Halfway by Tom Macher

Author:Tom Macher [Macher, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Hostages

RAY suggested we take personal inventory. This was on Super Flats, after we’d performed Majors and Group Funked the Circle K, when we were smoking grits and flicking butts at the cans outside Room Four. Seriously, he said. What’s the worst thing y’all ever done? He didn’t care. He was just bored. Think it over, he said. Take your time. Ask a brother. He smiled. Why don’t you start, Tommy, you Georgia motherfucker. You’re probably one of these sheep fuckers, am I right? I hear it works best if they’re on a cliff. So they got nowhere to go but back. Or are you the type to put boots on their hooves, slide right in?

Is that how you do it? Jack Rehab asked Ray.

If I have to, Ray admitted. Now, go on, Tommy. I want real, fucked-up shit.

I was so green. What could I say—I stole shit? Christ. I thought of other things: taking that woman’s food, or a guy whose ass I’d whooped in Georgia who’d come looking for me with a gun and who got arrested and who scared me so much that when I thought of going back to Georgia, I knew I couldn’t—but I didn’t have an answer.

Like most fears, it didn’t matter.

Sweet Daddy said they used to live in a second-floor flat, and I pictured it above a run-down liquor store, bar, or auto supply place. I saw the grit of his past—dirty snow, barred windows, random trash, and smokeless smokestacks of Gary. I thought of his woman, her toes curled, hands upturned, her laugh. He’d said she chewed the inside of her cheek when deep in thought, and I imagined her this way now, in a coffin. One day he’d gotten home early, unlocked the front door, and walked up their narrow steps. A door on this landing opened into the kitchen, and when he opened this door and stepped inside, he found his woman getting fucked on the kitchen counter. He used hand, mouth, and leg gestures to illustrate the position—her teeth buried in the man’s neck, ankles crossed firmly at his lower back. She wore a cotton sundress. Her bare ass slid back and forth on the Formica counter. Panties dangled from her ankle. The man stood, his buttocks exposed, her freshly painted fingernails digging into his back.

What I did, Sweet Daddy said, was stab that motherfucker.

How many times? someone asked.

A lot. Fifteen? Twenty? I might have stabbed that motherfucker thirty times. He rolled the butt of a Newport across his lips, removed it from his mouth, packed it against his thumbnail. I stabbed him until I damn near passed out, I was so tired of stabbing.

When Sweet Daddy first began the stabbing, the man expressed outrage, then shock, and finally fear. Sweet Daddy saw it happen, this range of emotions. Dude pulled his dick out and began running around the apartment, trying, it seemed, to get hold of his bearings. Sweet Daddy kept stabbing him. Over and over. He stabbed this guy, he said, until the guy jumped through the living room window fifteen feet to the street below.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.