A DARKNESS PALE

RAZOR

…Irie, continuing her spiral, continued on her bender and almost picked up Reba, but instead gave her a book on Taoism…

Razor

Irie was done drinking, again. The whole work week her guts burned like a grease fire and her head felt like it had been pounded into gravel. She was useless. No one at work noticed except for Roddy Tot, who informed her on Friday that if she didn’t get her shit together by the end of day she’d be in trouble. At the end of the day she found him polishing the hubcaps on the truck. Irie said, “I’m still no good. What’s the punishment?”

Roddy Tot glared at her. “Work.”

The next morning he showed up at her place in an old white Toyota truck retrofitted with treads and pulled by two oxen. In back a treated canvas hood was propped over the bed.

Roddy Tot was inspecting her house as she climbed into the cab. “You just letting the walls rot. Let that shit fall down on you like some Philistine temple.”

“Morning Roddy Tot.”

During the time it took him to drive them across town he explained in detail how he personally installed the treads. “Though I’ve got to tell you,” he said, both of them wrapped up in thick wool army surplus blankets, Roddy operating the oxen’s bridal through the open windshield, “all this gonna change. I’m hearing about this outfit up in Vancouver BC that’s ready to mass produce a steam engine. Like more than just what they got going with busses and that beast in the station. Got it hooked up in a kit. Any fool with a tool can install it. All this carriage culture gonna change. There gonna be a lot of horses and oxen out of work in a year or so.”

Roddy Tot said, “Ask you a question.”

“Shoot.”

“You used to fuck people up in L.A., right?”

“Not people, ratshas. Yeah. It was a different time. The rules were different.”

Roddy held up his free hand as though he might slap any more words that tried to exit her mouth. “Don’t start on all that SA bullshit, black. You already know where I’m at. Some motherfucker come at me, I’m gonna put them down. No, where I was going was did you have anything else you did, or did all you do was fuck people up?”

Irie saw Evie in the darkness of her bedroom, supine, her legs angled wide and relaxed.

“I drank a lot.”

“Uh huh. That don’t count.”

“Uh, I wrote screenplays for a bit. That was actually why I moved to L.A.”

“What’s a screenplay – something with the movies?”

“It’s like the story you base a movie on, yeah.”

“And you stopped.”

“Yeah.”

“You get paid?”

“No. I got a script produced but… No, I never got paid.”

“Uh huh. And now you don’t do shit except bust my ass on Thai Chi and push paper around your desk.”

“Guilty.”

“You gotta have real work, and it’s got to pay. Your woman’s gone, ain’t she? She drift.”

“How’d you know that?”

“You think I’m deaf and blind? I know how people act when they’re dealing with the drift. A lot of that shit going on. That woman you were with, you could be lazy with her. But you can’t be lazy no more. Not starting today.”

The job was cleaning out a basement in a large brick home. The deal was Roddy Tot would haul everything away for free and sell what he wanted. They clomped carefully up and down stone steps, moving out what seemed to Irie to be a lifetime of junk. The basement was stuffed with bed springs bent like steel tacos, boxes of broken board games, broken furniture, shoes gone gray with grime, and piles and piles of rotting clothing. She quickly became overwhelmed and tuned everything out except what was in front of her. Roddy loaded it all into the bed of his truck and secured the haul with a tarp.

The whole endeavor took the better part of five hours. Roddy Tot procured a receipt. “This is good for their taxes and it also protects us. Gotta have it.”

They headed to the dump.

Even with all her Thai Chi and hitting the station gym everyday, Irie’s muscles hummed in a way they hadn’t in a very long time. She felt settled. 

“Thank you,” she told him. “I needed that.”

Roddy Tot snorted derisively. “Gotta work. Gotta have a job that means something.”

“We get anything good?”

He shrugged, doing calculations in his head. “That end table was a find. Need some refinishing, but it could pull a couple grand.”

“No shit.”

“Furniture is scarce. I think we got a box of books. Am I right? Didn’t you haul out a box of books?”

“Maybe, there was so much. But yeah, maybe like some old paper backs.”

 “Books are hot.”

“Paperbacks bring in real money?”

“People getting bored with the videos. No new content. And, you know, like that hipster bullshit. Gotta dress funny and get my Moluxhc on and read me some smelly old pulp. They got buyers guides all over the place, tell you what’s cool.”

There were all those boxes of books at the Source Orchard. “That’s interesting,” Irie said.

“Yeah. Some fascinating shit.”

They rode along in silence for a while and then Irie said, “You got people?”

“I got people. I got a daughter. With yours, she tell you when she start to drift?”

“She tried. But she was checked out. I mean she was there, but she was gone before she left, you know?”

Roddy Tot chewed on that. “You worried about catching it?”

Irie shrugged. “Seems random. If it happens, it happens.”

“Ain’t no fucking drift gonna catch me. When you work, you don’t have to worry about nothing. You get shit done and you stay one step ahead. Here.”

Without looking over he handed her an antique coin on a thin chain.

“Thanks,” Irie said uncertainly. The coin wasn’t much larger than a fifty cent piece. A lady’s profile etched across its surface. Garlands pulled her hair back. The detail on her face expressed a form of certitude Irie instantly admired. 

“Some Greek shit. Play with the sides.”

Irie did and a half-moon knife blade flicked out. Irie tested the blade on her thumb. “Whoa, it’s like a razor. Is it worth anything?”

“Naw. You see a ton of them. Ain’t worth nothing. Why I gave it to you.”

…A murder to investigate… Roddy Tot confesses….