by Roger Smith
That left Fingers, who was standing open-mouthed, his scarred stumps moving in the air, his thumbs twitching like he wished to hell he could hitch a ride out of there.
Benny Mongrel felt the knife in his palm.
No guns for Fingers.
Rudi Barnard was in communion with the dead. He heard their voices; he saw their faces. They were calling his name, inviting him to join their number. He was fighting harder than he had ever fought in his life, fighting the tide that dragged him down.
The roars blasted his eyes open, and he saw the half-breeds before him, explosions of red reaching from their gaping mouths. Reaching toward him, trying to take him with them to join the legion of the damned.
Barnard found some last reserve of energy. He sprang from the sofa and hurtled headlong toward the living room window, and in an explosion of blood, glass, and fat he burst out into that bright, terrible light.
Silence. Burn realized that the weapons discharging in the confined space had momentarily deafened him.
He saw the fat cop leap from the sofa and smash through the glass, disappearing from view. He saw the watchman kick the legs from under the surviving member of the trio who seemed to be attempting a prayer for mercy without the benefit of fingers. He saw the watchman’s blade catch a perfectly angled beam of sunlight as it rose.
“Wait.” Burn’s voice sounded muffled to his own ears. He held the Mossberg like an extension of his arm, pointed at the watchman. The blade halted in midair.
Burn went to the kneeling, fingerless man and applied the Mossberg barrel to the side of his head. “Where is my son?”
The man stared at him blankly. He shook his head. Burn took the barrel back and smashed the man in the face, seeing thin beads of blood hang in space before they hit the dirty wooden floor.
He took the barrel back for another swing. He felt the watchman’s hand on his arm. “He don’t know nothing.”
He looked at the watchman. “Then what’s he doing here?”
“He come here so I can kill him. Old business.”
Burn believed him. For some reason this seemed a perfectly rational and satisfactory explanation. But the question of his son’s whereabouts remained. And the man who held the answer had justhurled himself out of a closed window.
Burn ran toward the door.
Benny Mongrel looked down into the eyes of Fingers Morkel and realized that a great tiredness had enveloped him. It was all he could do to hold the knife in his hand. But he knew, one last time, that there was something he must do.
He took Fingers by the chin and, with the precision of an executioner, lifted his head to bare the neck and sent the blade across the throat.
“Benny Mongrel say goodnight,” he said, and let Fingers slump to the floor.
Then he relaxed his hand and felt the knife slip from his grasp, and, perfectly weighted instrument that it was, it landed blade first in the wooden floor and quivered for a time before, at last, it was still.
By then Benny Mongrel had left the room.
CHAPTER 30
The fat man flew out the window, a trail of blood and glass in his wake, and landed heavily on the sand. As he lay on his back, his great naked chest heaving, the blanket floated down and covered him like a shroud.
People in the street and the adjoining apartments, drawn by the all-too-familiar chatter of small arms, paused when they saw the man plunge. There was a collective gasp when the blanket moved and he sat up. He hauled himself to his feet, and the blanket fell away.
A sharp pair of eyes recognized him beneath the gore, and his name was whispered.
“It’s Gatsby.”
Wheezing, bleeding, and foaming, the fat cop took off down Tulip Street as if he were being pursued by the devil, massive legs pumping.
The cry grew louder. “It’s Gatsby!”
A small boy rolling a bald tire fell in behind Gatsby, following him up the road as women in curlers, hanging over fences, put their gossip on pause as this demonic vision crossed their view.
Farther down Tulip Street, Donovan September lay under a car, parked halfway up on the sidewalk. He was adjusting the exhaust mount, while two of his friends passed him tools and offered advice. He put out his hand for a screwdriver, and it wasn’t forthcoming.
Then he heard one of his friends say, “Jesus, Donovan, you better come look at this.”
Donovan slid out from under the car. As he stood, he wiped the sweat away from his eyes with the back of his hand, not believing what he was seeing. Gatsby, the cop who had put his little brother in the ground, was running up the road, half naked, bleeding. People were trailing in his wake like pilot fish feeding off a harpooned whale.
Donovan picked up a hammer from the hood of the car and stepped out into Gatsby’s path. The fat man didn’t see him, ran straight on. Donovan had to sidestep, or the mountain of fat would have rolled right over him. Donovan stuck out a leg and Gatsby stumbled, teetered for a moment, then toppled like a great beast to the sand.
Donovan stver the felled man, the hammer in his hand. He looked around at the gathering crowd of his neighbors and heard their voice as one. “Do it, Donovan.”
He raised the hammer high and brought it down on the fat cop’s head.
Carmen Fortune walked back from the taxi toward her apartment, still feeling a buzz even though she knew the tik rush was waning. She knew, also, that she was going to have to face the mess in her bedroom. But she had done good. For once she had done the right thing.
After she had smashed the Virgin on Uncle Fatty’s head, she had grabbed the boy, Matt, pulled one of Sheldon’s T-shirts over his head, and run with him. She had not stopped to think until she was in a minibus taxi, the blond kid on her lap, watching the streets of Paradise Park slide past her.
The kid was still groggy from the Mogadon, which was a godsend. She hoped that he would have no memory of what Uncle Fatty had tried to do to him. She knew only too well how those memories burned into your consciousness like a hot wire into flesh.
She ignored the stares and whispers of the other passengers. She knew how it looked, a beat-up colored chickie, blood on her T-shirt, with a white kid.
Fuck them.
She stroked the boy’s hair, and he lifted his face, trying to focus on her. Then his eyes closed again. Sheldon’s T-shirt was too small for him, and it was unwashed, but at least it was better than the pj top with Uncle Fatty’s brains all over it.
She knew she had killed the old man, had felt his head all spongy and soft under the Virgin Mary. Served the bastard right. While she was beating him she had flashed back to memories of her own childhood, and there were moments when, what with the tik and all her rage, she wasn’t sure if she was hammering Uncle Fatty or her own sick fuck of a father.
The taxi slammed to a stop, and passengers fought their way off, while others clambered in. She grabbed the boy and pushed her way out, past the leering sliding-door operator.
“I see where he got his blue eyes,” he said, laughing at her bruises.
She didn’t waste her breath on him, just slung Matt over her shoulder and crossed to the community center. The kid weighed her down. He had big bones, the little bugger.
She pushed through the smear of depressed humanity patiently waiting for nursing sisters and social workers and government grants, until she came to the door of Belinda Titus’s office.
She banged once on the door and opened it without waiting for a reply. Belinda Titus sat at her desk, fastidiously applying lipstick while she admired herself in a compact mirror. Her freshly painted lips parted like a hooker’s thighs when she saw Carmen.
“I beg your pardon, but you can’t just march in here!” Belinda Titus, indignant, twisted the lipstick back into itself like she was twisting Carmen’s neck.
“I just did,” Carmen said, dumping the boy on the chair facing the social worker.
“What is this?” Belinda Titus demanded. “Who is this chil?”
“His name is Matt. He’s Am
erican. I think he was kidnapped.” Carmen was on her way out. She stopped as she opened the door. “By the way,” she said, rubbing a finger across her mouth, “you got lipstick on your teeth.”
She had slammed the door and walked back through the downtrodden and the oppressed, and she had felt better than she had in a long time. She knew it wouldn’t last, but what the fuck, she’d enjoy it while it did.
Then, as she came into Tulip Street, she heard the crowd before she saw them. A low animal roar of bloodlust. Carmen pushed her way through the mob and saw a bloody shape lying in the dust. It took her a few moments to recognize Gatsby. Donovan September was hitting him with a hammer, and some of the other boys and men were putting the boot in. The crowd was roaring its approval, calling for revenge.
Carmen, not able to drag her eyes away, was having serious reality issues. At last she convinced herself that what she was seeing was real, not some tik hallucination, and she heard her voice joining in, calling for the blood of the fat boer.
Burn sprinted up the street in time to see the mob form around Barnard and envelop him. Burn dived in, shoved bodies aside, his white skin and American voice surprising people out of his way.
“Stop! Don’t kill him!”
The boy with the hammer looked up for a moment, paused. Then he went back to his work, smashing Barnard’s head open like a Halloween pumpkin.
Burn tried to level the Mossberg at the boy, but hands in the crowd, like tendrils, took the gun from him. He was jostled, sworn at, and he felt a fist connect with his jaw. Then a rock hit him above the left ear and he dropped to the ground. The crowd became a single organism that lifted him off his feet and moved him to its perimeter, where it dumped him onto the sand.
Berenice September, carrying shopping bags on her way home from work, arrived at the moment when the mob parted and allowed the child to roll his tire to the center.
She saw the unmistakable form of Gatsby lying on the sand. And she saw her son, the serious one she loved so much, crouched over the cop, a bloody hammer in his hand.
“Donovan! No, Donovan!”
Her son looked up at her, and she saw his face as she had never seen it before.
Then the crowd closed again.
Donovan September took the tire that was offered by the solemn child, and he lifted Gatsby’s head and slung the tire around his fat neck like a necklace. Then a jerrican of fuel was passed through the crowd, and Donovan doused the fat man’s body.
Gatsby was still alive, his ribs pumping, his hands reaching up to the heavens. The mob moved back a few paces, and Donovan September lit a cloth and threw it at the fat man.
Gatsby exploded into flame.
Benny Mongrel stood at the very edge of the crowd and watched as they fell upon the fat cop. Every blow that rained down on that fat body smashed the desire for revenge out of his own.
It was right that this was happening.
It was good.
It was why he had been led here.
Benny Mongrel watched as the flames consumed the man who had killed his dog.
Rudi Barnard was in the lake of fire that his preacher had prophesied. His body was spiderwebbed with black char lines as the flames burned through the layers of his skin. He lifted his arms and welcomed the flames, even though they consumed his flesh with a most terrible agony. This was when he would be granted salvation, the gift of voices, when he would emerge from the fire cleansed of mortal sin and find his reward.
He looked around him in the lake of fire and saw the sinners, the lost souls, damned to burn in this hell for eternity. He tried to lift himself, to take a step forward, toward the light that he knew was ahead of him.
But he could not.
The burning water held him back. The limbs of the damned enfolded him and pulled him deeper and deeper into the inferno. He tried one last time, to drag himself toward the light that grew fainter and fainter as it retreated from him. Then, when the light at last was dimmed forever, Rudi Barnard finally had his answer.
His god was dead.
CHAPTER 31
Susan Burn lay in the operating theater, bisected by the sterile drapes that screened her lower body from her view.
She felt dislocated, detached, a numbness beyond that caused by the epidural anesthetic. She felt alone. Unlike when Matt was born, she had no hand to hold, no familiar presence to give her strength through the pain. No Jack to share the joy when the moment came. The drapes added to the sense of dislocation and alienation. Her doctor and his team were busy beyond the curtain, and Susan was reminded of a puppet show she had seen as a child.
She heard a whirring noise, like a food processor, and the acrid smell of her own body burning reached her nostrils. He’s cauterizing your blood vessels, she told herself, trying to pretend that she was narrating something on the Discovery Channel. After the whirring ended, she heard nothing but the muted clink of surgical equipment and the whispers of the doctor and his nurse.
“We have her head here, Susan,” she heard the doctor say. “I’m suctioning fluids out of her nose and mouth.”
Thank God, she’s breathing. That dread, that terrible superstitious premonition, had hung over her the whole day. That some price would have to be paid for the wrong that she and Jack had done. And that price would be the life of her baby.
“Okay, now I’m going in for the rest of her, Susan. I need you to help me, okay?”
She heard herself reply. “Okay. What do I do?”
“Just press your hands into the upper part of your abdomen and push down.”
She felt the nurse guide her hands to the spot, and she started pressing. It was nothing like the protracted ordeal of giving birth to Matt, when she had felt as if a part of her body was being torn from her, but at least she was a participant in this drama, no longer a member of the audience. She pushed.
“Okay, we have her,” the doctor said.
Then, exactly like in one of those puppet shows, her red and yellow baby, face squashed and furious, was held up above the curtain for her to view. Instinctively, she reached out her hands, but the nurse shook her head.
“She has to go into the warmer. We’ll give her to you in a minute.”
Susan lay staring up at the lights, listening as another suction did its work. Then the nurse returned with the infant and handed her to Susan. She lay her baby daughter, Lucy, against her breast and felt those tiny lips already sucking at her nipple.
And Susan felt herself crying, really letting go, for the first time since that day in Florida when Jack had told her what he had done to their lives.
Burn wandered, dazed, at the periphery of the mob. His head throbbed, and he could feel sticky blood behind his ear, from where the rock had struck him. The sickly sweet smell of burning human flesh came to his nostrils, and through the shifting mass he saw Barnard’s body ablaze.
The crowd, after its initial violent rage, was strangely quiet, as if now that the thing was done, it had to absorb the impact of its actions. People on the outside of the pack started to break away and drift up the street.
Burn moved through the thinning mob until he came to its center. He stood over the charred form of Barnard, the face unrecognizable, the teeth visible in a grimace, the arms stretched upward, blackened claws grasping. Whether this was Barnard’s last action or an involuntary muscle contraction caused by the heat, Burn would never know.
But what he did know, with absolute certainty, was that the only man who could take him to his son was dead.
People were dispersing with more urgency. Even those closest to Barnard, the ones who had initiated this act, freed themselves from the mob’s grasp. The young man, no more than a teenager, who had beaten Barnard and set him alight, took a last look and turned and wandered into a house nearby. A middle-aged woman stood in the front doorway watching him. They said nothing to each other as the boy went into the house.
Burn realized that he had been listening to the clamor of sirens for at least a minute, and they we
re getting closer.
He turned and ran back up the road toward the Ford.
He had no idea what he would do next.
Benny Mongrel walked away. It was done. There was nothing more for him here.
On the corner, near the taxi stand, he saw a man around his own age propping up the gate of a cramped yard, smoking, watching the goings-on but keeping his distance. His tattoos and his demeanor were those of a man who knew enough about trouble to give it a wide berth.
“They saying that’s Gatsby they got there,” he said to Benny Mongrel.
“Ja, it’s him.”
“He was a fucken bastard.”
“Last of his kind.” Benny Mongrel saw an opportunity and took it. “You got a smoke for me, brother?”
The man removed a crumpled pack of Luckies from his trouser pocket and held it out. Benny Mongrel took one, slipped it between his lips.
“You know, Gatsby, he shot me once,” the man said as he lit Benny Mongrel’s cigarette.
“Then how come you still here?”
“He must of been in a good mood.” The man laughed sourly and turned and made his way toward the shabby house, dragging one leg as he walked.
Benny Mongrel headed away from the sirens, puffing on the cigarette behind his cupped hand. The wind had died, and the air hung as heavy as a blanket on the Flats.
Carmen Fortune left the mob behind and walked back toward her apartment block. She was relieved that she wouldn’t have to deal with Gatsby finding out what she had done with the boy. At least there was that.
She passed a white man getting into a dented brown Ford. Most of the white men you saw on the Flats were cops, but he didn’t look like one. He was bleeding from his head, and he looked confused. Lost. When he pulled away, he grated the gears of the car.
