Warren Ellis - Gun Machine

There may have been new owners, but there wasn’t new money in the Fetch. Everything in the place seemed to creak—the door, the flooring, the cracked and scabby fake leather on the booth seats—as if all were installed in the husk of something old and tired and hunched.

Tallow went to the bar and did what he always did. Looked at all the taps and then ordered a pint of cream ale. Looked at the food menu, front and back and specials, and then ordered a cheeseburger and onion rings in beer batter. Tallow asked the bartender if he knew if there was a spare table outside in the smoking area, which there was, and asked for his food to be taken to him. The bartender’s bored assent was smothered by a yell from the guys in the back of the bar, where there was a big flat-screen TV that justified the old window lettering that called the place a sports bar. A cheer shot through with shouts of something like “Oshidashi!”

Tallow frowned, dimly recognizing the word. “ Oshidashi ?”

The bartender’s face broke open into a big yellow grin. “Sumo. It’s saving my life.”

“How?”

“Got the big-ass TV. Got the satellite feed. But those guys, there just ain’t enough football and baseball in the world to keep them docile. And soccer just don’t do it. There ain’t enough happens in soccer. It’s like watching twenty-two hair models kick a ball around for what seems like six months and then one of them falls over and the ball goes in the goal. And then I found this channel does big-ass edited-highlights sumo specials. So I say to the guys: You got these two big-ass guys, none of this kiddie wrestling shit, they look like two linebackers been locked in a Burger King for five years, they run at each other like two eighteen-wheelers in loincloths, they beat the shit out of each other, and the winner gets a plate of fucking money right there in the ring. Two days later, the guys are crack whores for sumo. I got big Irish guys yelling at the TV in Japanese and they’re not giving me shit anymore. Saving my life. Gimme like twenty minutes for your burger, okay?”

Tallow went through the bar and out into the smoking area, shaking his head. The smoking area was an old service yard that’d just been stuffed with tables and chairs, probably from a garden center in Brooklyn, and a couple of metal buckets for cigarette butts. He didn’t intend to stay out here all night, but a smoke before and after some food sounded good. It sounded better, in fact, than the idea of eating, but he knew from experience that if he didn’t force something in there now, he’d wake up feeling sick and empty.

It was warm. He took his jacket off, fished the cigarette pack and lighter out of it, chose a table at the far end of the yard, and folded the jacket over the chair before sitting down. His back was to the rear fence. He wanted to stay facing the entrance to the smoking area so he could keep an eye out for the CSUs.

The cream ale was the color of maple syrup topped with an inch’s fall of apple blossom. It tasted much as he’d expected it to. He lit a cigarette, and although he paused at how it already tasted much like cigarettes had when he was a heavy smoker, it still tasted much as he’d expected it to. He smiled slightly, briefly, and pushed curls of the smoke up toward the darkening sky. He began to relax, just a little bit.

Tallow looked for an ashtray, and found it: an old seven-inch record that had been melted to form a cup. The spindle hole looked like it’d been plugged with Silly Putty. Tallow frowned at it. Clamping the cigarette between his lips and squinting one eye against the smoke, he turned the ashtray around in his hands. He figured it’d only been suffering this abuse for a few weeks, but it was still no way to treat a record. He didn’t find the telltale gouge of a record yanked out of an old jukebox that could justify turning a piece of music into a bad flowerpot. Someone had just decided that, hell, it’s only a bit of vinyl.

He found a tissue in his left pants pocket, wadded it, moistened it with a little beer foam, and gently sponged away at the record label. Someone had stubbed out a cigarette hard in the middle of what some wiping revealed to be a butterfly motif. That and the exposed white C meant the label was Chrysalis. A fossil brand. Chrysalis Records had gone away long ago, a pretty little butterfly that got eaten by a business spider that got eaten by a corporate bird that got eaten by a big multinational cat. Tallow kept cleaning, determined to solve this one little mystery, exposing as much of the ravaged pale blue paper as he dared. He tossed his cigarette into the nearest metal pail. It was distracting him. He wanted to do this. It felt like archaeology to him. He immersed himself in it, making small passes with the tissue until he could see the type above the spindle hole.

Tallow could feel himself actually grinning. The record was “Heart of Glass” by Blondie. He hadn’t heard it in years. He remembered when he first heard it, as a kid, and had giggled because Debbie Harry said “pain in the ass.”

He remembered that, and a lyric about being lost in illusion, and nowhere to hide.

Tallow was pretty sure he didn’t have that album on CD and resolved to buy the MP3 when he got home, as tribute to the record’s sacrifice. He replaced the ashtray on the table. He knew he’d use the damn thing as an ashtray, and it was too late to save the record now, but it didn’t sit right with him. You just don’t do that to a record. Then again, he thought, chances are that no one in the vicinity of the record that day owned a device to play it on. Tallow himself didn’t know anyone apart from himself who possessed a turntable for home use.

That said, Tallow had to tell himself, he didn’t actually know that many people.

His food arrived. He looked at the label he’d unearthed, smiled, and took a bite of his burger. It tasted a bit better than he’d expected.

After the first few bites, he reached down into the laptop bag propped next to his chair, flicked on the wi-fi pod—he knew the machine well enough to do it by touch—and pulled out the tablet device. He tapped the search string tobacco prayer into the web browser and, as he worked through his meal, got a shallow education in Native American tobacco use from a handful of horribly designed websites using color schemes that should have earned the sites’ creators a night in the cells. Crazy street guy was right about the use of tobacco, it turned out. Two of the web pages he looked at featured large flashing links to quit-smoking sites and help lines, declaiming that the casual and heavy use of tobacco was un–Native American.

Tallow washed the last of the burger out of his teeth with a mouthful of ale and, on the ground that he wasn’t Native American, casually lit his second cigarette. Somewhere in the middle of the meal, his body had decided that it was actually hungry, and now he was a sated and sedate mammal.

He let his head lean back, and he blew smoke at the sliver of moon in the evening sky and two pigeons swimming along the light breeze. He relaxed.

And then, as certain as if he were going to throw up: Oh God, I’m going to cry .

Tallow sat up straight, eyes wide, breathing gone jerky and ragged, chin creasing and mouth twisting, unable to feel his feet on the ground. He watched his right hand tremble around the cigarette, his head too distant from it to make his fingers obey him. He clenched his left hand into a fist, hard enough that after half a minute he could feel white blazing crescents in his palm from his fingernails. Tallow gathered it all and tried with every internal guard he could muster to push it all down into that awful gaping hollow sensation in his chest.