Hell's Half Acre

by Will Christopher Baer

  Two dollars.

  The wallet holds three yellowed clippings from a communist newsletter, two sad dollars and one expired library card. Leonard Brown, 2112 Valencia. I regard the dollars with a gassy sigh and lean back against a wall of red bricks to contemplate life. One man is soft in the belly and clumsy. He is confused. He drops three of his last five dollars on a capitalist mocha and is allowed a brief moment to savor the hot, bittersweet chocolate. Then another man, thin and hungry and only slightly less confused, comes out of nowhere and uses that mocha to fuck up the first man’s favorite shirt and thereby ruin his day.

  For two useless dollars.

  I could buy a pack of gum and god knows gum will be handy when I run out of cigarettes. I won’t go insane and I will have fresh breath and this shit should be funny. Jude will surely think so, tomorrow. John Ransom Miller might think so. I leave the two dollars untouched and dart across the street to drop Leonard’s wallet into a mailbox.

  What to do.

  I can’t grab another wallet. My skull is still tingling from the first. I stare at the dark windows of the drugstore and wonder what the hell Miller is doing in there. I could use the gun to rob the store and maybe take him out in the crossfire, thus solving two problems at once. I could empty the cash register, then chop off his finger and hustle back to the King James. Then I would have plenty of time to get good and drunk before dark.

  I feel a headache coming on. My vision goes black around the edges. Blackbird on the wing. I’m tired of walking. I’m tired of stink and vapors. I’m tired of California already. Winter is gone, a torn wing. The horror of Christmas lights in the month of May. The swab of yellow glimpsed through trees is nothing to fear, the yellow is nothing but the sun. I have to keep walking. But when did you last eat something, when did you become sick. Such a simple thing, to ruin the body from within. Child’s play, chutes and ladders. Easy to poison the blood, to wither the precious organs. The nervous system is consumed by Phineas and already the sense of smell is gone. Perhaps it’s time to kill yourself and soon, before madness sets in. The fingers and toes will be first to fall from the host. The shadow that walks beside you is neither man nor woman. The shadow is a friend, the shadow is your beloved. The shadow beside you is death.

  Come on, boy. Don’t you know me.

  Death is always on the wing.

  Lucy. Henry. Eve. Moon. These are my dead. They died on my watch, all of them an arm’s reach away. The beautiful dead flutter beside me always, torn clothes I can never take off.

  John Ransom Miller exits the drugstore, a small white paper bag in hand. Prescription drugs, maybe. I hope he has some good stuff, something I can steal from him later. He heads up the street and I follow him, still penniless. Three blocks pass and I start to wonder if the bastard is just walking home. Now he’s entered a BART station. I follow, wondering how far two dollars might have taken me. The machine that dispenses tickets informs me that for two dollars one can gain entry on BART, but not necessarily return. I am weirdly cheerful as I hop the turnstiles like the scumbag I never wanted to be and luckily the guard is off taking a crap somewhere, or shining his shoes.

  The train isn’t crowded.

  Windows streaked with fingerprints. Smoke blue carpet. There are so many empty seats that I feel indecisive and find myself standing across from Miller. He is too restless to sit. He stands with his feet wide apart and his hands in his pockets. The train lurches forward and as I reach for the bright steel safety bar, a smile edges across his face.

  The smile disappears without recoil and maybe I imagined it.

  I feel warm, though.

  John Ransom Miller is staring at me, or through me. His eyes are unfocused and this is but the etiquette of trains. I tell myself to let my own eyes glaze over, to look at the flashing windows. I tell myself to close my eyes but I’m stubborn. I can’t help but stare at him. I am thinking of killing this man, unlikely as it sounds. His name is John Ransom Miller and he is the force behind a lot of evil doings in the velvet. I tell myself that if I kill him, none of what follows will come to pass.

  I want to remember his face and at first glance, he is near perfect. He looks like a movie star. Upon close inspection though, he is not so perfect. He leans hard on the umbrella. His black, square-toed boots are fairly ruined. The leather is gouged in places and streaked with brown and yellow grime. He recently stomped through some nasty shit. His pale charcoal suit is a fine Italian wool and silk blend and probably cost five thousand dollars. But the jacket is soiled and wrinkled, as if he slept in it. The trousers are flecked with curious stains and his gray shirt is missing a button. He licks his lips once, then stops himself. His lips are red and cracked, as if he’s dehydrated. His left eye is bloodshot beneath the drooping eyelid, which makes the right eye appear very white in contrast. There is black stubble along his chin and upper lip.

  John Ransom Miller played rough last night, obviously.

  He slept on someone’s floor and went to work without changing clothes. He slept in the trunk of someone’s car. He’s having a nervous breakdown, or his marriage is fucked up. Or none of the above. He continues to stare through me and one thing is clear. He doesn’t look vulnerable.

  Ten minutes pass, pushing twenty. I relax. And then two white guys come hopping down the rabbit trail and my heart begins to wiggle around like a spider caught in its own web because the headache ratchets up a notch and I have a vision of what’s going to happen, real or false. I know what’s going to happen.

  Dirty clothes and expensive tennis shoes and fierce rabbit faces. They have the look of those Nazi rabbits in Watership Down, the ones that shredded the ears of their enemies. Those rabbits were tough motherfuckers but they were still rabbits, and they ran like rabbits when that big black dog showed up to eat them in the end. They died like rabbits and now I watch these two human rabbits approach us from the rear of the car and I am not surprised when Miller moves his hips to force a little unnecessary physical contact with them.

  John Ransom Miller is a black dog at heart.

  The first rabbit is muscular and rubbery, with red hair that falls in greasy shanks. He stumbles into his friend, a bald skeletal kid with metal studs through his eyebrows and blackened lips. The two of them turn to stare at Miller with the splintered flashes of hate and love that usually mean violence is on the wing. The adrenaline kicks in and I feel the muscles tremble in my arms.

  This is a scene from the dark side of my skull. This is a product of one of my seizures but it can’t be. This is random. This isn’t my drama and I tell myself to back off, to relax and let it happen. As if I’m watching television.

  Miller smiles. How clumsy of me, he says.

  His voice is a soft, metallic monotone. His voice is computer-generated and I believe these rabbits are fucked. The bald one wobbles a step back and glances fearfully at me. He knows it too, perhaps. I look at him without emotion. I don’t know him and I don’t care if he lives or dies. I truly don’t give a shit. The rubbery rabbit-boy sneers and tosses his red hair out of his eyes.

  Every motherfucking day, he says. Every day I pass your narrow ass on this train and every day you bump me.

  I know, says Miller. It’s weird, don’t you think?

  You a faggot, says the rubbery guy. Or what.

  He wants to be mean and dangerous, a human razor. He looks the part but his lips tremble slightly as he says these words. His little bald pal shifts from one foot to the next and the tension is like jelly. I’m thinking I might as well stick out my finger and taste this jelly as the rubbery redhead smiles and leans forward and Miller steps into him, bringing his forearm around like the butt of a shotgun. A great purple scarf of blood billows from the redhead’s nose and hangs in the air like comic book art. He buries his face in his hands as the train rattles to a stop.

  Miller shrugs. Excuse me, he says. But this is my stop.

  The redhead is bent over, bleeding onto his own shoes. His little bald friend has already bolted from th
e train. The redhead tries to speak but his voice is far away, underwater. He is gurgling and I wonder if he is swallowing his own blood.

  Miller nods. His throat is full of blood, he says.

  I stare at him, unblinking. That doesn’t seem good. Does it?

  It probably won’t kill him.

  The redhead chokes and spits blood. I shoot a glance at the doors and they remain open, for now. The air shimmers between train and platform. The redhead will soon be blowing bubbles with blood and I wonder if I should just get off. John Ransom Miller is looking more and more like a psycho and maybe I don’t want him to think I’m following him but the doors will surely close soon and I can see myself standing on the wrong side of them if I get off too quickly and Miller decides to hang around and torture the rabbit some more. I shove my hands into my pockets, gaze up at a snarl of graffiti where someone has written you are beautiful in black ink. Beneath it, someone else has written or else you’re dead.

  I scratch my head.

  The doors have been open forever. John Ransom Miller crouches down to face the bleeding redhead, who is still hunched over with his face in his hands. Miller smiles warmly, tenderly.

  My skin crawls.

  Miller reaches into his breast pocket and the redhead flinches. Miller laughs and hands him a gray silk handkerchief. The redhead stares at it as if he’s never seen a handkerchief before, as if this might be some kind of trick. Miller shoves it into the rabbit’s hand and says softly that no one ever died from a nosebleed. The redhead gurgles back at him and John Ransom Miller shrugs.

  He nods at me. Are you coming?

  nine.

  I’M GETTING COZY WITH THE IDEA THAT TIME IS CIRCULAR, that lost time will come back.

  Behold.

  I find myself outside in the final minutes before dark falls over California and I am confronted by an apocalyptic sunset. The odds of this happening today and not tomorrow seem astronomical or anyway too staggering for my small brain to contemplate right now. The hills before me are splattered with some kind of freak sunlight that appears to exist on a physical plane but is forever shifting from one form to another and is therefore impossible to contain. If only I had an instant camera, then I would never need step outside again. I despise cameras, though. They butcher your memories and anyway when you’re an old man drooling yellow shit down the front of your pajamas and your eyes are long gone, what good is a boxful of shitty snapshots that have turned green with age.

  Nothing is real to me anymore. The world around me has been systematically reconceived through digital imaging and computer animation until every flower and raindrop is pure and flawless as the flowers and raindrops of the book of Genesis. The new world is brought to life in high-density pixels and is then transferred to human memory. The digital sunset always looks better than the real thing, always. Because a sunset generated by the basic package of yellow sun and blue sky is unreliable. Today it may be stunning, hypnotic. Tomorrow it may be lifeless and dull, a white sky scorched with yellow. Tomorrow the sky will be velvet.

  Beautiful or not, it disappears. The sky goes dark and what are you left with.

  The image stored in my head suffers rapid decay and within hours I will be unable to describe the sunset that I have just witnessed without accessing the false but technically perfect sunsets that I’ve seen on a thousand television and computer screens. I have no personal memories that are untainted by media and marketing and I often suspect that I am dead but still functioning. My heart is raw and pink, a package of ground beef wrapped in plastic. My body is composed of shatterproof glass and fluoride and vitamins and sheep hormones and recycled copper wires. There is no poetry in such a being but neither is there fear. I tumble easily into the void and I am safe as a kitten in the bony confines of my own skull. If I can afford the proper software, then I can download anything imaginable. The physical world is getting less and less realistic by the minute and eventually I will learn to pay it no mind.

  Twilight, now.

  John Ransom Miller and I have been walking for nearly an hour, most of the way uphill, not talking. I am chewing a hole in my lip. Miller is much too cool and friendly and unconcerned about my sudden presence in his life. The silence is heavy between us, but not terribly unpleasant.

  What’s your name? he says.

  First names are dangerous, I say.

  Why, he says.

  The intimacy, I say.

  My legs are heavy and I hope Miller doesn’t try to run away. The BART station is a long, long way down. He won’t run, though. John Ransom Miller could not be any less afraid of me. But he might like to fuck with me. I would probably fuck with him, if our positions were reversed. Miller nods and again I have the sticky feeling that he can hear my thoughts.

  Yes, he says. Intimacy is a tricky thing. I would think it’s hard to kill somebody if you are in the habit of calling them by their first name.

  I whistle through my teeth, irritated. Why don’t you have a car? I say.

  Miller shrugs. I have two cars. Three, actually. I had a driver for a while, a guy who wore one of those fucking sailor hats. I don’t know. I started to hate the cars after a while. I would sit in traffic, listening to Mozart and drinking bottled water and it was like my soul was trapped in a Mason jar.

  The hole in my lip is getting bigger. It will bleed, soon.

  I like cars, I say. I believe in cars.

  What about the soul, he says. Do you believe in the human soul?

  No. But I think mine would be perfectly safe in a Mason jar.

  Miller stares at me, unblinking. You might want to punch holes in the lid, he says.

  Okay, I say. What makes you think I’m going to kill you?

  He laughs. You would be wise to kill me, that’s why. You would save a few lives and probably your own sanity. But you won’t kill me.

  You won’t even try.

  That’s a good answer, I say. Damn good.

  By the way, he says. You can call me Miller for now.

  His voice trails away from his mouth, exhaled like smoke. There is a narcotic quality about it, as if it comes from inside my head and now a feeble smile drifts unwanted across my face, a polite muscle spasm. Which bugs the shit out of me. This is my face, right. This is my fucking face and I will be one sorry meatpuppet if I ever lose control over who sees me smile. When and where and so on. I keep shining my crippled smile at this man and I may as well piss myself on a crowded bus. I may as well be a whore with a weak bladder. I abruptly take the gun from my pocket and Miller doesn’t blink. I wave the gun at a low stone wall that creeps along the side of the road and tell him to just sit the fuck down. He shrugs and sits down, crossing his legs and fiddling with the crease in his trousers.

  Are you okay? he says. You look green.

  Miller is one of those rare fuckers with a psychic sense of smell. He takes one sniff and he knows you. He knows things about you, things you might not want him to know. He should have been a cop, probably. The funny thing is I am starting to like him, and this idea makes me feel slightly carsick. I tell him to get up and we keep walking. I put the gun away and try to relax.

  Pretty sunset, I say. Don’t you think?

  Miller shrugs. I saw a peculiar story on the news the other day. A newspaper in China confessed that they’ve been falsifying their weather reports for the past twenty years.

  What do you mean?

  They would claim that it was sunny yesterday when in fact it rained.

  Revisionist weather, I say. That’s brilliant.

  Isn’t it?

  What the fuck, I say. It’s nice to meet you, Miller.

  Miller yawns. You never know when that person will come along, the person you have been waiting for.

  Yeah. What is that supposed to mean, exactly?

  Life, he says. It’s often a dull dream.

  I scratch my head and suddenly I hear something like the manic hum of locusts but it’s only the drone of rubber tires on blacktop as two boys cruise by on
mountain bikes.

  They look like brothers, I say.

  Miller and I turn to watch as the boys disappear over the next hill.

  Poof, says Miller.

  Like they just fell off the edge of the earth, I say.

  Amazing, says Miller. How easily a child can vanish.

  Miller takes a sheaf of mail from a bright metal box on the side of the road. The box looks new. The surface is shiny as a silver dollar and unblemished by bird shit, but there is a nice round bullet hole in the thing’s belly. The hole is black around the edges and I poke two fingers in there without lubrication. It was a big bullet.

  You have enemies? I say.

  No, he says. The neighborhood kids. I love it, though. I love it when the kids have spirit.

  I finger the hole. That’s some fucking spirit.

  Miller might be a liar. He might not be. He has the eyes of a sleepy blackjack dealer and why should I care if he wants to lie about a misplaced bullet. I lie all the time, to myself and others. I lie whenever it feels right. I’m a cheap rug. I am not very good at lying, however. Jude can always sniff out a lie before I take another breath. Then again, she’s a woman. Jude says that if a woman has ever fucked a guy and studied the ugly contortions of his face, the face that he wants to hide from sight, then she knows the machinery behind his mouth and eyes and thereafter she always knows when he’s lying.

  Anyway.

  I shot up a few mailboxes when I was a kid, with a pellet gun and later a .22, a rifle meant for shooting squirrels. This hole came from a big gun, a serious gun. Miller has got Dirty Harry shooting at his mailbox and it’s none of my business.

  Not yet, says Miller.

  What? I say.

  It’s none of your business, he says. Yet.

  It is still not quite dark but the air is the color of blue plums. A black Mercedes rolls past with headlights off, eerily silent. It looks like a tank on a night mission. A white moth flickers past my face and I wave it away, distracted.