When the generators kicked in, supplying just enough juice to put the bulbs at tepid yellow, I felt a little better. Now maybe I would be able to get things moving. But the reprieve was short-lived. I heard an inquisitive sniff, this time to the left.
Another familiar voice, different from that of the phantom patrimony peddler: “Who is that? I smell a rat.”
“It’s me: Eddie,” I said, trembling.
“Baby Eddie? Eddie Feet? Fast Eddie? Eddie Pussy?”
I bent over to sneak a peek. There he was, upside-down in dark glasses, handicapped act, and the same old stained shirt. Fuses blowing in the murky light, I cried, “How did you get here?”
Grinning like the dickens, Shep said, “I was about to ask you the same thing. This is definitely a demotion from the Nec. What have they got you on? Sewer duty?”
In a flash I reverted to virulent rat. “I happen to have a management position—more than you were ever able to offer.”
“You abandoned me, Eddie. Wasn’t I was your friend? Didn’t I look out for you? Didn’t I treat you like a son?”
“You shouted at me. You made me hustle change. You stole my food.”
“See? I was like a father to you!”
I refused to believe my eyes. Maybe oxygen deprivation was affecting my senses. I put my head between my knees and took a couple of quick deep breaths. This was turning into a twisted Christmas Carol. “Shep, if it’s really you, tell me this: Who was my mother—?”
“What’s the use in wondering, Eddie? Mother is an empathic computer on the spaceship of the soul who learns how to think and goes berserk … Mother is a tea-sipping, nonchalant, male manager for an underground cortege of agents named X … Mother is the mummified remains belonging to a madman’s once-mother, stacked skeletally in a rocking chair at a broken-down motel…”
I craned my head under the partition and shouted, “All right, already! Shut up!”
Shep made that lock-the-mouth-and-throw-away-the-key gesture from days of petty, juvenile secrets, sitting with arms crossed and a pursed-lipped expression that, under the circumstances, pantomimed by a pretend-sightless man, struck me as doubly enraging. From the other stall came a thunderous crack. I craned around to the right. Metzger was back.
“Where’d you go?”
“Actually, I never left.” He bent his legs demonstratively. Not one to risk getting stung, Metzger had put his feet up on the seat.
“Is this the one you meant,” I said, with a thumb back toward Shep, “the other shepherd who handed me off to you?”
Metzger said, “He’s your man.”
“Shep, you know this guy?”
“Can’t say I don’t recognize the voice,” Shep said. “I gave Metzger the okay to take you, Eddie. That’s standard practice with a pack master’s property.”
Metzger said. “Ditch Dig City, Eddie. This place is going down the tubes.”
I sucked in my gut, snapped up, and snapped out of it. “You two are just polluting precious air.” I bailed out of my stall, retaining a painful plug. Pausing at the sink, I said, “I’m going to get the guards. They’ll take you both back where you came from.” In the mirror, I saw their doors swing open.
“Oh, sure!” Metzger said. “You just want Corrente’s inheritance all to yourself. Be reasonable, Eddie. You’re not going to forget the old fellows who made you a fortune, are you?”
Flicking water droplets from my fingertips, I turned to face the squatting grouches. “What if I let you split all the money?”
Shep didn’t miss a beat. “Sounds pretty fair.”
“Tell me something first. Where did I come from?”
“Beats me,” Metzger said. “I never bothered to check.”
Shep gnawed his lower lip.
“Hoard the secret any longer,” I said, “and the big payoff goes down the drain.”
“Go ahead and tell him,” Metzger said. “What harm could it do?”
“Okay, Eddie,” my old patron said. “You asked for it.”
I didn’t have any time to waste, but I was so surprised to see Shep concede that I sat up on the edge of the sink.
“A long time ago, before I opened the Nec, I used to run with a wild crowd. There was this friend of mine who played poker. He was always burning up and down the interstates after the high stakes. I’d go along sometimes on rides, hang around during the game. Everyone believed I was really blind—see the potential advantage? Anyway, my buddy liked to play with fire. His favorite was five-card stud, jokers wild, and this one time he challenged Apple Jack to a match. I don’t have to tell you that idea was bad. You know how these things go: Final round, he had already put everything he had on the table, but they both had one more card coming, so by the showdown Apple Jack proposed a blind bet. They wrote down what they wanted from each other on two slips of paper and put them in the pot. Guess what Apple Jack asked for?”
“His life? His wife?”
“Close. Just to fuck him over, Apple Jack had written: your motherfucking firstborn.”
“You’re telling me I was bet away in a poker game?”
“Rash tactics, but your dad had a great hand. For a couple of scoundrels, he and Apple Jack had been pretty good friends, although what happened at the call changed that fast. Apple Jack showed ten-to-king, all spades, while your dad showed a joker and three bullets—”
“Bullets?”
“Bullets, pocket rockets—aces, Eddie. It looked like Apple Jack might have gotten the mortal nuts, a royal flush, but your father believed he had the nutcracker. When it came time to roll, he thought he had snagged the pot. You know what beats a straight flush? Five of a kind. It doesn’t have to be aces, but in your daddy’s case it was, which was bad news for baby. When they turned over their hole cards is when he lost more than just the game: Apple Jack shows a flush, ace high, your father’s got a joker and four aces—it doesn’t add up. There was one too many spadey Ays, which isn’t cool with honest AJ. He can’t stand getting stuck, and it enraged him to catch your dad trying to sneak lady luck out in her evening gown. Your father had plucked that second ace of spades from up his sleeve.”
“But what could Apple Jack have wanted with a baby?”
“Nothing. He had just been joking, but the cheat routine made it a point of pride. In the end, the big boss did the noble thing by letting your father surrender the kid to me. That’s what happened the day you of the flappy feet ended up the jester.”
“What about my mother?”
“Your father snuck you out of the crib while she was asleep. Oh, the old lady was pissed, but you can’t fight Apple Jack.”
“Where did this all go down? Southie? Sommerville?”
“Down here, Eddie. Dig City. Your mom is still a big figure in the movement.”
“How big?”
“For one thing, she’s got a booming booty.”
Gulp. “You mean … a large behind?”
“The mud-flap kind. Big feet, too, but she always wears bell-bottoms to cover them up.”
I was at the edge of hearing horrors, but I had to hear. “And my father?”
“Crazy cat, built this place, drove a rig.”
A sinister quiver passed through me. That big eightwheeler runnin’ down the track means your true lovin’ daddy ain’t a-comin’ back. “A trucker? What was his handle?”
“He called himself the King.”
Double whammy! Daddy had been Levis, the King, and I had summoned him to a deadly collision that day at the Crossroads. Jocy was mother and I had done her. Raving, I thrashed and raged. The glasses got torn off my face in the melee. Either Shep or Metzger stepped on them: I heard the lenses shatter.
Crowds stomped overhead and I cowered, covering my ears against the reports reverberating through the metal doors, shutting my eyes to the sight of the loading-belt bed where I lay, the location of who knows how many incestuous copulations. I clutched my stomach, bent double and ready to barf like I had swallowed a good gob of tobacco juice. App
le Jack’s motherfucker echoed in my head together with Adelle’s fortune: PS: He lives—and dad had, back then, but I had iced him in the TW tunnel. In the interval, I had married mom: All along, the crystal springs of blissful ignorance had been polluted by the murky waters of my leader-libido. If I had been given a little more information, I might have figured it out for myself, but I had been groping blindly in the dark.
“Eddie, it’s me, Shep,” my old master said, kneeling beside me in the dim Nest. Without glasses, I was blind as a baby whose eyelids have not parted. “You must have picked up a wicked parasite. Hang in there; Metzger’s got a plan to get you up and out of here.”
“Just let me lie here for a little while, I’ll be fine,” I moaned, but I knew I was that which had to be regurgitated, the toxin at the heart of Dig City’s pollution. There was no way the underground could hold me down. If I went ahead and sacrificed myself to the overworld, just as Levis had done to the infant-me, maybe Apple Jack would lift the plague of bad air. I wanted to be gone before anyone—uncle-brother-in-law Cray, mother-wife Jocy, or my melodramatic sibling-children— could see me.
Shep heaved the portal open and pushed me up to the level of the street, slamming the door behind me. The assault of light was a cosmic club on the head, Zeus clobbering me with his shoe. Sun! I wept, and it was for much more than irritation of my long-dilated pupils. In the ultimate indignity since having been dubbed Eddie Feet, I was exiled from the Hive. Some heavy headgear, a cumbersome construction of plaster and wire mesh, was thrown over my shoulders, pinning my arms to my side. Suddenly snared, I awakened to reality. A few inches from my pupils, everything was fuzzy through a narrow slit bordered by a nest of feathers and a shimmering canopy of sequins, but I could tell that the early morning shower had passed and now Chinatown was choked with festival-goers. So abruptly yoked, I didn’t have time to get my bearings when a punt at my can accompanied Metzger’s hissed command, “Dance.”
I had no choice. The shepherd took his job seriously enough so that if I did not step to, I knew, I would suffer another poke. I did the funky chicken, feebly protesting, “I can’t see!”
“We’re a dragon, all right? Now keep moving.”
Amid continuous reports, we high-stepped across a carpet of firecracker paper. I found myself nose to nose with the owner of one of the ubiquitous groceries. He held out a thousanddollar bill, placing it almost all the way in the crepe-paper mouth, and I snatched reflexly at his idle holiday offering. The dull electrical thrum of a long-slumbering thrill shook right out of the ground, up my leg, and into my spine. I might have forgotten my disgrace and gone over the whole route to pocket a great day’s take, but another well-parlayed pestle at the heart of my mortar told me it was time to bob and weave away.
Wheeled around by a switch of dark genius in the nether end of the monster we pretended to be, I found myself standing face-to-fire-breathing-tongue with my blurry enemy. Huffing down on me: Mayor Apple Jack, breath fetid as ever, Chinese donut crumbs stuck to his cinder block chin. My heart beat uproariously enough, it would seem, to betray me despite the din, and the blood in my ears burned as hot as the boiling shot of soup inside those innocent looking Asian dumplings. Hizzoner, goldly guffawing, was looking past me, evidently mugging for some kind of pict op, and, I recognized almost too late, trying to shove something down my papier-mâché throat. It was one of those cheap keys mayors foist on suckers at public functions. “Are you going to swallow this chunk of brass,” he growled into a glass eye set a foot above my actual head, “or do I climb in and shove it up your ass?” I accepted the token with a gulp! and my tail and I were on the run.
At the edge of the festival, Metzger lifted the costume off and, brandishing cuffs, grabbed my hands. I held out the Gnote and the key to the city. When Metzger grabbed, I bolted, leaving him holding the bait and shackled.
Stooped, clutching my stomach, I pushed my way through the throng and under the great, oriental gate to the accompaniment of gong dong and cymbal crash. My irises adjusted to the light, but without glasses I could focus no definite shapes beyond my palm, and not even that with my arm outstretched. Everyone I bumped into punctuated their watch-where-you’re-goings with grumbled motherfuckers. To weak eyes, the Mandarin signs all seemed to read patricide. All the same, I knew where I had to go. I was like the sick man rushing to the toilet to throw up, only it was me, everything I represented, that I needed to flush. I felt nauseous and cold. I couldn’t shut off an audio loop playing over and over in my skull, a sample out of a juke box tune from the days of Apple Jack’s Paramus arcade. Atonal organ, ruminative guitar, freeform percussion, gritty baritone: “Father?” “Yes, son.” “I want to kill you … Mother? I want to—” The growl turned into a howl.
I must have looked like a madman staggering to the end of Long Wharf under the skeleton of the bombed-out Marriott. It wasn’t exasperation—or any other dramatic aspect of how we might expect madness to take shape—that led me to the edge of the dock. It was more like indifference. I had almost died a dozen times, not a few of them by my own hand. During particularly dark chapters, a latent fascination with suicide had been the only thing that had kept me from killing myself. The fetish for one’s own death is great incentive to stay alive. The promise of another day brooding on the exigency of the end depends, after all, on survival. Now there was nothing keeping me from finishing the job. Light! let me look my last on you. Not to be born is best. Call no man fortunate that is not dead. Disgraced by exposure of my execrable incest, I felt around in the heap of jetsam for plumb and tackle. Cast off at the end of the crumbling pier, I found some braided rope and a weight of the nautical variety used to keep lobster traps from getting dragged away by currents: iron, with an iron loop at one end to receive the line from rigging or cage. Letting both feet dangle over the water, I tied one end of the rope to the anchor, the other around my feet, and, like a paramedic marking the ETD, cast a last glance at the watch on my wrist.
In the shadow of black pillars, by the crumbling compass mosaic, the day was dimming with the overtones of a deepening bruise. Just as the sky’s light would diffuse into the leaden sea, so the darkening medium seemed ready to accept me. After all, gravity had stuck me to earth all my life. Wouldn’t it now, at the edge of the world, drag me into a bold, new element? Who cared about what dreams may come? I was ready for them, so long as they would cease the steady irrelevance: the senseless conflicts that had jettisoned me to this remote outpost of barbarian territory, the meaningless momentum that had dragged the neo-savages to New England in the first place. Long had I lived a subterranean life. Now, at the edge of this cold continent, where swamp meets ocean, I would graduate to an eternity submarine. Compared to open sea, the harbor was just a shallow tub, but enough to ship this struggling knot of nerves once and for all. It only takes a teaspoon. Great, gaping bay!—mouth onto the awesome, insatiable Atlantic—you take all the earth feeds you. What has not been deposited at your lips by land’s overspilling ladle?
I was ready to take the final dive when out of nowhere came a sultry slur: “If you’re looking for trouble, you came to the right place.”
Once again, I recognized the voice—the twang rang like an alarm in my head. He was right behind me. The outline was fuzzy, but it sure looked like leather. “Is it really you?”
“Who am I,” he vamped, “that the King would bleed and die for?”
It was Levis, the King, my dad. PS: He lives came back to me again, this time in the creepy sense of resurrection. Was it a father’s shade come to greet his son at the border of Hades? “I must be dead,” I said.
Levis leaned so close I could smell the sarcasm, enough to sink a small island-state: “Only the strong survive.”
The stink of that cynical grin brought me back to my senses. How could I have been so naïve? I knew this trick: the reverse–Trojan horse! If you say there’s nothing up your sleeve, people become suspicious; but they lap it up when you show them an empty vessel and say you’ve made s
omething disappear. “You weren’t even in the TW that day,” I blubbered. “You just burned the high beams and sent that truck down the tunnel with a brick on the accelerator.”
“Play it, son!”
Levis’s dump truck had been such a convincing hat, I had failed to notice there was never a rabbit. “You just wanted to play dead.”
“I got my mojo working, but it just don’t work on you.”
“You set me up to take a dive! Your own child!”
Levis lowered his dark shades. “But that’s the best part, Eddie. You’re not. Jocy never let me in her cell when the wedding was done. She had somebody’s son, but it wasn’t mine. You’re just a joker, wild. You’re an ace from another pack.”
Disease and dementia departed; the poles in my lobes were reversed. The day was still out of focus, but the metropolis sang a hosanna: the ingenious brainstorming of jackhammers! the roar of muscle cars out on Northern Avenue! the patois of alarms getting tripped! “You mean …?”
“You didn’t kill me and I’m not your father.”
I had caught my credulous cleft on treachery’s hook, but now, half-acquitted, I tasted possibilities of release, of getting thrown back in the mystery, and, perhaps, of redemption. “When we met at the Crossroads, you weren’t just fishing for any sucker to bump up against in the tunnel, were you?”
Levis shook a leg, did a little jig. “I gave you away as a baby and I thought the debt was paid, but as you grew, you kept scavenging for bits of history. When you had Metzger do those DNA tests, word got around that not only were you not my firstborn, you weren’t mine at all. Trick Apple Jack once, you get a life indenture. Trick him twice, it’s the death sentence. Rather than wait around for AJ to come get me, I decided to have a spectacular accident—and take you down for good measure. I never would have had to rig that crash if you hadn’t kept scurrying around. You ratted on me, Eddie.”
Fast Eddie, King of the Bees: 1 Page 16
