Braddock looked at him. “Who are you?” he asked with a disdainful objectivity, then rubbed the back of his neck as if it didn’t matter what answer he got.
Bruno gave him a questioning look.
Braddock stopped rubbing and stared at him.
“It’s me—Bruno from the schoolyard,” Bruno said, smiling.
Larry gave him a puzzled look.
“You busted my skull and lied that it was an accident!”
“Bruno!” Larry shouted, then grinned as if glad to see him. “How ya’ been?” It was suddenly a long ago moment that no longer mattered.
Bruno readied to release his fury. It stirred with an intensity that might be a pity to spoil by action.
Larry began to look troubled as it dawned on him that this was not going to be a friendly reunion. “Well, you do know it was an accident,” he said. “I was running after you and you tripped just as I caught up with you.”
“So you said,” Bruno said calmly.
“I didn’t push you,” he muttered. “You tripped just as I grabbed you and you thought I pushed you. Don’t you get it? I remember it all exactly. Can’t believe you’re still thinking about it. Don’t you have anything else to do?”
Not now, Bruno thought. I can do as I please simply because I can. “Makes no difference,” he said. “You caused what happened by chasing me. And you do remember, so it still worries you.”
“But it’s not the same,” Larry said softly.
“You were a creep then,” Bruno said, “and you grew into a slime. I know all about your crooked business dealings.”
“What are you talking about?” Braddock asked. “Who sent you?”
“I did,” Bruno said.
Braddock shook his head. “Nobody hangs on to grudges from grade school. Who sent you? Is this blackmail?”
“I sent myself.”
Braddock took a step back and Bruno stepped toward him.
Braddock stood his ground. “What do you want?” he asked. “A job?”
Bruno laughed. “I’ll be doing a lot of people a favor by getting rid of you.”
“Rid of me? What are you talking about?” Braddock’s face reddened and he clutched at his throat. “Call a doctor!” he cried. “I’m having a stroke.” He collapsed to the floor, moaning.
“Doesn’t matter much,” Bruno said. The twinges of sympathy and shame he had felt when he had disposed of the mother and her two sons tugged at him, but he only laughed at Larry.
The fat man was suddenly very still. Bruno leaned over him and saw that he was breathing regularly. He had only passed out. Just as well. He would not have to hit him or cuff him.
Bruno stepped aside, closed his eyes, and summoned a black pocket.
“Oh, shit,” he muttered to himself as he saw it appear about four feet from the floor. He had been trying to get it lower this time, because Braddock was a whale, but the pocket came in at the height of his practice runs with the garbage, which was okay for the light stuff like the woman and her two sons, or someone he could trip in, like Al, but an effort with the electronics, especially the two big monitors.
The fat man was still out cold as Bruno dragged him by the shoulders toward the suspended darkness, thinking that he would get his head and shoulders in first, hook him over under the arms, then lift the lower body.
The body slid slowly. It was only six feet or so to the pocket. He pulled close and stopped. There was a strange sound coming from somewhere.
Bruno listened.
Braddock was snoring.
Bruno stepped forward, placed his feet wide at Larry’s shoulders, then bent at the knees, gripped the jacket fabric at each shoulder, and lifted.
It was impossible. The man’s upper body alone probably weighed two hundred pounds.
“What?” Braddock muttered. “What’s going on... who turned out the lights?” he demanded as he tried to turn over and rise up on one elbow.
Bruno let go of the shoulders and stepped aside, knowing that he would have to get Braddock to do some of the work.
“It’s dark, Larry,” he said. “Careful how you get up.”
“Who’s that?” Braddock whispered.
“An old friend, you fat snail.”
“Friend... friend, friend,” Braddock chanted as he rolled over and got up on all fours, then slowly struggled to his feet, facing the pocket. When he was still partly bent over, Bruno stepped forward and happily gave him a shove from the rear.
Braddock grunted and went halfway into the pocket, and hung there by his gut on the lower lip.
“Help!” he cried. “For God’s sake, someone help me!”
“Gladly,” Bruno said, gripped his ankles, lifted, and sent him over. Not so bad, he thought, catching his breath. He might have preferred some more conversation, but he felt good about it. He closed his eyes and the pocket vanished.
He hurried to the door and listened, then slowly unlocked and opened it and removed the sign. He slipped it inside his belt and closed his jacket.
He went over to the sink and washed his face with cold water, noting that the big creep’s smell was still all around him. He had read somewhere that an odor is a loose molecular sample of the very thing that you’re smelling, going up your nose and into your lungs, clinging to your skin, infiltrating the fibers of your clothes.
A bad smell was all that was left of Braddock in this world, Bruno thought with satisfaction, noting that his rage, what there had been left of it toward Larry, was coiling back inside him, growing cold.
“You can’t be sure,” Felix had told him, “how long they may live in each pocket.”
“But the air,” Bruno had objected, “what about the air?”
“Who knows? Maybe they branch inside to other pockets. I doubt it, but I have never explored enough of one to know.”
The woman and her two boys may still be alive, Bruno realized. It had not yet been very long.
“You can recall pockets you’ve made and check,” Felix had said.
“But don’t they stay where I made them?”
“They stay close,” Felix had explained. “Entangled with your thoughts. Not nearby in space. Space isn’t the same there.”
“You mean they follow you?” Bruno had asked.
“Only when you summon one.”
“You mean any pockets I... fill?”
“Yes, and you can look inside with a flashlight.” He had laughed. “You can shout in and hear if anyone answers.”
Felix knew more than he had told him, Bruno thought as he saw by the calendar that it was a week since the woman and her sons had gone in. It was too late to call that one back. But Braddock was only a day gone. He wouldn’t be rotting yet.
He closed his eyes and thought of him.
The pocket began to appear in front of his fireplace.
He got up from his recliner and went over to the dark patch. It was a living thing to be fed, a black, stemless flower like nothing that had ever grown from the earth, and he wondered about its roots.
“Hey, Larry!” he shouted into the maw. “Still alive?” An awful smell hit him.
He waited.
“Yes,” came a pitiable whisper. Bruno felt nothing.
“No one will even know you died, or how you disappeared!” Bruno shouted. “No one will have the slightest clue about what happened to you.”
He waited for an answer.
“Son of a bitch,” came the reply. “Let me die in peace.”
“What gives you the idea that I’m going to let you die?” Bruno asked.
The odor of human sweat and wastes coming up from the pocket grew stronger. As he listened to the sound of coughing and wheezing, Bruno became concerned about polluting his own living area.
“You cruel shit,” Braddock said loudly. “To hell with you!”
Bruno felt the cruelty within himself, but Felix had given him good advice, if he could follow it. “You will have to control yourself,” Felix had warned him. “Don’t let revenge cloud yo
ur mind or you’ll make mistakes and get caught. Enjoy, but deliberate, and check up on yourself. Believe me, you’ll have help.”
But Bruno had felt very differently about Braddock than he did about the woman and her two sons. Pocketing her had been an assignment pledged to Felix; but he had no ill feelings toward her. It had to be done, or Felix would have refused to teach him the skill. Bruno had not been truly worried that Felix would somehow know that his order would be ignored; that danger had probably died with him, but Bruno had decided not to chance the loss of his new strength; even the smallest chance was too great a risk. There was no honor among enemies, only compelling circumstances that left no choice.
“Let me out!” Braddock shrieked suddenly. “Please! Have mercy!”
“You stay where you are, you fat slob.” Of course fat was not part of it. Larry had been a swine even when thin.
“Oh, God, no! Please don’t let me die in the dark!”
Bruno felt a surge of satisfaction; but it wasn’t enough; he cared too little about Larry; that place was already occupied by Felix. He saw the special place of torment within himself, and could not let go of the longing for fulfillment that Felix had denied him by dying.
Bruno closed the pocket, went back to his recliner, and began to select his next enemy. Felix’s ex-wife and her two sons did not count; they were on Felix’s head. And Larry had been only a warm-up, scarcely better than getting rid of the garbage.
That night he dreamed of Braddock crawling through a snaking passage, and somehow finding his way out into a green countryside in a distant land. The woman and her two boys were there, and she had an airline ticket to somewhere for all four of them.
He woke up with his living enemies. They would deserve their fate, measured out without mercy. His hatreds were refiring with empowered rage.
“You have to control your human sympathies,” Felix had told him. “Your common humanity can defeat you. Those impulses evolved for common survival. You and I are past that now. We’re even beyond most leadership groups, who know that they can kill large numbers of people without danger to themselves, if they claim a greater good.”
Larry Braddock had been a bully, and bullies hated fair fights. They loved to come in groups, to guarantee their victory. That was their prime trait. Never use less than overwhelming force. Have three or four hold the one and take turns gut-punching him. Use more help and ammunition than you need. Waste but win. Bomb from the air. Never come in low enough to get shot down. Nothing horrifies a bully more than to have overwhelming force used against him, to have it all coming at him in a way he imagines is unfair; better to horrify him for the first time and in the final moments of his life, when there is nothing he can do about it.
Bruno lay back, feeling calm. Human cruelty, he told himself, was a very special thing, poorly understood even by many who practiced it; so they failed to be satisfied by the experience. Cruelty well practiced satiates the giver with the certainty that the object will suffer before dying, however briefly burns the pain of that knowledge. Longer is better. Behead slowly.
But once satiated, the bringer of cruelty must move on, untouched, his weapon intact, his composure whole.
Bruno realized how feelings of pity and regret might wound him and undo all revenge. Felix had warned him well about the tasks before him, to help him accomplish them regardless of how he felt. Revenge would not ruin him. That was the most important thing. His rage would be loosed, by degrees, on the right enemy.
Felix had promised help, and Bruno wondered about it.
But still the pity of it wore away at him that his greatest enemy, Felix Lytton, was beyond suffering. Braddock had made an all too brief understudy. Scheler, the director of the sales force in the office-supply company for which Bruno had worked, would make a more rewarding substitute. Bruno had never been able to break through Scheler’s composure, to get inside him, and he had never had any help from him in the workplace. In fact, Jean Scheler had always worked against him, in a well concealed, deniably undeniable fashion.
Promotion to a better branch?
No.
More vacation time?
Not once in a dozen years.
Blame for the failings of others?
Often.
Good morning and good evening greetings?
Never.
A simple how-do-ya-do?
Not once.
A nod?
No.
The birthday party Bruno had organized for him?
Scheler had failed to show up.
A word of thanks for holding a door open for him?
Not a grunt or a nod.
Laying him off, then firing him with the loss of his pension?
Yes. And Scheler had taken his time, playing with him, until all the fun was gone.
Bruno had always been at the bottom of Scheler’s “makes me no never mind” list.
Jean Scheler seemed taller and leaner, with the same thinning hair combed over his bald top, when Bruno came up to him at the annual company picnic. He showed no sign of surprise or anger as they went silently through the food line and found a small table under an elm tree.
Bruno looked around and noticed that not one of the hundred or so workers here seemed to be paying any attention to them.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Scheler said softly, unwrapping a ham sandwich.
“I didn’t go last year,” Bruno answered.
“Doesn’t work that way, Mr. Willey.” He took a big bite of the sandwich and grimaced. “You don’t work for us any more.”
“Throw me out,” Bruno said.
“I guess you need a free lunch,” Scheler said without further facial dread of his sandwich. “But you might have done better at the charity mission.” He finally dropped the ham sandwich onto his paper plate. “Might just as well be Spam.”
Bruno stared at Scheler, determined to break through that brown-eyed stare and see what the man was like behind his mask.
“What’s made you such a hard ass, Jean?” he asked, and saw that Scheler immediately wanted to reprimand him for using first names, but hesitated, since that habitual response would now be wasted on a former employee. Was that a hint of a Uriah Heepish smile? More a smirk, Bruno decided, feeling that Scheler was congratulating himself on the efficiency of his non-response.
Scheler stared down at his uneaten sandwich as if it had poisoned him.
“What kind of caterer did you hire?” Bruno asked. “A cheap one, even though you knew you were going to have to eat it. Hope it makes you sick.”
“I can’t just think about myself,” Scheler replied.
“Yes,” Bruno said, “you’re a philanthropist.”
The sun came out from behind some clouds. Scheler got up and said, “I’m going for a walk. Goodbye, Mr. Bruno Willey.”
Scheler had always been a fitness freak, but the exercise had only made him look cadaverous.
“Mind if I come along?” Bruno asked.
“It’s a public path,” said Scheler. “You’re no longer my responsibility.”
Bruno picked up his own wrapped sandwich and put it in his pocket. As Scheler would say, a free lunch was a free lunch, shameful though it was to eat one. It put you one ahead even if it was lousy. That’s how Scheler thought of business: whatever brought a profit; even a penny found on the street might tip the balance to an honorable end of a day’s toil.
Scheler went down the path from the picnic area toward the lake. Bruno followed. No one else came after them, or even glanced in their direction, Bruno noted as he looked back. Scheler was not liked by the employees. They paid attention to him only when they had to. Taking a walk with him was unimaginable, and would have stirred suspicion among the employees.
Bruno went after him, taking soft steps. Halfway to the lake, where the trees were thickest, Scheler stopped.
“Are you still there?” he called back to Bruno.
“What is it?”
“I’d leave if I were you,”
Scheler said softly.
“Maybe it’s the bad sandwich,” Bruno said with a chuckle. “You almost sound kindly.”
Scheler was silent, then turned to look back at him.
“You must leave, Mr. Willey.”
Bruno said, “Must? I don’t have to do anything you say, you creep!”
“I’m serious, Mr. Willey,” Scheler said, unmoved by Bruno’s outburst.
“So am I,” Bruno said more calmly. He closed his eyes and opened a pocket downhill of his old boss.
He was about to turn away as Bruno came forward suddenly and shoved him backward. Scheler cried out as he fell in head first. His oversized shoes seemed to hang on the edge. The pocket muffled his cries as he disappeared.
Bruno stared at the opening, noting with satisfaction that it stood about three feet from the ground, perfectly still and unreal, as if someone had painted a hole in reality, defying anyone to believe it. Dust from the trail was being sucked into the mouth. He took the sandwich out of his pocket and threw it in.
“You might get hungry!” he shouted, “before you run out of air.”
“Ahhhh!” came a cry from the opening.
As the pocket faded away, Bruno looked out across the calm waters of the lake and again felt cheated of the chance to have tormented Felix Lytton. His oldest enemy had given him the means, at a price, of course, but had bowed out before it could be used against him.
“Enjoy your crappy sandwich, Mr. Scheler,” Bruno muttered as he turned back up the path, imagining the man weeping as he ate his last meal and wondered whether hunger or lack of air would kill him first.
He would do in place of Felix.
For now.
Bruno’s mind now inventoried other worthy enemies, the category so well defined in all the old etiquettes, but so difficult to eliminate. That same book, first shown to him by June, had claimed that the category only worked between equals. A quaint, romantic notion of justice, since an unequal enemy was still an enemy and should be destroyed at first chance. Where had there ever been such honorable enemies? It had always been villains and victims. Now the tables were turned. Bruno knew that what he could do to the villains, he would do to them, leaving no trace, no consequences. The moments of cold fury would be his to savor at his leisure.
Black Pockets Page 27
