Pistol Poets Read online

  “No.”

  “No? What do you fucking mean no?”

  “I have to…” Think, Jay. “I have a function on campus. I was honestly just walking out the door.”

  “Oh, bullshit. I’m coming over there right now.”

  “Uh…”

  “I’ll see you in a few minutes.” He hung up.

  Morgan flew for the door, grabbed keys, jerked his coat off the back of a chair.

  Outside, the rain still fell but only gently. Halfway to his car Morgan noticed he was still wearing slippers, water soaking through cold. He thought about going back for shoes. Screw it.

  He jumped in his car, cranked it.

  Fled.

  Ginny drove home.

  She felt confident she could make Morgan want her, could manipulate him with the right combination of tears and sex. Men were insecure, horny, ego-driven apes. Control the dick and you control the man. The tears pressed the guilt buttons.

  Of course, too many tears at the wrong time could send a guy running. Owning a man was a delicate business.

  She thumbed a Nine Inch Nails tape into her cassette player, pounded the steering wheel in time with the driving rhythm. She squirmed in the seat, wet clothes uncomfortable.

  Maybe Morgan had hit a dry spell. His writing output had evidently slowed to nothing. Maybe the professor was all out of inspiration. But Ginny could fix that too. Like that woman who inspired Pollock in the Ed Harris movie.

  Ginny rubbed lightly between her legs. Sore. Morgan had pounded her good. A slight tingle.

  She hurried home, wanted to flip on her computer. She felt like writing.

  nine

  Harold Jenks discovered the graduate dorms were full and were going to stay that way. They wouldn’t kick anybody out just so he could move in. Jenks had thrown a shit fit.

  The deputy director of student housing showed up to hush him, and Jenks called the man a racist. When the director of student housing and the vice president of student affairs showed up, he’d called them racists too.

  They finally agreed to find him housing off campus and to foot the bill. At first, they’d assigned Jenks an unfurnished apartment five miles from campus. Jenks had loudly pointed out he had no furniture and no car, so they located a furnished studio four blocks from campus. The vice president had even called security to come drive Jenks to his new digs.

  Looking around his new place, Jenks nodded and smiled big. These dumb rednecks were fucking pushovers. He threw his duffel on the bed. He shoved Red Zach’s gym bag underneath. He went to the room’s only window, leaned on the sill, and looked at the wet street below. The studio was warm and comfortable, over a garage in a quiet residential neighborhood.

  Stealing Sherman Ellis’s life was going even more smoothly than Jenks had planned.

  Jenks had a rap sheet of minor crimes as long as his arm. That sort of reputation dogged a man, pulled his life down into the mud. Jenks had tried to right himself once, get out of the ghetto life of poverty and petty crime. But he found all doors closed to him. No one believed a thug would reform. Nobody wanted an employee you couldn’t turn your back on.

  So Harold Jenks decided he would simply cease to be Harold Jenks. Sherman Ellis had no family and no record. Jenks would drape himself in Ellis’s innocence, wrap himself in Ellis’s accomplishments, a cloak of safety and legitimacy.

  There’d be problems, of course. He’d need to stay clean. If he got picked up even for jaywalking the whole scam would be shot to shit. He couldn’t let himself be fingerprinted. He’d already vowed never to return to East St. Louis. Too many people knew him there.

  But what worried him most were the classes, the teachers. Worried? Hell, he was terrified. Jenks knew he was smart. You had to be to survive on the streets. But he was smart enough to know the difference between intelligence and education. Jenks had barely made it out of high school.

  But poetry? Shit, how hard could that be?

  He pulled an N.W.A. CD out of his duffel and a Walkman. He thumbed the PLAY button and slipped on the headphones, bobbing his head with the rap music and slapping his thigh to the beat. But this time he really listened, took note how the rapper bit off the words. Jenks mouthed the syllables, moved his mouth over the vowel sounds. Yeah, this was his kind of poetry. He could do this, no problem.

  And they’d give him a college degree for it? White people were crazy.

  He shut off the Walkman, dropped it on the bed. He’d study more later. Right now he had more immediate problems.

  He took his rapidly shrinking roll of cash from his jeans pocket, counted the wrinkled bills. Jenks had exactly sixty-one dollars to his name, and that wasn’t going to do it. The minifridge was empty, and he strongly suspected he was going to need books and other supplies. Pencils and shit, notebooks.

  He counted it again. Still sixty-one bucks. He checked his other pockets. Nothing.

  And he hadn’t set up the deal yet to move Red Zach’s coke. Once he did that he’d be set for a while, but that wasn’t helping him now. Jenks needed operating capital. Going straight would need to be put on hold just a little longer.

  Okay. He knew what to do.

  He stripped out of his clothes. His body was lean, hard, three knife scars about an inch long across his belly. He pulled a pair of plain black sweatpants out of his duffel and stepped into them. He put on the matching sweatshirt. Then the black knit ski mask. He rolled the mask up above his eyes until it just looked like a watch cap.

  The Glock would be a problem. A nice bit of heat, 9mm. He checked the clip. It was full, so he smacked it into the pistol. Jenks liked the metallic click when the clip snapped into place.

  But it wouldn’t stay in the elastic band of the sweats. He took a half-used roll of duct tape from the duffel, ripped off a piece. He used it to tape the Glock across the small of his back. He danced around a little, hopped twice, shook his ass, but the Glock stayed put. Good.

  Jenks looked at his watch. Shit. It was too early. He pulled the gun off his back and dropped it on the bed next to the Walkman.

  The little twenty-four-hour convenience store he’d spotted three blocks away might still be busy, students filling up on RC Colas and MoonPies. He’d wait.

  The convenience store was not the perfect target. It was too close to where he lived, but he didn’t have a ride and you can’t take a taxi to a holdup.

  Also, it might not be much of a score. Last time he’d done a Quickie-Mart, he made off with only twenty-three dollars and a fistful of SlimJims.

  But Jenks had to have some cash.

  No matter how much Jenks had screamed and ranted and called everyone within earshot a racist, the lady at the financial aid office insisted that stipend checks were only-ONLY-disbursed on the last day of the month.

  About two in the morning, Jenks figured it was time.

  He taped the gun to his back again, and made sure nobody was watching when he left the garage apartment. Once, on his way to the convenience store, a set of headlights scared him into a row of low hedges.

  At the convenience store, he watched through the window for ten minutes, nerving himself up and making sure the old guy behind the register was alone.

  Then he pulled the Glock and went in fast.

  The old man turned big eyes on Jenks in slow motion, mouth dropping open, blood draining from his face.

  I can’t kill this guy, Jenks thought. Black man kill a white dude in this dumbshit, redneck town and they’ll level the place looking for him. Too many of these convenience stores had hidden cameras, and there was always the chance of some bystander seeing him no matter how careful Jenks was. But he’d need to put the fear of Jenks’s 9mm into this guy. Let him know not to twitch. Bluff him.

  “Don’t move, motherfucker!” Jenks held the Glock sideways at arm’s length. “Get in that register, old man. Get out that green stuff.”

  “What the hell, boy? You on the crack?”

  “Don’t give me no shit. Just the money.”


  “Get the hell out of here, boy. I work for a living.”

  Jenks waved the gun, shoved it in the man’s face. Didn’t this old fool know what was happening? “You want to die, motherfucker?” he screamed, deep-throated, saliva flying with each word. “I’m going to put a goddamn bullet in your brain, you dumb redneck.” Back in East St. Louis, he’d be pulling this job with Spoon, and Spoon would have shot this dumb fuck by now.

  Spoon had no patience for dumb white fucks.

  “I mean it,” Jenks yelled. “Gimmee that money.” But he was losing his nerve, had already lost the edge of surprise he’d had when he’d exploded through the front door.

  The old man’s hands dipped under the counter, came back holding a pump shotgun, barrel sawed off short. He pumped a shell in slow and firm like he was shucking corn. Swung the barrel around to Jenks, who was already diving behind a display of two-liter Dr Pepper.

  The shotgun blast shook the little store, riddled the Dr Pepper with double-ought pellets. Soda fizzed, foamed, sprayed sticky across the dirty tile floor and Jenks’s back.

  Jenks’s cry was a strangled, animal bleat. He belly-crawled down the first aisle, a high-pitched shriek caught in the back of his throat. He heard the old man pump the shotgun again and crossed his arms over his head. Oh, Lord, this fucker’s crazy.

  The second blast shredded the candy racks. Butterfingers rained. The odor of chocolate and cordite swirled thick in the air.

  “Show your ass, you son of a bitch.” The old man fired twice more.

  But Jenks was already running around the end of the aisle toward the rear of the store. He fired wildly back over his shoulder, the 9mm popping away at cigarettes and beef jerky.

  Jenks looked up and could see the old man still behind the counter in the store’s big, fish-eye mirror. The old dude was thumbing fresh shells into the shotgun.

  Jenks ran for the door.

  The old man pumped in a shell, swung the barrel in line with Jenks’s chest. Jenks hit a muddy-slick patch of Dr Pepper just as the old man squeezed the trigger. Jenks’s heels slid out from under him. He landed hard on his ass, bruised his tailbone.

  The shotgun blast destroyed the newspaper display.

  Jenks fast-crawled through the front doors, knocking them open with the top of his head. The doors swung closed behind him, and the old man’s next shot obliterated the glass. Jenks ducked beneath the diamond glitter shower.

  He stood and ran.

  The old man was shouting something after him, but Jenks didn’t try to hear. He pumped his arms and legs, ran a long way for a long time.

  ten

  It was Abba this time that rolled through the empty corridors of Albatross Hall’s fifth floor. The treble-sharp, crisp disco-pop of “Super Trouper.” Morgan followed the music to Valentine’s office.

  He was wet and unhappy. His feet were bricks of ice.

  This late in the evening, he hadn’t really expected the strange professor to be in his office. Morgan didn’t exactly know what lured him up the stairs, up through the building’s dead floors to seek the bizarre reclusive poet who haunted the vacant offices.

  He approached the door, prepared to knock, but stopped when he heard voices. Several voices. Cheerful and occasionally boisterous voices all simmering on the other side of Valentine’s door.

  And the door opened.

  A nice-looking woman in a deep blue cocktail dress almost ran into him, stopped short, delicate hand going to the plunging V of her neckline. “Oh. Sorry, didn’t see you there.” She was small, blond, handsome, makeup only slightly too heavy

  It occurred to Morgan to say, “Uh…”

  “I’m just looking for the little girls’ room.” She slipped past him. “Go ahead on in.” And she glided down the hall.

  Morgan stepped into the din.

  Valentine’s office was crowded with people. A few looked young enough to be students. He recognized at least three professors from his own department. One bumped into him and spilled beer on his sleeve.

  It was Dirk Jakes.

  “Morgan! Didn’t expect to see you here, you old gypsy prof,” Jakes said. “Sorry about the spill there, chief.” Jakes dabbed at Morgan’s sleeve with the tip of his tie.

  Dirk Jakes was the loudest man Morgan had ever met. A blowhard, a self-promoter, and a merciless hack. He was squat, red-haired, red-nosed, and fit poorly into expensive dark suits. He puked out three pulpy crime novels a year and made Mickey Spillane look like William Faulkner. He taught fiction writing for the university.

  “What is all this?” Morgan asked.

  “A party. You’ve never seen a party before?”

  “Why here?”

  “Valentine’s idea. All the stress builds up from the semester. Good to blow off steam.”

  “The semester’s only a week old,” Morgan said.

  “You don’t want the stress to build up,” Jakes told him. “Gets you all tight in the bunghole.”

  “I see.”

  “You’re not a tight in the bunghole type of guy, are you?” Jakes was clearly gearing up for a colossal drunk.

  “I try not to be,” Morgan said.

  “That’s swell, fabulous.” Jakes nodded, pushed him on into the depths of the party. “The bar’s over there someplace. Go loosen up your goddamn bunghole, for Pete’s sake.”

  “Good idea.” Morgan moved into the mass of partygoers, glad for an excuse to get away from Jakes. The party writhed around him, seemed to breathe in and out like a living thing.

  He tried to spot Valentine but didn’t see him.

  Somebody grabbed his arm, and Morgan turned.

  It was Dirk Jakes again.

  “Listen, I forgot to tell you.” Jakes wouldn’t let go of his arm. “Don’t mention to anyone that Valentine’s back. Make like he’s still in Prague, you get it?”

  “I get it.”

  “Don’t let the cat out of the bag, eh? The old man doesn’t want the dean putting him on some goddamn bullshit committee or something, so he’s lying low, capische?”

  Morgan pried his arm loose. “I won’t say a thing.”

  He made his way to the little fridge where he’d found a bottle of beer his last visit, but it was empty. A curtain on the back wall was pushed aside, and he saw that the wall had been knocked through into the next office. He ducked through, found another crowd of people on the other side. They stood around a keg of beer, a stack of yellow plastic cups on a sideboard.

  Morgan took a cup, poured beer. Too foamy.

  “You have to tilt the cup.” The high-pitched voice belonged to a petite, raven-haired girl about twenty years old. “You have to tilt it. I know because I tend bar down at Peckerwood’s, the sports bar across town. You know it?”

  Morgan shook his head. “I’m new in town.”

  She took the cup out of Morgan’s hand, dumped the foam, and tilted the cup. “See, like this.” She poured the beer, smooth.

  Morgan watched her pour. She was barely five feet tall, twig of a thing. Tight denim shorts, pink T-shirt a size too small. Flip-flops, toenails painted lime. She must’ve had boots around somewhere. He thought of his own freezing feet.

  “You’re a student here?” Morgan asked.

  She shook her head, handed Morgan his cup. “I walk Professor Valentine’s dogs.”

  “He has dogs?”

  “Two Irish wolfhounds. Huge, but very gentle. I keep them for him ever since the problem with his house.”

  “I was looking for Valentine,” Morgan said.

  “I haven’t seen him in a while.” The girl’s attention immediately whipped to a newcomer at the keg. “You have to tilt it or you’ll get foam,” she said.

  Morgan drank half his beer and drifted back through the hole in the wall, where he found a couple of familiar faces, two more professors from his department.

  They seemed to be in the middle of an argument, both very drunk.

  “It’s a ridiculous book and you know it, Pritcher. You Irish folk have been s
kating on Joyce for too long. Finnegans Wake is bullshit. Everyone knows it’s bullshit. Joyce knew it was bullshit when he wrote it. Now get out of my face please, you ridiculous little tit.”

  Professor Louis Reams was a lanky, storklike man. Morgan had spoken casually with him a few times and seemed to remember he’d done his dissertation on the complex prosody of Sri Lankan poetry in translation. Morgan suspected Reams had an inferiority complex from having to explain all the time just exactly what his specialty was.

  He towered over the much shorter Pritcher, jabbing a finger at his face as he spoke.

  Professor Larry Pritcher looked uninterested, dismissed the ranting Reams with a wave of his small, pale hand. Early in grad school, Pritcher had hitched himself to the James Joyce bandwagon and never looked back. He fully enjoyed the massive safety of James Joyce studies and relentlessly needled “fringe” scholarship as new wave, multicultural carnival acts.

  “Put a cork in it, Reams,” Pritcher said. “You’re drunk.”

  “You have no concept of what it’s like to follow an original thread of thought.”

  “This again.”

  “Fuck you with bells on.” Reams gave him the up yours gesture.

  Pritcher turned to Morgan. “Can you believe this guy? I’m just trying to have a goddamn drink.”

  Morgan blinked. He hadn’t expected to be drawn into it. “Well…”

  “Exactly,” Pritcher said. “Nobody wants you here, Reams. You’re bringing the party down.”

  Morgan noticed that the bulk of the party appeared to be pressing on unhindered.

  “The hell you say?” Reams scowled. “That true, Morgan? I’m somehow some kind of party pooper?”

  “I don’t think anyone wants to have an argument,” Morgan said.

  “So you do think I’m a party pooper.”

  “I never said-”

  “Fine.” Reams finished his beer in one angry gulp, threw the empty cup on the floor. “Screw you too, Morgan. Easy for you to judge. You’re just passing through. I have to work here for Christ’s sake.”

  Reams jostled his way through the crowd for the door, partygoers frowning after him.