Excerpted from Three Sheets to the Wind

Jack followed the kid through the twilight haze. The nape of the kid’s neck winked from under his wool collar. Jack was not right, had not been right for so long that he was starting to forget what it felt like. He had found the root, but he could not dig it up, and so it grew longer, more prying as time went on. The two figures moved swiftly. Above them, stars and fog curled together like fingers on a bit of gold.

The kid had cried and Jack had hidden him in his barrel arms, and now the kid was embarrassed, and trying to show Jack a good time.

-Just around the corner, the kid was saying. When I give three peeps, they’ll open the door, sure.

He pursed his cracked lips; practicing.

Jack thought back. The kid smelled of alcohol and creeper, and a little of violets. His hard-on sticking out through his thin pants, bolder than his wet face and talk of home. Had the doorway been deeper or Jack been in a different mood, he might have pushed him back against the Sailor’s Home and sucked him off. Jack’s mouth was agile. It comforted. It dolled up. It spoke a language that his groping words could not articulate.

-Hey. The kid nudged Jack. You won’t say nothing will you? It would bend me down to them, you know? They treat me ok, but they like some fun.

A callus rubbed on Jack’s heel, where the leather had broken off from the sole. It was night again (it was always night) and his knuckles were shiny black from fighting. This time he had been swinging his fists for air.

-Ok, yeah.

Jack used his blind eye as bait, and it scared most pugilists pale. In his stillness was an insolence of unknown quantity. The kid had not seen him fight, but his head was full of rumors and he snuck a look at Jack’s bruised right side. He marveled at how the putrid eye-sack hung.

They stopped on a slovenly doorstep, covered with a thick paste of smashed bottles and food. Jack shivered. They had wound far up (near the soupy smell of Chinatown and hot music), and still the wind sluffed at them from the water. Noticing, the kid made his three soft peeps. There was a half-pleading look to his face. He wanted Jack to think of him as Ace.

-Hey. A groggy voice slid up from the dank cellar door. Get down here. This stuff is real nice….

Jack gnawed his lip. How many times had the same kind of door swung in his face? The flat smell of old liquor hit him with a sagging gravity. Not for the first time that night, he felt that his tongue was not his own, but a thick monster, a muscle wasted from misuse.

-Uh, muttered the kid. The party’s hot. I’m heading in.

The stairs went down forever, curling into the waste of the building. Jack’s body bent into a ruckus of elbows and stooped parts. He was swollen, and could not keep up as the kid slid and dodged down into the dimness. His feet pounded on the weak wood. The house shivered, as if it would not bear his brute body. It was that ticklish vertigo of new penetration. The walls, though foreign, pulled him into their damp husk. So complete was the darkness, it seemed to his struggling one eye that the exit had closed up entirely, or that it was never there. The idea soaked Jack in sweat and still he spilled on.

In the Dandy-Hole, they were waiting his arrival.

The Ruffler gang was an odd one. Though most had been sailors, they had since forgotten the smacking health of the sea or the sight of bronzed arms. Instead they dressed in front of long mirrors, sucking their cheeks at their fresh-thieved finery. They were drawn to velvets, diamond under-jackets, and anything current and costly. Having cracked an oyster called morality and found it rotten, the Rufflers chucked it to the side. Now the Barbary Coast amply obliged them and they pilfered at will. In sore moments, they would offer up one or more of their pink asses to the indelicate tastes of the superior class, but that was dirty work and they strove against it.

-Think he’ll show?

Word had come that their newest kid was bringing home a guest and that it was One-Eyed-Jack, prize-fighting boxer and genuine Barbary bugger. They were ready for a laugh and a lookie. A keg had just come down the steps with grain alcohol of unexpected fortitude, and already they were riling for it.

-Hush ya louse. That’s him on the stair now.

Half-dozen or more of them lounged in the basement hole. Further back into the den, more Rufflers sawed off or slept. The air was thick with the noxious off-gas of processed drink from their stinking bodies.

Heard he’s got a pole the size of California.

Yeah and he boxes with it!

Beaters. My sis says he struck a guy dead with it!

Jack’s hollow stomp sent timbers into each slummy heart.

-Sssst!

-Suck it, that’s what I say.

Jack tripped on the bottom stair and came through the doorway cursing. The effect was a hot poker to the room. Instead of quieting down, the men became a gang of parrots in a crooked old tree.

The kid leaned hard on the wall and watched. Here was his prize being frisked by the grubby paws of the Door-Dick. The Dandy-Hole was kept pistol-free, but small knives and chunks of glass in pocket linings were let slip through. The kid’s gaze grew more sullen as the Dick’s fingers lingered around Jack’s mid-quarters and worse, on his burly thighs. He rubbed his grimy belly where it suddenly ached, and gulped a drink. He wanted to undo the night--pull Jack back up the stairs, down the hill, and to a wine dump of no-place particular. He almost wished he was crying again, just to have Jack’s rankness close.

Jack was speared by the Dick’s grasp. His gut told him to wrestle away and swiftly deliver himself from the crummy fumble on his groin. But the sharp eyes of the Ruffler lads were buoying him, sticking him to the very moment. Fucking louts. Jack’s pride held him still.

-You get on with it, he hissed at the smirking Dick.

And as if it had never started, the Dick stepped off, leaving Jack panting in a smeary, smoke-drenched room.

-Izzat really him?

He braced himself for a sucker punch or a grunt with a knife. He saw it in their eyes. But they held off. The rawness of his presence was a threatening weight, an alternate velocity.

It was the dusk of the buggers. These men were almost not men at all, but foxes glinting in the lantern light. Unlike the simple milkyness of sailors, who opened their thighs thoughtlessly, here was something else. An elegance of deceit, a cramping, a compression. Jack was unable to sense them, and though he sniffed arousal, it came with an unfamiliar ointment.

Taking a jar of liquor from a sunken table, he drank it back. A skinny man in a Chinese gown stared at him from a corner, his gold teeth surging through the dim light. Another Ruffler glistened pale and topless. On his neck he had wrapped a series of fur stoles. Once Jack had been scrutinized, they seemed determined to ignore him. Talk moved past him with broad berth, until he became so uncomfortable that he fixed sullenly on drink.

Left so astern, he could not pick the kid out of the steamy pond of man parts. The whole place reeked with the indolence of laudanum, layered on top of the sweet smell of the colorless juice in the keg. Damn cry-mouthed kid.

The party pigged on unmercilessly.

Crushed and swearing to himself, the kid sat down on the floor and drank.

And drank.

Jack became loose. Then he turned itchy. He was crawling, weeping with bugs. His lips were numb and he drained his jar to revive them. His largest desire was to tear off his shirt.

-Kid! He yelled.

He was reminded of standing in the hot sap of a hurricane. The noise was immense. Riotous. He was dimly aware that before the noise, there had been a vast silence—a nothing. And now this roaring shook him. God he felt good.

-Kid! He yelled again. Or had he said it at all? His lips were numbing up his cheeks. They were taking over his face.

Jack twitched for the stairs but all he could see was the rapidly multiplying backs of the Rufflers. Their furs turning to a yowl of mink face and otter.

-Howazza! He shouted, then lurched over a body on the ground.

There were bodies all over the ground! He could not move without stepping on flesh. The lanterns swung in staccato, a burning light in his eye! His face was stuck in a terrible, teeth-baring grin. God drown him in the ganged up sea but do NOT strangle him here, against the armpits, the clammy skin, the rude members of men.

Jack’s mouth made a broken sound. He fell against the bulky form of the keg. EMBAL… A blurry sequence of letters rose in front of his eye. EMBALM…

He could not read it, because of the excruciating black.

 

© 2005 Jessica Arndt - Contributor's Bio