Shelter

birthday blues crime noir

Reaching under the Christmas tree for his gift, Victor pulls out a little packet in gold reflective wrapping with a simple yet bold red ribbon bow. A creamy vellum label bears his name in cursive sharpie with a little black doodleheart.

Trey perches on the velour cream sofa looking on, all smiles, eyes wide and hands poised just apart in suspended applause

But it’s not Christmas. There’s a family tradition that on Victor’s birthday, June 25th, the Christmas tree is deployed for “Half-Christmas” and his birthday presents are laid there as if by some midsummer Santa. The result of a throwaway remark Victor made over thirty years ago which, taken up as a piece of delightful whimsy by Trey and incorporated into their domestic life, is at once a savage delight to Trey and a source of ongoing bowel-stirring disgruntlement to Victor.

“Wait, wait!” says Trey, giving a single clap as a call for attention but otherwise leaving further applause in abeyance. He shimmies his bulk over to the other end of the sofa, swells of his belly swoshing in tidal consonance beneath his Rudolf sweater, and picks up his iPhone.

“There!” he says. “We gotta let Tracey in on the action!” He dials just as the ambient music switches from Maria Carey to George Michael.

Morning sun breaks in on the room like judgement. Rays starting low, glistering on the tree-tinsel, outclassing the lights. Soon the sunbeams will incide on the whole room and the Yuletide morning setup will be revealed as an imposture, a Potemkin psyop. This is what Victor fears and abhors; this is what Trey welcomes from the shallows of his kitsch multibypassed heart.

“Hi Dads!” says Tracey on video. She’s deployed overseas in some place that sounds Spanish but really is British but really is American: Diego Garcia. An atoll in the nowhere-swept vastness of the Indian Ocean.

“Hi Dad!” she says to Victor, “Happy birthday to you this Half-Christmas!” Something forced in her smile. She’s looking tanned in army tanktop and fatigue pants, short buzzed blond hair, seated at a console.

“Thanks honey!” says Victor, attempting cheer. “I guess it’s presents-time.”

So Tracey, empalmed now in Trey’s right hand, watches on as Victor unwraps his Half-Christmas gift. George Michael muted, Trey and Tracey both sing in unison:

Happy Christmas to you
Happy Christmas to you
Happy Christmas dear Victor
Happy Christmas to you

The gift: it’s the Criterion ‘Hitmen Boxed Set’: Le Samouraï by Jean-Pierre Melville, Day of the Jackal by Fred Zinneman, Leon the Professional by Luc Besson, Ghost Dog by Jim Jarmusch, and The Killer by David Fincher.

Not sure why Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly wasn’t included, thinks Victor. Two nice performances there, Pitt/Gandolfini. Cool atmosphere, cool action. You could leave out Ghost Dog, downgrade it as a fey postmodern take on worn-out tropes, and swap in Dominik’s taut thriller.

“It’s wonderful!” he smiles.

“I got you something too! Take another look under the tree!” says Tracey.

A smaller more discreet package, wrapped in black matte paper and a tightly-drawn dark grey cross-binding ribbon, tough to break. Victor risks his teeth.

HITMAN De Luxe Edition for Xbox

Free Xbox seasonpass included! says the sticker.

“Dad suggested it for you!” says Tracey, beaming, her freckled broad face showing her gleaming white dentalwork. No beauty, but good enough, thinks Victor. Good enough for what? he asks himself but doesn’t answer. Tracey leans in: “I asked him what’s a good game you don’t have and might like, and that’s what he said!”

“It’s wonderful!” he smiles. “Gotta dust off the Xbox and play it.”

“Kind of a themed set of gifts!” says Tracey, giggling. She looks over her shoulder. “I... uh... I gotta go, dad. Something’s come up. Happy Christmas, birthday boy!”

And she’s gone.

George Michael is back on. Last Christmas I gave you my heart. Victor looks down at the two gifts and registers the message.

“You callous fuck,” he growls low to Trey. “Won’t work though. They’re not real.”

“You’re gonna die, you two-timing asshole,” says Trey, tone just as even. His smile is unchangeable.

Balding, pudgy, content and murderous on his couch, in his Rudolf festive sweater he’s a midsummer Christmas monument to hatred.

============

This is Victor Blum’s opinion: at any given moment within all this far-stretching bump-and-grind that we call the world, there may be a hundred thousand rackets, scams, and ponzi schemes all in simultaneous operation. Some guy who’s susceptible to righting wrongs, one prone to fancying himself the vigilante do-gooder, could spend whole lifetimes Ahabbing round the globe seeking to push his righteous harpoon into the heart of all that villanous duplicity.

A definite opinion. It’s been spelled out to his followers on Twitter, his followers on Facebook, acquaintances in the neighborhood, and each and every employee of his at the Belnap Beach Dog Rescue Center. What need is there to crusade after scammers? Let them scam, let those other suckers get drawn in. It can’t affect me none, so let it ride.

But now Victor Blum is compelled to look at it another way. Now it’s his money that’s been scammed, converted to crypto and pissed away on some Darkweb Craigslist, and all in order that his dumb-as-fuck partner can hire some fake contract killer to murder him.

“Hitmen don’t really exist. They’re a movie thing, a crime-story thing. When have you ever heard of an actual contract killer actually really killing someone in the real actual world?”

So he’s telling his personal trainer Milo at the Hi-Muscle Workout Center, minus the bit about the involvement of Trey in the scam, the bit where his own money is used to supposedly kill him.

“Yah very true,” says Milo while chewing gum, eyes strayed elsewhere. “Careful to keep your legs bent on the shoulder press.”

Victor Blum is fighting all the time, not just against notional scammers, but against the onset of late-middle-aged flab. Today, the day of his sixty-second birthday, it might just as well be termed senior flab. Fighting the strain of thirty-five pounds on his shoulders for forty reps, fighting ignorance and complacency, an Ahab of informed opinion.

“Yah, keep focussed on the set,” says Milo, sneaking a glance down into his cellphone.

“But you know what I’m talking about?” says Victor. “They advertise on the darkweb, on weird little forums where perverts hang out, even over on Craigslist with all kinda crytpid references. ‘I’ll take out your trash. I’ll paint your walls’. Movie terminology. Bullshit.”

“Yah, coming up for thirty reps,” says Milo.

“Just a scam. Wiseguys, yeah, wiseguys, they have people. Special people they can call on. Those spooks and shit, the what-have-you, the deep state, they got people. But people-people? Regular joe-schmos? Can’t do it.”

“And forty. Rest.”

“There’s no way... no, no way,” puffs out Victor. He catches a glance at himself in the gym wallmirror and quickly looks away. Where Trey is filling into himself, cute as a button in his Rudolf sweater and huggable like a big teddybear, Victor... well, Victor is a fuckin’ mess.

In his old green Celtics tanktop, too tight, stained now in wet dark sweat, showing off the shame of desuetude and age. Bloat all up on those oldman saggy dugs and grotesque belly, a generous mass of flesh, sure, but scraggy hanging looseness all elsewhere: spindly arms, atrophied thighs, neck wattles, shoulders frail like porcelain dolls.

Worst of all, barely seen in this snatched sideglance, the blown-out eyes, twin Stalingrads in the bombed out waste of Victor’s face, those red-veined horrors telling of torment and unhealth. It’s getting so he combs his transplanted hair by focussing strictly on the crown of the head, never letting the gaze stray south into that danger zone.

“No way, no way...” he repeats, struggling now against a tightness across the chest and a searing in the pharynx. His hand darts to his sternum as if to clutch something not there.

“Rest means no talking, Vic,” says Milo, picking his nose. “Just rest. Forty reps on the rowing machine up next. Two minutes.”

Gritted yellow teeth: “Just no fuckin’ way.”

============

Today would not be Victor’s happy Half-Christmas at work either. Word was passed to him mid-morning that the Dog Rescue Center would be consumed in conflagration, the little pups burnt all up.

“Sad, but it is what it is.”

“What the fuck you tellin’ me, Ursula?”

Ursula is the latest thing in mob enforcement. Big Lou’s crew needed someone who was forceful yet not brutal. And Big Lou, who was a traditionalist in so many respects, was keen to be seen to move with the times in this instance. Hence, Ursula, the cougar mob enforcer.

Ursula is fifty-something, dressed sharp in a gray pinstriped business suit, gold jewelry, heels. To all intents and purposes she is what they call a MILF, thinks Victor. Hot, well-built, sophisticated, elegant like a realtor. She always visits alone, which in itself shows cojones. Before her, Big Lou’s heavy boys always showed up in pairs.

“Victor, Victor, you know me, you know Lou,” states Ursula in her rich furry tones. “You know it’s all on the up-and-up.”

“But burn down my Center. What...?”

“It’s rough, but we need to do it. What it is. Quarterlies, adjustments, assets, policies. It would be boring. Just accept.”

“But the pups...?”

“Will be valued as pedigree breeders on the claim. If you want, swap out the ones you like for some ugly-ass strays. All we need are a bunch of charred bodies.”

Victor reaches into his desk drawer for the whiskey bottle. He remembers his manners and offers the fifth to Ursula, nodding at his BEST DAD WORLDWIDE coffeemug on the desk. She declines with a delicate gesture of thanks, a tasteful waveaway.

Victor takes a slug of his top-shelf booze straight from the neck, no mug. Vile, bitter, warm, comforting. The taste of humiliation. The taste of himself.

“But Ursula... you and I?”

She smiles warmly. “Victor, what you and I?”

“Our... thing. Six months ago.”

“That was not in any way a thing,” she says, straightening in her chair. Polite, measured, stern. “It was a non-thing. Too many whiskeys, Christmas Party, you thought momentarily you were hetero-man Vic. Turns out, you’re very much not a hetero-man.”

“Trey found out about it,” says Victor. “He found about you and me.”

“Vic, baby, there was no you and me. You tried something, that something didn’t work, at which point it ceased to be a thing. Don’t sweat it.”

Flash of that body of his in the gym mirror. Sweat pooled under the protruding breasts, welling in the hollow above the roundness of the belly. Those eyes... Did she see all that in the bathroom of the WaysAway Club? A swig more of his shame, hot and peaty, warm.

“But Ursula, he found out... Trey... says I’m a two-timing fuck... says he’s gonna...”

Flash to those eyes, the web of blood vessels, blue shot all to hell, the dark dark black of nothing pupils, the nothing. Tears squirt now across his right hand, holding the whiskey bottle up to his mouth. Taste of bitterness.

“Gonna what, Vic?”

“Gonna hire... has hired...” sobbing hard now, “... hire a hitman to take me out.”

“Oh, Victor,” voice vibing low with sympathy, and you can see why Big Lou chose her. That savoir-faire, her wide range of options, menace-to-consolation, that versatility. “Oh Vic, normies can’t hire a hitman. Silly. You’d have to know somebody. Somebody like me.”

Pouring one more. Flash to his eye in the bottom of the bottle, where the amber liquid thins to clear and the red web stares back out.

============

Days pass, a week. Then:

He dreamed of being an outcast, an exile on streets of grit, searching in torn pockets for ID that wasn’t there, for credit cards that aren’t there, downspiralling, downspiralling, and he wakes on the stale single bed in the guest room at 3.00AM or something.

Victor knows this is the last day of all days, the day when all the things that are circling out there come home, but his head is full of fogged inconsequence. He rises slow and creaky out of that bed and prowls the landing, past where Trey sleeps in the Master Bedroom, down the stairs to the kitchen for a drink or something.

He wonders why in the week since his birthday Trey hasn’t just kicked him out, why he never tried to reconcile with Trey either, never established that it was just a silly passing thing he tried that didn’t work.

Trey believes it’s a sacred responsibility not to break up the family, unfaithfulness is sin, the only true sin he said. If they split, they’ve failed, the family is broken forever. But if Trey punishes him with a contracted death, then the family remains together and it will be like there’s nothing really wrong, nothing at all. Penance and payment. Bills come due and are settled.

The scorch smell hits him now from the dream. He knows now what’s gonna happen tonight. He picks up the Four Roses and heads out to the garage, pajama’d in his macaroon leather slippers, thinning hair tousled and greasy. There’s a Glock 19 in the glove box, compact, next to his driving glasses.

============

On the drive over to the Belnap Beach Dog Rescue Center Victor consumes half of the fifth of Four Roses and rummages in the glove box for the Glock. He spurts through red-and-ambering lights with a mind half on a cancellation of outcomes, but there’s nobody here on the streets, nobody, not even some cop with the will to annul Victor’s perplexity for him with a swift and terminal exchange of fire.

There’s a driving-seat blip through his memories: acquiring the Rescue Center as a write-off for the mob, Big Lou dominant in the consortium, eager to flush money through the pups, a good loss investment twenty years ago, straydog rescues trending high, favors taken and gained, all so kosher and so so comfortable.

Then a certain sourness ebbed into the arrangment. Hard to pin down, coinciding as it did with the more constant disgruntlement of middle-aged anomie, of the unlovely spread of Trey’s gut, the discordancy of Tracey’s adolescence and her fluctuating rages at all that was gay and then at all that was straight. Big Lou not so happy laundering cash through the dogs anymore, limits reached, looking elsewhere for conduits: crypto, memestocks, superpacs, freeports.

And the thing that was to happen this night. The puppies all burned up in their pens. Kerosene as an accelerant and zippo cremation, howlings from the deepest pits of hell.

There’s a guy they use for this kind of work: Mr Lonelybuns. Some Irishman, a pyromaniac, resolute and pitiless, from Connemara so they say. Call on this most unstoppable of firebugs for insurance scams and fire shakedowns. Lawrence or something. Lawrence Lonelybuns from Connemara, a name so much more poetic than the reality. Victor’s met him: mulleted, tripey, shell-suited, smelling of complex solvents and atrocious intent expressed in cryptic pheromones. Devilish in the most scorched pitch-black sense of the word, thinks Victor. No happy rapscallion but a heinous thing of rot and sulfur.

There he is now, standing on the desolate industrial street outside the Rescue Center.

Now screeching locking brakes now shouldering out of the car now raising the pistol to shoulder height not even aiming he fires once again again again. Mr Lonelybuns, who’s sloshing a jerrycan of kerosene against the unit with the dogs yelping and barking inside, torques sideways and appears hit but won’t quit won’t stop he turns and kneel-walks towards Victor still holding the can which jerks and sploshes and he’s growling motherfucker gonna kill ye so I am he’s nearing Victor across the blacktop knees abraded and bloody, blood too leaking from under the tracksuit top he’s hit but he won’t fucking quit and now Victor remembers there’s more rounds in the clip or do you say mag and shoots again again.

Mr Lonelybuns plops tired down onto greasy pavement and crawls, growling, moving slow and Victor senses retribution building within himself and reaches with his left into his overcoat thrown over the pajamas and finds that plastic disposable lighter and softpack of Lucky Strikes only three left and he puts the gun in his right pocket and lights a cigarette as Lonelybuns unstoppable Irishman mutters underbreath and crawls bleeding up toward where he stands, and Victor leans forward and lights him up with his lighter.

There’s not a sudden whoosh but a lambent growing flame. A flicker like a crème brulée in a fancy restaurant blue at first and then orange and yellow, and not a scream but a muted gurgled cursing in guttural tongue from the man as first his blond-gray mullet catches, then the polyester blue crackles of his tracksuit, melting slick drips, he continues miraculously crawling forward, and Victor goes back toward the car, thinking first to fetch the Four Roses and empty the bottle on him but on second thought getting back in to drive away as the Irishman crawls on and along, an inching torch of resolve on the asphalt shining.

============

Having done all this, having made it back home alive, Victor makes the decision never to go back again to the Dog Rescue Center no matter what, checking the clip and loading up pop-click-pop as the gray dawn approaches and the last of the Four Roses he takes in his mouth, grateful for the decision not to waste it on the final scorching of Mr Lonelybuns. He sloshes it round like mouthwash, savoring sourmash burn, then yanks open the driver door and onto the driveway vomits that whiskey and a full load of anxious heavy bile all over all across. And then lights the Lucky Strike the last Lucky Strike and gasps the smooth soothing smoke into the retching and hiccupping moment of utter calming peace that falls.

For Victor at this time has achieved this strange serenity, knowing or at least suspecting that the puppies will be alright no matter what else. That his action in its absoluteness could not have been in vain. God, and this is actually the first time in a long time he’s considered God in any way, God would not permit such an unthinkable action to be wasted, that the conflagration of such a hideous person as the Irishman could amount to nothing at all. Something has to come from that, thinks Victor. A redeemable.

There’s a stirring in the house, curtains twitch apart, and Trey’s face appears at the window looking out at him in the driveway. Then gone.

Could there be a reconciliation now?

Victor thinks there could be. In the same way that puppies go unburnt, so these stray errors of our lives might find forgiveness. He’ll finish his Lucky Strike in the car then go in and make everything alright with Trey. Maybe they’ll both watch Alain Delon in Le Samouraï. They met at college film club and bonded over Delon in Plein Soleil, so alive and youthful. It could be that way again.

But now the front door opens and it’s not Trey. It’s Tracey, somehow, unexpected in the here and now of morning. Black bomber jacket and aviator shades as the first pink light of dawn emerges out over the Atlantic and the gulls cry out in expectation of the day and the day’s catch. Blond military buzzcut, tan, looking so... little girl all grown up. Victor starts to bawl but fusses himself back into normalcy by stubbing out the Lucky.

She steps up to the car, noting the puddle of whiskey and bile on the driveway. Stands clear of it, looks over.

“How you doing, Dad?”

She leans in to the driver window, obliging him to lower the glass. Hard eyes, hazel and hard.

“Not so great, frankly,” he snuffles. She sniffs tobacco, vomit, whiskey, smoulder. Nods once.

“What’s that in your lap? A gun?”

“Yeah, I was just... uh, cleaning it.” The lie rings pathetic and hollow and it lays there flat and discarded.

“How about you give it to me, huh?” She reaches a hand. A working man’s hand: tough, calloused.

“Uh, sure.”

She pushes it into her waistband, strides round the front of the car, and slides into the passenger seat.

“Let’s go for a drive, Dad.”

“But I had a drink, a couple drinks, and...”

“You’ll be alright. Just a quick run to the ocean, we’ll watch the sun come up. You and I gotta have a talk. To figure something out: you, Dad Trey, the family.”

As the car crawls away up their suburban street, he catches sight in the rearview of Trey walking out of the garage with the hose, spraying away that puddle of vomit on the driveway.

============

Still nobody on the road this predawn hour with the western sky bruise-blue and the eastern reaches out above the sea flushing an emboldening pink, scattered clouds orange-lined precursors to the coming sun.

Tracey took an earlier flight than expected when her deployment ended, some kind of delay, details not important. Here now, and from what she could tell, it wasn’t a moment too soon.

Victor didn’t follow her talk too close. He was focussing on the road and on the nausea that tided up and down through belly and heart. Barfing so voluminously on the drive should have put paid to that, he thought, but no.

He was also fatigued, dragged like a slow bell to a heavy toll that gonged out slow as oceans. Microblinks became microdreams of the Irishman’s hair flaring blue as gas then red-orange on the pavement as dogs howled inside.

“...and so that’s why Dad Trey told me all about how you betrayed us, betrayed our family.”

He pulled up to the patch of open ground next to the beach as he clicked back into what Tracey was saying.

“You are such a scumbag making my father suffer like that. How could you do it, Dad? It’s just like all those other times, all those times you let us down...”

The gulls bucked and bounced in brash seagusts like kids riding swings. He thought of her with her cowboy hat and her little gun seesawing on the backyard plank he’d set while he swigged a sour mouthful of Jim Beam. That seemed like far in the past; everything seemed like the past.

“See, I done this before, this kind of work. It’s what they trained me for in the service. I’m ready for this, you know.”

Sunfire crowned the far horizon over the shimmer of ocean waves, a fringe of it, then a bright shell, then a light that scorched the eyes with clarity. Weeping eyes. Couldn’t see but only water.

He felt something squeezed into his right hand, hard and metallic, familiar now, her strong grip pulling his small fist within her fist. Bending his arm up towards his head sobbing, feeling the touch on his temple, the strong loving finger held upon his trigger finger.

“There’s no such thing...” he started to say, but was not able to finish the thought.

==== SHELTER // END ====

Thanks to Emil Ottoman for suggestions, feedback, and hints about workout reps and the ideal automatic weapon for a middle-aged schlub to wield.