Wetbones

by John Shirley

  A puddle of blood and broken bone and pulped flesh – and a garnish of blonde hair, like a pelt slashed from some fantastic fur bearing animal…

  Constance had forgotten about the knife until Ephram made her kneel beside the wreckage of Naomi. Until Ephram took hold of Constance's left hand and flattened it out on the tarmac next to Naomi's steaming remains, so that Constance thought: At long last, he's going to kill me.

  Constance was beyond struggling – especially now, in the aftermath of Wetbones, drunk on Naomi, stoned on the tsunami of sensation that had roared through her. She was pliant as a Gumby in Ephram's hands.

  Let him kill her. It was a good time for it.

  But instead he pressed the knife home on her ring finger, cutting it all the way through, below the second knuckle. Sawing away at the rubbery shred of skin remaining. Tossing the finger into the heap that had been Naomi – along with the gold CONSTANCE necklace he'd taken from her, weeks before.

  Constance felt no pain through all this – he was pushing her cerebral buttons to prevent that, so she wouldn't thrash about – but the hideous crunch of the knife breaking through her finger bone reverberated through her, brought her horribly back to herself, and she seemed to see the wretched puddle of Naomi's pulverized flesh for the first time and thought she recognized the torn and flattened remains of a face in the midst of it, looking emptily back at her.

  7

  Near Malibu

  There wasn't much in the girl's room. Just a bed and a window and a bathroom with a pile of paper towels for toilet paper. It was dark out, and the only light was from a naked bulb in the overhead bracket. It was a weak bulb. She could see light coming from under the locked hall door and a little coming through a crack in the wall from the next room.

  She turned to look at the bed. It was bare except for a single clean white sheet, like a bed in an emergency room.

  She stood in the middle of the room, hugging herself. They'd stripped her down to her underwear. They hadn't even given her a blanket.

  She was pretty sure, now, that they weren't going to get her into the modeling business or the music business, either one.

  Mitch had moved the dresser away from the wall, when he heard them bringing someone into the next room.

  He had a feeling it would be someone new. Something about the way the voices murmured – by turns cheerful and smugly secretive. And then there was the confused quality of the girl's unanswered questions.

  He could see her, in there, standing in the middle of the room, shivering though it was quite a warm night, hugging herself. A tall, slim black girl. Shifting her weight from foot to bare foot. Her long legs and small waist and the swell of her hips glossy with the meagre light.

  It took him fifteen minutes with one eye pressed to the crack, shifting his head to try to see better, before he finally got a glimpse of her face.

  Recognition went off like a firecracker in his head.

  "Oh shit oh no! Eurydice."

  Finally. He knew what they'd been saving him for.

  Los Angeles

  Garner understood the deadness in his feelings. He didn't begrudge it. He knew what it was, and he knew it wouldn't last.

  The numbness made it possible for him to drive to police headquarters, where the main morgue was. It made it possible for him to park the van and to say to himself, from time to time, It's not necessarily her, it doesn't have to be her.

  But it made him tunnel visioned and mechanical. He locked the van and walked to the front of the LAPD building but he didn't really see it. He had an impression that there was a metallic LAPD symbol on the front of the building somewhere. He was vaguely aware that it was drizzly out today, not raining out but the wind a wet one, and he thought it was probably sometime in the interminable afternoon.

  Inside there was a counter and, behind it, a black woman in uniform. Her face was a blur. It was like one of those TV reports where, for legal reasons, they'd used some kind of computer-video effect to block out someone's face with swatches of cubistic blurriness…

  The sergeant who took his paperwork had a cloudy face, too. But the heavy set cop led Garner back to the morgue. There was the chattering of computer printers tattling on someone; there were squares of paper on bulletin boards with little black and white faces on them, and those, paradoxically, came into focus more readily than the faces of the flesh-and-blood cops around him: Wanted sheets displaying two grainy black and white views. Bland, ordinary faces. Many of them murderers. They all had a patient look about them. You've got me now, and you're taking my picture, and you're going to put me in a cell, but I'll wait, I have only to wait…

  A blur who called himself a Morgue Orderly took him and the Sergeant into a cold room.

  "You won't be called upon to identify the body, per se," the Sergeant said. "It's not really… identifiable. We're not even sure it's a…" Not even sure it's a body, he'd been about to say but decided that was unnecessarily gruesome, considering. "The hair was taken. We have only the necklace and the one finger to show you. We've identified the finger from the print but… The lieutenant wanted… well, if it were up to me you wouldn't have to…''

  The cop's words phasing in and out of Garner's consciousness as a drawer was opened. There was a dark green bag of heavy plastic in it. It was a lumpy bag that, from its lumpiness and shapelessness, might have been filled with garbage. There was no hint of a human body, except in the little freezer bag, next to it. A zip-lock bag. In the zip-lock bag was a small, slightly frosted human finger, with a distinct pink nail polish. A plump finger he knew quite well. As he stared at it, the Sargeant produced a Polaroid snapshot from his pocket. When Garner didn't turn away from his fixed stare at the finger in the freezer bag, the cop sighed and thrust the polaroid into Garner's field of vision. Garner had to make a world-wrenching effort to focus his eyes on the photo. It was a picture of a slightly bloodied necklace lying on a white paper towel. Her gold necklace. Spelling her name.

  "Yes," Garner heard himself say. "Yes. Yes."

  Garner followed himself out of the morgue, into the blurred hallway; the blurred chatter of the offices. It seemed that way: that he was following himself around. He could see himself walking with the cop. But he was not quite part of it. He was floating near the ceiling like a lost helium balloon. Bobbing along, detached, swept along in a slipstream by these strangers.

  Another paradox: liquor brought a strange clarity to Garner's world. It dispelled the blurriness. He knew that was temporary, that booze would bring its own cloudiness, its own distancing, when alcoholism pulled him into the world of the bottle.

  For the moment it had screwed him back into a definite point of view. He could see the big red X on the signpole in front of the adult bookstore complex across the street; he saw it with a new clarity. It was two stories high, that X, and its lower end was a good twenty yards over the parking lot. Just a big X on a pole. It seemed to signify more than just dirty movies here. It was like a hot-iron brand on the flank of the city. Or a cancel sign, a crossing-out of the city's dreamy ambitions.

  It said, All this? It ain't shit. Cross it out. What was that line from Lou Reed? Stick a fork in their asses and turn 'em over, they're done.

  Garner was in a weekly rates motel at the raw end of Hollywood Boulevard. He'd checked in, thirty-two minutes after leaving the police station. He was sitting at the grayed-out window looking at the boulevard, drinking Early Times Kentucky Bourbon from a plastic cup. He'd drunk his way down to the label on the fifth. Long way to go, yet. He remembered Early Times. It was cheap but it tasted pretty good.

  He had seven hundred dollars left. He thought about that a lot. Used to be his savings. Might call that little putz James and tell him to sell everything in the house. Send the money, if the pimply motherfucker could be trusted.

  The police thought that she had been put into some kind of machine. Maybe a crop thresher of some kind, or "some kind of processor," in some old factory somewhere. That would explain the Wetbones
effect. The pulp and broken bone ends that had been his daughter. They'd taken her hair, like an Indian taking a scalp, and, presumably, it was displayed somewhere, in some basement room. Maybe the son of a bitch was jerking off over it, right now.

  Your baby was put into a machine…

  Your baby was probably raped and tortured and then put into a machine that…

  And the fucking son of a bitch, probably put her in alive!

  It was a fucking marvel how the world went on. How the cars continued to pass; how children continued to play Nintendo and talk about the Lakers; how Smurfs continued to gambol in cartoons for other children; how the President continued to lie in press conferences. All the usual shit went on. And someone had tortured his baby to death.

  He looked out the window at the fibreglass dinginess of the monumental X sign; the razor brilliance of the points of coloured light coruscating the reptile-skin of the adult bookstore's parking lot: sunlight on broken glass. The dumb persistence of the Mexican crone with the aluminium walker, her back hunched with age, inching along the dirt path beside the curb, in one of the many ones of Los Angeles hostile to pedestrians.

  "Give up and die," Garner told the crone with a mutter.

  A jet, coming over the hills from the Burbank airport, seemed to shoulder sullenly against the sky as it veered West, probably for some unsuspecting tourist's nightmare sojourn in threadbare, polluted Hawaii.

  The wall of the Mexican bar, beside its small gravel parking lot, was etched with the pathetic psychological watermark of Hispanic gang graffiti. Above it, something unfelt hung from the powerlines with the tennis shoes someone had tied together and tossed up there as a practical joke; something fell with a translucent blizzard of hydrocarbons from the smoggy sky.

  Five years old, Constance came to him with her first Barbie. "I think Barbie's sick, Daddy." Constance had been morose, and unable to eat much, for weeks before.

  He looked at the doll and there was nothing broken on it. He thought Constance wanted to play, so he said, "Uh oh. I'll be the doctor and you be the nurse and we'll -"

  "No!" She was crying, now. "No, she's really hurt."

  He stared at his daughter and somehow knew this was about her mom being dead. He had taken her into his arms and said, "How about you? Are you hurt?"

  He'd coaxed her into talking about it and she'd begun to cry in earnest – and then to heal. There was no dramatic moment, no 'Barbie feels better Daddy!' But, as weeks passed and he stayed close to her and drew her out, he could see her begin to bloom, see her become interested in playing with other kids again, and he'd almost wept with relief. He had shown her – and himself – that he could be there for her. She's going to make it. We're going to make it. We'll be all right…

  The police thought… a machine…

  Now, in the hotel room on the downtown end of Hollywood Boulevard – well below the territory where Japanese tourists snapped photos of Marilyn Monroe's handprints in concrete and Bob Hope's star in the sidewalk – he said it aloud: "Grieving. What a fucking joke!" As if he deserved to grieve! Christ. Christ.

  He was afraid to scream, or cry. He felt like a bug scrambling desperately to avoid the heel of some giant's shoe. Scrambling into a crevice in the floor, going to ground so as not to attract attention. So that the gargantuan, black, crushing weight of his criminal absence wouldn't flatten him to pulp… as she had been…

  Surely she had screamed for him and he hadn't come. It didn't matter that he'd been unable to bear her, unable to come.

  At least, now, he could be really, definitely punished.

  But something in him rejoiced. It was a small thing he had starved and ignored and withered with contempt, for many years. A creature somewhere between plant and arachnid; a spider that started not as an egg but as a kind of seed; a crawling thing with roots. But now the liquor was irrigating it; now despair was revitalizing it. Its joy was unspeakable. A whole world of self destruction opened up for him, now. And it rejoiced.

  It was the addict – and it had never really died.

  The liquor, surely, was not going to be enough. Garner got up, staggered to the door. Went out to cop some dope.

  Culver City, Los Angels

  More and more, Prentice was afraid of going to bed. Lately his pattern had been to lie there for at least an hour, his mind teeming and morbid, trying to think about anything but Jeff and Mitch, Amy and Arthwright; and thinking almost entirely about Jeff, Mitch, Amy and Arthwright.

  He was staying at Jeff's now, which was probably a mistake. Sleeping on the couch in the office. It's back folded down so it made a pretty decent single bed, except for that valley down its middle, but he had some privacy here, and he was tired, so he should be able to sleep.

  Should, but couldn't. Instead, he'd putter about the office, toying with Jeff's Japanese monster collection, looking at the hoard of comics and pulps; he'd pull out a book, flip through it, read a bit, put it back, and be unable to remember any of what he'd read.

  It was dark out, and Prentice had the shades drawn. He was sitting on the edge of the sheet-covered couch in the dim room in his underwear, restless and worried. Thinking about Saturday. He'd be going out there Saturday. He'd be able to clear it all up then… And Arthwright would give him the break he needed…

  But did he want to belong to Arthwright? After what he'd realized about the mirror in the guest bedroom? And then there was the way Arthwright had manipulated Prentice into doing his dirty work for him. Prentice had successfully talked Jeff into holding off on the court orders. They'd found a private detective referred by a cop – who was already looking for a missing teenager, a guy named Blume. That was a good start.

  But still. It had been manipulation. Arthwright puppeting Prentice who puppeted Jeff. And then Arthwright prompting Lissa to check up on Prentice…

  So what? Prentice told himself Arthwright was no more a sick manipulator than most producers in the business. It came with the territory.

  Prentice glanced at Jeff's word-processor; in the gloom its monitor was a ghostly, square head propped on the desk. Jeff had been out taking meetings all day and he'd let Prentice use the computer for writing, in the hopes of getting a start on the spec script that Jeff and Buddy were counselling him to write. Prentice had produced exactly two pages of uninspired melodrama. Which he hadn't bothered to save.

  On a shelf above the desk, the radio chattered to itself like a cancer patient trying to stay cheerful. The DJ finally finished blathering vacantly and put on a song. It was Iggy Pop's song, "Butt Town."

  All over Butt Town

  Values are thrown down…

  But in Butt Town I'm learnin' in Butt Town, I'm earnin' in Butt Town I'm turnin' into my worst nightmare…

  Prentice stared at the radio as if a hand had reached out of it and slapped him in the face. He stabbed a finger at the button, switched it off before Iggy could say it again.

  "Fuck you, Iggy," Prentice muttered. He'd like to have flung the radio against the wall. But it was Jeff's.

  Instead, hoping to ease some tension, he stretched out on the folded-down sofa and jerked off. It didn't help much. "Turning into my worst nightmare," Prentice muttered, stretching out on the sheets.

  He couldn't quite bring himself to turn off the desk lamp.

  Rest, he thought, and then get up, try to write some more, turn the restlessness into something productive.

  He laid an arm over his eyes and stared into the dull flashes the pressure made on his eyeballs. It might have been an hour later when he went to sleep.

  The dream, anyway, seemed to sidle up to him before he was truly asleep. Or was he dreaming about lying on the sofabed?

  Amy was sitting on the arm of the sofa, near Prentice's feet. She looked good. Healthy. She wore blue jeans and a t-shirt, barefoot – then she wore lingerie and pumps. Then she wore blue jeans and a t-shirt again – it changed from second to second. She said, "That bitch is going to eat you alive, you know that don't you?"

  "Wh
at?" he asked sleepily.

  "You heard me."

  They were walking through a shopping mall, now. Some generic shopping mall. He glanced at Amy and saw with a shock that she was desiccated and mangled again, as she had been in the morgue. She smelled of embalming fluid. A walking corpse, nude and mummy-like, but not shambling, walking perkily along with a purse on one arm, impatiently passing a troop of Girl Scouts selling cookies. She shook her head at them, No, she didn't want any cookies. They didn't react to her appearance. Lots of people in the mall were dead.

  He looked away from her and said, "I don't want to see you like this. And don't say, 'Like what?"

  She said, "It's your dream. Make me something else. By taking me back to somewhere else…"

  He put a hand over his eyes – and when he removed it he was in their Manhattan apartment, sitting with his arm around her, doing something she'd loved to do: watch a foreign film on videotape while drinking a bottle of red wine.

  It was Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits. Prentice and Amy were cuddled comfortably on a big floor pillow, leaning back against the foot of her bed, watching the film. He felt warm and secure; he knew she felt the same way. For a moment or two.

  Then he felt her go tense. "Nothing can stay like this," she said. "Why can't anything sustain for more than a few minutes? Or more than an hour at most? I could accept the downsides of life if there were more upsides. But there's an imbalance. It's mostly either downsides or dull gray areas, you know what I mean?"

  "Yes," he said wearily. "I know what you mean." He was thinking that he was simply hearing the point of view that came when her depression hit her. She couldn't sustain simple warmth long, it was true. It was either a glittering up or a slide downward. There were few plateaus for Amy.