Thrust Read online

  THRUST

  Tom Piccirilli

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2011 / Tom Piccirilli

  Copy-edited by: Kurt Criscione

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

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  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 to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  OTHER CROSSROAD PRESS ITEMS BY TOM PICCIRILLI:

  NOVELS:

  A Lower Deep: A Self Novel

  Nightjack

  Short Ride to Nowhere

  Sorrow's Crown – A Felicity Grove Mystery

  The Dead Past – A Felicity Grove Mystery

  The Night Class

  NOVELLAS:

  All You Despise

  Cast in Dark Waters (with Ed Gorman)

  Frayed

  Fuckin' Lie Down Already

  Loss

  The Fever Kill

  The Last Deep Breath

  The Nobody

  You'd Better Watch Out

  COLLECTIONS:

  Futile Efforts

  Pentacle: A Self Collection

  Tales From the Crossroad, Vol 1

  UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

  Nightjack – Narrated by Chet Williamson

  Buy Direct From Crossroad Press & Save

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  For Michelle

  who keeps the ghosts off my back

  & To Matt Schwartz & Gerard Houarner

  with extra special thanks to Larry Roberts & Jim D'Angelo

  1

  Chase wasn't quite ready to be dead yet. The urge continued to ease through, thin as a filleting blade, but he kept slapping the desire aside every morning, each night. It got to be sort of fun after a while.

  Shake Sunshine Jr. put it like this during the slam, grooving in place as he stood at the microphone, his buttery voice getting the ladies all slick in their seats: A harvest moon pours down through the dying trees, and the breeze, the breeze is the breath of an angry lover hissing up at your neck, show your class, baby, shake that ass. The husbands looking aside now, frowning, ordering double Dewars. Checking their watches.

  There's a knocking on the far side of your brain as you open the door and let the naughty girl out, hope she goes her own way through the woods, before my dark paws scrape along your thighs, get you high, and take you down in a carpet of red leaf.

  Christ, look at the broads squirming, holding their legs tightly together as Shake aims his love in their direction: pow, mama, ker-pow!

  My little big man, he wants the keys to your car, palm out, with a shout. Got a pack of rubbers ready and waiting. You take him in hand, in mouth, choking him down. Teee, hee hee, oh you so bad. The husbands wishing this wasn't Manhattan but maybe East Mississippi, wanting some redneck sheriff to show them the way. That's the knife, my fine bitch, suck it down, the knife of a flung-down life.

  Eighty, ninety women rolling back in a swoon. Their nipples all thrust out at once, like switchblades. You could set your watch to it. Happened whenever Shake said suck it down. And he said it a lot.

  He never clenched his massive black hands, refusing to make fists even though his knuckles were distended and flat as quarters. It made Chase wonder how he could go at the world like that and still win.

  As his chin wagged, Shake swayed and lifted those enormous shoulders, his shining bald head beading up with sweat and catching the stage lights. His goatee was just long enough that he could shape the ends into twin prongs. He held himself like an ancient Moorish king, demanding full attention.

  But Shake had no rhythm at all and would sometimes trip himself up as he shuffled to the cadence of his own poetry. Sort of funny seeing a black man as bad at dancing as some white dweeb. As bad as Chase. It drew nervous chuckles from the crowd and tended to throw them off some. They were afraid of him. Even the women who loved him were terrified of that intensity, that coca glossy sleekness.

  He held his hands out and scratched at the air, snapping his fingers too slowly to even make a sound.

  From out of the darkness came delighted squeaks and the heavy thrum of clapping.

  The Narrative Bone Palace had been set up like a Vegas lounge, with plenty of small round tables and squat mohair chairs. Lots of candles, martini glasses and linen napkins. Weak track lighting and impressionistic oil paintings on the walls. Chase usually felt like he was opening for Joey Bishop or the Rat Pack back in the day. Most of the time he just wanted to croon into the mike.

  He came out from the sidelines and walked across the stage to stand next to Shake, trying to locate that same cool, calm place in the soul, but Chase always overshot. He still hadn't found the right balance to give a truly perfect show.

  No introductions, exactly as he asked.

  Shake just dropped back a step from the mike, closed his eyes, fluttered his fingers and gestured towards Chase. Telling him, go on and take it away, baby. He was swaying to his own vibe, looking a little high. A few people clapped politely, unsure of the etiquette.

  Chase opened his mouth and Shake cut him off without meaning to, not even seeing him. Letting loose with another half-sung, half pillow talk line, Now you lay it down, lay it down sweet, and now, now you lift it on up.

  Waiting another three beats to make sure Shake was done, Chase let the buoyant energy of the room waft through him. He went, "I—" and spotted Jez standing at the back of the room. It made him flinch so violently that he nearly fell over.

  Huh.

  Well.

  All right, he thought, this is a new low in psychosis.

  Where did you go from here? Was this finally the bottom? His nerves began untangling one by one up and down his body until nothing seemed to function. Really, it didn't take much nowadays.

  Hell, just look into the crowd and watch her bringing her gold lighter up to a cigarette. You watch the angle of her jaw tilted to show off the curve of her neck, the splendid jut of her chest, and you're immediately back in the hydrotherapy room drowning, but in love.

  Maybe she's naked on top of you, soaped and glistening, mashing down so your hips slammed the metal sides of the tub. Or maybe Arlo Barrack and the other attendants are holding you by your arms and legs, hoping to jab you back into the womb, pressing you under until you're this close to being dead.

  Either way you're in the water getting a little saner, maybe. Or not.

  Shake opened one eye and peered at Chase, did the fluttery fingers thing again.

  This should've been pleasant, seeing Jez in the audience. She used to read poetry to him on the ward—all the suicides: Plath, Sexton, Berryman, Brautigan—plus her own poems, after a while. With leaky ball-points she wrote in a cramped script, eventually filling three tiny marble notebooks. He found all the sexual repression imagery in her work to be cold and hostile, but somehow still arousing.

  So it made a kind of sense that she'd walk into the Palace to watch a few slams.

  The fact that she was dead hardly seemed to enter into it.

  Glancing sideways and trying to get into the groove, Chase shook his head and was drawn back to the fourth floor. Where
he'd loved, despised, and been moderately healed by her.

  The word "Jesus" cracked in his throat.

  "Grayson Chase, speak up, speak on," Shake whispered like it was part of the act, raising his arms, putting in a little southern Baptist preaching. "Be heard."

  Everything Chase had prepared drifted off and something else took over. The pages of his latest poems curled in his tightening fist. The sentences started rolling out of him, and they weren't even slightly familiar.

  Happens like that sometimes, he said into the mike, especially out in the halls of Garden Falls. You pay the price for being down in the gin, this sin of where you've been and can never get back to. You were stillborn until they told you different and slapped you awake and alive. You died, but never quite often enough. They had to lay on top you, take you down into the vat to scrub away your baby fat. The hell was this? He was rhyming?

  Indemnity without finality, staring out the cube windows at the creamy ghosts in their powdered blue jammies, crying for their mammies. Beautiful, you say mammy when a third of the audience is black, the dark ladies giving you the Bronx head wag, the killing gaze.

  He had to get it back, but there wasn't any way to do it now.

  It was true, he'd liked those soft oversized pajama togs, the detergent in them as sweet as his prom date's perfume.

  Shake's nostrils flared and he gave Chase his oh you lousy Motherfuck scowl.

  Sailing over the meadows out back, where they buried all the many faces you can no longer recall, but see every day in Garden Falls. There's a lot of marrow buried in your back yard. There will be more marrow on the morrow. Chase's throat closed up until he was just mouthing words without anything coming out.

  The audience started to get antsy. They didn't know what the Falls was, imagining it to be just like it sounded. A small town in middle America, maybe an old folks home where teens visited Grandma on Sunday afternoons.

  A few of them remembered that he'd once been in prison and they figured that might be it, imagining him on his knees with a shiv at his throat, some bubba going two-forty grabbing him by the front curls and sticking it to him. They crossed their legs and twisted in their seats. Some sick, some excited. His voice faded in and out. The whispers carry deadweight. Your yearbook howls in those heavy shadows, bleeding as it scurries in frantic circles.

  Clearly, Jez knew she'd done wrong showing up like this, rattling the hell out of him. The realization made her panic. She scanned for the exits, took a few steps towards the nearest one but stopped to turn and give him another look.

  He kept expecting her to vanish. His hallucinations hardly hung around for more than a minute or two now. His tried to hold her with his gaze, break her image down by force of will, but she inched along the back wall and the track lighting threw a bloody sheen down on her.

  Huh. So—

  Chase cocked his head one way and she tilted hers the other. From here, he couldn't make out the freckles sprinkled down her cheeks, her neck, a denser speckling between her breasts. When she let out a stream of smoke it outlined her sensuous lips and he felt a painful tug in his vasectomy.

  She had her black hair up in the fancy twist of an elaborate ponytail. Chase liked it and gave a subtle nod. The dress showed off just about the same amount of cleavage as her nurse's uniform. Her legs were bare and he kind of missed those white stockings she wore on the ward.

  Hissing through his teeth, an anguished chuckle came rippling through his chest. It alerted Shake to the bad curve he was on, losing control. Shake knew body language and touched the center of Chase's back, trying to reaffirm some poise with his own strength.

  As Chase trembled Shake pushed harder but couldn't make it stop. Nobody could, and that was the beauty of art, when you finally got right down to it.

  A bit of a swagger in Shake's hips now as he tried to shove Chase aside, like it was all still part of the performance. You had to give him credit, he could make almost anything appear hip and well-practiced. Even giving you the hook. He raised his voice just a notch, trying to cut back into the action. A couple of ivory girls in the front row grinned at him, urging him on, putting some grind into how they sat.

  It got good to him and Shake almost smiled, went shoulder to shoulder with Chase and tried to knock him out of the way. They were both the same size, six feet, going 200 or thereabouts, the hard ridges of muscle standing out thickly on their necks when they were pissed.

  Nobody could crop Chase. He got his voice back fast. Turning to look up the dank street at all the crackling leaves wafting past, you can almost see another figure walking up there, gassed, wearing your clothes and carrying himself bent against the wind, the same way you do. There's a bleat, a shriek that hangs from the sycamore. It's as if you stand in back of yourself, perhaps only a minute behind, a few feet, and if you could only catch up you can warn the stupid bastard as to what is coming, at last.

  The heat flashed up and down his arms until it felt like the skin was peeling off. The old familiar crazy rage was always there, no matter how much medication he took or therapy he went through. None of the doctors or cops knew that the more you tried to kill it, the stronger it became.

  Timmy Wiggs, the bartender, started pouring himself double shots of JD. He wore a black silk short-sleeve shirt and the burn scars along the tops of his sturdy arms appeared especially pink as he tossed the drinks back.

  Okay, so you embrace what makes you unique. Maybe that's what Jez's ghost was here to clarify.

  Chase was still trying to make sense of the past few years: the accident, the hospital, jail. You could squander your whole life hoping to see the reason behind just a few minutes of it, when you derailed and hit the wall.

  Shake shouldered him aside again and took over. That was all right, Chase was about done. He listened to Shake's smooth jive. You meet the dying frauds along the way, every day, knowing they've got little more to say than you do with the rain coursing down your chest, sometimes it's almost best to stay, to hope for the sky to reach down and pluck you up out of the shitting dumped luck where you shuck and go on out to fuck the broads.

  In prison, you learned to tell the difference between the pricks who accepted their own evil and those who didn't. The ones who didn't always walked around with a bewildered expression, like they were waiting for somebody to come along and slip them a note that explained just what the hell had happened and why.

  Men who stared down at their own hands on occasion, puzzled at how those fists could club a grocery clerk to death with a bottle of beer, how they could've strangled their own kids. Most of them had a conscience that would slither out at the most inappropriate times. They'd be playing chess or exercising in the yard, and you'd catch a glimpse of their faces falling apart as the unexpected realization swarmed into their eyes.

  Hey, I'm a serial rapist. Guess I won't be getting a birthday card from my brother, I put both barrels of the shotgun in his chest. Where's Aunt Edna and why doesn't she send oatmeal raisin cookies? Oh, I fed her into the wood chipper.

  The surprise and sudden clarity. Shock would surge up and swirl away, and for just a second you'd see their absolute fear—or their utter joy—at the complete understanding what they truly were.

  And then the comprehension would be gone, and they'd go back to frowning about it, wondering which turn had been the wrong one to take.

  He knew what to check for in those kind of convicts because they all looked like his father. Angry, resentful, but with a trace of sorrow, as if after they killed you they might drop to their knees and begin sobbing.

  When Chase was six his old man came home one night drunk, covered in lipstick and blood. As usual, Ma was working late at the bakery and his baby-sitter, a dim and pregnant sixteen-year-old named Doreena, sat on the couch watching sit-coms while the old man made his move on her. He patted Chase on the top of the head, gave him a candy bar, and then Dad and the girl went into the bedroom together.

  She was happy and friendly and a touch slow, but tha
t night she went totally out of her head. They must've just been getting into it when her water broke. Now you've got screams and cursing and the pitter-pats of some seriously viscous liquid dappling the wood floors. Dad rushed to the hall closet to get a towel, disgusted and sneering. Chase didn't understand what the hell was happening and neither did she. Doreena went into the bathroom and began hopping like a hobbled frog with her panties around her knees when she found the mucus plug. It flipped her even further over the big edge and she started dragging herself around the house in crazed circles.

  You've heard about these teenage girls trying to hide the fact they're pregnant, carefully concealing their bodies under heavy sweaters and through extreme dieting, leaving the babies in motel trash cans or dumpsters that backed up to the highway. But Doreena really didn't know a damn thing.

  In her terror she forgot all about Chase and the old man as she rushed around the kitchen unable to work the lock on the back door. Her hands clawed and slid free as she tugged and whined leaving bloody hand prints on the light blue walls. Finally she pulled the lace tablecloth over her face and shivered in the corner.

  His father kept his arms around her, whispering and shushing her in a loving manner, going, "Shhh, Doreena, you'll be all right." It was sort of sweet in its own severely fucked way.

  She lunged out of his grasp and tried the door again, peering out from beneath the fine tatting threads.

  Chase eventually opened it for her, impressed by the luster of her blood, rubbing it across his fingers as she took off into the dark. Flapping the table cloth like a great shroud, she kept calling, "Mommy, save me! Oooh! I didn't mean it! It ain't my fault!"

  It probably wasn't. Dad put his coat back on and trudged out after her.

  These are the things you remember when you're on stage, and the dead are at the back of the bar watching you.