Knuckleduster Read online

  “Boss?” the other officer asked.

  “Go get us some statements.”

  The officer headed inside.

  Detective Pierce drew near with a casual stride and announced, “Brody ‘Knuckleduster’ Calhoun.”

  As soon as the vigilante for hire’s name was uttered, the bouncer snapped his fingers. “That’s it. Knew I knew it.”

  Ignoring the bouncer having his moment of selfcongratulations, Nathan removed the cuffs from the pouch on the back of his belt. “Well?”

  Brody sighed and let the cigarette dangle from his lips as he lifted his wrists, bloodied hands palms down.

  2

  Nathan Pierce took a deep breath before reading from a sheet he found in the dense, rubber-banded file folder. He remained standing while Brody sat at the table in the small, too-bright room. “Ready? Okay, here we go again. Broadwell Alexander Calhoun of Minneapolis, Minnesota, your crimes are as follows. Eleven harassment charges. Two cases of flagrantly disobeying a restraining order. Ten separate complaints against you about malicious threats. Seventeen misdemeanor cases of aggravated assault, all of which were with a deadly weapon, those goddamn brass knuckles we always find on you.

  “And a few other misdemeanors, like shoving a man into a mail collection box. Another one says you punched a man in the chest while he was at his job at Tofu Pagoda. Broken noses, broken arms. You gave one man two broken hands …” He went on and on.

  Brody listened and said nothing. He had no way of refuting any of those allegations or previous crimes he had been found guilty of. Each time the police arrived to collect him at whatever venue he had given the men their due comeuppance, he had accepted it without struggle. He struck the classic pose, silent, wrists held out ready for the cuffs.

  Any rent-a-cop could scan his jigsaw, see the organized list of his crimes. But his reputation went beyond that. Everyone knew what it meant when Brody “Knuckleduster” Calhoun arrived. Even though they may be part of the citywide problem of dangerous apathy themselves, they knew they should let him do what he wanted. He was an unwavering no when a reluctant yes was the norm. Unlike many of the averted-eyed masses, he gazed unflinchingly into the vacuous abyss that mankind had dug itself into. Their staring contest held at an unbreakable stalemate.

  Nathan threw down the folder. The contents slid out in front of Brody. The files and his old mug shots from when he still wore a beard. The tight text all bundled together on the lines, the reports, the quotes from the officers who had been first on the scene and their observations of what had gone down. Words such as violent and cooperative, even though the pairing was incongruous, appeared repeatedly.

  One of the pages, kept close to the bottom, was a record of all the community service he had done as recoupment for his crimes. Brody was sure that page went wholly unnoticed. The crimes were much more appealing to fawn over and gape at. Cops didn’t like criminals who repaid their debts; they liked them to run. They were the feverish bloodhounds of the city in that way. The chase was all they desired, even if their restrictions kept them from actually doing anything beyond a polite Q and A in a small, windowless room.

  “So, what do you make of this? I’ll be happy to inform you that the bill’s up for switching the law back. We’ll be able to stop this fucking around and just put you in a box, throw away the key, say sayonara. You happen to do something like this come January 1, we very well could if we want.” He drew in a breath, rubbed his gray temple, slightly mussing his hair. “But until then … anyway, we’re talking about tonight, weren’t we? Today. Number eighteen. Eighteen for you in the breaking-a-man’s-face category since we can’t call it assault, even though we both know it is. Chiffon’s not going to be one bit pleased to hear about this.”

  Brody remained silent. He was famous for this, being pulled in and stuck in the hot room and not saying a word, ultimately just accepting his sentence, which wasn’t even up to the cops. The caseworkers and parole boards held that particular ring of keys with white-knuckled fists. Brody knew it didn’t make a bit of a difference. As long as the men he visited continued to carry a pulse, he’d just be pitched back out into the world. They were even obligated to reunite him with his brass knuckles—personal property couldn’t be confiscated if he had the receipt from that tobacco shop slash pugilist’s accessory boutique, which he did.

  Brody, as well as the detective, knew that even the judges who favored the lax state of the law liked him. They didn’t see a vigilante but a human coupon. On a monthly basis he was doing what the cops could never do—and it was off the government payroll. And in a roundabout way, justice was being served. To them, a minor auxiliary bonus. Since Brody had discovered the convenient loophole and begun making temporary employers at the community center, the rate at which women were being brought to the ER for signs of battery had halved.

  “Let me tell you, it’s not just you who gets an earful when you do this shit. I have to hear about it, too. And just so it keeps Chiffon off my ass and makes it seem like I’m trying to do something with you, I’m going to ask her to move your monthly visit up to Friday. She’ll know what to do with you and how many more hours will finally make you get the message to quit this shit.”

  Brody thought about his probation officer. Her cramped little office, her constant gospel music. The antique candy dish on the corner of her desk, while inviting, was clearly not there to be sampled from by her “clients” but maybe, as he always suspected, as a symbol of learning to control oneself. What would she have to say about number eighteen? A few hundred more hours mopping floors? Or would this prove to best her patience, causing her to send him to the Minneapolis Penitentiary for a few months to “gain some perspective,” as she was always threatening to do one day?

  In the corner of his left eye, Brody caught a glimpse of a pinprick of flashing red: 00:59:59. Only an hour before his lenses would require a charge. It prompted Brody to move this talk to the fast track. After clearing his throat, he spoke for the first time since the cuffs were thrown on. “I have nothing to say. You got me. Here I sit willingly, not giving you any trouble. I just did what I thought was the right thing—”

  “Yeah. A real knight in shining armor, you.” Nathan put the file back together, slammed the end of it against the top of the stainless steel table to straighten the pages. He took the keys out of his waistcoat pocket and gestured for Brody to lift his wrists. He unlocked the cuffs and gathered them up with a clatter of metal. “Hiding behind that adulterer’s loophole won’t stand up forever. Eventually we’ll have to scan you for biological evidence that you were actually screwing these women.”

  “Maybe in January,” Brody dared quietly.

  Letting that slide, the detective tucked the cuffs away, stared at Brody. “It’s funny how you claim you’re actually in relationships with all these women, but when we run you through the sniffer out front, you always come up clean. Figured you’d have picked up something by now, especially since it’s at the community center you’re meeting all of them—the last place I’d expect to find a clean woman. And you always tell me you had absolutely no idea the husbands and boyfriends were beating your new friends …”

  Brody blinked. “It just happens.”

  Nathan stifled what he was going to say next with a grunt and let it go. Instead, “I know you already have a collection of these, but I’m going to give you another one just for shits and giggles.” He removed his business card and flicked it onto the table between them. “Next time some poor girl asks you to intervene, tell her to give me a call. Leave it to the paid professionals, Prince Valiant. Now piss off.”

  Going back out into the processing area, Brody passed a group of hookers chained shoulder to shoulder to the bench and a gaggle of leather-clad hunchbacks, divided by their assumed gender. He went to the counter to retrieve his belongings.

  The uniformed cop on the other side of the bulletproof glass finished the call he was on, hung up, took a sip of coffee, and then finally asked Brody through th
e intercom for his name—last, middle, first.

  As the cop presented the items and dropped them into the drawer, he said, “Wallet: black leather, silver chain. Contents: driver’s license, expired military ID, jigsaw monetary and personal account card, Mega Deluxo Mega Savers card, also expired. One butane lighter. Look at this antique: one cellular phone. One pack of cigarettes of a foreign brand. One contact lens case … What’s this attached to it?”

  “The battery,” Brody said, impatient. He wanted to get home.

  “What the hell do contact lenses need a battery for?”

  Brody wiggled a finger next to his right eye. “Carotene lenses.” Let’s get a move on here, please.

  “All right, one carrot bean. Carrot teen. Whatever. A contact lens case. And one pair of knucks, black.” The officer dropped the knuckleduster, the heaviest of the items, and it made a terrific bang as it landed in the metal drawer.

  Behind Brody, one of the men dressed in head-to-toe shiny leather gimp attire unzipped his mouth. “Hey, man, that’s favoritism. Am I going to be getting my whip back? I doubt it. That’s bullshit. You hear me? That’s bullshit.”

  The uniform ignored the masochist’s protests and slammed the drawer under the partition. “Any complaints about how you were treated during your stay can be sent to us at our website. Please remember that by releasing you, the St. Paul Police Department is not encouraging you to break the law in any way but has considered your unique case and has deemed you satisfactory to be released back into the general populous under the stipulation that you will try your very best not to cause any other problems or break any other laws in the state of Minnesota henceforth. Know that by passing through the front doors, you have agreed to these terms. Thank you and have a nice day.”

  Outside the precinct, among the row of parked squad cars and night traffic, Brody spotted Marcy standing near a telephone pole, smoking a cigarette with a shiver quaking every inch of her slender five-foot frame.

  They met in the middle on the sidewalk. In the dim light being thrown off the precinct’s entryway behind him, Marcy’s face looked even more battered and swollen than he remembered. He had met her when the injuries were fresh, and now, well into a week of healing, they looked somehow worse. An inky, shallow pit swallowed her entire right eye because the skin of her brow was hardly able to hold in the green and purple knot outcropping it. He made sure not to let Marcy see him staring.

  “Hey,” she said softly, tucking a purple-and-green-streaked strand of white-girl dreads behind an ear busy with piercings. She looked apologetic, seeing him with his hands red from the fight, his wrists bruised from the cuffs. “I hope you didn’t get in too much trouble or anything.”

  “It’s fine,” Brody said.

  Here came the terribly awkward moment. The job was done, and all had been settled save for the minor detail of payment. Beating up guys for the women he met at the community center was one thing. He tracked them down, gave them what they deserved with a certain enthusiasm, but discussing how much he was owed afterward took the air out of his heroic sails. But a man had to eat, he reminded himself. The batteries for the lens changer weren’t exactly cheap, either.

  “So, what’d we say—fifty?” she asked, withdrawing her pocket ordinateur.

  Brody removed his wallet and extended his jigsaw card, his stomach twisting. This felt wrong, but at the same time the promise of money coming his way was a jolt to his system. He watched her make the tabulations on the touch screen, punching the keys and scrolling up and down in the menu, her fingers bejeweled with gaudy costume rings.

  Once through, Marcy looked up at him, her unnaturally crooked smile toothy and bright. It probably hurt to smile, but she did it anyway. “I gave you sixty instead.”

  “You didn’t have to do that,” he replied, taking his jigsaw from her hand gently.

  “No, it’s okay. I got paid today, and with Jonah not living with me anymore, my grocery bill is, like, a third of what it used to be.” She smiled again, the right hook of her mouth unable to go up as far as the left, but it faltered as if the left side, the frowning side, had succeeded in pulling the right down into the doldrums with it. “You deserve it for what you did tonight. I mean, violence begets violence, right? I think it’ll be better this way. Whoever Jonah shacks up with next, maybe he’ll think twice before coming home stinking drunk and pissed off.”

  “How’re the treatments going?” Brody asked.

  “Good,” she said with buoyancy, putting her ordi back in her purse. “A few more rounds and I’ll be done. They had to cut out a pretty big hunk of my pancreas, but I guess they got it all. So, yeah—it’s a good thing.” She sounded unsure.

  Before Brody knew what was happening, Marcy took a step forward and put her arms around him. She hugged him tightly, her face mashed against his chest, the scratchy texture of her dreadlocks tickling his chin. Her warmth, both figurative and literal, was surprising.

  “Thank you so much,” she said. “I know it’s bad to want someone to get hurt, but I don’t think he’d understand it any other way. I feel better and worse at the same time. Does that make sense?” She wept—wetness soaked through the material of his shirt and touched the flesh of his chest, chilled already from the late November air.

  Marcy released him and seemed momentarily embarrassed, then daintily wiped at her bruised eye with the back of her hand. She didn’t meet his eyes. She stood there, obviously unsure as to what came next.

  Brody knew from experience that Marcy would want to extend their friendship, ask him to lunch or something. After all, they had used the adulterer’s loophole as a way for him to do this for her, so why not make it official? But he knew that every time she laid eyes on him she’d be reminded of Jonah, even though the two men weren’t a lick alike. He’d be a bookmark flagging that horrible chapter of her life, forever glued in place. There might be good times ahead of them. Great times, even. But every time they were asked to hear the story of how they met or perhaps during her own reflecting on their relationship and its origin—there it’d be, a blemish that regardless of what pristine beauty surrounded it would continually be the most noticeable aspect of that possible them. So, instead, Brody decided to say his line to complete the transaction. “Take care of yourself.”

  “Yeah, you too. Thank you again.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Brody said, turning to walk in the direction of the light-rail station.

  Once off the train in relative proximity to his apartment building, Brody turned a few corners and walked the cold streets of St. Paul. He crossed the bridge into Minneapolis and entered the first bodega he found that still had its lights on.

  The red digits on his lenses reminded him that he had only twenty minutes before he’d be completely, helplessly blind. Navigating the city sightless would be impossible, and his mind was already fatigued enough that putting on the sonar before he could get a full night’s sleep would be an invitation for a migraine. He found the batteries he needed at the back of the store among a jumbled offering of other electronics. They were just a set of two batteries, the size of typical double As, except set into a long security bracket to prevent theft, too wide to be jammed down a pocket on the sly. He took them to the counter, and fifty of the sixty credits Marcy had given him mere minutes ago evaporated from his account with one quick swipe.

  “Have a nice night—or morning, I suppose,” the clerk said, referring to the clock on the wall.

  Back out into the night, he made it to the front door of his apartment building just as the final ten minutes of his lenses began to count down.

  Brody’s apartment was spread out, one wholly undecorated room, before the elevator doors. It was cavernous with its cement walls, cement floor, cement ceiling. Windows along one side provided ample light in the mornings. In a corner were his television, black pleather couch, coffee table. Next to it, the kitchenette: cupboards with no doors, his meager collection of plates and glasses on display, cleaned and neatly arranged. The
bedroom was divided from the rest of the space by a ratty paper curtain he’d bought at a flea market, fixed to the ceiling with duct tape. It contained a mattress thrown in the corner, the nightstand a repurposed bucket.

  He didn’t feel like watching any television or requesting his voice mail—he knew it would just offer the same emptiness that his mailbox downstairs had. Of course, this never came as much of a surprise. He never got anything besides his monthly injury payment from the government, a nice impersonal Army apology printed on yellow paper with the check attached—a perk he gladly cashed.

  But he’d spent his October check already and still had two weeks before the next. He considered the ten credits still floating, never touched as actual hard currency, in his bank account. Ten credits. He began arranging lists of combinations of things he could afford with only ten credits as if accumulating an order from a menu of dollar items at a fast-food joint. Toilet paper was always one of the essential items, kind of like the soft drink when ordering off that menu board. Other essentials he thought about were of course food, cigarettes, laundry soap. Paint was unessential, but it still found its way onto the list. A few more bottles of black and gray would be nice. Now he was just mixing a little bit of every color he had to make his own black, but when dry it always ended up looking more cobalt. This reminded him of the painting he left out on the balcony earlier in the day.

  He went to the row of floor-to-ceiling windows and rolled a few of them open to let some air in. While he had been out, he had left the dryer going and the loft was sticky with humidity, every glass surface fogged.

  Out on the balcony, he looked over downtown Minneapolis. The light-rail expansion had gone up a few months after he had signed the lease, and the crosstown track now ran right by his window, obscuring a good portion of the view. A trio of magnetized cars zipped by soundlessly on the raised track, just the occasional screech when metal met metal on the curves and bends steering between structures. He flicked his cigarette over the railing and watched it trail down, down, down to the street below. It hit asphalt, spraying a puff of embers that only took a strong breeze to snuff.