THUGLIT Issue One

A Clean White Sun by Mike Wilkerson

Waiting for her.

Hours spent kneeling and praying with her paperback copy of Falconer in my hands, the book’s cover speckled black with her blood. The terrazzo floor is cold and hard beneath knees raw and burning. Unrelenting, I rest my head on the edge of the bed’s bare mattress, close my eyes and wait for her.

Fading. Booze and Morpheus proceed to conspire against me, allowing only micro-second cuts, flashbacks of a final blinding glance. Numbers blip on a gas pump as Audrey smiles at me through the passenger side window, holding the book she’s been reading to her chest, the white sun on her mahogany skin. I can smell the sweetness of her perfume cutting through the thick vapor of oil and gas and stink of this world.

Eyes flickering. Images floating.

The world’s gone red and I’m reaching, grabbing for her. She’s only a few steps away but like lost halcyon days, never within my grasp.

Spinning free.

St. Petersburg, Florida-Tuesday, July 10th, 1979

The phone ringing and cutting cathartic tendencies short. I grab the receiver and check the time on a glowing bedside clock-11:00-straight up.

“Yeah.”

“Preston Street. Head south off 15th Avenue, a few houses up on your left. Little white shack, bare yard, maroon Crown Vic in the drive. You’ll know it when you see it. Back door opens into the kitchen.”

Standing and straightening out stiffened knees. Tender skin breaks open and blood trickles down my shins and seeps through brown gabardine pants. The pain feels good.

“How many?”

Freddy sniffs. “Two Bloods and a skinny-ass whitebread. Cats be strapped and straight up flyin'. Bad scene, my brotha.”

“Whitebread-the cousin?”

A grunt. “Dig it. Half-assed prison tats on both forearms. Lightning bolts and I do mean Shazam! mothafucka.”

“My nigga.”

Freddy sneezes. “Just remember that, cuz.”

My pulse spikes as the connection buzzes a flatline. I drop the phone, slip on my shoes and grab a black, sweat-streaked t-shirt from a month-old pile of dirty clothes. I don’t even notice the sour aroma of body odor anymore.

Two clean throwdown pieces sit next to a battered gold shield on my dining room table. I clip the shield to my belt and then remember where I’m going, what I’m preparing to do and the price I’m willing to pay.

What I’ve already paid.

Past and present collide and my head does a drunken dizzy dance. I throw the television through the living room wall. Picture tubes explode. Chunks of plaster scatter across the floor and dust fills the air. I toss my shield into the wreckage and grab the hardware, goose a line of flake off the kitchen counter and make my way out the door.

Rolling. Constricted capillaries distend to make room for the river of blood gushing through my veins. Scenarios circulating. She’s been missing going on three days straight, her country bumpkin jailbird cousin off the grid just as long-and alive or dead, she’s already a statistic.

Childhood gone.

Innocence gone.

Morning headlines:

POOR JENNY HUGHES, TWELVE YEARS OLD AND JUST PLAIN GONE.

I grab another gear, drop the pedal, kill the yellow light at 34th Street.

Running east on 15th Avenue South. Hot. This city at night is a sweat lodge and visions appear in the darkness which I know aren’t there-hope in the faces of the hard young brothers who sit on front porch stoops of cribs gone to wrack and ruin. They’re guzzling malt liquor out of bumpers wrapped in brown paper bags. They’re smoking Kool Milds. They’re yapping about poontang. They see me with anxious eyes but don’t care unless I’m buying. The dollar rules, along with despair and destitution.

Teeth gnashing. Perspiration flows down my back and I’m sweat-stuck to the seat as I ease my foot down on the gas, the rumbling of the 'Cuda’s Hemi losing the battle against fleeting minutes screaming Tick!-Tick!-Tick! in my ears even as a realization begins pounding in my skull:

I didn’t call in backup because I’ve got no one left.

I’ve burned all the bridges.

Chances taken will belong only to me.

Regret drives me. I’d given up being a husband to Audrey a year earlier. The detective shield changed everything. Days, weeks at a time away from her, 1976 as a stone blur. Faces-dead faces and scared faces and blank faces crippled me. Shakedowns and kickbacks were justified in my mind to ease the pain, making myself believe I was right.

I ran the gamut even as the grind wore me down. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat. But against my will, she held me together.

She held me together until she fell apart.

Childhood stomping grounds revisited.

Preston Street. Beneath the untrimmed Sabal Palmetto trees and shabby live oaks, faded turquoise and peach-colored houses loiter on barren sandy yards. Rusty bicycles with flat tires and busted chains. Old pots and pans filled with typhoid-infested water being lapped up by oversized mutts on log chains. Trash strewn from here to fucking there.

I cruise by my destination at an idle, a tiny clapboard bungalow with peeling white paint and aluminum foil taped to the windows, a shroud for keeping the heat out or the glare of violence in. I don’t stare and I don’t slow down. I scope the scene-this burg is disco dead. Check it-I’m just another Southside nigger out for a late-night joyride.

One block down, I park in front of a vacant lot void of spillover light from street lamps and kill the engine. One more hit and the blow clears my head, amplifies minutes giving way to seconds yelling TICK!-TICK!-TICK! while sweat runs down my nose and onto the hardware as I re-check their loads by feel in the darkness.

Ready-the.45 in my hand, the.357 backup strapped to my ankle. Jaw clamped shut, teeth ready to crack and implications leapfrogging in my head as I open the car door, knowing I’ve got this one last chance to stop, call it in and do this on the level.

My feet hit the ground and I’m running across the street, sprinting and tripping my way through a backyard overgrown with crabgrass clumps and scruffy orange trees. Limbs slap my face, scrape my arms. The gun is light in my hand and those scenarios and implications are winding on a closed circuit.

Knowing.

I’ve got one last chance to make this right.

Friday, May 1st, 1977. A seven-hour trip would put us in Atlanta, Georgia, Audrey’s hometown. Friends. Family. Home-cooked meals. I got off early on a Wednesday and we would leave that same day.

Audrey met me at the front door, almond-shaped eyes like green pools of water and a smile on her face, the first one I’d noticed in months.

Me, making up lost time: We made love before leaving and she cried in my arms.

Me, making up lies: “Things will change, baby. I promise."

Humping it over chain-link fences, my heart working like a piston in a top fuel sled. Trash cans bang together as feral cats squeal and dance across their metal lids. A backyard dog goes stone batshit.

A kid’s voice from somewhere behind me says, “Who dat?”

A mother responds: “You’s don’t be worrying about who’s out there. You’s just get yo black ass inside and shut dat window!”

One more backyard, one more fence and I’ve reached the bungalow, sucking air while staring at a back door painted red. I feel like a sinner entering hell for the first and last time.

I steady my breathing and ask God if He’s listening.

He doesn’t answer.

I take the silence as approval and kick the door off its fucking hinges.

I was inside paying for gas and buying Audrey a Dr. Pepper when I heard the spattering of shots fired. AK-47 on full auto. I sprinted outside. A blue Chevy Impala with dirt-covered plates laid rubber out into 34th Street traffic. People scrambling and screaming, horns blowing.

Dead in my tracks.

Her blood sprayed onto the passenger side window.

On my knees in a lake of shattered glass, holding her in my arms.

Her blood sprayed everywhere.

Sightline. On a gold velour couch sits a fat-ass Blood with a lopsided fro and wearing a red shirt the size of a tent. He’s eating ice cream from the container. Next to him sprawls a rail-thin and shirtless white boy with blue tattoos on his forearms. Lightning bolts. They’re hittin’. They’re buzzin’. The glass-topped coffee table in front of them is stacked with dope and guns. The air inside smells stale, dead.

Chaos as I cross the kitchen into the front room. Music blaring and lava lamps burning low buffer the two stunned faces with glassy jaundiced eyes. Tunnel vision as the.45 spits-two in the face, and the juiced-up cracker’s shaved head snaps back, a bloody halo spattering on the white wall behind him like a repulsive modern art masterpiece. I want to linger. I want to ask him why.

Ears ringing as I take another step.

Fat Albert’s stuck in the couch, trembling and struggling to get on his feet. Garbled sounds are coming from his mouth. He takes two in the chest with a jerk. He coughs up a glob of blood into his ice cream before falling sideways into his partner’s lap with a confused and questioning look on his bulging face.

Head spinning, blood pounding.

Thinking is a liability. I forego the temptation as I haul ass through an open bedroom door to my left,.45 leveled in front of me and jumping headlong into the kind of nightmare I foolishly believed could exist only for me.

I don’t want to see her like this.

I don’t want to see Jenny Hughes laid bare and tied to the bed with the soiled white sheets turned cherry beneath her. I don’t want to see her soaking wet hair, dark and stringy while sticking to her face and mouth. I don’t want to see the yellowing bruises on the soft alabaster skin of her thrashing arms and legs.

I only want to fall away; for a minute, a day.

A goddamn lifetime.

Strobes of light begin pulsating in my head and the dizziness is back along with a nauseous clarity. The bright-as-day room. The bed. The cheap, walnut-veneered chest of drawers with the busted mirror shoved against a jizz-stained eggshell-white wall. The girl and the empty bottles of codeine-laden cough syrup they’ve forced down her throat.

Me.

Everyone and everything is in their place, but only the sight of him has stopped my world from spinning out of control on its greased-up axis.

And he’s straight zoned.

Big Stud Blood’s in his birthday suit, holding a twelve-gauge pump and fumbling with fat red shells. His feet are moving like he’s standing on burning hot coals and he’s not even paying attention to what’s in front of him-because with his posse out front no one should’ve ever made it this far.

His eyes find me, blink once, twice and then go “OH MY GOD!” wide.

I knew the reasons why, knew the potential implications. The kickbacks. The shakedowns. The time away from Audrey spent living another life, making the excuse that I was owed the money I took. Like a rodent, I’d taken the cheddar from their hands and then tried to turn full circle on the very men who paid me to keep my mouth shut. I was naïve. I thought I could walk away from the game without consequence.

I thought the badge meant I was untouchable.

Scared-another strange face and the girl is screaming bloody fucking murder. I put one in Stud’s thigh. He drops. He cries. Arterial damage and a bloody geyser erupts.

Move-

My pocketknife slices through the ropes. She rolls up in a ball, covering herself down there. My hand on her shoulder and Jenny balls up tighter. She’s so small.

Move-

The brother on the floor yells. I wipe and toss the.45, retrieve the.357 from my ankle and put one in his gut. Lungs push rotten air out through his mouth and into my face. I gag. I aim for his nappy head. The girl whimpers and I see Jenny Hughes’s future as a funneling black whirlpool and my mind screams: Let him fucking bleed!

I don’t take the next shot.

I’ll let him fucking bleed.

Move-

I clean and drop the.357. I wrap the girl in blood-stained sheets, throw her over my shoulder and head straight for the front door, slipping and sliding while making tracks through the puddle of human fluids and melted ice cream before being thrust out into the sultry night.

Booking for my car straight down the middle of Preston Street, the 'Cuda sitting a million miles away. Lungs burning. Legs giving out. Neighborhood porch lights click on and hidden faces appear in doorways, but nobody says a threatening word and no one tries to stop me.

Running on fumes and I’m a million fucking miles away.

I’m at the passenger side door, a stitch like a blade in my side. I stash Jenny, start my ride and stomp the gas. Tires burn, smoke and then grab hold of the pavement. The steering wheel goes loose in my hand as the front end kisses the ground goodbye and I’m flying.

Hemi stroking-end of the block and I hit the corner in fourth gear, speedometer knocking on 60, an orange-red blur slicing through the night. I don’t bother looking back.

The hopeless will continue buying and selling in the streets.

The scared will continue standing still for fear of deadly retribution.

Off duty night moves. For the next two years after the day they took Audrey away from me, I burned this town to the ground. I took weeks of stored-up vacation time off and dug for names, promising anyone who stood in my way that hell would be a better choice than me in front of them, me behind them.

I got names. I got places. I formed big bad habits.

Supplication. I began praying with her book in my hands, the last thing Audrey would ever touch, begging for the reprieve I would never get.

Heading north on 16th Street South. Traffic’s late-night thin. I drop my speed down to the limit. Eyes ahead. Eyes to the rearview. A cruiser passes me going the opposite direction, the uniform’s eyes strafing my ride. Dicey. Window rolled halfway down, a blood-spattered nigger driving a boss crate with a brutally traumatized white girl in tow. No questions would be asked.

Goosebumps. The sticky warm night feels cold and I roll the window up. Jenny’s hunched down in the passenger seat, her moaning like a constant electric hum. Primal-she’s shutting the world out.

I put a hand on her arm. She flinches. She kicks and bites and claws my hand bloody. I reach across the seat and pull her close, her thin body going limp as the sobbing of incoherent words are being choked and jerked from her mouth.

My voice is placid, telling her the same untruths I told Audrey, over and over and over:

“Everything will be okay, sugar. I promise.”

There were two of them. Two second-tier crackers I’d sent to Union County for a deuce. Time served. Shyster’s working overtime.

They served six months.

I took six months from them and they ripped my fucking life apart.

I won’t make excuses to justify. I opened their stomachs while they were still alive and watched them die a slow and bloody death in an abandoned Midtown warehouse for two long days. I’d do it again. Even after the swarming greenbottle flies and the smell of men losing control and their begging, I’d do it again. I’ve already crossed the line and I’ll keep crossing it until He hears me.

Until He understands what living is doing to me.

Next morning, early.

I throw my shield on my Sergeant Brice’s desk. He’s sitting in his shirtsleeves with blue veins plumped out on his forearms and biceps, a reluctant seat shiner. He looks at the shield, lights a cigarette and then stares me down while talking in his raspy phlegmatic voice.

“Don’t let ‘em beat you like this, Mike. Don’t let this…society we live in and what happened to Audrey dictate your life.” He points at me with the cigarette crushed between two nicotine-stained fingers. “We’ve been through this a dozen times in the last two years, so just pick up your badge and walk the fuck back out that door.”

Society. Ghosts. One and the same.

In a nigger drawl, I give him a bullshit self-serving excuse. “Yeah, wouldn’t want the department to lose another token jig.” Bulge those eyes. Shuffle those feet. “What would da colored folk think then?” I shake my head, dig down deep for a grin, come up snake eyes. “Listen…it’s time, Sarge. We’ve both known it for a while now. I’m no good for this anymore. I just can’t fucking do it.”

Brice stabs out his cigarette in a heavy glass ashtray filled with two days worth of half-smoked butts. He doesn’t blink, doesn’t raise his voice. “Token-don’t lay that crap on me. I’ve never been that person, Mike. If you want to call it quits, fine. If you want to make excuses, fine.” The corner of his mouth jerks up and he leans forward on his desk, lacing his battle-scarred hands together. “But you’re not being rational. And you’re a mess, kid. I can smell you from here.”

I want to respond, but have nothing left to say. Sarge still has plenty, though. He takes a breath and lets fly.

“Don’t know if you heard, but the Hughes girl showed up last night.” A head shake. “Bad shape.”

Calm and easy. “Yeah?”

His steel-gray eyes run down and then up my body before settling back on my face. “Somebody dropped her off downtown at the hospital ER and split. Left a note with her. Just a scribbled address, but it was the right address. Fucking bloodbath. Her white trash loser cousin and a couple other model citizens. Looks like the cousin was selling her for cash and dope to his buddies. Him and a fat boy were DOA. The third guy managed to crawl outside, but bled out on the back porch steps. Femoral artery and gut shot. That’s a hard way to eat it.”

I shrug. “Doesn’t sound like much of a loss.”

“Neighbors must feel the same way.” Brice snatches up a pen and gives a rat-a-tat-tat on the desk. “At least six shots were fired but nobody heard anything. And not one person got a plate number or even noticed the make of the getaway car. Tire-burn marks for twenty feet and no one saw a goddamn thing. Sled had to be a beast to lay rubber like that.”

Blood thumping. Mouth like cotton. I dry gulp and nix the car conversation: “Say what? Telling me no one at the ER had anything worth a damn to add? Not one motherfucking thing?” I shake my head, lay it on thick. “Seems kinda hard to believe, I mean, joint’s jumpin’ all day every day. Shiiiit-cops and staff must’ve been all over that motherfucking place!”

“You’d think. But all they heard was the admittance door buzzer. Girl was sitting outside in front of the door. She was sitting there alone in her own fucking blood and just…humming to herself. One of the attendants lost his chow and set off a chain reaction. Whoever dropped the girl off slipped in and out tout suite.”

I lick my lips. “How is the-?”

Brice cuts me off. “I think you know how she is, Mike.”

My right foot starts tapping out of control. My brain’s telling my foot to play it cool. Play it Billy D. Fucking Williams cool. I spread my legs, dig my toes into the carpet and lock my knees. I don’t answer him.

Brice, chewing his lower lip bloody. “Come on, you’ve seen this kind of thing before. Jesus. You know how she is today and you know how she’ll be twenty goddamn years from now.”

I don’t push him. I put my shades on beneath the buzzing and flickering fluorescent lights. “Yeah, I know, Sarge. I’ll see ya around, huh?”

Eyes down, Brice bobs his head of thick black hair, palms flat on the desk. “Yeah.”

Through the cubicles, through the rows of questioning eyes watching me. My legs nearly give way as I step from the building’s sterile air conditioning out into the heat of a new day. I breathe deep-dig that nasty smell oozing from my pores, snuffing out the fresh summer jasmine.

I walk through the parking lot and to my car, the blood-smeared seats covered with beach towels and already frying pan hot. My stomach gurgles. I open the door and heave up yellow bile. I put my head between my knees and mutter the one word which seems to makes sense: “Hold.”

Don’t fall apart.

Don’t lose your fucking mind.

Hold it together.

Ten minutes go by before my hand is steady enough to put the key in the ignition and drive away.

Hindsight and conscience rips and tears at me. Not them, never them. Her. I’d given Audrey the worst years of my life and those same years are what I now have left to live with. I try to tell myself that if she’d left me on her own, because of the man I was, I wouldn’t feel this way because at least she would still be alive. She would have moved on and eventually, I’d have done the same.

Nothing is a lie if you truly believe it.

Only I couldn’t.

Booze and blow, blow and booze. I’d left a running tab with Full Time Freddy and orders to keep product coming until my funds dried up and my credit was gone.

Till there is nothing left.

Drifting. Days turning into weeks of highs and lows, fear and depravation. The phone ringing, me hiding-paranoia at its zenith: It’s Audrey and she knows about my transgressions. The sweet Lord has told her why our lives turned out this way and now she’s angry. She wants to hear the truth from me.

Two weeks in, I rip the phone cord from the wall. It still rings. I chug bourbon. I loop one end of the cord around my neck, the other around a bedpost. Ease into it. Feel that cord go tight around my neck. Feel my head getting light. Feel that badass floating sensation.

Feel that cheap-ass cord go snap!

On my feet and screaming: “Now what, nigga!”

Flip the bed over. Turn the chest of drawers into kindling. Beat your head against the wall until blood’s running in your eyes and down your chin.

Blood blind and raging: “Now what nigga!”

Closet, top shelf. Grab the 9mm, shove it in your eye, pull the trigger-click-click-click. Check the clip and stare in disbelief-what clip?

On my knees, blood dripping on the floor, nothing left. I taste the blood on my lips and mutter to someone I used to know: “Now what nigga?”

Five weeks and fifteen lost pounds later, I hear a knock at the door. Judas window view gives me little Jenny Hughes standing on the concrete landing in a little pink dress and little black shoes over frilly white socks, hands behind her back. The world behind and around her is a radiant summer yellow and hurts my eyes.

I hesitate. I run my sticky tongue over sticky teeth. I haven’t showered or shaved in weeks. The living room is a reeking pigsty. Delivery food boxes filled with moldy food litter the house. Empty bottles of booze stand like desert sentinels watching over the drifts of coke residue on the coffee table. Curtains pulled. Room dark. The a/c is turned down to seventy, countering the subtropical heat outside and I’m freezing.

Hand on the doorknob. My teeth rattle with the cocaine shakes as a voice inside my head begs: “Please don’t do it!”

Betraying myself-you crazy looped-up nigger.

I open the door and Jenny walks in with a large manila envelope appearing in her hand. She turns on a living room lamp I haven’t used for a year.

Pushing a pizza box aside, I sit on the couch and wrap myself in a blanket. Jenny’s picked a picture off the coffee table. Two faces I don’t recognize anymore are smiling against the backdrop of a blue clear sky. She puts the picture down, looks at the hole in the wall and the mess on the floor I never bothered to clean up. Then she turns to me, speaking in a voice as timid as she is small.

“I wanted to die, you know. All that time. I’m scared most all the time, even now, Mr. James. I still don’t sleep so well and my stomach always hurts…but I know…” She stops and bunches her eyebrows and tightens her lips as if she’s searching for a word or an answer and hoping maybe I can provide one or the other.

And then it starts, her tiny hands gripping her pink dress. She’s pleading with me.

“Hmmmmmmmmmm.”

She can’t stop and she’s looking at me and I’m falling apart at the fucking seams. I want to ask how she knows my name, how she found me and how I can possibly respond to the horror she’s been through and will continue to go through. Only I can’t look at her, can’t talk to her. All I can hear is her throbbing hum. My hands go to my ears and I press down tight.

Her hand falls light on my arm. I push her away until she puts both arms around me and pulls me close and I’m crying like a baby on her shoulder, telling my life’s story to a twelve-year-old girl.

Audrey.

The money.

The bloody reprisal.

All of it.

Twenty minutes go by before I can pull myself together. Jenny’s stopped humming, but doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t tell me everything will be okay.

Before leaving, Jenny hands me the envelope. I follow her to the door and see a car waiting for her. Sergeant Brice at the wheel of a navy blue unmarked. He gives me a wave. I hold up my hand and watch the two of them drive away into a bleached-out horizon.

I open the envelope. A school photo of Jenny. Her dark brown hair in pigtail braids with something passing itself off as a smile drifting across her pale face like clouds moving across the sun. She’s trying to tell me everything is all right, only those baby blue eyes deceive and fail to contain her innocuous lies.

I turn my eyes up to the bright sky and then to the brilliant colors of white blossom oleander and rusty crotons growing in my own and neighboring lawns. The sun is warm on my face.

I put the picture back in its envelope, go inside and lock the door. When once again safe in the darkness of my bedroom, I slip Jenny’s photograph into Audrey’s book and proceed to drink and pray and hate myself into a sweet and bottomless oblivion.

Two months down and the cycle repeats itself. I try to right the wrongs. For myself. For others. I hope life will work out for people like Jenny at least.

I live off my hope.

Exercise has taken the place of hate. No, nothing can fully take the place of that. I try, though. I take long runs and I lift weights and I sweat out the anger. Some of it, anyhow.

I’ve talked hours with my old Sarge over beers and bourbon. Brice confessed how he knew it was me who found the Hughes girl. Said it wasn’t easy. The girl couldn’t give a useful description, save for he was black and tall and had dark wet spots the size of silver dollars on his knees. And he stunk like hell. That was all she remembered. The detectives chalked up her fuzzy memory to post traumatic shock. The girl was safe, the bad guys were dead and the case was put in the back of a random file cabinet somewhere downtown.

Only Brice put the timing of my exit from the force and Jenny’s scant description to work. He knew the whole story that morning I stood in his office. My knees. My car. My fetid smell. But he let it die a fast death on an official level.

A few weeks later he showed my picture to the girl and now the three of us hold a secret bonded in blood.

And against doubts new and old, I still pray to God, Falconer in my hands, Audrey in my hands. My knees will never stop bleeding and the terrazzo floor will always be cold and hard. But I continue waiting, knowing full well that God and Morpheus and booze will never let me have her. I know this.

I’ll live out my days and nights reaching and grabbing for her in a blood red world left untouched evermore by a clean white sun. Audrey, only a few steps away, but never within reach. Her smile. Her clean sweet scent. Her iridescent green eyes and soft brown skin.

Halcyon days are gone forever.

Spinning free.