When you're down, seems the only way you can go is up. In the Gutter there's gravity, and gravity don't work like that.
Beauty & Ruin by Tom Leins
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The midday sun burns like a bullet
wound. It feels hotter on my bare shoulders than the arena lights on fight
night. There is no breeze, and the stink from the petrochemical plant lingers
in the air like an afterthought.
We are in the long grass next to
Testament Falls. Nikki asked me to go down on her, but my neck-brace got in the
way, so we sat around and smoked her cigarettes instead.
I close my eyes against the sun’s rays. My sunglasses got trampled in a crack den, and I haven’t had chance to replace them yet.
I close my eyes against the sun’s rays. My sunglasses got trampled in a crack den, and I haven’t had chance to replace them yet.
Every time Nikki leans across to kiss
my blistered lips, I feel my broken ribs pop under her weight.
We have known each other since the
final year of high school. She was over-sexed, even back then. During recess she
would jerk guys off behind the sports hall in exchange for a cigarette. If you
gave her a second one, she would stick a finger up your asshole at the same
time. By the summer term I even remember some of the teachers getting involved…
With her forefinger, she traces the
thick, ragged scar from my spinal surgery.
“Are you sure you’re up to this,
Johnny?”
I catch my reflection in her cheap
drugstore sunglasses. My face looks puffy, my hair is receding. I’m a fuckin’
mess.
Before my enforced retirement, the ring
announcer used to say that my age was 36, but I’m going to be 46 next birthday.
He said I hailed from Los Angeles, California, but I’ve never been any further
west than Hellbelly.
“Fuckin’ A.”
I can’t fight… I can’t fuck… but I can
sure-as-shit still wave a firearm in some poor bastard’s face.
*
Five hours later.
We are in the service alley behind
McDaniel Meat, in Nikki’s dead brother’s truck, smoking the last of her
cigarettes.
It is the first Friday of the month. Fight
night. Strictly bareknuckle. Twenty men. $1,000 buy-in. Last man standing takes
home the $15,000 prize fund.
The fights are organised by a dude
known as the Rattlesnake Daddy. He is rake-thin, and looks older than God. He
always wears a sleeveless Black Sabbath t-shirt, and has a shriveled USMC tat
on his forearm. On fight night, he keeps an old rifle looped over his left shoulder
with a length of electrical cable.
I’m wearing a threadbare cop uniform we
picked up at the Crippled Civilian’s thrift store two counties over. It is
itchy, and too tight, but looks convincing in dim light.
I can tell Nikki is nervous, because
she is talking too quickly. Babbling about the guy who does her ass-cheek
implants. Tells me he is doing time for injecting pre-op hookers’ asses with
Fix-a-Flat tire aerosols…
*
You can throw a beer can in Testament
and chances are you will hit an ex-wrestler, but the kind of guys who fight in
the parking lot of a meat factory after dark are has-beens and never-weres. Most
of these fuckers have probably changed their ring names more often than the
girls at the Slop Shop change their panties.
We stay in the shadows, and edge toward
the aluminum trailer in the far corner of the parking lot. The security
guard’s office. Where the Rattlesnake Daddy keeps the prize money.
I knock on the dented door with my
cane.
“Testament PD. Open up.”
The door opens a crack. It’s Rattlesnake’s
half-sister, Kellyanne. She looks haggard, like a partially melted Barbie doll.
I drop my shoulder into the door, and she hits the deck like a sack of warm
shit. Nikki scrambles up the breezeblock steps in front of me, and I drag the
battered piece out of my holster and scan the empty room, cop-show-style.
I gesture toward the pump action
shotgun that Kellyanne dropped.
“Pick up the fuckin’ gun, Nikki.”
She is jittery with nerves, and when
she stoops down to retrieve the gun Kellyanne kicks her in the face with the
heel of her thigh-high boot. Nikki screams as the heel pierces her cheek. Kellyanne
yanks her boot away and slams it into Nikki’s face a second time.
“How do you like my boots? Classy and
sassy, Daddy says.”
“Fuck…”
Nikki is screaming, hands over her
face, blood oozing through her fingertips. Her eyes look wild.
Kellyanne gestures at my neck-brace
with the shotgun.
“What’s up with you, you crippled
motherfucker?”
“Give me the money, Kellyanne.”
She reaches for a plastic cube dangling
from a cord around her neck.
“What the fuck’s that?”
“Rape alarm, dick-sucker.”
She presses the button and the cube
starts to shriek, reverberating off the aluminium walls and out across the
parking lot.
“Fuckin’ bitch.”
I raise my gun and squeeze the trigger.
The bullet ruptures her leathery face.
“Nikki, get the fuckin’ loot.”
I glance across at her, but she’s passed
out in a pool of her own piss.
“Fuck!”
I stumble down the breezeblock steps
and hobble towards the truck.
There is a figure leaning against the
cab. Shit. The motherfuckin’ Rattlesnake Daddy.
“Evening officer,” he drawls, flashing
me a gummy smile.
I start to shuffle toward him, but he
jabs his rifle into my beer gut.
“Drop the piece, shit-stain.”
I pluck the gun out of the holster with
my fingertips – just like a real fuckin’ cop – and drop it on the cracked
asphalt.
“I’m no palm reader, but I see tough
times ahead for you, my friend…”
I shrug.
“I don’t like to think that far ahead.”
“Just as fucking well.”
He points the rifle at my
left knee and grins, and for the first time in my Godforsaken life I really wish
I was dead.
