same space. I feel it moving inside me.”
This trucker’s either paying close attention or no attention at all. The brew in his hand tilts at an odd angle. If it was full he’d be bathing the counter.
“That’s how I know. About the cuts. It doesn’t look far to find them. I guess they’re almost everywhere. In the forest, underwater, by the side of the road. And in people. People, too.”
The hail ramps up. Can’t remember hail ever lasting this long, not by half.
“Can’t say when. Never felt it, but I…I’m not sure, but I think it must be my weakness. My fault. I did the wrong, I made the cut. It was me that let it in.”
There’s a rustle like dry paper, the smell of a grease fire. Norman stands up slowly, hunched over the counter, but in the half-light it looks like something’s still sitting down. A stream of shadows snakes around his body.
“It was like a nightmare, me lying in bed. I looked over and saw it beside me, a blur with a human face. It smiled…and kept smiling, kept smiling as its mouth opened wider and wider. I looked in but couldn’t see a thing. And then it entered me through the cut. Forced its way in, and it hurt. Hurt just as much as you’d think it would. It pushed its way through, and all I saw was the grin, I had fallen into its grin, and then I heard screaming and knew it was me, the pain of it moving inside me.”
This trucker must be at the end of a hard run. He’s just now catching on, righting his bottle and scrambling to drop change for the tab.
Norman, inches away from an audience of one, is screaming.
“I let it in, felt the pain of it moving. It’s moving, it’s moving now! It’s moving inside me!”
There’s a rip in the air, a tearing of fabric, as a crooked blur leaps from Norman’s frame. Its body is mist, but the face is just as Norman described, a grin that splits wide to reveal an endless red tunnel. The tunnel swells as it emerges from the grin like a giant hollow worm, curving up and around the trucker’s head before parting it from his body with a sudden twist.
I’m not thinking, just doing. The pile of steak knives rockets from the counter to my hand to the air in a split, flying into the mouth of the tunnel.
And then, suddenly, when it seems like the knives too are about to be swallowed, they jolt to a stop. The yawning tunnel falls away, the mist parts. All that’s left—and that’s damn little—are the remains of Norman’s face.
Our proprietor clicks the remote, slides his leg off the stool. Peers once at the corpse to his right. Turns to me and nods, his voice strangely calm.
“You tell the story, I’ll repeat it.”
Back in the Ten, I savor my alleys and one-way streets. Warm my hands on the sun-baked concrete of my parking lot. Avoid the flower shops and parks, any place that’s green or growing or lively.
If they’re out there, then spirits live in the raw earth, fly through a sky where the air’s worth breathing. Roam the kind of spot where people rely on each other for more than ill will.
Big things, things I don’t want to know about, they avoid narrow spaces. They want to visit the Ten, they have to make a reservation. Call long distance. Nowadays I’m used to the clamor: the thing can ring as long as it likes.
I never answer the goddamn phone.