Dead Low Winter - T.K. O'Neill

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ugly. I parked in front of the club and the chicks shuffled through their purses for the fare. I figured they must be exotic dancers. Why else would a chick go to a strip bar? Unless maybe they were lesbians. And that would be all right, too. They sure were pretty.

      I was just about to ask their names and maybe their phone numbers—at least the tall one, anyway—when I saw this scrawny punk of a guy come scrambling out the side door of the Castaway and start running across the parking lot like the devil himself was chasing. The dude’s shirt was torn up and there was blood and spit all over his face. And I knew the guy. Harvey Dornan was his name. A small-time dealer/hustler who anybody with any brains steered clear of. He’d been missing from the scene for a few years but recently I’d seen him back on the streets and in the bars.

      Shortly after Harvey went rocketing by, two big guys in oxblood leather jackets and creased trousers came busting out after him. They were pointing and yelling and running when a third guy—sandy haired pompadour, short leather jacket, blue jeans and a sadistic look—jumped out the door of a brown Lincoln and dished out a forearm shiver to the throat of the running hippie.

      I jumped out of the cab and yelled Hey. But they didn’t pay me any mind. I started running to where Harvey was down but one of the husky dudes pulled a huge black gun from under his jacket and pointed it in my direction. I needed only that one hint. Harvey was fucked up anyway.

      I ran back to the cab and jumped in and looked back to see if they were coming my way. Much to my relief they threw the kid in the back of the Continental and drove off. Then I realized the girls were gone. Three dollars for the fare lay on the front seat along with a dollar tip. I lifted up the bills and put them to my nose to see if the ladies’ scent was still on them. It was. I made a mental note to go to the Castaway for a show real soon and got the hell out of there.

      I laid low in Bay City and waited for my regular Monday-through-Friday fare, taking a guy from the Androy Hotel to the grain terminal for the overnight shift. But after that I was still a little shaky so I drove back over to Zenith City and sat outside the Norshor Theatre for a few minutes to calm my nerves. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it said on the flashing marquee. My nerves didn’t calm down at all. And even though I could have used a few more bucks I drove to the Blue and White office and checked out for the night. I didn’t tell Al the vein-nosed phlegm factory of a dispatcher anything about the incident, just said I was a little ill.

      I got in my Olds and wasted no time getting back over the bridge.

      Going by the Castaway I couldn’t stop thinking about that girl—the dark eyed one—but I kept on driving. I was a little short on cash. I drove to the gray-shingled barn-like duplex where I’d lived for the last three months and parked in a circle of amber light under a sodium lamp in the alley. I walked up the faded back stairs to the faded entryway, stepped around the empty cases of Leinenkugel’s and the old paint cans and put the key in the lock of the ugly Aqua-Velva-blue door.

      My roommate Mick was passed out on the couch in the living room kicking out jackhammer snores, a beer bottle balanced on his slightly rounded stomach, the thumb and forefinger of his right hand holding it upright in a nocturnal death grip. I settled back into the weakened springs of the easy chair and watched the dust motes drift up into the yellow glow of the table lamp. A black and white movie droned on the old tube; Daniel Webster was being seduced by the devil. People and shapes and disembodied voices were trying to pull Daniel over to the dark side.

      Shit was eerie. Webster must have had a hard time making his dictionary with those bastards on his ass.

      I got up and turned the dial, found a Kojak rerun on channel thirteen. Kojak made me feel secure. If Kojak was your daddy and you ever got in trouble, you can bet he’d get you out of it. But I never liked the dude who played the sidekick so I shut off the TV and went to bed.

      * * *

      The next day a biting Alberta Clipper roared into town, dropping three inches of dry snow followed by a blast of arctic air. I was in no shape to wrestle with the beast of winter. It was shut down dead stop, grinding to a halt cold. The kind of cold where the car exhaust lays down low to the ground and the wind is all the time trying to get inside your face and rip your eyes out. The sun has no warmth and cars don’t start. Furnaces break down and water pipes burst. You can feel the cold pinching in through the windows and underneath the doors. You need some kind of routine to get you through, something solid in your life to hang onto. Me, I had myself a motto: Do what you have to do and stay drunk the rest of the time.

      Fate seemed to have it in for me and I didn’t have a lot to be thankful for except that liquor was cheap in Bay City—real cheap. That helped, being I was off the coke. In my own way, I was going through rehab. I provided the castigation.

      Slowly my obsession with cocaine was beginning to lift. The drug makes you selfish and greedy and all you care about is drugs and money and sex. After being off the shit for a while, I started thinking about others again, like my wife and son.

      Poor Loraine was getting fat and so was little Mike and I blamed her. If only I could’ve seen the kid more often I could’ve straightened him out. But Loraine told him I was a no good character and that made it hard, if you know what I mean. Then she moved back in with her Jesus-freak parents and I only got to see the kid when she brought him to the bowling alley with her. And I hate bowling. Truly, I hate bowling. Bowling alleys aren’t so bad, but all Mike and I used to do there was eat greasy food and he was beginning to look like a pregnant seal. Made me think of a seal because of the way Loraine slicked his black hair down and this sound he made that annoyed me. I guess eight-year-old kids do that sort of thing but sometimes I think she put him up to it. It was also pretty tough because I was living in Bay City and he was across the water in Zenith City. It wasn’t that far but I only spent time in Zenith when I was driving cab or working at the porno store and those are no places for a kid.

      It’s important that you know about the divorce because it was, I think, one big reason I got deeper involved with the Cross brothers. After the break-up, things started going downhill for me in a gravity-fueled spiral. Success was failure and failure was success and who could tell the difference?

      Then on one hung-over February afternoon I was sitting in the living room reading the morning paper in the waning light of a bitter day. The Gong Show was on the tube. Chuck Barris was clowning in a floppy hat and giving away trips to Bulgaria. My roommate Mickey was bartending at the High Times. Dishes were stacked up in the kitchen and my room was piled-high with dirty clothes. Worse, all the beer was gone and I was getting thirsty.

      MAN FOUND MURDERED IN BAY CITY MUNICIPAL FOREST

      The headline jumped out at me. It was the lead story of the day and told the sad tale of a Caucasian male found face down in the snow: Shoulder-length light brown hair, five front teeth missing and two large bullet holes in the back of his head. Harvey Dornan. Alleged police informant, it said in black and white right there in front of me. Body partially eaten by wolves was also there.

      Harvey had finally pissed off the wrong people in his short miserable life. Maybe if someone had fixed the kid’s teeth a long time ago, things would’ve turned out different for him. It was only two weeks since I’d seen him running out the back of the Castaway with thugs in pursuit. I didn’t do a thing to help him then—but you never can with guys like that.

      Now all these bad premonitions and free-floating anxieties were swarming inside me like a cloud of locusts. Did I mention before that I get flashes from the future? Mostly bad premonitions like when you feel something horseshit is going to happen and then it does. And the more I dwelled on it the worse it got. But later that night after a few drinks I started feeling better, you know how it is.

      Then things went routinely for a while. Days of high snow banks and nights of low life. I made enough money to get by but not enough to make any progress on my debt. The only lesson learned: time passes quickly when you dread the rising sun.

      TWO

      Cross Is What My True Love Bears

      February faded into March and I hardly knew the difference.

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