Wetbones

by John Shirley

  The worms thrashing and squirming over this feast. Not eating flesh but taking something – taking what? The woman looking up at Lonny with eyes that were glossy with sensation but something imploring in them too.

  Use the gun on me, boy. Use it on me

  Was that her voice?

  Use it on me, Mein Schones jung. The head. Shoot me in the head

  Orpheus's belly was humping up with the movement of the things probing in him and he was way beyond yelling now, he was just staring deep into the lightbulb and going "Ack… ack… kuh… ack

  …" as they probed into him, his eyes bulging, the joy in his face worse than anything else. All of them smiling through the wormstuff at Lonny. Reaching out…

  Lonny felt a buzz in his head. A flush of pleasure.

  "NO FUCKING WAY!" Shouted so hard he could feel something rip in his throat. And the gun came up -

  Me, herrliches boy…

  – but he wrenched the. 45 away from the target it wanted, and pointed it at Orpheus. Fired. Felt it jump in his hand, glimpsed Orphy's brains splash. He fired it wildly at the others till it expended its magazine – with the last round, the light bulb exploded and the room went dark.

  He threw the gun into the darkness and spun, careened into the hall. Sprinted for the front door.

  He stumbled through the trash. Bottles and cans rebounded from his feet; he felt his heels crunch something that was probably a spine. A fading murmur of gratitude came from underfoot. Then he was outdoors and racing across the terrace. Someone lunged from the shadows under an oak tree and he felt a hand close around his wrist and he shrieked his best approximation of a karate yell and slammed a fist into a soft part of whoever it was. They went flailing down and he kept going, tearing through brush and feeling it tear through his skin, until he got to the black metal fence. He was over it in seconds, wailing one long note like a siren the whole way over. Dropped to the other side, ignored the pain in his ankles and ran on. Another fence. It was nothing. He went up it like a cat up a treetrunk. Dropped into the sand on the other side. Thought he heard a really pissed-off yell behind him. They hadn't expected him to get away.

  He just kept going, shouting hoarsely, "Not me you fuckers!" He kept going, running at random into the brittle, aromatic brush of the countryside, until his legs stopped working. He fell into sand and rocks.

  After a spinning while, the sobbing started. With that, came strength to crawl.

  It didn't matter how he went. He just had to keep going.

  Culver City, Los Angeles

  Prentice had been sitting with a stack of books at the table in the Los Angeles main library since eleven a.m. It was almost two. His butt hurt from the chair and his stomach growled, but something kept him there. He imagined Amy saying, You always did give up too easily, Tom. Like with me…

  He shook himself, and focused on the book. It wouldn't do to let the Amy obsession haunt him again. He turned the page, and then he saw them. Sam and Judy Denver.

  The book was called Those Fabulous Hollywood Parties. The Denvers had been known for their parties. Prentice was looking for anything he could find about them – he wanted to get some kind of impression of them, and judge how likely it was that Mitch was actually being held out there…

  He'd just about given up on finding them in this book – it seemed to focus on the old Hollywod Babylon sort of parties from the days of silent movies. Too early for the Denvers.

  But here they were – there names caught his eye, first, in boldface under the photo. Not the names "Sam and Judy Denver." It said " Mrs. Stutgart and Future Husband, Mr. Samuel Denver." The date was 1929. Here was a middle aged woman and an older man in Roaring Twenties fashions, Denver holding eight champagne glasses clutched together at the stems like a bouquet in his hands, Mrs. Stutgart slopping champagne over them as if to fill all eight at once. Both of them laughing. Oliver Hardy looking on, making a comical face of mock astonishment; Faye Wray drunkenly leaning on Hardy with one of her dainty feet cocked up behind her. Another man stood rather stiffly in the background in an immaculate black tux. Denver's bowtie was undone and his salt and pepper hair rumpled.

  Prentice stared. Maybe it was a misprint. This man was far too old, here, to be the man who later made his mark in Hollywood as a television producer. That would be thirty years later. This man was at least sixty. The producer of Honolulu Hello must have been this man's son.

  But to the right – under the caption The Merry Widow, and after a rather sensationalistic description of the widowed Mrs. Stutgart's ribald, cocaine-dusted parties – the text related, "… born Elma Hoch, she married the industrialist Albert Stutgart; their relationship was said to be stormy and it was, in fact, during a storm that poor Albert was mysteriously lost overboard during a transatlantic crossing to New York. It was some years later before she married Sam Denver and became Mrs. 'Judy' Denver. Sam was later to become a successful television producer.

  "In the late '30s and early '40s the parties at the Doublekey Ranch faded noticeably after nasty remarks by L.A. columnists regarding certain of Elma's visitors who were alleged to be high functionaries in Germany's Nazi party. The man shown in the background behind Faye Wray and Oliver Hardy has been identified only as a 'Mr. Heingeman, a follower of the German firebrand Mr. Adolf Hitler'.

  "Sam and 'Judy' were childless but for a time ran a charitable' summer camp for disadvantaged youth at their Malibu ranch. Accusations of child molestation, which were never prosecuted, caused the closing of the 'charitable summer camp' in 1976…"

  So it was the same guy. But how old had he been, as a TV producer? Ninety? A hundred?

  Prentice got up, stretched, and went to the microfiche stacks. His body begged him for food and his brain implored him for coffee. But he had to know immediately…

  In minutes he was at another chair, reading the old newspaper accounts from a fiche projector screen, shadowed over, in spots, with magnified dust particles and what appeared to be the leg of a fly. Variety, early

  '70s. A photo of Sam Denver giving an award for documentary film production at a dinner for the Producer's Guild. Maybe the guy's last public appearance, from what Prentice had been able to find out. The picture showed a man in a leisure suit, his hair dark blond. He looked about 40. He looked younger than the picture in the Those Fabuhna Hollywood Parties book. But it was unquestionably the same guy.

  Unless – it was a son by another wife. That must be it.

  It took Prentice another ten minutes to locate an encyclopedia of Television History in the nostalgia section. Denver had one brief paragraph. It didn't give a birth date for him. It was the only entry he could find with that omission. It simply said " Born -? " The last remark about him was, "Denver married the widow of industrialist Albert Stutgart in 1946. He has no children as of this writing."

  It was him.

  So what? The guy was probably into health foods and plastic surgery. Maybe he looked older in that photo from the 20s than he really was. But looking at the picture, he had a nasty feeling of recognition. An ugly certainty.

  Prentice decided to check the microfiche files one more time. There might be an article about the child molestation incident…

  The house was only a mile from the library. It was a small, stucco house with Spanish tile roof and a row of sickly geraniums in a red wooden box on the porch railing. Prentice pressed the buzzer for the third time.

  A raucous voice inside said, "Awright, keep your pants on!" It was followed by mimicry in a weird little cartoon voice, '' Awright, keepapantin! " The door opened and a woman with a parrot on her shoulder scowled at him from the other side of the screen. She was somewhere in her sixties, probably, her hair puffed out with the odd shade of blue-silver that some old ladies affect, her face jowly, her hooded eyes as green as the parrot. She wore a mu-mu with scarlet and blue flowers; the bright green parrot crapped on the print of a nasturtium on the old woman's right shoulder, and shifted its footing, torquing its head to peer at Prentice with
one hostile eye. "All I can say is, you better not be selling anything," the woman snapped. "I needed that nap, boy."

  "Actually – " Well what was he going to tell her? How was he going to get her to open up about it? With an inward sigh, he chose the one route that would probably work. Lies mixed with the truth. "I'm a writer. A screenwriter. My name's Tom Prentice. I have been, uh, researching a story about Wendy Forrester -"

  "She's dead. Did your research tell you that?"

  "Well – no. Uh – when did she die?"

  "A year after her lovely little summer vacation. That much you can find out yourself. I'm not stupid enough to tell you anything more without a contract."

  "What? A…?"

  "You heard me. You want the story, you people have to buy it. I owe it to that poor child to get a little something for her story."

  Prentice almost laughed aloud at this pretzeled logic. But managed instead to say, "I see. Story rights for the film. Well, it's not that far along. We don't know if there's enough of interest…"

  "A twelve-year-old child driven to suicide by the filthy molesting of a TV producer? If you want to believe the suicide part of it."

  Prentice held in his surprise. He hadn't seen anything in the article about the suicide. But then, it had happened much later. "What do you mean, if you want to believe that part of it?"

  "I think those bastards killed them both."

  "Both…?"

  "My sister and my daughter, obviously."

  " Obviously Obviously! " the parrot squawked.

  Prentice could smell vodka on the woman now. She leaned against the doorframe, cocked her head the way her parrot did, and sharpened her glare. "Wendy was my niece. And I don't believe this business about Susan killing herself after she found Wendy dead. I can't imagine Wendy loading and shooting her father's shotgun at herself. A little girl like that! She didn't know how to load a shotgun. Killed herself with a shotgun! The police will believe anything if they're paid enough," she added, sniffing loudly.

  "You think she was murdered."

  "Surely! She was in therapy and she was beginning to talk about those Denver people!"

  "Do you know what exactly they did to her? I mean – nothing was proved. Did a doctor -"

  She aimed a mottled finger at him. "I am not telling you another goddamned thing without a contract. You think I don't know your business? Of course I do. Why, I've written a screenplay! Part of one anyway. I have it in a notebook. I can get an agent and a lawyer – " She snapped her fingers. "Just like that, my fine boy!"

  Prentice nodded. Everyone in L.A. who spoke English, and some who didn't, had a screenplay somewhere. He deserved this harangue, he supposed. He'd lied to her about his interest.

  "If you want to come in and have a drink we can talk over a deal -"

  "No, uh, no thanks. I'll – I'll send a representative around." Maybe he'd send Blume over to talk to her. "Your name is…?"

  "Griswald, Lottie Griswald. I don't mean to be rude, now, but a story like this – "

  "I understand. You're, uh, perfectly within your rights." He decided he'd learned enough. What sounded superficially like a morose and isolated old woman's paranoia might well be true. Maybe it hadn't been a double suicide. "I'll be in touch…"

  "You sure you wouldn't like a drink?"

  "No, no really, thanks." He backed away, smiling, almost stumbled off the porch but caught a railing and steadied himself, turned and hurried down. He heard the old lady mutter something, but he couldn't make it out, till the bird echoed it for her:

  " Asshole! "

  Downtown Los Angeles

  The codeine was making Garner woozy, but he was grateful for it. It was the only thing that had got him through the morning at the General Assistance office. The hours at the combined food stamp and welfare office were humiliating; the stories were true: they treated you like a dog. No wonder there were so many welfare cheats – it was the only revenge. And the place was foulsmelling enough to make William F. Buckley sneer knowingly. But Garner had gotten emergency foodstamps; he'd eaten and kept most of it down.

  Now he stood in the smoggy late afternoon on a barren streetcorner under a freeway overpass. The street echoed with the shriek of the big trucks shaking dust down from the monolithic slabs of concrete above him. He was standing at a payphone next to a hotdog stand, waiting for James to call him back. He thought about the freeway that had collapsed in Oakland, during the October 17th earthquake; he thought about how, at first, the media had rosily reported that people were "heroically pitching in to help" until it was learned that more of them were looting the bodies; he thought about a woman he'd counselled who'd been pinned, by the collapse, in an overturned car. Two men had come from the Oakland slums, clambered over her to rob the bodies of her friends, then jerked her purse from her hands and crawled away – one of them stepping on her broken leg as he went. He thought about all this with Olympian disdain, through the fuzzy filter of the codeine they'd given him at the hospital.

  The payphone rang. It was James. "Mr. Garner? Hi! Um – I couldn't get the guy Sykes on the line. But I left a message that you need him to wire you some money at Western Union and all that."

  "Try him again. And I want him to see about selling my things. Tell him he can take forty per cent." Garner was pretty sure Sykes would come through. Sykes owed him favours. He mentally went down the list of the other people he could siphon money from. His brother, though he hardly ever saw him, ought to be good for a hundred or two. His friend Larry – but he'd have to be careful about that, Larry was a reformed addict too, he might suss out that Garner was going to use the money for drugs.

  No. Probably not. Garner had been clean a long time, so far as Larry knew. But it was best he didn't talk to Larry himself, he'd hear the slur in his voice from the codeine.

  "You gonna be okay, Mr. Garner?" James asked.

  "Sure." Okay? What a fucking joke. "Sure, I'm just… mild concussion, some fractured ribs, busted nose, a few bandages. What happens if you're lucky when you get rolled down here. I was looking for Constance in a rough neighbourhood -"

  "Oh shit!"

  "Hm?'

  "I forgot to tell you she called! Constance called. How could I forget that? Jesus!"

  Garner snorted. "She called." Just like the postcard. The scumbag had her call, sometime before he killed her, to try and keep them from looking for her. "And she said she was okay and all that and not to look for her?"

  "Um – not exactly. She said she was alive. That's about it. Then she just sort of hung up. Oh and your brother called the same day to say happy birthday."

  "Yeah. Great." The depression rolled over him like a tidal wave of sludge. "Listen – I really need that money." He had it all figured out. He'd just avoid the toss-ups, the strawberries, the coke whores, the other users. He'd buy himself a case of whisky and a double handful of crack cocaine and lock himself in his room and burn himself out that way.

  "Sure thing, Mr. Garner. You got it."

  "Okay. I'll check Western Union in the morning." He could get through the night without crack. He had the codeine. He could trade some foodstamps for liquor. Of course, he could also trade foodstamps for crack. It was done all the time. Crack or heroin. He could get fifty dollars worth of rock for a hundred dollars worth of food stamps. It was something to think about. "Thanks James. See you…"

  He reached out to hang up the phone. His hand stopped over the hook. What was wrong? Why couldn't he hang it up?

  The codeine mists were parting…

  Your brother called to tell you, happy birthday.

  His hand started to shake. He put the receiver to his ear. "James!"

  The infinite buzz of a dial tone, like his own neurological drone behind codeine. Fingers shaking, he stabbed the buttons again, calling Alameda collect. Waited impatiently as the operator languidly asked James if he'd take a collect call…

  "Mr. Garner? You forget something?"

  "James – when did you say my brother
called?"

  "On your birthday. He said it was your birthday."

  "James – no think, get this right – was it the same day Constance called?"

  "Yeah. It's right here on the note pad. And I remember because her call interrupted your brother's call. She came in on call waiting. And when I came back he'd hung up -"

  "Two days ago? She called two days ago?"

  "Yeah."

  His birthday. A day after he'd I.D.'d her body. He remembered the cop, on the way out, saying something about how her body was the only one with a finger intact. Lucky they could get an I. D. this time…

  The son of a bitch. The motherfucker. The bastard had cut off his daughter's finger and dropped it in with somebody else's body but JESUS FUCKING CHRIST SHE WAS ALIVE!

  Sawa Monka

  Ephram was in the lawn chair, in the back yard, in that same smoggy late afternoon, a Panama hat and yellow tinted sunglasses shading his eyes from the westerly tilt of the sun as he scrivened busily in his notebook Constance was in the chair beside him, dozing.

  Ephram wrote,

  I can't get over the feeling that I am playing some odd sort of game with myself, a game which as yet has no name. Could it be that I came here out of a sense of destiny? A realization that here – or more precisely in that snakepit out by Malibu – waits those who should be, and will be, my followers? Is it not possible that the stars have turned to facilitate my domination over them? The Dark Constellations are beginning to yield up their secrets; the Negative Signs are beginning to speak. Once more I turn to Nietzsche at his most inspired, and this I write purely from memory, demonstrating how well I know his gorgeous Ecce Homo: "… I know my fate. One day there will associated with my name the recollection… of a crisis like no other before on earth… of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man, I am dynamite… For when truth steps into battle with the lie of millennia we shall have convulsions, an earthquake spasm, a transposition of valley and mountain such as has never been dreamed of…"

  There was a noise at the back gate, making Ephram glance up from his notebook. His blood seemed to arrest in his veins.