The Shaft

by David J. Schow

  He walked all the way home, fifty minutes of putting one foot in front of the other, thinking, then brooding, then fuming.

  When he used his keys to unlock the deadbolts he found the security chain latch engaged. He smiled to himself. Then he kicked the door brutally just to the right of the knob, snapping the chain and tearing the screws from the lintel like pimentos blowing free of a thrown hors d'oeuvre.

  She would be expecting him to tarry guiltily by the bedroom door. They could exchange more meaningful silences, more useless apologies, and proceed with the erosion of their lives. One more day paid up in pain and wear.

  Jonathan did not stop at the threshold.

  He grabbed her by the throat, gripping her neck with the same familiarity her pussy had enclosed his cock. He was remembering a time when, dinner completed, they would be making love by now, laughing, wrestling, sharing. She thrashed and made a noise but he was stronger and she was badly positioned.

  Then her frightened eyes saw what was in his hand. He had brought it from the kitchen.

  He had never struck Amanda and did not strike her now. She yelled for him to take his hands off. Then she focused on the weird light in his eyes and shut up for her own good, like a trapped cat resigned to an oncoming beating.

  Jonathan knew what she was thinking: Go ahead. Do your worst. You'll pay later. In guilt.

  Almost perfunctorily, he asked her just who the hell she thought she was. Holding her tight to the pillows by the throat, he emptied a one and a half liter jug of Rhine wine, ice cold, all over her. It gushed from the bottle, foaming from her mouth and nostrils and soaking her hair.

  Amanda tried to scream.

  This was what it had finally come to. Making her feel pain in response to the tiny agonies she thoughtlessly manufactured and dispatched to sting him every time they spoke. She did it automatically, almost without malice. Jonathan's response, now, was automatic in the same way. Robotic. Almost inhuman. Someone else was at work here, using Jonathan's skin as an envelope.

  He made her hurt because he could no longer make her feel pleasure. Any emotional response was better than the arid vacuum of stress and the slow poison of their decomposing love.

  She sucked huge, husking breath in watery gulps, sobbing and quivering on the bed. Jonathan left the wine jug on the dresser intentionally. She would be forced to touch the awful thing, feel the memories of her humiliation, if only to start the jug's journey to the trash dumpster.

  He had lost control at last. No doubts here. A big door had slammed and now they were on opposite sides of it. It was time to leave. Only an imbecile - or an even bigger masochist -would have needed a brighter GO light.

  In concept, his act was dazzling. Never again would Amanda be able to look at a bottle of vino without remembering what she had brought down upon herself. But the effect had reversed on Jonathan unexpectedly. Now wine would remind him endlessly of what he had done to her.

  Beer reminded him he was no longer drinking wine.

  ***

  '… maybe a third of the suburbs to the east and south of Chicago are what they call dry townships, can you swallow that? One place you can buy liquor; two blocks away it's against the law. The local heat has beefed up the open container violations, all that kinda horse piss. The public issue is 'decency.' The bottom line is cash flow. Y'know - guilt, wrongness is the stalking horse. The paper tiger. What they've really got big boners for is-'

  'Tribute,' said Jonathan. His throat had unlocked. 'Your money in their pockets.'

  'Rightee-o, Felix. But I'd never seen a dry township until I landed in this corner of the world.'

  'What do they have instead? You don't have bars and liquor stores, what do you fill all those empty lots with?'

  'Churches, my man. Loads of God condos. Come Sunday you'll think you're celled up in a Pavlov ward, for all the ringing bells you'll suffer. Enough to drive you straight into the embrace of the demon alcohol.'

  'Which you have to sortie out of the dry township to buy, yes?'

  Bash grinned. Jonathan had rarely seen individual teeth so large. 'Now you're getting some notion of how this place functions, my son.' He stomped brakes and skidded to avoid a darting mongrel. Wet, ragged, freezing and starved, the dog shot a look of feverish panic toward the truck that reminded Jonathan of the wino in the bus depot. Maybe this was the bum's lost mutt. Dogs often assumed the traits of their masters

  There you go again. Running.

  He had not mentioned Amanda to Bash yet. He could predict Bash's feelings on the topic: You enjoy eating that brand of cow patties, he'd say. Good old Jonathan softens up and goes no, you're not being a bitch, darling, Bash would say. You fall for it every goddamn time, he'd say. Then he would yell that he gave up doing guilt a long time ago. Guilt doesn't exist, he'd say. It costs too bloody much and you never have anything to show for it, he'd say.

  Not mentioning Amanda was another kind of flight. Running away could be a cleansing, declarative Act. Also cowardly - a child's response to a grownup problem.

  Vehicles wallowing in snowbound lanes honked in the night. Water diffused the passing streetlamps into bold splashes of primary color.

  Without noticing, Jonathan had begun rubbing his palms heavily along the legs of his pants. Out, damned guilt. His feet were roasting inside of his Justin boots as Bash's heater blasted.

  The streets that ambled past the truck windows were dark, icy, sinister. The truck thrummed, wipers squeaking. Bash kept eyes front.

  Jonathan cleared his throat, which seemed coated with a double scoop of thick gunk. 'So. Anyway. What do they call a district where you can buy liquor legally? A wet township?'

  'Ho, ho, ho. I can see you're really gonna love it here. Near as I can reckon, the newspapers call them 'depressed neighborhoods.' They roll over to Division Street and shoot tape of derelicts whenever they need to emphasize our civic need to contravene urban decay.'

  'Downscale?'

  'Strictly.' Bash rubbed his lip with his index finger, as though miming brushing his teeth. 'You know that when winos freeze to death they turn black? No matter what color they were when they were alive. Weird. Like bones in an archeological dig. Spring thaw always unmelts a hundred or so every year - sterno and ethanol drinkers who sat down on a curb or a bus stop bench and got covered up by snowfall. When the snow goes away, you see loose clothing washing along the gutters when the sewers overflow. Some of 'em just melt right out of the clothes they were wearing.'

  A glance in any direction confirmed that the snow here could bury or erase nearly anything. Jonathan saw featureless dunes of hard-packed snow, weeks old, with car bumpers sticking out. Sometimes the snow lifted the automobile from the street, like a glacier on the rise. It was simple to envision corpses, heatlessly entombed beneath the unyielding drifts of white.

  In the surface streets, gray slush. Black ice. Oil-slick colored frozen puddles, and the waffled grain of a thousand thick-treaded tires. Fangs of snaggletoothed icicles depended thickly from every eave, dripping venomously tinted water. They fattened like stalactites, broke free and plummeted to the ground to assimilate into the frozen Arctic topography, to evaporate and rise into the filthy air. To condense again into new icicles.

  'How the hell do you live in this?' said Jonathan.

  'Stay indoors. Drink a lot.' Bash negotiated the first of several narrow turns. 'It's really odd to watch the locals when snow season starts. They try to pretend nothing important has changed. They're determined. And they go sliding around in their bigass cars and crashing into each other at intersections, and the expressions on their faces never changes. Like this is all some act of God and it's not their station to comprehend.'

  Bash had chosen the surface streets because the highway had become a nightmare of vehicles jumbled together in HO toy chaos, not so much an orderly, frozen row of taillights as a mad, Modernist neon sculpture: Black pavement, sliced from an ice frosting in double strips; police flashbars winking pink to crimson on the snowbanks; whirling
frost-blue from the tow trucks; the brilliant glare of high beams pointed in the wrong directions for progress on the road. And everywhere, white, descending from the sky like a hex of legend to bedevil mortals foolhardy enough to attempt travel. White, blanketing all, the starched sheet on the corpse, the non-tint of bloodless leftovers, the visual expression of absolute death.

  Bash's eyes memoed the freeway deadlock with his usual bitter bemusement. 'Like I said, they all try to ignore the snow. Stupid. And… congratulations. You have just made your first successful excursion through the township of Russet Run without getting robbed.' His voice dropped into his deadly Rod Serling impersonation. 'And survived.'

  'Russet Run. Sounds like what you get when you eat too much Tex-Mex.'

  'Your first dry township, me bucko.'

  'So that was one, huh. I noticed it looked a touch haunted.' Actually, Jonathan hadn't, but it sounded good.

  The streets began to shed their commotion of crowded brick buildings, metamorphosing into a series of woodland suburbs linked by scenic roadways lacking many streetlamps. In moments it was all trees, shadows, and snow. Jonathan fantasized the night-time eyes of forest creatures, chatoyant, monitoring the motorway and trying to figure out what automobiles were.

  'They're heavy into oaks in this neck of the woods.' Bash was still in tour-guide mode. ' Oakland, Oakdale, Oak Run, Oak Park, Oakwood. The mighty oak, lending a touch of spurious class to the progeny of gangsters and bootleggers. You'll see more Frank Lloyd Wright architecture here than in any other part of the country. Actually, I dig the hell out of the houses - there's very little ticky tacky here. The houses aren't all falling down or rotting, like in New Orleans. If I never see no more Spanish moss in my life, it'll be a lifetime too soon, you know what I'm saying?'

  Splash! Jonathan had sunk back into fugue and was jolted to reality by the truck's obliteration of a genuinely awesome puddle of ice.

  'Sorry,' he said. 'I'm phasing out. Too much time on the white line.'

  'Mm. Road fever. Classic case. What you need is some Terminal Turbo from Uncle Bash's killer espresso robot.'

  'Or a Quietly Beer.'

  He regretted missing Bash's anecdote about Quietly while busying himself in misery. If he waited a respectful distance, he could probably coax the story out again; Bash loved rattling on, never more so than when the talk involved one of his personal theories on why the world was so fucked up.

  'What the hell is a Terminal Turbo?'

  'Santy Claus - in the voluptuous form of Camela - hath bestown upon my pore white head a Krups Espresso Novo. Top of the line, state of the art. When I first got it I spent a week trying to figure out how to froth milk for cappuccino. It looked like the Amazing Colossal Man had ejaculated all over my kitchen. Whitewashed it. Now I'm pretty good at driving that ole foam nozzle. I had to drink all my experiments. Espresso is too expensive to waste. Speed while you learn. I spent the next week or so grinding my teeth to sleep. Once I got the espresso right I cross-bred it with a Hot Shot. You use four measures for two and a half cups; really strong. Add a shot of Bailey's. A shot of Kahlua. Add inspiration of the moment in the form of amaretto or Frangelica or chocolate or whatever. A hybrid is born. Voila-Terminal Turbo.'

  'The Doctor Frankenstein of coffee.'

  'It's aliiive!' Bash's Colin Clive really sucked. 'It knocks you down and wakes you up at the same time.'

  Jonathan wondered how many Terminal Turbos had greased Bash's tubework already.

  They slalomed into the oncoming lane to dodge a fool trying to parallel park in a snowbank twice as tall as his Le Car. The traffic moved at fender bender velocity and that was about it.

  'Hey squirrel dick!' Bash bellowed. 'Get a license! Get a brain! Get some motor control! Buy a fuckin' American car!'

  'Where are we now?' Fleeting panic hugged Jonathan. Irrationally he thought that alone, he could never pick his way to the bus depot through all this Bosch.

  ' Elmwood Park.'

  'Wet or dry?'

  'Wet. I think.'

  'Then there is a God.'

  He watched the artful way Bash would shift down and cut speed preparatory to hanging a turn, utilizing the truck's momentum against the treacherous bushwhack of ice. They sla-turned onto a smaller side street. Neat houses smothered in snowfall paralleled to meet at some infinity point in the darkness beyond Jonathan's vision. An Exmas card view, with the cold light of a television fire in each parlor window. Life in the cadaver locker, the calm of bloodless blue-white flesh, the stability of rigor mortis.

  The alley into which Bash cranked the truck was stopped up with a two foot drift of snow. In the dim light it looked like a concrete wall. Tire ruts had been excavated and were half full of falling snow already. The Toyota 's jacked chassis swept on through. Jonathan thought how frustrating this passage would be for a conventional auto, like trying to jog through waist-deep water. Bash slammed into first and floored it to negotiate a steep concrete ramp leading to a second-level parking slot. The garage was open to the weather; the space into which Bash slotted the truck overshot the edge of the building above by several feet. As a consequence, each parked vehicle had won a neat mound of snow on its hood, a foot or so.

  'Yesterday the wheels froze to the concrete,' Bash said. 'It was hysterical. I finally jarred the truck loose by jacking it up and then knocking out the jack.' He smacked his bare hands together and got an echo from the far side of the parking bay. 'Can't go nowheres if your wheels don't go round.'

  When Jonathan opened his own door the frozen wind tried to shove it shut again. He gawked at the door in mild surprise. When he tried again he put his foot into it. Above them the apartment building shot upward for five floors. More TV light up there, from windows blurry with condensed moisture.

  'Is this it?' he said.

  'Home Sweet.' Bash rolled his big brown eyes. 'Welcome to Hell.'

  FIVE

  'Welcome to Paradise, sailor. You've got to be Cruz.'

  The Corvette must have been carrying around at least eighty coats of lacquer; it looked as if it had been dipped in blood-coloured liquid glass. Cruz tried to see through the window crack.

  'I'm Bauhaus, and I detest idling among the peasantry.' The voice came in a draft of warm air through the crack. 'You get my drift? Jump in before your balls turn to ice.'

  Cruz tossed his NIKE TEAM bag onto the floorboard, got his legs around it, and crimped himself into the low-slung suicide bucket. Water pooled on the rubber floormat. His hair dripped condensation in the heat of the 'Vette's cabin. First freezing, now soaking.

  'Christ-o-mighty, kiddo, we're gonna have to procure you an overcoat if you plan on staying in this distribution zone a spell.'

  Bauhaus stuck out a powdered and uncallused hand. He was large and fleshy-pale. Cruz saw Armani lapels tucked into a big London Fog trenchcoat with a hefty fur liner. The guy probably wore colored silk underwear.

  Cruz tried to warm his hands in his armpits and nodded a quick acknowledgment. He wanted Florida, Rosie, and his bowling shirts. He did not want to make new friends. The Corvette peeled out of the loading zone to the chatter of Cruz's teeth. Bauhaus withdrew his unaccepted handshake and peered briefly at the road unwinding ahead of them, pretending to concentrate on his driving. The interior of the car stank of some top-end lime and woodsmoke cologne.

  Once his teeth stopped, Cruz's split lip began to throb. Warmth brought the pain of thaw. He stamped his feet on the floorboard to restore circulation and soon it felt as though acid was coursing through his veins down there. His nose leaked. When he cleared his throat, the snot came up the temperature of ice cream. It was totally repulsive.

  Bauhaus reached across and poked open the glovebox to reveal tissues. Cruz saw a crooked stack of compact discs and what might have been the butt of a revolver.

  As Cruz hocked and ventilated, Bauhaus said. 'So. Feel more human, kid?'

  Talking to Bauhaus was going to be unavoidable. Rosie would tell him it was all for his own good. 'So,' Cr
uz said. 'Why Chicago?' He'd been dying to ask that. 'And don't call me kid.' Now that his moustache was history, he was more sensitive about his looks than ever.

  'Sorry. Off on the wrong toe.' Bauhaus rummaged around in the depths of his coat. Every movement brought the backwash of cologne. Cruz's eyes stung, then watered. 'That stick?'

  Cruz accepted and fired up, using the dashboard lighter. After dusting his nose and pounding down airline alcohol, he welcomed the draughts of sweet smoke. It was another kind of warm air. Bauhaus refused the pass and dug out a chrome breast pocket flask with imitation Deco engraving and a blued dent in the cap. 'Got my own insulation.' He swigged and chuckled to himself.

  Jolly dude, this Bauhaus.

  They zipped past a spotlit welcome sign featuring the signature of the current mayor in three-foot neon script. After a few more inbound miles, Bauhaus sighed and said, 'Okay. I'll tell you why Chicago, kiddo. I mean… sir.'

  That sounded even worse. Inside his skull Cruz saw Chiquita tumble, and rupture redly, and change his life.

  'Had another boy. Man, I mean. Another runner by the handle of Jimmy McBride. Did his summertime rounds on skates, for godsake. Too too bad to the max. He's currently in the slam for porking some thirteen year old junior high school squack from Oakwood. In Oakwood they take Ash Wednesday seriously, slick, you copy what I'm saying? No liquor. No sense of humor. Jailbait offense is worse than cannibalism there. Just the pits. Doesn't mean dick that his little quail was totally wasted on Peruvian flake and Lite Beer. She and Jimmy did it four times on her parent's heirloom dining room table. Ma and Pa walked in on Act Five. Girl wins herself a bellyfull of bambino - strictly dark meat, if you hear what I'm saying? And Ma and Pa, being standup local God freaks, don't have a clue about how to unsmear their precious except maybe lock her up in a nunnery after she drops. They have money, they have community standing, they have a kind of exposure that I can't afford to pull. So poor Jimmy goes away for awhile, because even if I slid him free I couldn't run him in Oakwood again… and the Oakwood High footballers need their dope to go ten-for-ten this season. Shit, man, I made fifty grand off those guys in side bets last year. Paid for this bucket you're riding around in now.'