Pulse Points by Jennifer Down

Author:Jennifer Down
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2017-06-21T04:00:00+00:00

Mike pulls into a motel. It’s a two-storey place with concrete stairs and ugly wrought-iron banisters, so old that the lit-up sign still says COLOR TELEVISION. Mike jumps out of the car to tap at number 11. The door swings open and a little weedy guy stands there, middle-aged, and kind of shrunk. He blinks, because Mike’s left his headlights on and he’s standing full in their glare. The two of them talk a while. The weedy guy looks like he would have been bullied in high school and probably all his life, but I can see Mike is asking him for something and he’s not backing down. He lights a cigarette, squinting at Deenie and me through the windscreen. Mike gestures for us to come over. Deenie twists around in her seat to look at me.

‘Do you have a bad feeling?’ she asks.

I shrug.

‘You always have a bad feeling,’ she says, more or less to herself, and I hear the click of her seatbelt.

The guy ushers the three of us inside. It stinks like a teenage boy’s bedroom. On the wall is a mural of Adam and Eve. It’s a weird picture—they’re fat child-humans, but not in a cherubic way. There’s something grotesque about them. They stand in a rainforest of blues and greens, trees with figgy-looking leaves. A cartoon serpent is coiled behind them. He looks sad, as if he’s sorry for what he’s about to do.

Mike’s staring at me like he’s waiting for a response, but I don’t know what the question was.

‘Whatever. At this point, a dime,’ Deenie says.

The guy adjusts his balls. ‘Angel will have something,’ he says. He knocks on the door adjoining the next room with his cigarette between his knuckles, smoked right down to the filter, and a woman opens it. Her big red tits and puddingy arms spill from her tank top. I look past her and see that there’s a mural on her wall, too, only it seems to be Moses among the cattails. She sees me looking. She smiles.

She and Deenie sit side by side on the bed like they’re old friends, and I hang in the doorway between the two rooms.

‘You want some too, honey?’ Angel asks me, her medicine bag open on her thighs like a giant slack mouth.

I pull my sleeves down over my hands. ‘You got any dexy?’

‘I just might, you know,’ she says. ‘I just might.’

There’s a scuff le next door, and when I turn Mike and the weedy guy are tussling. Neither of them is any good at it, and it’s almost funny to see them slapping and pulling at each other.

‘The fuck are they doing in there?’ Deenie asks, craning her head to see what I can. Mike’s a head taller, but the little guy’s full of sudden rage. He’s grunting like a pig. Mike pushes him against the mirror, and then into the plastic venetian blinds. They make a rippling sound.

‘Would you quit it,’ Deenie yells. There’s a series of muffled thumps and some more snorting, and then an explosion.

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