Loser's Town Read online

  Potts had started in on the chili when the woman turned up at his side.

  ‘You want to give me a Miller?’ she said to Kepki.

  Kepki brought her one and she drank it standing next to Potts. Potts opened several packs of saltines and broke them up into his chili and stirred it around. He was hungry and when he took a bite it was too hot and he had to spit it out into his hand. ‘Shit!’ He took a swig of beer to cool down.

  The woman laughed. ‘Didn’t your mother never teach you to blow on it first?’

  ‘Damn, I burnt the hell out of my mouth! God damn, Kepki, you coulda warned me.’

  ‘Just cause it says chili don’t mean it ain’t hot,’ said Kepki, winking at the woman.

  Potts took another swig of cool beer.

  ‘You always eat like that?’ the woman asked him. ‘Big gulps of everything? I reckon that’s a good sign, though. A man just taking big bites out of everything, like taking big bites out of life. That the way you are?’

  ‘I never thought about it.’

  ‘I bet you are,’ she said. ‘I bet you that’s the way you do things. My name’s Darlene.’

  ‘Potts.’

  ‘Just Potts?’

  ‘Just Potts,’ he said.

  They drank up the rest of the evening. Potts had some of Stella’s money in his pocket and the beer bottles and whiskey glasses accumulated on the bar in front of them. They laughed and talked, Darlene resting against Potts with her arm around him. Somewhere early on Darlene leaned over and kissed Potts and slid her tongue deep into his mouth and rubbed his crotch through the blue jeans. Potts got up to have a piss and was standing at the urinal when Darlene came in. Potts started to zip up but Darlene said, ‘Don’t bother,’ and she grabbed Potts by the dick and led him over and pushed him up against the wall. She raised her blue dress and jammed Potts’ hand down into her panties. Potts was a little overwhelmed. A biker came in and said, ‘Hot damn! Well don’t let me interrupt nothing,’ and took a leak watching Potts and Darlene administer to each other. The biker whistled appreciatively before he left and winked at Potts.

  ‘Why don’t we go to your place?’ Darlene said to him.

  ‘No,’ said Potts.

  ‘You married?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Then how come? I don’t give a shit how clean it is, long as the bed is okay.’

  ‘I never take anybody there, that’s all.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Why you asking all these questions? I just don’t, that’s all. Now you want to get it on somewhere or not. Let’s go to your place.’

  ‘Can’t. I got a kid. I bring anybody home and the kid’ll blab to the goddamn social worker.’

  They drove in her car to a motel. Potts was drunk so he handed her a wad of cash. She was perhaps slightly less drunk than Potts and she went in to book the room. She came back out a few minutes later with some cash still in her hand. She looked at the money, looked at Potts, then jammed the money into her bra.

  ‘You want it,’ she said to Potts, ‘you got to come and get it.’

  In the motel room Darlene sat on the bed and took a pint of vodka from her purse. She took a hit and offered it to Potts.

  ‘You look nervous. You always like this or is it just me?’

  ‘I ain’t nervous,’ said Potts.

  ‘Fun to be a little nervous,’ she said. ‘I like being a little scared.’

  She sat back on the bed and motioned for Potts to sit next to her.

  ‘Come on, honey,’ she said. ‘Come and talk to Mama Darlene a little while.’

  Potts climbed onto the bed. Darlene pulled his head to her chest and gently stroked his hair, his face. Potts closed his eyes.

  ‘You had a hard life, ain’t you? I can tell. You can always tell a hard life. What you need is a little love, ain’t it, sugar? What you need is someone to be gentle with you, someone to be soft. Life’s too hard. Life ain’t got to be this hard all the time, is it?’

  She tilted his chin up and brought her lips down to his, tenderly kissing him. She looked into his eyes.

  ‘You got beautiful eyes, you know that? I noticed that right off. Them big sad eyes of yours. That’s why I liked you. I thought: anybody with them eyes got to need some love.’

  Potts watched her undress. She was beautiful, in her way. Her pale body was lush and soft but there was an ugly deep scar across her abdomen. She caught Potts looking at it.

  ‘That upset you?’

  ‘No,’ said Potts.

  ‘Ugly, ain’t it? A doctor did that to me, when I had my kid. An infection. I like to have died. Maybe you don’t want me now. Some men don’t.’

  ‘No, I still want you.’

  She let him touch the scar softly. He ran his fingers the length of it.

  ‘You’re a good man, ain’t you? Are you?’

  ‘Yeah. I am. I’m a good man.’

  ‘Come on. Get undressed. I’m going to hold you for a while, then I’m going to love you.’

  Potts undressed and climbed into bed with her. She seemed shy now. Potts touched her all over and she giggled. It was like high school. She pulled Potts close to her and it was as if she enfolded him. She pushed Potts onto his back and she slid him inside her. She smiled down at Potts and in that moment Potts thought she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. The ceiling light was behind her and she looked like an angel; there was a halo round her head. Potts was in heaven. Like an angel.

  She rolled over onto her back and pulled Potts on top of her. He kissed her as he made love to her but as she became more and more aroused she turned her face away. Her fingernails bit into Potts’ back and her legs wrapped round him as she arched beneath him, urging him harder, faster, harder. Potts thought she was going to come but she stopped and grabbed Potts’ hands and placed them on her neck. Potts wasn’t sure what to do. Darlene glared at him. ‘Do it, for God’s sake, do it!’

  Potts tightened his grip on her neck and she relaxed and he could feel her begin to move beneath him again. Potts was worried about her but whenever he loosened his grip she became angry. Finally she grabbed his hands and squeezed them herself into her neck to show him what she wanted. She turned red and then began turning purple and made gurgling noises in her throat. Potts wanted to stop moving but she hit him on the arms and he kept on. She began to twitch and her eyes began to roll and Potts was afraid he was killing her, he didn’t want to hurt her. She started slapping the bed with her palms and Potts stopped and took his hands away. He looked down at her as she fought for air and seemed to come round to consciousness again. Her eyes focussed and she stared at Potts curiously and then she screamed at him:

  ‘Why the fuck did you stop? I was coming! I was almost there, you stupid son of a bitch! I was nearly there!’

  Potts backed off the bed and Darlene became hysterical. She sat up in the middle of the bed crying, cursing, tearing at the sheets that tangled her. Potts pulled on his pants and ran from the room carrying his boots. He stumbled out into the parking lot and the cool night desert air hit him and made things worse. It only increased his confusion. He looked around for his bike and remembered they’d taken her car. He sat down with his boots and tried to pull them on when Darlene appeared in the doorway, naked, shouting at him.

  ‘What is wrong with you? Am I too much woman for you, you fucking faggot? Is that it? You fucking loser, you fucking goddamn little faggot!’

  She kept shouting at him, shouted as the doors around the motel opened, shouted as Potts hobbled carrying his shirt and boots out into the street and away.

  Four

  After Spandau left Coren’s office it was nearly 3 p.m. when he got back to his home in Woodland Hills. He lived in an older two-bedroom house, small, but it had a nice backyard. Spandau had put in a pond with some fish and a turtle. The turtle seemed to be doing well but the fish were being eaten by the raccoons. Every few days Spandau would look into the pond and notice a fish was gone, and sometimes he’d find the tail
and a fin or two under the hedge. Then he’d go buy another fish. He thought about sitting up some night in the dark lurking behind the open window with a pellet rifle and catching the damned raccoons in the act, and the fact that he did think seriously about doing this worried him a little. They were just animals, after all. Thinking about them in human terms like revenge was already halfway to being crazy and best not explored. But he wished he’d never put in the goddamned pond. It was supposed to relax him but now whenever he looked at it he got angry.

  He pulled the BMW into the drive, got out and opened the rickety two-car garage, then parked next to his pickup truck. It was a refurbished 1958 Chevy Apache shortbed, which he would have far preferred to drive than the BMW, a car that struck him as pretentious but was what Coren leased for his agents. Coren’s reasoning was that a BMW was familiar enough not to be much noticed in LA but hip enough to allow his people to fit in. As far as Spandau was concerned it was a goddamn large and hot kraut car that he wasn’t allowed to smoke in.

  Spandau himself was of German extraction, his father a butcher coming from Düsseldorf just after the war, and he thought perhaps the car reminded him of his father. Dark, cold and aloof. The old man used to beat him with a wide strip of military webbing, and Spandau always suspected it was some romantic vestige of his military service defending the Reich. Spandau once asked him if he’d been a Nazi and old Horst knocked him across the room. In the shop the old man hacked angrily all day at carcasses of meat, as if they were Jews, homos or gypsies, and came home to drink schnapps and terrorize his wife and children. Katrina, his daughter, two years younger than David, he never beat, but merely slashed with invective. Something in his German genes that wouldn’t let him hit a woman made it alright to reduce them to emotional rubble, dismember them as surely and deeply as the flesh he worked with. Whenever someone praised the BMW as a ‘fine piece of German engineering’ Spandau recalled his father’s own ruthless efficiency at carving meat and human beings. But in the end that too was the road to madness. In the end, it was just a car.

  Spandau had stopped at the market, and now he balanced the bag of groceries in the crook of his arm as he pulled shut the garage door. No fancy electronic openers for him. It was a hot day and the back of his white dress shirt was soaked underneath the thin Armani jacket. Inside the house it was cool and dark; he’d pulled the shades and left the air-conditioner on. It was a relief to be inside, safe, quiet, private. He missed Dee but in truth it felt good to come home like this, to shut the world out, not to hear anyone talking.

  Delia had left him the year before. It had been an amicable divorce – if a divorce could ever be called such – and he did not contest it. He had long seen it coming, they both had. The marriage had been fine during the stunt work, because she understood that, it was what her father did too. Then Spandau had that run of bad luck where too many bones got broken in a single year, and Spandau had hit that producer.

  A broken hip and arm and collarbone in the span of ten months were bad enough, but Spandau had lost his temper on the set one day and clocked a Suit with a nice, crisp short one to the chin. The Suit cracked several expensive dental crowns and summoned his attorney. The attorney threatened to sue the stunt coordinator, Beau, who owned the company and was also Dee’s father. Beau chewed Spandau out but would have fought for him and lost his ass in the process. Beau refused to fire him. Rather than jeopardize Beau, Spandau appeased the Suit by quitting. He sat home for three months, drinking through most afternoons toward the last. Then Coren had come through with the detective job, and Spandau found out he was good at it, and it required the injury of hardly any body parts.

  It was the detective work that had ruined the marriage. Dee didn’t care how much he drank and caroused, what he damaged, who he punched out. Hell, she was Beau McCauley’s daughter and she was used to all that. What she wasn’t used to was the change that came over Spandau, and how readily he took to a job that she found morally offensive. On one early job, Spandau had been required to befriend a man, a personal manager suspected of ‘misappropriating’ some of his client’s money.

  The client was a bitch-goddess of a TV star, a pneumatic peroxide blonde with a body like Barbie and a mind like J. Paul Getty. She worked the manager like a dog, paid him a minimal amount of kibble, and thoroughly enjoyed humiliating him in front of whoever happened to be around. The manager put up with it but took his revenge by siphoning small amounts of her money into an account in Nevada. It wasn’t much, the man just wanted to pay off a little cabin at Tahoe, where he went to fish and relax whenever he could escape the clutches of his boss, which wasn’t often. Spandau arranged to meet him in Tahoe, they went fishing together, became pals.

  One drunken dusk while sitting in his johnboat and fishing for bass, the man confessed the whole thing to Spandau. He explained how he’d been draining the money little by little for over a year, hardly enough to notice, so that he could finish paying off this place and have somewhere to live when he quit working for Queen Titzilla, which he planned to do within the next few months. The way he told the story to Spandau, you could see he felt there was nothing wrong in what he was doing. To him the actions were justified and he felt no guilt about it. Titzilla overworked and humiliated him, so he extracted an amount from her he felt was fair, and that was that. It wasn’t like she’d miss it. She was loaded and owned real estate up the wazoo. But of course she did miss it. She said she began to suspect him when he quit looking hurt whenever she insulted him. She said it was cheaper to hire a detective than to audit her books, which she wasn’t keen to draw attention to anyway. Spandau helped the poor drunken fool off the lake and back to his small cabin, put him to bed, called Titzilla and told her the whole story.

  Dee found this appalling, and was surprised that Spandau didn’t. How could he betray a friend, someone who liked and trusted him? Spandau didn’t see it that way. He felt no qualms at all, not a trace of guilt. He tried to make his position clear to her, but it was useless. The man was a crook, Spandau explained. Spandau had been hired to catch him. He did. End of story. But for Dee, friendship and family were sacred. You didn’t betray a friend, no matter what, especially if there was even a remote justification for his act. You just didn’t.

  ‘But he’s not my friend,’ pleaded Spandau. ‘He’s a thief.’

  ‘But you told him you were his friend!’ she accused. ‘You made him feel safe, you let him think he could trust you. And then you used it against him.’

  There was nothing Spandau could say. Her whole argument seemed irrational to him. But the case had opened up a rift between them, an unbridgeable chasm. He suspected there was something more at stake, that something else was going on, but he couldn’t grasp what it was. The incident struck some hidden weakness in their relationship.

  It wasn’t until Dee had been gone for a few weeks, when Spandau had time to sit and obsessively go over each and every marital fuck-up, that he suspected he had an answer.

  Dee herself had pointed it out once, early on. Spandau had told her about his father. About the beatings, the verbal abuse, the coldness and cruelty. How he and his sister and his mother became close because of it. How that closeness excluded everyone else, how it isolated them from friends and confidences, but made bearable the daily mortification that old Horst inflicted.

  It was possible, David understood, to watch someone you love be abused and to say nothing to defend them, because that was simply the way of things. You accepted, you let the pain and humiliation ride through you like cold wind through a hole, and you made up for it later by doling out the tenderness you’d kept hidden.

  This had meant nothing to Spandau when he told it to her, except for the embarrassment of coming from such a home, such a father. Dee had tears in her eyes. Spandau made fun of her, but truthfully could think of nothing he’d said that should move anyone to tears.

  And this, said Dee, was exactly why she was crying. That he had no idea how tragic it was.

  That was th
e word she’d used: tragic. Dee’s upbringing had been boisterous but loving. Beau might get shitfaced after a night out with the boys, but otherwise he was a model husband and father. Two sons and a daughter adored him, as he adored them. He’d raised his voice often enough but had never been malicious and never, never struck any of them. Dee had grown up so loved that she was in college before she realized what a privilege that was.

  She thanked David for telling her, and said it explained some things.

  Like what? Spandau asked.

  Like your ability to distance yourself when you feel threatened, Dee told him. Your ability to turn inside yourself, like a hedgehog.

  David said he had no idea what she was talking about, and she wouldn’t discuss it anymore.

  The fault lay in their concept of family and loyalty. Dee had grown up expansive in her love, in her trust, in her loyalties. For Spandau, life was like rowing in a very small boat, and you were either in the boat or out of the boat.

  If you were out of the boat, how long you could tread water was up to you. He loved his mother, his sister, he loved Dee and Beau. A tiny crew for a tiny yacht. The rest of the world wasn’t his problem. You protected like a tiger those closest to you and to hell with everyone else; there wasn’t even time to be sorry.

  Had this been what ruined his marriage? He thought it might be.

  The destruction was as simple, perhaps, as the difference between happy families and miserable ones. They approached the world differently, and perhaps even loved differently. For Spandau, the world was something to be mistrusted except for those proven and close to you. For Dee, the world was to be loved and embraced.