A DARKNESS PALE
DEWEY
Dewey
Husker Dewey went out again, looking for someone to kill. This particular afternoon he took the horse-drawn trolly down to the shopping center in South East Portland, far enough away from his mom’s home in Alameda so that he wouldn’t be shitting where he ate.
With his cross country skis attached to his backpack he trundled over the packed mint blue snow, past a boarded up Walmart and cineplex to a strip mall. There were always ladies in such places in the late afternoon and it was a lady he wanted to kill.
Through the frosty window of a hair salon he saw a girl working a phone. Chunky, and her make up appeared to have been applied with a paint brush. She put down the phone and stared wistfully at nothing. A dreamer, bored and and very much alone. Husker considered himself excellent at reading people. He thought, could be something, could be promising.
A sign said the salon was closing in half an hour. To get his temperature back up, Husker dipped into a Thai Restaurant and splurged on a Paad Thai with dragonfly larvae, to go. When he came out again she was putting on her skies.
Following her wasn’t hard at all.
Like most of the kids her age, she sported what they were calling the neo Stiva look. She wore a long acrylic frock coat, an imitation beaver fur hat tied tight to her skull with a black nylon scarf, and a clear vinyl visor and welding goggles. What a hipster, especially compared to Husker, who faced the weather with a vinyl cone hat over a beanie, a vinyl poncho over his North Face parka, and vinyl chaps over his Wranglers.
She turned onto 79th street where there were hardly any pedestrians or traffic. Husker felt his stomach tensing. The afternoon light ebbed away and the icy blue snow was picking up. Butterflies with fangs overtook his guts, and he told himself, so okay Mr. Chickenshit. Kill her. Kill her and be Mr. Chickenshit no more. Kill her and graduate into a fully realized psychopath, and then do anything he wanted anytime he wanted.
He wanted to become his dad, the most impressive man ever. His dad worried about nothing. His dad held the world by its balls. His dad told a million stories of his expert nut squeezing. His dad had been a drug sales rep and whenever he’d come home there were always new tales to tell. He’d hold court in the living room with a quart of Jim Beam. Wild stories. Crazy stories. Violence, rape, murder, mayhem. His dad would pretend he was talking about shit he’d heard on the road. Sip from the bottle and wink at young Husker, showing him where to read between the lines.
That time when Husker was nine and they were swimming in Vancouver lake and Husker, as usual, wasn’t swimming so good because he’d always been on the porky side and seemed to posses two left feet. His dad had gotten a funny yet dead look in his eyes and pushed Husker under. Just as suddenly he released him, and barfing up lake water Husker watched him wade over and chat up a lady in a yellow bikini.
They were now skiing past a stretch of desolate car lots, all casualties of the Big Dip. He was almost skiing with her. She turned on Foster and stopped at the Racado. He skied past and circled back in time to see her buy some mud, filling a thermos. Husker was thinking, she sure seems solitary. Hot shit, she really could be the full package. He then told himself not get his hopes up.
Her destination was a sagging four-story apartment building, which, like most buildings these days, had its roof enshrouded in vinyl wrap. A tired neighborhood tavern took up the ground floor. She dipped in the side entrance and minutes later a light blinked on in a shaded third floor window,.
Husker ducked into a laundry across the street and threw his parka, hat and gloves in the chemical dryer. Undoing the belt of his vinyl chaps, which had been digging into gut, he tried to remain nonchalant about peeping at her window, not making eye-contact with the hard Filipino grandpa who wore an Oakland Raiders baseball cap tight on top of his bald head and patrolled the place like one of the Lompoc guards.
Over the course of the next forty minutes he didn’t see anyone enter the building or exit. An old lady trudged into the tavern. A couple of horse-drawn carriages crawled down the street.
He imagined her alone in some sort of dingy studio. Bars and nightclubs and restaurants and you name it, everything was so expensive now thanks to the Big Dip and he didn’t see her making enough at that hair place to engage with any of it. Alone. He visualized her up there by herself with a hot plate and a can of beans and that sad thermos of fancy fake coffee she couldn’t afford.
Husker thought. Stay cool, stay in charge, and don’t pussy out.
…Husker’s housemate, Jacob Sundry, grifter and hairdresser, finds his next mark…