The Shiv, the Raven Woman and the Stripper

The Conspiracy
I woke up in a cold sweat with my heart pounding so hard it felt like it was skipping beats. Was I having a heart attack in my sleep? I coughed up something nasty but I felt no chest pains.

Then I remembered I was dreaming, but suddenly I realized I was awake! There were those screams again. It was the sound of a woman's voice; in sheer terror.

"Help me! Somebody call the police. Will somebody please help me? Help!"

I grabbed my 12 gauge cannon from the bedside and tried to locate the screaming. I pumped a shell into the chamber and attempted to clear my head while trying to keep from shooting it off; always a concern when you're half asleep.

I heard the screams again.

"What kind of shit is this?"

Outside in the courtyard, I saw glass shattered everywhere beneath the window where she was screaming. I looked around and saw no one and no one on the street side either.

"Shut up god damn it! I'm tryin' to find if anyone is still around." I told her. So much for the element of surprise.

"Call the police for me please? I don't have a phone yet."

I went inside my apartment and dialed 911 and within 15 minutes the whole complex where I lived starts to unravel. Inside my apartment, I unload and clear the cannon, then I stepped outside. What I found out from her was that Shiv was window peeking at her from outside her window, she'd started screaming and then Shiv took off. It scared her to death and with good reason, Shiv was a convicted felon.

People were milling around everywhere like ants, cops were lurking in shadows and I gave a cop a witness report. Already, events are not coagulating in any meaningful way. Nothing added up to what she had told me.

Raven Woman
The deal around here in this 105 year old apartment complex was the somewhat temporary crowd living in other parts of the complex. A drunk named Raven (ravin'?) Woman had moved in, she was always begging beer from me after I got off work. I occasionally bought her a six pack in trade for some of her wild stories and a titty grope. Her real name was something else, but now she claimed to be part Cherokee Indian. I never saw even a part Indian with that much white skin. Besides, every American claims this I think. So I heard these strange stories about her Indian relatives. I always got a few laughs and copped a feel.

One evening I was standing outside smoking and enjoying a double-shot of Jack Daniels when a car pulled up with her in it.

"God damn those fuckers." she said. She got out of the the car, slammed the door and the car peeled off.

"What?" I asked, wondering what the hell was going on with her that night. She always had some drama going on; either real or imagined.

"I go to my boyfriend's house OK? And like, he has a bunch of his friends over. You know, I have been dating him, we all sit around and drink a few beers.."

Raven Woman drinking a few beers was like a deep sea Blowfish getting a little wet, I knew where this story was headed and I couldn't wait to hear the rest of it. She put a puppy dog pouting look on her face. If you didn't know her you would have been worried.

"We got a little drunk and the next thing I knew he started feeling me up and taking my clothes off in front of all his friends!"

I was amazed that she was acting shocked and pissed off about this. What a hoot!.

"You didn't try to stop him?" I said.

"Well you know...." she said (a girlish grin snuck over her face) "It was kinda fun and...well...I like got a little carried away with it, ya know? I started to like feel liberated or somethin'. They like got me all spread-eagle and shit and start screwing me and my boyfriend starts making a video of it! Then he told me he wouldn't make a copy for me ... the fucker!"

I was amazed.

"I don't think Cherokee Indians were into that sort of thing." I said.

Her life always seemed to be filled with that kind of drama mixed with comedy. I really couldn't say if any of it was true but when she started drinking like a sailor on shore leave it was not hard to believe. I soon found out that her stories weren't that hard to believe.

She had met a biker that worked as a contract anthropologist for the state highway department. The two got it on quite heavily and at some point they decided to get married, two days before Thanksgiving. The so-called reception was held in their dungeon troll apartment and it ended up being nothing more than a drunken drug-and-sex party that got wilder by the minute so I left.

Raven Woman was conspirator #1. I think she dreamed up the whole scam during one of the basement orgies when he had her on all fours with a collar and chain.

The Stripper
Next there was the topless dancer and her boyfriend that live there also. Now they were always up to weird shit. They threw a number of parties (without the lap dances damn it) and this was the party I met Shiv. At that party, he told me way too much about himself being in the penitentiary and nothing at all about the ONE THING I really want to know; why he spent so much time en la chirola.

Asking a convict why he was sent to prison is like taking a stick and stirring up a den full of copperhead snakes. Him and the titty-dancer couple took too many drugs and screwed each other in their apartment. What a bunch of depraved fucks Then the titty-dancer couple got pissed off at him for some reason and told him to quit coming over dressed only in his underwear, ready to go. They may have been mad at him because he always wanted to play 'titty bingo' every time he saw her. The titty dancer was conspirator #2 and she was scorned.

Finally, throw in the Screaming Mimi that woke me up that night. She too was a topless dancer. I didn't know her too well and the Screaming Mimi normally stayed to herself or hung out with the other dancer and Raven Woman the drunk. Somehow, the Raven Woman and the Titty-Dancer claim to be related, like 3rd cousins or something. She didn't stay at her apartment much.

All three were a fucked up mess.

This then, was the depraved menagerie that formed the conspiracy.

The Victim
"Here! Let me do that for ya!" he said, "I don't mind at all."

Shiv yelled this after I pulled into the parking lot after a long day at work. He saw that I had a flat tire. I pulled out the tire iron and jack.

"Lemme do it, you have your good clothes on." he said.

It was over 100 F. and so hot you could boil cockroaches in oil, so I didn't argue. That's the kind of guy he was, at least around me.

As far as I could tell, Shiv was like that with everyone he knew. For me it was hard to imagine him being a convicted murderer. It was the rumors though that got things fucked up. All of a sudden one day, he quit hanging around much. The Conspirators quit being seen with him and started bad mouthing him.

Their main complaint that he was beating on Bruja one of their chick friends that lived in the apartments. This was not inconceivable considering everyone's preconceived notions of ex-convicts let alone a convicted murderer. But the odd thing was I saw Bruja every day and there was never a scratch on her to speak of. I wrote it off as one of the Conspirators S&M fantasies or their cracked up moronic machinations.

Shiv was introduced to his future girlfriend Bruja, by way of the topless titty dancer. It all gets rather shitted up when they partied and did too much XTC and crack. It seems as if Shiv, hard as he tried, wasn't adjusting well. I liked him, in an unexplained way and on hot evenings we sat around, bullshit and drink cheap drugstore beer.

For me the victims in all this were Shiv and his girlfriend. He treated her like gold and was a fine gentleman to her. There were never any loud arguments from across the courtyard. They stayed to themselves and went out on Saturday nights dancing and hitting the casinos.

It was at one of those parties that I crashed one hot summer evening, that I met Shiv. He had a face like a boxer and he looked like he had his face pounded a few times. He told me he had just left the correctional facility, came home and was staying with his parents. He was trying to get back on his feet.

"Yeah, I did wrong but now I got another chance."

I tried to look at him such that he would finish and tell me what he did. He'd been down this road before I suppose and started talking about something else.

I found out later from rumors that he went to jail for manslaughter.

Conspirators Get Unraveled
The next couple of days I looked around the apartment and tried to figure out what she described as the crime. Nothing she told the police or me added up. The problem was the fact that there was no way Shiv or anyone else, could have done what she described. It was obvious to anyone that cared to look.

First for him or anyone to be able to look through the window and also try to get in her apartment would mean he had to be on a tall step ladder. Not just that but the screen has been pushed from the inside out, NOT from the outside in. I took some pictures of this and showed them to others; The 'crime of the century' was big news around the apartments.

It was very obvious to me or anyone what really happened that night.

It didn't seem to matter to the police. I came home from work one day and two detectives were sitting in their car across the street. They had been there for a couple of hours and then left. The next day the same thing happened. I walked over to them and asked them what the problem was.

"Hey, it's pretty obvious you two guys are staking someone out. Is there criminal activity going on we should know about?"

They told me to not worry about it, then they left. Sometimes I wonder about how smart these guys are. A couple days later, I find out that Shiv was busted and thrown in jail. He couldn't make bail.

I basically keep my mouth shut about all this and asked Bruja how he was doing.

"He's doing OK...say, would you go down tomorrow at 1:00 and file a deposition with his lawyer?"

It was still nagging me why they would accuse him of something that he obviously didn't do. So much for police investigations. You get what you pay for.

I had an appointment to see his lawyer. I typed it up and printed the deposition. I even described the day after and included photographs refuting the account Screaming Mimi gave to the police. He rots away in jail for about 60 days. During that time I wondered why these chicks tried to set him up and blame this on him. They stuck by their story. But one day, I caught Raven Woman in one of her finer drunken moments and started quizzing her about it.

This is your brain on drugs...
It had been awhile since I had seen Shiv and I met up with Bruja and asked her how things were going.

"Well, he's been in the hospital. He had a hernia operation."

"Damn!" I thought to myself. I saw him lifting weights all the time. I guess convicts do that a lot in prison.

"Yeah he did it lifting weights about a week ago. His folks are taking care of him right now."

A week or so later I was having a beer with him outside on the porch. He started telling me about the operation and how dumb it was for him to do what he did to get the hernia.

"I didn't realize that I am getting older and can't do what I used to do. In prison, I could lift weights all day and nothing like a hernia would happen at all."

He shows me where they opened him up and exposed his guts and stomach muscles. It was an ugly scar but it was how they do it so that there eventually wouldn't be a scar. I knew it was painful for him. When we laughed, he tried to stifle it. Shiv told me the only good thing about it are the was the pain killers they gave him to take.

"Yeah, one of these and some cheap beer you could saw your leg off and not care." he said.

"Shiv dude, you shouldn't do that. You might be real messed up some night and forget you took one and then take another."

"Naw, I have done it before." he told me. The light went off in my head.

"Yeah Shiv I know, but you just said you can't do things you used to when you were younger."

It gets us every time I think. We fool ourselves and commit perjury to our inner voices. We don't like to admit to things we don't want to hear and sometimes it gets us in deep shit that we can't crawl out of. It is that moment, that ignorant second of thought an ignosecond, that takes us swiftly into the Hall of Idiots.

A few weeks later I had one of those mornings where I woke up and it felt like someone beat the hell out of me with an ax handle. I went out to the back step, noticed what a great looking morning it was and grabbed the morning dead tree paper. Eventually, I got to the obituaries, something I never read and glanced at them.

There before me was a photo of Shiv. He was staring back at the world blankly. I go running over to Bruja's house, amazed that she hasn't said anything to me about his passing.

"Yeah...I'm sorry I didn't come over and tell you. You did a lot to help him with his innocence. His parents found him in his room dead, he passed away in his sleep."