Needle Freak, page 19
He shut up.
Hank lay on the floor in the open doorway between the shop and the store where Jack took care of customers and watched Shane most of the day. His eyes followed him, except when Jack got up and went to get something. Then his attention would shift to him and he’d track him with his gaze through the store. The dog didn’t know what was going on, but he knew that things were tense between his two humans and it bothered him.
Toward evening, after everyone except for Shane and Jack had clocked out and gone home, Shane was still out in the shop working on a truck engine and Jack was eating chips from a .99 cent bag of Doritos when the phone rang. He wiped neon orange nacho cheese dust and spices off on his pants leg and picked up the receiver.
“Donovan Automotive. How can I help you?”
“Hey there, Jacky baby. What are you doing, answering phones now?”
“Zane?” Jack said.
“How ya doing, Handy?” Zane said.
“Uh… okay. I guess,” Jack said.
“You are becoming quite the consummate liar, aren’t you?” Phineas asked him.
“Well, I hope you’re doing better than ‘okay.’ You sound better,” Zane said. “Anyway, here’s the thing. You need to keep an eye out for that freak of nature, Steve. Turns out, he ain’t dead. Guess you didn’t hit him hard enough. That or he’s got a harder head than you or I gave him credit for.”
Jack’s stomach turned and the Doritos he had been eating turned into a chunky ball of glue in his belly. “What happened?” he asked.
“That crazy fucker came out here to my house, about scared the tits right off Sasha,” Zane said. “Screaming and, well, acting like a crazy fuck. He was looking for you. I told him to kiss my ass, then I let the dogs chase him off the place. I expected he’d be back, but on that I was wrong. Point being, Handy, you better watch out. He’s probably going to be looking for you. Any chance he might find you? Does he know your real name or anything like that?”
He had already found him, but that was Jack’s problem, not Zane’s. Zane had been good to him and Jack was grateful and he still liked the man, but there was nothing he could do about Steve Walker. If Steve tried anything, Jack was going to have to take care of it himself.
Except he was blind now and he didn’t only have himself to worry about anymore.
Which wasn’t Zane’s problem either.
“He doesn’t know my name. Or… he didn’t know it. He might know it now,” Jack said. “I left a piece of paper with the phone number here on it in the pants I was wearing. They were all bloody, so I took them off, but I forgot. And I thought he was dead, Zane. He fucking looked dead.”
“Shit, man, I seen some dead looking motherfuckers in my time. I’m talking zombie shuffling fucking tweakers, you know what I mean? They looked worse than Steve probably did. Sounds like maybe all you really did was put a dent in his head and give him a concussion. Pissed him off though. My god, what a fucking psycho. I might have shot his ass if I wasn’t worried about the cops going through my cupboards after. I don’t know how you could have stayed with that son of a bitch long as you did, Handy.”
“He’s probably forgot about it,” Jack said.
“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” Phineas said in a sing-song voice.
“It’s a long way out of his way,” Jack said. “I mean, why would he come all the way down here just to find me?”
“Dunno,” Zane said. “But I tell you what, he seemed pretty determined for a guy with a short memory. I’d still watch out if I was you.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “I will. And thanks, Zane. You didn’t have to call.”
“Nah, forget it,” Zane said. “I’m sorta invested in the outcome of this little sideshow drama. Besides, that fucker kicked one of my dogs in the face.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack said.
“He’ll be fine,” Zane said. “I gotta go. Just wanted to give you a heads-up. Stay gold, Jacky.”
Jack smiled. He missed Zane. “Thanks, Zane. Bye.”
He hung up the phone and sat there for a moment. Then he got up and walked out into the shop where Shane was. He didn’t know where Shane was in the shop and he didn’t blindly know his way around out there. They were moving stuff around all the time. He stood in the doorway and listened.
Shane tossed something into his tool box. It landed with a metallic clatter.
“Shane?” Jack said.
“What?” Shane asked.
He was sullen and still angry and Jack was sure that what he was about to tell him would only make him angrier, but he was also sure that he had to tell him. So he told him about Ben Watterson—about Steve—and when he was finished, he waited for Shane to explode. Shane surprised him by not doing that at all. He tossed something else into his tool box then there was a scraping click as he lit a cigarette.
“Why didn’t you tell me this when it happened, Jack?” he asked.
Jack didn’t like how calm he sounded. He didn’t want to be yelled at, but at least when Shane was mad at him, Jack could read him and knew where he stood. He didn’t know what this calmness signified and it made him uneasy.
“I think I hoped he would just go away. That he wasn’t going to do anything,” Jack said. “I mean, I know better. I should have known better. I know Steve. He’s not like that. But I think… and then after a point you weren’t listening to me anymore anyway, Shane.”
“Fine. Come get me when he shows up again and I’ll handle it,” Shane said. He hit the lights and walked around Jack into the store. “You coming? I’m done here.”
Jack followed him out and waited by the truck while Shane locked up. He didn’t know what Shane meant when he said he’d “handle it” and he didn’t like the possibilities. He didn’t have a lot of confidence in his brother’s ability to take care of Steve. Shane had a lot of bottled up rage inside of him, a lot of self-control keeping it in check, and Jack didn’t doubt he would be formidable if he let it out, but Steve was crazy and mean and dangerous as hell. He did not back down from anyone. He wasn’t afraid of anything. If Shane tried to handle him with anything duller than a butcher knife, Steve would tear him apart.
“I know which dog my money’s on in this fight,” Phineas said. He was in the back seat of the truck and leaned forward between the two front seats to talk to Jack. “I have always respected the unbridled malice in our friend Steve. The cruel, calculating, nasty—He reminds me of me. That’s what it is.”
“Don’t forget parasitic,” Jack muttered.
“What did you say?” Shane asked.
Phineas laughed.
“Nothing,” Jack said.
At home, Shane went into the kitchen, cracked open a beer and went out on the back porch to sit with Hank. Jack understood that he wanted to be alone, but he followed him outside anyway and sat down in the chair by the door. Shane was on the porch swing on his left and he pushed against the floorboards with his toe every once in awhile to make the swing move. The chain was a little rusted and it made a grinding sound.
“Shane, you have to forgive me,” Jack said softly.
Shane sighed. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah or I have to leave,” Jack said. “I never wanted to tell you anyway, but I thought you needed to know. All of it. Not just… you know, the shit about me. I shouldn’t have told you, I get that now, but I thought it was what I was supposed to do.”
“It was,” Shane said. “It—You know what? I wish you’d never told me either. I don’t want to know it. I didn’t want to know this about you, Jack.”
“And I can’t take it back, so we’re going to have to live with it,” Jack snapped. He had held onto his own anger since the night he confessed to Shane, but it had been hard and he finally lost his patience. He was tired of dancing around him on eggshells; it didn’t seem to be doing any good. “I am sorry. I can’t keep apologizing for it though and you can’t keep ignoring me and doing this shit or I am going to fucking hate you. I love you. I don’t want that to happen, goddamn it.”
“And where do you think you’d go?” Shane asked.
Jack could have hit him then if he could have reached him without getting up and fumbling in the dark to find him. “Can you not be an asshole right now?”
“You’re right. I’m sorry,” Shane said. “Look, it’s just… it’s a lot. It’s a lot of shit all at once for me to deal with.”
“And it’s bad,” Jack said.
“Yeah, Jack. It’s fucked up. I mean, you were a whore, fine. I could handle that I guess. But what you did—I can’t get my head around that.”
Jack tapped his foot and didn’t say anything for a minute, afraid that he would start shouting at him if he did. On one hand, he could understand it from Shane’s perspective, but on the other, it made him angry; Shane could forgive him for being a whore, but he could not put himself in Jack’s shoes long enough to even try to understand the rest. How very noble of him.
“You have no idea what you would have done if our situations were reversed,” Jack finally said.
“I would never have done that,” Shane said.
“You might have done exactly that,” Jack said. “You might have done worse.”
“I wouldn’t fuck strangers for money and I wouldn’t murder people,” Shane snapped. “I don’t care how you try to justify that shit, Jack. There were other ways.”
“Don’t you fucking tell me about my options, Shane,” Jack snarled. “You are not me, you weren’t there, you were here and you were safe and loved and taken care of and—Don’t you fucking preach to me. It’s easy for you to look down on me when you’re up here and you don’t have to fuck people for money because you finished high school and you can get a job because you have an address that isn’t a motel room and references that aren’t made up. All I ever had was me and then there was Steve and for a little while I could catch my breath sometimes thanks to Steve, so yeah, I did some shit I’m not proud of to keep him happy. You won’t understand this either, but it wasn’t an option.”
“Jack, you fucking killed people,” Shane said slowly, like Jack just wasn’t understanding that part and how important it was.
He understood it fine. “I know,” Jack said.
“All right, what if Steve hadn’t tried to kill you and you hadn’t fought?” Shane asked. “What then? Would you have ever stopped? Would you have ever come home?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said.
“Because you didn’t belong here,” Shane said flatly. “You, what? Belonged out there strung out on dope, getting fucked all the time for money, probably beat up all the time, living with creeps like… I don’t know. You seem to be doing okay.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m awesome,” Jack said, touching a hand to his cheek below one blind eye. “Certifiably well-adjusted, that’s me.”
Phineas giggled off to Jack’s right.
“I just meant, maybe you were telling yourself that so you didn’t have to come back here and you could keep doing... what you were doing.”
“Right, that’s it. Why didn’t I think of that? I actually loved being a junkie prostitute indentured to a psycho killer who fucked dead women.”
“Oh, my god.” Shane sounded horrified and Jack remembered; he hadn’t told him that part before.
“Most of them do it, you know,” Jack said. “Fuck the dead bodies. I don’t get it.”
“Jesus,” Shane said. “This is what I’m talking about. How can you not know that something like that is fucked up and wrong, Jack? You’re not stupid.”
“No, I’m not, but we’re from different worlds, Shane,” Jack said patiently. “How can you not know that?”
“The same things happened to me,” Shane said quietly. “I didn’t—I’m not… It happened to me, too. You can’t blame what happened for what you did.”
“The same things did not happen to you,” Jack said. “But fine, sure. And I don’t. But then life happened and mine took me to bad places full of bad people and… You think there was always a choice, but there wasn’t. I don’t know how to make you understand that.”
“Why did you…?” Shane stopped, took a breath and blurted, “Why did you fuck me? I mean, is it just because… I mean, did it not matter? I’m your brother. You had to think…”
“Yeah, well, it takes two and I didn’t make you do anything,” Jack said. He winced the moment the words left his mouth. He didn’t want to hurt Shane, he wasn’t trying to be cruel, he was just frustrated by his inability to make him understand. He was also coming to realize that there was no way to be honest here without hurting him and it was too late to take any of it back. “It mattered, but not the way you think,” Jack said, trying to be gentle. “It’s sex. It’s just not a big deal to me the way most people think. But I love you, so it’s different.”
“It’s not a big deal. Because you were a whore.”
“You know what, yeah, probably that’s got a lot to do with it and thank God for that, really. Look; me and them, we had an agreement. An understanding. That was business. Steve wasn’t business. Half the time, Zane wasn’t business either. He was running it to me on charity or just because we liked each other. You are not business and I love you. So don’t try to make me sorry for it because I’m not.”
Shane shifted in his seat. “Okay,” he said after a minute. “We can’t do it again, Jack. It’s wrong.”
“You want to though,” Jack said. “I don’t see why it has to be wrong. No one has to know but us.”
“No,” Shane said.
“Okay,” Jack said. “But remember; this is your decision.”
“I need to go… somewhere,” Shane said, abruptly standing. “I can’t… I just can’t do this. I have to think and I can’t think.”
“You have to forgive me,” Jack said. “Otherwise I have to go.”
“No, just… You’re not going anywhere. Just… Fuck, I just need some time,” Shane said. He called to Hank and the dog came running out of the tall grass toward the house a second later. “I’m gonna go walk. Don’t follow me, Jack.”
Jack laughed. If he tried, he would get lost. He had no mental map of the area surrounding their house. Shane sometimes forgot that Jack was blind now though because he was what people liked to call “handicapable”.
“I won’t,” Jack said.
Shane left and Jack sat there until he couldn’t hear his receding footsteps anymore. Then he went back into the house and turned on the TV. He couldn’t see it, but he could hear it, so he selected a channel playing a nature program about the snow monkeys in Japan and rested his head back on the sofa as he listened to it. It did make him sad that he was blind now, but most days he went about his business in a way that people never knew it. He had bad moments, bad hours, bad days even, but they were private. In those private times, he sometimes did allow himself to indulge in a little self-pity. There were things he could never do now, doors that were closed to him forever and calling him handicapable did not change the fact that he had seen everything he was ever going to see in his whole life already.
He would never again see Shane and that hurt a lot. He hadn’t been thinking about that when he drove the needles in, he had just wanted all the shit with Phineas to stop, to finally be free of him. If he had it to do over, he would not do it, but he hoped no one ever asked him that, especially not Shane. He would have to lie.
“You did it to yourself, you know,” Phineas said. He sounded like he was sitting in the easy chair where Shane liked to sit. “You’ve no one to blame, not even me.”
“I know. Shut up,” Jack said. “And get the fuck out of my head.”
“Oh, please, your head is like a sack full of rabid squirrels,” Phineas said. “Why would I want to spend any time there?”
“Stop it,” Jack said.
“How is that working out for you, by the way?” Phineas asked. “Being blind. Doesn’t seem to have helped you one bit. In fact, you seem slightly more mad than you were before.”
Jack turned the TV up a little.
“And I wonder about things, you know,” Phineas went on, unperturbed. “For instance, do you think your brother would have fucked you if you didn’t blind yourself?”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything. It’s a series of events leading to one thing or the other. Butterfly effect, I think they call it. If a butterfly farts in the Amazon, there’s a tidal wave in New Guinea a hundred years later. If you poke pins through your eyes at the end of October, by the first of December, your brother’s fucking you on the floor like he paid for the privilege. See?”
Jack sighed. “Go away,” he said.
“It’s almost Christmas, you know,” Phineas said. “I wonder what Shane wants for Christmas, don’t you?”
“No,” Jack said.
Phineas laughed. “Ah, well, maybe you already have an idea.”
“I’m nobody’s Christmas present,” Jack said.
“Not true, not true at all,” Phineas said. “I remember one year at Christmas. You know the one. They bought you for a bachelor party on Christmas Eve. Everyone had a little taste of Jack Handy—except for that one plump fellow who turned red as a beet when they asked him if he wanted a turn. Now, that was some Christmas. Seven hundred dollars later, I think you woke up on the floor in the bathroom the day after Christmas. But I had fun.”
Jack needed to invest in some headphones or those little bright orange earplugs, he decided. First chance he got.
He hated that he couldn’t see the snow monkeys.
“I wonder what your dear brother is going to decide,” Phineas said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jack said.
“Doesn’t it worry you?” Phineas asked. “You might have to make good on your threat and leave and then what? There’s nowhere to go and now you’re blind. A blind boy prostitute, imagine. Do you think that would drive the price up or down?”
“Up, if you play it right,” Jack said. He had thought about it. “It’s the novelty of the thing. It’s exotic.”
