(no subject)
Go and scream at the back of the pool hall. Shatter two cues against the ribs of supportive concrete. It makes a point. Scream again. Let the broken wood sink into the stomach of the man that hit Jessie with his car and took off. He runs forward still; it sinks deeper. The blood hisses from his skin. He babbles threat and slur. His friend goes for my face. The knuckles go for stars, for blackout and injury. I am very numb. I was crying and then I was screaming and when I started screaming it was because everything I had been touching up close for so long was finished and cold. I saw the truck swerve twice, both times towards people. There is another hit to my face. I worry about slipping on blood. Screaming again, louder now as two more men come from across the room, towards me, towards a body with a piece of wood put through the lower half of the torso. No one is answering any questions. One of them has a knife.
It rains before turning to snow and the police make redundant statements about her death. A doctor comes to talk to me about the grieving process. She is very pleasant in tone but she keeps suggesting that I should get some rest. I look like shit. Half my face is very pale and the other half is black. She doesn't want the trauma to be taken the wrong way. Perhaps, it could suggest to me glorious swells of violent balance, box cutters across the nerves and tendons of certain truck drivers and their friends. She doesn't say, "box cutters", but I do and she writes it down. One of the officers is going to drive me home. Turn on the lights. Help me sit down. I want to sleep in a hotel. I am broke. I can't be at the house. I can't be alone at the house. Take me to a diner, to the Howard Johnsons. They have pancakes with syrup and cheap preserved fruit. There will be sugar to put in coffee. I will sip at it. I am going to cut into the pancakes with the side of a fork. I am going to twist a fork in the eye sockets on the backs of the hands of -
The police do one part of their job and I sleep at their excuse for a hotel. I can't leave. I don't get a room key. There is no phone. The woman doctor from the night before talks to me. I can't stop crying. She tells me to write down how I feel for her. I get the yellow notepad all wet, the ink runs, smears black and clear down to my lap. My handwriting is terrible. The vowels look like a girl with her head smashed against a wall after being thrown ten feet. I am supposed to make the words I write clear. Perfect cylinders and squares, once in a while some tiny curls. After a day or two I can write the word DOG, but that's not how I feel.
This is all for my own good. But my doctor cries, attempts to fight back against release with deep breaths, tells me a story about cancer and her husband and an inability to stop something so fast. Don't they cut cancer out of bodies? Don't they run scalpels and chemicals through it? She can't look at me. I have stopped crying. I write down: PLEASE. We sort of touch hands. She drops her pen. I didn't notice she wore glasses before, maybe she didn't.
I am not satisfied with the information the police give me. As a witness I am considered to be untrusted, unstable. The clerk mumbles about scumfuck lawyers dismissing evidence. The report being thrown out. The police knowing but doing nothing because of brother's friends wive's brothers. This is a lot for a mumble but I’ve gathered that specific words can be useless. A citation was given. A fine was paid. There is a man that drinks at Maddigans and plays pool at the Finch and Haddock Club. This man will not have his license back for another 3 months. The clerk looks down at the floor. He says clearly, quietly, that he's got a baby daughter.
Maddigans is too new for it's decor. The waitress is younger. Annoyed. Lone employee except for the bartender. She shivers in all black, half smiles. They gutted smaller, long-standing family bars for the interior. Detached family portraits line the bathroom wall. Gum and dirt wiped on the faces of Europeans. The toilet stall smells like VD. The upstairs is open. I wouldn't dare sit at the bar. Someone has to have followed me, to know that this is the first place I came, and why. It gets crowded at odd intervals. I can barely order the few drinks I do. I just look. There are three men at the bar, grinning, large shoulders and slagging bodies. Muscle gone fat from cockiness and apathy. There is one that I would never forget. Eye contact and acknowledgement made as his truck tore into Jessie, the fender tossing the body. Eye contact and acknowledgement like semblance of blind, stumbling love. I think of my hand on Jessie’s fragile shoulder blade, her hair drying to my lips at night, kissing her thighs and the bridge of her nose. We saw each other only once before it all began. We saw each other in a building lobby. She was all I could think of.
And now: I think of murderers gagging on their own tongues; their sinuses filling with blood and vomit. And it will happen.