Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (14 page)

He was Hispanic, with an old drunk’s face like piss-cured leather, eyes melting, bloodshot marbles. He blinked at her as if she’d awakened a sleepwalker. His fist balled, his arm cocked and stopped inches short of smashing her face in. She looked long and hard at the frozen fist, seeing just who she’d thought he was. Big as a billboard, the wall of knuckles before her eyes was scarred and swollen, bruise-blue and black, and red, red red with blood and lipstick.

If she was startled by the man’s reaction, he was thunderstruck. He looked at his poised fist as if it was only the last and least of his countless betrayers, then let it sag against his drooping gut. She thought he was hyperventilating, but as he grasped himself, she heard the razored breaths as prayers, though in what language, or to whom, she couldn’t tell.

“I know what I want,
puta
,” he mumbled, and ducked through the door into #9. The door-music sounded again, and she retreated to her post.

He never came out.

Crayonne sat at the counter, shaking his head at her. Zoe called her into the office. “You’d think you would know to steer clear of that type.”

“What type?”

“You know.”

“How do you think you know—”

Zoe pointed to the signs on the mirrored ceiling, where only a shifty customer would look, that said SMILE! YOU ARE ON CAMERA!

“I—I—” she stuttered, making the truth feel like a lie, “I thought he was someone else.”

“And if it was him, what would you have done?” Zoe’s round face was all laugh lines. She had rhino hide skin, trouble never penetrated.
But she must know what happens back there, in that booth…

“You don’t even know me! You think you do…”

“So tell me what makes you different. Why did you run away, Vi?”

She defended herself and attacked Zoe until her manager lit a joint, grumbled, “Fuck it,” and dismissed her.

Maybe Violet had to be yelled at or blown off to open up, but she sat down and started talking about Wade, and kept talking until Zoe told her again to get out.

Shaky, Violet rose and went to the door, stopped. “What happens in there?”

“You’re not ready to ask that, yet. Ask yourself this, first. If he came back tonight, could you forgive him? And when he hit you again, could you forgive yourself?”

Violet bought a little TV, some groceries and a discreet, minimalist vibrator with her first paycheck. But when she tried to fall asleep watching her shows in the morning, Zoe’s words banged against each other in her head.

She kept watching. In the week since their talk, four men had gone into #9. Neither of them brought it up. Once, thinking she’d caught Lupe in the act of cleaning up #9, she snuck back. She was not at her perch at the center of the labyrinth, and none of the booths were occupied.

The other booths bore bland, stenciled placards on their doors, announcing the nastiness within—BLACK GLADIATOR STUDS IV, DIAPER PAIL HIJINX, SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMA, and so on.

There was no placard on #9, but someone had tagged the door with a black permanent marker. The ritualized graffiti flare was so dense the words were an abstract picture, but as near as she could tell, they said MAGNA MATER.

She thought she heard someone stir inside, a whisper and a hiss of wet flesh against sticky plastic. She drew in a deep breath and grabbed the edge of the door, threw it wide open and prepared to get hit. But the booth was empty.

It looked just like an Andy Gump porta-shitter, with a molded plastic seat bulging out of one wall and a twenty-inch screen with a coin slot at lap level on the other. The blank screen was indifferently smeared with a streaky antiseptic that made raw chlorine smell like sugar cookies.

The booth was dimly lit by a stuttering fluorescent bulb. The interior crawled with spiders of black ink, every battered inch of the green plastic walls, floor and ceiling swarming with insect initials inscribed in Magic Marker, pocket knife and blood: tags, symbols and names, most rendered with no flamboyant gangster style whatsoever, but in the unaffected, palsied script of the drunk, the drugged, the lonely, the beaten down and the beaters.

So many names.

The booth reeked with the rancid musk of ancient jism, but aside from the names, there was no sign that the booth had ever been used. None of the sticky, omnipresent ooze, here, that coated even the outer floor, despite Lupe’s relentless chemical warfare. No trapdoors, no secret entrance to an underground railroad for damned masturbators, no scent of brimstone, no scorch marks or fresh blood. Nothing but whatever Lupe took out wrapped in towels, and she had foiled Violet again.

Shivering, holding the door open with one foot, Violet put a quarter into the slot. If this was some sort of trap, then surely this was how to spring it, and the thing had chewed up Violet’s brain too much for her to care whether she sprang it on herself. When nothing happened, her sigh of relief was sour with disappointment.

Lupe was back at her perch in the cleaning closet when Violet came out. She must’ve been there all along, but the door had been closed while she disposed of whatever she took out of #9. Her sad chocolate eyes bore right through Violet as she asked once again about the man who went in, about all the men, and where they went.

She learned nothing more, and tried to forget what she already knew, until the night she’d feared and hoped for finally came.

She held down the counter at half past two, head propped up on her sweaty hands, glassy eyes turned inward as she sat watch on the empty store, when he came in.

She told herself at first it was just her eyes playing tricks, like before, because none of the men she’d thought were him bore any real resemblance to him, except in the way they walked like a losing boxer leaving the ring. When she saw him come in the door, she believed it was only a fantasy, a waking night terror.

But it was Wade.

He looked to be at the ragged end of the bender that had driven her away, six weeks ago. His eyes were bloodshot, his skin oily and oozing alcohol dregs and less healthy stuff. His fists flexed at his sides as he stood there in the doorway. Violet opened her mouth to call for Zoe or Crayonne, but her teeth clamped on and bit through the tip of her tongue.

She leaped off her stool. One leg pulled her towards the back office, while the other simply buckled. She caught herself against the frame, rattling the beaded curtain screening the office.

Wade just stood there, looking. She knew what he would be expecting. She’d been collected before, and though her terror was never greater, neither had she ever missed him so much. She hated herself for it, but what else, who else, did she have?

“Wade,” she managed, “how did you find me?” She made herself look up and meet his gaze, recoiled as if slapped when his eyes roved over her. He didn’t recognize her at all. Or if he did, the rage he burned her with where other men felt love had guttered and gone out. The walls he’d built to keep her out were smashed and smoking ruins, and deep down inside where he’d let her in, there was no hurt little boy, no cursed, bestial prince, only a howling vacuum.

Looking into him was like putting her ear to a big conch shell, the rumbling silence of a ghost-ocean where his shouts of love and hate came from echoes without a source. He knew her, but he was past hitting, past begging, far past any words or feelings. He looked like a man bound and determined to drown.

He fed the change machine, then turned and went through the saloon doors into the maze of booths.

“Wade,” she cried out, “don’t.”

A hand reached through the beaded curtains and clutched her shoulder. Surprisingly strong, it tugged her off balance as she tried to rip free and go after him. “Let him go, honey. He’s not here for you.”

She got away and ran for the booths. She hit the saloon doors so hard one of them broke off its hinges and flapped in her wake. She hit the locked door of #9 even harder, screaming, “Wade, come out, baby, I’m sorry, it’s my fault, come out of there, they’re gonna kill you—”

From inside, she heard a choked sob.

She turned to Lupe, inscrutable on her stool in the closet. “Open it,” Violet shouted in her face, taking hold of the cleaning woman’s smock and shaking her like a doll. “Open it, or so help me, if he’s not okay, I’ll fucking—”

“So you forgive him, then?” Zoe’s reasonable voice pricked her panic and instantly flattened it. The manager stood behind her, massaging Violet’s white-knuckled claws off Lupe and pulling her back down the corridor. “His life is not in your hands, honey.”

Violet trembled so hard her words wouldn’t come out in a string. Even now, she couldn’t be of one mind about it. She knew nothing about what went on in #9, but she knew what it meant.

All the men who came in here were of a type, Wade’s type, the kind who hit women, and none of them came out.

How many times had she wished him dead? How many times had she seen his type defiantly roaring at a talk show audience mob, and wished for all of them to burn and hang and be blown straight to a special Hell run by battered women? This, too, Zoe must have known, when she hired Violet. She knew everything. She must have known that, sick as it was, her love for Wade was still strong. “You set him up, you bitch!”

“I told him nothing, honey. He came here, but not for you. Sooner or later, when there’s nowhere else to go, that type of man always finds his way here. It’s just a sort of coincidence, or maybe the Goddess brought you here, to see.”

“You kill them! What gives you the right? You’re not the one to judge him—”

“No, none of us can judge, any more than we can change them. You still think you can change him, don’t you, honey? Well, come into my office, and I’ll show you.”

Numb, she let herself be led. Crayonne had locked the front door and stood outside, pointedly watching the street. They went through the curtains and into Zoe’s cluttered office. Zoe crossed the room and took down a row of binders on a shelf above her desk.

There, on the stained formica-paneled wall, was a single fisheye peephole. Zoe beckoned her closer, bade her put her eye to the hole. “There’s security cameras in every booth, but they don’t capture what really goes on, inside. You have to see it with your own eyes. Go ahead and look, honey…”

Violet pushed back, but again Zoe’s soothing hands squeezed the resistance right out of her limbs. “You want me to watch him get… ki—ki—killed…”

“It’s what he wants, Vi. It’s all he wants, now, and it’s all he ever wanted, and couldn’t have, so he hit you and every other woman who tried to give it to him, and couldn’t. Watch…”

She put her eye to the hole. She saw only blackness, but she heard rustling and the familiar cadence of Wade’s half-snoring, drunken breathing. Clicking, and the booth filled with grainy silver-blue light as he fed the slot. A fine blur of wire mesh before her eyes told her she was looking through the ventilation gills behind and above Wade’s head.

She cursed that she couldn’t see his face or the screen, but the set of his shoulders, the galvanic twitches that wracked his neck, told her all she needed to know. He had gone past the point where he broke and begged forgiveness, and she had not been there. What was going on inside him now, she couldn’t begin to guess.

She wanted more than ever to go to him and pull him out, but the screen blinked and syrupy electronic music snapped on, and she was pinned to the spot.

“Go back to your bitch, then, asshole! Go beat
her
up, and eat
her
fucking food!” The voice on the soundtrack was her own. She was so angry and hurt and wired that night, she knew there probably never
was
another woman. He barely had the strength to beat
her
up—