Old Ghosts, page 1
OLD GHOSTS
Nik Korpon
PRAISE FOR OLD GHOSTS
“Who you are is who you’ve been, for better or for worse. There’s old ghosts everywhere, but, now, as far as I’m concerned, there’s only one Old Ghosts, and it’s Nik Korpon’s.” —Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mongrels
“Nik Korpon brings us back to a Baltimore we haven’t seen since The Wire and answers the question of what might’ve been if The Grifters’ Roy Dillon had tried to settle down, go straight and have a kid. A story of brothers and sisters or lovers, Old Ghosts reads like a horror story down one man’s memory lane. Not to be missed!” —Seth Harwood, author of Jack Wakes Up
“Nik Korpon’s Old Ghosts is about old friends and older dreams getting in the way of your present, and then totally kicking the shit out of your future. Plus rebar. Moody, smart, sexy, and tension-filled, Old Ghosts is a whip crack of a crime novella.” —Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts
Copyright © 2011 by Nik Korpon
First Down & Out Books Edition February 2019
All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Cover design by Zach McCain
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Old Ghosts
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by the Author
Preview from All the Way Down by Eric Beetner
Preview from Main Bad Guy by Nick Kolakowski
Preview from Silent Remains by Jerry Kennealy
“It’s a trap.”
—Ancient Mon Calamari proverb
Chapter 1
Just before we finished the crown-molding, Will Watkins cut off his finger with the miter saw. He jumped back and screamed like an attacking eagle, swinging his arm all around and flinging blood everywhere. It mixed with sawdust and metal chips, turned the plywood floor into a Jackson Pollock painting. Hank took one look at it and—being hemophobic—quickly scuttled away from the scene. But in his haste, he stepped on the cord, ripping the circular saw from his hand, which sent the blade chewing across the wood, which scared the shit out of Dwaine the foreman, who proceeded to knock over the twenty-pound sledge and send that through an adjoining wall, taking out half the wiring in the adjacent room with the home theatre system. One of the Guatemalans tried to shove Will’s finger back into its place, setting off a chain reaction of vomiting. I watched in abject disbelief as one fucking finger set us back more than six days.
I knew I shouldn’t have gotten out of bed.
With a T-shirt turning red around his hand, Watkins shuffled into the truck and one of the plumbers took off for Hopkins Hospital. I just sat there, shaking my head, sipping from the cracked thermos of iced tea Luz packed. I imagined us reading in bed this morning, her long black hair spilling over the pillow like eternal night. My watch said it was four-thirty, so I guessed she was almost done her shift at Esperanza Community Center, two blocks off Broadway, leading kids through yoga poses with a voice like wind through tall grass or helping some of the abuelas fill out health and citizenship forms. Meanwhile, I was sitting on rebar, sipping tepid tea and drawing shapes in the coagulated-blood-and-wood paste with the tip of my boot.
Dwaine’s feet came into my line of view. I looked up. He pursed his lips and shook his head, and I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Beer, Picasso?” he said. He always said the ahs like ass, thinking it was funny. I assumed it was the only artist he’d ever heard of.
I nodded once. “Beer.”
The November sun tried to warm us, but the clouds choked it to little more than a pallid orb. Leaves crunched under our feet. At the crosswalk, I scraped my boot against the curb to remove the glass of a crushed vial. The Baltimore wind licked at our exposed necks. Ash hung in the air, yard waste or a rowhome burning somewhere close. Luz said she’d meet us after work, and I thought it’d be a good evening to walk home.
Dwaine lit a Marlboro. “Kind of funny when you think about it.”
“How so?”
“I mean, we was worrying because we only got one more job. Now we got this one for another weeks.”
“They going to pay for another week, especially if it’s because we screwed up?”
He smirked. “I got ways.”
Clapping my hand on his shoulder, I said, “Dwaine, I’ve never doubted the revisionist tendencies of your bean counters.”
“Damn right.” He opened the door to Santo Sangre. Ranchero music wove through the air. “Hey, first round’s on me.”
We were halfway through our beer when he told me about the contract.
“Some hotshot—I dunno—lawyer or some shit. Lots of Yankee dough. Bought one those fixers by the Park and wants us to remodel it.”
I shrugged, looked over his shoulder for Luz. A wrinkled couple played touch-screen poker on the machine at the end of the bar, silver streaks in their shadow-black hair. A stack of quarters sat next to their beers. Without looking, the man reached for a coin, touched her wrist for a gentle second, then resumed his game.
“Was gonna have Watkins watch over it while I finished up the finger trap house, but seeing as how he’s outta commission, I’ll do it for now. But I want you to plan the job.”
“Sure. Whatever.”
“Guy says he wants it aesthetically pleasing. You being the art fag, figure you’re the one for him.” He tipped his mesh hat to the back of his head, scratched at his scalp. Bits of dirt and sawdust fell like dirty snow. “Something not right bout them two, though.”
“What two?”
The door opened, Luz entering on a gust of wind. She scanned the bar for us, ponytail swinging.
“The hotshot and his wife. Like—” he snapped his fingers in the air, “—what’s that movie with the bastard and the chainsaw?”
I waved my hand to get her attention. I thought it was a good sign that, after eighteen months of being together, her smile still turned my knees to water. Dwaine had told me that the honeymoon ends two weeks after you put the golden shackle around each other’s finger, but we’d been married over a year and still said I love you every time we parted company.
“Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” I said to him as an afterthought.
She came over to where we sat. Cotton jacket zipped to her throat, cheeks still flushed from class. Her yoga pants halted just below her knee, a small line where she’d cut herself shaving.
“Bueno, amor,” she said with a kiss. Her sweat could be bottled as an essential oil.
“Hey, chica.” Dwaine raised his hands over his head, made the “Walk Like an Egyptian” motion. “I might could learn you something.”
She just smiled. “Hi, Dwaine.”
“Something to drink?” I stood and motioned for her to sit.
She plopped down with a sigh. “Just a water.”
I waved to Consuela the bartender, pointed at mine and Dwaine’s glasses then asked for agua con limón. A few months ago, after we finished a total rehab in under a week, Dwaine told all the guys on the job that he’d get them drunk to show his appreciation for our hard work. The brother of one of our new hires owned a bar nearby, so we took our business to him, and we’ve been drinking here ever since. Dwaine still loved to ask me to translate for him, despite the countless times I’d said my parents were from Portugal, and that I didn’t speak much of it anyway in the first place, and that I sounded like a racist gardener when I spoke Spanish because I fucked it up so bad.
I squeezed Luz’s thigh. “Your day go okay?”
She shrugged. “Not really. You remember Hortencia? From San Salvador?”
“Sure,” I said, but couldn’t recall.
“No, you don’t.” She shook her head. “She made those pupusas for us a couple weeks ago.”
“Ah, right, right.”
“Of course, you remember food.” I shrugged. She continued, “She’s been having problems with this lawyer, trying to get her niece’s papers together to bring her up here.”
I nodded remembering now. Her niece’s boyfriend had been forced to join Barrio 18, which meant she became part too. She’d been beaten near-blind for walking through an MS-13 neighborhood—because she didn’t know any better—and her mother was trying to everything to get her to the U.S. before something worse happened.
“Is there anything you can do?” I said.
“Go to El Paso and smuggle her over?”
“Ah, the old very-tall-man-in-a-rain jacket move.”
Luz held gangs with a special, bitter contempt. Her family had been driven from their village by warring cartels when Luz’s mother was seven months pregnant, forcing them to make the long trip to el norte. I wasn’t supposed to live here, she told me one night when we were drinking. She didn’t remember it the next morning, but that sentiment burrowed into my gre
“Anyway, I picked up something for you today.”
“It’s not a very large rain jacket, is it?”
She slapped my shoulder, then nodded at my now-empty glass. “How many is that?”
I put up a finger. Consuela set down our round. I put up another finger.
“Just be careful.”
Before I could say anything, Dwaine belched and slammed his glass on the bar, then announced there was a fire somewhere he had to put out with his pink fire hose. He kicked the stool away and stomped to the bathroom. A pack of men walked through the front door, lined up on stools. Their flannels smelled of concrete and sawdust.
“What’d you want to do tonight?”
She shrugged. “Make dinner, have a drink, and watch something funny?”
I tipped back half of my drink, wiped my mouth and extended my arm.
“Shall we, then?”
She curtsied, wrapped her arm in mine, and as I stepped through the door, someone collided with me, almost at a jogging pace. I stumbled into Luz. The man caught himself with the door. Ashen wool hat styled like a newsboy from the ’40s. A thin mustache crawling across his upper lip. Eyes uneven, as if one was perpetually squinting. He tipped his hat to me. My skin turned gooseflesh, like walking through a pocket of cold air. He spun and disappeared around the corner, the incident so quick I wasn’t positive that he wasn’t a ghost.
“What a dick,” Luz said. “He didn’t even apologize.”
I adjusted my jacket, brushed away dust.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” I swallowed a hint of bile, my skin still tingling with phantom residue. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
She lay naked on her back, bent at the waist, right knee kissing her nose, left leg extended. Closed eyes and measured breathing. Every thirty seconds, she alternated legs. Theory held that the sperm would exert less energy traveling to her baby maker and thereby have more energy to make said baby. I told her that idea seemed too familiar, so Hollywood that it couldn’t be true, but it hadn’t dissuaded her. She also tried douching with soda water before sex, using egg whites as lubrication and drinking six or seven cups of green tea daily, so my advice usually drifted away like smoke. I alternated between hoping all the weed I smoked before had lowered my sperm count too far or that I was just sterile—so she wouldn’t have to carry any childless guilt—and imagining her uterus as a frozen tundra, so there’d be one less thing I did wrong.
I pressed on my eyes, watching the rainbow circles swirl on my flesh while she counted to thirty. Four or twenty-two minutes crept by. I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Water beat down on my body, temperature fluctuating when other people in the building flushed their toilets. A few flakes of sawdust flowed down rivulets from my hair. I stayed in until the water was a torrent of white-hot needles and my skin glowed bright red. The scar stayed the same, though, like a gnarled prune, a wormhole through my stomach.
Seven years ago—before I met Luz, before I came to Baltimore, before I fled Boston—I’d been drinking my way around a party in Kenmore. Bald men in tuxes crowded around the baseball game on the television in the kitchen, spilling cask-aged scotch over the marble floor when the Sox got a hit. I remembered thinking the scene was profound in some ridiculous way: no matter which strata of society made up the gathering, whether business men or drug dealers or college students, the party always ended up in the kitchen. In this case, it was all three. I was working as the right-hand man, a consigliere of sorts, for Chance Miller because I couldn’t find a job after graduation—he’d just said and said, well, art school, as if it was that obvious. Regardless, it was a natural transition, as we’d been inseparable since we were old enough to cheer for the Red Sox, and I’d been organizing and cleaning up things for Chance in some fashion for just as long. The idea of finding a real job seemed more like something I should do than the inevitable position with Chance. We’d grown up in Fall River, south of Boston. As his business grew, I followed him to the city, because that was what I always did with Chance. His younger sister, Delilah, had just given me the most exquisite blowjob in the bathroom and my body, unable to reassemble itself, left me sprawled on the leather couch, watching how the velvet curtains would swish whenever someone brushed past them. I wanted to rub my face on them.
A few men were deep in conversation with one of Chance’s enforcers, sitting in the chairs surrounding the couch. They used deliberately vague pseudo-business terms like product, assets, distribution chain, and acceptable loss, but the gold piled on their necks said they’d never read shit about Milton Friedman and free-market theory. Chance drifted through the party, injecting comments into various conversations. One of his eyes was smaller than the other; he passed it off as being perpetually in thought, but I knew his mother had actually dropped him in the basement as a newborn. Though twenty years younger than most of the men, he’d as easily shake their hand to confirm a shipment’s price as break their forearm with a hammer. Maybe I was feeling territorial, as if I wanted to make sure they knew I was worthy of being there and not just Chance’s wingman. Maybe my brain was drifting somewhere in a post-orgasm haze. Or maybe I was just drunk and stupid. Whatever the reason, I said something about our plan to expand the business to a man who’d had his eyes on our territory. I didn’t know he was planning some kind of move at the time, but I knew better than to say anything. I still don’t know why I did, but immediately after the words passed my lips, the enforcer hurried from the room.
I should’ve seen it coming.
Ten minutes later, I was standing in the hallway, lighting a cigarette because Chance wouldn’t allow smoking inside his apartment. Passersby crossed the sidewalk eleven stories below as I blew smoke through a vented window, watching it dissipate in the cold, wet Boston wind. The enforcer passed by me and I nodded to him, because I couldn’t remember his name. We’d worked together once before, visiting some kid at BC who’d liberated one of Chance’s couriers of his shipment using a rusted piece of metal and an acetylene torch. Later, while working construction, my stomach turned sour on realizing how similar the damp crack of plasterboard sounded to shattering the kid’s ribs. When the enforcer passed me in the hallway that evening, I averted my eyes, following a crack in the wall that snaked behind crown molding, then caught a flash of metallic light at his side and electric fire bursting through my stomach. A stain like oil spread across my white shirt, my hands sticky with blood. Next time it’s in your mouth, he said. He continued walking down the hallway as if nothing had happened, the knife already sheathed.
The warning given.
I left Boston the next day, holding a duffel bag and a gut crisscrossed with handmade sutures.
As the shower fell silent, I could hear Luz counting twenty-eight, twenty-nine, and thirty through the door. I wrapped a towel around my waist and lay next to her on the bed. Her hair was piled on her head like an abstract sculpture.
“You want your present?” she said.
I pressed my hand to her stomach. “I thought it was two-to-four weeks before you’d know.”
She smacked my shoulder and called me a cabrón. She grabbed a tin the size of my palm from her yoga bag and took off the lid.
“I got this from one of the abuelas.” It smelled of pine trees and burning insulation.
