He brought out her clothes, wrapped in plastic. “Twenty-three dollar.”
She couldn’t help but see the first piece through the clear PVC, a silk blouse she’d bought for it’s unusual buttons, tiny lilies carved from bone. There were none on it now.
“Wait a minute. What happened to the buttons?” she asked, gesturing to the blouse which had been carelessly pinned shut.
He shrugged, scowling. “Twenty-three dollar.”
“But you’ve cut the buttons off. I want them back, please,” Candace insisted, fuming at the damage done. When she’d been a lawyer’s wife she could afford to buy silk blouses like this one. Not anymore. Now it was the small-town adulteress who was buying them. Candace had to make do with what she had left, since it was impossible to make up for what she’d lost. “What good is the blouse in this condition? It’s ruined.”
“No one here steal,” the manager snapped. He began shouting in some language she couldn’t understand. Others came out from the back, sweat drenching their white shirts, red eyes squinting and stinging, no doubt from chemicals used in the cleaning process. Their faces all bore the same stamp; it was a family business, then. He yelled at them and they began yelling at Candace. She fumed, managing to hold her tongue. Otherwise, literally everybody would be shouting at everybody. It was how riots started.
She pondered for a moment whether or not it would be difficult to acquire a live grenade. Well, it was easy, in this neighborhood. She could ask around, find out who the arms dealers were…
Candace slapped the money down on the counter and stalked out. The wind caught the tails of the plastic-wrapped bundle and almost tore it from her hands. Damn, she thought, no wonder perfectly normal people go on shooting rampages.
She tried to keep her eyes to herself as she strode furiously down the sidewalk. Not so much to avoid the faces of the scary passersby, but so she wouldn’t see weird, swirling dirty smoke, like an eidolon of oil, arising from any of the city’s many orifices. Or so the gouges of a thousand kids’ penknives (jackknives, switchblades, machetes) made in storefront brick wouldn’t suddenly open into nasty little devil mouths, just in the corner of her vision. Not that she actually accepted that any of these things were alive but it did give her a disquieting prescience of ‘other’. Like the hot and cold flashes, it was probably only a reaction to stress that any high-pressured city denizen might have while being caught between the generosity of the wolf and the machine.
««—»»
The four of them had been kicked out of the downtown dance club ALATE for being too visibly fucked up. After that they tried going a couple blocks further and into THE PRODIGAL KISS but weren’t even allowed beyond the door. They’d ended up at the expressway, under it really, not planning on going anywhere else for a while. Not until it was fashionably late enough to be in a pancake house drinking coffee and sucking out the centers of cherry blintzes in the wee time.
Spazz, Tuck, Gaff and Jonny teetered on their toes like ballet dancers, the snow tingling against their skin. Ecstasy and a few other sundry and superfluous additives induced into their bloodstreams ran like diamond dust through underground rivers. Gaff had been on the last fingertips-on-the-ledge shreds of an acid trip, and the new drug introduced into his flagging system had soared him back up and then in four directions at a simultaneous sideways. Spazz and Tuck had laughed hysterically when old Gaff screwed the big dog that had come sniffing along the underpass. But they’d held the bitch still for him so he wouldn’t get his hands or nuts nipped off. He moaned, cranking himself in and out, hands on the multitude of swollen and sagging and seeping teats. He cried, “She got pups somewheres!”
It had gotten Jonny hot as she watched until she commenced to touching herself. Not just on the tits and between the legs—even if those were the best places. She touched every place on her bundled up body, yanking free gloves to lube her fingers in her mouth, then pulling away swathes of lumpy woolen clothes to stick the greased digits into hollows and slide along the curves.
“Spazz?” she wheedled, lying down on the ground.
The dog had stopped whining and fled, soon as Gaff collapsed off her and she was let go. Tuck watched her scrabble away, back legs bowlegged. He squinted, scratching his head under the long-striped cap that made him look like some pervert rejected from a Seuss book.
Had it been a dog?
It stopped and glanced slyly back at them, narrow yellow slits for eyes like a radioactive piss etching the god of fire’s name in the snow. The feral smile dripped threads of meaty saliva, the stretched nursing teats elongating more to commence swinging.
Tuck heard mewling and saw that puppies now suspended from the milkers, mouths fastened and sucking. Only these pups looked deformed, as if their insides were on their outsides with a glistening muscle and circulatory system ferocity. Their tiny brains softly shuddered in and out, pulsing in and out.
Then the dog shimmered and leaped into an advertisement painted on the wall of the building which bordered their side of the underpass. It was a gig for dog food in which there had been an empty space.
The caption read:
MAST BRAND VICTUALS
ALL THE NUTRITION YOUR LITTLE MOTHER WILL NEED
WHEN SHE HAS A LITTER AND MORE TO FEED.
Spazz had undone his pants and gone at it with Jonny in the thick snow.
“Hey…” Tuck gestured toward the ad, eyeing suspiciously the now placid pastoral of the sweet-faced mommy golden retriever with her adorable litter squirming into her milky belly. Of course, now the big dog was really big, exponentially larger into a fifteen-foot-high pedigreed madonna with chocolate crème pie eyes.
“Oh, Tuck?” Jonny called, voice like an overturned five-gallon plastic jug of pink satin paint.
“But, look,” Tuck protested, “that was no real dog. It was a fornication formication. It was a fig newton of your illumination phantasmagoria.”
“Hey, another one!” Gaff cried, pointing up at the advertisement. “Come down here, mama, and give my Doberman a great big kiss!”
Gaff was stumbling over to Jonny, pants down around his knees, erection surprisingly solid considering the extreme cold which prickled his balls. Had to be the drugs assuring him, in the deceptive whisper of brain cells popping, that he was warm.
Jonny saw him coming and began hastily to jerk her jeans up. “No, I want Tuck. No way, Gaff! Don’t you come near me. You ain’t gonna do it with me after just humping some stray mutt.”
Spazz giggled, scooping snow out of his coat pockets, accumulated there when he and Jonny had been making the snow angel with two backs. “Takes one to know one, sweetheart!”
Jonny glared hard at him. “Well what does that make you then?”
Spazz winked, patting his groin affectionately. “The alpha male.”
“I helped hold it still for him but it couldn’t really have been there,” Tuck tried to explain to them. He placed his hands on the painted-over bricks. “Come here, you guys. Come look at this.”
Jonny sprinted over to the wall, an excuse to dodge Gaff. Spazz followed.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Gaff asked, starting to stuff his waywardness back into his pants. He had trouble with the zipper which was frozen. “Of course, it was there. My very own hot dog. Hair o’ the dog that butt me. Got the hairs on my dick to prove it.”
“Ow,” he said a split second later, actually examining himself. His penis was abraded, skin ruptured and bleeding in spots, dusty and granular. The tip especially was very sore. As if he’d stuck in into some hole in a wall.
He joined the others at the side of the building, traffic creating a muffled din on the overpass above, sliding through snow and across ice. He put his palms across the painting, high up over his head to touch the image of the reclining maternal retriever and her eight black-tongued puppies. He leaned forward against it.
Spazz chuckled. “Yeah, man, assume the position.”
“I don’t feel anything weird,” J
onny stated.
“Oh, yeah? So, feel this.” Spazz reached down and grabbed at Gaff’s crotch.
Gaff jumped and punched the other guy in the shoulder. “Yowl! Damn, asshole. Don’t do that…”
Spazz saw blood and wiped his hand on his coat. “Sorry, man. Shit, looks like you fucked a concrete donut or something.”
“Yeah, that’s what I been trying to tell you,” Tuck interjected, pointing at the fifteen-foot-high golden retriever. “It was Victuals here.”
And they might have walked away from that notion if they hadn’t all been so stoned. But they began stroking the brick, patting it, looking for whatever supernatural anomalies might give it away. The wall was cold, subzero chilling, sucking the heat out of their hands, drawing the puffy clouds of their breath-vapors into the mortar. They examined the right side, the left side, the huge cocoa eyes of the mother dog in the picture following them like those in a Styx Gallery portrait.
When Tuck got his hands drawn in to the wrists and Jonny was pulled in by her breasts up to the ribcage, they screamed. Tuck’s was more of a growl, teeth grinding together in sudden intense pain as the tips of both incisors broke off against pressure from his bottom teeth. Jonny’s was a tin whistle, bubbly, as one of her lungs then slid partway into the brick.
Spazz and Gaff, seeing it with hallucination’s own wonder vision, tried to pull away in time. But Spazz was jerked in at the knees so that he buckled backward. Gaff had been resting his head there against the wall, sure he was feeling the cold building throb, certain he was sensing the glacial heartbeat like the one in the iceberg which had struck the doomed Titanic. He was yanked in at the third eye spot on his skull.
Bones cracked as the snow crystals in the white blizzard crackled. Blood seeped out of the mother dog’s teats into the eager puppies’ toothless maws. The outer structure of the M in MAST vanished into the brick, leaving only the V, turning the word to VAST.
The side of the wall crawled, pushed out like a recently fed serpent’s gullet. It rippled, surreal in the blinding storm. A woman’s skinned face appeared at the big dog’s mouth, peering from behind the teeth like a tortured witch in Toledo’s prison. Then even this faded, the only sign of the four having been there at all being a single finger which stuck out through the mortar.
A homeless man walking by on his way to his favorite park saw it and paused.
“What do you think of that?” he asked himself. “A sign within a grim totem.”
Then he grabbed the finger, working it back and forth and around below the hinge of the second knuckle until he managed to break it off. This he put into his coat pocket and continued walking on.
««—»»
Bear yawned, worked his aching shoulders around in circles and shrugs. He searched the park for a bench. Of course, he already knew where each and every one of them were. Who didn’t know the location of where they slept?
His sometime comrades, Jake and Gil, had scurried off to try to find spots in an open shelter, desperate to get out of the cold. But Bear had always rather liked the cold. The outside was his element, in any case. He was half Lakota Sioux and half Arab, descended on both sides from natural nomads, even if the Sioux had been forced to remain on reservations for over a century. What was in the blood was in the blood. Else he’d have journeyed south to warmer climes, like the many homeless who flocked to Florida and Texas by hopping freighters or panhandling just enough to climb aboard a bus.
But they didn’t call him Bear for nothing, even though it had partly to do with his size. All he wanted to do—or had to do when winter came, for that matter—was curl himself up and go to sleep. His body seemed to slip naturally into a protective hibernation, his inner heat contained while recumbent in a semi-dormant state. If only it would last for months, as it did with real bears (real yet no bigger than he), instead of just for hours when park patrol would jostle him awake to hustle him off, or when those irritating human urges of unrequited hunger or full bladder forced him back to consciousness… If only he could descend into that thoughtless, hibernal place to remain.
The falling snow reminded him of being in the Black Hills his father was born in. Even if the emotions of the population in this Draconian municipality—swinging from sullen to ferocity—were surely more reminiscent of the desert wasteland his mother had hailed from, a location he’d finally had the chance to visit during his stint in the army. This wilderness he now called home was the capital of the thousand and one nights of apostasy. It was no wonder he’d begun to see things that couldn’t just be chalked up to the further ravages of Gulf War Syndrome.
Maybe his father would have called the visions spirit animals. His mother would likely have whispered “Ghuls” fearfully, respectfully. Bear knew they were neither. They were the dreams the city hatched out as it turned the land bad. Didn’t bother him; he’d seen manifestations all his life. He’d seen tanks grow arms and hands, stroking cannon-sized phalluses prior to firing. He’d seen rusted derelict cars and paint-peeling abandoned tenements shapeshift into the illusion of larger-than-life human outcasts, a society of lepers. He’d seen street signs transform into deformed four-pronged heads, turning and twisting in agony as they tried to decide in which of four directions to reach for help.
Lately everything seemed to be coming alive, even if only for nanoseconds. Then they would go dead again. Or perhaps it was better said that they just reverted to inanimate. If there could be such a thing in a world, that is, where what was alive and what wasn’t might depend only upon a delicate state of grace. He believed he’d probably lost his. State of grace, that is. This was why he didn’t stay home in the Dakotas after the war. He was only there a season, maybe less. What was a season anyway but a state of time ruled by temperature.
Hell, Bear knew he’d lost that grace. So, what could he be certain of when it came to things dead or alive?
Memory of Desert Storm. Bear was at his post, at the computer. Sand fleas crawled under his clothes, through his hair. From time to time he scratched absent-mindedly. Nomads didn’t pay that much attention to such things; they lived with elements and vermin as easily as pausing to shake the sand from their shoes. It was the fussy, two car-garage city-types who became discombobulated at the mere suggestion of something natural but too tiny sharing their space with them.
An Iraqi missile had fallen among nearby dunes a few days before and he’d been part of the team dispatched to go check it out. It was a dud, like most of Saddam’s bombs, broken but unexploded. After determining it wasn’t a hazard, the guys had him take their pictures standing next to it, grinning.
“Dud, rhymes with SCUD,” they’d chanted.
“Hold still,” he told them, trying to focus through the grit in the air. Grit, rhymed with SHIT. Through the camera lens, Bear watched the rocket shimmer, the way of mirages far off that seem to stripe and layer horizontally as with interference on a fritzing, staticy television set. It’s outer metal shell became covered with scales, and the beast undulated like the whore of Babylon’s favorite python dancing partner. It was almost a sensual thing, lithe in saraband, hypnotically physical in a slow yet relentless tarantism which could—with certain fluctuant rolls and thrusts—stimulate the pleasure and fantast centers in a man’s brain.
Bear had stared because he’d had no choice. His jaw had dropped as his nerve-endings tingled. But he’d controlled it, only giving into that depraved suggestion for far less time than it would have taken a cobra to strike.
This didn’t end up on the photos.
But then, at the computer, tracking a war plane which might have originated in Baghdad (in that country which—curiously enough—was once Babylonia), he became transfixed by the changing of the blip on the screen. It became a horrifying little cartoon of a roc, the giant bird of prey of Arabian mythology. What was it carrying in its claws, a man? Bear leaned closer. No, it wasn’t a man; it was a bald eagle.
And something was wedged in the screen itself, a sliver several inches long.
>
Bear reached out and touched it, surprised to discover it had substance, that he could feel it in three dimensions. He pulled at one end, tugging with a grunt, the fibers of it clinging to the matrix of the screen. Finally, it came free.
Bear stared at it, musing. He’d had many such hallucinations before, if that was what the visions could be termed, but never had physical proof of one. This was a feather. He ran the tip of his finger along its softly textured edge. His finger came away red and wet. He sniffed at it and detected the unmistakable salty rust of blood.
“Corporal!” shouted an officer behind him, looking over his shoulder. “What? Are you on hashish? That blip…”
The officer had reached around him to get at the keyboard. It was then that Bear heard the thunder, felt the earth shaking. The roc had disappeared on the screen but the plane had not. The officer was trying to send the alert but it was too late. The Iraqi bomber had dropped its load.
Bear leaped to his feet and ran outside. He saw fire, shrieking twirling torches of what had been his fellow warriors emerging from smoking ruins of barracks. The hand he’d used to pull the feather out of the screen with was clenched tightly in a fist. But the feather had disappeared. The blood was gone as well. Only its smell remained.
He put his hand in his pocket and removed the finger broken off from the wall. He’d expected it to be gone but there it still was. Not totally an illusion. A fetish, yes. But it was turning the color of red brick. And it was getting hard, not in the way of a frozen solid digit but in the way of those materials made by man to mimic stone.
Bear recalled not really breathing again after the Iraqi attack. Even after he was discharged for failing to obey any more orders, such as: stand up, take this gun, change your uniform, eat. He’d begun to ignore everything but the command to sleep.
Up, Out of Cities That Blow Hot and Cold Page 2
