A Golden Yellow Cage
THis story was first published in the now defunct
Crime Factory Magazine
They invited me over just for drinks and not, they said, to talk about it again. Christina paid me and Turk massaged my shoulders but the serenity didn’t last once he opened his mouth. Why did I ever mention Cobb to them? I wanted to go home, tell them this wasn’t working, that they could just visit me at the club. I couldn’t come to their place anymore. It was too much. It was all just too much.
“It’s simple. We’ll handle the hard part. All you have to do is get him comfortable, and just slip this into his drink.”
Turk held up a small baggie of pills.
“You’ll need three.”
“Christ Fel, one of these is enough to drop a rhino. Give him three and we’ll kill him.”
I laughed in anger. “You really don’t understand how big these guys are.”
“You keep saying ‘these guys’. Is there someone other than Cobb we should be thinking about?” Turk’s mind raged then, I could tell.
He was thinking about all those guys and all that cash.
“No, no. Cobb is the only one that’s ever taken me back to his apartment.”
“Then Cobb it is.”
I drank the rest of my bourbon and nearly shattered the glass putting it back on their granite countertop. Christina put her hand
on my leg and rubbed. Her creased eyes watched me. At the club, we had a name for girls like her. She was a hard thirty-five, a woman
that could be ten years on either side but pass for both. Fit and trim but tired, the lines in her face tracing the smokes and the
alcohol and the drugs and the sleepless nights, she was pretty enough to be taken home and then just as easily discarded.
“If he goes to the police, he’ll have to show them. The moment he shares the pictures a cop, a secretary, a clerk, someone in that
precinct will tweet, or Facebook or God knows what else and they’ll be everywhere.” Christina’s eyes went big and round. “Everywhere.”
“A guy like that can’t risk it.” Turk paced. “No one will care that he’s being blackmailed. They’ll just see the pictures and judge
and his career will be ruined. Trust us Fel. He’ll deal.”
I poured the rest of the bottle into my glass and drank out the bottom. Christina slid it away and lit a joint, toking and then
putting it in my mouth. I took the hit with her hand still holding. Her pinky finger caressed my cheek. I waited for the head rush to
subside before responding.
“How much?”
Turk nodded his head a lot then; he knew I was in. “The contract he signed this summer was for sixty-five over five years. So what
is that? Like thirteen a year? I say we hit him for five hundred. That’s like less than four percent of one year’s salary. No way he
wouldn’t deal on that.”
Beautiful natural light flooded their apartment. The windows across from the countertop tilted forward. At night, after Turk passed
out, Christina and I would lie against the glass and lord over the streets. Turk and Christina were like a king and queen and I was a
lovely maiden come to service them. Or Roman aristocrats. Yes, more like that. Because they didn’t have much power but they had
everything else people envied. They were my patrons and I felt protected.
“We split evenly.”
“Well no.” Turk stood up and opened his antique liquor cabinet. “I’m the one with the most risk you see, because I’ll actually
be in the pictures. On the off chance anything goes wrong, they’ll have me in the evidence.”
“But he knows me. He’ll accuse me first.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that. You can just claim ignorance. Say we drugged you too. Actually.” He tapped his chin and then nodded
at some incomplete thought. He pulled my cup back and poured from a new bottle, throwing the old into their double sink. “That’s a
great idea. We drug both of you. That way you’re completely covered. Any screens will show it in both of your systems. You could say it
happened at the club. Oh, this is genius.”
“Turk please, that’s not necessary. It wasn’t necessary any of the other times,” Christina again.
“Can we please just stop talking about this?” I rubbed my temples.
Home gigs were tricky, so much cash and every time I asked for more they gave it to me. But we would finished so late, and the bourbon
and the pot, and before I knew it the sun would wake me and we’d all still be naked on the floor. Days and nights tripped over each
other, and my emotions, well, I guess my emotions weren’t as easy to sort out as they used to be. I was twenty-six, but already the
hard little bits of me were crumbling to dust.
“I just want to make sure we’re straight, because it has to happen soon.”
He kept going on like that for the next twenty minutes while I smoked most of the joint and the second bourbon bottle sloshed towards
empty. Christina looked lovely to me then, as she always did once I had drank enough to believe she was someone who could cure my
isolation. I played with her hair while Turk walked the room, talking to no one in particular. She and I kissed and after a few
minutes he finally gave up his pontificating and joined us. We didn’t bother going into their opulent master bedroom, the one with the
sweeping drapes over the ceiling to floor windows and the grand California king, lost in the massive space. No, we did it right there
in the kitchen. Turk placed me on the countertop, beside the microwave and the blender. Christina helped and they both took their time
and I didn’t mind. God help me but I never minded.
I wouldn’t see them for two weeks. I did see Cobb though. He came to the club, hanging out in the back like always. He knew people
recognized him, but the bouncers were good men and our manager, Reuben, while a bit of prick, knew how to treat VIPs.
Cobb stalked me from there. Of course I couldn’t see his eyes through the neon, but when I took the stage I danced just for him. I
didn’t care about losing cash, just a bunch of horny stockbrokers who tipped like shit anyway. No, when Cobb was there it was all for
him.
My set ended and I worked the room, approaching him last, gauging the flame of his jealousy when I touched a John’s lapel, licked
another’s ear. Cobb hated it, but it turned him on too.
“You take too long.” Even the thub thub of the club’s house music couldn’t strangle the low strong chords of his voice.
“I’m not in any hurry, Mr. Cobb.”
“We’ve got a home game this weekend.”
“Do you?” I giggled and acted like I didn’t understand his meaning.
“Seeing as how it’s Tuesday, we don’t have practice until tomorrow night.”
Enjoy the moment in the club, I told him, don’t be so keen to leave. The thought of going back to his place conjured an image of them,
and more particularly of Turk and the things he wanted to do to lay this mighty man low. I couldn’t go back to his house tonight. If I
was going to betray him, it’d be once and I’d let it all crash down at the same time.
Reuben stood in front of the backroom curtains, his bald pate reflecting high green lighting. Cobb guided me, handed him a pair of
hundreds, the implication of privacy and no time limit explicit in the one gesture.
With other Johns, I had a routine. Start with flaunts, work the inside thigh, gyrations and an open palm, end on top with furious hips.
It could be clinical, but it ensured another song and more tips. The songs didn’t matter with Cobb, the time didn’t either. Sure I knew
he’d take care of me, I couldn’t remember a time he hadn’t handed me at least a roll of five hundreds or more. But just being close to
him, smelling his Clive Christian and rubbing his wonderfully starched oxfords, created within my heart a potent swell of belonging.
After the fourth song I collapsed next to him and tried to catch my breath. He smiled and my leg stayed draped over his waist.
“Damn girl, you know how to make a man feel special.”
I laughed. He wiped drops of sweat from my neck. “You’re a special kind of guy.”
His hand rested on my hip, heavy and long enough to cover me from front to back. No one really understood just how big they were. Only
a few hundred men in the country could do what they did. When I was with him I felt like a little girl, a feeling I abandoned long
ago.
“I missed you.” He patted, absently.
“Yea?”
“Yea, yea I did. We were stuck in Cleveland last week. Coach didn’t want us coming home because we were playing in Cincinnati Sunday.”
“Never been.”
“Ain’t missing much.”
“Is it clean at least? Everything here is so dirty.”
“Cleveland can be, yea. But the streets are the streets and dirty means something different to every city. I got some family there.”
“Extended?”
His quiet rolling laughter spread between us like fog. “I have an Auntie that lives there, yea. But also one of my exes with my little
boy. Ain’t easy avoiding that situation for more than a few days.”
“Kids complicate things. I’m assuming.”
“They do. I just want things to be simple. Like with you. Things are so simple here.”
“I missed you too.” I rubbed his strong belly.
“You sure you can’t come back tonight?”
I’m sure, I said. Too much going on in the morning, too many things to do. Cobb didn’t want me back at his place anyway, he wanted a
girl. He wanted pussy. I was lonely, sure, but I thought of his five hundred dollars. Turk’s plan could pay off a hundred times that
much. I couldn’t entertain this man another ninety-nine times to make up the difference. The heartache alone would suffocate me.
Another week without word from anyone. Nights I spent picking up extra shifts, my days I slept, drank and had one way conversations
with the bird in my apartment. My place was so small; I bought a parakeet to help repress the isolation. She didn’t talk. She didn’t
tweet, didn’t sing. She just sat on her perch and pecked at her food. It was the saddest Goddamn thing I’d ever seen. I talked to her
for three hours one night just hoping for some kind of noise.
I had almost assumed the plan was off, until Christina and Turk met me outside the club after my last shift at four in the morning. He
was wearing a suit, which I thought was odd, but she looked plain as usual.
“Tomorrow.” Turk said, sipping on a joint.
The rain had subsided but slick asphalt stretched the neon.
“I don’t know if he’ll be in tomorrow.”
“You said he always comes in on Tuesdays.”
“I said he usually comes in on Tuesdays, and besides, it’s only if he’s in town.”
“He’s in town.” Turk pointed his phone at me. The white screen forced my eyes to a squint in the dark alleyway. “They have a home game
this Sunday, last of the season.”
“I can’t guarantee he’ll be here.”
“He’ll come and don’t worry. We’ll be here too. We’ll help you through.”
Thin jeans did little to abate the wind so I pulled the top of my jacket over my exposed neck. “I gave it some thought, and I don’t
want to be the one to put it in his drink.”
Christina smiled and put an arm around me. “Sweetie, of course not! That’s why we’ll be here. Turk’s great at making conversation.
He’ll introduce himself, really buddy up to Cobb. It’ll be just like a normal night. Take him for a dance. Do what you always do. We’ll
take care of the rest. All you have to do is get him back to his place. Once we’re there, we can take care of everything.”
Her words flapped a sing song rhythm. She reminded me of a story my mother used to read, something about a witch lulling sirens to
sleep. Or maybe it was the other way around. I never knew if she really liked that book or if it was the only one we owned.
We agreed that if he came in tomorrow, that’d be the day. A small part of me wished Cobb wouldn’t make it. Maybe he got held up in
Green Bay, or maybe he decided to stay home with his girlfriend for the night. I began summarizing the things I knew about the man, his
interests; playing the sax, watching war movies, his love life. He had a girl here in town but another mistress down in Florida whom he
saw regularly, his kids, three from two different women, neither of which he was dating.
Did the people in a man’s life define who he was? I didn’t love Cobb, I couldn’t. For all his kindheartedness he was still just another
man in the club looking for attention he wasn’t getting elsewhere. I imagined my opinion of them was similar to the way a corrections
officer views prisoners. They were human beings sure, but the location changed them, made them something else. That was the club for
me. The front door might as well have had bars.
Cobb did come. And true to his word, Turk made contact, wearing a different suit than the night before. I had to give it him though; he
was a con-man of the first order. He never said where he was from, or who he represented, just wrapped an arm around Cobb’s immense
shoulders, paid for his girls and his drinks, spoke only about sports; a sales pitch with nothing to buy. And Cobb loved it, loved
feeling important. It was the one trait I knew I could always go back to. Make him feel special, different than all the rest and he’d
never leave your side.
The alcohol helped, but sill, I was less nervous than I thought I’d be, so relaxed I almost missed Turk handing him the drink. But his
glaring eyes rose like an angry dawn from behind Cobb and I knew it had been done. He extended his elbow to me and when I took it, he
placed my hand in the big man’s grip, my red nails quickly swallowed by thick fingers.
I skipped the normal chatter, the little exchanges we shared. I threw at him all the sex nine years of dancing had taught me, nine
years, starting when I was seventeen, lying about my age and knowing no one cared because my legs were long and smooth and I could
twist with the veterans. His gropes were harder than usual, a side-effect of my grinding or the chemical cocktail working his veins, I
couldn’t be sure. Lust, his enraged passion as he lifted me with small effort and turned us to the side, then atop me, in control, it
all felt normal. He was too massive and too rich and too famous for the bouncers to do anything about it.
A whisper in his ear, a siren’s call to action, I urged him home, take me back to his castle of an apartment and bed me, in his
chambers, like a true king, a Caesar.
Later that night, when Cobb passed out, the blankets doing little to cover his toned and bulbous physique, I didn’t have to answer the
door when they tapped. I wondered where my life would be if I pretended to stay asleep, nestled below him, muffling the sounds of my
arrangement with the drape of his hard bicep. I’d never know.
*************
“You need to see him again. It’s the only way we can get the heat off.”
“Are you crazy?” I lifted the note from Turk’s mahogany dinner table, waved it in my hand. “Have you read this? People came by the club
last night.”
“You’re the only one that’ll be able to diffuse this thing,” Turk leaned in as he spoke, his tie dangling. I wanted to grab it and hang
him from the ceiling fan.
“You’re insane Turk, insane. He doesn’t even know who you are.”
“He knows who I am.”
“No, he knows what your dick looks like because you took a picture of it in his mouth. But none of these,” I pushed the black and white
photos across the table, all of which had been returned in the envelope to the correct place Turk had assigned but without any money.
Just a note. “None of these have your face in them. Which means, you don’t have anything to worry about, do you?”
He sighed and turned on the tap, drinking a glass of water and then sitting down beside me.
“I’m sorry. This obviously isn’t how this was supposed to go, but we can still salvage it. We can still get something. Maybe we were
too aggressive. Maybe we pushed him a little too far. That’s okay. We can deal. It’s all in the art of the deal.”
“It’ll never work.” My voice caught the back of my throat as I lost the strength to form words. “You’ve set something in motion here
that can’t be put back.”
Silently beneath all that natural sunlight in their kitchen, we sat beside each other. I could hear his breath but couldn’t feel the
tips of my frozen fingertips. I drank more bourbon but had forgotten what it tasted like.
Christina came home, and Turk did a poor job of explaining the situation to her. Things had taken an unexpected turn, he said. Cobb
wasn’t quite ready yet.
“The police?” She asked, a prematurely wrinkled hand to her mouth. Too many cigarettes.
“No, Christina, not the police.” I grabbed my jacket and headed for the door.
“You’re the only one that can do anything about this, Felicity,” I kept walking through Turk’s protests. “The only one. You have to see
him again.”
“I don’t have to do anything.”
He grabbed my arm. “Yes, yes you do. You don’t get to walk away. It’s the three of us or it’s nothing. You understand that? It’s up to
you to make sure we all get out of this.”
Despair pushed tears from my eyes and I shrugged off his hand.
“I’m going home,” I whispered.
That’s a good idea, he said. Go home and rest, take the evening and in the morning we’d all get back together and sort this mess out,
together, as a team.
Too scared to walk, I hailed a cab. Certain phrases in the letter glowed in my thoughts. Had Cobb really written those things? Could
the same man whom I had spent having sex with, laughing with, who had asked me for advice on how to deal with his kids and his
girlfriends, was he capable of his proposed evilness? Turk seemed confident we could salvage everything but the way Christina looked at
him, those soft eyes with concern lurking in their creases. This wasn’t the first time Turk had fucked up and hadn’t been able to put
it back together.
The dim, six flight climb to my apartment stopped when I came upon the shattered doorframe. I paused in the shadows, waiting for what I
couldn’t be sure, but my body seeded itself into the old hardwood beneath my feet and I became a part of the very city itself, as if I
weren’t already.
Seconds, minutes, hours passed. The splinters hadn’t moved, the knob askew on its broken frame.
I unearthed my feet and peered in.
Destruction.
My vanity shattered. Coffee table broken in two. Yellow foam spewed from the gutted intestines of the couch. The light fixtures torn
down, bulbs shattered in their cradles. On the wall, in red spray-paint, dripping hatred.
Die Cunt.
Whore Fucker.
Blackmail Bitch.
I stared so long the streaks stained my eyes and when I looked away I saw their negative ghost imposed on the rest of the world,
imprisoning me in the words.
Sifting through the debris, I searched for an article of clothing that wasn’t torn apart, a wall without a hole in it. Every drop of
cash hidden behind a draw, or in a jar in my kitchen, all of it gone, I’d have to make do with the thirteen dollars in my pocket.
Then I came upon the golden yellow cage, tipped on its side and crushed so succinctly I could make out the boot size used to stomp it.
My bird, the silent little bitch that wouldn’t talk to me, had her poor body crushed beneath the force of my stupidity. And her head
was gone.
A halo of shock settled about me while I walked to the bus station, tripping over the black rats and pitched garbage pails. The station
was more alive than I had seen in weeks. I didn’t have enough money to get out of town and I hadn’t eaten since the morning. I thought
about going back to Christina’s and Turk’s, or calling my mother in Pittsburgh, or finding comfort in anyone’s arms but my own. None of
it worked.
I curled my head into my hands on a pair of dirty plastic chairs bolted to the floor. A junkie nodded in the corner and three cops
walked past him without saying a word. I may have fallen asleep. The ruddy sunrise crept up the walls the color of blood. Another cop
walked by and patted my ass with his baton.
“Morning sweetheart. Time to head home.”
I stirred and lifted the heavy weight of my skull off the yellow plastic.
“I don’t have a home.”
“Join the club. The mission on Douglas is serving breakfast if you can make it before they run out.”
“Thanks.” The words scraped through my mouth.
“Just don’t be here when I get back.”
He moved on to the junkie next, and then the old lady with the little baby swaddled in filthy blankets after that. We all shuffled the
seven blocks to the mission together but I ate my free breakfast alone.
I gave up on dignity and headed to Turk’s, walking on the opposite side of the street as though it would conceal my identity. It made
little sense, and I wouldn’t have given into the derangement of my paranoia if a low riding Lincoln hadn’t rolled past me and stopped
in front of Turk’s building.
Turk stood outside, smoking a cigarette, no Christina in tow. Three men stepped from the car, the driver side door stayed closed.
Turk’s arrogance was one of his finest qualities but also his biggest flaw. I don’t know what he expected these men, these three dark,
burly, and utterly out of place from the posh downtown surroundings men to do, but apparently it wasn’t running him down and squaring
him to the sidewalk with a combined tackle.
My hand muffled a scream. The Lincoln idled nearby. My phone was long dead. It was too early in the morning for the commuters. A quiet
pall cascaded around the narrow road, broken only by the periodic smack of fists on flesh.
I sunk into the ground then, the concrete devouring my knees, my hips and torso, until finally my mouth, frozen shut as it already was,
became silenced by the enormity of the city’s violence.
Their mass blocked my view but I heard their strikes, and between lowered bodies, blood and yells and curses lifted into the cold
morning air.
Nothing could drown out his screams and their profanities. I pinched my eyes shut but the beating bled through, overlaid by the spray
paint from before. Die cunt. Die cunt. Die Cunt.
Then I opened my eyes and saw a pair of boots.
I scrambled backwards, pushing through rotten fruit and wet newspapers. Cobb walked towards me, tall enough to block the sun, wide
enough to stop the spin of the earth. I tried to turn and run but he grabbed my jacket and with one arm gently pushed me into the wall,
forcing me to stay seated.
“I just want to know how you thought this was going to work?” his voice was still smooth and low.
“I didn’t know. I didn’t know. Cobb, I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know.”
“Everyone calls me that.”
His men kept at it. I didn’t spare a glance but the punches were little more than pulpy slaps. Turk’s voice was gone.
“Cobb. It’s what’s on the back of my jersey. I got a first name too. You know that? How many times you ride my cock and yet you never
used my first name?”
“I didn’t know, I swear. Please, Cobb please.”
“Dog only begs when it knows it did something wrong. I ain’t got time for dogs in my life, Fel.”
I flinched and turned from him. He lifted me up and faced me around the corner of the alley, the comforting strength of his hands
turned into something so much darker.
“Open your eyes.”
“I don’t—“
“Open your eyes, Fel.”
He forced me to watch the end, watch the knives emerge and see Turk’s nice suit torn, witness a hawkish handsome face distorted by
angry gashes. Turk’s waist twisted but his legs stayed still, as though they were paralyzed, but he lifted a hand, a call for mercy or
an attempt at reason. As despicable as Turk was, he was something of a civilized man. But civilization was dead. It had been a long
time since the barbarians sacked Rome. I had always known that too, it just ever occurred to me to warn him.
The blades came down. He deflated like a balloon, a proper Roman assassination.
They got back in the car. Turk’s corpse flopped across the sidewalk, raised in the middle by the broken curb. He didn’t look like a
dead man. He just looked like a red sack of meat.
“We missed girl. She left before him. She’s probably at the cops right now.”
“You can’t do this, Cobb. Even you can’t get away with this. She’ll tell them everything. Oh God, what the hell has happened?”
He let me go and I crumpled down the side of the brick wall.
“You’re from the street.” He smiled without irony. “None of this is ever supposed to last. You knew that. All of us know that.”
He was right, of course. Christina would go to the cops. The note would be found and linked to Cobb and his boys. She’d get a month in
jail and probation. I would tell them everything and still get more time. He’d get fifteen to life even though he never laid a hand on
Turk. The trial would be huge and everywhere and it’d give me enough time to contemplate just how much Drano I’d need to drink while
watching them announce his sentence. But at least then, at that point, I’d know his first name.
But before all of that, he left me there, weeping in the corner when the sun crested overhead and through the day until it began its
descent into the west. It didn’t warm me. Instead, the garbage bags and dumpsters and junkies and hookers and graffiti and subways and
the pain of never getting a fair start, all of this city’s insurmountable inequities reached up their black arms and pulled me and my
selfish tears beneath the cold concrete.
END.
“It’s simple. We’ll handle the hard part. All you have to do is get him comfortable, and just slip this into his drink.”
Turk held up a small baggie of pills.
“You’ll need three.”
“Christ Fel, one of these is enough to drop a rhino. Give him three and we’ll kill him.”
I laughed in anger. “You really don’t understand how big these guys are.”
“You keep saying ‘these guys’. Is there someone other than Cobb we should be thinking about?” Turk’s mind raged then, I could tell.
He was thinking about all those guys and all that cash.
“No, no. Cobb is the only one that’s ever taken me back to his apartment.”
“Then Cobb it is.”
I drank the rest of my bourbon and nearly shattered the glass putting it back on their granite countertop. Christina put her hand
on my leg and rubbed. Her creased eyes watched me. At the club, we had a name for girls like her. She was a hard thirty-five, a woman
that could be ten years on either side but pass for both. Fit and trim but tired, the lines in her face tracing the smokes and the
alcohol and the drugs and the sleepless nights, she was pretty enough to be taken home and then just as easily discarded.
“If he goes to the police, he’ll have to show them. The moment he shares the pictures a cop, a secretary, a clerk, someone in that
precinct will tweet, or Facebook or God knows what else and they’ll be everywhere.” Christina’s eyes went big and round. “Everywhere.”
“A guy like that can’t risk it.” Turk paced. “No one will care that he’s being blackmailed. They’ll just see the pictures and judge
and his career will be ruined. Trust us Fel. He’ll deal.”
I poured the rest of the bottle into my glass and drank out the bottom. Christina slid it away and lit a joint, toking and then
putting it in my mouth. I took the hit with her hand still holding. Her pinky finger caressed my cheek. I waited for the head rush to
subside before responding.
“How much?”
Turk nodded his head a lot then; he knew I was in. “The contract he signed this summer was for sixty-five over five years. So what
is that? Like thirteen a year? I say we hit him for five hundred. That’s like less than four percent of one year’s salary. No way he
wouldn’t deal on that.”
Beautiful natural light flooded their apartment. The windows across from the countertop tilted forward. At night, after Turk passed
out, Christina and I would lie against the glass and lord over the streets. Turk and Christina were like a king and queen and I was a
lovely maiden come to service them. Or Roman aristocrats. Yes, more like that. Because they didn’t have much power but they had
everything else people envied. They were my patrons and I felt protected.
“We split evenly.”
“Well no.” Turk stood up and opened his antique liquor cabinet. “I’m the one with the most risk you see, because I’ll actually
be in the pictures. On the off chance anything goes wrong, they’ll have me in the evidence.”
“But he knows me. He’ll accuse me first.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that. You can just claim ignorance. Say we drugged you too. Actually.” He tapped his chin and then nodded
at some incomplete thought. He pulled my cup back and poured from a new bottle, throwing the old into their double sink. “That’s a
great idea. We drug both of you. That way you’re completely covered. Any screens will show it in both of your systems. You could say it
happened at the club. Oh, this is genius.”
“Turk please, that’s not necessary. It wasn’t necessary any of the other times,” Christina again.
“Can we please just stop talking about this?” I rubbed my temples.
Home gigs were tricky, so much cash and every time I asked for more they gave it to me. But we would finished so late, and the bourbon
and the pot, and before I knew it the sun would wake me and we’d all still be naked on the floor. Days and nights tripped over each
other, and my emotions, well, I guess my emotions weren’t as easy to sort out as they used to be. I was twenty-six, but already the
hard little bits of me were crumbling to dust.
“I just want to make sure we’re straight, because it has to happen soon.”
He kept going on like that for the next twenty minutes while I smoked most of the joint and the second bourbon bottle sloshed towards
empty. Christina looked lovely to me then, as she always did once I had drank enough to believe she was someone who could cure my
isolation. I played with her hair while Turk walked the room, talking to no one in particular. She and I kissed and after a few
minutes he finally gave up his pontificating and joined us. We didn’t bother going into their opulent master bedroom, the one with the
sweeping drapes over the ceiling to floor windows and the grand California king, lost in the massive space. No, we did it right there
in the kitchen. Turk placed me on the countertop, beside the microwave and the blender. Christina helped and they both took their time
and I didn’t mind. God help me but I never minded.
I wouldn’t see them for two weeks. I did see Cobb though. He came to the club, hanging out in the back like always. He knew people
recognized him, but the bouncers were good men and our manager, Reuben, while a bit of prick, knew how to treat VIPs.
Cobb stalked me from there. Of course I couldn’t see his eyes through the neon, but when I took the stage I danced just for him. I
didn’t care about losing cash, just a bunch of horny stockbrokers who tipped like shit anyway. No, when Cobb was there it was all for
him.
My set ended and I worked the room, approaching him last, gauging the flame of his jealousy when I touched a John’s lapel, licked
another’s ear. Cobb hated it, but it turned him on too.
“You take too long.” Even the thub thub of the club’s house music couldn’t strangle the low strong chords of his voice.
“I’m not in any hurry, Mr. Cobb.”
“We’ve got a home game this weekend.”
“Do you?” I giggled and acted like I didn’t understand his meaning.
“Seeing as how it’s Tuesday, we don’t have practice until tomorrow night.”
Enjoy the moment in the club, I told him, don’t be so keen to leave. The thought of going back to his place conjured an image of them,
and more particularly of Turk and the things he wanted to do to lay this mighty man low. I couldn’t go back to his house tonight. If I
was going to betray him, it’d be once and I’d let it all crash down at the same time.
Reuben stood in front of the backroom curtains, his bald pate reflecting high green lighting. Cobb guided me, handed him a pair of
hundreds, the implication of privacy and no time limit explicit in the one gesture.
With other Johns, I had a routine. Start with flaunts, work the inside thigh, gyrations and an open palm, end on top with furious hips.
It could be clinical, but it ensured another song and more tips. The songs didn’t matter with Cobb, the time didn’t either. Sure I knew
he’d take care of me, I couldn’t remember a time he hadn’t handed me at least a roll of five hundreds or more. But just being close to
him, smelling his Clive Christian and rubbing his wonderfully starched oxfords, created within my heart a potent swell of belonging.
After the fourth song I collapsed next to him and tried to catch my breath. He smiled and my leg stayed draped over his waist.
“Damn girl, you know how to make a man feel special.”
I laughed. He wiped drops of sweat from my neck. “You’re a special kind of guy.”
His hand rested on my hip, heavy and long enough to cover me from front to back. No one really understood just how big they were. Only
a few hundred men in the country could do what they did. When I was with him I felt like a little girl, a feeling I abandoned long
ago.
“I missed you.” He patted, absently.
“Yea?”
“Yea, yea I did. We were stuck in Cleveland last week. Coach didn’t want us coming home because we were playing in Cincinnati Sunday.”
“Never been.”
“Ain’t missing much.”
“Is it clean at least? Everything here is so dirty.”
“Cleveland can be, yea. But the streets are the streets and dirty means something different to every city. I got some family there.”
“Extended?”
His quiet rolling laughter spread between us like fog. “I have an Auntie that lives there, yea. But also one of my exes with my little
boy. Ain’t easy avoiding that situation for more than a few days.”
“Kids complicate things. I’m assuming.”
“They do. I just want things to be simple. Like with you. Things are so simple here.”
“I missed you too.” I rubbed his strong belly.
“You sure you can’t come back tonight?”
I’m sure, I said. Too much going on in the morning, too many things to do. Cobb didn’t want me back at his place anyway, he wanted a
girl. He wanted pussy. I was lonely, sure, but I thought of his five hundred dollars. Turk’s plan could pay off a hundred times that
much. I couldn’t entertain this man another ninety-nine times to make up the difference. The heartache alone would suffocate me.
Another week without word from anyone. Nights I spent picking up extra shifts, my days I slept, drank and had one way conversations
with the bird in my apartment. My place was so small; I bought a parakeet to help repress the isolation. She didn’t talk. She didn’t
tweet, didn’t sing. She just sat on her perch and pecked at her food. It was the saddest Goddamn thing I’d ever seen. I talked to her
for three hours one night just hoping for some kind of noise.
I had almost assumed the plan was off, until Christina and Turk met me outside the club after my last shift at four in the morning. He
was wearing a suit, which I thought was odd, but she looked plain as usual.
“Tomorrow.” Turk said, sipping on a joint.
The rain had subsided but slick asphalt stretched the neon.
“I don’t know if he’ll be in tomorrow.”
“You said he always comes in on Tuesdays.”
“I said he usually comes in on Tuesdays, and besides, it’s only if he’s in town.”
“He’s in town.” Turk pointed his phone at me. The white screen forced my eyes to a squint in the dark alleyway. “They have a home game
this Sunday, last of the season.”
“I can’t guarantee he’ll be here.”
“He’ll come and don’t worry. We’ll be here too. We’ll help you through.”
Thin jeans did little to abate the wind so I pulled the top of my jacket over my exposed neck. “I gave it some thought, and I don’t
want to be the one to put it in his drink.”
Christina smiled and put an arm around me. “Sweetie, of course not! That’s why we’ll be here. Turk’s great at making conversation.
He’ll introduce himself, really buddy up to Cobb. It’ll be just like a normal night. Take him for a dance. Do what you always do. We’ll
take care of the rest. All you have to do is get him back to his place. Once we’re there, we can take care of everything.”
Her words flapped a sing song rhythm. She reminded me of a story my mother used to read, something about a witch lulling sirens to
sleep. Or maybe it was the other way around. I never knew if she really liked that book or if it was the only one we owned.
We agreed that if he came in tomorrow, that’d be the day. A small part of me wished Cobb wouldn’t make it. Maybe he got held up in
Green Bay, or maybe he decided to stay home with his girlfriend for the night. I began summarizing the things I knew about the man, his
interests; playing the sax, watching war movies, his love life. He had a girl here in town but another mistress down in Florida whom he
saw regularly, his kids, three from two different women, neither of which he was dating.
Did the people in a man’s life define who he was? I didn’t love Cobb, I couldn’t. For all his kindheartedness he was still just another
man in the club looking for attention he wasn’t getting elsewhere. I imagined my opinion of them was similar to the way a corrections
officer views prisoners. They were human beings sure, but the location changed them, made them something else. That was the club for
me. The front door might as well have had bars.
Cobb did come. And true to his word, Turk made contact, wearing a different suit than the night before. I had to give it him though; he
was a con-man of the first order. He never said where he was from, or who he represented, just wrapped an arm around Cobb’s immense
shoulders, paid for his girls and his drinks, spoke only about sports; a sales pitch with nothing to buy. And Cobb loved it, loved
feeling important. It was the one trait I knew I could always go back to. Make him feel special, different than all the rest and he’d
never leave your side.
The alcohol helped, but sill, I was less nervous than I thought I’d be, so relaxed I almost missed Turk handing him the drink. But his
glaring eyes rose like an angry dawn from behind Cobb and I knew it had been done. He extended his elbow to me and when I took it, he
placed my hand in the big man’s grip, my red nails quickly swallowed by thick fingers.
I skipped the normal chatter, the little exchanges we shared. I threw at him all the sex nine years of dancing had taught me, nine
years, starting when I was seventeen, lying about my age and knowing no one cared because my legs were long and smooth and I could
twist with the veterans. His gropes were harder than usual, a side-effect of my grinding or the chemical cocktail working his veins, I
couldn’t be sure. Lust, his enraged passion as he lifted me with small effort and turned us to the side, then atop me, in control, it
all felt normal. He was too massive and too rich and too famous for the bouncers to do anything about it.
A whisper in his ear, a siren’s call to action, I urged him home, take me back to his castle of an apartment and bed me, in his
chambers, like a true king, a Caesar.
Later that night, when Cobb passed out, the blankets doing little to cover his toned and bulbous physique, I didn’t have to answer the
door when they tapped. I wondered where my life would be if I pretended to stay asleep, nestled below him, muffling the sounds of my
arrangement with the drape of his hard bicep. I’d never know.
*************
“You need to see him again. It’s the only way we can get the heat off.”
“Are you crazy?” I lifted the note from Turk’s mahogany dinner table, waved it in my hand. “Have you read this? People came by the club
last night.”
“You’re the only one that’ll be able to diffuse this thing,” Turk leaned in as he spoke, his tie dangling. I wanted to grab it and hang
him from the ceiling fan.
“You’re insane Turk, insane. He doesn’t even know who you are.”
“He knows who I am.”
“No, he knows what your dick looks like because you took a picture of it in his mouth. But none of these,” I pushed the black and white
photos across the table, all of which had been returned in the envelope to the correct place Turk had assigned but without any money.
Just a note. “None of these have your face in them. Which means, you don’t have anything to worry about, do you?”
He sighed and turned on the tap, drinking a glass of water and then sitting down beside me.
“I’m sorry. This obviously isn’t how this was supposed to go, but we can still salvage it. We can still get something. Maybe we were
too aggressive. Maybe we pushed him a little too far. That’s okay. We can deal. It’s all in the art of the deal.”
“It’ll never work.” My voice caught the back of my throat as I lost the strength to form words. “You’ve set something in motion here
that can’t be put back.”
Silently beneath all that natural sunlight in their kitchen, we sat beside each other. I could hear his breath but couldn’t feel the
tips of my frozen fingertips. I drank more bourbon but had forgotten what it tasted like.
Christina came home, and Turk did a poor job of explaining the situation to her. Things had taken an unexpected turn, he said. Cobb
wasn’t quite ready yet.
“The police?” She asked, a prematurely wrinkled hand to her mouth. Too many cigarettes.
“No, Christina, not the police.” I grabbed my jacket and headed for the door.
“You’re the only one that can do anything about this, Felicity,” I kept walking through Turk’s protests. “The only one. You have to see
him again.”
“I don’t have to do anything.”
He grabbed my arm. “Yes, yes you do. You don’t get to walk away. It’s the three of us or it’s nothing. You understand that? It’s up to
you to make sure we all get out of this.”
Despair pushed tears from my eyes and I shrugged off his hand.
“I’m going home,” I whispered.
That’s a good idea, he said. Go home and rest, take the evening and in the morning we’d all get back together and sort this mess out,
together, as a team.
Too scared to walk, I hailed a cab. Certain phrases in the letter glowed in my thoughts. Had Cobb really written those things? Could
the same man whom I had spent having sex with, laughing with, who had asked me for advice on how to deal with his kids and his
girlfriends, was he capable of his proposed evilness? Turk seemed confident we could salvage everything but the way Christina looked at
him, those soft eyes with concern lurking in their creases. This wasn’t the first time Turk had fucked up and hadn’t been able to put
it back together.
The dim, six flight climb to my apartment stopped when I came upon the shattered doorframe. I paused in the shadows, waiting for what I
couldn’t be sure, but my body seeded itself into the old hardwood beneath my feet and I became a part of the very city itself, as if I
weren’t already.
Seconds, minutes, hours passed. The splinters hadn’t moved, the knob askew on its broken frame.
I unearthed my feet and peered in.
Destruction.
My vanity shattered. Coffee table broken in two. Yellow foam spewed from the gutted intestines of the couch. The light fixtures torn
down, bulbs shattered in their cradles. On the wall, in red spray-paint, dripping hatred.
Die Cunt.
Whore Fucker.
Blackmail Bitch.
I stared so long the streaks stained my eyes and when I looked away I saw their negative ghost imposed on the rest of the world,
imprisoning me in the words.
Sifting through the debris, I searched for an article of clothing that wasn’t torn apart, a wall without a hole in it. Every drop of
cash hidden behind a draw, or in a jar in my kitchen, all of it gone, I’d have to make do with the thirteen dollars in my pocket.
Then I came upon the golden yellow cage, tipped on its side and crushed so succinctly I could make out the boot size used to stomp it.
My bird, the silent little bitch that wouldn’t talk to me, had her poor body crushed beneath the force of my stupidity. And her head
was gone.
A halo of shock settled about me while I walked to the bus station, tripping over the black rats and pitched garbage pails. The station
was more alive than I had seen in weeks. I didn’t have enough money to get out of town and I hadn’t eaten since the morning. I thought
about going back to Christina’s and Turk’s, or calling my mother in Pittsburgh, or finding comfort in anyone’s arms but my own. None of
it worked.
I curled my head into my hands on a pair of dirty plastic chairs bolted to the floor. A junkie nodded in the corner and three cops
walked past him without saying a word. I may have fallen asleep. The ruddy sunrise crept up the walls the color of blood. Another cop
walked by and patted my ass with his baton.
“Morning sweetheart. Time to head home.”
I stirred and lifted the heavy weight of my skull off the yellow plastic.
“I don’t have a home.”
“Join the club. The mission on Douglas is serving breakfast if you can make it before they run out.”
“Thanks.” The words scraped through my mouth.
“Just don’t be here when I get back.”
He moved on to the junkie next, and then the old lady with the little baby swaddled in filthy blankets after that. We all shuffled the
seven blocks to the mission together but I ate my free breakfast alone.
I gave up on dignity and headed to Turk’s, walking on the opposite side of the street as though it would conceal my identity. It made
little sense, and I wouldn’t have given into the derangement of my paranoia if a low riding Lincoln hadn’t rolled past me and stopped
in front of Turk’s building.
Turk stood outside, smoking a cigarette, no Christina in tow. Three men stepped from the car, the driver side door stayed closed.
Turk’s arrogance was one of his finest qualities but also his biggest flaw. I don’t know what he expected these men, these three dark,
burly, and utterly out of place from the posh downtown surroundings men to do, but apparently it wasn’t running him down and squaring
him to the sidewalk with a combined tackle.
My hand muffled a scream. The Lincoln idled nearby. My phone was long dead. It was too early in the morning for the commuters. A quiet
pall cascaded around the narrow road, broken only by the periodic smack of fists on flesh.
I sunk into the ground then, the concrete devouring my knees, my hips and torso, until finally my mouth, frozen shut as it already was,
became silenced by the enormity of the city’s violence.
Their mass blocked my view but I heard their strikes, and between lowered bodies, blood and yells and curses lifted into the cold
morning air.
Nothing could drown out his screams and their profanities. I pinched my eyes shut but the beating bled through, overlaid by the spray
paint from before. Die cunt. Die cunt. Die Cunt.
Then I opened my eyes and saw a pair of boots.
I scrambled backwards, pushing through rotten fruit and wet newspapers. Cobb walked towards me, tall enough to block the sun, wide
enough to stop the spin of the earth. I tried to turn and run but he grabbed my jacket and with one arm gently pushed me into the wall,
forcing me to stay seated.
“I just want to know how you thought this was going to work?” his voice was still smooth and low.
“I didn’t know. I didn’t know. Cobb, I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know.”
“Everyone calls me that.”
His men kept at it. I didn’t spare a glance but the punches were little more than pulpy slaps. Turk’s voice was gone.
“Cobb. It’s what’s on the back of my jersey. I got a first name too. You know that? How many times you ride my cock and yet you never
used my first name?”
“I didn’t know, I swear. Please, Cobb please.”
“Dog only begs when it knows it did something wrong. I ain’t got time for dogs in my life, Fel.”
I flinched and turned from him. He lifted me up and faced me around the corner of the alley, the comforting strength of his hands
turned into something so much darker.
“Open your eyes.”
“I don’t—“
“Open your eyes, Fel.”
He forced me to watch the end, watch the knives emerge and see Turk’s nice suit torn, witness a hawkish handsome face distorted by
angry gashes. Turk’s waist twisted but his legs stayed still, as though they were paralyzed, but he lifted a hand, a call for mercy or
an attempt at reason. As despicable as Turk was, he was something of a civilized man. But civilization was dead. It had been a long
time since the barbarians sacked Rome. I had always known that too, it just ever occurred to me to warn him.
The blades came down. He deflated like a balloon, a proper Roman assassination.
They got back in the car. Turk’s corpse flopped across the sidewalk, raised in the middle by the broken curb. He didn’t look like a
dead man. He just looked like a red sack of meat.
“We missed girl. She left before him. She’s probably at the cops right now.”
“You can’t do this, Cobb. Even you can’t get away with this. She’ll tell them everything. Oh God, what the hell has happened?”
He let me go and I crumpled down the side of the brick wall.
“You’re from the street.” He smiled without irony. “None of this is ever supposed to last. You knew that. All of us know that.”
He was right, of course. Christina would go to the cops. The note would be found and linked to Cobb and his boys. She’d get a month in
jail and probation. I would tell them everything and still get more time. He’d get fifteen to life even though he never laid a hand on
Turk. The trial would be huge and everywhere and it’d give me enough time to contemplate just how much Drano I’d need to drink while
watching them announce his sentence. But at least then, at that point, I’d know his first name.
But before all of that, he left me there, weeping in the corner when the sun crested overhead and through the day until it began its
descent into the west. It didn’t warm me. Instead, the garbage bags and dumpsters and junkies and hookers and graffiti and subways and
the pain of never getting a fair start, all of this city’s insurmountable inequities reached up their black arms and pulled me and my
selfish tears beneath the cold concrete.
END.
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