Gavin Holder Series

Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Sammy-who-was-once-a-straghtedge was lying on the ground, unconscious or semi-conscious, and Mike Croop was kicking him repeatedly with his heavy black workboots. If he kept kicking Sammy much longer, Sammy would never wake up at all.

“Help, Chaos, this guy's killing him!” Jackie screamed in panic, and I realized I was going to have to intervene because Chaos was me. It's a stupid thing to call yourself, I'll give you that. But it was my street name, and the reason my band was called Chaos Factor. At first I had the impression that Jackie was standing next to someone else, then that she was completely alone – like I said, I was drunk.

But then my head was suddenly clear, as clear as main street at noon in summer – or so it felt for a few moments. I came running over across the parking lot with some kind of wordless war cry, and knocked Mike Croop three feet clear of Sammy. The rain exploded from the heavy sky at the same moment, and Mike slipped on the wet pavement and fell to his knees.

“What the f**k are you doing?” I yelled. “Can't you see you're gonna kill him?”

In the dark of the parking lot I couldn't possibly have seen his eyes, but in my memory or my imagination I saw them as dark pits of rage and madness. He came up swinging, or so I thought. I never felt the knife, it slid across my body so easy it felt like nothing more than a regular punch. I didn't feel any fear, I was too drunk and too caught up in the moment. Instead I laid right into him, punching him in the face so hard I actually felt a few of his teeth come out. That part got mentioned in the newspapers later, a symbol for the middle-class readers of the mindless brutality of the punk scene. The fact that I was just trying to keep my friend from getting killed never made it in to the papers.

What happened after that, I couldn't really remember. The vodka or maybe the sheer trauma of what happened had erased that memory, leaving me with nothing except guilt and speculation, endless years of guilt and speculation I could never get over or get rid of.

All I knew was this. At some point I was lying on the ground with my face in the water, with rain pouring down on the back of my head, with the taste of blood in my mouth. Someone was screaming a name, but I couldn't quite hear what name they were screaming or who was screaming it. Mike Croop was dead, although I didn't find that out until later. I had no idea how this had happened, but he'd been stabbed three times.

When I woke up again I was somewhere else, somewhere dark and wrapped in sheets of plastic. I couldn't understand what I was looking at, but later on I figured it out. There was plastic hanging everywhere because we were in an unfinished construction project. There had been a number of failed attempts to get the city's economy going again with new development, and this was the result of one of them. I was in some half-finished building that would never be built, a failed project destined to rot back into the rot all around it.

Jackie Cole was using a lighter to sterilize a sewing needle, and there was a long red thread hanging down from it like a fishing line. There were no lights anywhere except a flashlight, which she had balanced on a nearby pile of cinder blocks. Her hand was shaking, but her voice was totally steady. “Don't worry, hon, I know what I'm doing. You'll be alright.” Her eyes were kind, and for some reason I wanted to believe her. I passed out just long enough for her to get started and then of course I yelled out loud. She had just poured vodka all over my wounds.

“Hang in there, buddy,” she was saying. “You can't go to the hospital. That asshole from the parking lot is dead, and Sammy's still unconscious. The cops might know someone else got hurt in the fight but they won't know who. The only one who knows you were even there is me.”

“Lots of people saw me go outside,” I moaned. She only shrugged, pulling the thread through one of the gashes in my torso. The blood was splattered all over her hands but she didn't seem to care.

“If anyone was sober enough to have noticed you leaving, what can they really tell the cops? The truth is, a lot of people went out through those doors and no one can know exactly when he got stabbed, so... I'll get you sewed up and you can forget it ever happened.”

“That just isn't going to work, Jackie! He's really dead?”

“As dead as you would have been if you hadn't done what you did.”

“It was self-defense. I'll say so.”

“With a knife?” She laughed. “That's not a good idea. No cop is gonna look at it that way, and no jury will either. This is your best bet, hon. Believe me.”

“How the hell did you even get me here?”

I winced, feeling the hot needle pull the thread through my skin again and again.

“These cuts aren't really as bad as they look, or you'd be as dead as the other guy. You actually walked here, with a little help from little ol' me. Blacked it out, huh?”

If I thought really hard, I could remember a few images or a vague dreamlike sensation of my feet pounding heavily one after the other as blood poured down my torso. Did I really stumble here, bleeding all down the sidewalk? Had Jackie led me here?

“Blood trail...” I said.

“The rain will just have to take care of it, or we're out of luck. Now sit up a little and let me have a look at you.”

I did what she asked, and she bit her lip as she examined my upper body.

“These scars are going to look horrible. You'll have to make up a story about those at some point.”

“I feel sick,” I said.

“Go ahead and puke if you need to, I won't be offended. But what you really need is some sleep. Don't worry, I'll stay here with you. You came and helped when I asked you to, so from now on I'm going to take good care of you. You've got a new big sister.”

She was true to her word, but her use of that last phrase only confirmed her unreachable status for me. By the time we showed up at the squat again I was seriously, stupidly in love with her, not just infatuated. We took walks together and talked for hours, we went to shows together as if we were a couple. We got drunk together all the time, although she never told me anything about her life or where she really came from or why she always seemed like she was only slumming even though she obviously had nowhere else to go. We helped each other watch out for the cops, ducking into buildings or disappearing down alleyways when they rolled by.

The cops would stop our friends in the street and ask them questions about what happened to Mike, and some of them even got taken in for formal questioning – although always the wrong guys, the guys least likely to put two and two together. The most common theory was that Sammy the former Straightedge had stabbed Mike Croop, who had then beaten him into a coma before bleeding out. Sammy remained in a coma and never did come of it, so there was no way to ask him.

There were street rumors for a long time about vengeance from the straightedge guys, although nothing ever came of it. The killing of Mike Croop was a huge local scandal that led to the Freehold losing its license and eventually to some local politician making sure that the squat got evicted so he could say he had cracked down on the violence in the punk scene. But that all played out after Jackie moved on. She was there in the squat with us for about four months, and I can remember every minute of it as if it happened just last week.

One night I was lying on the floor and she was cuddled up with me, her head on my shoulder while we talked and drank rum.

“What's this in your pocket?” she asked me after her hand brushed against the metal of the watch.

“It's my mother's pocket-watch,” I said. I took it out and showed her. “The only thing I still have of hers.”

“She died, hon?”

“Yeah. My dad had walked out on us when I was a baby and my mother died of cancer when I was nine. I don’t remember my dad at all, but I remember my mother pretty well. Or at least the feeling I get when I think about her. After she was gone I had a bunch of foster families – the alcoholics, the born-again Christians, one pedophile who got caught with kiddie porn before he could do anything to me, and one raging asshole who was mad about something from the minute he woke up until the minute he went to sleep. I was with that guy and his family for the longest stretch before I ran away. I've been staying in abandoned buildings ever since.”

She smiled sadly at the watch, and traced the designs in it with her finger.

“This is beautiful. I bet your mom was too. Don't worry about it, hon,” she said, “You have me now.” She laid her head down on my shoulder and closed her eyes.

“Listen, Gavin, there’s something I have to ask you,” she said.

“Sure, no problem. You can ask me anything.”

“If I asked you to go somewhere with me, would you go? Like, if I said that I didn’t want to live here anymore and I wanted to go back home and see... my old friends and stuff. Would you come meet them with me?”

“I’d go anywhere with you,” I said, and went to kiss her. I finally felt like the moment was right, like the stars had aligned and she would definitely go for it. But she had fallen asleep, and I pulled back from kissing her at the last moment because she had started to snore. It was okay, I didn’t mind. With my arms around her that night my life actually felt like it was worth living despite everything that had happened.

She stayed there with her head on my shoulder all night long, and I held her close to me until the sun came up. That wasn't the only time we slept side by side, and yet I never had s*x with her. She never said anything else about me running away with her, and there was never another moment where she seemed to want me to kiss her. The way she treated me was always the same – she always looked out for me, she always took care of me, but she slept with Kelley or with Popov Pete or occasionally with someone passing through, but never with me. I didn't resent it. As far as I was concerned she had saved my life, and there was literally nothing I wouldn't do for her. I would have lied for her, taken a bullet for her or killed for her – and in a way I already had.

I figured she just wasn't interested in me in that way, that she really thought of me like a little brother. So when I took a girl back from a show one night and slept alone in one of the abandoned rooms with her, I had no reason at all to think Jackie would mind. She had s*x with other people, why shouldn't I? I walked right past the corner where Jackie and I kept our stuff, dropped my backpack with the watch in it next to hers, and went hand in hand with my new friend to go enjoy each other's company.

I came out with the girl the next morning figuring Jackie would actually be happy for me, but there was no sign of her or her stuff. The corner where she usually slept was empty, not even her sleeping bag was there. I asked Popov Pete about it, but he just laughed and said she'd left in the middle of the night without saying anything to anyone. I felt this stab of terror like somebody had put an ice-pick through my chest, but at first I figured she would come back before long. She never did. That was the last I saw of her, she never came back to the squat again and no one saw her at any shows. I freaked out of course, and spent most of the next month drinking and crying. That's probably why it took me three days to realize my pocket-watch had disappeared.