Grindlewode (early draft)
The bit collection of chapters that came out of the conversation between Woodsy and Gene. Basic character introductions through (hopefully) unique 1st POV narratives. I run the risk of a few characters sounding much the same, knowing for a fact that Isaac needs to be about 70% more acidic snark. Poop.
U P S E T
i : eugene boyer
So we’re sitting in this kitchen, see, in this shithole safehouse in the dead center of the city, hiding in plain sight. There’s me and Woodsy, and about twenty cans of my best friend in the coolbox. The light’s real awful but it’s good on my eyes and Woodsy don’t complain anymore like he used to. The topic of brothers comes up, because one of Woodsy’s expensive cigarettes had fallen to the linoleum and melted a nice little brown spot among all the food and murder stains. Woodsy had never had a brother, not a real one.
Because, see, pledging brotherhood, dying or killing for a guy ‘cos you got to that kinda friendship, that ain’t the same as being born into it.
I had a little brother, sure.
Had.
I used to risk shit for him.
I used to feed him.
Christ, I never fed nobody in my life, not even myself, but I'd make this kid a sandwich when we were all out of mashed peas, wetting the bread with milk and spooning him this sort of sugary lump of peanut butter and cheap jelly. He was my science experiment, he was my stand-in pet hamster, he was kin and clan and all that I had in the world. (I had a sister, too, but all she ever did was tug my ear and insult me. Her and ma were a lot alike, all bitterness and perfection and rotting sanity, but I'll get to that part later.)
So my brother, I'm trying to explain to Woodsy, it might not have been so different between us were I the younger one, see? 'Cos my brother, he. He came out... wrong.
Our kitchen had been a fuck-ugly mess of yellow and orange and brown, like all cheap rents. Linoleum and round metal edges and burnt little cigarette craters and the crawly feeling on your bare feet because your ma only swept up with the changing of the fucking seasons. My brother, well, let's call him John. Johnny. That ain't his real name 'cos I don't trust Woodsy not to look this shit up and get me all up on file and shit.
Cocksucker mole rat fink asshole.
So anyway, Johnny was always kinda skinny and doofy and we’d hang out in the kitchen, see, like sleeping there when the city summer didn’t fucking let up for the night. I see a cheap rental’s kitchen and I think of Johnny and I sleeping in our diapers ‘cos Central Air was but a far away fucking dream. No listen though, because Woodsy didn't know and I think it's a crucial part of a man's makeup, takin' care of someone littler'n you without any real obligation or payback. Really sets a standard, you know?
"Thought you said it wouldn't have mattered if he was the little sibling or not." Woodsy's got this sly frown over his cigarette that tears me the fuck up sometimes, like he can't just let me be drunk and expository and cut me some fucking slack.
"No, man, it doesn't matter. 'Cos I mean the kid was born wrong. Only thing woulda changed had he been born first, 's he'd'a hafta waited for me to come along and get born to defend him. Might've starved."
"So why didn't you starve?"
"My sister fed me."
Woodsy gives me this shrug and roll of his eyes like oh, of course, and you have no idea how hard it is not to launch over this flimsy little card table and deck him. Just the booze pricking on my nerves, prolly. Let me finish my goddamn exposition, goddamn. "Why wouldn't your sister have fed him?"
I blow out a breath, relaxing into the passing air of the rotating fan set up on Woodsy's stack of Wallstreet Journal. It's sticky in this house like it was sticky in every house I've ever lived. Tobacco sticky. Armpit sticky. Cereal bowls in the sink sticky. "Babsy didn't take to Johnny. He wasn't blood, not all the way. The only reason she took to me was because she was too damn young to know any better. By the time Johnny got around to coming along, she fucking hated his dad's guts. Lucky she never tried to drown the kid." I flick the ash from my cigar, take a deep pull to keep the cherry, not really tasting it.
Yeah, Babsy... I almost tried to kill her once, when she was a teenager: insane and miserable and hurting me every three days out of the month. We were walking down the Union City river and it was all dried up and the concrete dam was about eight feet high (which is like, skyscraper proportions to a kid) and the bridge didn't have no siderail 'cos this was before society got stupid enough to walk off the side of dams. I nearly grabbed her by her blonde head and pushed her over.
Never did, though.
You ever ask me if I have any regrets, and I’ll shrug it off like you’re trying to make me feel bad about giving folks what they already got coming to them, but I do have a single solitary fucking regret and that’s failing to kill B____ T_______ during our formative fucking years. I don’t tell Woodsy this; well, maybe I mumble it but he don’t hear the slip, so. The night Babsy came home from a date and pushed Johnny over was the night I was arrested for giving my own sister two broken ribs and a black eye. I hadn't come out of that monumental row unscathed, exactly, but when you're a boy and you do violence you get sent to a cement room to cool off. I was fifteen.
Anyway.
Woodsy's all apprehensive over my mulish silence and I shrug, gift-wrapping a smile and passing it over the table like an apology. I wouldn't be half as hard a bastard as I am today if I hadn't had a rough start of it, but now's not the time for bragging.
"So, my brother, right?"
"Right,"
"So he's the only reason I ever started fighting. I mean, every man has it in him to fight; it's like for getting tough and surviving and shit, back when we had to hunt and fight over chicks and whatnot. But not everybody nowadays ever even really needs ta fight, see, unless we’re in the thick of it right off the fucking start, see,"
Woodsy gives a hum, acknowledging my spiel with polite indulgence. The fan hits us again, waits for a span, then starts its slow progress to the rest of the room.
"But I mean, I didn't give a shit what happened to me. I sure as fuck didn't care whatever mess Babsy'd get herself in, neither. 'Sides she could handle it all way better than me an' R--Johnny, combined. She knew how to kill things without caring. Spiders, mice, anything that got in the house, y'know, she'd kill. Without batting a fake eyelash. So my brother, he comes along and I know Babsy don't give a shit and I know his pa was too busy to really give a shit, though he did kinda when he wasn't drunk off his ass."
I don't even remember the point I'm trying to make anymore.
My brother came along and I was only, what, four? You think somebody like me wouldn't be able to remember this shit but I remember the dog his Pa bought to guard the homestead, a dopey pit rottweiler mix that proved its infinite patience while baby brother crawled all over him and tugged his ears and his tail and fell asleep in the great warm curve of his side. I remember wanting to be that big dog, that huge scary thing who wasn't so scary close up, who my baby brother adored.
I was too young; I didn't feel that pinch of male sibling rivalry that most brothership don't survive. We were both in too much peril ourselves to fight with each other, though sometimes he'd break my shit and sometimes I'd rough him up. Nothing too bad. Usually he'd be laughing under my arm, egging me on 'cos he wanted to fly across the room and I wasn't that strong yet.
And it's a real fucking indescribable feeling, that kind of love.
I'm piss-drunk and trying to make Woodsy understand why I let him hang around, why I make him food when I don't hardly make myself any fucking food.
"So he's this little guy, right? And I'm kinda this little guy too only next to him I feel like a huge fucking guy. Like he's this pink fleshy bag of bruises you gotta herd away from sharp cabinet corners and keep outta the beer his pa leaves laying around. I was just so young, man, I don't even know where that all came from. Ain't like I had a good example for it, christ."
Woodsy is contemplative over his newspaper, listening but not listening. He's got the names, Babsy and Johnny, and they're fake but he won't know that until he looks it all up and runs himself in frustrated little circles over his peatboard desk.
"And he grows up, and we grow up, and for some reason, like, one night ma's just giving me grief over my cigars and Johnny's like, what, you smoke?" I shrug my elbows in close, palms up helplessly, gesturing between me and Woodsy like he could maybe relate. "And the kid's never drank a spot of liquor, never smoked a day in his life, and he's taller'n me 'cos I just kept feeding him whenever I could and he's a grade-A fucking honor student and I realized that he didn't know I smoked 'cos I never smoked around him!" I laugh, hacking up the thickness in the back of my throat like I could just spit the memory out and be done with feeling so much like shit all the time.
Woodsy looks a little more interested, probably catching on to a point I myself can't coherently name right now. "And?"
"And, that's it. I had a brother. Until I realized that the guy with the brother, that wasn't me. That guy was a good fucking guy. That guy, man, Johnny looked up to that guy. I set a bad example maybe with the way that Johnny treats his girls nowadays, but that's like. A whole different life."
"Wait, I thought your brother was gay."
"What?" I frown, more puzzled than angry. "Who says?"
"You did. He was born wrong; I thought that meant he was gay. Or retarded."
I snort, grasping for the parallel I was trying to make between Woodsy and Johnny. "I didn't mean wrong like that. I meant wrong for the whole fucking family, for this whole fucking fucked up world. People like that, if they survive, they usually survive to get rich and happy."
"Did he die?"
"No," I relight my cigar, eyeballing Woodsy because I can't remember why I ever thought of this burnt-out double agent like my brother, but then I remember; "No, nothing like that." Dramatic pause, dramatic exhale. "He works for the Feds."
ii : goddard wodes
“You have a name for me yet, Eugene?” He hates it when I call him that, but names are powerful things and I’m not one to overlook advantages.
“Woodsy,” Gene drawls, a puddle of bones sagged against the table with a beer clutched in an abused paw. “Fukken take a pill, bossman.” He’s half west-valley bubblegum slang, half east-coast practicality, and all swamp madness. The midlands had laced their way through my own sense of speech, but if you listen close enough I’m sure you could hear old Texas or new Florida behind the cigarettes. Gene’s just all... a mess. Nothing refined, nothing concrete. The mutt of mutts.
I like Eugene (last name yet to be determined, but I’ve got my resources). I’m glad to be working with him. He’s fascinating, and not half-stupid, and we can pal around like this and just be two small-time hombres playing cards at a table, lamenting the female condition and how it always manages to ruin a good time. I wouldn’t call him my friend, exactly; this job implies that I keep my friends few and far between. But he is an ally.
“’Sides,” a tremendous belch that I nearly applaud. “I give you a name and you get your typey lil’ manhands all up in th’ shit an--” A mumbled tangent that I have since learned need only be half-heard. Typey lil’ manhands? A clarified statement: “My brother’s got small hands, th’ poor kid!” Alcholic laughter. Somebody light a match, we’d all be dead. “E’s got small hands and feet bigger’n his own pa’s, and gets as many wimmen as you or I! With a suit an’ a convertible!” Gene announces to the tavern. “I’m proud’a the little sunovabitch!”
“Said his name was Johnny, didn’t you?”
“Yeh,” a twitch, a shift, any glimpse of change in the square face. I know he’s lying. I went to Directionary for this kind of thing, after all. I can’t put my finger on how exactly Gene lies, but he does it pretty consistently. Unless he’s drunk, and then maybe he tells a little too much of the truth. (We both agreed that killing is not nearly as bad as people make it out to be, because at least it’s change. Beautiful, incontangent change. And hell, what kind of honesty could this man be offering, to get me to admit to that?)
I’m about to flag the servitor down for a fresh beer, but then--
It’s not really a splat, not really the open empty pop of an explosion. Suddenly I have been shot through the head. Suddenly, I am dead.
The servitor swaggers around to our table and blinks a question at me. I wave, distracted with the scene happening just inside my perephiral vision, as if the walls had been turned to silver screen, and Eugene orders us some java juice and something filtered and halfway healthy and maybe a side of fries, dollface. He’s so shitfaced he just hit on a piece of machinery.
Warehouse, midnight, I thought I was alone. Female assassin, round and blonde. Nice hips, maybe someone I’d make my old lady. I stare out of the clouding of dead eyes, watch her inspect me with a frown. Hear her curse and spit and fling my mind far, far away.
Back into the bar, where Eugene has passed out with a grin. Okay, so new rule; no warehouses. Anyone even suggests a warehouse, and I haul ‘em in for conspiracy to murder.
“What’s her name?” Gene’s eyes are closed.
I clear my throat. “Who?”
“The name of the dame that just struck you dumb, Romeo. Three beers in an’ yer usually a motormouth. ‘S gotta be a dame you got yer eye on.”
“I don’t know her name yet.” I stub out my cigarette, zeroing in on a cute little redhead shooting pool with her friends. “Think I’m gonna find out, big guy.” I pat Gene’s arm in passing, leaving the table as much to dodge further scrutiny as to chat up the tattooed kitten that was starting to return my lingering gazes.
U P S E T
i : eugene boyer
So we’re sitting in this kitchen, see, in this shithole safehouse in the dead center of the city, hiding in plain sight. There’s me and Woodsy, and about twenty cans of my best friend in the coolbox. The light’s real awful but it’s good on my eyes and Woodsy don’t complain anymore like he used to. The topic of brothers comes up, because one of Woodsy’s expensive cigarettes had fallen to the linoleum and melted a nice little brown spot among all the food and murder stains. Woodsy had never had a brother, not a real one.
Because, see, pledging brotherhood, dying or killing for a guy ‘cos you got to that kinda friendship, that ain’t the same as being born into it.
I had a little brother, sure.
Had.
I used to risk shit for him.
I used to feed him.
Christ, I never fed nobody in my life, not even myself, but I'd make this kid a sandwich when we were all out of mashed peas, wetting the bread with milk and spooning him this sort of sugary lump of peanut butter and cheap jelly. He was my science experiment, he was my stand-in pet hamster, he was kin and clan and all that I had in the world. (I had a sister, too, but all she ever did was tug my ear and insult me. Her and ma were a lot alike, all bitterness and perfection and rotting sanity, but I'll get to that part later.)
So my brother, I'm trying to explain to Woodsy, it might not have been so different between us were I the younger one, see? 'Cos my brother, he. He came out... wrong.
Our kitchen had been a fuck-ugly mess of yellow and orange and brown, like all cheap rents. Linoleum and round metal edges and burnt little cigarette craters and the crawly feeling on your bare feet because your ma only swept up with the changing of the fucking seasons. My brother, well, let's call him John. Johnny. That ain't his real name 'cos I don't trust Woodsy not to look this shit up and get me all up on file and shit.
Cocksucker mole rat fink asshole.
So anyway, Johnny was always kinda skinny and doofy and we’d hang out in the kitchen, see, like sleeping there when the city summer didn’t fucking let up for the night. I see a cheap rental’s kitchen and I think of Johnny and I sleeping in our diapers ‘cos Central Air was but a far away fucking dream. No listen though, because Woodsy didn't know and I think it's a crucial part of a man's makeup, takin' care of someone littler'n you without any real obligation or payback. Really sets a standard, you know?
"Thought you said it wouldn't have mattered if he was the little sibling or not." Woodsy's got this sly frown over his cigarette that tears me the fuck up sometimes, like he can't just let me be drunk and expository and cut me some fucking slack.
"No, man, it doesn't matter. 'Cos I mean the kid was born wrong. Only thing woulda changed had he been born first, 's he'd'a hafta waited for me to come along and get born to defend him. Might've starved."
"So why didn't you starve?"
"My sister fed me."
Woodsy gives me this shrug and roll of his eyes like oh, of course, and you have no idea how hard it is not to launch over this flimsy little card table and deck him. Just the booze pricking on my nerves, prolly. Let me finish my goddamn exposition, goddamn. "Why wouldn't your sister have fed him?"
I blow out a breath, relaxing into the passing air of the rotating fan set up on Woodsy's stack of Wallstreet Journal. It's sticky in this house like it was sticky in every house I've ever lived. Tobacco sticky. Armpit sticky. Cereal bowls in the sink sticky. "Babsy didn't take to Johnny. He wasn't blood, not all the way. The only reason she took to me was because she was too damn young to know any better. By the time Johnny got around to coming along, she fucking hated his dad's guts. Lucky she never tried to drown the kid." I flick the ash from my cigar, take a deep pull to keep the cherry, not really tasting it.
Yeah, Babsy... I almost tried to kill her once, when she was a teenager: insane and miserable and hurting me every three days out of the month. We were walking down the Union City river and it was all dried up and the concrete dam was about eight feet high (which is like, skyscraper proportions to a kid) and the bridge didn't have no siderail 'cos this was before society got stupid enough to walk off the side of dams. I nearly grabbed her by her blonde head and pushed her over.
Never did, though.
You ever ask me if I have any regrets, and I’ll shrug it off like you’re trying to make me feel bad about giving folks what they already got coming to them, but I do have a single solitary fucking regret and that’s failing to kill B____ T_______ during our formative fucking years. I don’t tell Woodsy this; well, maybe I mumble it but he don’t hear the slip, so. The night Babsy came home from a date and pushed Johnny over was the night I was arrested for giving my own sister two broken ribs and a black eye. I hadn't come out of that monumental row unscathed, exactly, but when you're a boy and you do violence you get sent to a cement room to cool off. I was fifteen.
Anyway.
Woodsy's all apprehensive over my mulish silence and I shrug, gift-wrapping a smile and passing it over the table like an apology. I wouldn't be half as hard a bastard as I am today if I hadn't had a rough start of it, but now's not the time for bragging.
"So, my brother, right?"
"Right,"
"So he's the only reason I ever started fighting. I mean, every man has it in him to fight; it's like for getting tough and surviving and shit, back when we had to hunt and fight over chicks and whatnot. But not everybody nowadays ever even really needs ta fight, see, unless we’re in the thick of it right off the fucking start, see,"
Woodsy gives a hum, acknowledging my spiel with polite indulgence. The fan hits us again, waits for a span, then starts its slow progress to the rest of the room.
"But I mean, I didn't give a shit what happened to me. I sure as fuck didn't care whatever mess Babsy'd get herself in, neither. 'Sides she could handle it all way better than me an' R--Johnny, combined. She knew how to kill things without caring. Spiders, mice, anything that got in the house, y'know, she'd kill. Without batting a fake eyelash. So my brother, he comes along and I know Babsy don't give a shit and I know his pa was too busy to really give a shit, though he did kinda when he wasn't drunk off his ass."
I don't even remember the point I'm trying to make anymore.
My brother came along and I was only, what, four? You think somebody like me wouldn't be able to remember this shit but I remember the dog his Pa bought to guard the homestead, a dopey pit rottweiler mix that proved its infinite patience while baby brother crawled all over him and tugged his ears and his tail and fell asleep in the great warm curve of his side. I remember wanting to be that big dog, that huge scary thing who wasn't so scary close up, who my baby brother adored.
I was too young; I didn't feel that pinch of male sibling rivalry that most brothership don't survive. We were both in too much peril ourselves to fight with each other, though sometimes he'd break my shit and sometimes I'd rough him up. Nothing too bad. Usually he'd be laughing under my arm, egging me on 'cos he wanted to fly across the room and I wasn't that strong yet.
And it's a real fucking indescribable feeling, that kind of love.
I'm piss-drunk and trying to make Woodsy understand why I let him hang around, why I make him food when I don't hardly make myself any fucking food.
"So he's this little guy, right? And I'm kinda this little guy too only next to him I feel like a huge fucking guy. Like he's this pink fleshy bag of bruises you gotta herd away from sharp cabinet corners and keep outta the beer his pa leaves laying around. I was just so young, man, I don't even know where that all came from. Ain't like I had a good example for it, christ."
Woodsy is contemplative over his newspaper, listening but not listening. He's got the names, Babsy and Johnny, and they're fake but he won't know that until he looks it all up and runs himself in frustrated little circles over his peatboard desk.
"And he grows up, and we grow up, and for some reason, like, one night ma's just giving me grief over my cigars and Johnny's like, what, you smoke?" I shrug my elbows in close, palms up helplessly, gesturing between me and Woodsy like he could maybe relate. "And the kid's never drank a spot of liquor, never smoked a day in his life, and he's taller'n me 'cos I just kept feeding him whenever I could and he's a grade-A fucking honor student and I realized that he didn't know I smoked 'cos I never smoked around him!" I laugh, hacking up the thickness in the back of my throat like I could just spit the memory out and be done with feeling so much like shit all the time.
Woodsy looks a little more interested, probably catching on to a point I myself can't coherently name right now. "And?"
"And, that's it. I had a brother. Until I realized that the guy with the brother, that wasn't me. That guy was a good fucking guy. That guy, man, Johnny looked up to that guy. I set a bad example maybe with the way that Johnny treats his girls nowadays, but that's like. A whole different life."
"Wait, I thought your brother was gay."
"What?" I frown, more puzzled than angry. "Who says?"
"You did. He was born wrong; I thought that meant he was gay. Or retarded."
I snort, grasping for the parallel I was trying to make between Woodsy and Johnny. "I didn't mean wrong like that. I meant wrong for the whole fucking family, for this whole fucking fucked up world. People like that, if they survive, they usually survive to get rich and happy."
"Did he die?"
"No," I relight my cigar, eyeballing Woodsy because I can't remember why I ever thought of this burnt-out double agent like my brother, but then I remember; "No, nothing like that." Dramatic pause, dramatic exhale. "He works for the Feds."
ii : goddard wodes
“You have a name for me yet, Eugene?” He hates it when I call him that, but names are powerful things and I’m not one to overlook advantages.
“Woodsy,” Gene drawls, a puddle of bones sagged against the table with a beer clutched in an abused paw. “Fukken take a pill, bossman.” He’s half west-valley bubblegum slang, half east-coast practicality, and all swamp madness. The midlands had laced their way through my own sense of speech, but if you listen close enough I’m sure you could hear old Texas or new Florida behind the cigarettes. Gene’s just all... a mess. Nothing refined, nothing concrete. The mutt of mutts.
I like Eugene (last name yet to be determined, but I’ve got my resources). I’m glad to be working with him. He’s fascinating, and not half-stupid, and we can pal around like this and just be two small-time hombres playing cards at a table, lamenting the female condition and how it always manages to ruin a good time. I wouldn’t call him my friend, exactly; this job implies that I keep my friends few and far between. But he is an ally.
“’Sides,” a tremendous belch that I nearly applaud. “I give you a name and you get your typey lil’ manhands all up in th’ shit an--” A mumbled tangent that I have since learned need only be half-heard. Typey lil’ manhands? A clarified statement: “My brother’s got small hands, th’ poor kid!” Alcholic laughter. Somebody light a match, we’d all be dead. “E’s got small hands and feet bigger’n his own pa’s, and gets as many wimmen as you or I! With a suit an’ a convertible!” Gene announces to the tavern. “I’m proud’a the little sunovabitch!”
“Said his name was Johnny, didn’t you?”
“Yeh,” a twitch, a shift, any glimpse of change in the square face. I know he’s lying. I went to Directionary for this kind of thing, after all. I can’t put my finger on how exactly Gene lies, but he does it pretty consistently. Unless he’s drunk, and then maybe he tells a little too much of the truth. (We both agreed that killing is not nearly as bad as people make it out to be, because at least it’s change. Beautiful, incontangent change. And hell, what kind of honesty could this man be offering, to get me to admit to that?)
I’m about to flag the servitor down for a fresh beer, but then--
It’s not really a splat, not really the open empty pop of an explosion. Suddenly I have been shot through the head. Suddenly, I am dead.
The servitor swaggers around to our table and blinks a question at me. I wave, distracted with the scene happening just inside my perephiral vision, as if the walls had been turned to silver screen, and Eugene orders us some java juice and something filtered and halfway healthy and maybe a side of fries, dollface. He’s so shitfaced he just hit on a piece of machinery.
Warehouse, midnight, I thought I was alone. Female assassin, round and blonde. Nice hips, maybe someone I’d make my old lady. I stare out of the clouding of dead eyes, watch her inspect me with a frown. Hear her curse and spit and fling my mind far, far away.
Back into the bar, where Eugene has passed out with a grin. Okay, so new rule; no warehouses. Anyone even suggests a warehouse, and I haul ‘em in for conspiracy to murder.
“What’s her name?” Gene’s eyes are closed.
I clear my throat. “Who?”
“The name of the dame that just struck you dumb, Romeo. Three beers in an’ yer usually a motormouth. ‘S gotta be a dame you got yer eye on.”
“I don’t know her name yet.” I stub out my cigarette, zeroing in on a cute little redhead shooting pool with her friends. “Think I’m gonna find out, big guy.” I pat Gene’s arm in passing, leaving the table as much to dodge further scrutiny as to chat up the tattooed kitten that was starting to return my lingering gazes.