Megan Abbott - Phoenix Noir

She straddled his lap, backlit by purple neon, grinding as the Red Hot Chili Peppers caterwauled about Californication. Her face was so close he could taste butterscotch from the candies she chain-popped between sets. They were in a private VIP booth, their love lounge.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Cheryl said, voice husky. “You can make me yours, for all of the time.”

“You don’t belong to me,” Eddie said. “You’re Wade’s. He loves you.”

“Wade ain’t like you, Eddie. He’s weak.” Cheryl arched her back. “I hear things. I’m afraid he’s going to get you busted. Or worse. He’s not the friend you think he is.”

It would take Eddie years to wise up to Cheryl’s lies and manipulations. He couldn’t see his hands in the dark. But he knew how his fists would one day smash her face.

“You always get what you want?” he said.

“What I deserve, you mean.” She stroked him.

Eddie closed his eyes.

“Open your goddamn eyes, boyo!” the old man barked. “You owe her that much.”

Eddie obeyed, blinking into focus a cheap pine casket atop a floral-strewn dais. Inside, rose-colored satin framed his mother’s deflated features, rouged and painted into a plastic sheen. He and the old man were alone in the mortuary. “She looks pretty much the same as the last time you beat her,” Eddie said. “Only happier.”

“Is that why you came here? To lay blame?”

Eddie really couldn’t say. He wanted to mourn her, but the only genuine sentiment he’d been able to summon for his mother was conflict. A fitting eulogy. “Guess I wanted to make sure she was finally safe from you.”

“Jesus, but you’re a weak sister.” Eddie could hear the alcohol burn in his father’s pitiless voice. “No way you came from me. I knew the moment she spat you outta her cunny lips I wasn’t your father. But I gave you my name anyway. Know what they call that? A legacy.”

“Swell legacy, Dad. Look what you did for her.”

“What about what you did, Eddie? The shame you put her through. The way you took advantage of her. You forget about that? Need me to remind you?”

“Shut up!” Eddie swung at the old man, who deflected the punch and clamped Eddie’s jaw in one meaty hand. Squeezing, he pushed Eddie against the casket, crashing over vases, toppling arrangements, and scattering blossoms across his mother’s body.

“Let me clue you in, boyo. I gave your mother what she wanted. You call it battery. She called it love. We made our peace a long time ago. How about you?” The old man pushed Eddie’s head toward his mother’s, crushing his face onto her lipstick-encrusted mouth. “Here’s your chance, Eddie. Tell her you’re sorry. Kiss her goodbye.”

Pink underwear kept Eddie from escaping America’s toughest jail. Well, maybe escape was overblowing it. Security was so loose he could’ve walked out the front gate.

But then he wouldn’t have access to pink underwear. He couldn’t believe the money he was making off the things. Hell, he was wearing three pairs at a time just to keep up with demand. And supply? Eddie was kicking back to the laundry crew so they’d keep quiet on the count.

Putting inmates in pink underwear was the brainchild of the Maricopa County Sheriff, who thought degrading men by forcing them to eat green bologna sandwiches, watch the Disney Channel, and work on chain gangs made him America’s Toughest Sheriff.

Of course, the sadistic fuck also built a jail out of tents on the floor of the goddamn Gila Desert. And on that one, Eddie had to give the sheriff props. Satan’s front porch had nothing on a thousand men crammed ten to a tent in 120-degree summers.

Eddie processed into Tent City a couple of months after his nineteenth birthday, which he’d celebrated by racking up a misdemeanor assault charge and causing a near riot at a Mesa bar. Charges would have been worse except when police arrived Eddie was being stomped into the ground by a group of seriously pissed off vatos . Seems Eddie had inflicted a grievous insult to their culture when he cold-cocked one of their homies then shoved his hat under the pachuco’s ass and asked if that was where the candy came out.

Eddie thought he should send the greasers a complimentary pair of pinks. He’d gotten the idea for his underwear caper from a stroke rag, some freak of nature writing about how she got off when her boyfriend gave her the Dirty Sanchez. If chicks were willing to brag about licking their own shit, what would they be willing to shell out for an inmate’s dirty drawers?

Anybody could sell clean boxers. In fact, Eddie was pretty sure the sheriff had a side business doing just that. What he offered was lived-in stuff. Pissed in, shit on, cum-filled and bloody, the messier the better. He had Wade set it up with a classified and a post box. First week, they got a dozen orders. Doubled it the next week. Finally had to bribe a couple of deputies to get the boxers out.

Eddie felt like a captain of friggin’ industry. Escape. Are you kidding?

“Knuckles, bro? Fury. That some kind of promise?”

“A reminder. Finally stood down the old man.”

“Righteous. He back off?”

“Nah. Kicked the shit outta me.”

They were barreling west on U.S. 60 in a Lexus that Wade had boosted from a movie theater parking lot, where they had just seen Starship Troopers for the upteenth time. Wade geeked over science fiction. Eddie didn’t mind. It gave them somewhere they could go together and disconnect. For them, sci-fi wasn’t a theme. It was a place.

“Remember when we use to fly paper airplanes off the Alma School overpass?” Eddie said. “Like we were X-wings making a run on Death See if we could make it to the pavement before getting crunched.”

“Yeah. Till you taped an M-80 to one. Nearly caused that trucker to jackknife.”

“Man, I’ll never forget that dude’s face.”

“Funny stuff, Eddie. Long time ago.”

“Not for me.”

Eddie’s body devolved. The pain was exquisite. He saw his muscles thin out and flatten. His limbs shrank. Broken bones snapped fresh, bulging under his skin, then fused together as if they had never been broken at all. Tattoo blue vanished. He could literally see his manhood fade as he slipped into adolescence, his life clicking away like slides in an old-style View-master, the selector switch set to suffer.

He tore through the boy’s pod, his clothes, books, finally fingering the three-by-five picture under the mattress. Eddie hated the boy. He was a pampered puss, a crybaby. One of those kids who didn’t think he belonged in juvie, no matter his crime.

The picture proved it. Family Vacation 101. Silly smiles backdropped by Arizona red rock, the boy front and center, arms draped around a bored little sister and brainiac brother. Mom and Dad flashed peace signs over their heads.

The boy treated the picture like a piece of magic, rubbing it through his pocket, peeking glances and talking to it when he thought no one was watching. It only made Eddie hate him more. It confirmed that whatever the boy had done, it would eventually be forgotten. Not so for Eddie. The picture people knew it. Their smiles ridiculed him.

Eddie dropped the picture on the floor between his feet. He unbuttoned his pants and began jacking off.

The old man came out of Eddie’s bedroom wagging a pipe and baggie. He was dressed in his police uniform and he put the weight of the badge behind his voice.

“You’re a walking felony, Eddie. Guess it’ll be Christmas in Durango for you,” he said. “I’ll process you through intake myself.”

Eddie held the old man’s eyes. Kept quiet even as his father shoved him bodily into the back of the patrol car. What could he say? The pipe wasn’t his. Neither was the dope.