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

He let go of me and turned.

– What! What!

I dropped to the floor and tried to figure out how breathing worked.

Soledad came and kneeled next to me.

– What the hell, Jaime?

Jaime waved his knife.

– He was being an asshole, just like you said he would be!

She put a hand on the side of my face.

– I said he might act like an asshole and you needed to be chill.

He pointed the knife at me.

– Why do I have to be chill when he's being the asshole?

She shook her head, looked at me, her face all but hid in the long curls of hair falling around it.

– You OK?

I squirted more tears and kept my hands jammed in my crotch by way of an answer.

Jaime came and leaned over her and looked down at me.

– Besides, he deserved it for being an asshole at your house today.

She looked up at him.

– He wasn't. Fuck, Jaime, he was trying to make me laugh.

He raised his hands over his head.

– See! That's sick, man. Your dad offs himself, blows his fucking brains all over, and this asshole tries to make it funny? That's sick shit.

She stared at him, shook her head.

He raised his shoulders.

– What? What did I say? He's the one made jokes about your dad eating a bullet. Why'm I getting bitch looks?

She looked at the floor.

– Just shut up. Shut up and have a drink.

– What'd I do?

She put fingertips to her forehead.

– Please, Jaime. Just. Chill and have a drink. Please.

He reversed the gesture with his wrist and thumb, folding the knife and tucking it back in its sheath.

– Fine. Whatever. Just want people to remember, this whole production, it's my deal. We got a schedule to keep to here and I don't like falling behind.

He walked to the room's lone chair, almonds popping under the heels of his chrome-studded ankle boots, took a seat, and picked up a white plastic shopping bag from the floor.

– So you just get the asshole up to speed and on set. I want to roll this thing and wrap.

He reached in the bag and pulled out an airline bottle of Malibu rum.

– Incidentals keep popping up and throwing my budget to shit.

I pointed at him.

– Let me guess, you're an actor, but what you really want to do is direct?

He drained the bottle and threw it across the room and it bounced off my forehead.

– Fuck you, asshole, I'm a fucking producer.

Soledad closed her eyes, shook her head, opened her eyes, and looked at me.

– Web, meet my brother Jaime.

– It's not as bad as it looks.

I sat on the closed lid of the toilet, the plastic bag of ice she got from the machine by the motel office resting between my thighs.

– See, the funny thing about that statement is the fact that it looks so very very bad, that there is ample room for it to be not as bad as it looks and still be chronically fucked up.

She took the wet hand towel from my forehead.

– I know. Still. It's not as bad as it looks.

I looked at the blood on the towel in her hand.

– Well then, that explains all the relief pouring over me at this moment.

She bent and peered at the gash in my forehead, reopened when Jaime kneed me and I bit the floor.

– This should be stitched up. Want me to take a crack at it?

– What? No. What the hell with people who don't have any medical training at all wanting to stitch my tender flesh?

She straightened and dabbed the towel on my head again.

– I don't know. Just something I always kind of wanted to try.

– Stitching up an open wound?

– Yeah. Weird, huh?

I didn't bother with an answer, the weirdness of such a desire going without saying. The sexiness of it not being something I wanted to get into. As it would suggest too much about my own weirdness. A quality already on abundant display in my current mode of employment. Also by the fact that I was sitting in a motel bathroom at one thirty in the morning with a bag of ice in my bruised crotch and a beautiful and bookish and emotionally complicated young woman tending to my hurts while her brother got tanked in the adjoining blood-splattered room.

Instead, I got straight to the most important matter at hand.

– You smell great.

She took the towel away again.

– It must be the rose petals I've been bathing in.

I inhaled.

– Could be.

She tossed the towel in the sink.

– Or the deodorant I've been spraying on myself to cover the fact that I haven't bathed since my dad died two days ago.

I nodded.

– So I am kind of an asshole, huh?

She boosted herself on the sink and dangled her feet.

– You do have some moments of impropriety.

I took the ice bag from my nut bag and touched my numbed genitals.

– Yeah, certain things bring it out in me.

She picked up a pack of cigarettes sitting by the basin and put one between her lips.

– Like having the future generations of your family name put at risk?

I dropped the ice bag in the tub.

– Like being asked to an apparent murder scene to clean it up.

She struck a match and placed the flame to the end of the cigarette.

– Oh, that.

She shook the match out and let it fall to the floor.

– Jaime didn't actually kill anyone.

She blew some smoke.

– He just cut him up a little.

I rose from the can, testing my ability to move with a dangling pendulum of agony between my legs.

– Oh, is that all? Well then, let's get to work.

– He was being an asshole, asshole.

– One assumes.

– What?

I took my head from under the bed, where I was shining a flashlight looking for stray blood, and looked at Jaime.

– One assumes he was an asshole. Otherwise, one assumes, you would not have cut him up a little.

I looked at Soledad, standing by the open door of the bathroom, arms crossed, a cigarette she only occasionally bothered to drag from between the fingers of her left hand.

– That was the phrase, was it not? He just cut him up a little.

She looked from the floor.

– Yeah, that was it.

Jaime waved the latest in a long line of Malibu nips.

– A little? I just about did a Silence of the Lambs on him. Just about peeled him raw.

I looked again at Soledad.

She shook her head.

Based on the amount of blood I'd seen at her house, and how much less there was here, I was inclined to think he was full of it. But thinking isn't knowing. Is it?

So, not knowing which of them to believe, I went back to work.

I'd done as I saw Po Sin and Gabe do at the Malibu house, started at the top and worked my way down. Like cleaning a dirty window. There hadn't been anything on the ceiling, but along one wall next to the bed there was a nice spackling of blood that rose nearly to the top. I'd worked my way down it, spraying with a bottle full of Microban and sopping it up with paper towels that I dropped in the room's waste basket. To be disposed of later.

Jaime narrated as I worked.

– See, if he'd just come in here and conducted business in a responsible manner, I wouldn't have had to cut him. I mean, I understand that in this business contingencies sometimes arise without having been accounted for, but it's not the exclusive burden of the producer to absorb those costs. The deal starts going all Waterworld, I don't see where I should be on the hook for the overages. He got all the situation has changed. Shit like that. I told him, said, Dude, I'm working this deal on a short schedule with, like, no budget at all. So maybe you should get out of my fucking face before I fucking cut your ass. He didn't listen. All that blood up there, that's where he freaked out, started waving his arms around after I'd cut his hand. He'd stayed still he wouldn't have got blood on my new jeans and I would have left it at that. As it was, I had to stick him to make him sit down and shut up. Gave him a poke in the shoulder and he settled down. Wadded up those sheets and got them over the hole to stop the bleeding.