Crown Royal
The bottle of Crown was new, unopened, just sitting there on the bar in the kitchen. It was the nicest thing in that fucking kitchen, really. The sink being piled high with dirty dishes, dishes that had all kinds of colorful shit on them, shit I’d never even seen before. They’d probably smelled bad at one point but now didn’t smell at all cuz they’d been sitting out for so long. All the other kitchen counters were equally fucked up, yellowed with age and cluttered with trash: there was an empty box of saltines here, a half empty tin of sardines there, which alone was gross as fuck cuz, really, who the fuck eats sardines? There were crumpled up Snowball wrappers and an old paper towel, which was mostly clean with blue, yellow and orange printed flowers on it. It had a couple of fucking pieces of burnt toast wrapped in it, one piece had a bite taken out of it as if whoever had made the toast thought to give it a try before deciding that it was too fucking gross to continue with. Then, precariously perched near a ledge, there was a chipped yellow smiley face mug with something that had probably been coffee once but was now some fucking petri dish for shit that was giving it a green and white topping. You don’t get that shit at your local coffeehouses, motherfucker, I’ll tell you that, not unless you special order it!
There were crumbs all over the counters, down on the floor, every fucking place! You could say the place was downright crumby if that wasn’t some lame ass pun. There were even crumbs all over on this one folding table in the kitchen that had a leg all broken and was shorter than the other three, it was all propped up with this old ass hardback Webster’s Dictionary under it, the table had what looked like a white bedsheet doing double duty as a tablecloth, stained with what looked like mustard, ketchup and brown things which, I thought were gravy stains. At least, I fucking hope they were gravy stains! Then there were all these fucking mouse droppings which, if you didn’t pay attention to and didn’t know what you were looking for, looked to the untrained eye like just more crumbs. As shitty looking as the kitchen and dining area looked, I was surprised it didn’t stink.
After I’d dropped out of high school I’d gotten a job as a home health aid so, none of this was super shocking or anything like that, I’d seen worse shit before but it all looked a hella’ lot worse than it did when I’d been here a few months earlier. A hella’ lot worse! Place had gone to seed and fast! I mean, I kinda’ figured that the wife, Mrs. B, that she was the one that ran the show and called all the shots but who’d have thought the guy would fall apart so quickly after she dropped dead. I mean, he had been a legendary hardass so, I figured he’d have kept his shit somewhat together or, you know, he’d have had someone looking out for his old legendary ass but, no, apparently not.
Course, it didn’t happen like that, not quite like that, anyway, not the way I heard it. The just dropping dead part, I mean. Word was he found her sitting in a caramel-colored leather recliner they had in the living room, book in hand, some smutty romance novel or some shit. She was fucking deader than that Russian mystic guy from back in the day, the one they shot and stabbed and poisoned and finally drowned. That’s fucking dead, man! That’s fucking dead! Blood vessel burst in her stomach or some shit. Happened so fast it caught her just sitting there in her fucking chair reading and there she was, still sitting when he came home and found her.
I imagined him coming in the door and maybe calling her name or starting to talk to her about where he’d been or what he’d been doing and there being no answer, just fucking silence. He probably flipped out. She seemed like the type who was the talker in the pair, like the one that did all the sharing and the storytelling and kept things from being totally, peacefully, blissfully quiet every minute of the day. Women can be like that, I know.
Still, maybe not. Hell, maybe he’d just seemed shy that day I was there because we were around. Maybe, when it was just him and her, maybe he talked up a hurricane and they laughed and cussed and yelled and fought and fucked. You never know. You think you do but you don’t. I stood there in the kitchen and didn’t hear anything but the ticking of the big old grandfather clock in the living room. So, since I didn’t see the famous leather recliner anywhere, I figured they took it out and threw it away or some shit. At first, I thought maybe he wasn’t home and I had the whole place to myself to go through. It wasn’t until I started down the hall to the bedrooms that I heard the snoring.
It was a two bedroom affair and he was in the smaller one, that one I figured was a guest room. He had the door cracked open and he was lying on his side, facing the door, his head propped up on a pair of smashed, dirty pillows, breathing through his mouth. What was left of the hair on his head was matted and whiter than the last time I’d seen him even though it hadn’t been that long. His breaths came ragged, uneven, and he seemed to shudder on his exhales. I peeked through the door and saw him lying there and made sure to keep quiet, I didn’t expect any trouble from the old guy but you never knew. He’d had a reputation back in the day and even though he was old and looked like shit, you just can’t take chances. Thing is with life, it’s best to play it safe whenever possible. Stealing from the old and the sick was as much a crapshoot as any fucking thing. You could plan it all you wanted but things could still go crazy on you in a half a second. I just wanted the old lady’s jewelry, that was it. I knew he kept in the other room, the master bedroom, up in the back of the closet, in an old leather suitcase. Or, at least, that’s what Tillie had said.
She was the one that was in charge. It was obvious as soon as we got there. Yeah, she was frail, a tiny thing that was little more than skin and bones but her eyes had a spark to them and her make-up was on point even if it couldn’t hide the fact that she looked pale as fuck. Him? He smiled and nodded and he shook our hands with a strong, firm grip but he wouldn’t make eye contact for long and seemed antsy. He was the shy type, I guessed, not one for people if he could help it. I understood that, even as I took an instinctive dislike to the way his wife bossed everybody around including him. Fuck it, life is hard as hell and people make it worse as much or more as they make it better so, being shy, that shit made sense to me. I always would rather just keep to myself than have to put up with a lot of people and their bullshit anyway.
As for the wife, it wasn’t the bossing per se that made me all pissed the fuck off. Hey, I got no problem with bitches being the boss. Really! It was just the way she went about it, is all. She had this sneer to her face when she said things and she always added insults to everything. Like, she couldn’t just ask you to do a thing, she had to make it into some production: “If you’re done just standing around,” she’d start out, “maybe you could actually do something and move the garden hose out of the way.” Shit like that.
Why act like that, you know? I mean, what the fuck? Just ask somebody to move the goddamn hose! That’s easier! Or, if you really want to step it up, you could be polite and throw in a motherfucking ‘please’ for good measure. But no, not this cunt! She stood there, not even five feet in heels, arms crossed, looking like we were excavating some Egyptian tomb or some shit when all we were doing was digging up some dead yuccas and laying down some new rock in their fucking weed-infested backyard.
Chichi had talked me into the landscaping job even though he knew from the joint that I hated getting fucking dirty. I hated that shit! He laughed at me with that toothless laugh of his when he saw my reaction. “You want to be clean,” he said, “you gotta’ get dirty first!” As if that was some sort of cryptic Far Eastern wisdom or some shit.
I took the fucking job. What the hell else was I gonna’ do? Tina was pegging my ass over all the money she said I’d promised to send her for Joaquin even though I couldn’t remember agreeing to jack shit. She was always tearing me down, man, always busting my balls. If I had dreams, she called them delusions. If I didn’t have dreams, I was fucking lazy and a scrub. If I was working, I wasn’t hard enough. If I wasn’t working, well, she’d yell at me that it was no surprise I turned out to be such a fucking loser. That fucking bitch, I swear!
How do you fall in love with a bitch like that? I mean, she wasn’t even the hottest piece of ass I ever scored. She didn’t have the prettiest face I’d ever tea-bagged my nutsack on, either. Yeah, her pussy was tight and it was wet enough but, man, I’m not sure she scored top marks in either of those areas either to be perfectly fucking honest. Still, she had me man, she had me by the short and curlies! I wanted her so bad, so, so fucking bad it was almost like I was the fucking one in heat whenever she was around!
God, I hated that bitch but I loved the scars those fake-ass nails of hers left down my back, especially when they were fresh and bloody and raw. You know what I mean? War wounds, I told myself. The sort of shit I’d look back on when I was old and gray and be proud of. Yes! I would shout into the mirror someday when I was in the fucking old folks home, “I was there back in 2019, in that broken down queen sized bed with fucking Tina Hartnett blowing load after load inside her, all over her face, all over her back.”
Whenever it got too rough, I just reminded myself that later I’d be glad I got through it all, that the tough stuff was what made life worth living. At least, that’s what some smart motherfucker once said.
The high temps of peak summer had been sweated out of the air and the slightest of chills was showing up in the mornings now, fall’s way of saying, “Hello. Remember me?”
Once I got in the place, through the back door with the shitty lock, I was hit by the staleness of it all and the built-up heat. When you came in from the backdoor the kitchen and dining area were to your left and the living room off to your right.
Everyone who knew anything, and that wasn’t many people really, knew it was Hector Esparza’s place. Hector did bad things to people for people who were even worse than he was. He got paid really good to do what he did but he didn’t like to be flashy. He kept his home, simple. He spent his money on two things, a nice car and the finest things he could find for the love of his life, his wife, Berenice.
His car was in the garage, a black Chrysler 300 from back in the day when they were all classy looking and were designed to be a poor man’s Bentley. A greasy piece of bright yellow plastic rope hung down from the latch to the attic. I grabbed it and pulled hard and the latch opened and the stairs just folded down right as rain. So I went on up to check the attic out.
I figured, all those years doing the work he did, Hector would have the attic all piled high with goodies. Man, was I fucking disappointed. It was all shit up there, all personal shit, photo albums, his wife’s old wedding dress all sealed up in plastic. One box, it had all these yellowed letters from the time Hector did a stretch up in the state pen. Looked like Berenice and him wrote to each other every fucking day or some shit. I read a few of them before folding them up and putting them back in their envelopes and stuffing them back into their boxes. The fucking shit people save man, it never ceases to amaze me!
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You gotta’ know all the photo albums were the same lame shit, right? Cuz, they were! All these pictures of him and her on vacations, on dates, at the high school prom, at birthdays, at their wedding, at their son’s christening, at their daughter’s confirmation, at a welcome home party from when he got home from doing his stretch. Hell, there was even one album, at the bottom of the box, that was all of nudie pics of his wife when she was young. Like, they did the pics maybe while they were still dating or, hell, right after marrying maybe. She looked good. I mean, not my type, all short with tiny little tits but yeah, I caught some wood there. I mean, if I ran across her back in the day, I’d definitely have fucked her, I’m not gonna’ lie. I don’t know shit about pictures or photography or none of that but some of them I had to look at twice cuz I thought to myself, “Goddamn!” So, I guess that means I thought they were really good.
The house, it was down on the south side of town, you know, where all the bad neighborhoods were. It was one of those houses that would have looked great when it was built eighty years ago but, like most things, hadn’t aged well. It had this yellow stucco job that was hard to figure. It sure wasn’t any yellow I could tell for sure. Egg yolk yellow, maybe? Tractor yellow? Maybe school bus yellow or, even, jaundiced yellow? Yeah, that was it! It was jaundiced yellow! That’s what their little casita-type house looked like! It looked sick, like nothing inside it could possibly be healthy and thriving, all jaundiced and shit, like it was rotting from the inside out.
I had this one old-timer tell me once that he heard Hector was a badass when it came to torturing people. Like, he could make any motherfucker lose his shit and give stuff up. He’d cut off fingers, toes, ears, dicks. Didn’t matter to Hector, I guess. He’d just start cutting shit and cut his way straight to the truth of whatever he was trying to find out. A lotta’ years later, I was stuck on a bus with this lady a row or two ahead of me who just talked all the time, like a lot of bitches do. I usually wouldn’t have paid her any attention or anything but she was talking about writing and about how writers make their shit better and she said something that caught my attention. She said good writers cut their way to the truth. That they write a lot of shit then they go back in and cut away all the bullshit to get to the truth of whatever thing they were working on. I heard her say all that and I instantly thought of that story I’d heard about Hector.
I wore my meter reader uniform that day, the day I broke in. It’d help me blend in. I parked a few blocks down the street and walked, clipboard in hand, trying to look all official and shit. The little house faced due west, the meter was on the south side, I went around under the uneven carport, one leg of which was propped up on some cracked cement blocks and made it look like I was reading the meter. It was the middle of the day, a weekday and the neighborhood was all quiet, there was a park across the street but nobody was out. I looked around and undid the latch on the warped reddish wooden gate and slipped into the backyard.
“He used to be a bad man.” Chichi said as he adjusted his grip on the wheelbarrow and glanced over his shoulder. “An ejecutor. Some jefe up in the heights used him to solve troubles. A fixer, a fijador. They say he has lots of money stashed away somewhere inside that place. Maybe up in the attic or under a floorboard or something.”
I looked up from the digging I was doing and looked him over again. He was stooped but if he was all straightened up he would’ve been a head taller than me. His shoulders sagged inwards like eaves on a rotting roof but if he had stood up straight and put his chest out like a real man he’d have been broad shouldered motherfucker and, even old, he’d have caught your attention. I mean, I’d seen bigger guys, lots bigger, but he’d still have registered, especially if he were coming down a dark alley in my direction. You know?
“Seems nice enough,” was all I could think to say to Chichi.
“Seems? Hijole! Seems! Nothing hermano is ever what it seems!”
The attic hadn’t worked out. That’s when I decided to check the bedrooms, when I heard the snoring and peaked in to see him all lying on side and shit. The door that was open, like I said. He was there, on the bed, lying on his side, facing the door. All around him, on the floor, on the nightstand, on the headboard, all around him was all sorts of shit, like he’d been in there forever, just living in there. Bowls. Glasses. Water bottles. Wrappers. Kleenex. The room was small though, I mean, it was clearly not the master bedroom so what the fuck he was doing in there, I didn’t know. Aside from sleeping the day away and snoring all kinds, that is. So, I went a little down the hall to the master bedroom.
Aside from all the fucking dust, it was clean, organized, neat as could be. There was just one big problem that I could see, his fucking dead wife was in there. Fucking Senora Berenice Esparza was sitting in there, in a chair, book in her lap. It was just like the way they said he found her when he came home and found her dead, except, this chair wasn’t the recliner. I hadn’t seen the fucking recliner so, my guess is that it had gotten tossed out after she died in it. No, this was a fine handcrafted antique rocking chair and she was sitting in it, dead as fucking dead could be.
It was the way the light reflected off her that clued me in, finally. I mean, you don’t have fresh dead people just sitting around your house not falling all apart, not stinking shit up to high heaven. Not in a little house like that with no air conditioning at the end of summer. No goddamn fucking way! I noticed the way the light hit her just so and reflected off her and it reminded me, for some reason, of plastic wrap. So, I decided to get a closer look.
I’d heard of shit like this before on a podcast or some radio show or something. I forget the fucking term they used but it was plastic something or, you know, something close to that. Basically, it really was wrapping up a dead body in fucking plastic wrap. Everything was covered and coated in plastic and sealed up all air tight and shit so there was no way for any smell to leak out or for any air to get in to start decomposing shit.
I reached out my finger and touched her. Fucking eh! It felt like fucking hard ass plastic! It totally didn’t feel like no fucking skin I’d ever touched. Damn! It creeped me the fuck out so bad I fucking jumped!
She looked all peaceful, I guess. I mean, they said a blood vessel burst in her stomach and she died like, instantly. So, I guess if you die all quick and shit, that’s what you look like after. I’m not in the habit of seeing dead fucking people so how the hell do I know? What was worse, I thought, was how just barely touching her set the goddamn rocking chair to rocking and for a second there she was just rocking back and forth, this little creaking sound coming from the chair. It was like some shit in a horror movie or something.
I waited for the fucking thing to stop rocking. I tried to stay as far away from it as I could but I still had to go around it to get to the closet. Sure enough, back in the top of the closet was a beat to fuck old leather suitcase that looked like it’d been kicked, dropped, burnt, soaked, shot, stabbed and every other fucking thing. Weighed a goddamn ton, too! Shit! Almost killed me pulling it down from up there. The shelf it had been sitting on had sagged like a motherfucker under the weight but was tough, tough enough that it withstood it all this time.
I couldn’t wait to check it out so I sat it down, unzipped it and checked it out. There were so many jewels in that fucking thing that it looked like even the jewels had their own jewels! I bought a house with that shit. Bought a real nice Ford F-350 and a trailer, too. Shit, I even put some of the money I made from that haul away in a retirement fund to live off when I got to be as old and fucked up as Hector was. Don’t get to thinking I was all practical and shit cuz I did spend a good chunk of what I got from fencing all that shit on drinking and fucking but still, I made enough of all of that to do pretty good for myself.
I hauled the damn thing down the hall, back past the guest room where the snoring had stopped. I thought for sure I was going to give myself a motherfucking hernia or some shit. I left it in the living room and went back to look at the old bastard.
There was this really nice gold locket on a chain he was holding in his hand. I hadn’t noticed it earlier. It dangled there like it was going to fall into an empty tray of Oreo Thins but just couldn’t do it. I felt greedy, it looked like gold so, why would I just leave that shit behind? You know? I eased in through the crack in the door and slipped it out of his hand.
I found some heavy duty black plastic bags in the kitchen and filled up one and half of another with all the shit from the suitcase. It’s not like I could just go walking down the street with a big fucking suitcase and not attract attention. Trash bags though, in that part of town, would not be as noticeable a thing. I checked the locket out. It was nice. I don’t know much about that shit but I was sure it was gold, real gold. Maybe even that 24 karat shit. It had this pic of his wife, of Berenice. She was young. Pretty. She was smiling and staring right back at the camera. It was a good pic, for sure.
Don’t ask me why but I had a bad feeling about taking it with me. I’m not usually like that, you know? I usually don’t give a fuck about sentimental shit and all that. I took my share of shit that I was sure was some family heirloom or something over the years but this one, I just couldn’t. I held it there a for a minute, just looking at her smiling at me and I decided the suitcase was more than good enough.
I went back down the hall. There was still no snoring. I slipped in through the cracked door again and got close. He’d stopped breathing and I waited for him to start again. I, like, seriously waited a fucking while. He didn’t start. Didn’t gurgle, didn’t cough, didn’t gasp, nothing. I put the locket I’d took with his wife’s picture in it and put it back in his closed hand. I peeked back at him one more time before I left but there was still nothing.
I could’ve left the bottle of Crown Royal, too but I didn’t.
