Red walls, flashing colors, the clash of coins under cigar smoke. He’s flickering around like a camera bulb, at the pool table and at the slots and flashing his hand at poker, holding the cards in that odd way that burns in the minds of everyone to ever play him. His name’s in the mouths retreating to the edges, in the empty wallets the words he gives to everyone, Him? That’s Knucklehead Nines, biggest shark of the States, nine fingers four-and-a-half on each hand, told me he’s a navy man but he ain’t never been in the navy, told me he’s a genius but he ain’t never learned how to read. If he sits at your table, brother, just get up and walk away, ‘cause you already lost.
Knucklehead Nines. Only name he’ll ever give, maybe the only one he remembers.
He draws a crowd wherever he goes, dice or cards or magic tricks at the bar, flocks of women in blinding dresses waiting to blow on his dice but he always does it himself, a laugh and a loud voice crowing, “I’m Knucklehead Nines, spirit of the South, and I’m anything I set my mind to!”
Always halfway out the side of his mouth, like it isn’t really him talking. After hours and hours of this, he moves on to the next town, leaves not a trace but his name. He won’t keep the money, he’ll put it god-knows-where, and he’ll roll up to the next casino with nothing only to leave it a rich man again by the end of the night.
He’s young, not as young as he looks. He’s dressed up like a parrot but it doesn’t distract from his eyes, bright black eyes, blood threading the whites. No car, not anymore, must either take the bus or hitchhike, and he plays cards in the back with strangers to pass the time, and that’s the only time he’ll let anyone win. He’s alone in the world near-completely, never keeps anyone more than a night, never lets anyone follow him, not that he knows -- well, except the one night when through the crowd of sharp-dressed people round his table he tears his wild eyes from poker and points them straight at me.
“You been around a while, haven’t you? But you ain’t never played me a hand,” he says.
To my own surprise, I shake my head.
“You wanna blow on my dice?” He holds out his hand, shakes his head. “Naw, no you don’t. You wanna be my friend?”
Soft brown fingers curled around the sharp black dice, snake eyes in the palm of his hand. I shake my head back.
“Well, too bad, you, ‘cause I wanna be your friend.” Crooked smile, toss back of the dark, straight, magpie hair. “Ain’t you heard? I’m Knucklehead Nines, and I’m anything I set my mind to!” Showman’s wink. “And tonight, I want to be the man you fall in love with.”
He means to kill me.
I follow Knucklehead Nines around all night, table to table and hand to hand, hunger in my gut, and I wonder if he feels it too or if he’s too young yet -- if he doesn’t understand the animal to which time reduces power. Almost nice to watch him in what must be my final hours. Almost reminds me of something, but I can’t claw it up.
Then I’m gone. I don’t go, but I’m not there, not really. It happens often, more often than it doesn’t. Mist pushed away by the wind.
I blink back in in a new casino next to the same man. He looks up at me from the pool table, raises his eyebrows, and says, “I was wonderin’ where you went off to! Rude of you to go like that — I ain’t even made you fall in love with me yet.”
He doesn’t seem all that surprised by any of it. Does he understand what I am? What he’s so quickly turning into? Or does he just feel it — know the change as well as he knows the absence of his ringfinger tips.
I watch him play pool. When he leaves, I leave with him.
“I have an interesting philosophy on life and love,” Knucklehead says, scuffing his shoes against the streetlit concrete. “In that I think those’re the exact same thing. I love my life and I live my love. Ain’t never did nothing more or less than that.”
I walk beside him. I can’t remember my feet enough to walk with sound.
“I hope I ain’t been too forward with you. But I think I’m your cup of tea, huh? You been following me long enough. Maybe it’s ‘cause I wanted to be followed by you, and I just didn’t realize it yet.” He looks up. “Yeah, since I’m anything I want to be. I set my mind on being a card player not so long ago, and that’s who I am. Soon I’ll be someone else. Maybe I’ll be a woman next month, or a man, or a skinny dog — Whew, a dog, can you imagine! I bet I could if I set my mind to it, and you don’t wanna take my bets, trust me, my friend.” He lets out a short whistle of breath. “Shew. Most people’d say I’m talking nonsense, but you understand me, don’t you? Better’n anyone else.”
And so I go with Knucklehead Nines.
The back of a bus, the floor of another casino, a wet street at night. I never say a thing. I’m gone for hours, days, at a time, but I always find myself back at him. He’s happy to keep talking. The way he chatters, I wonder if he even stops when I’m gone, or if he spends all his time alone telling himself the same heroic stories with the same fairytale syntax, explaining the same card tricks to himself ad infinitum. I don’t mind. When he talks, I almost recall something. I almost smell the sea.
It’s roughly fifteen nights before he eats in front of me.
He pulls his body off the dumpster the stranger crushed him into, swiping a hand across his chin in habit though he does not bleed. He braces his hands on his cheeks and cracks his neck back into place, then laughs, nasal and open-mouthed, stumbles into a mockery of a fighting stance with his fists half-raised, fingers uneven. The other man is easily twice his size, bulky, bald, iridescent. He gasps under Knucklehead Nines’s gaze like a fish.
Knucklehead Nines spits. “Didn’t think it’d go my way, huh? What was it you called me? You want to call me that again, see if your luck runs better?”
The man cannot speak.
Knucklehead Nines opens his mouth wider than a mouth looks like it should open, extends his hungry teeth, leaps, and the man is unmade.
Fast, violent spurts, jerking limbs and eyes, but somehow quiet. All sound and motion, the screaming, the fluid, goes softly, easily, into the black at the back of Knucklehead Nines’s throat. Like ink stirred into water. All the sacrifices the man once made, the outcomes he influenced, the sacrifices he took, the name — Knucklehead Nines takes them with grace, lets them become his history, his legacy, his being, one long, fathomless river.
He licks the tears of life from his lips and looks to me, eyes red, pupils blown. “You want some of this, right?” Ragged breaths, glistening. “It’s what you followed me for, right? You’re dying, friend. I bet I can share.” He rubs his arms. “Come closer.”
I shake my head.
“Good answer.” Knucklehead Nines walks away, shrugging his sequin jacket up his shoulders. Too thin to warm him – all for show. He shivers. I smell the exhilaration fading from him. I smell the new blood pounding in his cheeks. “Damned distasteful,” he says. “I Gawd. I had a streak going. Going on a month, you know what—?”
I come to his side. He glances up at me, chitinous black eyes. Up — he hasn’t noted my height before. Hasn’t seen my substance. He steps a little back. Here, my fingers move, and I undo the buttons of my coat one-by-one, and I proffer it to him.
He quiets. He takes it.
I go away for a while. I come back, and when he sees me, he smiles. The slots lights flicker off his incisors, spit-shiny. On the night bus, he gives me back my coat. Tries to brush my hand, take my temperature, feel my pulse. Misses. “Is this navy? What navy? You could be a sailor, I see it, I can see you with your captain’s hat and a pipe between your lips, I can see you all over the world, big and bow-legged with the deck throwing you every which way. Nice big coat, waterproof, warm. You a whaler?” I am not used to being commented on. I button up the coat, look out the window. Itch in the sleeve, shake it free: into my hand falls the ace of hearts.
“You in love with me yet?” he asks.
Then he’s more often outside so he has an excuse to ask for my coat. Doesn’t seem to get the temperature aspect of it, asks in the heat of Arizona, on the L.A. strip. Beneath the neon, he does card tricks for money, pulls aces out of his hat. Always draws a crowd some layers deep, new pushing past old like sharks’ teeth. There’s always a moment, after he conjures their watches and rings out of his sleeve, everything he snatched in the second the cards had their eyes, when they stiffen, wondering if he’ll give any of it back. Wondering what kind of animal he’ll be. What they’ll do then. His eyes flash, and he returns it all. But that’s why he does it – the threat, the answering kick.
I wonder if he’ll pivot from gambling to street magic. He keeps at it for a while, but it’s not the same rush. On the streets, there’s always a moment when the crowd dissipates. Without a crowd, people skirt around him. Alone in the clubs he is king, alone on the streets he is — deluded. Belligerent. Nine-fingered, four-and-a-half on each hand — he talks to himself, talks to himself to me, talks to himself to the people who heckle in his direction, ask him if where he got his money, how’d he get that nice fancy sequin coat that drags at his heels behind him, who’d he swindle it off? These are dusk hours, dawn hours. They would comprehend him even less in the day.
Twilights find him blood-streaked, shaking, always shaking, soaked red down the front of his silk shirt. He never plans, never careful. Skips town soon as he’s done, wraps my coat around him on the bus and rocks, back-forth-forward, bending at the waist in almost a bow, and no one ever asks about the stains. Cries sometimes, streaking read down his cheeks, his jaw, trailing over the knot of his throat.
“Don’t you get hungry?” he asks. “I ain’t never seen you eat, not a bite. Do you live, man? You never indulge?” He grins around the blood-tracks, stretching them up in clownish new shapes. “I’ll take you round the bars, yeah, I’ll take you to the fanciest shitholes this side of Tennessee. Hell, I’ll take you somewhere real nice, how about that? Foie gras, escargot, we’ll eat with those little fancy forks and come away still hungry, that’s how it is with money. I’ll pay, I’ll hit jackpot. I’m anything I put my mind to. Lord!” Catches my flinch. “You don’t like that word? You don’t want to talk about food? I’ll talk about something else.”
Next he spends a few months betting on horses, finding his way to underground dog fights. Shadows, smoke, and sprays of blood. He watches skinny little scraps tear each other apart, keeps a running commentary, always bouncing to see over the crowd, picking at his teeth, pumping his fist and twitching his jaw in time with the lunges and bites. “That one’s me,” he says at the beginning of every fight, pointing to a dog. He always bets on the winning one, but only calls it himself half the time. Skin stretched over ribcages, pitbulls missing toes. He makes a fortune, bores, and goes back to the casinos. “Thought it would be more your speed,” he says, “but then I realized, hell, you don’t give two shits what we do.”
Lie. The street magic led him to this underground, and there to a thing that sometimes was a woman and sometimes a rottweiler. Always the loser, she was. The other dogs would leave her in a bloody heap unbreathing but she’d be back the next night, the prancing, glossy heel. Had it down so good she could stud her collar in gold. He’d started recognizing her by a bite scar badly dyed over on her shoulder and calling out to her each night, heckling at the side of the ring.
She never let him catch her out. Now his abrupt absence reels her. She appears to him in a back alley, always a back alley, and says, “You.”
“I, aye, me.”
“The fuck is that behind you?”
Black eyes flick to me over his sequined lapel. “Oh, don’t you mind him,” he says. “He’s like a pet or somethin’.”
“Return what’s mine.”
“Do what?” He makes a show of turning out his coat. “I ain’t got nothing but the shirt on my back!”
“My library,” she growls. “You followed me. I smelled you there.”
“What do I look like to you?” He splays his hands, aghast. “These dirty fingers ain’t never been within fifty feet of no library book!”
“Drop it,” she says, and lunges.
His burst-vessel eyes go comically wide. She’s as fast as a shadow and he makes no move to dodge. But before her teeth reach him she crashes to the ground, and she’s clawing at my boot, and I drive my heel down into her face over and over until she’s a dog and she crawls away, whining, bleeding bright and beaten, like she knows how to do.
Knucklehead Nines looks at my face, directly at my face, his red tapetum gleaming like the sunspots in the shitty neon light. “I Gawd,” he says. “I thought she was going to be kind to me, you know, I really did. I spent a long while thinking we all owed each other some kinda underdog love, serves me.”
He blinks, turns, faces the deep pothole puddle at the dumpster’s foot. Starts pulling things from the secret folds of his coat, clumping them down into the water so the surface shatters into a constellation of pink. I come closer. I see that they’re books.
“Thought I needed somebody to explain it,” he says. “Since I met you. That anybody could. Hell, I bet you could. But who’m I? I don’t need to know nothing. I know everything I need, and everything knows me. Ain’t no need for book learning. I teach at the school of life!” More books than could possibly have fit in his jacket; he dumps them out onto the ground, and his hands shake. “I bet you know every word these say. I bet somebody thought to teach you something, once. Hell. Everybody goes through a phase of wanting to know, I’ve heard it, everybody says. Maybe some of them actually do it. But I, I don’t need to know the answers. I need no explanation. I’m Knucklehead Nines, and I’m the spirit of the South. I’m anything I want to be. I ain’t no sucker!”
The final book splatters into the mud. The pages break from the fragile binding, thin as moths’ wings. The leather’s old, the ink cramped, the water staining slowly over the paragraphs pages, over the centuries of questions that holy men went blind in scribbling.
Knucklehead Nines delivers the pile a final, spindly kick and swaggers off into the night. “Man, I don’t even know how to read.”
After that it’s back to the clubs. Doesn’t talk about questions or dogs again. He tries a few times to touch me, and when his fingers meet air, reaches out to touch the dancers instead, strangers, lets them kiss his lucky finger stumps. Cultivates a fascination, for a while, for the form, the pull of sinew beneath beaded costume.
I find him one, two, many times crouched naked over bloody sheets in cheap motels, their sequin costumes tattered on the floor, and he looks up to me, dripping, says, “You know, I do feel a little judged, on occasion, lover.” He calls me lover, Ishmael, Annabel Lee. “Must take you a lot to master your appetite. I wonder if you’d want me reformed.”
I say nothing; I call him nothing. The truth is I have already seen him form and unform and form again.
They ask him what his day job is. He tells them he’s a whaler.
This is chapter one of a three-chapter story. I’ll be posting the installments on Fridays on DHP’s off-weeks throughout the month of October, with the final chapter posted on Halloween. It will only get weirder and gayer from here. Stay tuned.