Man Down Read Free

towelettes to clean himself.
    Turner was taken back to the car that idled in a light drizzle.
    He was left this time to sit alone in the rear of the BMW, the car wipers mewling on the window glass and the tires hissing on the wet road, watching the city with unseeing eyes, the sky, made violet by light pollution, draped across the buildings like a sagging marquee at the end of some sad revel.
    Before he realized where he was Turner was flung from the still-moving Bimmer near to where his Kawasaki lay in the gutter.
    Turner fought his bike upright, kicked it a few times before it caught and rode into the rain, the bike sliding and bucking on streets stained purple by pulped jacaranda blossoms, heading for the genteel suburb of Houghton, home to the aged saint, Nelson Mandela.
    Bloody, soaked, teeth chattering, Turner limped up the driveway to the twin cottages that were built at the bottom of the garden that belonged to an Edwardian stone mansion—once the lair of a mining magnate, now offices of a PR company—and was on course for his bed when Tanya (his neighbor and sometimes fuck buddy) opened her door and waved a bottle of tequila at him, and he realized he needed company, even hers, and went into her front room where sluggish reggae thumped from buzzing speakers and apartheid-era trade union posters were taped to the walls.
    “You look like shit,” she said slinging the bottle at him.
    He caught it and drank a third of it away.
    “Better?” she asked.
    “Getting there.”
    Tanya rolled a hefty joint and, ignoring his bloody leg, stripped him and sucked his cock and rode him like a jockey—her tanned boy’s body straining toward climax after climax, her juices acrid to Turner’s skin and his nose—while he lay semi-conscious, the perfect storm of terror, chemicals, weed and booze keeping him hard and delaying a tepid orgasm that, though little more than a tingle and a squirt, was enough (as he was to discover on a night of blood and mayhem a month hence) to prime the pump of reproduction.

     3
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Turner, kneeling, still gagging on the pistol barrel, tasting gun oil and his wife’s blood, looked across at Tanya who crouched on all fours, slack-jawed, gasping and was reminded of the Lamaze classes she’d obliged him to attend with her, where she and the other pregnant women had adopted this swaybacked pose, their distended bellies almost brushing the carpet as they panted like perverts.
    The blood dripping from her face, striking the wooden floor of their Arizona living room in metronomic beats—loud in the sudden silence after the small man muted the baseball on TV—brought Turner back to the present as the gun filling his mouth was cocked with a sharp, ratcheting sound.
    “Wait, Bone,” the small man said, “we’re still gonna need this cocksucker.”
    The pistol barrel was withdrawn, a tendril of drool landing like a leech on Turner’s cheek. The man named Bone stood over him, the weapon in his gloved hand pointed at Turner’s head.
    To distance himself from the reality of what was happening, to ring fence the fear that was causing a bitter sweat to rise from his body, Turner imagined that he was making a report to the police after all this was over, conjuring some wry, lanky lawman with a gray brush of a mustache and watery eyes that had seen every kind of evil the world could offer, demanding descriptions of the three masked invaders.
    Bone was not a tall man but he was wide, as if the maximum amount of meanness had been compacted into his blocky frame. He was dressed in tight blue jeans, black workboots and a leather waistcoat over a gray T-shirt, a hard gut balanced on top of his Dixie belt buckle. A lacework of incongruously delicate tattoos covered his Popeye arms.
    The man attending Tanya was towering and massively obese with one gimpy leg that gave him a broken walk. A pit latrine stench rose from his body as he scratched at the ocean of pale flesh that