The Porter 100 was nestled between two of Step Crawford’s thin fingers, and the filter kissed a glass of mountain-made bourbon resting in his cupped hand. The smoke mixed with the rising aroma of sour mash settled his cluttered mind. He sat shirtless in a tattered chair that he’d picked up from the curb in front of his neighbors’ house almost three years before. The fabric was faded and torn, but other than that it was a perfectly serviceable chair. The thought that his neighbors would push something out the door before it had been worn beyond its use sickened Step. Three more glasses of whiskey and he’d likely tell them exactly how much it sickened him.
Step did this a lot. He sat hating his neighbors and drinking his promise away. The most stable relationships in his life were with homemade brew and cheap cigarettes. They were always there, always altering his mind and mood. He could rely on them. He’d found them when he’d lost everything, and they helped him bury the old Step Crawford—the happier, meatier, bright-eyed Step Crawford—the one who had been blindsided by life.
The whore he called Bones lay on the mattress, her arm still tied off and the needle still piercing her bruised flesh. A tortured grin was frozen on her face. Her skinny, naked body revealed the cruel toll years of bad choices had delivered to her doorstep. She was once an All-American cheerleader who was raised in a middle-class home with a detached garage and detached parents. They’d managed to be a physical presence during her formative years without providing any kind of emotional support whatsoever.
Her straight A’s and tumbling talents got her into college on a cheerleading scholarship. Everything seemed to be set up perfectly for her to lead a country-club life outside of Knoxville when she graduated. Then she stumbled into a fraternity party her sophomore year and tried heroin on a dare.
Flash forward five years, and she’s lying on Step Crawford’s mattress with a needle in her arm, thirty pounds lighter, minus six teeth, and nowhere to be until ten P.M. the next day when she’d hop on a pole at The Rat’s Tail Gentlemen’s Club and dance for a roomful of rumrunners and drug dealers with even fewer teeth than she had.
That’s where Step had met her. He was there on a closeout; he did a lot of closeouts in The Rat’s Tail. She stepped out on the stage and gave the saddest striptease Step had ever seen. Somehow she managed to convey the tragic turns of her life with every sway of her hips and jiggle of her tits. And she did it in the most beautiful way. It was masterful.
Step met her offstage and without saying a word, he dragged her into the manager’s office and they fucked the living daylights out of each other. They fucked the misery out of their lives. They even temporarily fucked themselves free of the bitterness that poisoned their day-to-day existences. But, try as they might, they couldn’t fuck away the loneliness. Their need for one another sent them both into a frothing carnal fit that produced damaged furniture and desperate growls of ecstasy. They were drawn to each other’s crippling sadness.
That’s all they shared from that moment on: sex and sadness. They talked occasionally, but it wasn’t Step’s favorite thing to do with the whore because her conversations usually centered on the dicks she sucked to get a fix. It was a thing with her, a sickness almost. The size, condition, and structure of male genitals fascinated her to no end. Still, besides Kenny, Bones was the closest thing Step had to family.
Step’s phone vibrated on his leg. He watched it skitter across the denim fabric of his baggy jeans for as long as he could. At the last possible moment before it went to voicemail, he answered. “What?”
“We got a closeout,” Kenny said.
Step held some smoke in his mouth and then puffed it out in rings. “Where are you?”
“Home.”
“I’ll pick you up in five.”
“Is she there?”
“Is who here?”
Kenny chuckled. “How many women you got, Step?”
“I don’t have any women.” Step twirled the bronze liquid in his glass, and watched it spin.
“You know what I mean.”
He sniffed the whiskey. “She’s here.”
“Did y’all…you know?”
“Did we what, Kenny?”
“Have sex?”
“No, we did not,” Step said, taking a sip from the glass. “We fucked, fatass.”
Kenny hooted. “Goddamn, Step. You are one lucky son of a bitch. How do you always get the pretty girls?”
Step looked at the woman on his bed who most closely resembled skeletal remains. “Simple. I find the ugly ones pretty.”
“C’mon on, now. I’ve seen that girl dance. She’s fine as hell, boy.”
“She is fine. When she’s dancing. Offstage, she uglies up a good bit.”
“Then why do you like her?”
“Who says I like her?”
“You don’t?”
“I ain’t got nothing against her. She gets down to business as soon as she walks in the door. She don’t ask me about my day or bore the living shit out of me about hers. She just drops her drawers to the floor and flat-backs it. She makes things easy. Life is hard enough without having to woo some goddamn woman and think about her feelings all the time.” Step laughed and drank from his glass. “Hell, I don’t have any fucking feelings, why would I give a shit about hers?”
There was a pause before Kenny said, “You think that’s my problem, Step? You think I’m too nice? I’m always asking this woman and that about how they’re doing or what their day’s been like, but I’ll be damned if it ain’t worked out for me. Can’t get none of them to come home with me. I ain’t gonna lie, I’ve ’bout worn my hand out. Thing cramps up on me night and day because I’ve used it so much.”
Step took a drag from his Porter 100. “You do know you have two hands, right?”
“I ain’t about to use my left hand. I ain’t got no control over it. It’s liable to twist the wrong way and cause all kinds of problems with my man hammer.”
“Man hammer? What’re you, twelve?”
Kenny didn’t respond to his question. “Am I too nice?”
“You’re too fat, and your face is too present.” Step chuckled to himself as he brought the glass to his lips.
“You’re drunk, ain’t you? You’re always meanest when you’re drunk. You’re mean other times, too, but you are flat-out rude when you’ve been drinking.”
“Listen up, Kenny, Ima tell you how to get a woman. You listening?”
“I’m listening.”
“Make your case.”
“Make my case? What in the hell does that mean?”
Step swallowed the last of his whiskey. “It means, what have you got to offer a woman? Why in the hell should she put time into you? You’re fat, your face looks like a deformed ass, you’re always wearing those goddamn dirty-as-shit hats…you’ve got a lot to overcome, my friend. So, you gotta just come out and tell her what you’re gonna give her that makes her life better.”
“You talking sex-wise?”
“No, I ain’t talking sex-wise. Sex means about as much to a woman as a sensible diet means to you.” He poured more whiskey into his glass. “What have you got that women want?”
“Well shit, brother, if I knew that we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Step held the full glass in his hand and admired its perfection before taking a big gulp. “So, we are down to the meat of the problem. You ain’t got no idea what women want.”
“I can’t see how we’re just now getting to the meat of it. I more or less said as much some time ago.”
Step ignored him. “You know what women want? I mean what they really want?” He peered at the skinny naked whore on his bed. “They want to forget shit.”
Kenny hesitated. “You mean like the am…am…What the hell do they call it when you get hit over the head and forget things?”
“Amnesia, and yes, that’s what I mean.”
“I ain’t hitting no woman over the head.”
“You don’t have to hit them over the head, dumbass.”
“Then how am I supposed to make them forget shit? And while we’re at it, what is it exactly they want to forget?”
His eyes still on Bones, Step reached for his pack of Porter 100s. “Who they are. The shit they have to put up with day in and day out. The state of their sorry-ass lives.” He extracted a cigarette from the pack and stuck it in his mouth. “The same shit we all want to forget.”
Kenny chuckled. “How in the hell do I make them forget all that?”
Step brought the new cigarette to life with the old one. “Each woman’s got a different ‘forget-shit’ trigger, Kenny. A man’s whole goddamn point in life is to figure out what that trigger is and pull it.”
“What about your girl there, Step? What’s her trigger?”
“Black tar,” Step said, snuffing the spent cigarette out on the windowsill.
“Oh,” Kenny said, sounding almost sad. “No offense, but I ain’t interested in a junkie girl.”
“Nobody is, fatass. That’s what she wants to forget.”
“What about Angie?” Kenny asked. “What was her trigger?”
Step stopped mid-drag and his eyes dropped to the floor. He let the name “Angie” rattle around in his brain and then growled out, “I’m tired of telling you we don’t talk about her, Kenny.”
“We don’t talk about her when you’re sober. I figured since you’ve had a snootful you might want to get into it.”
“I don’t.”
“They say it ain’t good to bottle stuff like that up, Step.”
The liquor was adding weight to Step’s eyelids, and he struggled to keep them open. “Who’s they?”
“Them, you know. The ones that say stuff we’re supposed to pay attention to.”
“I got news for you, Kenny. They’re just making shit up as they go along.”
Kenny sighed. “Suit yourself. Still think you should talk about Angie and all that to clear your mind of it.”
“Goddamn it!” Step snapped. “You are not to say Angie’s name ever fuckin’ again! You understand?”
“All right—all right. I just thought you was drunk enough is all.”
Step closed his eyes and blew streams of smoke out his nostrils. “Didn’t you say something about a closeout?”
“I did. There ain’t no hurry. We’re due to meet up with Boss for breakfast. Take some time to dry out. Give me a call when you’re on your way.”
Step told Kenny to fuck off and then disconnected the call.