I put a cat carrier on the bed and scooped up The Loose from the animal puddle she made at my feet, too aware of the bones beneath her fur and the cruel outline of her hips.

  The doctors told me The Loose had only weeks. Talked about peaceful options. Peaceful, my ass. I took her home and gave her food she wouldn’t eat, except ice cream, she would still steal my ice cream when she had energy.

  When I took her to the vet she had howled at me from inside the carrier. Now she didn’t talk to me at all.

  I unwrapped the yellowed handkerchief, revealing a greasy, black .45 revolver. Shiny brass winked up at me from the cylinders like they meant business. Even so, I stuck a claw hammer and a pearl-handled straight razor into the suitcase before I closed it up. Opened it again and added a roll of black electrical tape.

  I got as far as “G’bye babe,” on the postcard before I froze. So I added, “Love,” and my name and stuck it in a mailbox. Screw it, words were never my thing and she’d understand.

  Besides, I was sure she’d be able to read about it all before too long.

  * * *

  The windows were small with no light shining behind them, and the wooden sign hung crookedly on the bricks. If there was more than one funeral home in town, then this was the shitty one.

  I parked next to an abandoned factory on the next block and walked back, boots clacking on the cracked sidewalk. Occasionally I’d hear the low tone of a motor in the distance or the scratch of a newspaper against the road as it danced with a breeze. The Loose still wasn’t talking to me from inside her carrier.

  The fence sagged but held under my weight, and I slipped between the funeral parlor and the building next door, hunting around until I found some boards I could lean against the back wall beneath a window. A couple of short jabs with my elbow spider-webbed a pane of glass, and with a bit of reaching and wriggling The Loose and I were inside.

  I flicked on my lighter and looked around the room. Some sort of records storage, littered with dusty piles of paper. Mold streaked the walls and I wondered when the window I’d used had last been opened.

  Floorboards creaked under each step as I eased into a narrow hall. The flickering light in my hand picked out tiny details as I passed. Framed newspaper obituaries hung on the walls alongside a state mortician’s license, and a nearby shelf was stacked with takeout menus.

  When I reached the cellar door I grasped the knob and turned it quietly in case some apprentice had a room upstairs. The knob turned easily, and a draft of cool, medicinal air wafted out. Wooden stairs dropped into the dark, and I descended behind my small flame until I found a dangling cord. The bare bulb hanging from the ceiling threw a white, actinic light across the square cellar with its shelves of equipment, machines and coiled hoses mounted on one wall. The floor itself was cement and sloped gently towards a drain set dead center in the room.

  * * *

  I stuck a lit cigarette in the dead man’s mouth and rolled one for myself as a thin spiral of smoke rose to caress the dangling bulb. The smoke was the same color as his skin, milky and lifeless. Another man might have wondered at the symbolism of the rising vapor.

  A cone of light shone down from overhead, isolating the steel table with all the class of a cheap pool hall. Everything beyond was darkness, and the only sound was the scrape of a bowl as The Loose drank from it. It was a metal thing shaped like a kidney, and she was dragging it around the floor with her front paws. She could still do that.

  The dead man was naked on the cold table and smaller than I remembered. The light made his hair seem wispier, his crotch more pathetically shriveled. It deepened every wrinkle with shadows and delineated each rib, making me wonder what he had been eating near the end.

  I took it all in.

  The cigarette in the corpse’s mouth was a solid inch of ash when a breeze I didn’t feel powdered it along one pale cheek. I wiped it away from a face that felt like plastic and plucked the butt free, sticking it in my mouth to relight it, dragging deep, tasting embalming chemicals on top of the smoke. When it was going, I wedged it back between his stiff lips, braced against teeth and gums that had been sewn together.

  “You said we’d smoke one when I got out,” I said.

  When our cigarettes were finished I kicked them toward the drain and lifted my bag onto the table, removing the pinstripe jacket and slacks.

  “Brought your favorite suit,” I said, pulling out a pair of wingtip shoes and socks. “Your lucky suit.”

  Then I dressed my father.

  * * *

  O’Malley. That was the name I had in Garfield Heights, a shithole east of Cleveland. There were four of them listed in the phone book.

  “Fuck,” I said around my cigarette, the orange tip bobbing as I carefully dragged a pen through the third O’Malley.

  I glanced at my father stretched out on the other bed, old pennies on his eyelids. After a week, the motel room stank of chemicals and something ugly even with the window open. But at least he didn’t talk, and after three years with the Egyptian as a cellmate, I was done with talking. The Egyptian had talked through the day. He had talked through the night. He was insane.

  “Don’t eat Dad,” I told The Loose. “That embalming stuff is poisonous.” She had no appetite so I wasn’t really worried. Just looking for something to say.

  I lit a new cigarette from the tip of the old one and dropped the butt onto the rug. Ground it out with my boot and made a new stain. My knee was stiff where I’d wrapped it with what was left of the electrical tape. I gingerly probed at the shiner beneath my eye, a little concerned. I couldn’t afford to get seriously hurt before I finished the job.

  Garfield Heights.

  I stuck the gun in the back of my belt and pocketed the straight razor.

  O’Malley.

  * * *

  The first and last few characters on the neon sign were dead, so only a green MAL reflected off the oily puddles in the street. The potholes were big enough to eat a foreign car, and I figured the garage on the corner did a lot of suspension work.

  People walked in and staggered out. The walls on either side of the graffiti-covered door were stained with fresh piss, and no one seemed to mind. I hated to think of my father in this kind of place but couldn’t erase the image from my mind. A hunched, skinny old guy sitting at the bar with a pack of cigarettes and a diminishing pitcher of beer. Doing anything to avoid being at home alone.

  Two in the morning came and went, and I saw a cluster of men leave, talking more or less sober, as they locked up. There was a big guy with a face like a baked potato, another guy helping him put on an expensive raincoat—London Fog, maybe. He looked sick in the green neon light and had potholes in his cheeks that matched the street.

  After the backslapping and bullshitting, the group split up. O’Malley got into a big white car—maybe a Cadillac—with two other guys. He sat in the back while they took the front.

  I followed but got stuck at the first red light. They were long gone by the time it turned green.

  * * *

  “Lady next to you complained about a smell,” the tweaker at the motel desk said. His pupils were fat, black things that ate the whites of his eyes.

  “Gonna need the room for tomorrow,” I said, sliding a little more than the room warranted across the sticky counter.

  Upstairs I found The Loose sitting on my father’s chest. The bathroom smelled horrendous, so I hung up a few more air fresheners shaped like pine trees, disturbing a cloud of blowflies.

  I made six trips back and forth to the ice machine, dumping the cubes into the tub where I stuck in a couple of 40s to chill alongside the three severed heads and the hand. The heads were ballooning up in a funny way and it was hard to look at them. I saw movement in the nostrils of one but decided it didn’t bear investigating.

  The detached hand had curled like a smacked spider, and I wasn’t sure why I had taken it. I should have just kicked it down into the hole beneath the hydraulic lift with the rest of that dead O’Malley. It had become a white thing in the water, fingers bloated like sausages, crescents of black grease under the fingernails. A mechanic’s hand. Useless, but I took it anyway, like a kid gunning for extra credit.

  People act funny under stress.

  I carved my father’s name in each forehead with the straight razor, the cuts parting like lipless mouths as I sliced. Wriggling things slid from one, but I grabbed it by the ear and continued working until the job was done.

  “Enough then.”

  My bed squeaked when I sat down and knocked the cap off a Miller High Life, the champagne of beers. I swigged and belched and thumbed the remote, but the color on the TV was screwy, and the actors looked like painted clowns. A brown stain was spreading on the wall across from the bed.

  “What a dump,” I said, my voice hoarse.

  I stared at The Loose until I saw her ribs moving, afraid that she’d caught what my father had by laying on top of him. You know, catch a little death.

  Heat grew behind my eyes. Pressure.

  I looked at the shiny insects on the fly strip hanging by the window.

  “One more, Dad.”

  * * *

  I woke up at a clatter from the bathroom. Sat up in the dark, confused, a crazy image of my father in there giving his old man’s bladder some midnight relief.

  I heard a sloshing sound, and the hair on my arms stood on end as I slid my bare feet onto the sticky carpet. The .45 had already migrated from beneath my pillow and I thumbed back the hammer, the metallic click loud in the small space.

  “Who is it?” I whispered.

  My knees cracked like rifle shots as I rose, glancing at my father’s bed and into glowing green eyes.

  “Loose,” I whispered and the eyes vanished.

  The dark rectangle of the bathroom doorway held a deeper blackness than the bedroom itself. Again came the sloshing. Goose bumps fanned across my naked torso as I crossed the room on the balls of my feet. The doorway ate my vision and revealed nothing.

  Behind me, the television suddenly sprang to life, and I spun around holding the revolver in both hands, tracking the shadow moving across my bed. Rationality was already insisting that The Loose must have stepped on the remote and hit the power button. My father had not sat up in the dark to take in a little TV.

  I stepped inside the bathroom, slapping at the wall with my free hand until I found the light switch, squinting against the fluorescent glare. The melting ice in the bathtub shifted, and a Miller High Life rolled over with an audible clink. The heads swayed from side to side in the brief current as if they disapproved.

  I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding and turned toward the sink.

  “You didn’t get him!” I recoiled from my father’s furious face in the mirror. A pale face. A dead face. The sour-milk eyes bulging in fury. “Get him, boy! Get him!” He grabbed the edges of the mirror on his side as if to drag himself through. Staples in the black autopsy scar on his chest pulled, stretching puckered flesh.

  I shrieked and stumbled back, arms wind-milling as I sat down hard in the tub, banging my skull against the tiled wall. The .45 tumbled into the water and I grabbed for it, my hand jerking back as it brushed against teeth.

  “No, no, no,” I repeated as I pushed myself from the cold water and snatched up the gun from between two rocking orbs of bone and flesh.

  In the mirror I saw my father’s retreating back as he walked away from me, the lumps of his spine visible over his withered flanks. I smashed the butt of the revolver into the glass and cracks raced across its surface, splitting my father’s naked figure. He turned and stared back at me over one shoulder until I looked away.

  Back in the bedroom I sat on my bed and listened to the buzzing of the flies, watching the unmoving form of my father’s dead body until sunlight seeped beneath the shade and spilled across the floor.

  * * *

  The bar’s interior was windowless, dark and stuffy, and the red Christmas lights strung about the place served as a reminder of what your life didn’t have, so have a drink. A corner television flipped between boxing and horse racing as the remote was passed around, and a broken video poker machine squatted at one end of the counter. Neon signs for beers you wouldn’t drink hung on the walls, and phantoms danced in the mirror behind the bar like fish in muddy water, half seen in the murk. Bottles caught the weak light and invited themselves over with a shimmering of gold and red and blue, depending on the poison. Have a drink.

  I took the suggestion. “What’s on tap?” I asked the albino tending bar.

  A can of Busch smacked against the countertop. “Two fifty, tap’s busted,” the charmer said, turning his head to cough

  “Cover your mouth,” a fat man said.

  “Fuck you,” the bartender replied with the conversational rhythm of a couple married fifty years.

  I peeled my sleeve off the bar and dropped three singles in the wet ring left by the can.

  “Get him, get him!” The old man next to me was whispering at the fighters on TV. He looked at me and dropped his eyes to his near empty pitcher, adjusting his trucker hat.

  “Spot me one?”

  “Tits aren’t big enough,” I said and shied away from the light like everyone else when the door opened. Somewhere on the street a car backfired and exhaust billowed inside, improving the atmosphere.

  “You’ll be here soon enough,” the old man said.

  “No I won’t.”

  He moved to put a barstool between us, herding his pitcher and smashed pack of Winstons over to the new pasture.

  “Get him!” A ragged voice hissed. I looked up, confused, but the old man had his glass to his lips. “Get him!” I searched for the bartender and saw a glaring face in the mirror, lips pulled back from long, yellow teeth.

  I flinched away, knocking over my barstool, but the seat next to me was empty. Trucker Hat looked at me and his eyes twinkled with dark knowledge, smiling at the decay he thought he saw.

  Snatching up my beer and the empty glass, I moved away from the mirror to a small table by the wall, where the reflections were too soupy to pose much threat. Any time the door opened I was careful to concentrate on pouring beer into my glass.

  “Get him.” I could hear it underneath the hum and clank of the bar, the non-stop whisper of insect wings. A red eye hovered in the middle of the bubbling liquid in my glass, and I told myself it was a reflection from the damned Christmas lights. Something brushed my ankle. Looking down I saw nothing but floor.

  I put a coaster on top of my glass and hit the men’s room, standing in a puddle as I braced my hands on the stained sink to gather myself. I lifted my chin.

  “You didn’t get him!” The bony palms slapped against the mirror from the other side, held back by spray painted black swirls that read MARY HAS A DICK on my side, maybe something else on his.

  “Stop it,” I said to the glass.

  “Useless,” the old face hissed, wormlike lips rippling with disdain. “Failure!”

  “No more!” I said, barely avoiding a shout. I banged out of the bathroom and ordered another beer. Retreated to my table and lifted a toast to Mary.

  The place slowly filled up as second shift ended, and I nursed three beers and pissed twice while I waited, avoiding the mirror no matter what the whispers said. On TV a horse named Prodigal Son had won, and a buzz cut guy was slapping everybody five when O’Malley finally walked through the door.

  * * *

  O’Malley was never alone. People went over to his table all night. If the guy was well dressed a thick neck in a brown suit would stroll over to the bar and chat with the albino while the supplicant sat down and had his five minutes. If the guy looked broke, beaten down—like me, in other words—he stood while he talked to O’Malley, and the thick neck gave him a look, the kind a guy who wears brown suits thinks is intimidating.

  Sometimes money changed hands. Nobody tried to hide it.

  Trucker Hat took his turn to stand in judgment, twisting his hat while O’Malley smiled and Brown Suit silently eye fucked him.

  It was impossible not to see my father in that same position, the same posture, the same beaten down place where he wasn’t allowed even his pride. I wondered if what I saw in the mirror was all that remained of him, the stale hate left over from standing like that as the whole bar watched him get stripped down.

  I thought about the razor in my boot. The gun in my waistband. Egyptian magic.

  I drank and pissed and O’Malley was never alone. When two in the morning came I was herded out onto the cold sidewalk with the barflies. We stood in a confused clump, breath gathering in a poisonous cloud over our heads until we each shuffled off to whatever hole awaited.

  I had to try twice to get the key in the car door and leaned close enough to fog the glass as I watched the lock pop up. I didn’t register the footsteps behind me until the revolver was jerked from the back of my pants. I spun around and had just enough time to register that ugly brown suit before a fist the size of Detroit turned my lights out.

  * * *

  Creedence was singing about a bad moon rising when I woke up in the back seat of a moving car. I shifted my lower jaw from side to side and felt a jagged bolt of pain, heard a click. The inside of my mouth was swollen and the outside felt like it was shaped wrong. I tried to spit out the coppery taste and dribbled blood down my chin.

  “He’s awake.” The driver’s fat neck was wider than his head.

  “No shit,” I said, sounding like I had a mouth full of marbles. I tried to touch my face and noticed my wrists were taped together.

  O’Malley turned around in the passenger’s seat and looked at me. Mildly curious. Like how-did-this-red-sock-wind-up-in-my-drawer curious.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “You know my father’s name,” I said. When he didn’t react I told him the name.