Contenders. Erika Krouse
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than flesh, more like dreams than names. Then Nina would love, in the primitive way that sleeping babies love. She loved because she could, and because she needed, and because a hand lay in hers, and, in its careless sleep, promised to stay there forever.
~
Three blocks from the scene of her latest crime, Nina sat in the driver’s seat of her Pinto, ignition off. She still felt the aftershocks of contention, like minor quakes through her chest. She tried to shake the adrenaline from her limbs, but they trembled anyway. It felt bad in a good way, and good in a bad way. The loose window shuddered next to her, and a soda can rattled in its cup holder.
The street was quiet—no police cars, no sirens, just the night traffic playing its one note. She wiped her cheek, and a smear of blood snailed across her palm. She probed until she found the raised outline of a nick on her cheekbone, the size of a grain of rice. She checked the rearview mirror; a new bruise bloomed above her eye.
Nina picked up the wallet she had won. It was blue. They were never blue. She smelled it—real leather. She pulled out his driver’s license. He had lied about his height—no way he was six foot one. Men always lied about height. She replaced the license and flipped through the billfold. Fifties, four of them, two twenties, and some singles. That was all right. The credit cards she would sell tomorrow to Jared, a teenager who worked at the Denver Public Library. The folds hid a video rental card. An Eagle Scout card. A punch card for a deli downtown—one more visit and she’d get a free sandwich. She slipped the cards and the cash into her own pocket. Nina was an Eagle Scout, now.
She smoothed her hand over the dashboard of her Ford Pinto. She loved this car, admirably well-performing despite its danger of bursting into flames upon impact. It had somehow missed the recall, and for that reason she had been able to buy it for a few hundred bucks and twenty-five stolen credit cards. She had a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy with this car. If she heard a strange sound, she turned up the radio. If she smelled something burning, she opened the window. It was like the old, balding widows who shuffled around her neighborhood—they never seemed to work right, but they just wouldn’t die, either.
Nina scrabbled a Strike Anywhere match against the stack of papers in the passenger seat. It ignited, and the list of phone numbers flared under the flame. She lit her cigarette. She only smoked one pack a week, but she couldn’t bear to quit. Not because she missed cigarettes, but because she missed missing cigarettes—the swift ache, and its instant satisfaction. Besides, she wasn’t a quitter. She figured that if she died of anything, it would be in a fight, and the worst thing she could imagine was lying in the street, bleeding to death, and thinking, “Wish I had smoked that last cigarette.”
She drove toward Capitol Hill, steering with one middle finger locked over the wheel. She parked near Kitty’s Porn Shop and got out of the car. She shifted the stack of papers in her arms, the blue wallet wobbling on top, and walked down the alley to her apartment building.
She loved this alley, her alley. Nobody else ever walked down it, never ever. Maybe that was because it was next to a gun shop, and maybe because it was the only alley in Denver that dead ended, due to an proviso made to an ex-mayor who owned an interfering building at what should have been the alley’s mouth. The building had been turned into a gun shop that sold firearms, porn, and, strangely, secondhand shoes. To get into the alley, you had to squeeze past the building via a broken sidewalk too narrow for a bicycle.
Not only was the alley cut off from street view, but no windows faced the alley at this end. It was as if all the adjacent buildings had agreed on a boycott. If you died right there, nobody would find you until garbage day. Maybe even later; the garbage trucks sometimes skipped this alley, since they had to drive in and back out in reverse. The walls looked like the blank, windowless sides of a prison, except you were on the outside, where nothing interesting was happening.
Nina did most of her morning and afternoon training here. She ran wind sprints up and down the alley, her sneakers grinding against the oily concrete, the rarefied air brushing her cheeks. She pounded an abandoned thirty-inch tire with a sledgehammer until her bones ached. She had made a medicine ball out of an old basketball and sand, and she did power crunches with it, bouncing it against the wall and catching it. She whipped chains so heavy, nobody had ever tried to steal them. Likewise with a dirty duffel bag packed with rags and sand, which she had covered in duct tape, attached to a chain, and hung vertically under the fire escape stairs for a heavy bag. Right now, lying on its side in the dark, it looked like a dead body.
Nina mounted the dim fire escape stairs to her second-floor apartment, the metal clanging against her shoes. The building was called The Chessman Arms, its facade originally constructed in careful brick patterns that were now painted with decades of soot. The Arms was one of many apartment buildings off Colfax Avenue—The Cavendish, The Holiday Respite, The Country Squire—designed to appeal to grannies and Section-Eighters, anyone willing to believe in the grandeur of the name despite all visual evidence to the contrary. The hallways were mottled with carpet stains, plaster scabs, and old mold. Inside the apartments were scarred hardwood floors, tall windows of rheumy glass, and ceiling leaks. It was just the right kind of old, and if you squinted and it was dark, the building looked classy with a capital K, at least from the outside.
Nina had moved into this apartment two years ago and stayed out of inertia. The neighborhood felt home-ish, flecked with prostitutes, gallant art deco buildings, and waving trees. Homeless people ambled down hot alleys, magpies squawking at them. She belonged here. The abandoned Guardian Angels Headquarters was two blocks away. She was within walking distance of three, count ’em, three tattoo parlors, and a head shop/bookstore called Leaves of Grass. She was as settled as a person could get.
But tonight, she dumped her stuff in the middle of the floor and scrutinized the squalor. What had she done here except time? She had wrapped rubber bands around doorknobs and subscribed to The Denver Post, but she was still a squatter. She saw her neighbors every day, smelled their cooking, and heard them have sex, but she never felt like she could knock on their doors and borrow an egg. She didn’t know their names. They didn’t know her, or like her. All her furniture had once sat on a nearby corner with a “Free” sign on it. She didn’t own anything she couldn’t move herself.
She kept a goldfish in a coffeepot. It swam upside down, too dumb to die. And every time she tried houseplants, she was reminded of the phrase, “Death comes to us all.” She never understood why they shriveled up, those quiet little guilt-trippers. They seemed so needy, always wanting water and giving nothing back to the world but (huh!) oxygen. Once, she found an abandoned cactus in a terra-cotta pot, sitting on the curb. She put that plant in her window and watered it for a year before she realized that it was plastic.
Home, this wasn’t.
Two weeks ago, a drunken ex-wrestler tried to slap her. As she blocked his hand, he followed with a punch to her jaw that she was too late to slip. Nina saw black, tasted aluminum. For a few seconds, she was unconscious on her feet, and her heart stopped in her ribcage.
Her twin brother’s face loomed in the ether, just like in cartoons and movies. He was huge, filling every inch of the screen of her mind.
“Hey, Chris,” she said. “What’s up?”
He looked at her the way a person looks at his own hangnail. Unfettered by consciousness, Nina missed him with the force of a tsunami, with a violent undertow of hope that she hadn’t realized was still there.
Then Chris was gone and she was back on the street, her heart beating again, that stubborn machinery. The sweating face of the ex-wrestler had replaced her brother’s, and she stumbled backward at the ugly transformation. The man reached into the back of his pants and pulled out a gun.
Nina turned and ran, but he shot at her anyway. The bullet whistled just past her head. The sound punctured a hole in her eardrum. That week, every time she had a cigarette, smoke leaked from her left ear.
What if she had caught that bullet? She’d never see her brother again. She’d never see anything again. She would end up unclaimed in the morgue, her body disposed of like medical waste, dumped from drawer to incinerator. No lover would mourn her. Nobody’s life would be ruined