Sean Beaudoin - Welcome Thieves

“This is good. This is just what I needed,” she said, a trickle of blood from one nostril.

“This is bad. This is not what you need,” he said, wiping it away.

Steak pulled off her dress. Her breasts lolled in opposite directions.

“Jesus.”

“Hera,” she said, knelt and began to lick the tissue around his ruined knee, trace the raw crossing lines. The scars rose, a livid white and then pink, her fingernails following the waves of his tattoo, around the sun and sky and schools of hungry koi.

For an album side they worked their way across the length and width of her futon. It was sensory immersion, action without thought, armpit and convexity and gentle undulation. There was no goal, nothing to attain. At intervals throughout the night she got up for smokes or to change the music. Danny got up to soap his stinking neck and fish out another baggie. Dawn came. They sweated through noon, drank more wine, ordered food. She licked his asshole. He bit her thigh. It was dinner and then midnight and then in a granular, panting lull they listened to Mingus, which Danny knew because Steak said “This is Charles Mingus.” The music was a carnival orchestra, like being jabbed with a fork. It whirled and beeped and honked with glee. In the center of the bedlam was Charlie, who held it all together, plucked away at his bass, sang and hummed and drove the other musicians like sled dogs across the tundra. At any other time Danny would likely have hated this prophet, this Charles Mingus. He would have snapped the dial, searched for ZZ Top or “Separate Ways,” but now, lying across Steak, he understood. Genius was a code pulsed down from a binary star, a revelatory percussive wave. It was math plus rhythm, an equation of intervals, the sound and then not the sound, something that could never be snorted or faked or even approached by the fastest, most devastating sprint across an open, grassy field.

HE WOKE FROM a dream about transmission schematics. Mostly for German sports cars of various makes and vintages, but mainly the 1957 DKW Monza, when Steak kicked the mattress.

She was showered, head powdered, wearing a clean dress.

“It’s Monday.”

“So?”

She gave him a glass of ice water and stroked his forehead, on the verge of confiding something. Even from the depths of his hangover, the cracked porcelain of his brainpan, Danny knew it was too soon for a declaration of love.

But he was wrong.

Steak told him that she was truly, deeply in love.

With her girlfriend.

The one out of town on a roofing job.

Who was coming home.

Soon.

He rolled over and the room rolled with him. “A make-popcorn-while-watching-lawyer-shows-in-pajamas-together kind of girlfriend?”

“No.”

The girlfriend’s name was Lula. Lula worked as a carpenter. Lula had broad shoulders and thick, callused hands that felt like loving bark on Steak’s soft and spoken-for hips.

Also, she was very sorry.

Steak confessed to being empathic, which would make for a bad cable television series but was still a rare and inexplicable gift. She explained that Danny was one of those people with a strain of need running so deeply through their core that she had no defense against it. Steak said this sort of person, him, sometimes barged into her life and ruined everything stable she’d worked so hard to build. She said Danny was a destroyer. A barbarian at the gate. Both emotionally and sexually. Physically and mentally. And right this moment, on an early Monday morning, she had briefly managed to wrest back control.

“So, can you please leave? Like, now?”

He stood, naked, covered in the patchy sheen of their commingling. The bodily proof of forty-eight hours of a deep and genuine connection.

“You’re shitting me, right?”

Steak scratched her calf with the other foot, balanced on one leg like the rare tidal bird she was. If the look on her face signaled anything, it was pure dismay.

And possibly the desire for fresh shellfish.

That Car Again

Danny got to Pizza Monster four hours late, the lot mostly empty.

Except for a mean-looking black Acura, all rims and grill.

His stash was in the walk-in. His cash was in his locker.

For a second Danny considered turning around and driving the truck west, keep going until he ran out of gas or maps.

A guy with a bulge in his waistband sat at the counter. He had huge hands and a nylon jacket and looked like an extra from a movie about swindling the London mob. Danny was scared, but probably not as much as he should be. If the life of a student was one long bong hit leavened with intermittent study, the life of an adult was the acknowledgment that there was only one rule: Everyone gets what they deserve.

Gail was talking to Hippie Tim by the salad bar. Mikey Atta’s forearms shed flour as he snapped a rolled-up towel at the ass of the busboy with the strawberry birthmark. Danny slid next to Miss Kay in the upholstered corner booth.

Her Afro stood straight up, like a silo. She wore blue eye shadow, pretty like a Jackie O blazer: trim, immaculate, lost to another era.

“You’re late.”

“Yeah.”

“Bossman says you’re a shitty worker.”

“Hard to argue there.”

“How’s the knee?”

“Gone. Thrashed.”

Miss Kay tapped salt on her wrist and licked it.

“So in terms of problems that matter, you got my money?”

“No.”

“You got my drugs?”

“Mostly no.”

The big guy at the counter swung around. Danny turned over a fork, readied the tines.

“Look, I know I messed up, but is this necessary?”

“Come again?”

The guy yanked at the bulge in his waistband. Gail walked over to the register. He aimed his wallet, paid, left a nice tip. A station wagon with a bunch of screaming kids idled into the lot. The guy got in the passenger seat and kissed the woman driving. They looked both ways before pulling back into traffic.

“Wait, he’s not yours?”

“Mine?”

“The muscle,” Danny said. “Tailing me around town.”

Air passed between Miss Kay’s lips, more dismissive than angry. “You donkey. I’m not having anyone follow you.”

“You telling me that’s not your Acura?”

They both looked out the window. The Acura wasn’t there anymore. In its spot was a Fiat. And next to that was a silver Hyundai with the license plate NURSE1.

“You wanna live on my salary, you’re welcome to try. But this isn’t the movies. You think I’d work with your dumb ass if I could afford muscle?”

Danny considered the possibility that he was deeply immature.

“Probably no.”

“Probably no,” Miss Kay agreed.

The Hobart clonked through a rinse cycle. The jukebox blared, Axl warbling about the relative sweetness o’ his child. When he was done, Bob Seger turned the page.

“Now do me a favor, genius, and go see if my pizza is ready.”

1965 Cadillac Convertible

Eventually fall dropped in full, red and black, orange leaves sweeping though the grass like arson. Danny put on an extra shirt, changed the antifreeze in the truck. Then Gail announced she was pregnant and quit. A day later Gail’s boyfriend, Zach, came looking for Mikey Atta with a claw hammer, and Mikey Atta quit, too. The busboy with the turban, name of Sandip, now manned the ovens. He was a wizard with crust. Business picked up. Hippie Tim tied on an apron and started waiting tables himself. Business dropped off again.

Danny cranked the radio, waited for texts, cruised the school grounds in ever-widening circles. Past dorms and clinics, past the field house and lacrosse pitch, past groups of kids running shuttles or down on one knee, crosses dug into the grass like spears as they absorbed strategy and tactics, ready to kill each other for the slightest nod of affirmation.