TUND: Short Stories by Thor Garcia

DOG

BAYCITY

Thinking back, it seems I can actually remember my first day in Bay City.

It was about 10 o’clock at night, say, the end of January 19—. I’d driven since the afternoon, seven or eight hours up from Windy Tree. I’d spent the night before there at my brother’s, sitting around with him and some of his people. I’d hit the road the next afternoon, racing the sun in full free-fall. It eclipsed me an hour or two out, then I’d stopped at one of the classier roadside burger joints, of the type with plastic walnut tabletops and gold handles on the bathroom doors. That had left my stomach crammed with a four-dollar plate of fried cheese potato skins; a side of fries; Pepsi in a glass, with ice. And a lot of ketchup.

My car was full of sand, socks, and three or four boxes of my best and greatest record albums. Everything else was about exactly 100 percent on the dot. My dollar-green sportscoat had brown patches on the elbows. My t-shirt was cuffed up and the color of peach paint. My pants, brown, flared at the ankles and seethed with white checks. The shoes: Spang maroon wingtips. My hands smelled like gasoline from all the fill-ups. I was halfway through a pack of new cigarettes.

I punched the car lighter and stoked up a fresh one, clean and lean and from one of the very top advertised brands. I had wanted it this way, I remember thinking – just like this. Smoke curled around my face and I blew more through my nose. I sucked again and blew, loving each tasty millimeter.

The city was finally coming up. I’d seen all the signs.

I recall steering leisurely, but also with a certain rapt surety, as I shot through a brief mountain pass. The road seemed to pause, ever quite so slightly, before suddenly surging to the left. My concentration ambled, but did not wander. It seems I had an inkling about what was coming.

I careened out of the pass, whipping over the nubbled highway surface.

A sheen of sweat lightly lathered my face. The radio was off. I’d nixed the tunes back near Converse Bay. A cruel trade-off, granted – but one against which I dared not quibble.

I recall these things with vibrant alacrity, and the agenda that lay behind them. I had wanted to keep my mind clear. Keep everything peeled, keep it perked. Keep the bubbles shining. Keep the desktop clear, the papers in their right stacks. My notion was to vacuum it in, each and every micrometer. ALL OF IT. Because each second was beyond totally crucial.

I was jack-knifing into Bay City, the world trailing after me. The beginning and the end of many, many things.

I keeled ahead, drumming across the lanky highway.

I saw my hair flutter, ever so swiftly, as I risked a final lightning glance in the rearview.

MY LAST LOOK BACK.

Then suddenly.

Bay City just fucking emerged.

She busted out from behind the cover of those cresting, sloppy hills. She tore away that veil of blank nightness – and erupted. Like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like it was what she was supposed to do.

LIKE SHE WAS WAITING FOR ME.

Bay City.

She was straight ahead, filling up half the gamut before me. Wall to wall, side to side, up and down. I hurled into her flickering gold gulf, an aching burning racing up the back of my neck.

I torqued into a torrent of twinkling skyscrapers. I saw lights and bridges and warehouse paddies, starboard and leeward. Cola billboards, whiskey signs, a tower of giant shining pantyhose. Ads for the people on the six o’clock news. All of that.

This is it, I remember thinking. This is the one.

The city and I: A conflagration in the happening. In the happening now.

In the mix.

I was 23 years old. Twenty-three – and I wanted it straight like it came. I wanted it straight, I wanted it deep, I wanted it lengthy. I wanted it ponderous, blue and heavy. I wanted it fast like karate and steep like the Poconos.

I wanted to screw it on. I wanted to screw it all the way over.

Nothing more, mind you; but not a filthy crumb less.

Or let me put it this way: I wanted in. And I wanted it now.

Things hadn’t always gone right. Heck, heck no. But they weren’t supposed to, they never did. There was always a shakedown, and there had always been. A tall man standing there with unflinching lips and waterless eyes, shaking his head, a sheaf of unknowable documents in his hand, giving him the legal right. He was the devil dog, the bastard in bastard’s clothing. He would always be there. That was the way it went, the world over, and no one got away, no one had a prayer. The ones who thought they did were wrong. The worst type of wrong.

I was past thinking otherwise.

Yet how can I say to you? From what perspective may you best discreetly discern?

Now was time.

Now was time for the grope and the run and the stabbing thrust toward the green water.

Now. Not a chance of it later.

Grope and run and stab. Grope and run and stab. Winner take nothing; loser taking even less.

I looked around savagely, drinking it all in as fast as I could gurgle.

The city was cloaked in her darkling robes. She seemed oddly moody, a shade petulant. But that classy lady sparkled too, yeah, she was bright. The bitch couldn’t hide it – not from me, not on this night.

Ah, I say to you! I was not mistaken when I ascertained Bay City was glowing with the force of some unquenchable interior furnace, some white-hot core which leached far into the extremities to burn and burn against the gloom.

I could tell it even then, that first feckled night – just driving into Bay City for the first time.

Remember, I was coming in from the south highway. That road doesn’t carry you above or below her, like some, but throws you smack into her, neck-to-neck, face-to-face.

She was spangles and cheroots, Bay City was – all uptown horns and downstreet shifteyes. She was left-of-center, right-on-top, and flush down the middle. Everything up front and all at once. Brass and tacks and show-time. Hanging wires and sharp canny cornices. Feathery pouches and blunt, angular curbsides.

I was just driving in there, into Bay City. No one could say a damn thing about it. Bay City. I was taking that woman on. I was rattling her chain and she was straightening her whip, tracing it across the ground with a wet, svelte hiss.

The intensity was high, I remember it being very high – it was a tango, a mambo, a two-step, a tete and a tete.

I whirred down the window and took a whiff. Sultry Bay City gushes wafted around my left arm: Warm and voluptuous and thick, but with a gilding of the bitterest cold – the residue that glided in from the ocean and the various bays which bloomed on her every side like glittering wings. I snorted, taking in a good deal of exhaust and fumes, ripe and pungent – along with the unmistakable aroma of steak on the fry, a scent of peppery falafel.

Bay City!

I was getting in. I felt it for sure then.

At that moment.

I liked her look, from the get-go I was liking Bay City.

Her press was no good, certainly, this was true. It was said she was filled with crude murderers and half-wit bandits, chockablock with predatory jades and eponymous ruffians, booted no-jack hustlers who found their solace in perversion and perving – who drew on the puerile vigor of the innocent foolish for their vile and craven sustenance.

This could not, of course, be doubted, and I did not do so. My people had warned me in this regard, repeatedly and with looks burdened by a dozen formless but ferociously loquacious fears: DON’T GO – STAY WHERE IT’S SAFE. You don’t know what you’re getting into. Those people will skin you like a Thursday night tripe, and won’t even notice when you’re gone. YOU DON’T HAVE A JOB.

But suffice it to allow me to declaim: I didn’t care. And I did not care. Not a damn penny whit.

I felt it inside, this feeling. It was there. It was every which way.

Bay City, hah. I would bash the bitch before she sucked my blood.

I’d decided it long beforehand. It was my premiere testament, my opening foray. I had declared it months in advance. There would be absolutely no turning back.

That was the one bargain. The one I had made with myself.

The way I looked at it, the gig was simple, basic. A question of execution, as based on general principle. Like a walk-on tryout for porn movies or such. Beer for the ballgame. A kiss for grandma. A boxful of labrador puppies.

I’d laid it all down way ahead of time.

Even if she turned on me, I would never let Bay City take me for a blind sucker.

Yes: She had industries and executive suites; tramps, trollops and troubadours; Chinese and stuntmen and art deco; drug war and turf war and sex war; poets and prelates, primates and prefab; football teams and baseball; dogs in the park and sludge-on-the-seas; grey-templed men; FBI field offices, Securities and Exchange Commission, Ad Hoc Offices of the Ex Officio; nuclear and Navy Intelligence; Armenians and Irish, Turkmen; shrimp burritos, advanced sharkskin; engineering software conglomerates.

All of this. And all of this.

I had one thousand two hundred dollars, but my balls hung like gunnysacks.

I saw my off-ramp and veered toward it, pumping the gas then letting off. I rode the thundering reverb, my every sensor tuned to the pinging hum of my pulsating V-8 Thunderbird, Gold Series.

I was coming in. Deep in now.

I was socking it to Bay City, I was knocking her left and right. Right from the go-gun I had her on the run.

Suddenly there were curves. The off-ramp flung me around at a 320-degree angle. Then it plunged, rolling steep in an awful hurry.

I jerked the wheel left. My teeth clapped. I struggled to keep the car from skating the highway rail. I yanked the wheel with most of the guff I could bring to bear.

I hit the brakes. There was a squeal followed by a squall, but no impact. Only minor skidding and a slight bouncing. Then it straightened, yeah, she went candid.

And there I was.

In.

All lights vanished as I vroomed ahead, still on a slight fall. I slid into a cavern of concrete, tons of metal and girders and implacable cement on all sides.

Then I was out of it. And then I knew I was really in.

I was there. I had landed.

The stoplight read red. I hit the brakes. My vehicle brayed and did as commanded. I checked myself, glances over both shoulders, fore and aft, reverse and counter. I was out of breath.

Reflexively, I lit a new smoke. I took a look around.

There wasn’t much. Tattered old houses and apartment blocks, row after row of them. A few trees and strips of sidewalks, bus benches, billboards shrouded and peeling. Very dark too, hardly any streetlights at all.

Suddenly, I had no idea where I was, or why.

Then I remembered. The light changed to a most pearlaceous green. I gunned the Bird, rearing myself forward, whirling into the lurking melee.

My breast mottled over with joy. I was in Bay City at last. Stalking armored in my gold thunder fowl, probing for the vortex of the action.

2

The plan was to bunk up with some buddies, Steph and Andy, pals who’d been living in Bay City for a year or more. They were my advance guard, the recon crew, the research team. They had said it would be fine if I stayed at their pad for a few weeks – that is, until I secured my own digs, and began the project of my fortune.

I followed the directions they had given me. A left turn, then right, another left, another right, then onto a broad main thoroughfare.

There was action here, lots of it, and I liked it. I was in now, and this what it meant: Liquor stores, people walking around in a haze of dull neon. A maze of sidewalk café tables and chairs, bums and trash of all kinds. A ratted purple sofa, half in the street, half on the sidewalk. Cardboard boxes, a gaggle of skateboarding kids with goatees. Designer purse stores with merchandise from Europe on all the major intersections. And there, to the right – a few nice fires, in a few nice trashcans.

I gandered some frolicking neon: 24-HOUR RUBBER GOODS.

I gulped it all in. I rinsed out, gargled, gulped again, and felt my eyes get bigger.

A dark swirling figure spun into the street, directly in front of me.

Bam!

I slammed the brakes.

I saw it to be bearded, a man, deeply tanned or possibly dirtied. An odd cap sat on his head, Santa Claus-style, with a long swinging element to it that hung almost to his shoulders.

But it was his hands that drew my immediate attention.

There was something flashing and silver in one of them. The fellow gestured at me crazily and made a kind of leaping motion, up and down, up and down. A patchwork of grimacing lines getched around the opening that was his mouth.

He darted toward me.

It was all happening very quickly. I could not help but think: O God, O God, here it comes, here it comes – the unleashed fury-hell of which I had been warned.

And so very, very early.

I saw it clearly. In terrible, vivid, color focus. Here he was coming.

I saw it all in less than an instant: This fellow would rip me from my vehicle.

He would knife me first, surely, then drag me off and rape away at me frenziedly in some alleyway. I would beg him NO PLEASE NO. But it would mean nothing, to him. He would slap angrily at the back of my neck, as if I were some loose red-headed woman – his loose red-headed woman. I would shriek and cower as he pulled my shirt from my back and lashed me with enraged swipes. Onlookers would hoot down from the apartment blocks, giggling and turning up the television as my assailant pounded away, clubbing away into oblivion all my tender beliefs and chivalrous instincts.

I’d be lying there. He’d take my car, loot it, sell it, spill my record albums into the streets. Punks would look them over scornfully, then ramble them over with their skateboards, gleefully yelping as the vinyl splintered and the priceless covers tore. He’d try on my clothes, only to discard them as fraudulent garbage he couldn’t be bothered with. He’d hogtie me, truss me, bloody me, leave me freezing and utterly shattered, wishing it had all been a dream – my youth, schools, my foolish craving to come to Bay City, everything.

There would be no police, no figment of an officer until it was far, far too late. That was a given, and darn tootin’. If I was lucky, I’d be able to call the police myself, crawling bloody from the alleyway, trailing an intestine, begging disinterested bums for a quarter.

Oh, it was coming. I could see it so clearly. He was almost at the door.

I jerked around and looked for the lock. It was UP.

UNLOCKED.

Why, why?

My annihilation was so very close now.

Forward he raced.

Closer.

CLOSER.

Ah, shit. Oh shit shit. Shite. Shi’ite. Poopy poop. Poopy pee poopy.

Here he was. Here. I could almost feel his breath at my ear, hot and rather mildewy. Smelled like a week’s worth of onions and cream cheese, mixed in with a crate of cheap appleberry wine. But that knife of his would surely be the sharpest of all.

And still he came.

Then I almost laughed. The guy jumped back, stood still, and took a deep drink – from a silver can of beer. He danced off to the other side of the road, whining and waggling his hands at something else, cackling at the moon and whatall else.

I swooned, then crumbled.

No, no murdering fiend here, friend. Indeed. Just something slothy and baggy, with his teeth curled in the mud. Just a born crow who couldn’t fly anymore. Just some old crust, some neck-deep fly fisherman with no top for his convertible left out in the tornado.

I gunned the car and sped through Bay City, lights of all colors and kinds raining down upon me.

A few more twists and turns and I found Steph and Andy’s neighborhood. It was a hilly and steep place, but the parking was surprisingly easy.

I stomped the emergency brake and got out, whipping shut the door with a crack and a boom. It was different out here – cool and quiet and comfortable, the houses old and in the style of Victorian castles, cast in soft blues and browns, red bricks and white trim, many with yellow bulbs in the porchways. Corner Irish bars and laundromats winked gamely from the top of a nearby ridge.

I took another look around, drinking in mouthfuls of the air – Bay City air.

Yeah, I thought. I could do with this here, like this.

It felt right, I could feel it inside me. I was getting in.

Check that – I was already in.

3

I found the number and climbed two flights of rickety wooden stairs. The steps were covered with a multitude of dead bugs, but I didn’t care. I would take all the dead bugs in the world at this point. In fact, I would demand them.

I rang the golden bell. Steph and Andy opened the door together.

Both were beaming.

Me: Is this the fuck pad?

Indeed, they said.

And in the next second I was inside that bright and warm place. It was a two-bedroom number, kitchen and fold out futon-style couches together in the main room, a window view of a wood and brick house on the catty-corner.

Steph and Andy had two fresh six-packs of beer in brown and green bottles – according to the packages, brands from Alaska and Ireland.

Hello, hello, Bay City!

Immediately we drank a few down. Steph stepped over to the stereo and yanked the trigger on some key Pooh Sticks. And there we were all of a sudden, talking and drinking them down and blasting the Pooh Sticks.

Andy quickly went into a story about the lesbians who lived next door, one of whom was a reporter for one of the local papers.

I’d like to fuck her, Steph said merrily. We had a few good laughs about that.

In due time they laid down some rules for me: NO SMOKING in the apartment, only on what they called the porch, and no loud music after 11 o’clock, except on Fridays and Saturdays, when you could go till midnight but no more. Sure, I said – sure, no problem. After that they both said they had to get to sleep.

Work in the morning: Steph taught computer-training downtown; computer-data input for Andy at a longshore shipping company, Procurement Dept.

Okay, for sure, I said – and the same goes for me: Sleep and then looking for a job and an apartment, first thing in the morning.

They shut the doors to their bedrooms.

And there I was alone – in Bay City.

I soon saw that five beers remained.

I cracked one of the Alaskans, stood around awhile, then walked over to Steph and Andy’s bookshelf. A bunch of bologna on it. These guys, I said to myself. What the hell was going on over here? There were things up there like oversize paperbacks by 37-year-old lit-seminar graduates, going on about sex with a cousin and mom’s drinking, stories about blind girls dreaming of Mozart while romping with Isaac the professor’s German shepherd. And the rest of it. Also, there were a seeming great many thin cartoon-type volumes about ways to kill your girlfriend’s cats, and joke politics and various pranks, how to put bombs in mailboxes, etc.

I walked out to the porch for a smoke. It wasn’t really a porch, but a kind of landing at the top of another rickety flight of stairs. Nothing but chipped paint, a few cracked wood planks. Splinters. I lit and looked.

Bay City – she was chains upon cris-crossing chains of lights, veritable trellises of lights, white and yellow and orange, bits of pink popping there and again. Office towers stood staunch and blocky amid the mist-foggy fray, bathing in sultry ochres, simmering aquamarines, burning lavenders. Solitary red lights blinked atop a good half dozen of the buildings, who knew what for.

I took it all in – her, Bay City, the one. I felt myself gently swaying as I stood and gazed on her. I was in now, or close to it – very, very close.

I looked up and saw the sky to be swimming with all manner of helicopters, airliners and single-engine bi-planes. And there, over to the left – a police searchlight. No, two police searchlights: one on some blown-out ghetto building, one aimed at the ground – probably on some punk thug who deserved a beating, by some cops who deserved to give it.

Love it, I thought. LOVE IT.

Bay City, I sneered. You bitch. You lying whore sack of come. You four-on-the-floor mother-cunt. Come on, you filthy bitch. You cheap whore. You dirty lying two-dollar strumpet.

Come to daddy.

I looked Bay City over. People were out there in her, running through her legs, streaming through her hair, scampering through her dank and wondrous jungles. And she was humming, Bay City was, I could hear it, even at this hour: A hanging hum, a whispered whir, a rousting about; clanging and hoots.

All kinds of folks were out there. Maybe they didn’t know it yet, but I was coming for them.

Me, I was coming. A new shriek across their horizon.

Excitement purred and throbbed within me. I would meet some of these people. I would meet them and put their necks to the stone.

They would be evil and insane, and I would expose them. They would be kind and generous, gracious of intent and exacting of mind, and I would hoist them onto my shoulders, shouting invective at all comers, throwing elbows at anybody who tried to