THUGLIT Issue Seven Read Online Free Page B

but I was tied down, so all I could do was open my eyes to see that was exactly what was happening to me. The guy Porky called Lashawn was taking my leg off with a bonesaw.
    At least I figured that 's what it was. I never saw a bonesaw before, but it was sure as shit a saw and it was cutting into my leg bone, about six inches below the knee. This was my right leg. Just like Porky.
    I been beat seven ways from Sunday more than anyone I know. My stepdaddy Darryl started in on me when I was six or seven, and then the kids around the trailer park after that. I learned how to scrap all right, but I got my nose broke, a couple fingers. One time one of my ears got ripped half off when we was cruising drunk and the pickup flipped off the highway. I been in all kinds of pain, enough to talk about it all night if I wanted to. But there wasn't never nothing like this.
    A scream ripped out of my gullet that didn 't sound like I could've made it. My throat was raw before I was halfway done with it, but I kept screaming anyways because I didn't know what else I could do. My arms and legs was strapped down with leather belts and the two guys who were Lawshawn's partners helped hold me down. My eyes filled up with tears and everything looked like it was underwater but I could tell Porky was standing there, at the foot of the table, smoking and watching. That big bastard wanted to see everything. He wanted to see me scream and he wanted to see my leg come off.
    And Porky Valentine wanted me to live. A hobbling, one-legged example to follow , in case anybody around—anybody like to see my crippled ass trying to make it across town or just up the road to get my fucking mail—had a thought in his head that the Big Man was worth ripping off. He wasn't.
    Blood was all over the place, rivers of it. I guess I passed out before Lashawn got all the way through the bone.
     
    *****
     
    Poke just disappeared. Nobody knew what happened to him except me and Porky 's crew, but everybody wondered. Folks asked me, time to time, whatever happened to your partner? I'd just shrug and tell them I don't know. Reckon he got sick of this shitbird town and moved on. You know how he is. Most likely he's at the bottom of the Arkansas River to this day.
    Soon as I could , I put Arkansas in my own rearview mirror. There was a couple months I had to mess around with rehab and all that first, learning how to walk on my new leg and how to manage the pain. That's what they said in the hospital: manage the pain. Maybe Porky was hurting all the time, too. Maybe that's how come he was such a mean sonofabitch. I just poured whiskey on the hurt.
    You probably know all about that thing where you lose a limb but it 's like you can still feel it tingling. That's true. Thing like that makes a grown man want to cry some nights.
    Before I was done, before I drove my ass out of town and straight up to St. Louis to work with Freddie Alvarez's crew, I saw Porky Valentine just one more time. I was coming out of the liquor store with my bottom-shelf bottle in my armpit, hobbling up the sidewalk with the walking cane they gave me. He was standing on the corner with the paper in his hand. When I saw him I stopped cold. I wondered how come I had to walk with a damn cane and this gigantic dude didn't need one at all.
    Porky saw me too, and even though he didn 't have none of his boys with him I got sort of scared and didn't know what to do. It wasn't like I was going to run. So we just looked at each other for a good two minutes before he started to laugh. A great big shaking laugh. He shook all over. And when most of the shaking stopped he pulled up the leg of his pants and bent over and he knocked twice on that metal shaft he had for a right leg. It rang like a bell.
    Mine didn 't ring at all. It was made of wood.

The Last Job
    by Justin Ordoñez