The Ledger

Chapter 4: Nothing's Owed

Chapter 4: Nothing's Owed

9

There were five or six of them in there, laughing, men and women both, and under the laughing was a woman's voice with ice moving in the glass.

"Is it true? Your little thing walked out on you?"

"He did."

"Are you going to call him?"

"Call him." A glass went down on something hard. "Nobody in my life has ever had to talk me down. I'm not spending breath on that."

"He's got a job. He's got a face. He's not nothing."

"He's a hobby," one of the women said, delighted about it. "That's all that ever was."

"So what do you do?"

"Nothing. He comes here."

"And if he doesn't?"

"Then he comes later." Ice again. "Nobody does this to me and keeps their week."

Farther in, a woman I couldn't see at all said, "I want him on his knees. I want the whole show."

"With his face in it," somebody said. "I want to watch him use his tongue."

They were still laughing at that when something hit me between the shoulder blades and I went through the door at a run and took the low table down with my knees.

Glass came apart around me. A bottle. The tray. The bucket. I put my right hand out to catch myself and put it down in the pieces, and the first thing I felt in that room was my own hand opening.

Somebody screamed at me from the far couch.

"Do you know what that bottle costs? Thirty thousand dollars. Do you have thirty thousand dollars?"

"Yes," I said. I was still on the floor.

It bought me one second of quiet, and I used it to stand up.

"Sorry about the door." It was the voice from the phone. Early twenties, a black leather jacket with studs along one shoulder, hands in his pockets, a face that had nothing to do with the apology. "You stood out there four minutes. I figured I'd help."

"You pushed me."

"I opened a door," he said. "You did the rest of it."

She was at the end of the couch with her legs crossed and she hadn't moved for any of it. Not the table, not the screaming, not me getting up with blood running down the heel of my hand and into my cuff. There were four phones out in that room and one of them was pointed at my face.

"So," she said. "You came here to ask."

"I came about the thirty thousand dollars."

"Then ask me for it." She turned her glass a quarter turn against the arm of the couch. "It's one word. I've heard you say it before."

"No."

"Then here we are instead." She tipped a hand off her knee. "The bottle's on my carpet because of you."

"I already paid for it." I got the phone up with the bad hand and showed her the screen. Monday, 9:04 at night, the alert still sitting at the top of the list. LARKSPUR CLUB. $30,000.00. Available balance, $500.00. "That's this room."

She read it. She didn't say yes and she didn't say no. Then she leaned back into the couch and clapped for me, slow, above her own head.

"Fine," she said. "Then nothing's owed. Drink it and I'll let you go."

The bottle was in pieces in the wool. There was one place left to drink it from.

"Move the lamp."

"Get his face, not the floor."

"He's not going to do it."

"He will," she said.

The kid in the jacket brought his phone up and around. "I'm rolling."

She didn't look at him. "Put the phone down."

"I got him in the door for you."

"Mhm." Still not looking at him. "Put it down."

"No," he said, pleasant about it, and kept rolling.

I didn't move.

"Not what you pictured," she said. "This is what money is. It's nobody stopping you."

She looked down at the pieces on the carpet. "Cheap. Like the drawings."

My phone started ringing in my pocket. RAY SANDOVAL. A hand came past my ear, lifted it out of my fingers, tapped the screen green, and held it up where the whole room could hear it.

"Ethan." Ray's voice came out of the phone big enough to fill the suite. "I had a call about you tonight and I don't like the shape of it. I've got two other people who'd take this project. If you don't want it, tell me now and I'll hand it over."

"I want it."

"Then I don't want to hear about it again."

The phone came back into my hand. The kid in the jacket did it without looking at me. I put it in my pocket.

"Actually," she said, "forget it. Go home. I'll find somebody else to draw it."

"No," I said. "I'll drink it."

Without the job the last three years were a joke.

I got down on the carpet and put my face to it. The bottle had gone over the napkin and into the wool, and there was more of it down there than I expected. I took it up in mouthfuls. The glass came up with it, small pieces I couldn't see. One of them cut my lip. One went into my tongue, and my tongue was worse than my hand, and the whole time it burned in the cuts on my palm. I had to stop twice and pick a piece out of my mouth and set it on the carpet in front of everybody, carefully, like a man doing a job.

The room liked it. Somebody turned a lamp so it was on my back. The phones moved around me.

"Get the other side."

"That's it. Kneel up. Like you mean it."

"Who's a good boy."

"Say thank you."

"He's doing it. Look at him. He's actually doing it."

"Say thank you to Vivian."

I didn't.

When there was nothing left in the wool I sat back on my heels with the taste of copper in my mouth and looked up at her.

She hit me. Flat hand, full arm, and the sound went off the walls and the room went quiet around it.

"I told you to drink it," she said. "You got down on a rug and drank it."

I laughed at her. My mouth was full of blood and the laugh came out of it wet. I looked up at her with it still on my face and something moved behind her eyes, fast, and then wasn't there. I don't know what it was.

"Isn't this what you wanted?" I said. "Is that enough, Hale? I can go again."

I put my hand down to get back to it and my arm gave out and I caught the edge of the table.

"Get out."

She picked her glass back up and sat down, and the kid in the jacket went to the door and held it open and gave me a little bow.

I got up and got out of there with my hand over my mouth.

In the hall a server came around the corner with a tray and stopped so hard the glasses rattled.

"Sir. Do you want an ambulance?"

"No."

"Do you want me to get somebody?"

"No."

The bathroom was down the hall, tile and one lamp and a sink with a good mirror over it. I ran the water and put my face under it and spat, and it came out pink, and then I did it again and it was pink again. I looked at myself in the mirror.

"Ethan," I said. "Look at you."

The server came in behind me with a paper cup of ice from the bar and set it on the counter next to the sink and didn't say anything about it.

I put the ice in my mouth and the cold hit the cut and my knees went and I had to hold the counter. When my eyes came back I knew what the rest of the night was going to be. Thirty thousand dollars of liquor, and I'd drunk it off the floor, and now I had to get on a bicycle and ride it home.

10

She was at the bottom of the stairs with her coat on and her arms folded.

"Do you regret it?"

My mouth wouldn't work right. I shook my head.

"Do you regret walking out on me?"

I shook my head again. That was the truth both times.

She came and put her hand around my throat and pushed me into the wall. She held me there with her face close to mine. She smelled the same.

"Drawings. My office, nine o'clock." She let go and stepped back and straightened her coat. "If they're not there, you know what happens."

She went up the stairs.

It was raining when I got outside, the kind that doesn't commit. I unlocked the bike and rode it back one-handed, down out of the north side and across the river, and the rain got into my hand and burned the whole way.

Tommy had the door open before I got the chain around the frame. He looked at my shirt and put both hands on top of his head and walked a circle in his own hallway.

"What is that. Is that blood. Ethan, is that blood."

"A bottle. And mine."

He pulled me in and threw the deadbolt and sat me down at the kitchen table under the light and turned my hand over, and made a noise like he'd been hit in the stomach.

"That's stitches. We're going to the ER."

"In the morning."

"Now."

"In the morning. I have to send something first."

He got me a clean shirt and stood outside the bathroom door while I washed, and when I came out he had a beer he wasn't drinking and a face like a man waiting on a verdict. I gave him the short version. I told him about the door and the bottle and the carpet and the phone call from Ray, and I told it flat, because flat was all I had.

He heard me out. Then he stood up and had a great deal to say about her and her family and the building they were sitting in.

"That thirty grand. We're getting it back."

"The last time I went at her I lost an apartment and a job and my face. Check the math on that."

He didn't have anything to say to that.

"Finish the project," I said. "Then I'm going home."

He looked at me a while. Then he got up and got the ibuprofen and a glass of water and set them down in front of me and went to bed.

Swallowing hurt. I sat on the floor with my back against his couch and the laptop on my knees and went through the set line by line, and at 3:58 in the morning I sent the set to Doug Whitaker and copied Ray. Subject line: final set attached.

Then I put my wallet in my jacket pocket for the morning. The ticket was still in there, behind the bank card. I left it where it was.

Tommy's alarm was set for six. I lay down on the floor with the wet towel over my face and waited for it.

Author’s Note

Here's the thing I can't shake from this chapter: Ethan gives away almost everything in that suite — his blood, his dignity, the floor he kneels on — and then draws the line at one word. Thank you. He won't say it. It's the only thing he keeps all night, and it costs him a slap. I still can't tell if that's strength or just the last thing a man has left.

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