Drinks with Fagen
Short (Dark) Fiction
Drinks With Fagen
It’s almost every night. It’s not my choice, but Fagen knows how to find me. I never make eye contact, never raise a glass or wave him over. The last thing I want to do is encourage Fagen.
Fagen found a girl with a lunatic laugh and bloodshot eyes. I don’t know if they were always bloodshot. I only saw them one time and the next time her eyes were closed and he was rolling her up in a rug.
“Junkies,” said Fagen. “They die one way or another. That’s how it goes.”
A while later, I met a dog walker in the park on Viscount. Her name was Lucy.
And Fagen met a bartender who told him her brother was loaded and lived with his partner in a condo on Ocean Drive.
Fagen parked under the balcony so I could reach it from the roof of the car. The slider was partially open. “They’re all gays here,” he said. “They won’t give us any trouble. They probably leave their keys and wallets in a whimsical, handpainted ceramic bowl on a repurposed, mid-century modern couch table in the front entry.”
It turns out that some gays are light sleepers and some of them are perfectly capable of throwing a grown man off a balcony with extreme prejudice.
Broken arm drinks with Fagen and Lucy. Lucy, Pinot-kissing my whiskey lips and rubbing my thigh, not curious about arms that break or dogs that get away or men who come and go.
***
Fagen makes me fast-drive the wrong way down one-way streets at 3:00 AM, has me nick the trash bins on the curb, dares me to run the light because, what are the chances, chicken shit? He tells me to pull in here and let him drive. He guns it into the window of Choice Liquors and we load-up the trunk with single malt scotch and cartons of cigarettes—as good as cash. Fast, fast, fast.
Fagen lifts his shirt to show the gun in his belt. “It’s a temptation, I know,” he says.
“Yes, a constant temptation,” I say.
***
Drinks with Fagen, white wine kisses with Lucy. She lost another one on the dog beach today, a Labradoodle. Fagen can’t contain his laughter.
Fagen has me driving fast, fast, fast every night. He flicks the wheel and we bounce curb to curb. “Faster” he says. “How much longer do you want all this to last?”
Fast, fast, fast. Fast enough for the crash to kill you. This is what he means.
He lifts his shirt and tucks it behind the gun.
“Leave it that way,” I say.
“You might grab it and try to shoot me again,” he says.
“Yes,” I say. “I might.”
Fagen has a pink scar that runs from the bridge of his nose straight up to his hairline. I always forget about it until I see him. It’s the same every time, seeing it and remembering how it was when I shot him, losing my nerve at the last second and letting the barrel drift upward.
***
Fagen sits on a towel, not dressed for the beach. “Corgi,” he says. “And Cockapoo. I hate the way she says Cockapoo.”
“Well, that’s what they’re called,” I say.
“Her hands smell like dog,” he says.
“You shouldn’t know how her hands smell,” I say.
Lucy has eight or ten of them dragging her along the sand. She gets tangled in the leashes and falls on her face. One of them gets loose and bolts away, fast, fast, fast, the leash sailing behind.
Fagan laughs like a maniac. “Go Schnauzer,” he shouts.
***
Drinks with Fagen. “She’s not much to look at, Bobby. Gangly and awkward to tell the truth.”
I stare straight ahead.
“But you can’t get a real woman the way you are now,” he says.
“They found the Schnauzer,” I say.
“We don’t give a shit about Schnauzers or Cockapoos or fucking Corgis, Bobby. They’re a bullshit distraction.”
He speaks to me in the mirror behind the bar and I see the pink scar, the reminder of my failure.
The windows of the bar are winter dark and we’ve had enough drinks for now. Fagan wants to take a ride.
Blue lights on the street, a block up, where we left the stolen Acura. I want to turn and walk the other way but Fagen keeps us heading toward the lights.
The cops have all the doors open. Two of them are leaning-in, searching with flashlights under the seats and Fagen laughs at their fat asses. He asks a cop on the sidewalk if someone reported a box of doughnuts in there.
“Keep walking, wise guy,” says the voice from under the cop cap.
We keep walking. Fagen fingers the gun through his shirt. “There were too many of them,” he says. “But I wanted to do it just to hear the sound of the gun again. You want to hear it again, don’t you Bobby”
“Yes,” I say.
“We’ll have to boost another ride tomorrow. That one was getting too banged-up anyway.”
***
Lucy shivers in fear when it’s Fagen. He punishes her for being gangly and awkward. He straddles her and holds her dog-hands behind her back, cursing, pumping, pounding, slapping, scolding, Laughing.
Afterwards, she pulls the covers over her head and whispers “Bobby, Bobby.”
***
Drinks with Fagen. He talks to me in the mirror. “Payday loans,” he says. “They give them three-fifty cash for four hundred next week. Cash falling out of their pockets. Grab and go, fast, fast, fast.”
They close at five. We walk the two blocks fast.
“Grab and go,” I say.
“That’s one big Mexican,” Fagen says. “Too big.”
“Chicken shit.”
“Fuck you, Bobby,” says Fagen.
“Grab and go,” I say.
“This guy,” he says and we follow him around back to the parking lot where Fagen picks up a brick and bashes his head-in for two hundred and sixty-three dollars and the keys to a 2002 Astro van full of rakes and shovels, leaf blowers, hedge trimmers, and seven bags of mulch.
“If we get rid of all the shit back there,” I say, “we can fit Lucy and all the dogs and drive them to the park on Viscount so she won’t lose them on the dog beach.”
Fagen tugs at a picture frame on the dashboard. The frame is plastic, molded in the shape of Jesus with his arms around a little oval where the picture goes and the picture is of a little brown family, father and mother, daughter and son, smiling, with their arms around each other on a lumpy beige couch. The frame says “Te Amo” at the bottom and Fagen has to use both hands to pry it off. “Alien tape,” he laughs. He holds it up to me but I look straight ahead because I don’t want to see it up-close. He rolls the window down and throws it like a frisbee.
***
Drinks with Fagen. He talks to me in the mirror.
“Her teeth aren’t right,” he says.
“You never see her smile,” I say.
“And her jeans are always filthy.”
“It’s because of the dogs.”
“But I guess you can’t do any better, the way you are now,” he says.
We drive. The wasted, western sun has deflated and fallen into the ocean, leaving only a faint rust stain on the gun-metal horizon, just how you might imagine the final sunset to look.
“Do you think you killed him, the Mexican guy?” I ask.
“Not me, Bobby. We.”
“I thought you would use the gun,” I say.
“It would have drawn attention to us. I know you want to hear it again.”
“Yes,” I say, “I want to hear it again.”
“Well, just so you know Bobby,” he says, “A bullet is faster than sound. If you do it right, you’ll never hear it.”
***
I sleep.
Two or three hours is all I ever get away from Fagen now, when I’m lucky. When I’m not lucky he invades my dreams and we drive fast, fast, fast and he taunts me with the gun and speaks in poison clouds that I am forced to breathe until I crash the car in a hideous wreck. Fagen laughs over the sound of hissing steam and creaking metal. He cackles hysterically when he sees that I have no arms with which to hold the gun.
And when he’s finished with the dream, he says “Wake up Bobby,” but I stay in it a little longer, feeling comfortable with my armlessness, innocent and harmless like a swaddled baby.
Louder now, on this, the final morning, Fagen says, “Wake up Bobby. Look what you’ve done.”
And I see Lucy, gangly and awkward, slack-jawed and broken beside me on the bed. I touch her cold cheek and notice that my arms are scratched and bleeding. I take the gun from the nightstand and head to the bathroom.
I turn on the light and Fagen is there in front of me, holding his head still so I can aim at the pink scar, not saying anything to distract me, letting me take my time and line it up, his eyes fixed on mine. I squeeze the trigger so gently and gradually that I’m surprised when it finally goes off, shattering the mirror and ringing our ears.
“Well, we got to hear it again,” says Fagen. “We won’t hear the next one. Are you ready, Bobby?”
I nod and put the gun to the pink scar on my forehead.
“That’s the way you fucked-up the first time,” he says. “Hold it to your temple.”
I move the gun around and adjust my grip. My finger finds the trigger and I squeeze it gently, gradually.
“Get on with it,” he says. “They’re waiting for you in hell, Bobby Fagen.”
.
.
This is a superb tale, Jim. So imaginative. You wrote a very distinct difference between Fagan's and Bobbie's voice and then blurred them seamlessly. Stories of brutality and the mentally deranged are never my choice in subject matter, and I would not have read this if I didn't know what art Jim Cummings is capable of. Glad I did! Chilling! What a mind you have.
Terrific. I've always believed two things about the human brain. One, we will never fully, fully understand how it functions. 300 years from now they'll still be studying it. Two, it can be the scariest, most horrifying thing in this world. By far. Nothing even comes close. Really enjoyed this, Jim.