The Ram (6 page)

14 Peach

She walks to her office door, finally finished with her clients for the day, and clicks the lock on her doorknob. The idiom
herding cats
comes to mind and she decides it isn’t descriptive enough to sum up what she does at her job. Cats would be manageable if for nothing more than the sheer predictability of cats. They will either purr and rub or hiss and attack. But it will be one of those options. Each day her clients stymie her with new problems, neuroses and poor choices.

If only she worked with cats instead.

Peach plunks back down into her swiveling desk chair and sighs. Her head has been itching all day and scratching through the wig does little to give her relief. She doesn’t dare remove her wig; she’s grateful she’s spent two days coming to work with no one, not even Camille, the coworker she’s closest to, commenting on any difference in her looks.

She puts her elbows on her desk, reaches her hands up behind her head and slips her fingers under the tight netting at the base of her skull. Here, where her neck meets her head is the point of annoyance. She runs her nails against her scalp. Her hair has always grown slowly; the long tresses had taken her years to cultivate. Her new locks haven’t broken through the skin yet but she knows in a few days, she’ll be dealing with the itch of sharp follicles pushing through the dermis like grass pushing through a garden bed.

She scratches away happily, closing her eyes. She pictures herself as a super heroine, decked out in a shimmering red cape, bodice, boy shorts. Instead of a big P on her chest, there’s an S and it doesn’t stand for
super.
It stands for
self.
She wants nothing more than to conquer her identity, to subdue it, change it. Turn it to steel. Use it for a life of epic note.

For now, she scratches happily. She works away the itch that lives right where the reptilian brain comes to dally with the cerebrum. Where primal meets refined. It’s also one of the weakest parts of the skull, tenuous in strength. It’s a point of weakness for all humanity. It’s Peach’s greatest bridge to gap.

Before she rouses herself from her thoughts to head home and work on other tasks, she pulls a small lighter from the long drawer where she keeps her pens and staples and coins for the soda machine in the front foyer of her office building. It’s a brass Zippo she found on a walk along the Boise River last month. It had been the first day of warmth in 2015 and she’d seized the opportunity to meander outside before the afternoon brought a set of snow flurries, each one worse than the last, winter reminding her it was not yet done with her city.

She rubs her thumb against the flint wheel and watches the butane flare. A triangular flame dances around above the brass casing and she thinks to run a finger through it, to feel the heat and mimic those badasses she’s seen in movies who pass their flesh through small flames to show they are impervious to pain. But this is no movie and she respects fire too much to taunt it.

In her curiosity to learn how old the Zippo was, she did some digging online and found out some interesting things about the manufacturer and the lighter’s history and role in American society. To be part of a Zippo Squad in the Vietnam War meant you were sent in to burn down a village with nothing more than the lighter in your pocket. She thinks of Linx, his mother Thai, but wonders all the same if any of his relatives were somehow in Vietnam, caught in the burn started by a flint-wheel igniter.

Most people had a healthy fear of fire. If one started, gained speed and intensity, they would flee. Then why, she wonders, did she have the desire to do the opposite?

“I want to run toward you,” she whispers down into the flame.

The fire
responds by singeing a few strands of her wig, punishment for getting too close. The room smells of scorched carbon. The burnt hair is real, though it isn’t biologically hers. But all hair smolders just the same.

Friday, the 27
^th
of March, 2015

15 Riley

“If I don’t get a decent drink by the end of this day, I’m retaining you as counsel and then I’m going to set fire to this hospital.”

Walker has his arms outstretched and Riley uses them to steady his wobbly legs. He’s standing on his own, though his left foot doesn’t support any weight. The pair wait for the nurse to return with crutches. When they pushed in a wheelchair through his hospital room door, Riley told them to take it away. He was resolute on walking out of the hospital.

“And as your counsel I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you you’d be a dumbass to set anything on fire. Not with your luck lately. You’re going to be golden if we can just keep you whole and fed, Rye.”

“Maker’s Mark. Neat.”

“You’re an alcoholic.”

“Sorry, no. Didn’t think of booze the entire time I was healing from having my digits cut off. But now I’m free, I’m getting soused.”

“Fair enough,” Walker says and the nurse with the nice shape and round ass walks in with a pair of crutches. Riley winks at her and she raises an eyebrow.

“So these will cost me, what, seven hundred dollars to take?”

She tucks the cushioned metal under both of his arms and Walker pulls back, gets out of his friend’s way. Riley tries them out, keeping his left leg bent at the knee. His balance is a bit shaky but he’s only left bed to piss and shit over the past five days.

“Not quite that much, Mr. Wanner,” she says with a smile.

Walker swings Riley’s bag of personal items over his shoulder. Double Al had been good enough to pick a few things up from his house and drop them off the night he was admitted to St. Al’s hospital. He’d been high on the strong doses of opiates that night and when Double Al told Riley he needed to leave for him to get his rest, Riley had shouted at him as he departed. “Saint Al!” he dubbed him. “Saint Al in Saint Al’s! It’s a springtime miracle. You are the biggest of all the saints.”

Riley gets a cadence down with the crutches and moves out of the room, Walker at his side. The nurse passes, glancing at Riley over her sloping shoulder. “That ass of hers is the only thing I’ll miss about this place,” he mutters.

It takes thirty minutes for the men to get to the parking garage. Walker chatters on about the weather, work, his ex-girlfriend. Riley keeps his focus on his feet, paranoid he’ll catch his foot on a parking space block. They arrive at Walker’s little Miata and Riley lifts his eyebrows.

“This should be interesting to settle into,” he says. Walker mumbles, “that’s what she said,” under his breath. Riley grins despite the soreness in his armpits from the crutches and the tiredness in his right leg and waits for Walker to unlock the car and pop the passenger side door open. Handing Walker his crutches, he falls back into the bucket seat and winces on impact.

Walker takes the speed bumps slowly as he maneuvers his car out of the garage. Riley braces himself with his hands against the soft roof of the shuttered convertible. Then they pull out onto the road running parallel to the hospital, headed for the Connector, a section of interstate winding through the greater Boise area. Flowering pear trees have exploded with white blossoms while Riley has been in the hospital. His nose catches their cloying, putrid scent when he rolls down his window. The air licks this face, wild and new, nothing like the oxygen he’d been forced to breathe during his convalescence.

They hit a stop light before the on-ramp to the Connector. Riley scoots up on his seat, his eye drawn to a bit of color in the middle of the intersection. There, at the junction of Emerald and Curtis roads, is what looks to be a giant V painted in bright red. The tops of the V curl outwards like shepherd’s hooks.

“What the hell is that?” he asks Walker.

“No clue. But they’re all over town from what I can see on my drives from work to home and out to play. I think one of the local stations did a piece on it. Just some bored kid tagging asphalt. At the worst, a new gang sign. Does Boise even have gangs? I should know that, right?”

Riley keeps his eyes on the symbol. It settles into his mind. When he closes his eyes and turns his face to the warm sun out his window, he can see it etched in his vision. The force of the fiery ball of hydrogen backlights the figure in burnt sienna. He doesn’t realize until they hit the Connector that Walker is going the wrong direction. The Miata zooms toward downtown Boise.

“Uh, house is the other way, Walker.”

Walker reaches over to Riley and pushes him on the shoulder. His body slides back down in the bucket seat.

“No shit,” Walker says. “I’m not taking you home.”

16 Peach

She typically didn’t see clients on Fridays, but she had to cancel some of her regular meetings on Tuesday after the fun she’d had on Monday night. She’d been unable to focus the following day and she could tell her clients sensed her antsy detachment. She was fidgeting with pens, any pen she could get her hands on while they spoke of their current problems or thoughts and she’d flick them against her thighs or her desktop, dreaming of wearing her gray hoodie and going out for a “run.” Peach was playing catch up, now, Friday late afternoon, when she should have been working on case reports for the week.

It was small inconvenience she was very willing to bear for her personal development.

She lifts the bloodstone pendant off her chest. Peach rubs the face of the multicolored gem between her fingers and her mind begins to drift back to when she received the necklace as a gift. The voice of the woman who gave her the present replays within her mind. Her English is spoken with a Russian accent. She listens for her deep voice listing off the stone’s metaphysical powers: courage, increased self-esteem, tenacity.

But she doesn’t allow her memory to deepen and expand until it pulls her from her office and into her past. She has work to do. She cups her palms around the stone and tries to find her own center, the place in her body where her energy resides and pulsates. She finds it, in the middle of her pelvis, just below her navel. It thumps away, hot, pulling at the nerves in her belly button.

For a time, she stays present with the sensation and keeps her eyes shut tightly. Then she releases the pendant and digs around in one of her desk drawers. She pulls out a small candle, rose-scented, and the Zippo. She flicks the lighter wheel to get a flame and sets the wick ablaze. There is the smallest indent in the wax; she’s only burned it a few times before.

She puts her face over the candle, not to the catch the scent of rose, but the first whiff of acerbic smoke from the burning metal in the wick.

Someone jiggles the handle of her door, pushing on it slightly to get in. Peach immediately licks her fingers and pinches out the candle. A drop of hot wax congeals on her finger and she picks up the candle and hides it behind a stack of books on her desk. To Peach, her play with the flame is a ritual unfit for uninitiated eyes.

He’s early, but he always is.

Peach tugs at her wig to makes sure it sits square on her scalp and goes to the door. As she unlocks it, a man, thin and tall with bright eyes and a small goatee rushes into the room. He’s in his early thirties, just like Peach, and he wears a deep purple cardigan over a threadbare dress shirt. An outline of a small tube shows through the pocket over his chest. The man smells like dirt and the body odor which comes from being outside, at work, in frigid air. His face is stricken, pained. It’s not the look of physical pain but of emotional anguish.

“You’re early, Michel,” Peach says, standing aside for him to sweep into the room and take a seat on the upholstered chair where she directs her patients to sit. It’s a gaudy thing of warm-colored flowers made of velveteen material.

“How can you keep me out,
ma chérie
?” The man’s face is suddenly aglow. A spark of mischief shows in the upturning of his mouth. “How can you lock out your lover, your ideal for all men on this planet?”

17 Riley

When they hit Main Street, Riley figures out where they’re going. The white Miata pulls into the parking lot of a building just outside of the city center. It’s early evening and the sun has yet to make its escape from the sky. But twilight is coming and soon, the place will come alive with patrons. Men like Riley and Walker.

Walker pops the parking brake and tosses Riley a smart grin. Riley keeps his eyes on the building. It’s an old, squat structure with a marquee above the entrance advertizing beer specials and fifty-cent wings via scrolling lights. The entry door is padded in a dirty, maroon vinyl, brass studs securing the fabric to the wood underneath. Coniferous bushes run the length of the front of the building, their undergrowth polluted with new dandelions vibrant with yellow blooms and bits of plastic debris and cigarette butts.

There’s a loud pop, a flow of electricity, and a neon sign flares to life on the roof of the building. The shingles appear to be alight with blue, white and yellow flames. Their peaked tips all bend toward the east, as if a strong, constant gale bent the glass tubing.

And then the last neon sign comes to life, a bold lettered beacon at the corner of the parking lot. It spells out
Blaze Lounge.

“Well,” Walker says, “I thought you wouldn’t mind stopping by your home away from home. You know, to shake off the hospital cobwebs. The gauze webs.”

“Trademark that winner right now,” Riley teases.

A cluster of men, all wearing ball caps with the bills jutting out over their backs, hoot at a passing car and then move inside the lounge. When they pull open the door, Riley can see the muted black of the inside, punctuated by shocks of laser lights in pink and orange.

He can almost smell the stink of musky body lotion from where he sits in the Miata. He can definitely hear and feel the shaky boom of a subwoofer’s bass. He thinks to make a joke about his soul being of the same low frequency but holds back.