Fires of Flesh
Sean Maschmann
“The meek and the weak shall inherit the earth,
The savage and honest are dead”
All the Good Times - Mr. Fox
Dan Jensen took pride in his bike, a long-faded Kuwahara Kiowa. It had begun life around twenty years before as a pretty high-end BMX – it was Taiwanese rather than Japanese, which is what separated the pro from the prosumer back in the nineties, but still. Whoever had bought this thing had not been fucking around. Dan had picked it up five years earlier, around the time he got fired for stealing from the register of Mac’s convenience store, his last regular job. He had managed to hold on to his tiny room for two months more, and then things had bottomed out for him. He’d been evicted and then picked up a meth addiction at more or less the same time. He slept at friends’ places most nights, with occasional kips in the park. Once in a while he went to the Labour Ready office up on Blanshard Street… but usually he was so sick from the previous night’s chicken flipping that he couldn’t make it down for the 6 a.m. call. Plus, he usually got stuck with some shit job like cleaning the site or plastering.
Dan made what money he had mostly by stealing things and fencing them. From time to time, he would also help Jag, the local meth dealer, making deliveries or watching for cops. It was a dangerous life, but without his bike, it would be far more fucking dangerous. At least a half-dozen times, Dan had pedaled for all he was worth, while someone – cop, dealer or robbery victim – chased him with pure murder in their heart.
He rode with the seat low, his knees absurdly wide on the tiny frame. He was a forty-two-year old man, whip thin, with a sun-ravaged face and icy and alert eyes so blue they were nearly colorless, constantly working and thinking, the kinds of eyes that frighten the bourgeoisie back into their chambers. He wore an oversize Anaheim Ducks jersey and his nearly toothless mouth held tight to a Player’s Light. He was rarely without a smoke in his mouth. Lucky for him, he had a connection down at the Songhees reserve where smokes were cheaper.
He was riding sloppy circles around the Esquimalt Plaza parking lot, cruising the strip mall for opportunities. Its shops and restaurants were populated by hundreds of people from the mostly working-class neighborhood. Fat women and skinny men proliferated. It was a Tuesday morning in early February. The cherry trees up in Rockheights were already blooming, despite the chill in the air. The hill, with its expensive houses, loomed over the mall, rising two hundred feet into the low grey sky, closer to the gods of the coast, and further away from people like Dan.
Several shoppers looked at him, some narrowing their eyes suspiciously, others smiling when they noticed the slapdash yellow paint job on his bike, and the streamers that followed behind him, and then looking down quickly when they saw his desperate and fearless face.
Those eyes.
Dan hadn’t been much of a student - he dropped out after grade ten – but had always done better than average in English. His teacher in English 8 had once asked the students to write a family history and Dan’s had come back. Where his classmates’ work was covered with comments and red ink, Dan’s was nearly unspoiled. At the very end was a single word:
Devastating.
Dan remembered sitting there, blinking at the word. There was nothing else. No mark. No criticism. Just that single collection of letters, organized into a word that was somehow both compassionate and judgmental. At the end of class, Mr. Waslenchuk asked Dan to stay behind. By then, Dan was furious. Until that day – this was near Christmas – he had actually liked the young teacher.
That was over. He had been made to feel like a specimen. So when the teacher asked Dan if what he wrote was true – that his father had killed himself two years earlier – Dan had said no, he was making it up. Mr. Waslenchuk had simply nodded as though he were expecting this answer.
He failed English 8 but scraped by with a C in summer school.
And from that day, he never wrote or spoke a single truth about himself to anyone who didn’t come also up through the black muck and slime of poverty.
On the other side of the lot was young Tyson on his own BMX. Dan had met him last summer at his usual drinking beach in Saxe Point Park, not far from here. Tyson had arrived from out east, Antigonish, to attend UVic, and quickly dropped out once he spent his student loan on heroin.
They connected at once. As Dan approached the small pit fire, he heard a familiar bass hook emerging from a tinny-sounding portable stereo.
1-800 Suicide, one of his favorite jams in high school in the early 90’s.
“Far as life, Yo, it ain’t worth it… Put a rope around your neck and jerk it!”
It was Tyson, standing up and drunkenly rapping along, knees bending a bit too deeply, while the three or four other guys laughed encouragement.
When the performance was over – including pantomimed versions of the many varieties of self-destruction outlined in the song – Dan introduced himself.
“Love the Gravediggaz,” he said, extending his hand. “Dan.”
“Tyson,” said the young man. They shook and quickly bonded over the Golden Age of Hip Hop. Since then, it had become shorthand for them, and they had built a system of codes based on the words of RZA and Dre and Tupac. The other indigent men they drank and slept with rolled their collective eyes. Some of them were even savvy enough to be surprised that Tyson, a wiry kid with gutter punk hair, would be a fan of decidedly above-ground hip hop, but Tyson was full of surprises. The things that weren’t surprising about him – his heroin addiction, his bad skin, the fact that he had been sexually and physically abused as a kid – were features they were familiar with from long and sad and often horribly personal experience.
Tyson and Dan had become a team since then, using techniques Dan had perfected over the post-Mac’s years. They had secured a bike for Tyson, and Dan had taken the time to make sure the young man was able to get around easily. He was clumsy at first. Actually, he was still clumsy. But he was less clumsy than he had been. That was something.
Tyson’s bike had also been customized, but with stickers: cartoon characters, random advertisements, even price and UPC labels. Tyson looked scary, with long ratty dreadlocks and a massive ginger beard. His eyes were preternaturally wide and young, lending him an unbalanced and uncanny energy. He was also incredibly wiry and thin…but this was true of all the men who rode bikes in the back streets and parking lots of Esquimalt.
Given enough time, Tyson would look exactly like Dan, right down to the mouth nearly devoid of teeth. On the street there was a horrible gravity, and its constant downward pitch hurtled a man into becoming something that looked like Dan.
Tyson’s bike was a more modest affair than Dan’s. It was no Kuwahara - more like a Super Cycle - but it was small, easily carried onto a bus, maneuverable and, in the end, expendable. Dan had long since learned that it was best to be able to let go of things that he otherwise had to carry.
Dan slowed his pedaling as he pulled up next to a red Kia Stinger next to the Archie Browning Rec Centre. The car’s passenger window was open, and it was parked in a temporary spot.
Opportunity.
Dan leaned forward, eyes shifting this way and that. The Stinger looked empty… Wait -
Yes. There. Back seat. Obscured under a coat.
Something. A purse maybe?
One more sweep of the immediate area. Nobody nearby. He looked at the entrance to the Rec Centre, where Sheryl MacDonald had dumped him at a roller-skating night in grade nine.
Fucking bitch, he thought absently.
Nobody leaving. He assumed that the owner of this car was picking up their kids from hockey practice.
One quick look over his shoulder showed him that Tyson was watching him now. Good. He nodded at the younger man, and Tyson pedaled slowly toward him, meandering loosely around the lot, taking up as much room and attention as he could, just as Dan had taught him.
This was the moment. Dan leaned in and reached into the back seat. He smelled vague cologne and leather. He swept the coat away.
For a moment, Dan hovered there, his hand suspended over the object, his blinking eyes trying to make sense. He swept the immediate area again: still nothing. There was Tyson, still meandering around on his bike, drawing eyes to him.
He stuck his head in the Stinger’s window and looked once more.
Yes. The coat was lying across the other side of the back seat.
And revealed now, gleaming in the morning light, was a MacBook Pro. It squatted there, sleek and silent and expensive. Dan could feel his jaw working. He seized the computer, nearly dropping it as he took it out the window. He then ducked back in and grabbed the coat, quickly wrapping it around the laptop. Dan could feel the computer’s heat. It was on. He cradled the swaddled computer like a living creature. Warmth radiated under his arm.
“Hey. Hey!”
It came from the entrance of the Rec Centre. Dan lifted the front wheel of the bike and swiveled in the opposite direction, looking over his shoulder.
A short and very muscular-looking middle-aged man was trotting toward him. His dark hair was severe and his black eyes spat rage. Everything about him said Navy. Two small kids, both girls, stood behind him, fearful and uncertain.
“Get the fuck over here!” he said, and then for good measure. “Hey!”
Adrenaline went to work on Dan. His ears ached. He pedaled as hard as he could while only holding on to the handlebars with one hand. He could hear the footsteps of the enraged hairy-ass chasing him. Well no doubt. The parcel under his arm cost a pretty penny.
“Don’t leave it in the back of your unlocked fucking car then, asshole,” he said to himself as he pedaled; he was doing more of that these days and it bothered him… but he couldn’t seem to stop.
Wind ripped through his unwashed, stringy hair. The Kuwie might be ugly, but it ran like a greased pig. Dan heard something, and realized it was his own keening voice, erupting into a triumphant laugh.
“Hey! Stop that guy!” The footsteps were still pounding, but becoming fainter.
As Dan pedaled, he noticed people looking at him, most with wide-eyed confusion. Tyson was moving toward him and Dan shook his head with grim intensity, then cocked it to the left, indicating to his young accomplice that he should peel down the little road that snuck between the strip mall and the Rec Centre to the sports field and swimming pool complex in the back. Tyson nodded and then zipped by him in a flash of dreads and bad skin, his wide and strange eyes seeming to linger in the air.
Dan redoubled his own efforts. He swerved at the last second as a white Merc popped out of a parking space in front of him, nearly tumbling onto the concrete in the process. The driver honked at him, her shaded visor obscuring her eyes.
He turned right, toward the coffee shop at the mouth of the strip mall, where its mostly mom-and-pop storefronts met Esquimalt Road. The MacBook was nestled snugly under his flapping denim jacket, its owner still in front of the Country Grocer store, far too far back to catch him now.
Dan stopped suddenly. Something about the way the crew-cut man was standing worried him. His attention was not on Dan at all, or even in Dan’s direction. His hands were on his thighs and he was bent forward slightly. His head and shoulders were moving, as though he were speaking to someone on the ground. His girls, looking scared even from here, lurked behind him.
Dan hovered over his bike in front of the coffee shop. A young woman was leaving, a baby under one arm and a to-go cup in the other hand. Her nose was pierced and she had dreads of her own, though they looked impossibly clean compared to Tyson’s. University dreads was what Tyson derisively called them.
She walked hurriedly toward the sidewalk and away from Dan as soon as she saw him.
Muffled shouting brought his attention back to the angry hairy-ass.
Something had happened to Tyson.
The MacBook was still warm under his arm, one of its rounded and immaculately industrially-designed corners digging into the flesh of his armpit disagreeably: Steve Jobs hadn’t thought of everything after all.
Cursing, and with a wary eye on the man he had stolen from, he circled slowly back toward the Country Grocer and the unfolding scene: More people were gathering. Mr. Tough Guy was still in the center of the group, and Dan noticed that he had not looked at Dan at all.
An older woman, fat and wearing a yellow pantsuit, paced nearby, her phone plastered to her head, her eyes wide and shocked and excited. Calling 911, Dan thought. No doubt.
Something was wrong with Tyson.
As Dan got closer, he saw the white Mercedes. It was stopped at the end of one of the rows of parked hours.
At an angle.
A sick and heavy feeling palsied his legs.
The woman driving the Mercedes stood next to the car, crying. The visor was still covering her eyes. Next to her, a tall man stood uncomfortably, his hand awkwardly patting her back. He was looking at something in front of the car. His face looked sick.
Dan slowed down. He could see something there, right in front of the Mercedes.
A leg. Tyson’s leg. Only there was something wrong with it. At first, Dan couldn’t tell what it was and then he could:
The foot was backwards.
Steeling himself, Dan kept moving until he saw Tyson lying there, his face moving; he looked as though he was smiling, but of course he wasn’t smiling. He was grimacing in agony because his legs had been turned into smashed glass by the front wheels of the white Merc.
Dan couldn’t move. He was as rooted to the spot as a blinded deer. Tyson’s head moved around with a frightening and deliberate slowness. Something began to boil in Dan’s stomach. Tyson’s unsettling eyes remained horribly clear and sober, just as much with broken bones and ruptured tissues as with heroin intoxication.
And then they settled on Dan.
All the colors of the rainbow shone in Tyson’s eyes. The people of the Plaza looked on, some of them with a dawning understanding that something deep and quiet was passing between the man with the crushed pelvis and twisted legs and the toothless scarecrow on the BMX.
“Is he your friend?” a guy with long grey hair and a massive beer gut said. “He looks like he knows you.”
Dan said nothing. Tyson’s eyes were still locked on his, but they were different now. Mud was coming in and disturbing the clarity. The colors were draining away. Tyson opened his mouth, closed it, and then opened it again, decided.
He screamed.
Almost everyone stepped back as one. The sound was unbelievable. It hung there in crystalline perfection, like the final realm before Empyrean Heaven. It crushed hope and cynicism alike with the purity of its pain.
“Jesus,” someone muttered appropriately.
The only person who stayed was the man whose MacBook Dan still held. He was kneeling next to Tyson now, his eyes serious. His little daughters stood well behind him, eyes wide, backs against the indifferent cream-colored wall of the mall.
“Hey buddy,” Dan could hear him say. “Hey buddy, it’s okay. Ambulance is coming buddy. I’m with you. It’s okay.”
Sirens. Close by, too. Victoria is so full of old people and junkies that every second building is an ambulance nest.
“Dan! It hurts!” He breathed raggedly, then said, “You need to tell my mom, Dan. Tell my mom so she comes!” A pause, then, screamed: “Mom! I need you! Mom!”
A few of the people turned to face Dan. The man with the crew cut looked up too, eyes hooded and strange. But he kept talking quietly, comforting Tyson.
Tyson had laid back, mercifully taking his eyes off of Dan, who decided that he was no longer needed here and that he could nothing more for Tyson…who, in turn, could do nothing more for him.
What good would he be, now that his legs were all fucked up?
Dan turned the bike slowly around in a lazy arc, moving back toward the scene of the original crime. There was the Stinger, accusing him afresh.
A sudden gasp turned his head around. The crew-cut man had sat back on the concrete, clearly surprised by something…by Tyson, who was flopping around on the ground despite his busted legs. His arms spasmed horribly. Even from here, Dan could hear the sound of Tyson’s hands slapping the cold concrete over and over like a fighter indicating surrender. The headlights of the white Mercedes flashed over the twisted fingers. Fires of flesh.
“He’s convulsing!” A woman’s voice. Authoritative. Tyson flopped away; nobody moved. The owner of the authoritative voice neither showed herself nor spoke again. The crew-cut man sat, his hands behind him, reverent. All of them, the whole group of maybe a dozen, watched Tyson burn, and were warmed and awed and fascinated as before any real fire.
Dan watched. What could he do? Nothing. How could he help? He couldn’t.
Well that was too bad.
That was just too damn bad.
Dan should have known better. Tyson had always been clumsy.
And in the end, the retard couldn’t even ride across a fucking parking lot without almost getting himself killed.
Dan turned his head, spat, and rode quickly down the narrow lane dividing the mall and the Archie Browning Rec Centre. If he hustled, he might catch Donnie at Garden City Consignment and Loan over on Pandora Street before the end of his shift.
Donnie was cool; he didn’t ask too many questions.
Sean Maschmann
“The meek and the weak shall inherit the earth,
The savage and honest are dead”
All the Good Times - Mr. Fox
Dan Jensen took pride in his bike, a long-faded Kuwahara Kiowa. It had begun life around twenty years before as a pretty high-end BMX – it was Taiwanese rather than Japanese, which is what separated the pro from the prosumer back in the nineties, but still. Whoever had bought this thing had not been fucking around. Dan had picked it up five years earlier, around the time he got fired for stealing from the register of Mac’s convenience store, his last regular job. He had managed to hold on to his tiny room for two months more, and then things had bottomed out for him. He’d been evicted and then picked up a meth addiction at more or less the same time. He slept at friends’ places most nights, with occasional kips in the park. Once in a while he went to the Labour Ready office up on Blanshard Street… but usually he was so sick from the previous night’s chicken flipping that he couldn’t make it down for the 6 a.m. call. Plus, he usually got stuck with some shit job like cleaning the site or plastering.
Dan made what money he had mostly by stealing things and fencing them. From time to time, he would also help Jag, the local meth dealer, making deliveries or watching for cops. It was a dangerous life, but without his bike, it would be far more fucking dangerous. At least a half-dozen times, Dan had pedaled for all he was worth, while someone – cop, dealer or robbery victim – chased him with pure murder in their heart.
He rode with the seat low, his knees absurdly wide on the tiny frame. He was a forty-two-year old man, whip thin, with a sun-ravaged face and icy and alert eyes so blue they were nearly colorless, constantly working and thinking, the kinds of eyes that frighten the bourgeoisie back into their chambers. He wore an oversize Anaheim Ducks jersey and his nearly toothless mouth held tight to a Player’s Light. He was rarely without a smoke in his mouth. Lucky for him, he had a connection down at the Songhees reserve where smokes were cheaper.
He was riding sloppy circles around the Esquimalt Plaza parking lot, cruising the strip mall for opportunities. Its shops and restaurants were populated by hundreds of people from the mostly working-class neighborhood. Fat women and skinny men proliferated. It was a Tuesday morning in early February. The cherry trees up in Rockheights were already blooming, despite the chill in the air. The hill, with its expensive houses, loomed over the mall, rising two hundred feet into the low grey sky, closer to the gods of the coast, and further away from people like Dan.
Several shoppers looked at him, some narrowing their eyes suspiciously, others smiling when they noticed the slapdash yellow paint job on his bike, and the streamers that followed behind him, and then looking down quickly when they saw his desperate and fearless face.
Those eyes.
Dan hadn’t been much of a student - he dropped out after grade ten – but had always done better than average in English. His teacher in English 8 had once asked the students to write a family history and Dan’s had come back. Where his classmates’ work was covered with comments and red ink, Dan’s was nearly unspoiled. At the very end was a single word:
Devastating.
Dan remembered sitting there, blinking at the word. There was nothing else. No mark. No criticism. Just that single collection of letters, organized into a word that was somehow both compassionate and judgmental. At the end of class, Mr. Waslenchuk asked Dan to stay behind. By then, Dan was furious. Until that day – this was near Christmas – he had actually liked the young teacher.
That was over. He had been made to feel like a specimen. So when the teacher asked Dan if what he wrote was true – that his father had killed himself two years earlier – Dan had said no, he was making it up. Mr. Waslenchuk had simply nodded as though he were expecting this answer.
He failed English 8 but scraped by with a C in summer school.
And from that day, he never wrote or spoke a single truth about himself to anyone who didn’t come also up through the black muck and slime of poverty.
On the other side of the lot was young Tyson on his own BMX. Dan had met him last summer at his usual drinking beach in Saxe Point Park, not far from here. Tyson had arrived from out east, Antigonish, to attend UVic, and quickly dropped out once he spent his student loan on heroin.
They connected at once. As Dan approached the small pit fire, he heard a familiar bass hook emerging from a tinny-sounding portable stereo.
1-800 Suicide, one of his favorite jams in high school in the early 90’s.
“Far as life, Yo, it ain’t worth it… Put a rope around your neck and jerk it!”
It was Tyson, standing up and drunkenly rapping along, knees bending a bit too deeply, while the three or four other guys laughed encouragement.
When the performance was over – including pantomimed versions of the many varieties of self-destruction outlined in the song – Dan introduced himself.
“Love the Gravediggaz,” he said, extending his hand. “Dan.”
“Tyson,” said the young man. They shook and quickly bonded over the Golden Age of Hip Hop. Since then, it had become shorthand for them, and they had built a system of codes based on the words of RZA and Dre and Tupac. The other indigent men they drank and slept with rolled their collective eyes. Some of them were even savvy enough to be surprised that Tyson, a wiry kid with gutter punk hair, would be a fan of decidedly above-ground hip hop, but Tyson was full of surprises. The things that weren’t surprising about him – his heroin addiction, his bad skin, the fact that he had been sexually and physically abused as a kid – were features they were familiar with from long and sad and often horribly personal experience.
Tyson and Dan had become a team since then, using techniques Dan had perfected over the post-Mac’s years. They had secured a bike for Tyson, and Dan had taken the time to make sure the young man was able to get around easily. He was clumsy at first. Actually, he was still clumsy. But he was less clumsy than he had been. That was something.
Tyson’s bike had also been customized, but with stickers: cartoon characters, random advertisements, even price and UPC labels. Tyson looked scary, with long ratty dreadlocks and a massive ginger beard. His eyes were preternaturally wide and young, lending him an unbalanced and uncanny energy. He was also incredibly wiry and thin…but this was true of all the men who rode bikes in the back streets and parking lots of Esquimalt.
Given enough time, Tyson would look exactly like Dan, right down to the mouth nearly devoid of teeth. On the street there was a horrible gravity, and its constant downward pitch hurtled a man into becoming something that looked like Dan.
Tyson’s bike was a more modest affair than Dan’s. It was no Kuwahara - more like a Super Cycle - but it was small, easily carried onto a bus, maneuverable and, in the end, expendable. Dan had long since learned that it was best to be able to let go of things that he otherwise had to carry.
Dan slowed his pedaling as he pulled up next to a red Kia Stinger next to the Archie Browning Rec Centre. The car’s passenger window was open, and it was parked in a temporary spot.
Opportunity.
Dan leaned forward, eyes shifting this way and that. The Stinger looked empty… Wait -
Yes. There. Back seat. Obscured under a coat.
Something. A purse maybe?
One more sweep of the immediate area. Nobody nearby. He looked at the entrance to the Rec Centre, where Sheryl MacDonald had dumped him at a roller-skating night in grade nine.
Fucking bitch, he thought absently.
Nobody leaving. He assumed that the owner of this car was picking up their kids from hockey practice.
One quick look over his shoulder showed him that Tyson was watching him now. Good. He nodded at the younger man, and Tyson pedaled slowly toward him, meandering loosely around the lot, taking up as much room and attention as he could, just as Dan had taught him.
This was the moment. Dan leaned in and reached into the back seat. He smelled vague cologne and leather. He swept the coat away.
For a moment, Dan hovered there, his hand suspended over the object, his blinking eyes trying to make sense. He swept the immediate area again: still nothing. There was Tyson, still meandering around on his bike, drawing eyes to him.
He stuck his head in the Stinger’s window and looked once more.
Yes. The coat was lying across the other side of the back seat.
And revealed now, gleaming in the morning light, was a MacBook Pro. It squatted there, sleek and silent and expensive. Dan could feel his jaw working. He seized the computer, nearly dropping it as he took it out the window. He then ducked back in and grabbed the coat, quickly wrapping it around the laptop. Dan could feel the computer’s heat. It was on. He cradled the swaddled computer like a living creature. Warmth radiated under his arm.
“Hey. Hey!”
It came from the entrance of the Rec Centre. Dan lifted the front wheel of the bike and swiveled in the opposite direction, looking over his shoulder.
A short and very muscular-looking middle-aged man was trotting toward him. His dark hair was severe and his black eyes spat rage. Everything about him said Navy. Two small kids, both girls, stood behind him, fearful and uncertain.
“Get the fuck over here!” he said, and then for good measure. “Hey!”
Adrenaline went to work on Dan. His ears ached. He pedaled as hard as he could while only holding on to the handlebars with one hand. He could hear the footsteps of the enraged hairy-ass chasing him. Well no doubt. The parcel under his arm cost a pretty penny.
“Don’t leave it in the back of your unlocked fucking car then, asshole,” he said to himself as he pedaled; he was doing more of that these days and it bothered him… but he couldn’t seem to stop.
Wind ripped through his unwashed, stringy hair. The Kuwie might be ugly, but it ran like a greased pig. Dan heard something, and realized it was his own keening voice, erupting into a triumphant laugh.
“Hey! Stop that guy!” The footsteps were still pounding, but becoming fainter.
As Dan pedaled, he noticed people looking at him, most with wide-eyed confusion. Tyson was moving toward him and Dan shook his head with grim intensity, then cocked it to the left, indicating to his young accomplice that he should peel down the little road that snuck between the strip mall and the Rec Centre to the sports field and swimming pool complex in the back. Tyson nodded and then zipped by him in a flash of dreads and bad skin, his wide and strange eyes seeming to linger in the air.
Dan redoubled his own efforts. He swerved at the last second as a white Merc popped out of a parking space in front of him, nearly tumbling onto the concrete in the process. The driver honked at him, her shaded visor obscuring her eyes.
He turned right, toward the coffee shop at the mouth of the strip mall, where its mostly mom-and-pop storefronts met Esquimalt Road. The MacBook was nestled snugly under his flapping denim jacket, its owner still in front of the Country Grocer store, far too far back to catch him now.
Dan stopped suddenly. Something about the way the crew-cut man was standing worried him. His attention was not on Dan at all, or even in Dan’s direction. His hands were on his thighs and he was bent forward slightly. His head and shoulders were moving, as though he were speaking to someone on the ground. His girls, looking scared even from here, lurked behind him.
Dan hovered over his bike in front of the coffee shop. A young woman was leaving, a baby under one arm and a to-go cup in the other hand. Her nose was pierced and she had dreads of her own, though they looked impossibly clean compared to Tyson’s. University dreads was what Tyson derisively called them.
She walked hurriedly toward the sidewalk and away from Dan as soon as she saw him.
Muffled shouting brought his attention back to the angry hairy-ass.
Something had happened to Tyson.
The MacBook was still warm under his arm, one of its rounded and immaculately industrially-designed corners digging into the flesh of his armpit disagreeably: Steve Jobs hadn’t thought of everything after all.
Cursing, and with a wary eye on the man he had stolen from, he circled slowly back toward the Country Grocer and the unfolding scene: More people were gathering. Mr. Tough Guy was still in the center of the group, and Dan noticed that he had not looked at Dan at all.
An older woman, fat and wearing a yellow pantsuit, paced nearby, her phone plastered to her head, her eyes wide and shocked and excited. Calling 911, Dan thought. No doubt.
Something was wrong with Tyson.
As Dan got closer, he saw the white Mercedes. It was stopped at the end of one of the rows of parked hours.
At an angle.
A sick and heavy feeling palsied his legs.
The woman driving the Mercedes stood next to the car, crying. The visor was still covering her eyes. Next to her, a tall man stood uncomfortably, his hand awkwardly patting her back. He was looking at something in front of the car. His face looked sick.
Dan slowed down. He could see something there, right in front of the Mercedes.
A leg. Tyson’s leg. Only there was something wrong with it. At first, Dan couldn’t tell what it was and then he could:
The foot was backwards.
Steeling himself, Dan kept moving until he saw Tyson lying there, his face moving; he looked as though he was smiling, but of course he wasn’t smiling. He was grimacing in agony because his legs had been turned into smashed glass by the front wheels of the white Merc.
Dan couldn’t move. He was as rooted to the spot as a blinded deer. Tyson’s head moved around with a frightening and deliberate slowness. Something began to boil in Dan’s stomach. Tyson’s unsettling eyes remained horribly clear and sober, just as much with broken bones and ruptured tissues as with heroin intoxication.
And then they settled on Dan.
All the colors of the rainbow shone in Tyson’s eyes. The people of the Plaza looked on, some of them with a dawning understanding that something deep and quiet was passing between the man with the crushed pelvis and twisted legs and the toothless scarecrow on the BMX.
“Is he your friend?” a guy with long grey hair and a massive beer gut said. “He looks like he knows you.”
Dan said nothing. Tyson’s eyes were still locked on his, but they were different now. Mud was coming in and disturbing the clarity. The colors were draining away. Tyson opened his mouth, closed it, and then opened it again, decided.
He screamed.
Almost everyone stepped back as one. The sound was unbelievable. It hung there in crystalline perfection, like the final realm before Empyrean Heaven. It crushed hope and cynicism alike with the purity of its pain.
“Jesus,” someone muttered appropriately.
The only person who stayed was the man whose MacBook Dan still held. He was kneeling next to Tyson now, his eyes serious. His little daughters stood well behind him, eyes wide, backs against the indifferent cream-colored wall of the mall.
“Hey buddy,” Dan could hear him say. “Hey buddy, it’s okay. Ambulance is coming buddy. I’m with you. It’s okay.”
Sirens. Close by, too. Victoria is so full of old people and junkies that every second building is an ambulance nest.
“Dan! It hurts!” He breathed raggedly, then said, “You need to tell my mom, Dan. Tell my mom so she comes!” A pause, then, screamed: “Mom! I need you! Mom!”
A few of the people turned to face Dan. The man with the crew cut looked up too, eyes hooded and strange. But he kept talking quietly, comforting Tyson.
Tyson had laid back, mercifully taking his eyes off of Dan, who decided that he was no longer needed here and that he could nothing more for Tyson…who, in turn, could do nothing more for him.
What good would he be, now that his legs were all fucked up?
Dan turned the bike slowly around in a lazy arc, moving back toward the scene of the original crime. There was the Stinger, accusing him afresh.
A sudden gasp turned his head around. The crew-cut man had sat back on the concrete, clearly surprised by something…by Tyson, who was flopping around on the ground despite his busted legs. His arms spasmed horribly. Even from here, Dan could hear the sound of Tyson’s hands slapping the cold concrete over and over like a fighter indicating surrender. The headlights of the white Mercedes flashed over the twisted fingers. Fires of flesh.
“He’s convulsing!” A woman’s voice. Authoritative. Tyson flopped away; nobody moved. The owner of the authoritative voice neither showed herself nor spoke again. The crew-cut man sat, his hands behind him, reverent. All of them, the whole group of maybe a dozen, watched Tyson burn, and were warmed and awed and fascinated as before any real fire.
Dan watched. What could he do? Nothing. How could he help? He couldn’t.
Well that was too bad.
That was just too damn bad.
Dan should have known better. Tyson had always been clumsy.
And in the end, the retard couldn’t even ride across a fucking parking lot without almost getting himself killed.
Dan turned his head, spat, and rode quickly down the narrow lane dividing the mall and the Archie Browning Rec Centre. If he hustled, he might catch Donnie at Garden City Consignment and Loan over on Pandora Street before the end of his shift.
Donnie was cool; he didn’t ask too many questions.
