We parked against the curb behind the basketball courts off Pine Avenue. I cut the engine and left the radio playing; the yellow light from it glowing in the space between us. Neither of us spoke. Alex leaned against the door, watching the action on the courts. She plucked at one front tooth with her thumbnail. I took a sip from a bottle of water, pulled the key from the ignition. She pulled the latch and stepped out of the truck. The door echoed behind her when it slammed shut.
Walking down to Broadway she turned into me out of the wind and lit a cigarette. She smoked lazily, in languorous exasperated exhales. Disinterested plumes of grey smoke poured from her nostrils. When we got to Broadway and turned the corner we nearly crashed into some guy in a tight red T-shirt. He smelled strongly of spiced cologne. No one said a word, only side-stepped and kept right on moving. She laughed. “Boy pussy,” she said. I told her that her shoelace was untied. With her foot pressed against a mailbox and her cigarette pinched between her teeth, she turned her head to me and asked if I was sure that I still wanted to go along with her. “I’m still here,” I said. She closed one eye against a wisp of smoke.
The sidewalks were busy with people. The city lights reflected against the cars cruising up and down the avenue.
“Let’s get a coffee,” she said, flipping her cigarette into the street.
Inside Café Roma, we bought coffees and talked about mudslides, the riot, the earthquake. One man had been killed. Not by the earthquake or a mudslide, but by four kids during what the news media called The Fat Tuesday Riot. The man was surrounded and beaten to death as hundreds of people walked passed or stood and watched.
“It’s things like that that make me want to run to the hills, or turn vigilante,” I said.
“What?”
“Four kids beating some poor guy to death.”
“How do you know he didn’t deserve it?” she said, and lit another cigarette. “How do you know he wasn’t drunk as hell and started some shit with them? Maybe he…”
“That’s not reason enough to beat someone to death.”
She sipped at her coffee, set the cup down and asked, “What is reason enough?”
It was quiet for a while. The side door of the café opened and a short woman walked in. Her hair looked wet. It was pulled back into a tight bun. She held a tall paper cup full of flowers and was dressed several layers too heavy for the weather. The last layer was a dingy yellow down coat. Smiling and waving, she walked straight over to where we were sitting. Her chin tilted against one shoulder. The woman’s head seemed to be forever ducking away from something. Her face was the color and texture of a rotten apple core. “Buy a flower for your sweetheart?” She held up the flowers in front of her. Only her eyes moved. The hand holding the cup was calloused and cracked, the first and second fingers brown with nicotine.
Alex laughed and punched out her cigarette. “I’m not his sweetheart.” She stood from the table. “We gotta go.”
“Got a cigarette?” the woman called after her.
“All out, hon,” Alex said over her shoulder.
As I stood, the woman reached across me and pulled the smoldering butt from the ashtray. “Assholes,” she said under her breath. She stuck the cigarette in her mouth and puffed the cherry red again.
Outside, a mist was falling. The clock in SeaFirst Bank read twenty after midnight.
“Well, sweetheart,” she mocked. “If you want to bail, this is your last chance.”
We turned down the alley behind Jack-In-the Box. Our shadows stretched across the dumpsters. Every footfall seemed to echo between the buildings. At the back of the news stand Alex pointed to the missing bulb from the lamp above the door. “I did that today.” She smiled. She was proud that she’d thought of everything. She grabbed my shoulders and stared at my face, studied my eyes, my nose, my mouth. I leaned in. “No,” she said. “Give me a boost.”
She looked down to my hands and raised her foot. I knit my fingers together. She stepped into my hands, swung her other leg over my shoulders and worked her way to standing. I held her ankles, could feel her Achilles twitch. She was so light. “Were you ever a cheerleader?” she joked. The soles of her Converse soaked through my shirt. I looked up as she reached for the fire escape. Water dripped in my face. She jumped from my shoulders and pulled the stairs down. The metal groaned then banged at the bottom. Everything went strangely quiet. With our backs pressed against the damp bricks Alex shook out two cigarettes. We smoked silently, looking up and down the alley. No one came. The cigarette went to my head.
“Okay, let’s go,” she said dropping her cigarette in a puddle. I flicked mine at a dumpster. Half way up my foot slipped and I smashed my shin against the iron rung. She opened the window and climbed in. Once we were inside she led me straight to an office door near the end of a long hallway. I was sweating and felt the urge to shit. She pulled a key from her pocket and opened the door. The office was dark except for the light coming from a twenty gallon tank on one of the bookshelves lining the walls from floor to ceiling. The bottom of the tank was full of saw dust and two tangled pieces of driftwood were arranged in the middle. There were three chameleons in the tank. Two of them were lounging on the drift wood, one with a single front leg raised, slowly stretching its toes. The third was clinging to the underside of the wire tank cover, one eye spastically surveying from its turret. I moved up against the tank. Something crunched under my shoe. When I looked down, something white jumped behind the huge desk. Alex already had the corner of an arabesque area rug turned up, and had the door of a floor safe opened.
“This guy’s got chameleons in here?”
“Uh-huh. You should see them eat, it’s wild,” she said, tucking three small stacks of bound bills into her pockets. “Catch one of those crickets. I’ll show you.”
I looked around. There were white crickets moving in the corners of the room and around a wingback reading chair. I caught one and Alex flicked the toes of the hanging chameleon. It didn’t budge, so she lifted the top and told me to toss the cricket inside. When it landed in the sawdust it froze. Wrinkled black eyes turned round frantically trying to locate the insect. One of the chameleons spotted the cricket quickly and, as fast as I guessed any chameleon had ever moved, made long, sticky steps to a better vantage point on the driftwood, its triangular jaw opening and closing, a thick pink tongue stretched and worked at the roof of its mouth. One eye zeroed in on its prey and didn’t move. The chameleon worked its mouth more and more slowly until it seemed to pause. Then the tongue shot down with so much force that a small cloud of sawdust spread out from where the cricket was. Two jagged white legs stuck out of the chameleon’s mouth, and with two shakes of its head, the cricket was gone.
“Wasn’t that awesome?” Alex stared into the tank wide-eyed and smiling. I agreed that it was.
“We better get going,” she said. She told me to start messing things around. She left the lid off the tank, and we started knocking things off of the desk, pulling things from the shelves, the table next to the chair. We turned over plastic trays full of invoices, dumped drawers of receipts and office supplies all over the floor. Back down the hall she opened every door. Two of them were storage rooms filled with boxes, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, cases of candy, bottled water, and soda-pop. One was the mop room. One had a small sink and a futon mattress on the floor with a folded blanket and an airline pillow. “So that’s where he did it,” I thought, and all the anger I felt the day she told me about it boiled up again.
“That’s a good reason,” I said.
“What?” Alex was already standing at the window.
“Nothing.” She knew what I meant. I climbed out first. It had stopped raining. I was back down the fire escape when I heard glass break. I pressed myself against the wall, trying to blend into the shadows and nervously looked up and down the alley. Alex dropped onto the pavement and we walked slowly back the way we came.
Passing a payphone, Alex asked if I had a quarter. I did.
“Who you calling?”
“Close Talking,” she said. “We gotta celebrate this, right?”
I nodded. Close Talking Eddie was her dude. While she was on the phone, I tried to rationalize what we’d done. Would it have been better, and more personal, to have just beaten the guy to a pulp? I could have killed his chameleons. That’s what I should have done; dumped the creepy things on to the floor and ground them into the rug.
“Come on. He’s going to meet us at The Comet.” We turned toward the bar, and she stopped me. “Wait a sec. Here.” She pulled one of the bundles of bills from her back pocket and, with both hands, squeezed it in mine.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“For helping out a friend.”
“I would have rather… What he…” I couldn’t bring myself to say the words. She stared at me with wide, shining eyes. We walked to the bar in silence.
Inside, The Comet seemed darker than usual, the only light coming from the TV behind the bar, the jukebox, and the hall light that led to the toilets. No bands were playing, and the crowd was thin. We ordered bourbons, and toasted to the night. She smiled a little, but quickly sank back into quietude. I studied her reflection in the mirror as she smoked. She didn’t look sad, or pensive. It was more like nothing. She looked like someone who had no one, nothing to say, nowhere to be. I have never felt more useless. I couldn’t think of anything to say to break the silence. As if to save me, the door opened and everyone turned to see who it was.
“Haha. Hey, man.” They were two young guys. They yelled at a table in the back. One of them walked straight to the table and the other ordered a pitcher of beer at the bar. He looked down the bar and nodded to us, then carried the beer and two glasses to the back.
I ordered another round, pulled a twenty from the roll in my pocket and set it on the bar. I bummed one of Alex’s cigarettes. Again the nicotine went straight to my head. “I’ll be right back.” I stood and went to the toilet.
When I came back, Close Talking Eddie was sitting next to Alex at the bar. He was practically in her lap. His hand was on her knee. I pulled another twenty from my pocket and asked the guys in back if they had change. They didn’t, so I stood at the jukebox pressing the buttons, flipping forward and back pretending to pick songs.
Eddie walked to the end of the bar and into the phone booth. He closed the folding door and picked up the receiver. I watched him as he pulled something from his shirt pocket and put it in the change return.
I turned to watch Alex folding some money in her lap into a small square.
In the phone booth Eddie pressed some buttons, said a few things into the phone, nodded, and hung up. I thought if I had a chameleon’s turrets I could watch both of them, simultaneously.
When Eddie walked back to Alex, he leaned into her, kissed her cheek, and she stuck the folded bills under his hand where it rested on her thigh.
Eddie left, and Alex went to the phone booth, closed the door, and picked up the receiver. Like Eddie, she never put money into it, only pressed at the numbers. But Alex didn’t say anything into the phone. She hung up and dug her finger into the change return. She sat back at the bar, put a cigarette behind her ear, drained her glass, and looked around for me. She nodded toward the door, and got up to leave. We walked back toward Pine. Alex was quiet and stretched her legs with purpose.
Back in the truck, under the streetlight, Alex pulled a small yellow balloon from her pocket. I watched as she tore it open with her teeth and dumped out a ball of resin the size of a marble on the back of the open glove box. The whole ritual always sickened and intrigued me in the way freak shows do. She took the cigarette from behind her ear and bit into the filter and pulled out a piece of the cotton.
She reached deep into the glove box for her silver cigarette case. Inside it was all of her gear. It was a tiny traveling kitchen where she could cook up her soup. Then she pinched off a chunk of the resin, set it in the cap from a forty ounce bottle, dripped water from my bottle over it, and tied off. I sat there, kind of wanting it, and watched her stitch another blue button in her arm. She leaned against the door. Her eyes closed. “We should get married,” she said, tired and syrupy.
“Oh yeah? Why do you say that?”
“Because we don’t care.”
I turned over the engine. “We don’t care about what?” I asked.
“Exactly,” she said, folding her arms around herself. “Take me home, please.”
I looked in the mirror, back down the street. It was quiet and dark except for the streetlamps shining on the parked cars and the empty basketball courts. I turned the wheel left and drove away.
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Dawson Steeber is a union carpenter living, writing, and reading in Akron, Ohio.
© 2025, Dawson Steeber
Halfway Down the Stairs 