Reed Coleman - They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee

“Where then?”

I thought about that. It’s tough to think of a secure meeting place when you don’t know an area all that well.

“Mens room of the Manhattan Court Coffee House. Check there for me every few hours. Coffee’s good, poetry sucks, but you’ll live.”

“Every few hours?” he puzzled. “What are you doin’ tomorrow.”

“Getting a marriage license.” I hung up.

Now I was really wound up. I peered over at Kira. She sort of half smiled at me.

“Is everything all right, Dylan?”

“Sure is,” I lied. I kissed the corner of her eye and stroked her hair until she fell back asleep.

I got up and took a shower to occupy some time. A few minutes later, I heard Kira stirring about in the room. I cursed myself for making too much noise, but I figured there was great potential for fun in making it up to her. As I shaved around my beard, I could no longer hear her and figured she’d gone back to sleep. I laughed at my reflection and vowed to make it up to her anyway.

Stepping from the bathroom, I hesitated. There it was again, that feeling someone uninvited was there in the dark. And this time, I was certain. Exposed by the light spilling out of the bathroom, I caught the faint reflection of a man in the mirror hung above the bureau. He was trying to hide himself in the corner and his body was partially obscured by shadows and the drapery. But I recognized his face: the desk clerk. My eyes shifted to the bed. Empty!

I pushed the panic down as far as I could, trying to think of what I might be able to use as a weapon. I figured I could take the guy in the corner, but I got the sense that he didn’t have the balls to try a stunt like breaking into my room alone. I was right again. To my left, I could hear a muffled voice, Kira’s. I’ll always think she was trying to warn me, but I won’t ever know. She was gagged or there was a hand covering her mouth. The muffled cries ended abruptly.

Acting as if I’d forgotten something, I took a step back into the bathroom and began to close the door. I wasn’t quick enough. The door pushed in on me, knocking me off balance. A strong fist, aimed at my chin, caught me on the point of the shoulder and sent me sprawling on the tile floor. My temple banged into the claw foot of the cast-iron tub. Dazed, I tried standing, but the owner of the strong fist had other ideas.

I caught a glimpse of him just before his left hook introduced itself to my ribs. He was taller than me, about 6’2”, blond, and built like a linebacker. Dressed in a shiny lycra suit that highlighted the cut lines between his muscles, he moved effortlessly. I guessed he was the ski dude MacClough said had followed me from the airport. I remember him smiling at me as his knuckles tried their best to make a tunnel through my thorax. It’s always a pleasure to see a man who enjoys his work.

I dropped an elbow to block his punch, but I only deflected it to the worst possible spot. It hit right under the center of my rib cage in the solar plexus. My body gave up on the notion of standing. The air couldn’t rush out of my lungs fast enough and once out, I couldn’t get any back in. I rolled on the tiles trying to force myself to breathe. Somehow, I managed to do that, but I can’t tell you how.

Ski dude stopped me from writhing by grabbing me by the throat. That got my attention. At that point, I was pretty well prepared to die. I don’t know what made me do what I did next-maybe it was the Brooklyn in me-but I smiled back at him and tried spitting in his face. He didn’t like that too well.

Then, seeing I was not much of a threat, the desk clerk stepped into the bathroom. I recall him shaking his head at me and saying: “What an asshole. Okay, it’s time for Mr. Sandman.”

And it was, too. Lights went out all over the world, just like in The Day the Earth Stood Still .

You know you’re fucked when it’s hard to tell which part of your body you’d like to have amputated first. I voted for the guillotine; kill the head and the body dies. Why bother doing it piecemeal? When I lifted myself off the tile, the lifting didn’t last long. The earth was spinning again. I made it to the sink and buried my head in a basin full of cold water. I can’t say that it felt good. I’d say it made things feel less horrible. When I picked my head out of the sink, I saw that the water had turned pinkish. One peek in mirror showed me why. My face was covered in jagged scratches, most not very deep, but some had drawn blood.

Seeing those scratches got me very scared for myself, but mostly for Kira. I could feel the nausea rising in me as I tried lying to myself about what I would find in the bedroom. Kira would be fine, I told myself. They had just taken her as a warning to me to let things go, to give up my search for Zak. Or maybe they had just slapped her around a bit to show me they could get to me. I wasn’t a very good liar, especially to myself. I had read too many books using this scenario. Raymond Chandler had used it in a short story before he had even created Philip Marlowe. I had used it in They Don’t Play Stickball in Milwaukee.

I was rigid, my hands glued to the sink. I could not force myself to look at what I knew I would find in the bedroom. No matter what games I played, no matter the ploy, I could not move. And then, as if on cue, I heard sirens in the distance. Of course, they would play out the scenario all the way. Now, if I wanted to survive, I had no choice but to move.

There would be no wedding. There would be no bride. There would be no drunken party at the Rusty Scupper with MacClough crying in the middle of his toast to me and to my bride. There would be no one to lift us up on chairs as the klezmer band-one that knew some traditional Japanese folk songs-played a hora. There would be no confused in-laws trying to reconcile sushi with pickled herring. There would be no laughter over silly gifts. There would be no kiss at the altar nor broken glasses nor mazel tovs nor whatever they say in Japanese for luck. Kira was dead.

I didn’t dwell on her. She was gone to someplace better. It was only her body there hanging off the bed headfirst. I knew what the police would find. My skin and blood would be under her fingernails. My semen would be in her vagina. They would comb her pubis and find my hair. She would be bruised, cut maybe, to show there had been a fierce struggle. The cops would find the emptied champagne bottle and probably some planted drugs. I noticed I was crying when I said goodbye.

I ran up to MacClough’s room. As I ran, my grief turned to self-loathing. Not only had I managed to get Kira killed, but I had made myself the world’s most incredibly stupid and perfect suspect. When the cops began investigating the crime, they would find a pattern of behavior on my part that would suggest stalking. The waitress, Sandra, would claim I had spent the morning questioning her about Kira. She would claim, with a clear conscience, that she had told me about Kira because she was afraid of me and that I had been acting paranoid; something about men trying to follow me. She had taken my bribe only to humor me. The guy in the clothing store would say I had bought a disguise-”You wouldn’t recognize your own mother in that outfit with those glasses”-and would say I had acted irrationally about sending the old clothing back to Sound Hill. The woman at the register would say I had acted oddly about her simple request to drink coffee out of a coffee container. Students would come forward to say that they remembered me lingering outside all of Kira’s classes that day, some would recall me following her. And as the piece de resistance, Prof. Jane Courteau would recount my rather weird story about wanting to use Kira’s artwork on my next book. Obviously, I was irrational, obsessed, paranoid. The shrinks would the orize that I had been deeply affected by my recent failure in Hollywood, my father’s tragic death, and the disappearance of my beloved nephew: