[Fiction] Mutual Aid By Autumn Harrison

Mutual Aid

By Autumn Harrison

 Hazel listened at the top of the open door that led from the kitchen down the basement stairs. The air in the stairwell was cool and quiet, not the usual emptiness of undisturbed damp and stale sea air, but animate, and tinged with ozone, as if the house was holding its breath. The hard weight of the revolver seeped a metallic coldness through the pocket of her apron, the flannel of her house dress, and into the soft flesh of her gut. Hazel adjusted the wicker basket that held sheets, pajamas, a towel, a bar of soap, a thermos of chicken broth, a plastic tumbler of ice water, and a hardcover biography of Harry Houdini, broken at the spine.

She paused her descent on the fourth riser, the one that was too short, careful of her stiff right knee. At the bottom she set the basket on a low card table normally used for folding laundry.

The mope was asleep. Maybe. He was curled in on himself in the middle of the old iron bed, like he was expecting a kick. The hair that hung in his face was brown at the roots, and the rest, streaked from a home bleach job, was the color of nicotine-stained fingers.

He rolled over, exposing his sunken chest, and moaned. His skin had the tacky look of yeasted wet bread dough. The flannel shirt he wore was more rag than whole cloth and gaped open to reveal a purpling bruise, the size and shape of the business end of a baseball bat, across his ribs. Too skinny.

She turned to the task of tidying up his mess.

Returning the emptied puke bucket, she made sure to keep him in her peripheral sight line. The bruise on her right thigh, above the knee, reminded her that he might be a skinny junkie, but he still had the unearned strength and vigor of the young.

As she was bent down, his brown eyes locked on to hers. They were rimmed in thick black lashes, the whites the pale yellow of onion skins.

Hazel felt a high whistle inside her head as a crashing wave of adrenaline hit her belly.

Slowly, she stood up and stepped back, noting that his eyes were still watching her. Am I really doing this? she thought, and was reassured to feel that she had already pulled the revolver from her apron pocket.

He looked at it and squeezed his eyes shut. How old is he? Trying to make me disappear like a bad dream. 

“Please.” The word pushed out of his mouth on the tail of a moan.

Hazel was surprised that his fear felt good, an echo of her feeling of victory after last night’s panic and helplessness, and she reminded herself that she had a plan.

 “I’m hurt,” he said, bringing his right hand to his midsection.

Hazel exchanged the revolver for an amber-colored prescription pill bottle in her apron pocket. She held up the bottle between them, giving him time to see the label, and then shook it. The dry rattle of six oxycodone pills broke the silence.

She had his attention. Groaning, he pushed himself upright and tried to reach out with his left hand, realization dawning on his face as he took in the handcuffs, padlock, and chain.

“What the fuck. Are you fucking crazy!” His words exploded through the empty basement, ricocheting off the enameled metal of the washer and dryer. He yanked and pulled down on the chain that hung from a thick radiator pipe above his head.

She stepped back. He was hurt but not enough to not be dangerous. She assessed his wiry arms, covered in track marks and imagined them locked across her throat.

Maybe she was crazy, but now she had a plan. Not last night. Last night, she had acted on instinct. The power was out and the storm that had rolled in off the Pacific was still lashing the windows in sideways rain when she had found him creeping through her dining room. She had hit him as hard as she could with the baseball bat, aiming for the center of his body. The mope had collapsed forward onto his knees, doubled over, like a man on a prayer rug. Her fear and panic driving her, she had given him the sweet spot of the bat to the back of his head.

There had been relief when she’d rolled him over and found him unconscious—not dead. The rest had been the good work of a hard puzzle solved. Using his skateboard and a tarp from the basement, she had secured him with loops of chain, dragged and rolled him to the basement stairs, and sent him sliding down.

Now he was standing on the bed and hanging his full body weight on the chain. He looked at her and yelled, “Call the cops! Why haven’t you called the cops?”

You’d like that, wouldn’t you? My word against yours. No. I know what to do. Hazel kept these thoughts to herself and the feeling of self-satisfaction returned. She crossed to the table, shook the bottle of pills again, and set it down next to the laundry basket. She moved to the foot of the stairs.

In a blur, he was off the bed, flying toward her.

Panic reared up, propelling her a couple of steps up. She turned, bracing her back to the wall, and reached to retrieve the revolver.

Her measurements were good. He was at the end of his tether with no more than a half a foot to spare, enough to reach the table and the tiny bathroom in the corner. 

He growled at her while snatching up the prescription bottle, knocking the laundry basket off the table in the process, the thermos of chicken broth clattering on the cold cement floor. 

 Hazel favored her right knee as she climbed the stairs. At the door she paused and listened. He had gone silent. She turned the skeleton key in the lock and returned the apron with the heavy, cold weight of the revolver to the hook next to the door frame.

#

A smell of burned food woke him to a throbbing in his head. He opened his eyes; the morning light lit up the basement and sent shards of glass through Buddy’s brain. The ache in his guts and his joints told him that the fat old witch was late. He lifted his left hand to pull the knitted afghan over his head and, forgetting about the padlock, whacked himself in the lip.

He screamed in pain, tasting blood in his mouth.

The burning smell was stronger and Buddy’s guts roiled. His mouth filled with saliva, and rolling to the edge of the bed, he puked a thin, violent stream of bile, saliva, and blood into the plastic bucket.

He hated her. Hated this house. Hated Harry fucking Houdini.

How long had he been here, in the basement, four days? Five?

She was keeping him just this side of hurt. Never enough to stop feeling the ache of it. He ate and drank what she gave him, and the pills came every six hours. Six pills, six hours, enough to ease the shakes. But not enough, never enough to get high. And now she was late.

He hated her because her house sat tucked behind the bluffs, on the outskirts of Pacific Glades and with no view of the ocean but was within walking distance of the freeway on-ramp. He had spent the day trying to hitch a ride south, back to San Francisco. No one stopped for him and he knew he needed a different plan.

Hers was the most run-down of the cottages. The paint was peeling and the mailbox was overflowing. It should have been easy. The storm door had come open with barely a kiss from his pick set. The backdoor deadbolt looked like it was going to be a bitch to get open, until he tried the easy way first. Grinning when the door swung open with a twist of the knob. It was a sign, like the storm, his luck was changing.  

Yeah, it was a sign. Bad-jinx-hinky sign.

A smoke alarm shrieked into life, and Buddy jerked his knees up. He  shrieked back before burying his face in the pillow. The shakes returned.

He hated her. Hoped she tripped on the stairs and shot herself in the gut.

But after. After she brought him his pills.

The smoke alarm stopped its knife-sharp scream, and the pain in his head was immediately overrun by the pain in his guts and his joints.

And then she was there in the basement with him. Buddy could hear her over by the washing machine. Still a good fifteen feet from him.

“I brought you some soup. Chicken, made it myself.”

“I need my pills. I don’t give a fuck about your burned soup,” he said, doubled over in the bed.

“I apologize for being late. The soup is not burned. I did burn the first batch of toast. Here, have your pills.” She was talking to him in her cool school nurse voice.

“I’ve been puking, I won’t keep them down.” He hated the baby whine in his voice, but his panic at missing a dose was crawling up the back of his neck.

“I got something for that.”

She leaned in closer, smelling of cigarette smoke, and handed him a little pill. She opened her mouth, lifted her tongue, and pointed under it, miming where he should place the pill.

It tasted like the poison left out on ant traps. His mouth filled with saliva, and he could feel his gorge rising. He knew what the sticky bait tasted like because when he was twelve he believed an older kid who said it would get him high.

“Breathe through your nose. Steady.” She was standing over him, close enough to kick.

Instead, he said through a clenched jaw, “I am breathing.”

She propped a pillow behind his back. Her heavy body inches from his, he could see a patch of beard hairs on her chin. Finally, he was able to swallow. She steadied his shaking right hand as he brought the tumbler to his lips. He kept down two sips of water. She handed him the oxycodone pills two at a time.

Buddy waited to feel better. Waited to feel good enough to whip his left arm around and hit her in the face with the padlock. Or grab her by her long gray braid and rap her head off the cement floor.

He watched her, and she looked up, made eye contact, and, as if she could read his thoughts, stepped back, out of reach. She pushed the rocking chair out of range and sat down with the gun in her right hand. She picked up the book in her left. She began to read, low and clear.

Buddy’s shakes subsided, and her voice came into focus. Harry Houdini was hanging suspended from a bridge, in a barrel.

“You got to let me go.” He didn’t care anymore that his voice was whiny like a little kid, pleading.

“You got a busy schedule of robbing little old ladies?” she mocked him.

“I need to get out of here, lady. Call the cops already.” No one would believe him if he told them.

She set the book down in her lap and looked at him. “I got a plan and this revolver. If you get a different plan, let me know.”

“Plan? We both know you aren’t going to shoot me.” Buddy realized it was true as he said it.

“Do we both know that?” Baseball bat hardness had replaced the school nurse tone in her reply.

Buddy tried to meet her gaze, but the pills were kicking in. Like sliding into a warm bath, his body relaxed. She was saying something about her plan, and Buddy thought, Would she? Would she shoot me? If she was going to shoot me, wouldn’t she have done it the first night?

“It’s your turn to read to me.”

“Read?”

“You’ll see, it’ll help.” Using her foot, she pushed the book to him, the gun now replaced by a ball of yarn and a pair of knitting needles. 

#

In the kitchen, the phone rang. Well into the afternoon, but Hazel enjoyed breakfast and turned back to her plate of bacon, eggs, wheat toast, and grapefruit.

The machine answered on the fourth ring.

“Hazel, pick up.” A pause, and then, “Hazel, if you don’t pick up, I’m coming over.” Michaela’s voice was insistent but pitched low, like she didn’t want to be heard by anyone nearby.

Hazel answered the wall phone and noted that she had left the mope’s skateboard propped  next to the baseball bat at the door to the basement. “I’m here.”

“Oh, good, you’re not dead in a ditch?” Michaela delivered the line with exasperated sarcasm.

“You’ll make a great detective, one day.” Hazel matched her granddaughter’s tone.

“Ha, I wouldn’t have to worry if you had a cell phone.”

“Nope,” Hazel said while thinking about the last place she had hid a pack of cigarettes.

“Did you have any storm damage?” Hazel noted that Michaela tried her official voice on for size.

“Michaela, don’t you have real police stuff to do, get a kitten out of a tree?”

“That’s Fire and Rescue. Look, I'll come over. See that you have what you need. They’re predicting more of these super storms this month. Also, somebody reported a prowler in Sea Ranch.”

“That’s the other side of the freeway and five tax brackets away. Also, I’m all set with a gas stove, a full pantry, and a battery-powered radio. And candles—.”

“No candles, Nana! House fires are started by unattended candles.”

Hazel closed her eyes. Stop fighting her. She cannot show up here. 

“Okay, no candles.”

“Remember I put a flashlight at the back door and another one in the front hall.”

“Yeah, I remember. Look, don’t worry about your Nana. I’m good. Go check on those sad souls stuck in the Pacific Glades Mutual Aid Home.”

“That’s not fair. I only gave you that brochure because I worry about you all alone in that house.”                          

Hazel let her silence speak for her. I am not your problem, little girl. She pawed through the junk drawer—batteries, pens, loose keys, a box of bullets, and takeout menus.

“How about a Sunday roast? We could cook together?” Michaela asked.

A pack of cigarettes materialized in the back of the drawer. Hazel made noncommittal noises, promising to think about it before she hung up.

#

Buddy was in the coffin-sized shower stall that would have let him turn around completely except the chain tether wasn’t long enough. He had to loop his left arm around his back to get water on his entire body all while being careful not to trip over the chain or whack himself in the nuts with the padlock. 

He had his own plan. Not the way the witch talked about it, but a plan to get out and find her stash. She’d had him locked up for over two weeks. He was sure because he had started counting the days when six pills became five. That was also the day he had taken a run at her. But like before, she seemed to sense it and was ready. 

She had pulled out her gun and asked, “You want to try doing this with a hole in your foot?”

Then five became four, became three, became two, and then every six hours was every eight, and then every twelve, and here they were, two pills every twelve hours.

He had gone cold turkey once. He was in the city working as a barback at a gay strip club and thought he could kick it on his own. He’d lasted twenty hours before he dragged himself out to the Tenderloin, scored, and shot up. Twenty hours gone in twenty minutes.

Almost clean, almost, Buddy thought as he came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist. He felt good, mostly. The thought was quickly followed by a phantom ache at his joints, the tantrum howl of his craving, muffled but growing louder.

Okay, not good. Good was high.

But Jesus he was awake. Wide awake, and it was like being split down the middle and pulled open, like a frog in biology class. A frog who was alive, really alive. His hair grew, his nails grew, his skin healed, and it felt good to eat. It felt good to take a shit. It felt good to sleep.

But the ache that had fueled his hunt for enough money and for strong enough dope was still there, waiting. The ache was the glue that held him together. Without it, he was a collection of broken bits. And yet there he was, almost sober for the first time since he was sixteen. Chained to a pipe in a fat old witch’s house. No one knew where he was, and no one cared if they did.

She was at the washing machine with her broad body turned away from him, the gray snake of her braid hanging to her waist. He tugged the slack in the chain and imagined wrapping it around her neck like in that one movie with the princess and the giant turd—slug monster. The thought made him cough out a dry laugh. She turned around.

Buddy met her gaze and slowly untucked the towel, letting it drop to the floor. Her eyes flicked down his body and he gave his hips a thrust.

 He pitched his voice low, working a vein of menace. “Is this what you want, you dirty old witch?”

Without a beat, she said, “Not much to work with, is it? Get dressed.”

Buddy did as he was told. Sitting on the bed and waiting and letting an idea simmer: he was awake enough, he could get the gun. He watched her settle in the rocking chair with her knitting, out of range of his leash, waiting for him to begin reading.

            “Why?” He asked on impulse, realizing he really wanted to know as he said it aloud.  

            “We all have our reasons. My story would make you weep if you had a heart, but it doesn’t add up to the cost of a cup of coffee. Every day I get to choose what kind of person I’m going to be. And so do you, and so does every other mope whose parents neglected them.”

            It sounded practiced, like she said it often, and it angered him. Who the hell did she think she was to judge him? She didn’t know what it was like to be dumped like garbage by your own people. “You don’t get it.”

            “You’re mad because I do. I get that your pot was left empty when you were little and that it stayed that way.” She looked up from her knitting and continued, “What are you going to do if I let you go?”

            “Be a good boy, I promise,” he said realizing too late that he should not have flashed her his cock if he was going to convince her he was reformed.

            “When you have a better plan, let me know.” Her eyes never left her knitting.

            They sat in silence, Buddy thumbing the pages of the book. They had finished the Harry Houdini biography and moved on to The Birdman of Alcatraz. She thought he was too slow to catch on to the theme, but when he complained, she pointed to a box of books in the corner and told him to help himself.

            As he found the spot where they had stopped the day before and began reading, they both heard the jingle of the bells on the front door knob.

            Someone was at the door or in the house.

            “I’m going to spank that girl,” she said, and stood up, putting her knitting in the chair.

            She walked to the foot of the stairs and turned around. “She’s police. If she finds you, she is going to arrest you.”

            Buddy watched as she walked up the stairs and heard her lock the basement door behind her. He closed the book and put it on the floor next to the bed, and then he picked up the pill bottle. Two pills.

            He could hear their voices. The old witch sounded annoyed, and the other person, the cop, was talking in a singsong, like she was talking to a kid. A shutoff notice? A neighbor complaint…

             I should be screaming my head off. I should start right now.

            He thumbed open the pill bottle and then looked over to her empty rocking chair and her discarded knitting.

#

Hazel’s eyes flipped open. Her hands were balled into fists, pressed into her cheeks, suppressing a moan. The dream afterimage, a man hanging from the overhead pipe in the basement, strobed in her vision against the backdrop of the completely black room; none of the expected light spilled from the windows overlooking the 1O1. She closed her eyes, listening to the silence left in the aftermath of the storm. She tucked her hands into her armpits and waited for them to get warm; instead, they seeped cold into her body. 

She clicked the switch of the bedside lamp and confirmed the power was out, again. Rising from bed, she pulled her robe from the hook on the back of the door.

Remembering that she was not alone in the house, she went back to her bed to retrieve her dead son’s service revolver from under her pillow, but it wasn’t there.

She sat down on the side of the bed. When did I have it last? She had brought him a bowl of stew, and he had read to her. The revolver in the pocket of her apron. Could she have left it in the basement? Was he waiting for her on his bed, revolver in hand?

No, it had been Michaela showing up uninvited and starting an argument. She had forgotten to check the mail. Michaela had waved a pink shutoff notice from the electric company and lectured her that family was all that mattered now. They had to stick together to keep her father’s memory alive.

But the revolver. Was it still in the pocket of her apron? Hanging on the back of the basement door? In the dark, she made her way to the bathroom across the hall and found a candle. She couldn’t remember where the flashlight was, in the entrance table drawer? The candle would do to get her down the stairs.

Hazel’s eyes adjusted, and she took the stairs one at a time, staying off her right leg.

The smell of cigarette smoke drew her to the kitchen, where he was sitting at the table.

From the doorway she watched him for a moment before she said, “You found my smokes.”

“Least you could do for me,” he responded, and she followed the amber glow of his cigarette as he took a drag.

She surprised herself by laughing at him. “Ha, just like a man. I fed you, bathed you, and emptied your puke bucket for weeks, and the least I can do for you is let you have a cigarette?”

But he is still here. His skateboard and his backpack right beside the basement door. He could have left. 

“Nobody asked you to keep me chained up in your basement like a fucking dog,” he said.

In the light of her candle, he looked good, healthy, still too skinny but bright-eyed and awake. Dressed in a pair of jeans she had taken in for him, her barn coat, and a pair of wool socks she had hand knitted for her son, he could be any working-class kid.

Hazel moved farther into the room, noting the glint of metal on the tabletop at his empty right hand. “You going to tell me your name before you shoot me?”

He looked down at the revolver. “Buddy.”

“My name is Hazel. Why did you pick my house, Buddy?” She moved closer. On the table, next to the revolver, was her knitting. The blue bootie unraveled, and the tips of both needles bent one into a hook, the other into an S shape. She remembered the set of picks she had found in his backpack that first night and gave herself a mental kick for having chosen that Harry Houdini book. She set the candle on the table between them and eased herself down into the chair across from him.

“No lights, mail spilling out of the mailbox, and I figured the lock would be old enough that I could pick it. Only I didn’t have to, because you forgot to lock your door.” Buddy put his hand on top of the revolver. “What gave you the right to keep me prisoner in your basement?”

“You know that revolver isn’t loaded.”

“It wasn’t loaded. I found bullets where I found these stale-ass smokes.”

Could that be right? Was there a box of shells in the junk drawer?

“Okay, so now you have a loaded revolver between us. What’s your plan?”

“I want to know why you’ve kept me chained up in your basement for a month.”

He sounded like he meant it, the little-kid wheedling tone was gone. “You needed the help. Don’t you feel better?”

Buddy scoffed, moved his hand off the gun, and flicked the ash from his cigarette into his palm, and rubbed it into his jeans at the top of his thigh.

Hazel pushed her chair back, reached forward, and gripped the edge of the table to help herself to standing. Her knee griped. Moving slowly, with purpose, she retrieved a heavy glass ashtray from the bench at the back door.

She placed the ashtray next to the candle, next to the revolver, and said, “Let’s have some coffee.”

“I know why you didn’t call the cops. I found that brochure, the one from the home, Pacific Glade Old Farts Aid Home. ‘Community living built on mutual aid and respect.’” The last was quoted in a mock-caring pharmaceutical ad voice as he crushed out the cigarette in the ashtray.

Hazel’s hackles rose, but she kept her back to him and continued to set up the stovetop percolator.

He went on, “You’ve been missing time, forgetting pots on the stove, bills not paid.”

“I can take care of myself. I raised my boy alone and kept my house without anybody else.” She turned to face him and crossed her arms.

“Where is he, your son?”

Hazel squeezed her eyes shut on the memory of her beautiful boy’s body hanging from the radiator pipe in the basement.

“Gone. Dead.” She pulled out milk and sugar, banging them on to the table with more force than necessary.

“That’s your sad story?” he asked, and Hazel heard his coaxing tone as mockery.

“I don’t owe you my story. I never asked you to tell me yours.” Hazel clenched her jaw, stopping herself from saying more.

“Fine. No sob stories. But a plan, right?” The coaxing was gone.

There was a dry rattle, and she turned around to see the familiar amber prescription bottle in his hand. He gave it another shake.

They looked at each other like two stray dogs meeting on the street, each waiting for the other to make the next move. Buddy placed the bottle next to the gun and the knitting.

“My plan was to get up here, find the rest of your pills, and be gone before you woke up.”

“What you’ve got in that bottle are the last two in the house except for a couple of acetaminophen with codeine ten years expired.”

The silence between them was broken by the glassy, clean clink of a sleigh bell. Hazel stepped away from the stove, picked up the prescription bottle and her knitting, and slipped them into the apron hanging next to the basement door. She nodded at the gun, looked at Buddy with a cocked eyebrow, and left the room headed for the front door.

He stood up, checked the safety was on, and slipped the gun into the waistband at the small of his back. He sat back down and lit up another smoke.

“Do I smell cigarette smoke?”

A large woman in a street-patrol police uniform stood in the doorway and flicked the wall switch. The room was bathed in light. She scanned the room, noting the baseball bat, skateboard, and backpack propped at the basement door.

She stepped farther into the room, hooked her left hand at her waist, and her right came to rest atop her service weapon.

“Michaela, meet Buddy. Buddy, this is my granddaughter, Michaela,” Hazel said.

“Hi?” Michaela said.

Buddy nodded toward Michaela’s pregnant belly and put out the cigarette.

“You want some coffee?” Hazel asked, turning to the stove.

“Not really. What I want is to know why Buddy is sitting at your kitchen table, in my father’s socks?”

Hazel shrugged. “Buddy was one of the boys from Michael’s Skate Park Program.”

Michaela looked at Hazel and then turned her attention back to Buddy.

“So you knew my father?”

Buddy nodded.

“What? Did he bring you around here?”

“Michaela, sit down and have a cup of coffee. Buddy’s been staying here, helping me since the last storm. Remember, I told you I had a plan.”

“A plan, Buddy, why don’t you tell me your part in this plan.”