Gin Palace 01 - The Poisoned Rose

hard wood ties. I saw myself walking that straight line right out of here, away from everything I’ve ever known, counting each tie with the morning sun at my back.
    I was awake now and still couldn’t shake that idea from my mind. Escape. The word echoed in my thoughts. But thinking and doing were two very different things. When I finally got myself up off the floor, I saw that it was three in the afternoon. I wandered into my kitchen but couldn’t find anything to eat, so I put on hot water for tea and stood at my window and looked at the train station.
    The shutoff notice from the electric company was hanging on the refrigerator behind me. I didn’t have to see it to know that it was there. It reminded me of the money on my coffee table, the cash Frank Gannon had given Augie to give me.
    I went to it, opened the envelope, and counted through the bills. It was more money than I had seen in a long time. It was almost as much as I had made in my best month last summer, when Jamie Ray and I had managed to do three painting jobs in one six-day week of working seven in the morning to eight at night.
    I closed the envelope and dropped it onto the coffee table. The teakettle whistled back in the kitchen and I went to it and took it off the stove and dropped my last bag of ginger tea into a mug and poured the water over it. Then I pulled the chair Augie had sat in most of the night back to its position in front of my living room windows and sat on it backwards and looked down on Elm Street.
    I thought about the chances that I could start a new life here and even made of list of errands to run, followed by a promise to myself to actually get out and run them. But before I could get too far with that I started to think of Vogler bleeding to death on that rainy street. From there it was a short trip to thinking about almost being killed out on Noyac Road. And it wasn’t long after that that I remembered the scratches on my face. I touched them with my fingertips, recalling the woman who had left them there, the fear that had coursed through her body. I had thought I was helping her, preventing her from making a mistake by running.
    I had thought wrong.
    I’d been told by a woman who lived with me for a month years ago that all things have a right to live. I believed that, I believed her, all evidence to the contrary.
    It didn’t take much for me to start looking through my place for unfinished bottles of Beam. I found one under my sink that had a few shots left in it. I emptied the bottle into a glass and settled in. I drank slowly to make what I had last. But it wasn’t enough. Around nine I was out of what I had scrounged together and nowhere near numb enough, so I headed downstairs for a few on George. I didn’t care anymore who was looking for me. I remembered Augie saying something about coming to get me tonight. I wasn’t sure if I was going downstairs to make it easier for him to find me or more difficult. But I didn’t really care about that. The threat of my starting to remember again grew with each minute I went without a drink in my hand.
    And anyway, I was hungry, and George served food over the bar.
    I don’t remember her face or much of anything about her, really. She sits beside me in the dark corner at the end of the Hansom House bar and we drink together. It is loud, the place is crowed, there is a great hum around us, chatter and music. I lose a lot to this noise—a lot of what she is saying to me—but it doesn’t seem to matter. She smiles a lot and laughs and I nod at things I don’t really understand. It’s the smiling and laughing and long eye contact that tells me what I need to know.
    We eat and drink, then go upstairs to my dark apartment. She opens a window and the curtain lifts and blooms like a restless ghost. The air coming in fills the room fast, too fast. It is a rush of cold and dark, a rush of outer space. I begin to shiver. She comes to me, presses her body against mine, wraps her arms around me. I smell her with each breath I take.
    And then we are lying down. Her body radiates heat. I pull it close to me out of greed. I can see the vague shape of her by the streetlight coming in from outside. Her hair is shoulder length and straight. I smell it, smell her skin, the Quervo on her cool breath. She is drunk, too. She laughs. It’s a laugh that comes from deep in her gut. She climbs on top of me and straddles me and leans down so her soft hair brushes my face and makes a cozy