By the time 6-X-32 of the midwatch showed up, both combatants were down on the pavement exhausted from having wrestled and punched and bitten and clawed for several minutes. Jonas Claymore clearly had gotten the worst of it. His face bore scratches and contusions, and his buttonless shirt was hanging out and blood-spattered. His breath came in short rasps and his hairless concave chest heaved as he pawed at his right ear where a tiny snippet of the lobe had been bitten off. His former boss had a purple mouse under one eye and a bruised lower lip and her left shirtsleeve was completely ripped away.
The black-and-white squealed into the parking lot and two blue-uniformed cops got out, the shorter one carrying a side-handle baton.
Jetsam said to his partner, “I’ll take the female, bro.”
“Roger that,” Flotsam said, walking toward Jonas Claymore, who was standing, hands on his knees, bent over and trying to catch his breath.
Before the tall cop could speak, Jonas said, “That Russki douche bag started it! She pushed me and then she slugged me. I was just defending myself.”
“You didn’t do too good a job of it,” Flotsam noted.
“She suckered me!” Jonas hollered, loud enough for gawking passersby to hear.
“Keep your voice down,” Flotsam said. “And tell me what happened.”
Meanwhile Ludmila was trying to tie her white shirt together in order to cover her size 46 E cup bra, and she said to Jetsam, “He is no-good bum. I hire him. I pay him good. He never share tip with nobody. He is worth-noth-ink shit!”
“How did the fight start?” Jetsam asked.
“He is say-ink rude things to me. He use his dirty mouth and make me fight.”
“Are you saying that you got physical before he did?”
“What?”
“Did you hit him first?”
“Well…,” Ludmila said, as though she were contemplating an exceedingly difficult question. “Is depend-ink how you see si-too-ation.”
“Uh-huh,” Jetsam said. “I had to be there, right?”
Flotsam suggested that Jonas tip his head back and press the remnants of his shirt to his nose and hold it there.
“Are you really interested in making a battery report?” Flotsam asked. “And a private person’s arrest?”
“Wouldn’t you?” Jonas pulled the balled-up shirt away from his face for a moment.
“I’d have to think about it,” Flotsam said. “She’s a woman.”
Jonas said, “She’s a slit-licking lizzy warthog! She ain’t no woman.”
“According to the law she is,” Flotsam said. “We’ll do what you want. You could make a private person’s arrest and we’ll be glad to transport, but then we’ll expect you to follow through all the way. Think about going to court and telling in public how that babe clocked you. It could be way embarrassing, dude. Up to you, though.”
That stopped Jonas cold. He thought about it a moment, about the humiliation and all the hassle, and he said, “Well, what if we forget about it, the both of us? Can we do that?”
“Okay with us,” Flotsam said. “But I don’t wanna get another call about you two duking it out again.”
“You won’t. I’m going home,” Jonas said. Then he yelled to Ludmila, “You can’t fire me! I quit, you goddamn commie carpet muncher!”
“Fock you, stupid head!” his former employer said and flipped him the bird.
That afternoon when Jonas Claymore got back to his apartment that he shared with Megan Burke in Thai Town, she was lying on the couch watching an old TCM movie in a Percocet fog.
She was shocked when she saw him, and said, “Jonas! What happened to you?”
“I got in a fight at work,” he said, “with some fucking Russian. Hollywood’s full of commie trash. There ain’t no Americans in charge of anything these days.”
Megan said. “You’re hurt.”
She was wearing a baggy T-shirt and cutoffs and her legs looked even knobbier and paler than the last time Jonas paid any attention to them. When he’d met her, she had healthy dark brown hair in a stylish bob that ended a couple of inches below her ears and looked like a dark hoodie. She liked to wear those cute tights from Target then, but now the tights and most of her clothes were gone, and her hair was longer, dull, and frizzy. He figured that pretty soon it would be bleached out and falling to her shoulders with bangs reaching to her eyes like Lady Gaga’s. A lot of the girls he knew did that to themselves, trying to look like the singer, but they ended up looking like shot-out skeezers, all sunken-eyed, pruned, and shriveled. There were dark circles under Megan’s nervous violet eyes and altogether he thought she looked like shit.
“Just get me a damp washcloth and a towel,” he said. “I gotta lay down.”
When he was lying on the couch, she returned and started dabbing at his wounds, causing him to yelp when she touched his damaged earlobe.
“Jonas,” she said. “You’ve lost a chunk of meat from your ear! How did that happen?”
“A bite,” he said.
“He bit you?” she said, shocked.
“Fucking Russians shoulda been nuked to the Stone Age,” he said to the ceiling.
She said, “He hurt you pretty bad.”
Then Jonas said, “You shoulda seen the damage I did. It wasn’t one-way.”
She dabbed at his ear with a soiled dishtowel, saying, “I’m sure you kicked his butt.”
“I knocked the shit outta that Russian pus bucket,” Jonas said to the wall. “Then I almost get busted by the cops for defending myself. Me, the victimized American.”
Megan said, “Just rest now and don’t think about it.”
“This is why my grandpa killed communists in Vietnam?” Jonas said to the coffee table littered with fan magazines, candy wrappers, and pizza boxes, as well as OC paraphernalia, including a 6 × 10 inch piece of tinfoil creased in half, a cigarette lighter, and a ballpoint pen with the ink tube removed lying beside it.
“Try to calm yourself,” Megan said.
“So a commie dirtbag could come to Hollywood and sucker me when I wasn’t looking?”
Megan said, “Your nose’ll start bleeding again. We’ve got half an eighty left. Do you want to chase the dragon?”
“A half of one bean?” Jonas said. “But I gave you a Ben Franklin yesterday!”
“It was three days ago, and Wilbur’s charging us eighty-five per ox. And we smoked a piece of it when we did those watsons and perks. You’re having a brownout. Don’t you remember any of it?”
He vaguely recalled the Vicodins and Perocets, but he couldn’t recall smoking half of an 80 mg OxyContin tablet. “It’s that goddamn screw-top wine,” he said. “It fucks up my memory. Can’t you go boost a better bottle somewhere? I’d even settle for a couple forties of OE.”
“I’m not a thief,” Megan said.
Jonas was getting heart palpitations and was sweating cold. His knee joints and right shoulder were aching, which he blamed on the fight. But when he looked more closely at Megan he saw that she had broken into a sweat as well, and she couldn’t stop yawning and scratching herself. That is, when she wasn’t coughing.
“Goddamnit, Megan, look at us,” he said. “We’re jonesing. I gotta chase the dragon and I mean right now!”
She jumped up, ran to the bedroom, and got the last piece of the OC tablet, bringing it to the coffee table and placing it in the crease of the foil.
“This ain’t a complete half,” Jonas accused. “You smoked a bite off it, didn’t you?”
Megan didn’t reply and he was too desperate to press her.
“Just hurry up,” he said.
Megan placed the flame of the lighter underneath the foil and heated the OxyContin tablet. Jonas picked up the empty ink tube, which, unlike a drinking straw, would not burn easily, and put it in his mouth. Megan tilted the foil, and as the heated fragment slid down the crease propelled by gravity and heated from beneath the foil, Jonas hungrily inhaled, and even swallowed as much rising smoke as he could, chasing that smoking ox down the crease before it burned up completely.
“You’re not worried about me, are you, Jonas?” Megan said. “Don’t you think I need a taste, too?”
Jonas said to her, “You call this chasing the dragon? All you left me was a crumb. There ain’t enough ox here to chase a fucking lizard.”