Vile Men Read online

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  She turned the bag over on the counter and shook out all eight volumes of Scrumptious Stuffed Sluts.

  I felt Steve’s gaze, but I stared at the woman, at her uneven skintone. All I could think about was how much better she’d look if she’d put on makeup.

  “I found these in his filing cabinet,” she said. “He told me everything. I made him tell me everything.”

  I stared too long. Her eyes narrowed and I shook my head.

  “My husband,” she hissed. “You know who he is. He’s in here all the time.”

  “That’s none of my business,” I said. “I just work here.”

  “You’re supporting this,” she said. “You’re ruining families, ruining lives. You have no idea how long this has gone on.” Her chest heaved. She blinked and her eyes got red, wet. “I cancelled the Internet. I spent nights talking with him. He promised he was over it and now he’s just getting all his filth from here.”

  The clock ticked. I looked down at the movies, the girls on the covers even filthier than me, taking on wine bottles and cucumbers and pillar candles.

  “We have kids,” she said.

  My lips smirked. “Like I told you, I just work here.”

  She blinked and the tears slipped down her cheek. She took a breath and looked me over, judging my low-cut shirt, my short skirt, and the streak of pink in my hair. She stared too long, just like all of the girls in high school used to.

  “It’s disgusting what you do,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t involve yourself in this,” Steve said.

  “I’m trying to keep the store in business.”

  Steve walked around the counter. He crossed his arms. “He’s not a sex-addict, Megs. He gets off to girls on a screen.”

  My heart pounded in my ears. Heat rushed up my chest. I blinked and felt the burning behind my eyes. “I don’t care about his marriage.”

  “He doesn’t want anything to do with you,” Steve said.

  I set my camera up in front of my bookshelf, the clocks ticking behind me. I took the salami out of the fridge, getting wet thinking of Nelson seeing me, seeing Masturbating Megan for the first time.

  “You’re fucking hungry, aren’t you?” I asked.

  His eyes were the lens, watching me lube up the meat, watching me spread my legs. The meat was cold, sliding in, stretching me out. The clocks ticked. My breaths got heavier, laboured.

  “Do you wanna know how disgusting I am?”

  The salami warmed inside of me. I opened myself, pushed it in deeper. The clocks ticked and my heart pounded, head spinning so fast I felt like exploding.

  There was an envelope in the return bin. Inside were the broken disc pieces of Masturbating Megan Munches Massive Meat: Volume 1. Inside were family photo of Nelson and his wife at a park. They were sitting on a playground bench with his two little daughters. On the back of the photo was a note his wife had written with a black Sharpie:

  YOU’VE BEEN CAUGHT, SLUT! STAY AWAY FROM MY HUSBAND!

  I flipped the photo over again. Nelson’s wife was wearing makeup in the photo. Her hair was shiny and straight, her pink lips turned, smirking.

  Steve would have lectured me, but Steve didn’t have the ability to understand.

  The sound of the clock was overtaken by the sound of a car pulling into the parking lot outside. I peeked through the blinds. The car was Nelson’s. His shadow was slouched inside, his head against the dash, hands gripping the wheel.

  I didn’t have to stay away from him. He would always come back. He knew me better than anyone.

  It was impossible to feel guilt, impossible to feel anything but the heat dripping down my leg.

  The second hand on the clock went tick, tick, tick.

  COLLEGE GLACIERS

  The cab driver is the kind of guy I’d fuck in my dreams. He’s got dark hair and olive skin and thick bench-pressed triceps. He’s probably got a monster dick, a big dick that’s actually a monster, a throbbing snake with a face. That’s just the way my dreams are. They’ve been nightmares since I started university.

  I pop another pill.

  “Can you drive a little faster?” I ask. “I really need to get to my dorm.”

  “Relax,” he says. “It ain’t that late, Cherry.”

  “Cherry?”

  “Cherry,” he says. “Like the fruit.”

  “I know what cherries are.”

  “Well, that’s sweet,” he says.

  I sit back and run my tongue over my teeth, picturing cherries, red stains of failure. Anxiety fills my chest. I swallow and grind my teeth. The sound vibrates through my ears. It’s how a glacier must sound when it moves and scrapes the earth. It’s called “glacial abrasion” and it’s going to be on the exam tomorrow. The professor said so.

  “I really need to get to my dorm,” I say again.

  “Of course you do,” he says. “Girls like you always gotta be somewhere.”

  The streets look like they’re covered in a miserable haze through the cab’s tinted windows. Downtown’s like a big garden full of ghosts, bright girls stumbling through the streets in their glitter dresses. Bass filters from the nightclubs. The sound throbs in my skull, makes my heart beat erratically.

  I try to swallow but my mouth’s already too dry.

  “You don’t look okay, Cherry,” he says. His brows furrow, and I meet his gaze through the rear-view mirror. His eyes are dark, little demons staring at me instead of the road.

  “I need to study,” I say.

  “In that dress?” he asks.

  My fingers flinch, pulling at the fabric. The dress is white with printed cherries. The fabric is tight around my thighs. Ashley gawked at me when I first tried it on. She said I looked so skinny. She said she was so jealous she couldn’t even stand it. She didn’t even care that I was failing Geography.

  “In that dress, you look like you belong downtown,” he says.

  “It’s not my dress,” I say.

  “Doesn’t change the fact that you’re wearing it,” he says.

  “My friend wanted me to wear it,” I say. My fingers clench and I tug at my seat belt, the pills kicking in like coffee jitters, just all kinds of worse.

  “You must have ditched her tonight,” the driver says. He approaches the rest light at the intersection and I feel his reflected mirror gaze, snake eyes staring.

  “She’s not really a friend,” I say. “I don’t hang out with her much.”

  “No?” he asks.

  “We don’t have that much in common.”

  The light changes and he puts his foot back on the gas.

  I look outside again. Two girls are yelling at each other on the sidewalk, fully made up with spray tans and clip-in extensions. I imagine their purses crammed full of credit cards, condoms and lip gloss, concealed within glossy cheetah prints with glitzy metal brand names.

  My purse is velvet vintage.

  My purse doesn’t even contain makeup, just my cash and my ID and a bag full of pills.

  I pop another one and catch the driver looking at me. He pulls off Main and drives past the coffee shops and the pharmacy, then turns onto Columbia and cruises past the hospital. The lit windows beam bright in the night.

  “Do you think she’s mad?” he asks.

  I look up.

  “Your friend,” he says. “She’s probably pissed at you.”

  “I never go out,” I say. “She knows that I’ve got an exam tomorrow. She knows I can’t fail Geography.”

  “What happens if you fail?” he asks.

  “I can’t,” I say. “I’m not going to fail. That’s why you have to get me back to my dorm.”

  “Are you no good at Geography?” he asks.

  The layered effect of the pills burns at my insides. My chest rattles. My fingers clench. The passing sights blur in the dark. I shut my eyes. Behind them is just a rush of black shadows, ghosts in my head, pieces of myself melting away with the receding glacier that’
s going to be on the exam. The professor said so.

  “I asked you a question,” the driver says.

  “What?” My heart’s throbbing and I glance at him in the rear-view mirror.

  “Are you no good at Geography?” he asks again. “Do you not know how the world works?”

  He drives further and my fingers start shaking. I glance at the readout on the meter beside the steering wheel, the red numbers flickering. I can’t focus on them. I reach into my purse for another pill.

  “You look scared, Cherry,” he says.

  “Stop calling me Cherry.”

  “I just call it as I see it.” He looks me over as he drives over the set of speed bumps at the campus entrance. The car shakes and the pill slips out of my grasp and under his seat. “You don’t know anything,” he says.

  My heart’s pounding, making an ache out of my chest. He approaches the dorms at the slow parking lot speed limit and my heart echoes uneasy in my ears. I squint to read the display beside the steering wheel. I peel out the only bill from my purse and hand it to him. He takes the money and shrugs.

  “Take care of yourself, Cherry.”

  I pull at the door handle, anxiety-ridden, scrambling to pull the strap of my purse over my shoulder, but it catches the door and falls onto the pavement. My pills spill out, along with my photo ID. The picture on the card is shitty. My face looks hollow and my eyes look too wide. I scramble for the card, but then he gets out of the car and pushes me aside to pick up the bag of blue pills.

  “No, please,” I say. “I need those. I really do.”

  He smiles and holds up the bag. “They’re not in a bottle,” he says. “You typically get Adderall in a bottle, don’t you?”

  “I need those to study. You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “I know plenty,” he says. “You college girls all want the same thing.”

  “You’re just going to sell them to somebody else,” I say, reaching for the bag.

  “Look, Cherry,” he says, stepping back. “You come to the gym one day, I’ll get you determined, but this shit, it makes your brain all red.”

  He stares too long, takes a step too close.

  “You’ve all got sad eyes,” he says. “Sad kitten eyes.”

  He gives the pills back to me, pushes the bag against my torso and waits until I grasp it before he backs away. “The gym I work at,” he says. “It’s downtown, under the Grotto Bar. It’s in a basement but it ain’t so bad.” He backs away, climbs into the cab and drives off.

  The pills shuffle in the plastic like plucked bits of myself. The jitters taper and I start to shake for real, because every time the pills recede I’m left with a new landscape. There’s outwash plains and terminal moraines and drumlins.

  I swallow.

  It’s all going to be on the exam tomorrow. The professor said so.

  SLIPPERY SLOPES

  The kid on the white bike was a nuisance, lurking in the shadows of the Pineview Estates parking lot with his flashlight and his uncoiled wire coat-hanger, leaving marks on the cars, scratches on paint, on windows.

  He’d steal things. Never important things, but they were things nonetheless. Having just chased the kid out of the parking lot, Luke Truman dug through his pocket for his brand new pack of cigarettes.

  The cigarettes were purchased in a lapse of judgement, but Luke unwrapped the package, wondering what he would have done if he hadn’t tripped and lost his grasp of the kid’s baggy sweatshirt. He wiped his forehead and brought a fresh cigarette to his lips. Frayed nerves twitched through his fingers as he ignited his lighter. He inhaled the smoke, the nicotine bringing on a foreign sense of relief that he vaguely remembered.

  Four years, it had been.

  He probably should have told Anita he’d been having cravings, but he hated the idea of worrying her. She already knew that he wasn’t sleeping through the night. Luke blamed his anxiety on work, but even after putting in a good day at the pulp mill he’d still wake up in a pool of his own sweat. He tried opening the bedroom window, tried sleeping on top of the sheets, but he could never get a full night of rest when his body was so taut with nervous ticks.

  He started taking walks through the neighbourhood, the night air cooling his flesh and doing little else. One night he ended up at the 7-11. There was a guy with a backwards cap leaning against the side of the building, inhaling a cigarette, the smoke floating upward. Luke had craved relaxation for so long, so he walked into the 7-11 and pulled out his wallet.

  The smokes sat unopened in Luke’s pocket for a week, but their burden now felt a little bit lighter with a lit cigarette between his fingers. The smoke tickled his lungs when he breathed in. He coughed and hacked up phlegm, its thickness sliding up his throat. He spat on the cement, his fingers flinching, shaking.

  Luke stared out at the cars in the complex parking lot, safe for the night because of his action. He finished the cigarette and dropped it, scraping it against the cement with the sole of his shoe. It was just one cigarette, but the pack lingered in the chest pocket of his jacket, his heart beating against it.

  He slept on the couch so Anita wouldn’t smell the smoke.

  He was up before Anita, printing out notices to pass to the neighbours. He didn’t hear her footsteps when she walked downstairs. She took one of the notices from the printer:

  The little shit on the white bike is back and looking into your cars and trucks. Be vigilant! Lock up and keep valuables away and out of sight. I chased him out of here at 1 AM and almost caught him. Lucky for the both of us!!!

  “Three exclamation points?” she asked.

  “Does it make me sound stupid?”

  “You shouldn’t have chased him,” she said.

  Luke took the notice from his wife’s grasp. “He would have stolen something.”

  “It was just CDs,” she said.

  “They were the boys’ CDs.”

  “You hated those things. You regretted buying them the second you played them in the car.”

  Luke remembered them, the songs about banana phones, baby belugas, robins in the rain. What was worse was seeing his twin sons upset over the loss—Andrew and Oliver, identical as the sound of their cries.

  “This isn’t about the CDs,” Luke said. “It’s about some shit kid taking what isn’t his.”

  Anita put her hand on his shoulder. “I just don’t want to see you get all wound up about this,” she said. “You’re stressed enough as it is.”

  Luke hesitated. He sighed and looked up at his wife. “I’m just doing what I can, Ani.”

  She took his hand and placed it over her belly, where their third child was kicking. “Since four AM,” she said. “He knows when you’re upset.”

  “He?”

  Anita smiled. “He sure moves around like the boys did. He kicks enough for the both of them.”

  “You want another boy?” he asked.

  She smiled and leaned in. Luke could smell her coconut milk lotion. He felt her soft lips against his furrowed brow and held his breath until his lungs ached.

  “He’s going to be a handful,” she mocked.

  Luke exhaled slowly, pulled his hand from his wife’s stomach, and turned to the stack of notices from the printer.

  Luke took the boys to the park on Sunday afternoon so Anita could cook dinner. He thought that he might have a chance to sneak away and smoke a second cigarette while the boys played, but his retired neighbour Joe was already at the park flying his remote control helicopter. The boys let go of his hands so they could play on the monkey bars, and Luke slipped his hand into his pocket, fingers flinching around his lighter.

  “Sounds like you had an interesting night last night,” Joe said.

  “You could say that,” Luke said. “He was going to break into your car.”

  “Really?” Joe asked. “He wouldn’t have found much, the lousy punk. I never understood kids like that, ruining a decent neighbourhood with their juvenile shit.”

  “He’ll be back,�
�� Luke said.

  “Is Anita worried?”

  “She’s more worried about me than she is about anything else,” he said.

  Joe laughed, his gaze on the helicopter in the sky. “Nothing worse than when your wife starts to worry about you.”

  Luke let go of the lighter. He watched the helicopter float through the sky, rubbing at the stubble on his neck.

  “Wouldn’t it be scary if she was having twins again?” Joe asked.

  “She’s not having twins,” Luke said, gritting his teeth. “The technician said so.”

  “Technicians make mistakes sometimes.”

  “I saw the twins. I know what twins look like.” Luke’s fingers tightened. His jaw shifted.

  “I’m just messing with you, Luke. You’re going to be fine.”

  Joe let go of the control and slapped Luke’s shoulder. The helicopter twitched in the sky.

  The day after he handed out the notices, Luke arrived home from work and noticed that the neighbour had left his truck unlocked. He unloaded the groceries from the car and peered through the truck’s window. An open wallet was left in the driver’s seat. Luke shook his head, staring at the neighbour’s driver’s license photo, twenty-six and fresh-faced, spending evenings out smoking on the patio. It was what Luke used to do in that fifteen minutes after he got home from work, was indulge in relief.

  He went inside and brought the groceries upstairs. Anita dug through the bags. “Did you not get any bread?” she asked.

  “Dammit,” Luke said. He scratched at his forehead and sighed.

  “We really need bread,” she said.

  “Can’t the boys have something other than sandwiches for lunch?”

  “I already promised them sandwiches. You know how they get.”

  “Alright,” he said, and he pulled out his keys again.

  He passed the neighbours truck and he stared at the open wallet on the seat. All he could taste was tobacco when he breathed in. He opened the driver’s door of the truck and pushed the lock down. He slammed the door harder than he should have. Luke stared at the neighbour’s youthful face and gritted his teeth. He couldn’t remember ever forgetting his wallet anywhere. He couldn’t remember ever forgetting to lock his car door.