Skin Deep

by Neil Richter

I kick his door in and the first thing I notice is the rush of air playing across my face. I usually wear a knit cap with holes cut in it for my eyes and mouth, paper covering its interior to keep the open sores on my face from sticking to the wool. Tonight, I’ve decided to spare myself this discomfort. Why exactly, I don’t know. I guess I just don’t care anymore; stopped caring a long time ago, as a matter of fact.

He’s sitting on the couch, obviously working his way out of a nice, long bender. Immediately he starts babbling his way back into sobriety, sputtering and swearing: I don’t got it. I fuckin’ swear to god I don’t got it. As I said before, I don’t really care, so instead of listening to him I just sort of stare at him. He’s young, late-twenties, just like me. Still, while my disfigurement makes me ageless, his skin remains smooth and tanned. His lips push out into the slightest pout and his eyebrows are waxed and shaped. It’s also quite obvious that he spends about an hour on his hair every morning.

Sumner finally steps out from behind me and pushes the door closed with his heel, the ruined hinges squealing in protest. He starts in with the mind-fucking right away, not even bothering to mention the money the guy owes us. He’s asking him the same questions over and over, what his name is, whether or not anyone else is in the apartment (even though I’ve already started checking the bedroom and the kitchen) Just having some fun, watching the whites of the prettyboy’s eyes get wider and wider.

Finally, Sumner chuckles and shakes his head. Over the past few months laughter has become his primary style of intimidation. “Let’s back up, ok?” He eases himself into a recliner and sets the butt of the gun down on his knee, still pointing it at the man on the couch. “It’s pretty clear why we’re here, right? I mean, you do know that much. You have to.”

I’m still staring at him. His face…bothers me. I imagine him wearing an open-necked shirt, jewelry dangling from his tanned chest. In my mind he’s pouring a bottle of Cristal down the silicone-embedded chest of some blonde in a V.I.P. lounge. He’s looking through tinted windows – not at the club floor, but at the poor saps waiting outside. He’s laughing at the have-nots, the ugly, poor and weak. My face has begun to hurt again, an intense burning around my lips. I should have put more ointment on earlier tonight.

I walk forward and bury the butt of my pistol into the center of his face. The movement is casual, unhurried. He doesn’t react at first, just absorbs the blow, his eyes open, the same color blue as a stove flame. Then I do it a few more times. First, his nose sits at an odd angle, squashed. Then a thin stream of blood begins to trickle out of what used to be the left nostril. The trickle begins to widen and pretty soon blood is just pouring down the front of his face. He’s struggling to breathe, air bubbles forming and bursting around his lips.

I speak softly. People have always told me I have a gentle voice. “All we want is a little money. Just what is owed to us. I don’t want to hurt you any more…I swear.”

He nods slowly.

*

Sumner is driving. He always drives. It’s this beautiful old T-bird that he’s been restoring for a while. He had it painted firetruck red a few months ago. Ever since then it seems he’s been whittling away his days waxing the damn thing. Sometimes when he’s sitting there, one hand groping the gearshift in a strangely lewd way, the other rubbing the steering wheel ever so gently, I swear I can hear him whispering things under his breath. I cannot understand them; I don’t really want to. However, as he coos sweet nothings to himself I can’t keep the awful imagery from popping into my head. One day I’m going to catch him with his pants down, fucking the exhaust pipe. I just know it.

“Are you listening?”

Unfortunately for Sumner, I’m not. This is usually the case.

“Should I take that as a no?” he presses on, impervious to my stillness.

A few more minutes pass, minutes pregnant with the sort of awkward silence that has become our primary mode of communication.

“You’re a dick, you know that?” he finally says.

“Leave me alone.”

Sumner brings his hands together at the top of the steering wheel, hunching forward. “It was a good story, you should have listened to it.”

“I don’t feel like talking right now.”

“That’s a lot of money we got. A lot of money.”

“It’s a shame he didn’t give it to us sooner.”

Sumner is quiet for a few minutes. When his voice pipes up again, it’s cheery in that mechanical way that shows me he’s uncomfortable. “You count it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I turn to Sumner. “Because I don’t care,” I say.

*

Doctors call it Acne Vulgaris: a simple corruption of the skin. To me it feels more like a cancer. It started when I was about thirteen. Little bumps under my skin. They criss-crossed my back, my neck, and my chest. There was a forest preserve behind the house, so my parents figured it was poison oak or something.  I was an active kid, so I didn’t really notice until the bumps covered most of my torso. They got redder. They hurt. Eventually this rash started to creep up higher and higher until large pustules began to settle in along my jawline. Mom stopped using fabric softener. She said it was the way she washed my sheets. Mom always had a simple solution. By the time my forehead had begun to burst out in nickel and dime-sized lumps the kids at school began to pay more and more attention. I used to like being anonymous, the plain little kid with the blonde hair and the pressed shirts.

At thirteen I was wearing t-shirts to bed every night and sleeping next to a humidifier to try and soothe the lesions on my back. I started going to doctors every month to have some of the larger cysts lanced. My collection of identical Oxford shirts became unusable one by one as the blood and pus began to seep through the bandages and stain my clothing with increasing regularity. Eventually, my parents started buying all my shirts from outlet malls. In their eyes it was a fitting punishment for what they saw as an intolerable lack of hygiene.

Showering was the worst. The weeping sores all over my body would open up and begin to ooze a thick, foul-smelling pus. After a few months I started hanging a towel over the mirror so that I wouldn’t have to look at myself. My mother stopped making eye contact when she spoke to me. Alone one night in my room, I made a promise never to look at my face again if I could help it. The next day I broke the mirror above the bathroom sink with my fist. I cleaned and dressed the wound myself. When my father came home from work I hid in my room so he wouldn’t have to see my bandaged hand. I was so ashamed.

*

“Stop spacing out. Stay with me man.”

“How close are we?”

“Wow, talking again. Good to have you back.” Sumner flicks what’s left of a cigarette out the window. He licks his lips. “So this nun, this priest, and this rabbi are visiting a farm, right? The nun says—“

“How close are we?”

“It’s close, all right? Jesus.” Sumner shakes his head. “Anyway, the nun says she wants to visit the stables, y’know?”

“No. I don’t know.” I’ve been staring at my feet and it’s making me tired. “I’m going to take a nap, ok? Let me know when we’re there.”

“Wait…” Sumner seems to regret saying the word as soon as it’s left his lips.

“Hmm?” I already know what this is about.

“Nevermind. I’ll tell you when we get there.” Sumner stares straight ahead.

“What?” He’s making me mad again.

“…Don’t you think you went a little overboard tonight, buddy?”

“He had the money, and he wouldn’t give it up. He was lying. What else was I supposed to do?”

“I know, I know.” Sumner is biting his lip now. He squints at the road again and he’s doing something funny with his jaw, working it in circles. I watch him with vague interest for a few minutes then stare out my window again.

“All I’m saying is…” Sumner’s voice floats toward me as if from far away.

“What is it?” I space each word out testily.

“If the loan was about drugs or gambling or anything else, and believe me, when I met the guy I figured it had something to do with that.”

“And?”

“What he said, y’know?”

“You’re saying you believed him?”

“I saw the photo, man, it was right there. He told me she’d die without the transplant. He needed that money. You heard it yourself, he was begging.”

I sigh. My mouth has begun to hurt again. I’m not used to talking this much. It makes the sores around my lips burn. Finally I go: “He was no better than us. If we hadn’t come along someone else would have. People like that have an expiration date. We all do.”

Sumner chuckles softly to himself and he leans back in his seat. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. I mean, at least we’ve got a place to put him, right?” Eventually his voice rises and everything is normal again. “Did I ever tell you ‘bout this whore I knew in Cincinnati? This is before I met you, y’know—“

“I’m going to go to sleep now. Be quiet.”

*

One day the kids at school stole my backpack and hid it in the boiler room. I went through the last three classes of the day empty-handed. The teachers loaned me paper and pencils and glared at me as if it was my fault. After school I picked a quiet corner of blacktop, curled into a ball, and wept, tears falling into open sores like gasoline. When I was in the eighth grade my father bought me a padlock to keep on my locker. He tossed it to me haphazardly while his other hand finished an effortless double-Windsor below his Adams apple. Then he looked me square in the face and told me to take care of things better. He always looked me in the eyes, even after the mirror incident. Even now, I guess I respect him for that.

Nobody ever hit me; they were too afraid to touch me. I almost wish they had. A punch to the face is easy to understand, easier than complete exile at least. Still, their hands never touched me.

So I went after them. I went after them with my hands and my feet, my nails and my teeth. Yet again, it started small. The odd scuffle every other week or a punch thrown in the cafeteria. I was a strong fighter, tall and muscular. That was the only genetic blessing I ever had. The men who came before me were all fighters: Decorated WWII vets, hometown football heroes, wrestlers, boxers, brawlers. The ability to hurt was always inside me; all it needed was a little push.

As the years dragged on and I staggered through high school the fights got more brutal. On any given day I carried a sap filled with tightly packed sand and a six-inch shard of glass half-wrapped in electrical tape.

So I graduated, lived my life perpetually drunk and aimless, and finally found myself at twenty. I worked in the back of a warehouse – hard, mindless labor, just the way I like it. Back here my silence was a virtue and the other workers were too busy watching the shipments come in to focus on my face. None of them except this James Dean-looking hood that operated the forklift spoke enough English to properly insult me anyway. I knew he was a hood because of all the talking he did. It was like a game to him: robberies, shoplifting, embezzlement, counterfeiting, it all spilled out with a wink and a nod.

None of it mattered when nobody could understand you and the boss was too cheap to install security cameras. As for me, everyone figured I was some kind of mute. Blondie, as I secretly called him back then, considered himself a jack-of-all-trades, a real renaissance man. His rapsheet ran through an impressive list of felonies, most of them nonviolent in nature. I guess that’s pretty impressive, so long as he wasn’t lying about everything. As for myself, all I had was the ability to crush a man’s nose with one blow; not a very impressive comparison

Blondie and I never talked until one morning in the breakroom. I was reading something awfully pretentious, Kerouac or Burroughs …or maybe it was Hemingway. Hemingway, that sounds about right. Most times I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible when I read. Something about a guy like me reading The Sun Also Rises made me feel like I was putting on airs. This day however, it didn’t work. Blondie’s buzz-cut soon loomed into view. He was short, but solidly built, the sort you could see coming from a long way off.

“I like the bullfights in there.”

I didn’t say anything. An odd, dry feeling crept its way up my throat. Blondie’s movements and speech patterns were erratic enough from a distance. Close-up, he made me uneasy.

“You don’t talk much, do you?” A thin little smile crossed his lips. “It’s a real shame, this is the one place where it don’t matter what you say.”

At this point I realized that trying to avoid a conversation would be impossible. My mind scrolled through the hundreds of possible responses. After a minute or two of tense silence, I decided:

“What is your name?”

Blondie immediately stuck out his hand, shattering both his previous title and my sense of personal space. “Sumner. Sumner Moore. And from what people tell me you are one mean sonofabitch.” He paused and sniffed the air, as if he could smell my response. “I got a proposition for you. How about we make us some money, hmmm?”

It turns out that he had only done about half the crimes he bragged about. A month after he met me, everything he said was fact. There was no more need for lies.

Six months later, with Sumner egging me on, I crossed the last barriers of human decency and never looked back.

Sumner and I don’t have a pattern or an M.O. We’re a two-man wolf pack, driving from place to place in that impeccably waxed T-bird of his. How we’ve managed to stay alive as long as we have is a mystery to me. You can only break so many laws before Karma catches up with you. I’ve learned to embrace the impending doom that my life has become. One day, fate will find me, and I’ll welcome it with open arms.

You see, Sumner needs me. He needs me because he’s a coward. He’s smart, my god is he clever, but a coward nonetheless. It’s an unspoken agreement. No matter what I do or who I hurt, he will always tolerate me. Sumner is the closest thing that I have to a friend, and this is a very sad fact.

I look back sometimes and think that maybe I could have been someone else. Nature vs. Nurture and all that. But in the end, all there is…is this. So no, I don’t feel bad. I don’t feel guilty. I feel hollow, and I like it.

But then I drink and the only one listening to my wet, sloppy tears is Sumner, and he’s far too drunk to be of any assistance. So I tell him over and over: I can see them. I can see them all staring at me. I can see them all pointing at me.

Sumner will answer in a stupor: Nobody’s looking at you. I’ll order you another one.

To which I reply: That’s not what I mean.

*

Sumner tells me we need to stop at a service station (he never says gas station) so I stay in the car while Sumner goes in to pay; only he’s taking too long, ten whole minutes by my count. I pivot in my seat and through the glass I see his head framed by a poster for a discount on candy bars and prophylactics. Eventually I make out him and the cashier handing bills back and forth. He’s quick-changing her, trying to fool her into giving him back more money than he gave her. I’m not surprised, Sumner’s always up for a hustle, even with a body in the trunk. So I step out of the car and into the station only to be greeted with the sight of Sumner clutching his left arm, which is soaked in blood. There’s a bloody screwdriver on the counter and the cashier is pointing a snubnose at his head. She’s pretty but her face is twisted into a rather obscene-looking grimace. Despite all this Sumner doesn’t look very upset, a little pale perhaps, but all in all he just looks stoned out of his mind. I guess shock will do that to you.

The cashier starts screaming at me over and over, telling me to call the cops, to do something. She hasn’t even looked at me yet and I’m thinking to myself: she’s in for a surprise. Her breathing is shallow and panicked and every time she inhales it makes a whistling sound.

I look at Sumner. He opens his mouth and gasps. There’s a chuckle in there somewhere, followed by a faint, wheezy voice: “You heard the girl, call the cops. There’s obviously some kind of tomfoolery going on here.”

The cashier is breathing hard, trying to get a grip on herself and failing. She’s still babbling something about the cops. ‘Help’ is in there too somewhere, only she’s said it over and over again so many times that the word has lost all meaning.

She looks at me for the first time since I entered the store. Her jaw goes slack, but it’s as if her mind has yet to catch up to her body’s response.

I pull the Glock out of my coat and shoot her in the wrist, blowing the snubnose out of her hands. The gun clatters harmlessly to the ground and she joins it, her whole body spun by the nine millimeter round. I immediately realize that she didn’t even have her finger on the trigger, which frustrates me because I could have ended this for good with a headshot. Instead, I vault over the counter and get ready to pump three into her chest.

Sumner grabs my gun at the last second. “No, don’t.” He’s breathing hard but his demeanor is still calm. “We might need her.”

“With all due respect, I don’t know if I’m ready to honor any more of your decisions at this point.” I fix him with a glare. “Let go.”

“She tripped the alarm.” He throws up his hands, wincing in the process. “I saw her do it after she got me with the screwdriver. She hit something under the counter, ok? They’re coming. We don’t have much time.”

“All the more reason.”

The cashier has begun to whimper. She sounds kind of like a teakettle, but lower pitched. I kick her in the ribs and she goes quiet.

Sumner has begun to pace through the aisles “We need a hostage. We need collateral.” He lets go of his bad arm and starts scouring through the shelves. “We need bags, fabric, toilet paper, anything. We’ve got to cover the backseat. She’s bleeding.”

It’s too late, though, I’ve already slung her over my shoulder and carried her out the door. Sumner’s right behind me. For the first time during the entire incident he sounds genuinely upset.

“Don’t, don’t you do it. Don’t you fucking do it. Don’t you let that bitch bleed all over my backseat. You know what it’s gonna look like? Chocolate fucking syrup. That’s what blood looks like when it dries. Its gonna look like I tried to blend a fucking milkshake back there. No way, man. No way.” He tears a piece of fabric off his sleeve with his teeth and ties the makeshift tourniquet around his arm, pulling it tight.

I’m not listening though. The cashier feels warm and soft in my arms and I realize that I can’t remember the last time I’ve touched a woman. Part of me wants to comfort her, but I don’t know how. She’s whispering a prayer to herself as I plunk her down across the backseat. Her wrist leaves a long smear of blood that looks black in the moonlight. I lean in and tell her that this will all be over soon because I don’t know what else to say. Pathetic. She just nods blankly at me. Then I hear Sumner yelling at me to get in the car. It’s time to go.

So off we go in the firetruck red T-bird, Sumner bleeding and muttering all sorts of dirty words under his breath, the cashier curled into a tight ball across the backseat.

After awhile Sumner starts going on and on about how cold it is, his chattering teeth turning the words into staccato bullet points. Apparently, the screwdriver got him worse than he thought. All his bravado about the car and taking hostages has regressed into something much more dazed and fearful. I look into the backseat and see that the cashier isn’t in much better shape. Her breathing has evened out but her eyes have a dull look about them. I suddenly feel like saying something, anything:

“How are you?”

“Don’t.” Her voice sounds robotic, a plea without emotion.

“What?” I stare at her quizzically.

“Please don’t.”

“Don’t do what?”

“Don’t.”

Sumner elbows me in the side, which I would have punched him for if the circumstances were different. “She’s going into shock, just like me. Leave her alone.”

I lean back in my seat and stare at nothing in particular for a while. There’s a sharp pain in my side and I think Sumner might have hit a scab or something. When we first peeled out of the service station I could already see red and blue flashing lights in the distance. It seems like it’s been an eternity since then and I’m wondering what’s taking them so long.

This is good. This is perfect. A real ‘blaze of glory’ type of situation. Butch Cassidy and all that shit. Isn’t that supposed to be ideal? Only it’s taking too long, and I lazily think to myself that we might actually get out of this one alive. I guess we’ll just see.

Sumner tilts his head and addresses the cashier. “Why the fuck did you get me with a screwdriver anyway? I thought you all carried bats or something.”

She just whimpers more.

“Oh god…” Sumner leans forward slightly and squints. “Could you drive? Please? Just for a while…”

“Sorry, I don’t drive stick,” I reply.

*

An epiphany is an old man in a ratty old cardigan sitting in an old house who knows he’s about to die. He is a veteran, medals hung over the mantelpiece, scarred-over war wounds mingling with the gasoline we’ve poured on him. Just another mark. Wrong place. Wrong time. Sumner got the job, heard that he had money, that he kept it in his house. That’s all it took for him to die. There are no reasons. I’m not going to pretend he was asking for it. Things just happen.

An epiphany is a man completely without fear. A man who can look you in the eye and call you ‘sonny’ when you’ve got a gun pressed against his forehead. A man who looks through you, through the back of his shitty old house, straight through to something you can’t quite comprehend.

An epiphany is a break from the routine; one more errand on the daily checklist that suddenly mutates into something concrete, true, and frightening.

Sumner’s face looks orange in the light of the fireplace and he’s staring at the far wall, away from me, away from two people in the midst of the most honest moment of both of their lives.

An epiphany stares you right in the face before you complete the sentence: “Any last words?” An epiphany fires back: “Try killing someone who deserves it next time, sonny.” An epiphany still judges you, even after you’ve shot it and the eyes glaze over, still peering through you at something you can’t quite comprehend.

And then he becomes a part of me, even after we’ve taken his teeth and his hands, after the house is in flames, after the money is counted, after the dusty dirt roads have led us back to the city. Half a dozen bodies later, he’s still there.

*

Oh, it was beautiful. My mind didn’t return to earth until the Glock’s magazine had been emptied and refilled three times. I think Sumner was hit by return fire, because there was blood on me that wasn’t mine. The cashier screaming her head off, even through the shock, Sumner’s low-pitched moan, and the flashing of a pair of handguns firing from the cop car ten feet behind us. Just beautiful.

It was an old one, all fins and pop-eyed headlights. The sort of car you used to see in old Civil Rights newsreels. It must have been about fifteen minutes ago that it was vomited out of a small oasis of trees and came charging toward us like a ten-ton bull.

I come to my senses after the crash. There was a moment somewhere in there when I heard my collarbone snap. It sounded like a wishbone at Thanksgiving dinner being pulled apart and I believe it was this recollection that jarred me back into consciousness.

“What happened?” I ask quite innocently to no one in particular. To a certain extent I know exactly what happened: They shot out our tires, we fishtailed, we flipped two or three times only to come to rest right side up, minus half of the roof.

Our wrecked vehicle sits in a direct sightline with the blinding spotlights of the cop car. They’ve turned their siren off and simply sit behind the wheel, figuring out how to proceed.

“Hey.”

“Yes?” I manage tentatively.

“You have to do it. I can’t do it. You know I can’t do it.” Sumner doesn’t look too good. His right hand appears to be hanging onto his injured arm by a few threads that look silvery in the moonlight. The thumb and forefinger remain gnarled around the gearshift. Looking at the expression on Sumner’s face, I doubt he’ll ever let go of it.

“What do you want me to do?” I don’t know why I feel so…healthy right now. Beyond the sharp pain whenever I move my shoulder I’m better then I’ve felt in years.

“Just shoot me. Right now. Just do it before I lose my nerve. Do it now. They’re coming. Do it now. Now.”

Luckily, my right shoulder seems to be working alright so I withdraw the Glock and stare at the boxy little semi-automatic like this is someone else’s gun, someone else’s arm. “Let me ask you something…” I say wistfully.

“…I’ll lose my nerve…”

“Where were we going to dump him?”

“All those people. All those fuckin’ people man…”

“Where were we going to dump him? Where have we been headed all this time?”

“I’m getting the fuckin’ chair for this…”

“Where.”

“A quarry. Now I’m scared. Now I’m afraid. You have to do it.”

“Did you remember the weights?”

For a moment, Sumner drops the whole Christ-on-a-cross act and looks genuinely bemused, like he finally told the ultimate joke. “You know, I think I forgot them back at the warehouse before we left tonight.” He’s still breathing hard, but there’s a tight little smile of resignation on his face now.

I raise the gun.

“Wow,” he says. “How about that?” He shakes his head weakly and manages a chuckle.

“Wow.” I shoot him in the temple and he just sort of puts his head down and goes to sleep. A tiny part of me sinks with indefinable emotion.

It’s just me and the cashier now. I look back at her and she looks all right, all things considered. Her leg is banged up but her face has that same dull expression on it, emotionless but still very much alive. My hand begins to rise, as if by reflex, but in the end I put the gun down. It’s too late. There’s nothing left to cover up, no witnesses to exterminate. More blood wouldn’t mean a thing. “You want to listen to the radio?” I finally say.

The cops are out of their car now, screaming obscenities at us. Madonna has begun to flow out of the dashboard, which has miraculously remained whole after the crash.

Life is a mys-ter-yyyy. Everyone must staaaaand aaaaa-lone.

I guess I should be reminiscing right about now; thinking about something that mattered. In truth though, all I can think about is the fact that Madonna is about to play over my execution.

“You like this song?” I ask the cashier. She doesn’t answer, just stares at me glassy-eyed. “It’s alright, I guess.” I say, answering my own question.

I’m still staring at her and all I want is one moment, one somethingbefore it’s all over. “My name’s Gabriel.” I say.

“That’s a pretty name.” Her voice is just barely above a whisper.

I can’t think of anything else to say so I just go: “He told me to kill someone who deserved it. How about that?”

I step out of the car before she can respond.

I hear you call myyyy naaaame, and it feeeeels liiiike….hOOO-oooome.

I’m thinking about being a boy, long before the taunts at school, before my body declared war on itself, before everything. I’m thinking about running through the forest preserve behind my house.

The police are saying something to me, screaming it, but I’m not listening. It doesn’t matter anymore because I know it’s too late to be made new again.

I’m thinking about running through long grass, letting my legs get ripped to shreds. Watching the scabs dry up and fall off.

I can still hear Madonna crooning from behind me as the hysterical chatter of the police reaches a fever pitch. I close my eyes.

I’m thinking about entire days wasted, nothing to show for them but the sun on my back.

…It’s like a lit-tle prayer. I’m down on my knees, I wanna take. You. There.

This is what I always wanted. Not atonement, not forgiveness, not mercy. I open my eyes and raise the Glock, maybe for the last time, maybe not.

####

Neil Richter is a senior at Knox College studying English Lit. He lives in Lombard, Illinois and enjoys non-synthetic fabrics, fine dining, and movies from the seventies. This is his first publication.