Up
by James Hargrave6:57 p.m.
Lucas flopped his hand onto his cell phone. Two seconds later it rang. He flipped it open and pulled it under the pillow to his ear.
“Christ, mom, I’m up,” he said.
“I just had to make sure, you wouldn’t want to sleep too late and not get back to sleep on time.”
“Mom, it’s dark almost as long as it is light and plenty of people get to bed on time.”
“Well, Lucas dear, they don’t all have to be in bed before dark. They’d go mad.”
“Thanks for that,” Lucas said.
“I’m just doing the one job I can,” she said. “And make sure to get plenty to eat tonight.”
“I’m not even hungry yet,” he said.
“And don’t leave any scraps behind,” she said.
“Goodnight, mom.”
“Have a good time, dear,” she said.
7:38 p.m.
The phone rang and he flipped it open.
“I’m up,” he said. He hung the phone up and sat up in bed. “Fuck.”
9:29 p.m.
The television lit his living room, and his stomach growled. Law & Order always made him hungry. Sometimes he just wanted to reach into the screen and pull one of the detectives out into his living room. Just to shred their necks open, just once, he wished.
He reached under the futon in the living room and pulled out a shirt, smelled it. It seemed clean enough at least it didn’t have any blood on it. He stretched it over his head and pushed his arms through the sleeves. He checked out the mirror, missed himself there, and frowned.
His stomach growled again, louder.
With a sigh and his keys in his hand, he stepped out the door onto the front balcony and out of the apartment complex. He stopped at the street and eyed the cars rolling up and down in the wet of the night. Right was the highway, population. Left was the park and past that the woods.
9:42 p.m.
At the edge of the park he watched some guys playing pick-up basketball under a streetlight. He turned down the bike trail and walked past the guys, let their laughter dissipate behind him, the skidding of their sneakers on hard top bouncing in his head.
“Fuck,” he said as he checked his watch. “The hell…”
He turned back and walked up to the court.
“Need a fourth?”
“Naw man,” one of them said. “We’re turning in anyway. Too wet to get serious.”
“Aw,” Lucas said.
Two of them started to walk away. The third stood, holding the ball between his hip and his forearm, his legs spread just enough. Lucas smelled the sweat on the guy’s thighs. The man smirked at Lucas and scratched his crotch.
“See you guys later,” the guy said.
They reached the corner, waved and rounded it, disappearing into the night.
“One on one?” the guy said.
“Here?” Lucas said, and winked.
“Whatever, man,” and the guy tossed the ball, hard, at Lucas’ chest.
The guy blinked and Lucas was sitting on the basket’s backboard.
“Shit, man,” the guy said.
“Never seen anyone play ball?”
“You can have the ball, man,” the guy said, backing away and tripping over the side of the court into the grass.
Lucas came down from the goal, trying to let gravity pull his body like the laws of physics applied. Feet on the court, he leaned down with the ball in both hands, and rolled it toward the guy’s feet.
“See ya,” Lucas said, and he ran away from the court, down the bike trail, to the woods.
He took a long stride at the tree line, pressed the ball of his foot down, like kicking off the bottom of a pool, and left any pretense of the laws of physics behind.
9:45 p.m.
From the roof of the club Lucas could see few people braving the rainy streets. It would pick up later, rain or no. He fished in his pocket for the plastic baggie and felt the white and green and yellow tablets grind against each other like baby teeth. He went to the side of the club against the alley, and went down to the street.
On the sidewalk out front he received familiar greetings.
“Jonny, man,” a guy called out, putting his hand out for a slap. Lucas received the gesture, palmed the cash for what he stuffed in the guy’s back pocket.
“Nice ass, Troy,” Lucas said.
“Later, Jonny,” Troy said as he walked away.
“Hey, Jonny,” said a blond girl, opening her purse as she walked by and playing with her phone. She couldn’t even see his hand and arm move, but once past him, she was a couple hundred shorter, and she had exactly what she wanted.
“I’ll tell Sabrina you said hi, Jonny,” the girl said.
“Jonny, long time,” said another…
11:57 p.m.
“You,” Lucas said, “were not here an hour ago. You have made me late.”
“To what man?”
“To the rest of my night,” Lucas said.
“I’m sorry, man, but I just need a fucking fix, man,” the guy said. The guy wore pimples and braces, but was easily thirty.
“Well, I keep schedule. So, it’s good to see you, but I’m running,” Lucas turned to walk down the block.
“How come no one ever sees you here, Jonny?”
“What?” Lucas turned back.
“Well, I mean, I know we all know you’re here, but no one ever narcs on you, man,” the guy, said. Stuey, Lucas remembered, His name was Stuey.
“What’s to narc on?”
“You know, dealin’ and shit, down here. This is the good side of town, Jonny, right?”
Lucas stopped, let the tire wheels on oil and water in the street and the two guys on the balcony having sex the next block over all drift to the back of his senses. Lucas heard the clicking he was looking for.
“You know what they say about good sides of towns, right? Do unto others… and all that?”
“Yeah, Jonny.”
The air around them thickened, as if everything but them were slowing down. Stuey’s heart beat faster. It was like gauze fell over the eyes and ears of the rest of the world. Stuey stared at Lucas who seemed to double in size. Stuey reached to scratch his back, pull at the sweat-slick plastic taped there.
“Well, these nice people don’t want me telling about the shit they’re puttin’ away in this nice neighborhood, and I don’t want them talking either. And you can tell the cops I’ll be here all night if they’d like to question me.”
Stuey looked over his shoulder. The cop car should have rolled up, the thing at his back still vibrated, the tape still turned through it.
“Waiting for something?”
“Nah, Jonny,” Stuey pulled his hand out from his back and pushed his short dreads up off his face.
“Cool,” Lucas said. “Check this, you got a couple dollars?”
“Yeah,” Stuey said, pulling out his wallet. He looked up and Lucas was behind him and the size he remembered.
The gauze over the world lifted. It all moved normally again.
"Holy shit," Lucas yelled. Some heads turned; the street was busier. "This fucker's dealing and he's a snitch. Watch your backs."
Later the cop car rolled up and found Stuey, three hundred cash, and 23 pills in a baggie stuffed in his back pocket. Stuey just stared at the sky, crying as the handcuffs clicked around his wrists and the cops pulled the tape recorder out of his shirt.
Lucas laughed as he sailed across the expressway to the bad side of town, took a turn north and headed somewhere between the two, and the opposite direction of home.
01:03 a.m.
The bench and the bus stop smelled like piss, but the ride was always worth the wait.
He tied and untied his shoes and fiddled with his hair, stuck a hand down the front of his pants. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and flipped it open and closed and open, and thumbed his canines until the skin broke, then held the hole hard against his tongue, moaning.
His stomach was a pit. The bus rolled up.
One of the lights had shorted out; the back was lit, but the front dark. Lucas climbed the steps, nodded at the driver, who smiled. Two women, both bottle blonds, and one reddish-brown haired man sat on the bus, all of them sitting in the dead middle of the bus.
“How long till the next stop?” Lucas said.
“’Bout seven minutes…” The driver looked up in the rearview and saw the three people halfway back, nothing else. He smiled again and eased off the gas, just a little bit. “Give or take.”
Lucas walked back to the middle of the bus, sat in front of the guy, and stretched his feet out into the aisle. He looked forward, glanced back. The guy smiled at him.
“I’m Kyle,” the guy said.
“I like that name,” Lucas said
The two women giggled as Lucas got up and moved to share the bench with Kyle. He put his hand on Kyle’s leg, who flinched a little.
“I’m sorry, was that too forward?”
“No, but they…”
“Are they bothering you?”
“Um - ”
“Hold on, Kyle, let me just rip their throats out.”
01:11 a.m.
Kyle's hair stuck to his sweaty forehead despite the shivers raising gooseflesh on his body. His arms were wrapped so tightly around his neck and chest he could barely breathe.
Lucas licked his lips and leaned down to kiss Kyle.
“You’re sweet,” Lucas said. “I could just about eat you.”
Kyle closed his eyes and smashed his head back against the window.
“That’s gonna bruise, Kyle,” Lucas said as he walked to the front of the bus.
“I know I softened him up, but Matty, just slip a couple bucks in his pocket when finally decides to get off the bus. Let him go.”
“Sure thing, Lucas,” Matty said, his fat hands gripping the steering wheel. Lucas stepped down front the bus, one foot on the ground the other on the step. He turned back.
“Oh, yeah,” Lucas said. “I saved you this.”
Lucas fished in his pocket and pulled out an indistinguishable chunk of flesh. It was skin and gristle on bone and he tossed it into his friend's lap.
“You’re the best, Matty.”
“No sir, that’d be you, Lucas, thanks sir,” Matty said, and Lucas disappeared as the bus lurched forward into the night.
Kyle started crying, silent, and shrank down into the seat as Matty sucked the flesh off the bone.
02:24 a.m.
The roiling in his stomach gurgled like a sated baby. The pit feeling was gone, but still there was the sense of not being complete, having room to fill. He wondered why he was so hungry. He closed his eyes and imagined two hot detectives, naked, wet, with their ankles handcuffed to their wrists and a single, surgical incision behind each of their knees.
02:37 a.m.
His cell rang, as he hung up his rambling thoughts.
“Hey, momma.”
“Where are you, Lucas?”
“I’m at my spot.”
“Matty radioed back to HQ, honey, the police saw the mess on the windows and pulled his rig over,” she said. “Honey, Matty’s dirt. You’re lucky you left that fucking kid catatonic, he ain’t said a word. Dammit, I told you about scraps. You used to be so clean.”
“I used to not eat, mom,” Lucas said. “You’re the one demanding I eat all the time.”
“Sweetheart, you are not Keifer Sutherland, Barnabas Collins is not your grandfather, and Nosferatu is a sweater. You need to disappear for a few days,” she said.
“Fine, mom,” he said, “I’ve got my eye on a nice, low mileage used car salesman. I’ll disappear after I’m done with him.”
“Where are you?”
Lucas looked down over the junk yard and listened to the faint rattle of the canned laughter coming from inside the guard booth.
He said, “My spot,” flipped the phone shut and leapt down from the church roof across the street, saying hail Mary as he marched up to the junk yard guardbooth. He tapped on the glass, once.
The guard, maybe twenty, jumped, yanking headphones off of his shaved head. The sitcom faded to a news promo and Lucas saw the bus as the rest of the world would see it, a scene of horror. The sound was inaudible to the guy now.
“Hey,” Lucas said, “you got a ‘83 Subaru carburetor in there?”
“For a…?” the kid started to look at his stock sheets where lines were crossed out, parts checked off. Lucas chuckled. “Whuh?” the kid said.
“You guys keep track of the shit you got in there,” Lucas said.
“Didya think we just memarized it?”
“Shit yeah,” Lucas said.
The guard looked up from his book, “Yeah, I prolly got that part. Let me buzz you in.”
He stepped out of his booth and closed the door, Lucas heard a lock click, and then the guard called out, “One sec.”
The gate rattled open wide enough for a person, and Lucas side-stepped through. He cleared the gate, massive in its way, and saw the guy press hard on a big red button, and the gate rolled shut again behind him.
Lucas followed him back through the junkyard quietly. They came up to a Subaru Brat that had seen better days, way down into the deep back part of the lot. The guy clicked on his massive flashlight and started to get the hood of the car open.
“You know,” Lucas said, then stopped. The guy swiveled the light, hitting Lucas just below the chin. “I didn’t really come here for the part. Well,” he said, pulling at his belt buckle, “not that part.”
The buckle glinted in the light as Lucas tilted it down, showing just a bit of soft light hair on his belly in the white beam from the flashlight.
“Cost you the same as the carburetor,” the guy said.
“It’s all the same to me.”
The guard unzipped the front of his dingy gray work coveralls, all the way down to his crotch. He had on a sweat stained wife-beater, and below that a dark trail of hair that gathered in the darkness.
“Turn around,” Lucas said, and the guy turned. “Drop the onesie.”
4:22 a.m.
Lucas lifted off the muddy ground of the junkyard, licking his lips.
5:33 a.m.
The key slid in the lock and turned. Lucas pushed his door open and closed it. He flipped seven deadbolts, two chains, and a doorstop into place.
Lucas peeled the bloodstained clothes off of his body, lifted the lid on his kitchen garbage can, pulled his belt and his boots off, and threw everything else he'd been wearing into it. He went to the sink and washed his hands, splashed hot water on his face and his crotch, and wiped down with a kitchen towel. Splatters of blood like freckles dotted his collarbone and wrists.
He flopped down in front of the television, felt the radioactive wash of color and noise on his skin.
“…ing up next on Action News 13. After a pair of brutal murders last night in the city’s typically civilized Northwest district left a man in stable, but mentally vacant conditi…”
He clicked the channel over.
“…nkyard in nearby Washington Bluff, the county seat of our neighbor to the east, was razed to the ground by hoodlums after the locked guard booth was left unattended overnight. The night watchman’s body was found, sitting in one of the junk cars. Police have not ruled out foul play, but note he had a half smoked pack of cigarettes in his pocket and appeared to have suffered coronary failu…”
Lucas clicked the television off, and floated into his bedroom.
After plugging his cell phone into the charger, he buried his head under the pillows.
The phone rang two seconds later.
He rolled his eyes and waited for the ringing to stop, and when it did he imagined his voice, the message he’d never changed, that said, “Hey, I’ll be up tomorrow.”
6:01 a.m.
He pulled his knees up to his chest and closed his eyes.
©James Hargrave
James Hargrave is a performer-novelist-lyricist-chain smoking-master-of-the-universe. He studied creative writing at the University of Texas at Dallas, and has performed self-written autobiographical plays with Dallas-based Abbreviated Enlightenment, as well as having contributed lyrics to multiple records by emerging recording artist Courtney Fairchild. His next few projects include editing a full length novel (which we haven’t yet decided is genre or not), recording his debut record (on which he will not play any instruments and will sing offkey but with gusto), and driving his new used car (into the ground). He can be reached at mynameisjames at hotmail dot com.-
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