Dermaphoria by Craig Clevenger Page A

his arm.
    “Come now,” he says. “I haven’t drawn my gun in two years. You pull anything out and I will shoot you in the belt buckle. Now, what are you doing here?”
    The money is a soiled sock in my hand. I want to shrink down and crawl into a crack but not here, not these cracks.
    “The doctor needs a sperm sample, but the magazines at the hospital weren’t doing it for me. When did you start working here?”
    “When did you decide to stop cooperating?” he asks.
    “The cockroaches tell you that? You shouldn’t listen to them. They’re pissed because I’m neat freak. I moved into that shit-hole room and swept up the crack pipes and bread crumbs. I killed one of them, so the whole colony’s got it in for me. It’s your colony, so you already know that.”
    “Where you been, Eric? I’ve been hearing crickets on my voice mail for two days.”
    “You know exactly where I’ve been. Your spies are in my room and crawling through my clothes.”
    “That’s not how I work,” says Anslinger. “I don’t come to you. You come to me.”
    “What luck. I just wandered into your office. Or is this where your daughter works?”
    Anslinger goes ice water on me, his warm eyes freezing to glass. He’s neither angry nor amused. He stares at the center of my forehead, and there’s nothing behind it that’s any good to him.
    “Mention my daughter again.”
    The pony box timer counts down with the temperature.
    “Go on. Mention my daughter.”
    Voices seep through the walls, moaning with pure pleasure but sounding like near death, obscenities serving as endearments.
    “Get a magazine,” Anslinger shouts, and hammers the widow to his left.
    I hear the door bolt open, the hasty departure of a frustrated patron.
    “I spoke with your lawyer,” he says.
    “So you know that I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”
    “I know you’re supposed to be cooperating. But he hasn’t heard from you, either. In a few days, he’s getting a set of binders, all of them thicker than the Old Testament. Every speck of glass we found within a hundred miles of the burn will be listed. We’ve run toxicity reports on the soil and groundwater. Everything. It’s on you. The registration for your car listed the burn site as your address. But guess who owns the place? Guess who’s legally responsible for what went down there?”
    Maybe White, maybe not.
    “We don’t know, either,” he says. “The deed is held by a limited liability company, represented by a law firm with a private mailbox address in Nevada. The paper trail fades out somewhere in the Cayman Islands.”
    “I’m not hiding. I’m trying to remember. I need time.”
    “Once the Grand Jury reaches a decision, it’s too late to make an offer. Tell me something useful. Or tell Morell.”
    “What if my former employers don’t want me to talk?”
    “So you do have employers?”
    Shit.
    “You’ve been threatened?” Like he’s asking about my paper cut.
    “I’m saying what if.”
    “If you tell us who threatened you, we know who you work for.” Anslinger slips into his camel hair coat. “And since you told us that, it means you’re cooperating. We’ll want to protect you.”
    “You got a card?”
    “No.”
    The pony box counts beeps and booth number four goes dark. My heart slows down, my hands cease their cricket twitching. I can’t leave, yet.
    I drop another token into the box and the Glass Stripper is back, a blow-up sex doll, carnival prize dancing as though the window never opened. Had Anslinger shot me through the face, she’d dance for my bleeding corpse just the same. I slip her the money and she presses her palm against the glass like she’s visiting me in prison. She holds her splayed fingers against the window while the numbers tick down. I press my palm in return to her jailhouse greeting and swallow the burning in my throat. It’s when I know she sees me I want her the most. The lights go out.
    The Glass Stripper waves, tickling the air