Kelly Link - Get in Trouble - Stories

men unlucky at cards

Lindsey’s job was not a particularly complicated one. There was an office, and behind the office was a warehouse full of sleeping people. There was an agency in D.C. that paid her company to take responsibility for the sleepers. Every year, hikers and cavers and construction workers found a few dozen more. No one knew how to wake them up. No one knew what they meant, what they did, where they came from. No one really even knew if they were people.

There were always at least two security guards on duty at the warehouse. They were mostly, in Lindsey’s opinion, lecherous assholes. She spent the day going through invoices, and then went home again. The wolf man wasn’t at The Splinter and the bartender threw everyone out at two a.m.; she went back to the warehouse on a hunch, four hours into the night shift.

Bickle and Lowes had hauled out five sleepers, three women and two men. They’d put Miami Hydra baseball caps on the male sleepers and stripped the women, propped them up in chairs around a foldout table. Someone had arranged the hands of one of the male sleepers down between the legs of one of the women. Cards had been dealt out. Maybe it was just a game of strip poker and the three women had been unlucky. It was hard to play your cards well when you were asleep.

Larry Bickle stood behind one of the women, his cheek against her hair. He seemed to be giving her advice about how to play her cards. He wasn’t holding his drink carefully enough, and the woman’s neat lap brimmed with beer.

Lindsey watched for a few minutes. Bickle and Lowes had gotten to the sloppy, expansive stage of drunkenness that, sober, she resented most. False happiness.

When Lowes saw Lindsey he stood up so fast his chair tipped over. “Hey, now,” he’d said. “It’s different from how it looks.”

Both guards had little conical paper party hats on their heads.

A third man, no one Lindsey recognized, came wandering down the middle aisle like he’d been shopping at Walmart. He wore boxer shorts and a party hat. “Who’s this?” he said, leering at Lindsey.

Larry Bickle’s hand was on his gun. What was he going to do? Shoot her? She said, “I’ve already called the police.”

“Oh, fuck me,” Larry Bickle said. He said some other things.

“You called who?” Edgar Lowes said.

“They’ll be here in about ten minutes,” Lindsey said. “If I were you, I’d leave right now. Just go.”

“What is that bitch saying?” Larry Bickle said unhappily. He was really quite drunk. His hand was still on his gun.

She took out her own gun, a Beretta. She pointed it in the direction of Bickle and Lowes. “Put your gun belts on the ground and take off your uniforms. Leave your keys and your ID cards. You, too, whoever you are. Hand over your IDs and I won’t write this up.”

“You’ve got little cats on your gun,” Edgar Lowes said.

“Hello Kitty stickers,” she said. “I count coup.” Although she’d only ever shot one person.

The men took off their clothes, but seemed to forget the paper hats. Edgar Lowes had a long purple scar down his chest. He saw Lindsey looking. “Triple bypass. I need this job. Health insurance.”

“Too bad,” Lindsey said. She followed them out into the parking lot. The third man didn’t seem to care that he was naked. He didn’t even have his hands cupped around his balls, the way Bickle and Lowes did. He said to Lindsey, “They’ve done this a couple of times, ma’am. Heard about it from a friend. Tonight was my birthday party.”

Then: “That’s my digital camera.”

“Happy birthday. Thanks for the camera, Mr.”—she checked his ID—“Mr. Junro. You keep your mouth shut about this and, like I said, I won’t press charges. Say thank you if you agree.”

“Thank you,” Mr. Junro said.

“I’m still not giving your camera back,” Lindsey said.

“That’s okay,” Mr. Junro said. “That’s fine.”

She watched the three men get into their cars and drive away. Then she went back into the warehouse and folded up the uniforms, emptied the guns, cleaned up the sleepers, used the dolly to get the sleepers back to their boxes. There was a bottle of cognac on the card table that had probably not belonged to either Bickle or Lowes, and plenty of beer. She drank steadily. A song came to her, and she sang it. Tall and tan and young and drunken and. She knew she was getting the words wrong. A moonlit pyre. Like a bird on fire. I have tried in my way to be you.

It was almost five a.m. Not much point in going home. The floor came up at her in waves, and she would have liked to lie down on it.

The sleeper in Box 113 was Harrisburg Pennsylvania. The sleepers were all named after their place of origin. Other countries did it differently. Harrisburg Pennsylvania had long eyelashes and a bruise on his cheek that had never faded. The skin of a sleeper was always just a little cooler than you expected. You could get used to anything. She set the alarm in her cell phone to wake her up at seven a.m., which was an hour before the shift change.

In the morning, Harrisburg Pennsylvania was still asleep and Lindsey was still drunk.

All she said to her supervisor, the general office manager, was that she’d fired Bickle and Lowes. Mr. Charles gave her a long-suffering look. He said, “You look a bit rough.”

“I’ll go home early,” she said.

She would have liked to replace Bickle and Lowes with women, but in the end she hired an older man with excellent job references and a graduate student, Jason, who said he planned to spend his evenings working on his dissertation. (He was a philosophy student, and she asked what philosopher his dissertation was on. If he’d said, “Nietzsche,” she might have terminated the interview. But he said, “John Locke.”)

She’d already requested additional grant money to pay for security cameras, but when it was turned down she went ahead and bought the cameras anyway. She had a bad feeling about the two men who worked the Sunday to Wednesday day shift.

as children they were inseparable

On Tuesday, there was a phone call from Alan. He was yelling in Lin-Lan before she could even say hello.

“Berma lisgo airport. Tus fah me?”

“Alan?”

He said, “I’m at the airport, Lin-Lin, just wondering if I can come and stay with you for a bit. Not too long. Just need to keep my head down for a while. You won’t even know I’m there.”

“Back up,” she said. “Alan? Where are you?”

“The airport,” he said, clearly annoyed. “Where all the planes are.”

“I thought you were in Tibet,” she said.

“Well,” Alan said. “That wasn’t working out. I’ve decided to move on.”

“What did you do?” she said. “Alan?”

“Lin-Lin, please,” he said. “I’ll explain everything tonight. When do you get home? Six? I’ll make dinner. House key still under the broken planter?”

“Fisfis meh,” she said. “Fine.”

He hung up.

The last time she’d seen Alan in the flesh was two years ago, just after Elliot had left for good. Her husband.

They’d both been more than a little drunk and Alan was always nicer when he was drunk. He gave her a hug and said, “Come on, Lindsey. You can tell me. It’s a bit of a relief, isn’t it?”

The sky was swollen and low. Lindsey loved this, the sudden green afternoon darkness as rain came down in heavy drumming torrents so loud she could hardly hear the radio station in her car, the calm, jokey pronouncements of the local weather witch. The vice president was under investigation; evidence suggested a series of secret dealings with malign spirits. A woman had given birth to half a dozen rabbits. A local gas station had been robbed by invisible men. Some cult had thrown all the infidels out of a popular pocket universe. Nothing new, in other words. The sky was always falling. U.S. 1 was bumper to bumper all the way to Plantation Key.