Charlie Huston - The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death

He stuffed the wallet deep in one of his front pockets.

– I spent the day hauling crap, I'd be pretty pissed if someone tried to rip me off.

I closed the door and leaned my forearms in the open window.

– Yeah, but you're a money-grubbing pig.

– You want to do some more work for the money-grubbing pig sometime?

Tomorrow maybe?

I looked at the rack of silver mailboxes riveted to the beige stucco wall at the base of the stairs.

– Well, not really. But I got to buy Chev a new phone.

He put the van in gear.

– One of us will pick you up at seven.

He started to pull out. I walked alongside as he backed into the street.

– Yeah, but I was kind of thinking I might get a check today. And if I do. You know.

He stopped the car.

– Web, your mom sent you some money and you don't feel like working, that's fine. She didn't, and you want to work, call me in the next couple hours. I haven't found anyone else by then, you can work. Good night.

And he drove away.

I watched the van to the corner. Pulled the money from my pocket and counted it. Eighty bucks even, folded around a Clean Team business card. I let down the tailgate of the Apache and sat on it and dangled my legs, riffling the edge of the card along my knuckles, thinking about things.

A truck drove slow down the middle of the narrow street, a windowless Dodge Ram van, freshly sanded and primered across the hood and down one side. It paused while some kids rode by on their bikes in the opposite direction, and then eased down the street while I watched the kids pedal to the corner and whip into the alley. I could hear the homeless couple screaming at each other down there, calling each other names.

– Whore.

– Asshole.

– Bitch.

– Fuckface.

– Cocktease.

– Cocksucker.

– Cunt.

– Shithead.

The glorious spoken-word street poetry of Hollywood.

I listened to them and looked at the Clean Team card and tried to remember the first time I met Po Sin. I could remember the first time I'd seen him. Dropping off his youngest, Xing, walking across the chain-link-enclosed playground, the kids stopping in their tracks to watch a leviathan amongst them, holding the hand of his round-faced daughter, her Sponge Bob backpack dangling from his free hand. He'd made an impression.

But the first time I'd met him? School play maybe. Po Sin leaning against the back of the auditorium because the little folding chairs were too small. Me standing back there keeping an eye on the rowdy kids who like to sit as far from the front of a room as possible.

I'd been one of those kids at the back. Spitballs. Whispering. Elbow digs. Giggles. Passed notes about boogers. But mostly sneaking a book out of my back pocket to hide in my lap and read, tuning out whatever was happening up on the stage at the front of the hall.

Pretty much the same shit going on with the kids I was eyeballing. Except there was a greater chance that the notes being passed around would include the word fuck, and that anyone looking at something in their lap was going to be playing a Gameboy or PSP, not reading a book.

Po Sin had smiled when Xing, an infamous back-stabbing two-faced queen-bee, universally hated by all the second-grade girls and the entire female faculty, came on stage as a fairy or a tree or a rainbow or something, and applauded after she got out her line.

I'd leaned close and told him how cute she was, and he'd looked at me and shook his head.

– She's a terror, an absolute bitch. But yeah, she's cute as hell.

We talked a little during the cookies and punch segment of the evening. He'd told me his business. I'd mentioned that my roommate needed someone to dispose of his biowaste.

He and Chev hit it off, and Chev would come home and give reports about what Po Sin was cleaning while I corrected papers. Tales of hand-scrubbing each piece of ballast along two hundred yards of rail bed after a train strike on a junkie, delivered as I put small red marks in the margins of phonics tests and What I Did for Kwanzaa essays.

He looked me up after I quit. To say what, I don't know. I didn't answer the phone or listen to the message he left. Something about Xing, I imagine.

Later, when he'd come by the shop to pick up Chev's waste, and see me hanging, he'd say some nice things. At first. Then he started making some suggestions about how I might want to, I don't know, get some help or some other kind of daytime talk show bullshit. When that weed didn't take root in me, he stopped talking about it. For a long time. Then he got used to the idea of me being a dick and started treating me like normal and telling me I was acting like an asshole fuckup, which was a whole hell of a lot easier on both of us.

And now I was working for him. Acquiring new job skills. The mystic arts of erasing all signs of death. These things, these things you do to get by when need arises, they sometimes equip you for the rest of your life. However long that turns out to be.

There was a rattle overhead. I looked up and watched a small flock of sparrows as they hopped and scratched across the fronds of a palm tree growing from the neighbor's dense yard, pecking at some kind of tidbit that had come to rest up there. A crow flapped down from the power line, scattering most of them, cawing, its action drawing the attention of several members of the murder that made the street home. I leaned over and picked up a rock and pitched it into the tree and watched the crows wing off to look for easier fodder in the alley dumpsters down the street. The sparrows came back.

I got up and closed the tailgate and went upstairs, dragging my hand over the stucco wall of the complex as I walked down the second-floor exterior walkway, listening to stereos and TV shows and arguments and yip-ping dogs behind the doors of our neighbors. I unlocked the front door and walked in and looked at the girl whose nipple I'd stretched the day before at the shop, sitting on the couch in her panties and Chev's favorite Misfits T, with one of my books open in her lap.

She looked up.

– Oh, it's the dick.

Chev walked in, pulling on his boxers, tattoos scattered over his body thickest at the ends of his limbs, thinning as they approached his torso.

He hoisted a tallboy of Miller at me.

– Hey it's the breadwinner.

He dropped on the couch next to the girl.

– This is Dot.

Dot made room for him next to her.

– Yeah, I already said hi.

She held up the big purple and gold book she'd been flipping through.

– So did you really teach over at Hollywoodland Elementary? These kids are so cute.

I walked over and took the book from her and closed it and went to the shelf and found its space with the other yearbooks and slipped it in where it belonged and turned and stared at Chev.

He rubbed his shoulder.

– Sorry, man, I didn't know she was looking at that.

Dot looked at him, at me.

– What? I like kids. What?

Chev got up and walked toward the kitchen.

– Hey good news, working man, you got a FedEx package from Oregon. And it's not berries.

He grabbed a FedEx envelope from the table and scaled it to me. I caught it and headed for my room.

Dot smiled.

– Sorry about looking at your book. I just finished my first year at UCLA in the education department. I was curious. I didn't know you were a teacher.

Chev opened the fridge.

– Told you she was eighteen.

She made a face as I walked past her.

– Oh. My. God. What the fuck is that smell?

I took a long shower. A very long shower. And then I took another one. Longer this time. And then I splashed myself with some of Chev's Old Spice. And a little more. Then I went in my room and turned on my fan and opened my window and tried not to breathe through my nose and prayed that the stink wouldn't get into my bedding and the carpet. And after about a half hour I finally grew something resembling a brain and gathered my dirty clothes and bagged them and took them down to the laundry room, ignoring the various squeals and grunts coming from Chev's room as I passed his door.