by Ray Garton
Elder Walters turned and said, “Thank you, Sister Ayers.”
She held the door open and a tall, thin man walked in wearing a flowing white robe. A large, ruby-studded cross hung from around his neck. He had white hair, sunken cheeks, and eyes that stared piercingly from deep within their sockets. His jaw was set and the corners of his thin-lipped mouth turned downward slightly. His eyes locked with Al’s the moment he walked into the room. He moved quickly to stand directly in front of Al, looking down at him with deep lines cut into his forehead and his eyebrows furrowing together above the bridge of his nose.
“You are Albert Caymon Holt,” he said softly.
Al looked up at him, at his face, his eyes, and got a sick feeling in his stomach. He nodded slowly.
“So am I,” the tall man said.
They said nothing for a long time . . . just looked at one another . . . looked long and deep . . .
“So,” the man they called Bishop said, “what do you think?”
It was a long time before Al could answer. His throat was dry and coarse and his voice came out in a rasp.
“It’s wrong . . . all of it . . . everything. This is not what we wanted. We had only one thing in mind, but now . . . now I’m beginning to wonder if that was right. We did not intend to take everyone’s choices from them . . . not all of their choices. This is blasphemous. Even . . . even God allows for the freedom of choice. Who are we to put ourselves before God? Who are we to say that we can make choices for everyone?”
Their eyes remained locked for a long, silent time as the other men waited in the room for Bishop Holt’s response.
He backed away from Al and turned to Elder Walters.
“Execute him. Now.”
“But Bishop Holt,” Elder Walters said imploringly, “you must understand that he is your — ”
Through clenched teeth, he hissed, “You are mistaken, brother. He is a heretic and a madman. Kill him at once. And after you’ve killed him, do the same with his whole family. You’ve heard me.”
He spun around and left the room, slamming the door.
Elder Walters was a little pale when he turned to Al. He tried to smile, but failed.
“I’m afraid we must follow the orders of Bishop Holt . . . Bruh-Brother Holt.” He turned to the uniformed officer. “Deacon Potter, you heard the order. Here and now.”
Without hesitation, Deacon Potter unholstered his gun, came to Al’s side and placed it to his temple.
Folding his hands before him, Elder Walters gave a slight smile and said softly, “If it’s any consolation, it has certainly been an honor knowing you.”
The gun fired . . .
PIECES
For Andrew Vachss, one of the last true heroes;
and for NAMBLA, one of the biggest groups of monsters
I’ve been coming to pieces lately. It seems that the more things come together in my mind, the more I come to pieces.
I’ve been in therapy for a long time, but it really hasn’t seemed to help. Oh, sure, it’s made me break down and cry a few times — something that men, in our society, aren’t really supposed to do, no matter what Phil Donahue says — but it hasn’t improved things any. I wasn’t even sure why I was there in the first place, except that something just seemed . . . wrong.
Just a few days ago, it hit me. It was like a lightning strike, like a sixties acid flashback or some sort of memory flash a Vietnam vet would have. My father hovering over me in bed in the dark of one rainy night, telling me that we were just playing a game, that’s all, but a secret game, a secret game that no one else could know about, so I would have to keep it a secret, a deep dark secret, and tell nobody. But the game hurt. It hurt bad.
It came to me while I was sitting alone one night on the sofa in only my underwear reading a magazine article about child abuse, and it seemed to come out of that part of my brain that was only black, with nothing in it, like a blind spot in my eye. In fact, it exploded from that part of my brain and, at the same time, the fourth and fifth toes dropped off my left foot, which was dangling loosely from my knee, and fell to the carpet with soft little tapping sounds.
Of course, that wasn’t my only problem at the time. My wife had just left me because, as she put it, “You are un-understandable. There’s something about you that is unreachable and untouchable and it seems to make you just as angry as it makes me sad. I can’t take it anymore.”
So she left. A few hours later, my right earlobe broke away and peeled off like a piece of dead skin.
But I guess that’s getting off the subject, isn’t it? Back to the secret games. I’m not sure when they happened or how long they went on. I’d never brought it up with my therapist. I’d stopped therapy some time ago because I figured I could sit home and cry for a hell of a lot less money, and the memory flashes did not start until my appointments stopped.
I had six weeks of vacation coming at work — I’m a shift manager at a power plant — and after my wife left me, I decided to take them all at once. I had nothing in mind, just . . . rest. A relief, I guess.
I remember something my wife told me. She said, “There’s something inside you that you know nothing about and you have got to take a break, just take a vacation from your life and find out what it is!”
That wasn’t my reason for taking the vacation. I was just tired. I mean, your wife leaves you, you get hit with some memory you hadn’t conjured up since you were a kid . . . you deserve a vacation, right? So I took it.
To tell you the truth, I wasn’t that concerned about my earlobe or my toes. I tossed them into the trash. No big deal, realty. It hadn’t hurt, there was no bleeding and I didn’t even have a limp. But I admit I was surprised by the suddenness of their departure. But so what, right? A couple toes? An earlobe? Big deal.
So, I took the vacation. I had nothing in mind but to sit around the house and relax, do nothing. Watch TV. Watch movies on the VCR. Read. Sleep. Relax.
Then I got broadsided by that memory, that . . . thing.
I put it out of my head, went out of the house and browsed through a video store and picked up half a dozen movies to watch. The video store was in a mall and, to pass the time, I decided to do some window-shopping.
It was outside a store called Art 2 Go that the next memory hit me. In the window, I saw a painting of a little boy who looked so innocent . . . and yet, there was something in his eyes that seemed so adult, so grown up and mature, and so very, very haunted.
My mind suddenly filled with the memory of my father holding me down on his lap, and I remembered the hard, throbbing thing beneath me.
My left hand dropped to the floor.
I stared at it as if it were an ice cream cone dropped by a child.
A fat woman with red-dyed hair began to scream. She screamed loud and pointed at the hand and dropped her brown paper bag.
I swung the plastic bag of videos under my left arm, picked up the hand, and hurried away, hoping no one else had noticed. The woman’s screams faded behind me.
I took it home with me, that hand, and put it on the coffee table, staring at it as I sat on the sofa. Suddenly, I didn’t want to watch any of the videos I’d gotten.
But I put one in anyway, just for the noise. I sat on the sofa, mostly staring at my hand on the coffee table. Occasionally, I looked up at the movie. At one point, I saw a screaming little child being chased down a hallway by a man whose big hands reached out like mitts to clutch the child’s hair and —
— I suddenly remembered the time my father had done the same to me. The memory had come from nowhere, slamming into my face like a slab of concrete.
My right arm disconnected itself from my body and slid out of my shirt sleeve, falling to the floor with a thunk.
The child on television screamed, and was dragged backward to the bedroom.
My eyes widened until they were bulging.
My left arm plunked the floor.
I began to cry uncontrollably. I couldn’t help myself. The tea
rs flowed and my body — what was left of it — quaked with sobs.
My father had done that very thing to me. He had done many other things to me, things that pranced around at the edge of my memory. I wanted to remember them, to bring them up . . . and yet, I did not, because they were horrible, far too horrible to hold up before my mind’s eye for inspection.
I looked at the coffee table and saw my hand. I thought of my earlobe and toes. I looked down at the floor and saw my pale, disembodied arms.
And suddenly, I felt sick.
I rushed, armless, to the bathroom and vomited for a while, then hurried into the bedroom, assuming I had little time left.
In the bedroom, I had an electric typewriter set up on a small table. I managed to place a piece of paper firmly in the carriage with my mouth, then lean down and use my mouth to reel the paper in. Then, I began to type this with my nose. It has taken a long time.
But in that time, my mind has been working frantically with the memories that have been conjured up like bloated corpses from the bottom of a bog. In fact, just a few minutes ago, I remembered my father saying to me once, “Just pretend it’s a popsicle, that’s all . . . just a popsicle . . . suck on it like it’s a popsicle.” And then my right leg, from the knee down, slid out of my pant leg like a snake and thunked to the bedroom floor.
I’ve been trying not to think about it, trying to concentrate on what I’m doing, typing this as fast I can with my nose, to tell whoever finds me what happened.
But another memory comes to mind, this one far worse than all the others, more painful and more horrible, and
CAT HATER
For our cat Murphy, who would get a big kick out of it — if
he would just stop watching TV long enough to do a little reading.
Clyde Allen Trundle’s nightmare, although he wouldn’t realize it until sometime later, actually began when he fell down the steps outside his girlfriend’s — rather, his ex-girlfriend’s — apartment and hit his head as he landed face-down on a passing cat, crushing it and killing it instantly. Although he was dizzy and the small cut on his forehead had begun to bleed ever so slightly, Clyde found himself back on his feet before he knew he’d moved . . . because upon landing on the cat, something shot through his entire body, especially through his head.
It wasn’t pain; it was much worse than that, much more shocking, and completely unlike anything he’d ever felt before. In an instant of endless hours, his vision was replaced with a darkness in which murky images shifted, moved about and whispered among themselves in a guttural, wet language that sounded like a choking infant; there was a rushing sound in his ears that drowned out the gibbering whispers as he felt something move through his body, slopping through it like unset Jell-O being pushed through the strings of a tennis racket, leaving little gloppy bits of itself behind, and he shuddered to the very marrow of his bones.
Then he was on his feet, staring down at the cat. It was an orange tabby and it wore a collar. Clyde poked its limp body with the toe of his shoe. When he realized it was dead, he looked around to see if anyone had seen him fall on it, then walked away. He pulled a handkerchief from the back pocket of his khaki Dockers and dabbed at the cut until he was sure the bleeding had stopped; then he stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket and walked on, his hands in the side pockets of his pants, the cut looking like nothing more than a scratch.
Clyde hated cats. Despised them. He had a lot of reasons for hating them, too — and not one of them was because he was allergic to them. He would have welcomed such an allergy, however; it would have made things so much easier, solved so many problems . . . it might even have saved, or at least lengthened, some of his relationships with women. As he walked through North Hollywood along Laurel Canyon Boulevard toward Ventura, he wondered, as he had wondered so many times before, what it was about cats that made them so damned important to so damned many women. So important, in fact, that when faced with the choice between a man and a cat, the man stood no chance whatsoever.
One of the reasons Clyde hated cats was that they hated him. All of them. Every single cat he’d ever encountered had hissed at him, growled at him, clawed him, bitten him, or simply run away from him.
He also hated cats because his initials spelled the word cat, and he had been the butt of countless hairball and litterbox jokes all through school. Some kids even called him Cat, just because they knew it bugged him.
He also hated them because every relationship he’d ever had had ended because each of the women was a cat lover and he was not. That included the relationship he’d just walked — or stumbled — away from a few minutes before.
But the main reason, the reason no one seemed to understand when he tried to explain it, was that cats were unlike any other kind of pet; they seemed to know things no one else knew, and they were unmitigated snobs about it, as if they were better than everyone and everything . . . even the people who sheltered and fed them and kept them alive. They communicated with their eyes, and most of the things they communicated were pompous insults, snide and sneering degradations, and even the most vile of obscenities.
While a dog was always friendly, always happy to see its master, a cat would rather starve to death than give an inch of affection or in any way display submission to the person who provided it home and sustenance.
Clyde hated them so much that on occasion — although he would never in a million years admit it to anyone — he sometimes swerved out of his way to hit one if it happened to dash in front of his car. But that was usually only at night, when no one was looking . . . when no one would know.
Because, for some reason, most people thought that sort of thing was horrible. Most people loved them, those vicious, hateful animals with eyes that always looked like they were scheming, plotting, planning something insidiously horrible.
He went into a little coffee shop on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura, slid into a booth and ordered a bowl of Cream of Wheat and a cup of herb tea. He couldn’t eat much anyway because of his stomach, but especially not after that scene back there in Janna’s apartment; good Lord, what an ulcer-wrencher.
She, of course, never raised her voice. She didn’t need to. All she had to do was use that . . . voice, that quiet, cold voice as brittle as a sliver of ice.
“Really, I don’t see any point in this relationship continuing,” she’d said.
“Why? I mean, sure, there are problems, everybody has problems, but . . . we can work them out, right?”
“Not this problem. This is something fundamental, something too deep to be . . . worked out, or altered.”
“Well, tell me what it is and maybe I can prove you wrong.”
“You’re too full of hatred, Clyde. It’s ingrained in you. I’ve seen it, and I know it’s not going to change.”
“What do you mean, you’ve seen it? Have I ever raised a hand to you? Have I ever — ”
“When you were over here yesterday and thought I was in the shower, I happened to get a glimpse of what you did to Cotton.”
“To Cotton?” he asked, genuinely confused for a moment. Then he remembered: it was one of her three cats. In fact, it lay curled up on the floor just a few feet away, all white and fluffy, staring at him with its eyes half-closed. “Oh, that.”
“You kicked her. Hard. Knocked her halfway across the room.”
“Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, the damned thing had mistaken me for a scratching post and was trying to remove a major artery from my leg!”
“See what I mean? There you go. Defending yourself like that. Clyde, she meant no harm. She was just doing what comes naturally. In fact, she was most likely showing you affection. And besides, that wasn’t the first time that happened. And I’m sure it won’t be the last if you stay around here.”
“She was showing affection? Janna, these animals are predators! Do you know what comes naturally to them? Killing things and eating them, along with shitting in sand, and that’s it!”
�
�See, now you’re shouting, Clyde. You’re frightening them.”
They didn’t looked frightened to him. The white one, the Calico, the Siamese, all lined up there on the floor looking up at him, still and silent, almost as if they were guarding their mistress . . . waiting for him to make the wrong move, say the wrong thing.
He calmed himself, lowered his voice. “Janna, I told you how I feel about c-cats, how I’ve always felt about them. It has nothing to do with you, or with us. I can only promise to do my best in — ”
“I suppose you’re a dog lover,” she said with distaste.
“I never said I was a dog lover either, but cats . . . well, I explained all that to you, Janna. I thought you understood.”
“What I understand is this; you need therapy. And if you agree to get some . . . I’ll work with you. Otherwise, Clyde, I just don’t see any future between us.”
“You don’t see any future between us?” He’d stood from the sofa then and faced her. “Well, you know what I see between us? I’ll tell you what I see between us! Three four-legged fur-licking, furniture-ruining, litter-box-stinking, Goddamned cats, that’s what I see between us!” he’d screamed. Then he’d spun around, stormed out of the apartment and slammed the door so hard, he heard something fall and shatter on the floor a second later. He hoped that, whatever it was, it had landed on one of those fucking cats.
Cream of Wheat; like an eighty-year-old man, he was eating, not like a successful thirty-three-year-old, the vice-president of a very profitable sign company that had billboards all over Southern California advertising everything from cigarettes to movies to trips to Las Vegas. But he was a successful thirty-three-year old with an ulcer, and it had gotten a little worse for every cat owned by every woman with whom he’d ever been involved.
The waitress, a dumpy middle-aged woman with her hair dyed a glaringly artificial black, brought his order and he took a mouthful of the Cream of Wheat, swallowing it a bit at a time, hoping that even something that mild would not send his ulcer into a rage.
