James Thompson - Helsinki Blood

His mouth moves, but nothing comes as he tries to form some half-assed rebuttal. I watch both of them. Jenna bunches her hand into a little white fist-not much I can do about it, as I’m not going to shoot her-and hits Sweetness with a solid roundhouse to the nose. He saw it coming and let her do it. I hear it snap and his nose folds over onto the side of his face. Blood runs out of it, drizzles like a water tap with a bad gasket.

He doesn’t react or complain, just pulls a wad of napkins from a Hesburger bag, spreads them out on the table and leans over them, to keep from making a mess.

Jenna grabs the kossu bottle and chugs some more. “Fuck both you guys.” She takes the bottle and disappears into the bedroom they share with Anu.

I put Anu in her carriage, walk over to Sweetness and put a hand on his shoulder. “Sorry,” I say.

“Naw,” he says, “you did right.”

“Want to go to the hospital, or do you want me to set your nose for you? The hospital might leave you prettier.”

“Fuck it. Just set it. Gimme a stiff drink first.” Luckily, he buys kossu by the case.

I give him a couple of my painkillers and a half water glass of kossu . He drinks both down. He sits and bleeds for a few minutes, waiting for the combination to take effect.

“OK,” he says.

We go to the bathroom, where the light is good and the blood can fly and be easily cleaned up. I grab his nose with my thumb and forefinger and jerk. I hear and feel the grinding of cartilage, but it doesn’t quite make it. He doesn’t make any noise, but it brings tears to his eyes. I have another go at it, and I feel it almost snap back into place, but not quite. This time he winces and yelps.

“Goddamn,” he says.

“Sorry. I think I can’t pull straight enough with my fingers. I could stick pencils up your nostrils and jerk. That might give me the right angle.”

“Fuck that. Give me the bottle.”

The break looks clean, since his nose is folded over on the side of his face instead of crushed. “The trick,” I say, “is to lift your nose off your face, pull it out and over so it sits back where it belongs.”

I go get the bottle and he swigs deep. I have a gulp myself. He looks in the mirror, grabs his nose tight with the meat below his thumbs, and jerks it forward. Cartilage and gristle crackle. His nose settles back in the right place. “Fuck,” he says, “that feels better. That dope you gave me, at least with kossu , helps a lot, too.”

“Yeah,” I say, “it does. All of a sudden, I’m hungry as hell.”

“Me too,” he says.

He jams toilet paper up his nostrils to plug up the bleeding, then we go the dining room and scarf double cheeseburgers and fries.

“It’s not my business,” I say, “so feel free to tell me to fuck off, but don’t you and Jenna use birth control?”

He has half a burger stuffed in his mouth. It takes him a minute to answer. “Sure we do. The rhythm method. Usually the rhythm of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They’re Jenna’s favorite fucking music.”

The sound of the door opening wakes me. I hear the trundle of suitcase wheels. Kate is home. I pull on sweatpants and go out to greet her. Her eyes are flat, lifeless. She looks like she’s aged ten years in a week. Milo is behind her, as if to cut off her escape. I hug her. She allows it, but doesn’t return it.

“I missed you,” I say.

She slurs, “Where is Anu?”

“In her crib, sleeping.”

“Would you get her for me?”

“Of course.”

I knock on the door, wondering what kind of scene I’ll find after Jenna’s anger and her TKO of Sweetness last night. “Come in,” she says.

I find them in bed, her head on Sweetness’s chest. It seems all is forgiven.

“Kate is home,” I say. “And Jenna, I think you have an impression otherwise, but I didn’t have sex with Mirjami. She just wanted to sleep in the same bed with me. Nothing happened.”

“Not my business,” she says. “Why tell me?”

“Because I don’t want some innuendo about me cheating on Kate slipping out unintended. I’ve never cheated on her.”

And then it comes to me. I intended to change the bedding. It will be redolent of Mirjami. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

I bring Anu to Kate. She takes Anu in her arms, squeezes her so hard I’m afraid she might hurt her, and Kate starts to cry. Not just crying, but wailing from grief. The kind of crying one would expect if her baby was dead, not reunited with her.

Milo whispers in my ear. “She didn’t sleep for the whole trip, so she’s been up for almost two whole days. Plus, she’s been drinking the whole time.”

Anu starts to cry, too. “She hates me,” Kate says.

“Of course she doesn’t hate you,” I say. “She loves you. She’s just upset because you are.”

“I abandoned her and she hates me for it. And she should, I deserve her hatred. And I don’t deserve her. A woman like me doesn’t deserve a baby.”

She sits on the footrest of my chair, holds Anu, rocks back and forth, and just cries and cries. I don’t know what to do, so I sit on the couch and wait.

Milo whispers, “Got any tranquilizers?”

I nod, get them and hand him a sleeve of Oxamin.

He goes to the kitchen, and I see him crush some of them to powder with the back of a spoon, make a stiff drink with kossu and Jaffa, and stir them into it. He takes it to her. “Here, Kate,” he says, “this will help.”

She wipes away tears and snot. “My kidnapper and bartender,” she says, and sucks down half the drink in one go.

Her crying stops as she finishes the drink, and her eyes start to close. “I have to go to bed,” she says, hands Anu back to me, and wobbles to the bedroom.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I say.

Milo sits beside me on the couch. “Yeah,” he says. “She’s confused and she stays drunk. Not much of what she says makes sense.”

“Have you had any sleep?” I ask.

“I didn’t have much time to sleep in Miami, so I caught a few Z’s on the plane, where she couldn’t get in any trouble. I’m in OK shape.”

“Thank you for this. I owe you.”

“You’re welcome, and no you don’t. You would have done the same.”

“A lot has happened,” I say, “and none of it good. We need to trade stories. Who goes first?”

I sit in my chair. He lies back and stretches out on the couch, legs out straight and feet crossed, hands on his stomach and fingers laced. He closes his eyes while he talks. “I guess I can. Like I told you when I got there, John was speedballing and Kate was drunk. I spent time listening to their conversations through the open window. Kate going on about how killers can’t be mothers, talking about a man who fell burning from the sky. Crazy shit.”

“She has post-traumatic stress disorder,” I say.

“That was apparent, and it was also apparent to me that it was only a matter of time before she picked up his bad habits. She was curious, asked him what speedballing was like. He said, ‘Like falling down an elevator shaft.’ I saw that the idea appealed to her. He’s a ‘one more day’ junkie. ‘Another day and I’ll go to rehab.’ Which, of course, she believed. So I went to a place called Walmart. Ever heard of it?”

“They talk about it on American TV.”

“What a freaky place. As big as a shopping mall and they sell everything imaginable. If a nuke went off, you could survive for years in there without ever leaving the building. They have like a hundred different kinds of potato chips. The place is so big that they have electric carts to ride around in. You would think mostly geriatrics use them, but almost all the people riding around in them are just too fat to walk. It’s the fattest fucking place I’ve ever seen.”