CHAPTER ELEVEN
Hashilli understood this much about teenage boys: they like pizza, beer, and naked girls. Oklahoma City boasted many establishments where all three legs of the motivational stool could be obtained. Yellow Pages ad executives called them “Gentlemen’s Clubs.”
First came the false IDs.
“Dude, how did you get our pictures?” The tall boy did all the talking. His two buddies fondled their fake drivers’ licenses and waited for orders.
Hashilli showed his new recruits a six pointed gold star with official-looking letters engraved across the middle. He flashed his fake government agency ID. He loaded the boys into his black SUV and drove them to a windowless cement block building with the name, “Nasty Boyz” painted in man-size red letters on all four sides. His passengers were too busy being manly to ask about the three shovels in the rear storage area. Hashilli had known it would be this way. Gentlemen are discreet.
“Your first assignment,” Hashilli told the tall one. “Infiltrate a strip bar and pass yourselves off as ordinary patrons.” Drinking beer and watching naked girls dance around poles. It was an onerous responsibility for three teenage boys. Hashilli imagined debauchery morphing into patriotism in their minds.
God, country, beer, girls. Their window of opportunity was wide open.
“But how did you get our names, dude?” The tall one was persistent but not intelligent. Teenage boys hang out in video arcades. They broadcast their names like candidates for the local school board. They put their most personal information on the Internet and then wonder why they have no secrets.
Instead of answering, Hashilli picked at an imaginary piece of lint on his cheap, black blazer. The jacket looked like it might have been purchased at a cops’ plainclothes uniform store. Its thin fabric kept his body at a marginally uncomfortable temperature.
Grandfather could change into an owl or a coyote. Hashilli’s style was more contemporary. He shifted his position so the boys could see the 9 mm pistol suspended under his left arm—just to remind them who he was.
He gave them each a hundred dollars in ones and fives, for lap dances and beer.
“Your mission, if you choose to accept it.” Was there ever any doubt?
Hashilli pressed a twenty-dollar bill into the bouncer’s hand. A twenty was all it took to keep the mean looking cowboy with no front teeth from looking too closely at the fake IDs. The bouncer’s two missing fingers didn’t compromise his ability to accept a bribe.
“Watch out for my boys,” Hashilli told him. “You’ll get twenty more if they leave without bruises.”
One of the bouncer’s eyes winked at Hashilli. The other found the ordinance lump at his left shoulder.
“Happy to cooperate with law enforcement,” the bouncer said.
Hashilli retired to a booth in the corner and practiced being invisible. Grandfather perfected the art, but Hashilli didn’t have it yet. At his best, he was almost completely invisible to women, but men could still see him a little, and the meanest men could see him best of all. Nasty Boyz was a good place to have a badge and a gun. Playing the role of an incompetent undercover cop was the simplest kind of magic, and it kept the magician safe.
The crowd around the bar looked like the waiting room at a free clinic. A hundred dollars was enough to get a teenage boy infected with a dozen STDs. Hashilli wondered how long it took for the first symptoms of herpes to emerge. Syphilis, gonorrhea, hepatitis, AIDS—so many possibilities. Bacteria with antibiotic resistance, viruses with edges sharp enough to slice through latex, and teenage boys who never learned to say, “No thank you.”
Hashilli felt a pang of conscience as he watched his boys resonate with the frenzy of the drunken crowd.
The dancers spun around brass poles and distorted their backs into shapes the patrons had only seen in wet dreams. The evening was young, and so were the girls, some of them anyway. They wore needle tracks, six-inch pumps, and dollar bills stuffed into g-strings that wouldn’t interfere with gynecological examinations. One at a time, the boys went into a curtained section of the bar for private dances.
Hashilli didn’t get it. Grandfather hadn’t gotten it, either. Urine, feces, and reproduction were close neighbors in the small region of a woman that most men found so enchanting. Blood and deteriorated endometrial tissue leaked out of the reproductive orifice on a schedule almost as reliable as Old Faithful’s. There were vaginal secretions with the consistency of phlegm, and odors that spawned a thriving industry of feminine hygiene products. Yeast grew inside of women and bacteria and worst of all, human seedlings that looked like chicken embryos you wouldn’t want to eat for breakfast. But vaginas still attracted ordinary men more than free admission to a monster truck rally.
Hashilli had to admit some of the girls had nice breasts. And their buttocks reminded him of things he hadn’t thought about for a while, but he didn’t have long to ponder the feminine mystique. A drunken cowboy in the private dancing area wanted his money back.
“Twenty dollars, and I can’t even touch her titties.”
It was the most articulate statement Hashilli had heard in Nasty Boyz all evening.
The bouncer charged across the room, knocking several patrons to the floor. He pulled the curtains of the private area aside and broke the cowboy’s nose with a well-placed right jab. He took a step back and waited for the aggrieved patron to refine his complaint. The argument was over. Diplomacy won out. The blood spatters on the dancer only made her more desirable.
Hashilli thought the world would be a safer place if the bouncer were in charge.
Time to collect his boys. They were properly fueled on testosterone and alcohol. The proper frame of mind to rob a grave.
Riverside Gardens Cemetery was a scary place at night. The moonlight reflected off the polished granite tombstones and cast distorted shadows that followed the three teenage boys as they searched out the grave they had come to desecrate.
The tall one led the way. He’d driven them to the edge of the cemetery, then parked his car and ventured into the land of the dead as if robbing graves was something he did every night.
“Wish I had a cigarette.” He pretended the tremor in his voice was the result of an unsatisfied nicotine addiction. His two companions didn’t notice; they were too busy listening to the sounds of their own breathing and wishing they had not taken money from the mysterious federal agent.
“There is a paper in the dead man’s pocket,” the agent told them. “Bring it to me, and I’ll give you each another hundred.” He provided shovels and a map. The map was hard to read in moonlight, and carrying shovels through a graveyard was just plain creepy.
When the tall boy came to a sudden stop, the other two members of his team bumped him. The last boy in the line dropped his shovel. It fell against a gravestone and rang out like a dinner bell. They stage whispered the word “shit” more or less simultaneously, then dissolved into a nervous laughing fit that sounded like a monkey house at feeding time.
The leader checked the name on his map against the inscription on the stone.
“Roosevelt Washington? What the hell kind of name is that for a dead man?”
His companions encouraged him with grunts of approval. They moved to the perimeter of the grave and imagined the dead man listening to their footsteps from within his coffin.
“What if it’s some kind of trick?” one of them asked the tall one.
“You mean like there is a vampire down there waiting to suck our blood? Or a zombie that wants to eat our brains?”
That was it exactly. The tall one listened while his companions journeyed down the verbal trail of supernatural speculation.
“Or a ghost.”
“Or a demon.”
“Or a doorway to another universe.”
“Or something more ordinary, like an atom bomb or some kind of bioweapon.”
So many possibilities, and none of them good.
“Just a dead man,” the tall one said, a
s if that weren’t bad enough. “A dead man named Roosevelt Washington with a paper in his pocket.”
The leader had never seen a dead man and suspected his companions hadn’t either. He backed a little further from the grave, waiting for someone else to call the whole thing off. Who would be the coward? Who would be responsible for telling the federal agent they had failed America? The Fed promised he would find them later on, “to settle accounts.” And he would. The leader didn’t doubt it for a minute.
“Half now and half when the job is finished,” the stranger had said when he gave them their retainer. He’d snapped each hundred-dollar bill like a shoeshine rag. He creased the money down the middle and stuck them in the waistbands of their jeans, like they were dancers in a gay strip club.
The boys jumped at a rustling sound that came from behind Roosevelt Washington’s headstone. The tall one wanted to believe it was an animal or a figment of their collective imaginations. He’d heard of mass hallucinations. Was a group of three a large enough mass to generate an apparition like the one materializing out of the darkness?
A black man with a neck and shoulders like a professional wrestler’s lumbered toward them. The man looked as solid and as heavy as a commercial grade refrigerator, so heavy the earth would barely hold him. He seemed to be wading knee deep through the topsoil of the cemetery until he stood on Roosevelt Washington’s grave. That’s when the boys saw the black man’s legs were missing below the knees.
When teenage boys scream, they sound like little girls, and when they run in panic, they stumble and fall a lot. Fear of the mysterious federal agent no longer figured into their plans. They abandoned the stranger’s shovels and escaped from the ghost of Roosevelt Washington as fast as they were able.
The tall one wore a crucifix around his neck, and he clutched it in his right hand, improving his confidence in Jesus, but significantly compromising his balance. Would this creature be repelled by the power of the cross? He knew from watching old-time horror movies that monsters followed a rigid set of rules. He could remember none of those rules at that moment.
The boys sprinted through the cemetery gate without a backward glance to see if the ghost of Roosevelt Washington followed them. Their feet pattered over the city street like a poorly synchronized tap dance, and the air passing through their open mouths sounded like old men laughing.
Back within the confines of Riverside Gardens Cemetery, Big Shorty collected the would-be grave robbers’ shovels from the carefully manicured lawn.
Never been used. Vandals usually took their tools with them when they ran away.
This was not the first time he encountered nighttime intruders in his cemetery, and he supposed it wouldn’t be the last. Shorty didn’t understand their motivations, and he supposed he never would. The boys (it was always boys) never stuck around to answer questions, and they ran way too fast for him to catch.
A double amputee had to face up to his limitations. Big Shorty didn’t make friends easily among the living, but the dead slept in peace while he was around, and that was all that really mattered.
The new shovels would find honest work in his hands.
Owl Dreams Page 11
