CASTLE STREET GLUE TRAPS
They were at it again. She was screaming and the kids were crying in the background and I knew that soon he would start hitting her. They had only moved in two months before but they were an excruciating addition to my life. I was trying to finish a manuscript that was two weeks late while ducking calls from my irate publisher and listening to the skirmishes that took place in the combat zone that was my neighbors’ apartment. I met them when they first moved in. My first impression was mixed. She seemed nice but shy. He was a jerk, smoking a cigarette in the hall while we talked, bossing her and the kids around while they brought their things in from the moving truck. He said he was a welder and had moved in from Lumberton for a job at the port. He smirked when I told him I was a writer. He wanted to know what I had written. The smirk grew when I told him I was still working on my first novel and had only been published in magazines up until then. The kids were polite and reserved.
I turned up the radio and tried to block out their screaming. My computer screen and I stared at each other for twenty minutes, but neither of us could piece together the next paragraph. I got up and I paced. I stared out my window at the parking lot. I heard the sound of knuckles on flesh and the children’s cries. I checked on my fish and the thermometer in their tank. I could not assemble the words in my mind. I decided to go for a drive.
I walked out into the parking lot and felt the lukewarm humidity engulf me. Mosquitoes from the garden in the courtyard buzzed around me and I slapped at one that left a bloody streak on my forearm. I jogged over to my car and opened the door. I could smell that she had been there. If you have ever smelled it before, then you know that it is hard to adequately describe, but it is something like burnt plastic and aspirin. The pipe was lying on the floorboard. It was a short glass stem darkened by fire and cocaine residue. I got out of the car and took it to the end of the lot. I stepped on it and kicked the shards of glass and the small piece of steel wool that had been within into the gutter. I hurried back to the car, receiving a few more mosquito bites along the way. I started up the car and drove out, turning the crank to lower my window, grateful for the breeze. I took my cell phone out of my pocket as I turned onto Market Street and called my brother Arnold.
“Hey, Evan, what’s up?” he answered.
“She’s been getting high in my car again,” I said.
“Aw, shit. She said she wouldn’t do that anymore.”
“Well, can you talk to her again?”
“I don’t think it’ll do any good. You know how she is. Besides, I just got off my shift and I’m on my way home. You want to come by and have a couple?”
“No. I reckon I’ll go talk to her myself. Does she still work the same spot?”
“Yeah,” he said, “but keep an eye out for that shithead Levon. Don’t say anything to him if he shows up.”
“You think it’s hopeless, huh?”
“She’s an addict. That’s what her life is about. She doesn’t want to have anything to do with anyone unless it contributes to her using.”
I took North 16th Street to Castle, made a right and found her on the corner. I parked the car and got out. Her hair was stringy and unwashed and her dark roots were showing through a poor dye job. She was wearing a tank top that was too tight and a pair of denim shorts that were far too short. Her stomach was threatening to burst the buttons and her thighs had more dimples than a Welch’s commercial. It was a sad sight to see.
“Hey, Mom,” I said. She raised her cigarette to her lips and nodded at me. “How’s it going?”
“Fine,” she said. The fingers on her other hand were tapping against her left pocket. I glanced down the street at the dealers that were talking or strolling, but didn’t see Levon anywhere.
“I need you to quit smoking in my car. What if one of my neighbors sees you?”
“I needed somewhere safe to go.”
“Safe from what?” I asked.
“The cops. These cutthroat niggers. Take your pick.”
“You work out here with all that.”
“I like somewhere peaceful to get high,” she said, her eyes dancing up and down the street and coming back to me.
“That’s not my problem. You choose to do what you do.”
“Not your problem,” she mimicked. She sneered at me and used the end of her cigarette to light another one. “Give me ten dollars. I need a pack of Newports.”
“I don’t have any money to support your addictions.”
“My addictions,” she snorted. “My addictions. You’re nothing like your brother, you know that?”
“Yes.”
“He said I could come and stay with him if I wanted.” She smirked and checked both directions again.
“That’s because he wants you to get cleaned up and get your shit together.” Her eyes snapped back on me.
“Who the fuck are you to judge me? I raised you, you ungrateful son of a bitch.”
“That’s an interesting choice of words. But Arnold raised me. You were too busy getting high. But the last part of what you said I can’t argue with.”
“Just give me ten dollars and get the fuck outta here.”
“What’s going on, Cheryl? Is this young man bothering you?” a voice said over my shoulder. I turned and saw Levon staring at me. He was tall and dark, but not so mysterious. “This another one of your kids? Your punkass brother locked me up on some bullshit last month, man.”
“Arnie’s a good boy,” she said before I could respond. “Don’t you talk about him like that.” Her defiant tone was undermined by the rasp of her last couple of words.
“Are you high? C’mere and let me see.” She walked over to him and he grabbed her chin and tilted her eyes up to his. “You been rockin’ up again. Damn it, what did I tell you, Cheryl?”
“Let her go,” I said. His eyes lit up as he turned back to me.
“Do us all a favor and go on home, kid,” he said, reaching into his pocket. I showed him my palms in capitulation. My mom just stared from behind him, taking another drag from her cigarette.
“I’m just asking you to calm down, be reasonable.”
“Get outta here, before I fuck you up like I’m about to do this bitch,” he said with malicious satisfaction, a butterfly knife in his hand. As I backed away, nodding my head, he turned back to her. She was visibly bracing herself now that his mask had been discarded. Her hair flipped back when he backhanded her and she almost smiled.
“Not in the face,” she said, “I gotta work.”
“Not in the face, huh?” He punched her in the stomach and she fell to her knees, vomiting onto the concrete. He turned his head to the side so that I could see his face without him looking directly at me. “Go on, my man, and don’t come back.” And I went, and I never did.
My mom was dead. She had died many years before and the beating I watched was not administered to any kin of mine. This was a fact I had avoided for years, but that made it no less true. There was no use in standing up for someone who chose not to stand up for herself. We had gotten her off the powder when I was younger, but perhaps it was inevitable that she would end up on this course. She had stolen from my brother and I and sold the coin collection and the guitars my dad left us when he died of a heart attack. Arnold had been kept on patrol for a couple of years longer than he should have because of the times he had helped her get out of solicitation and drug charges. His wife left him after Cheryl smoked in their house when she was supposedly detoxing. I knew he would never give up on her, but I could no longer see the benefit of measuring myself in relation to his loyalty and altruism.
The lady from the apartment next door passed me in the hall with her kids. Her lip was bloody and her eyes were puffy and purple and yellow and the kids were visibly frightened. Her stomach was slightly swollen and I knew there was another victim on the way.
“Hey,” I said. She stopped and looked at me. Her lip was trembling, one hand on her littlest one’s shoulder and the other holding a duffel bag. “Do you have somewhere to stay?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Are you coming back to him?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” She looked down at the floor as she replied and I knew the answer.
“Don’t come back tonight.”
“Why?”
“Just go, before he comes out here,” I said, taking her bag from her and heading to the door. I walked her out to her car and told the kids everything would be fine. She sped out of the lot and out onto the street. I went to my apartment and grabbed an old wooden nightstick Arnold had left one night. It was a relic he carried in his truck. It probably hadn’t seen any action in years. I pounded on my neighbor’s door. He answered it with a shotgun in one hand, the barrel propped against his shoulder. His face was swollen with beer fat and I could smell the alcoholic sweat that surrounded him like a fermented force field.
“What the fuck do you want, asshole?” he asked, rubbing his other hand across his fat lips and stubbly chins. This was the second time in one night that a stranger pulled a weapon and cussed me. I slapped the nightstick across the knuckles on the hand that held the shotgun. It fell to the floor butt-first and a round went off, spraying a small pattern into the ceiling and the side of the wife beater’s face. He fell to the floor, his hand over his wound. I could not hear his scream through the ringing in my ears. Smoke and sulfur filtered into my nose and lungs. I grabbed the shotgun and placed it on the hallway floor, out of his reach. I closed the door and he looked at me with fear as he pulled himself backwards, dragging his ample backside across the carpeted floor.
“So you like to beat on people?” I could barely hear myself. His lips moved and he turned his head and tried to pull himself up by grabbing the table next to him. I swung and felt the hard vibration of the stick cracking across his jaw. Teeth and blood flew out onto the table. I swung again and watched the skin on the side of his face go slack as the jaw that once filled it out broke in so many pieces. He lay on the floor, his mouth open, blood pooling and soaking into the carpet, panting and looking up at me like a mouse in a glue trap. I lifted the stick again, but could do no more.
I turned and walked out into the hall, picking up the shotgun on the way back into my apartment. A neighbor’s door quickly shut when I glanced down the hall, and I could hear sirens getting closer, now that my hearing was gradually returning. I put the gun down by the door with the nightstick and went back to my bedroom. I stumbled into the edge of the bed and sat down. I wiped the blood off of the back of my hand onto my pant leg and began to weep. It was not remorse, but a righteous grief that came over me. What I had done that night was right, but none of it was very palatable.
The first officer on the scene turned out to be a friend of my brother’s, a guy he trained a few years before. He helped make sure that things went smoothly. It’s six months later now and I am on house arrest as one of my terms of probation and I do community service down at the police department a couple of times a week. Arnold gives me a hard time when he sees me there, but mostly in a joking way, and we get together regularly for a few beers at my place. He tells me that his mom is still in the same old cycle. My book is selling slowly, but in the stores at least. Unfortunately, most of my royalties are going to my fines and the medical bills of my neighbor, the recovering wife beater. That is why I am trying to rush through my next book, which has been considerably easier, since it has been so quiet next door. Occasionally, there is an argument, but more often than not, the loudest disturbance is the kids playing or the baby crying. And that kind of disturbance I can endure.
