Andrew Vachss - Flood

I quietly opened the door of the Plymouth, reached over, and opened the other door too. I looked for the right cassette, fitted it into the player and hit the switch, and the solitary guitar intro rolled out of the speakers and into the empty warehouse.

Flood spun and slammed to a stop in the middle of her mad dance, whipping her hands into a defense against the music. But it flowed out and surrounded her anyway. “Angel Baby,” by Rosie and the Originals, the high, clear voice of the girl singer reaching for something that would maybe never be there, but giving it everything she had. And Flood stood there-white stone in silk underwear, waiting.

I walked out of the shadows toward her, willing her to feel the music and be someplace else, my hands open at my sides. “Hey, Flood,” I called softly, “remember reform school?”

She stepped into my arms like she was back at those dances they used to give in the juvenile joints where they would invite the bad girls from the training schools so we could learn the social graces. We danced like we all used to then-our feet hardly moved, we didn’t cover much ground. At first she held me as rigid as a steel vise, but as the tape played through and another song from the fifties came on she loosened her grip, her hands moving up until they hung around my neck, her face buried in my chest. We moved together like that until the whole tape ran down and there was silence in the empty warehouse. I kissed her on the forehead and she put her arms around my neck and ground her hips into me like girls did back then. I felt the muscles in her back smooth out and she laughed deep in her throat and I knew she was past it, back to herself.

I held out my hand as if the dance were finished, she took it and we walked back toward the car to sit the next one out. On the hood was a pile of black silk. She seemed to know what it was. She put on the loose, flowing pants and the thigh-length robe with the wide sleeves. As she stepped into the black silk I saw the red dragons embroidered on each sleeve and I knew Max had been there.

We gathered up Flood’s whore-clothes and threw them in an old oil drum-I knew they would disappear into ashes and she seemed to know it too. I got into the Plymouth. Flood slid in beside me, slammed in close to me, put her left hand on the inside of my right thigh and left it there while I backed out and pointed the car’s nose toward her studio.

THE PLYMOUTH ROLLED silently through the empty streets, heading for the West Side. Flood was quiet until we got to the highway, but her hand on my thigh wasn’t tense. When I went into the entrance ramp she looked over at me. “You got any more of that music?” and I reversed the cassette and we listened to Gloria Mann sing her “Teenage Prayer” and I guess we both thought about the things we wanted when that song was on the street. There was a lot of music in the juvenile prisons back then. Guys would get together in the shower rooms because the echo effect made everything sound better-it was all groups, nobody thought about being a solo artist. We only heard what came over the radio-it was no big racial thing, all the groups were trying for the same sound. The last time I was locked up for a few days there was almost a race riot-some of the white guys objected to the constant diet of screaming-loud soul music that they piped in twenty-four hours of every bleak day. Music was more participatory when I was a kid-you got three or four guys together and that was it. Whatever they sounded like on the street corner is what they sounded like on the record. Too many kids today don’t seem to give a damn about music, they only envy the musical lifestyle-gold chains and limos and all the coke they can stuff up their noses. But the kids themselves haven’t changed-the newspapers say they have, but they don’t know the score. As long as you have cities you have people who can’t live in them and can’t get out either. As long as you have sheep, you have wolves.

Flood took her hand off my thigh, patted around in my clothes until she found a cigarette. She found the wooden matches and lit one, holding it to my mouth for me to take a drag. Between Flood’s kick and Goldor’s backhand, my mouth was a little below par, but the cigarette tasted good. Or maybe it was just good to be smoking while Goldor burned.

I use the West Side Highway when I have to go uptown. It’s not always the fastest route but it’s the safest. The Plymouth might not be able to outrun anything on the road-although it will blow away any normal patrol car-but the special suspension gives it a real edge on a rough road and they don’t come much rougher than the West Side Highway. I swung back towards Flood’s studio and found a safe-looking place to park. It was the dead hour on the street-late enough for the predators to have retired for the night and not yet early enough for the first citizens to emerge from their fortresses to try to make an honest living. The sky looked reddish to me, but I couldn’t tell if it was the coming sunrise or my blurry vision. Flood walked along next to me, but the bounce was gone. She walked straight ahead like a soldier-her hips never brushed against me like they usually did. She didn’t understand yet, and I had to make her see what had really happened if we were going to flush a snake out of the urban grass.

Her key unlocked the downstairs door. The staircase was unlighted, and Max’s black robes made most of her disappear ahead of me. I could just barely see the blonde hair and hear the whisper of silk. The studio was empty again. We walked past the marked-off section and into her space, and Flood sat down. She was still off her game-usually she would be throwing off her clothes by now and heading for the shower, but I guess she figured some dirt doesn’t come off with soap. I took out a cigarette but she didn’t stir, so I went and found something to use for an ashtray myself. I sat and smoked in silence while I thought it through. Finally I looked over at Flood. “You want me to tell you a story?”

She started to shrug like she didn’t give a damn what I did, then gave me a half-smile and said “Sure” without enthusiasm.

I said, “Come here, okay?” and she got up and walked over to me. She sat down real close and I took her shoulders in my hands, spun her around like a top, the silk pants sliding smoothly on the polished floor until she was facing away from me. I pulled gently until she was lying on her back, her head in my lap, looking up in my direction-but not seeing me. I stroked her fine hair as I told her the story.

“I was in the can once with this hillbilly. Actually he was from someplace in Kentucky but he had lived most of his life in Chicago. They had two men in a cell then-the joint was overcrowded and the race situation was bad. Virgil was a good man to have in your cell-quiet, clean, and ready to take your back if he had to. He didn’t look for problems, just wanted to do his time. In the joint you don’t generally talk about your beef-you know, how you got there and all-but if you cell with a man, sooner or later you hear his story. Or at least the story he wants to tell.

“When Virgil arrived in Chicago to work the mills, he met this girl from his hometown and they fell in love and got married. Before she met Virgil, this girl had been with this other man from down south-a real evil, vicious freak. He had done time on a road gang for beating a man to death with a baseball bat. Virgil’s wife thought she’d left this man behind her, but he showed up one day when Virgil was at work. He slapped her around, hurt her without making any marks-he knew how to do that. He made her do some things she didn’t want to do. Then the freak told her he would be back, anytime he wanted, and if she told Virgil, he’d kill her man.