9. Florida Man Mutilated in Lovers’ Spat
Chapter 9
Florida Man Mutilated in Lovers’ Spat
“ H e shot me in the ear,” Rainy said for the thousandth time. “He shot me in the fucking ear.”
“Stop being such a sissy,” Nasrin ordered, the words rolling smoothly in her thick Farsi accent. She dropped the gauze swab she was using on his right ear onto the soiled tray, then picked up another pad soaked in something that stung like a motherfucker.
“It hurts,” he said defensively. “I’ve been shot.”
“The baby is old enough to hear outside the womb now. If you keep whining, you’re going to make her pathetic.”
“All babies are pathetic. They’re babies; that’s their whole thing.”
“Not as pathetic as you. You didn’t even cry this much when I stitched up that bullet hole in your shoulder.”
Rainy sniffed, trying not to wince at the fresh burn of antiseptic. “That time, some psycho hadn’t shot half my ear off.”
Nasrin scoffed. “Not half. Barely a quarter. Now hold still.”
Nasrin Espinosa was one of the best trauma surgeons in Miami, Felix Espinosa’s wife, and holder of his balls. She was also seven months pregnant, and had commandeered the operating table in the makeshift surgery in her and Felix’s garage while she made Rainy stand. He had been tempted to argue the contrasting disability levels of pregnant versus freshly shot, but he did have an interest in keeping his ear as intact as possible.
Once the shock of a bullet passing an inch from his skull had worn off, Rainy had felt a bubbling panic as he fished a coin-sized piece of his own cartilage and skin out of the bloody puddle on the multipurpose room’s floor. In the car on the way to Nasrin, the feeling had shifted into disbelief and, by the time he arrived, it had coalesced into rage.
“He laughed. He fucking laughed. Like it was funny. The ear. ”
“Yes, I heard you the first twenty times.” Nasrin was finishing up, wrapping his entire ear in stiff white bandaging. The world went muffled. Rainy reached up to tentatively squeeze. An inch-long chunk of the outer helix had been ripped away, along with a ragged piece of the flat cartilage that made up the upper part of the ear.
“It’s like someone took a bite out of me.”
Nasrin snorted. “Maybe a baby.”
She dropped to the bleach-scented concrete, rolling her swollen ankles. When he’d shown up in the deathly hours of the morning, ear in hand, she’d pulled on over her pajamas the white smock and sheer pink hijab that she always reserved for “backdoor calls.” Somehow, her current state of unwieldy rotundness did nothing to lessen the effect of her glare.
“Are you sure you don’t need the other piece?” Rainy asked, looking forlornly at the severed bit of ear lying next to a jar of cotton swabs.
“No point. Keep changing the bandages, don’t get it wet. The skin will grow back fast.”
“How soon will the rest of the ear grow back?”
“The cartilage won’t grow back. It’s cartilage.”
Rainy gaped. “You mean my ear is going to look like this forever?”
“If you want to go throw money at a reconstructive surgeon for a graft, be my guest. I’m going back to sleep before my daughter decides to use my spleen as a punching bag again and Felix wakes up crying about how Andy Parish is all over him.”
“How serious is this Parish situation, really?”
Nasrin sighed. “Serious enough that my husband won’t shut up about it. Lina says that he has us way outmatched in the legal department, and if she can’t organize to fight it just right, he could peel away some of our dockfront. He’s never been this hostile before. It must be related to Seong moving to town. That’s all I’m saying; I’m tired of hearing about it. I’ll be writing up a bill, by the way. Go freelance, no free backdoor calls.”
“If I’d known you were just going to stick a Band-Aid on it, I wouldn’t have bothered.”
Nasrin leveled a warning finger at him, thick eyebrows raised. Rainy lifted his hands in surrender.
“Okay, Jesus. Coming right up.”
“Good. Now get out of my garage.”
Rainy forked over one of the hundreds he’d taken from Adler’s wallet and walked back out to his car. The dawn was just over the horizon, and the stars behind the boxy skyline of the city were being washed out in the pale gray spreading up from the direction of the Atlantic. Rainy sat in the driver’s seat, resting his forehead against the wheel, until the street lamp overhead clicked off. His ear throbbed like someone was driving a hot spike into it. Like the bullet was ripping through again and again. It was a push pin stuck through his head to hold a reminder in place.
Adler had ruined his ear. Actually, honest-to-God mutilated him. He’d threatened the only thing in Rainy’s world that really mattered, then given him the most mind-blowing sex of his life, and then mutilated him just for the hell of it. No, not for the hell of it—to remind him that he was serious when he told Rainy he’d kill him later. Because Rainy had forgotten. The pain was a blessing in disguise, because each time it washed over him in a fresh, copper-flavored wave, it made everything crystal clear.
This wasn’t a game anymore. Not for Rainy. Adler might have been jerking him around just for the fun of toying with his food, but Rainy was done playing. This was kill or be killed.
He drove south, moving through the sparse early-morning streets of Coconut Grove, which had the air of a ghost town. Punnet Street was quiet, a painting of an idyllic palm-shaded neighborhood before the occupants were penciled in. He parked on the curb, hands white on the steering wheel. Despite the fact that he’d washed them at Nasrin’s, his knuckles were still stained pink with his own blood.
It occurred to him then to look down at himself. He looked fucking terrible. His shirt was rumpled, buttoned wrong, and covered in bloody handprints. He was wearing one sock and his hair was a warzone. There was a smear of crusty white fingerprints on the waistband of his jeans that he was ninety percent sure was dried semen.
Sighing, he released his seatbelt and crawled into his tiny back seat, where he kept a duffel bag with an emergency change of clothes for just this reason. He exchanged his shirt and pants for a clean set, then crammed a baseball cap on, backwards, to hide the blood in his hair.
Feeling both clean and filthier than ever, he got out of the car to climb the steps.
The chime of the doorbell echoed distantly, and a minute later his father was at the door.
“Rafa?” he grumbled, squinting. “What are you doing here?”
Underneath the years of home cooking he’d put on, José Perez was still built like a steam engine. There were patches of black remaining in his hair, though the silver was quickly rising to swallow them. He’d grown his beard out since the last time Rainy had seen him.
“Hi, Pa. Can I come in?”
His father shrugged and stepped aside. Rainy cast one final glance around the empty street before ducking through the door.
The house that he’d bought his parents was always warm and a little stuffy with his mother’s cheap incense. Their living room was cluttered, the couch smothered in blankets and one wall almost entirely covered by the collection of glazed ceramic crosses his mother had made over her years of pottery classes. They started from the top left corner and showed a marked progression in terms of symmetry and non-headache-inducing paint jobs. The shelf over the couch was lined with years and years of Rainy’s old football trophies. In the center of the wall, like some kind of weird shrine, was the chalkboard chore chart his mother had made about twenty years ago, never gotten anyone to follow, and refused to get rid of. In the middle of the chart, just above Rafa, Miguel was written in faded blue chalk. Rainy swallowed roughly.
He hated this place.
“Is something going on?” his father asked. “You look fucking terrible.”
“I’m fine,” Rainy said. “Look—”
“ Mijo, is that you?” His mother was coming down the stairs in her plaid pajamas, a thin red line from her breathing mask around her nose and mouth. She was a tiny, round woman with wide-set gray eyes that only Miguel had inherited. “What happened to your ear?”
“Hi, Mami. Accident at work. Actually, do you have some Tylenol I can borrow?”
“Yes, of course.” She bundled into the downstairs bathroom. Rainy turned back to his father.
“Did anything happen here tonight?”
His father narrowed his eyes. “Your mother made cookies for the Kaufmans and I watched my shows. We went to bed. Was there something you were expecting to happen?”
“No, that’s good. Listen: has anyone come around here asking questions in the past week?”
“I don’t think so,” his mother said, returning with a bottle of pills. Rainy tapped two into his palm and swallowed them dry. “I think I would have remembered something like that.”
His father’s voice was cold. “Why would someone have come around?”
“I—” Rainy swallowed. “I got into some trouble at work. I need you to be very careful for the next week or two. Don’t talk to strangers, don’t go out after dark. I’m going to have some friends hang around the neighborhood, just to keep an eye on things.”
“You can’t really have such a bad client?” his mother asked docilely, but his father looked livid.
“What have you done this time? What did I fucking tell you?”
Rainy sucked in a deep breath through his nose. He really didn’t have the patience right now. “It won’t be a problem. I’m handling it. Just, if you see any Espinosas near the house—”
“ Espinosas, ” his father ground out. “I don’t want your friends here at all, Rafael. I don’t want you dragging your bad decisions back here, just like I didn’t want your fucking charity—”
The last clinging thread of Rainy’s temper snapped. “But you needed it! And you need me now. You don’t get to sit here, where I put you, and spit down on me.”
“What I need is for my son to get an honest, decent job and stop running around like a thug, before I have no sons left!”
“No fighting!” his mother shouted. “No fighting in my house, and no using that language. Rafa is a good boy. I’m sure he’ll get whatever this is sorted out.” She smoothed her hair compulsively. “Now, how about I make us all some hot chocolate?”
“No thanks, Mami, ” Rainy sighed, adjusting his baseball cap. He couldn’t manage to look his father in the eye.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to look at that ear?” she asked. “It looks bad.”
“I already went to the doctor. It’s okay.”
“What happened? I can’t see some skinny little singer doing that to you.”
“He got shot,” his father said flatly.
“José, don’t—”
“Oh, discúlpeme, I didn’t realize it was a pretending night.”
“I lied, actually,” Rainy cut in. “It was a bad date.”
His mother smoothed her hair again. “Now, that’s where you’re not a good boy. You’ll be thirty soon; don’t you think it’s time to stop messing around and find a nice girl?”
“Or boy, Esperanza,” his father corrected impatiently. “He likes both.”
“Well, of course I remember that. But don’t you want to give us grandbabies with the Gonzales eyes, mijo? And if you want to get married in the Church. You know, there’s this sweet girl in my classes, pretty white Catholic girl named Amy…”
“No thanks, Mami. ” Begrudgingly, Rainy whispered to his father, “Thanks.”
“Shut up. We’re still fighting.”
“Why don’t you stay for breakfast?” his mother insisted, eager to keep changing the subject.
“Sorry—I need to get back to work.” That was partly true, considering he had a big mess in the multipurpose room that he needed to clean up before Malia got in. But, mostly, it was the fact that he couldn’t spend more than an hour in this house without wanting to crawl out of his skin.
“Well, before you go, we need to talk about Thanksgiving.”
“Thanksgiving can wait,” his father said. “He might not even be alive by then.”
“ José! ”
The Tylenol had lessened the throbbing pain in his ear a little, but there was a tension headache building behind his eyes now. “I’ll just go.”
“Wait!” she exclaimed. “I have something to give you. Wait here.” Then she scampered away up the stairs. Rainy sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“I’m not fighting you on this,” he said. “The Espinosas are going to look after you until I get this sorted out, and then my coworker is going to bury the leads between us deep enough that this doesn’t happen again.”
“Oh, that’s lovely! My son, who has to hide his real name and his parents his whole life. That’s what I always wanted!”
“ Pa. ”
His father’s face was flushed with the righteous fury that Rainy had never quite seen even the fieriest preachers be able to match.
“I worked my whole life at a real job. I may not have been able to give you much, but what I did give you didn’t come at the expense of anyone else. We came here to give you a better life, and look at what you’ve done with it. You think I couldn’t have gone down that road? I never wanted this for my family. I never wanted this for your soul.”
“ Pa. ”
His father was gripping him by the shoulders now. His hands were strong with years of hard labor, broad and dense the way Rainy had inherited. His eyes were dark with grief.
“You promised me, mijo. You promised me, when you started going down this path, that I wouldn’t have to bury another son.”
“And you won’t.” Rainy removed his father’s hands gently. “You won’t.”
His mother stopped at the top of the stairs, taking in the scene—Rainy gripping his father’s hands, their bodies tight with tension. They stepped apart.
“Here we go. We’re working with photography right now in Delia’s class,” she said cheerfully. “I made us a whole set, but I want you to have this one for your place.”
She handed Rainy a small ceramic dish, sleek with crimped edges. It was dark blue and green, painted in a marbled pattern. In the center of the dish, cut into a circle and preserved flush under the glaze somehow, was a picture. Two grinning, summer-browned boys standing in front of a lookout point sign against a canyon of fall-patterned foliage, arms slung around each other. Rainy and Miguel in the Appalachians, ages nine and twelve. He felt the quiet in him slide, roll off a shelf, and fall into the depths. As always, he waited for the crash that never came.
“It’s nice. Thank you.”
“I have more, if you want.”
“Uh, no thanks,” he said quickly. “This one would be special.” He cleared his throat and tucked the bowl, roughly the size of his palm, into his back pocket. “I really do need to get back to work. I’ll call you about Thanksgiving, okay?”
His mother wrapped him in a hug that didn’t do anything good for his bruised ribs. Over the top of her head, Rainy’s father leaned in the doorway to the kitchen, tense. Rainy attempted to meet his eyes, then let his gaze slide to the floor when he found in them what he’d been dreading.
Nine years was a long time, but not long enough to wash away the memory of the way his father had once looked at him as he jogged off the field, young and flushed with victory. He’d clapped Rainy—Rafa—on the back and laughed, and his eyes had shone with pride.
If you’d asked Rainy when he was that age, eighteen and immortal, he would have laughed at the idea that emotions had physical dimensions. But today, if you’d blindfolded him and placed in the palm of his hand the expression his father wore now, he would have guessed it right away, so familiar was he with the weight of disappointment.
After dodging a last-ditch attempt to dump some leftovers on him, he finally made it out the door and down the steps. Back at the car, he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Remembered how Adler had blown smoke out of his nose the same way, and stopped.
The little house looked so obvious and defenseless. It was all too easy to imagine it crumbling to dust before his eyes. The basil in the upstairs planter box was starting to wilt.
It was one thing for Adler to slash Rainy’s tires, even damage his ear. But if he laid a single finger on Rainy’s parents, Rainy would eviscerate him. This wasn’t funny, or flirty, or playful anymore. Adler had a bullet in Rainy’s ear and a knife pressed against his blind spot. Rainy found the memories of the previous night—how amazing it had felt to be inside him, how frightened he’d looked when the water came down, how he’d pressed his cheek to Rainy’s face at the word sweetheart —and shoved them down, hard.
Sex was just that. It had been good sex—brain-meltingly good, actually—but, in the end, that was all it was. Clearly, Adler had no problem making the distinction. Rainy wouldn’t either.
Sex and blood. What the world turned on. Well, this game had run its course.
It was time for blood.
When Rainy dropped into the driver’s seat, something jabbed him in the tailbone. He pulled out the little ceramic bowl, gleaming in the early dawn light, and placed it on the passenger seat. The two boys in the photo smiled up at him, remnants of a time long past. Rainy was struck by the feeling, heavy and sure as a hammer to the head, that both of the boys in that picture were dead.
Before he pulled onto the street, he tossed his jacket down onto the seat to cover their faces.