How Much It Never Happened

Black. Black as night. Black-hearted bastard.

BUMP.

Tamara’s teeth clicked together as the card table in the kitchen dropped off the chunk of baseboard shoved under one leg to keep it level. Her eyes popped open and she gagged, suddenly aware she was being smothered by the stench of fast-food grease oozing out of her McDonald’s staff shirt sleeves. She jerked her head up off her folded arms, which she had been using as a pillow. The bleary numbers on the oven clock read 11:32 PM. She hadn’t dozed off for very long.

Tamara sighed like it was heavy labor to do it. The TV argued with itself in the next room. Some show featuring a bunch of men in suits who didn’t do much besides drink and be disgusting to the women. Zeke mostly watched that one, not her.

Tamara coughed and rubbed her eyes, staring vacantly at the mess on the table. Supermarket ads. Mail addressed to the previous renters. Mail addressed to the renters before them. Plastic grocery bags. A couple of pans that wouldn’t fit anywhere else in the kitchen. A nest of rolling papers and loose tobacco. Paint chips that had grown tired of adhering to the wall and probably contained lead. A red pen that had rolled out of her hand.

The pen brought back the reason she had been sitting at the table in the first place. She moved her arm, uncovering the smallish black notebook crouching underneath it.

Black-hearted bastard.

She scratched at the word Record on the cover, stamped there in gold foil. A bit of her pink nail polish flaked off and she brushed it away irritably. All she really wanted to do after work was take a shower to melt the layer of fry grease from her skin, roll up in a damp ball under some blankets, and pretend she didn’t have to go do it all over again tomorrow. Balancing the budget was low on the list of desirable activities, but it had to get done sometime. She opened the book and flipped through the yellowish pages.

Yellow. Yellow like wallpaper. Yellow means slow down.

Yellow wasn’t really the right word. The pages had probably been yellow once, but now they were just some strange, pukey non-color. The spine of the book used to make stiff little cracking noises when you opened it. It had grown supple with age and now fell open with the smooth motion of a snake in water.

Pow-pow-pow!

Tamara’s head jerked up, listening. The gunshots didn’t sound too close, so probably not of much concern. But she sat and listened for a few moments to see what would follow. Could be any of a range of noises. Dogs barking, people shouting, cars revving, sirens. Some of those might require action, some not.

Nothing. Just the TV businessmen in their business suits, talking about business. Arguing about the best way to sell…popsicles? Something.

Tamara’s eyelids, which had momentarily flickered upward at the sound of the shots, sank back down to half-mast. Just another day in the North Woods neighborhood. She continued flipping the pages of the notebook until she found the most recent entries.

Red. Red ochre. Red ink on a page.

The entries were all written in her spiky but legible handwriting: black for income and positive balances, red for deductions and overdue payments. There was too much red. So much demanding red. The black entry of her last McDonald’s paycheck was drowned in the sea of it. Electric bill, gas bill, rent. Money sent to Tamara’s mother for her prescriptions. Money deposited into the prison commissary for Zeke’s brother. The book didn’t care how much bad news it had to dump on you. After all, it was just a black-hearted little bastard.

Tamara had bought some groceries this evening and at least managed to put them away before her brief nap. Power nap, she thought, and snorted as she reached under the card table to put the chunk of baseboard back under the wobbly leg. There wasn’t any power here. No power to get away from the gangs and their endless turf wars. No power to get away from the shivering crackheads and the temperamental tweakers. Just the starless ocean of graffiti and potholes that was the Woods, where you would be lucky just to keep the lights on.

Having steadied the table, Tamara sat up and rested her arm on it, pen in hand. She gave the table a couple of experimental nudges just to be sure it wasn’t going anywhere, then put pen to paper to mark down the groceries.

BAM.

Tamara jumped again, losing the pen in the underbrush of rolling papers.

“Fuck,” she muttered. She heard Zeke’s boots thump as he came into what passed for a living room in their cramped rental house. She leaned over and looked around the side of the kitchen doorway at him.

“Hey, what’s your problem? Slamming the damn door like that.”

She found herself looking at his back as he slammed the door closed with almost as much force, locked the deadbolt, and slid the security chain into its track. He stayed like that for a moment, leaning on the door.

“Zeke?”

He half turned so she could see him in profile, and he stared at the TV, watching the suited men argue while gesturing with their drinks.

Tamara huffed. “Ezekiel!”

Zeke finally looked at her. “Hey, Tam. What?” He sounded oddly breathless.

“Uh, don’t break the damn door?” she said. “We got enough problems without that, thank you.” The black-hearted bastard on the table agreed.

Zeke turned away from the TV and finished crossing the living room in little, shuffling steps. He stopped in the kitchen doorway and paused for a bizarrely long moment.

“Hey, Tam,” he said again.

“Yeah, I heard you the first time.” Tamara looked at him. The fingers of his left hand fidgeted and his eyes were wide. It still seemed like he couldn’t quite catch his breath. “You good?”

“Uh-huh. Yeah,” he said. He crossed the kitchen, dropped his black gym bag from his right hand, and reached up to take a bottle of Southern Comfort from the top of the refrigerator. He opened the fridge and looked at the five cans of off-brand cola on the top shelf, then appeared to change his mind. He closed the fridge, picked up a cloudy glass from the mismatched army on the counter, and poured the whiskey straight. Tamara watched him throw it back, heave a big sigh, then stare at his boots. There was a long silence in which they could hear sirens in some other part of the Woods.

“You’re being weird,” said Tamara. “What’s going on? Something happen?” She poked a finger at the open book in front of her. “If you broke some shit, please tell me we don’t gotta pay for it.”

She gave Zeke a half smile, but he didn’t laugh. His dark brown eyes looked slightly dazed.

Brown. Brown like mud. Clear as mud.

“Yeah, uh. So, I…I did something tonight,” said Zeke, his eyes on the book.

“You…did something?” said Tamara. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Zeke hesitated, then picked up the gym bag. He took a couple of steps closer to the table, held the bag toward her, and partially unzipped it. Tamara choked on spit.

Green. Green like…

“Money!? Wha…” Tamara put her hand over her mouth. “What…what the fuck, Zeke!”

The bag was filled with rolls of cash, each one held tight by a rubber band. There were rolls that appeared to be 20s, 50s, even 100s.

“The fuck,” Tamara gasped again. “The actual fuck, Zeke? Where did you get that?”

“It’s about twenty thousand dollars,” Zeke murmured, as though that answered her question.

“But how? What the fuck did you do?” Tamara said, her voice getting higher even as she tried to keep her volume down. The neighbors were close and the walls thin.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Zeke. Suddenly he dropped the bag and knelt next to her chair, grabbing her hand in both of his and looking up into her face. All wild eyes and clammy skin.

“Tam,” he said. “Look. This is enough. We can pay everything off.” He gestured at the book on the table. “And then we can get out.”

“Out?” Tamara felt faint. Her eyes were still locked on the bag at her feet.

“Out of the Woods,” said Zeke. “We can go some other place. Somewhere better.”

Pow-pow-pow!

Tamara jumped and looked wildly out the window over the sink, half expecting to find herself staring down the muzzle of a cop’s handgun. But the shots were again far away.

“We can’t…you…how did you?” Tamara couldn’t seem to form a whole sentence.

“Yeah, we can,” said Zeke. He released her hands, stood up, and reached for the rolling papers on the table.

Tamara stared at the money. Money. Magical stuff that couldn’t buy happiness, but sure as hell could buy you freedom from a thousand flavors of unhappiness. She reached a shaking hand down and pawed a few of the rolls aside. She picked one up as though it were a bomb and turned it over.

Red. Red like ink. Red blood on paper.

“Zeke!” Tamara dropped the money-bomb. It bounced off the side of the gym bag and rolled a few inches, stopping near Zeke’s foot. The rusty-red stains on one side were visible. She looked up at Zeke and all she could do was repeat herself. “What did you do?”

Zeke had finished rolling a cigarette and was licking the edge of the paper to make it stick. He then started digging in the mess on the table, searching for a lighter.

“We pay off the bills. Catch up on rent. Find a cheap car and get out. Maybe stay in a motel until we can find jobs in the new place. Show income and someone will rent to us,” Zeke said. It sounded like he had planned what he was going to say, but then it all became fragmented in the moment. He finally unearthed a lighter and the flame jittered as he lit the cigarette.

Tamara’s eyes were glassy. “What if…the police?” she said. “Zeke, did you…hurt someone?” They had guns in the house, of course, but Tamara had never seen Zeke use one.

Zeke took a long drag from the cigarette and exhaled. He held still for a long moment, eyes closed, then looked at her. His face seemed to have settled, like the nighttime sea after a storm. He took her hand again.

“It’s going to be fine, Tam,” he said. He squeezed her hand and turned his face toward the TV in the living room.

“Ain’t no way someone isn’t coming looking for that. Tell me what happened,” Tamara pleaded. Zeke kept his eyes on the TV, watching through the smoke coiling away from the cigarette he held.

“Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry.” The hand wrapped around Tamara’s felt almost like it was vibrating, but his voice was quiet and steady. “We’ll get a nice place, decent jobs. We’ll go so far that the Woods will just be a shitty dream. You’ll see. We’ll get out and it will be like none of it ever happened.” Tamara could see the TV reflected twice in his eyes as he said softly, “You will be shocked by how much it never happened.”