Vigorish

Previously: Batya manages to escape the Mayor’s confusing mutiny with Captain Nia and Daniel [last name too complicated to remember]. Nia says she’ll pay off Bat’s food truck debt to the Hand if she’ll be the enforcer in her new (as yet undefined) business venture. Bat agrees but doesn’t feel great about it!

— 67 —

OK, what do we know and not know about Batya Hull. No middle name. Age: younger than she looks. Build: squat little fireplug, per her big sister. Hair: ridiculous. Scars: umpteen. Tattoos: one, deeply upsetting, hindquarters. Current status: damp, bedraggled, looking like something pulled from a clogged drain.

And yet she’s feeling nice and giddy. She ambles along the seawall of Fort Hook, the best town you could ever think of, as she calls it, despite having never lived anywhere else. Legs still rubbery from the sea. Captain Nia’s spit still burning a hole in her hand. She’s thinking: Ain’t never leaving dry land again.

Friday night and the chatter on the promenade is lively. The fog’s rolling in, giving even the most banal bodega a kind of sweet mystique. The tars, the fisherwomen, the stevedores, the brutes and rowdies, the old timers and pee-wees—everyone looks fetching under the salty gauze of the streetlights.

Bat has an urgent, itchy desire to take a half-hour power shower in Mina’s beautiful undersea bathroom, but she has to take care of some business first. She slaps her own face and heads downtown.

For a second, there’s a confluence of sounds—the squeak of a streetcar’s brakes, maybe a tugboat horn, some drunken bellowing—and it reminds her of the song from the music box. The song made for her and her alone, the song she will never hear again.

She’s killing time in the lobby of Hillers Theatre, plowing through a giant tub of popcorn, just cramming one greasy fistful after another into her maw while the cashier looks on in horror. She laughs at him and that makes her cough out some corn shrapnel. She wonders if this day might’ve gone different, if maybe she’d have made some different choices, if she’d had more to eat than just a turkey leg and crab coffee.

NOW PLAYING: Love Up Above. In this three-hankie romance picture, a disgraced nun (Velma Autumn) returns home for Thanksgiving, only to discover the childhood friend (Jasper Dane, or Dane Jasper, Bat can never remember the actor’s name) she kept locked in her attic has developed the kind of rugged good looks that can make one believe in God again.

Bat is escorted into the projection booth by Steve, the large shiny man in shiny leather pants. No sign of Alice, maybe the crusty old bag finally carked it.

Waiting for her is the Hand in his cute little terrarium. He taps a pattern against the glass and the mechanical voice says:

— WELL WELL LOOK WHAT THE CAT COUGHED UP

“Ahoy, Hillers,” Bat says, collapsing into the easy chair next to his table.

— I HEAR YOU HAVE A NEW DOT DOT DOT BENEFACTOR

“Sheesh, word travels fast. Yeah I found a sap to pay off the debt. We square?”

— IF THE CHECK CLEARS

“I’m sure she’s good for it.” The rhythmic clacking of the projector threatens to soothe her to sleep.

— BUT ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO COZY UP WITH NIA MUTO

“I didn’t exactly have a ton of options.”

— YOU ALWAYS HAVE A HOME HERE MISS BATTERY

“Don’t call me that.” The sudden violence of the words surprising her.

The Hand twitches a little, but otherwise sits there impassively.

“This ain’t no home,” she hisses, feeling an old familiar rage bubble up, and liking it. “It’s a butcher shop. Your men are butchers, they don’t follow the code, and all that shit comes from the top and rolls downhill.”

— THEN FILE A COMPLAINT WITH ALICE AS PER USUAL / FORM 12 DASH B

Looks like Alice is still kicking. “Just tell me one thing, OK? Then you can start crying about how you’ll never see me again.”

— O PERIOD K PERIOD

“Vinnie Vinegar,” Bat says. “Where.”

— STARSHINE INN

“That dump? That’s where I was staying.”

— WHAT CAN I SAY YOU THUGS DO LOVE YOUR SQUALID HOVELS

“Pay us more maybe we could afford a place with a fancier kind of cockroach.” She starts to get up but then shoots him a glance. “This some kind of trick? Why are you giving him up so easy?”

— LONG PAUSE BECAUSE I LIKE YOU MORE I LIKE THAN HIM

“Thanks,” she says, standing. “Eat my balls.”

— UH OH HERE COME THE WATERWORKS

She steps up to the front desk of the Starshine Inn where the clerk in the bulletproof vest is whittling a shiv.

“Remember me?” she asks him.

The clerk gives her a warm smile. “I remember everyone who owes us money.”

“You remember some sick fop stalking me a few days ago?”

“I do indeed.”

“He killed my sister’s knee. I’d like to have a few words.”

“I don’t blame you. Gentleman in question is in your old room right now. Number fourteen.”

Now Bat is very suspicious at how smooth all this is going. “I thought you had a policy about snitching and all.”

“I’m assuming you want him to go away,” the clerk says, going back to his whittling. “So do I.”

Bat takes a moment outside Room 14. This here’s a golden opportunity to kick open a door, an opportunity she was cruelly denied at the hot pillow joint. But she’s worried that the doors at the Starshine Inn are so feeble they won’t give her the feeling she’s craving. The feeling of knocking down the barrier between you and what you want. The feeling of splintering whatever it is they think will protect them from you. No, these doors practically kick themselves in.

She tries the knob and it’s unlocked. No chain or anything. Opens right up. And there’s Vinnie Vinegar, in a chair facing the door, pistol in hand, pointed right at her.

She leaps into some semblance of a defensive stance but then sees his eyes are closed, his chin’s against his chest. Snoring lightly. Sallow crooked body clad in nothing but a sleeveless t-shirt, briefs, sock garters. Empty bottle of Snakehair rum nestled in his piss-stained crotch.

She closes the door, looks around. The disgusting bed is on its side and shoved up against the wall. The radio is playing static. A dainty little carpet bag is overturned in the bathroom, its fancy contents spilled out onto the linoleum: shaving brush, nail file, ascot, reading glasses, handkerchief.

Bat’s suddenly more tired than anyone in the annals of being tired. All thoughts of vengeance flitter away. How many nights did she lose in this very room, doing this very thing? Waiting for someone to kick down the door and end her? For something awful she did because somebody awful paid her to do it? Or maybe for no reason at all?

Nothing to nobody. A hired goon. You thugs.

What could she do to him that the life hasn’t already done?

She peels the comforter off the bed and drapes it over him. Probably thick with earwigs but it’s the thought that counts.

Bat staggers into Sal’s Crab House, dark aside from the glow of the fish tanks, and what do you know, Sal’s still there behind the counter, even this late, writing tomorrow’s specials (crab) on the big board.

“Batya, my sweet!” he cries. “I was convinced you would perish this day! In fact, I am ashamed to admit I put some money on it.”

“Five dollars he owes me,” a voice says, and Bat notices Margaret Feddema parked at a table by the window, smoking, making notes in a ledger.

“Five bucks?” Bat says. “That’s it?”

“It was all I had on me,” Sal says, apologetic, wiping down a meat tenderizer.

Bat squints at Margaret in the dim light. “I’m surprised you backed me.”

“I had a few different wagers going. Either way, I was going to turn a profit.”

Margaret gestures at the chair opposite her. Bat doesn’t want to obey her but can’t think of anything sassy to do, so she sits down.

“Is that you I’m smelling?” Margaret says.

“Probably,” Bat says. “There was a fish…a fish flood, I guess you’d call it. On the Gorgon. The job got a little out of hand.”

“Did you deliver the item?”

“I dunno, man. The item is no longer in my possession, put it that way. The recipient was shot dead before I could give it to him. And then there was a card game, and then I set the ship on fire, and then I escaped with the captain.”

“Nia Muto.”

“Yeah. She’s not running Snakehair anymore, pretty sure.”

Margaret puts down her fountain pen, the same one she jabbed in Bat’s eye the other day. “She’s not?”

Ooh, Bat gets a little thrill from telling Margaret something she didn’t know. Never happened before. She goes in for seconds: “She got mutinied, so she’s gonna start up a new operation.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. And she offered me a job.”

“She did.”

“Yeah and I said OK sure.”

“You did.”

“Yeah.”

“You have a job here, darling.”

“Yeah, thing is, ma’am, you haven’t actually paid me. And Nia gave me an advance. Sort of an advance.”

“At Hawthorne Grain, we settle up at the end of the week.” Margaret checks her ledger, then holds out a wad of bills held together by a rubber band. “This is yours, other half goes to Mina.”

Bat grabs it without a second thought. “Thanks. Still out, though.”

“The captain must have made quite an impression.”

“She paid some bills. And maybe I’m moving up a rung, who knows. Either way it’s a thing I’m doing, not a thing being done to me. If that makes sense.”

“Hm.”

“Sorry. I know you had big plans for me and Mina teaming up.”

Margaret closes the ledger. “I certainly did not. I don’t make plans, I thought I made that clear to you. If I did, I might be upset about your sister’s injury. I might hold it against you. I might resent your intrusion into our little family here. I might take steps. But I don’t concern myself with what might happen. All I care about is what is happening. So. Not that it’s any of your business anymore, but I’m taking Mina out of the field. Permanently. And I’m putting her in charge of the archivists. Outreach. Research. Dispatch.”

Bat stares at Margaret, eventually realizes her mouth is hanging open and shuts it. “She is gonna love that.”

“Yes.”

“Her dream is to boss people for a living. And not get her hands dirty. Like you.”

“I know.”

Bat sits back, looks over at the specials board, fiddles with the cash in her hand.

Finally, she says, “Can I see her? I mean, am I still allowed down there?”

Margaret takes a deep drag, exhales blue smoke toward the ceiling. “Tonight.”

Bat opens the hatch to Mina’s quarters and peers in. Her sister is in bed, under their father’s quilt, using a flashlight to read a dirty magazine called Bullwhippin’.

Their eyes meet. Same dark eyes. Same dark hair. Same winding pathway through this town, through this life. Twisted together tight like manila rope, knotted up like a strangle-snare, but now, here, tonight, fraying at the edges, strands spiraling off in different directions.

Mina pats the quilt. “Come here and tell me absolutely nothing. Spare every detail.”

Bat goes to her. They put their foreheads together and whisper their ancient incantation into each other’s mouths: we did the job / and now we nap.

+++

This has been Chapter 67 of Chokeville, a novel by Josh Fireland. The final chapter will ship out on May Day.