The Shaft

by David J. Schow

  His heart sped up again. 'Uh - a cot.' He couldn't help that one. 'Yeah. My friend - Bash, that is - got me some sheets and blankets and stuff, plus I've got a good sleeping bag, which works better than a comforter. You can take the cot, I guess, and I'll the take the bag, and -'

  'I think we can fit two on the cot, Jonathan.' She closed her eyes and smiled at some internal joke. She saw his puzzlement, the facial evidence of turmoil, conflicting signals, hormones and adrenaline rampant. 'Stop being so gallant and do me a favor. We did a ton of coke tonight and when I drop off I'll be like a corpse. I don't want to sleep like that alone. I want to be held while I snooze. If you want a more complex explanation, I'm sorry, I don't have one. Okay?'

  He swallowed hard. 'Sure.' His throat clicked.

  'Great. Now get out of here because I don't want you to see the red marks this tub has left on my butt.'

  He laughed, relieved, and handed over a fresh folded towel. 'Vintage Holiday Inn linens, stolen by Bash. For guests, strictly.'

  'Thank you. I'm touched. Do you think you could find me a T-shirt or something I could wear to bed?'

  'I doubt it,' he said. Jonathan the Glib.

  Now would be a good time to see if the space heater Bash had loaned him worked. Jamaica 's mention of sleep suddenly twisted his weariness knob to full blast. His feet and shoulders decided to leadenly protest their new, extended hours. Too many chores.

  Somebody was arranging to pass cash to him. Maybe they were working furtive setups for Cruz's bail right now. This all might seem more thrilling if he could catch just a nubbin of sleep.

  He looked down and saw the cat waiting for him at the end of a trail of dark, wet little cat footprints.

  You'll never guess what I just found.

  It was fastidiously licking beads of blood from its whiskers. It apparently liked the taste.

  FIFTEEN

  Morning.

  As suburbs go, even in daylight Oakwood can strike you as being a haunted place. Jonathan thinks it might just be the winter, a ferocity to which he is unaccustomed, but it takes more than snow and cold to make a place this inhospitable. He cannot imagine it warmer, even in fair summertime weather.

  The streets here seem as disused as the corridors of a plantation estate abandoned to cobwebs and dry rot. By noon the town's pallor resists the sporadic penetrations of sunlight; by midnight, with the chemical light of streedamps lending an operating-theatre sterility to the snow and quiet, the shadows rearrange themselves into an unforgiving chiaroscuro that bespeaks not a natural scene, but a still life. Stilled life. The few pedestrians or motorists that dare manifest themselves seem to originate from somewhere outside the dry township cordon, and are bound for destinations nowhere near Oakwood. That imaginary boundary locks out so much of the real. Residents sleep here as deeply as hibernating vampires, cocooned in ennui and insulated by the cobalt television glow of business as usual.

  They do not even sleep in a true section of Chicago.

  The visages of the houses lining Kentmore and Garrison are as blank of identity as a busload of retards. The architecture is lively and Gothic, but in the manner of a jaunty and ornate tombstone. The designers and artisans had been alive and vibrant… but that time is long past. The houses, the monuments, remain shrouded in their annual quarter of coma. Somewhere, smothered beneath the four-foot snow-pack, are paving stones and tarmac and sidewalks, icons of a lost civilization awaiting archaeological excavation. The eyes of the walkers who pass Jonathan look not trapped, but hunted; not totally dead, but fatally brutalized. They dart at the passage of another human being, not afraid so much as shocked into jaded lifelessness. Once passed by, you cease to exist - the better to curtail the bloody fantasies of assault, injury, the swift rape or the blade in the spine. Urban terror refined to the sweet, sealant thickness of country honey.

  Jonathan's mind tells him that this is not a place for those interested in living. One can subsist here, as in the Arctic, but beyond the challenge of survival no rewards await. It reminds him of an ancient bastille, gone to ruin and occupied by nomads. Life here had made sense once. Now there was no life, only occupation. Customers shuffle listlessly in and out of markets, clutching sacks. Snow is robotically shoveled from drives and walkways. At the coffeeshop where Jonathan takes most of his solitary meals for convenience's sake, the locals seem salty and inimical. Nobody wanted to be bothered. They shuffled to the churches of their choice every seventh day with the same zombiatic lack of expression. It was nearly atavistic, a behavior remembered but no longer comprehended.

  When daylight intrudes it lends a funereal aspect to the denuded trees. Still they reach, skeletally, toward a sky that cannot offer photosynthesis. What leaves linger, dead, are bereft of autumn hues and have gone utterly black. When Jonathan considers the iron-colored sky, the frozen mud, the black leaves, he thinks again of Usher's tarn.

  Not merely the sky, but the downpour itself is gray - the stained hue of unclean ivory. Fat drops, ice-cold, plash through swirling mist; the combination chills to the very strands of muscle fiber. Jonathan no longer feels the cold and the rain fails to touch or despoil Amanda, who stares down upon him. He is posed all wrong inside a casket that is too small for him. Her eyes flare. They tell him that if he wanted to get horizontal so badly, then this arrangement is fine by her. She plucks the best irises from the floral groupings while rainwater rapidly fills the casket. Wet silk is disgusting. Amanda smiles, keeps the flowers for herself, and continues to watch dispassionately as the freezing water rises to cover Jonathan's open eyes.

  Nobody fit in Oakwood. But most stayed. Jonathan does not fit here, and neither does Bash, for that matter. Or Cruz, or Jamaica.

  Jonathan wishes he could save somebody.

  ***

  He awoke spooned into Jamaica from behind, still wearing his pants and socks.

  His left arm was draped over her and cradled between both of her forearms. His hand had nested just under her chin. When first he tried to retrieve it, her sleeping grip tightened. Don't go. He could feel her breathing. Beneath the sleeping bag her scrubbed skin exuded a teasing aroma that made him want to close his eyes and return to dreamland, to stay this way forever.

  Except that would mean fossilization deep in the calcified heart of Oakwood, and Jonathan would rather die. The sound that had awakened him was itself like a heartbeat.

  Boom-cha-boom-cha-cha. He timed it against the noise of blood traversing his vessels, the backbeat of his own heart muscle. Boom-boom-boom-cha. Boom-boom-cha-cha-cha.

  First it was 4/4, then almost a rap beat. It seemed to vibrate in his direction from the outer walls of the building, sounding distant, easily blanked by the ambient noise of the other apartments. Transmitted, perhaps, via beam and bricking from the rooms on the far western side, in the manner of canyon acoustics. Perhaps from the other floors.

  A hard and a soft. Then hard/soft-soft. Then hard-hard-hard/soft/hard-hard/soft. Then over again. Same cadence each time, now. It stabilized.

  His mind wanted to explain it so he could forget it. Kenilworth Arms had been sliced and diced into forty or more units by his reckoning, its less vintage walls like pasteboard. Transient tenants and odd hours were factors of an equation whose product was this foundation rhythm, boom-cha, hard to soft. Somebody somewhere in the building would be spinning tunes no matter what the hour. Or staring at nightowl music shows on the tube. Someone was always awake, watching or listening or fighting, in a place like this. If Jonathan had hoped for respite by marking time in this place, then he'd better get used to the extended dance mix - uh huh uh huh boom-cha-cha.

  It was not an authentic part of the barrage of salsa and heavy metal native to the building's constituency, whom Jonathan had seen knocked rudely up just hours previously. Nor was it the raw noise of those occupants or residents themselves moving up and down the narrow firetrap stairways in the metronomic march of life in America below the poverty index. It was not outside traffic. Any sound could obliterate it. But
it was always there, like a base coat buried beneath the twenty-plus layers of generic paint that Fergus the super tended to slap all over every wall and door in the joint.

  A lone car slushed past on Garrison, compressing snow. Jonathan lost the mystery sound - what he fancied the heartbeat of the building.

  Boom-cha.

  He remembered coming out of the bathroom and seeing the black cat with fresh blood dappling its muzzle.

  Jamaica was going to be coming out the door any second. He had moved quickly, snatching up the cat.

  Hey! Now wait just a dam…

  Move fast. He ascertained that it had not injured itself. It was not in pain. The blood had come from somewhere else. Probably a rat or other small vermin of the sort cats relish torturing prior to killing.

  'You little fuck.' Jonathan's pleasant nighttime interlude was in jeopardy of being ruined by the innate sadism of a lower life form. Wunderbar. No mewling, he thought. You start meowing and I'll slam your face in the doorjamb.

  Rub, rub. Want some?

  'You don't fool me, you fucking little parasite.'

  Rub, rub. It got blood on Jonathan's shirt.

  I wuvw you… feed me. C'mon.

  He booted it out the first door.

  Sigh.

  It smoothed its ruffles and began to rub against the wall of the cramped interior hallway.

  Jonathan popped a button rushing his shirt off. Great.

  Jamaica will come out and see me stripping. Wrong ideas all around. Life could be such a sitcom.

  She emerged from the bathroom turbaned and swaddled in towels, deep heat radiating from her exposed shoulders, her racing-fine legs, the coltish weave of muscles at her neck. Naturally, the first thing she requested was the cat. Jonathan made a pretense of finding her a T-shirt to wear and she made a joke about him giving her the shirt off his back.

  He lamely explained that the cat had wanted to go out. After all, he was not sure whether it was owned by someone else in the building already. He was certain that any second he would stumble over a half-eviscerated carcass in the middle of the floor. Then Jamaica would want out.

  No miniature corpse turned up. Things stabilized. They fell to sleep surprisingly fast.

  Now Jamaica sighed and burrowed closer, maneuvering her ass into his lap, seeking his warmth the way a plant phototropically leans toward light. He had been conscious only scant moments. He became aware that the button fly on his jeans was restraining a heroic erection from the world at large. He had to disengage himself to take a leak.

  The bathroom had gone clammy in the steam's feeble aftermath, and Jonathan felt moving air as he pulled the light chain above the sink.

  The shower curtain stirred weakly. Not exactly a gust; most like a deflected breath. He swept it aside and discovered the cardboard square slightly dislodged from the window frame, its top edges bent as though it had been slapped through from the outside. He considered this quizzically, the light from the bathroom's bare bulb stinging his eyes. Too early for this shit. He leaned in and gave the cardboard a tug. It resisted. He had pressured it in nice and tight. From the colder face his fingers collected minute smears of the brownish gunk he'd had to deal with in pools earlier; the crap the cat had tried to lap up, dry and pasty now. It reminded him of vomited bile, of fresh hot bone marrow, of an encyclopedia of things revolting.

  He washed his hands. He repeated when he found the stink was tenacious and clinging. After the rinsewater gurgled down the drain, he thought he heard the heartbeat of the building again. Boom-cha-cha. Then an upstairs toilet flushed, the pipes awoke, and the ghost noise hid out again.

  The air was fetid, sulphurous and chilly. With care he bent the cardboard and pushed; it snapped back into the windowframe grooves willingly enough.

  He thought of swinging by Rapid O'Graphics when his business at the jail was completed. Capra had everything. Jonathan could probably borrow one of the big battery lamps, the six-volters racked in the garage. As for the airshaft, it certainly smelled as though some leprous creature had been half-eaten, then discarded to molder in the soup of freezing sewage and drowned fauna. Maybe he could spotlight physical evidence for some sort of complaint. For now it was sufficient that the ominously sagging bathroom ceiling did not collapse and inundate him in a downpour of watery shit.

  Tomorrow, he reminded himself. Tomorrow was now.

  It was light outside, and still raining. The snow smoked. Dense fog rose to swirl in the steady sprinkles. 207's steam coil labored, leaking heat like a running nose. Thank the gods for Bash's space heater.

  He'd have to ask to borrow the truck again tomorrow. Today.

  He ran the sink tap until the water warmed again, and dabbed his face, prodding nuggets from the corners of his eyes. A tubful of mystery diarrhea, then cops, then the cat had come back bloody. A kid had gone missing and a bust had gone down. Now he was awake, having slept maybe a grand total of forty-five minutes, with a hooker snoozing not fifteen feet away on a borrowed cot, on borrowed sheets, after having absorbed a Mason jar of other men's semen in one night. He nibbed his face to scare up circulation; the tip of his nose was cold. He tried to visualize Amanda's face, in the mirror, superimposed over his own reflection saying…

  Look at you. Some victory. Some life you're building. Just look at you. Baby, you're so fucked up you don't even know that you ARE fucked up.

  'Hell with you,' he said to the mirror, whose edges were blotched from where the silver backing had gotten wet, then blossomed into mildew and decay. He thought of thick comeal scars.

  'Jesus, you're freezing,' Jamaica said when he returned to bed. She snuggled, grabbing his arm and pressing his frigid fingertips to her sternum, near her heart. He felt the tempo in her chest, racing, then relaxing as she eased back into slumber. He felt her heartbeat, and heard no other. He tried to imagine he was back with Amanda, that she was touching him in this receptive way, that things had levelled out through some unguessable alchemy. And soon, lying to himself, he achieved fitful sleep.

  ***

  Cruz had to be signed for.

  The circumstances might have been amusing, but Jonathan was jumpy and flying solo. Jamaica had zero desire to cross the threshold of the Oakwood police station again, and Jonathan realized he had never been inside one of these places his whole life. He had never even phoned the police before, and now he was compelled to visit their brightly lit lair. All he knew of the trappings and procedures of police had come from two - count 'em - speeding tickets. And television. Most of what he thought he knew was tame or mistaken.

  Jamaica 's camisole was truly stale, and Jonathan had lent her an Overkill T-shirt and muffler to wear beneath her car coat. She provided explicit directions and they took the Eisenhower Expressway downtown. He was told to circle the block while she ducked into a brownstone near Van Buren and Wells. Ten minutes later she was out, with Cruz's bail enriching her saddlebag.

  The Oakwood station had plenty of exterior lighting and an abundance of parking. The lots and walks were clear of snow. Salts and chemicals had been sprinkled like Parmesan cheese on the pathways. It crunched underfoot.

  He took in the heavy glass doors, the security cameras and bulletin boards. Flyers featured feted officers and down-home updates on specially organized social soirees. The waiting benches were comfortless. There was a revolving pamphlet rack. JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS. TEN WAYS TO PREVENT HOME INVASIONS. RAPE IS A FOUR LETTER WORD. The room's centerpiece was a semicircular desk, laminated like the countertop at a McDonald's in a queasy hospital orange, and resembling the throne dais of some Martian monarch. Within were all manner of weird police buttons and phones and consoles. Beyond it was an eight-by-four window whose sickly tint tipped it as a one-way mirror. Jonathan saw himself, fingers steepled on the counter, wondering what in hell to do next.

  He glanced behind himself. Nobody home except for him and the payphones. He could be sealed in, no doubt, by the touch of a hidden switch.

  A buzzer razzed and a big door behi
nd the dais opened. An identical door was set flush with the brick wall outside the dais. Both had massy aluminum lock knobs and matched the doors Jonathan remembered from college classrooms. Both doors had inset squares of shatterproof, wire-mesh glass at eye level.

  'Something you want?'

  It was a fully uniformed officer of at least seven inches shorter than Jonathan. He had a bald spot for which a handlebar moustache fought to compensate. His eyes were red-rimmed; brown like a Labrador 's. Eyes unwilling to consider chat about the weather. His tags read MALLORY but for Jonathan it was too late - this man was the Doggie Cop.

  He felt as though his thought transmissions had been time-delayed. Voyager calling Jonathan. He consciously aborted the uh command from his speech center.

  'I'm here for Cruz.' It was out of his mouth. 'He was arrested yesterday.'

  'Charge?'

  I didn't bring my MasterCard. He shrugged noncommittally. Not my job.

  The Doggie Cop shrugged too, then riffled a card file with supreme disinterest. His tongue worked at his incisors, dislodging stubborn food. He turned to a stack of yellow flimsies on the crescent of desk and paged through. The carbon sandwiches left smudges; they were probably the source of the smeary fingerprints Jonathan noticed on most of the other paperwork.

  'Ah. A little nose candy action down at Kenilworth Arms,' the cop said - trying, convicting and executing in one sentence. His K9 eyes reassessed Jonathan in light of this new information. Jonathan read suspicion and dislike. He battled to look behind and see if anyone scummier had just entered, some alternate suspect for whom the cop's prejudicial glare was meant instead of him.

  'I don't know, man. I'm just here to bail him out.' Inwardly he winced. Man was obviously doper slang to this minion of justice.

  The Doggie Cop surveyed the room. 'No bondsman? No judge?'

  'Uh- no?' Jonathan had to wet his lips.

  Once more the glare, accompanied by a rueful shake of the head. 'Hope you brought your piggy bank, kid, 'cos bail for prisoner Cruz is going to run you a couple grand.'