I was beginning to think that perhaps First Violin was not playing such beautiful music for Scratch, and that he might find one of my other strains more to his liking. “You know,” I said, “I’ve got part of another bud here, of some stuff I call Sasha—Sasha Grey—or French Horn, take your pick. I’ll leave it with you to try later, when your head … ”
Just then I heard a faint noise, and Scratch’s reddened eyes widened and lifted toward the door. I started to turn to see who it was, but Scratch froze me in place by saying, “Don’t turn around, Thumb. Not unless you want a bullet in your face.”
Time stopped and I remained unmoving in mid-turn, fixed on the thought that, no, I did not want a bullet in my face. My face was the last place I wanted a bullet. When another idea finally formed in my mind, it was that this was either some sort of hazing, outlaw-biker style, or else a straightforward “joke.” One or the other but either way, it wasn’t going to result in my being shot. Unless I turned around, which I had been fairly warned not to do.
My high evaporated, and when I turned back and looked full on at Scratch’s comic-book-villain face I no longer felt like laughing. I relaxed, settled into my seat, and smiled at him. “Okay,” I said. “What next?”
He said, “Bottom line: You and your little outfit, you’re coyotes. The range is getting crowded and you’ve all got to go.”
“All right. So, I guess we’re not going to arrive at a business agreement? Is that what you’re saying?” I kept smiling.
“No, Thumb, we are not going to arrive at a business agreement. And, by the way, we’ve already started to bust up your little pack; a month from now, your operation won’t exist. In fact, that’s not even a Blood Eagle standing behind you back there; that’s one of your own posse holding the gun on you. I’ve agreed not to let you know who it is and I’m honoring my word.”
When I started to turn again, Scratch said, “I’ve seen people get shot in the face with a twenty-two. It’s ugly, and usually not immediately fatal; it looks real painful.”
Whatever else I might have been, I was not a coward. If I truly believed I was going to be murdered, I would have turned and looked my murderer in the eye. But I was sure that, provided I refrained from turning, I would not be shot. After all, if Scratch were really going to have me killed, he wouldn’t bother explaining it all to me. I thought it was possible, even likely, that in a minute or two Chimp and Fat Harold and a few of the other Blood Eagles would burst into the room roaring with laughter, drag me out of that leather chair, and begin pounding me on the back and praising me for having kept my cool.
I relaxed again, looked at Scratch, and widened my smile. After a moment I called, “So, who is it, back there?” When nobody responded, I said, “What’s the problem? Lost your balls?” I heard nothing but a subtle rustling as someone shifted from one foot to the other, or stepped forward a bit. I shrugged at Scratch and said, “No balls.”
Scratch said. “I am sorry about this, Thumb. We like you; all of us do. That’s why I’ve let you go on living a couple extra minutes; that’s why I’m talking to you. It’s because I don’t think a friend should die without knowing why—or at least as much as I can say.”
At that, I allowed my smile to twist. “You’re not killing me,” I said. “It makes no sense. You guys are Blood Eagles; if you really wanted me and my group to go away, all you’d have to do is say so.” But Scratch shook his head in a way that made me believe for the first time that my life really might be in danger. I felt my lips begin to twitch with the sudden strain of holding that smile, and all at once it occurred to me that the stinking green tarp covering the fireplace and part of the floor would make an ample and fluid-proof package in which to seal a leaking corpse. I began to feel afraid.
Scratch was saying, “In a regular coyote-and-wolf situation, you’d be right, Thumb. The wolves would say, ‘You coyotes better get the fuck out of here,’ and the coyotes would just fuck off. Problem is, here in the human world, there’s more to it than that. There’s other animals around—by which I mean the two other biker clubs who were here before us, and who would like us to leave what they consider to be their territory and go back to where we came from. Those two clubs, they’re not yet sure us Blood Eagles are wolves at all; they’re thinking we might only be coyotes just like you. It’s a matter of life and death for us that we show them that we are wolves—and, not only that, we’re badder wolves than they are.”
I said, “And that’s got what to do with me? In fact, I’m an ally of yours, not theirs, so taking care of business on me won’t do anything for you.” I turned my head as much as I dared and called, “What do you think back there, No Balls? You think killing me is going to help the Blood Eagles in some way?”
But again Scratch was giving me that worrisome headshake. He said, “Unfortunately, Thumb, the circumstances call for a blood sacrifice. Now, I could fairly easily kill a dude from one of those other clubs—but that would start a war, and a lot of good men would die. Some of those dead men would be Blood Eagles. In fact, we could even lose a war like that, because, as capable as we are, there are more of them than there are of us.
“If I kill you, on the other hand, especially since you’re well known to all of the people I’m trying to impress, it gets the message out just as effectively that I’m willing to take a life. It gets the word across that I won’t hesitate to kill any gangster who trespasses against me.”
Mantis. He was likely the only one who would end up cooperating with the Blood Eagles—and probably the only one they’d trust to handle a loaded gun in their clubhouse. In fact, it made sense that they would make him do something like this as part of a membership probation—a condition of his joining their club. There was a good chance that, just as they wanted me to be uncertain whether I was going to be shot, Mantis, standing there at that moment, had no idea whether he would be ordered to do the shooting.
“Mantis,” I called. “Isn’t that gun getting heavy in your hand? I bet all that sweat is making it hard to hold onto. Careful you don’t drop it.”
Scratch grinned, but his eyes looked sad. “What’s happened, Thumb, is that you’ve accidentally got yourself swept up in the big, three-dimensional chess game of outlaw-biker politics. Not really your fault; just bad luck. Wrong place, wrong time. But I really do believe that your sacrifice will save some lives, so rest assured it will not be for nothing.”
I started to say something, but could not get the words to leave my mouth; it was as if I already were a ghost. My mouth was dry; my heart was galloping; my breath rattled through my pipes. At the same time, I somehow still believed it was all a play and that, at the last minute, they would take me off the hook. The man behind me, creeping ever closer, perhaps did not even have a gun. Perhaps once he stood close enough to touch me, he would jab a finger into my back and yell, “Bang!” I told myself that when it happened, I should try not to flinch.
Scratch, speaking now as much to that other person as he was to me, said, “There’ll have to be some pictures taken—you know, for proof. But we will treat those with respect. They will only be shown when there’s a need, and only then to people with a need to see them.”
Scratch continued, “So, I guess now’s the time to say thank you, Thumb, for all the good times, and especially for sharing your special shit with me today. I sincerely meant it when I said that really is some nice smoke, that Oprah Thurston of yours.”
“No,” I said. “It’s Uma Thurman.” It was then that Scratch must have given some subtle signal to the person standing behind me, because those were my final words before the darkness dropped.
CHAPTER 6
Over the days and weeks that followed my memorial service, I dipped in and out of the underground river. Then one time I returned from the depths to find my house stripped of everything I had known. The furniture, the dishes, the rugs, even the curtains, window shades, and light bulbs—all had been taken, and the building abandoned. The place was so completely empty that
the crackle of sleet driving against the naked windows made an ongoing echo inside.
I went into the backyard where the trees were finally and completely shorn of leaves. A heavy lid of gunmetal clouds hovered just above the roof, and frozen rain poured through me at a sharp angle. The only remaining reminders of my life were the pile of wet ashes and cinders from the torching of my generator shed and Tigre’s forlorn tire swing, which twisted in the wind, its thick rope groaning against the branch it was tied to. Even my bird feeders had been rounded up and taken away—all except for one small suet cage, which had fallen among the leaf-litter and been overlooked.
Things weren’t any more hopeful at the front of the house, where I found a Riverside realtor’s crooked “For Sale or Rent” sign sticking from the lawn to face an icy road so deserted it was easy to imagine that no car would pass by until spring. By then, if I’d had eyes, I would have cried. Imprisoned in and around an uninhabited house, how in hell was I supposed to find out who had stood behind me with that gun? As the sleet fell even harder than before, I began marching out from the abandoned house in all directions, trying to escape to anywhere I could. But each time I reached some arbitrary distance from the house—sometimes a little closer, sometimes a bit farther than before—I would suddenly find myself back inside, standing by the front door where I had started. In spite of what my first messenger had told me about moving up or falling below, I began to wonder whether this might be my private, final, and pathetic circle of hell: to spend eternity as a ghost haunting a ranch house in the middle of nowhere.
At one point I went out through the front door and gathered myself to make yet another useless dash at my metaphysical prison wall. But I stopped dead on the front steps when across the road I saw the disembodied figure of Professor Virgil Shallow, hovering as he had before between my mailbox and the shapeless, brown wreath that hung from the broken power pole. The professor glimmered with an eerie beauty as, amid the darkness of the wet storm, each wind-driven chunk of sleet that passed through him ignited with a meteoric streak of green light. I remembered his ember-like eyes and his worms and his crumbling skeleton, and my first impulse was to flee back to the river. But then I thought, Here I am, in the depths of a canyon. What can a ghost do to me that hasn’t already been done?
The professor gave no sign he knew I was there. He kept studying the ruined wreath, the sleet lighting him from within like fireflies bouncing in a bottle. Finally, softly, I called, Professor Shallow …
He seemed not to hear me, so I spoke more loudly. Hey, Professor. A word if you don’t mind.
Still he ignored me, and finally, beginning to feel angry, I floated from the steps and drifted toward him. It was then that he snapped his head in my direction.
“Stop!” His scream tore through me and I stopped. I wanted to run, but I felt frozen to my spot. The professor lifted his hand and his arm unwound in my direction like a vine until his forefinger—the gray bones of his skeletal forefinger—was hovering before my face. In a matter-of-fact, almost pleasant tone, he said, “You criminal filth. Keep your distance.” Then he disappeared.
*
I had no clock, no calendar, and it remained difficult to tell one day from another. After my second sighting of Professor Shallow, I continued to return from the river to haunt my abandoned home during times of sunshine, and during days and nights of further winter storm. After a while I began to find tire tracks in the driveway and footprints in the snow leading to my front door. This worried me, because I was not looking forward to watching a new set of tenants move into the house; not only did I value my privacy, but I hated the idea of having to overhear an endless chain of conversations on such topics as whose turn it was to take out the trash. I thought that not hearing such things was one of the few advantages of being dead.
One morning I arrived to find that someone had broken through the back door, ripped out the baseboard radiators, pillaged the basement, and torn open walls and flooring in order to steal the copper pipes. On one hand, this meant no one would be moving in anytime soon, which was a good thing, but on the other, even though my use for pipes and heating systems of any kind had ended, it seemed like a personal violation. Also, the house was a sorry-enough haunt under the best of circumstances; in this vandalized state, the place stood just a cut above a tool shed, and I felt that both my dignity and my position in the world had been diminished. Worst of all was my feeling of helplessness; I was a feeble ghost, no stronger than a shadow, and even if I had been at home when the vandals came, there was nothing I could have done to stop them.
After raging over the damage, I pushed out through the front of the house and into the yard, which was covered by a good two feet of new snow from yet another storm. The sun was shining now, the pure snow glittering beneath it, and if I’d been in a happier mood, it would have struck me as a beautiful scene. It took me a moment to spot Professor Shallow, who was hovering in his usual place. Fresh as it was, the deep, dry snow he was standing on was nearly as light as air and would not have supported the weight of a mouse—not a living mouse, anyway.
I gathered my courage and called to him: “Professor Shallow!” But he was no more interested in talking to me now than he had been during the first two times I’d seen him. His response was to crouch down with his arms stretched behind him and spring a backflip in the direction of town. He flipped again and then again, pausing each time with his feet seeming to touch the virgin powder. “Please!” I yelled, though I felt my cause was hopeless. He began to backflip faster and faster, whirling himself into a translucent blur as he traveled, and he was getting close to the point beyond which I knew I would be unable to follow him. It was then that my anger returned. I found myself yelling, “You’re just as dead as I am, you bastard! I saw you die!”
The professor froze in mid backflip. After a moment he continued with a slow rotation until he was right side up, then he stretched his legs so that his feet were once again “touching” the snow. He stood looking at me, his face expressionless.
In a quieter voice I said, “I wanted to save you. I really did. I’m sorry.”
He remained unmoving and I added, “Please. I am a bad man, but I’m not quite as bad as you think, and I’m in despair. I don’t have anyone. I need your help.”
After a long moment, he surprised me by ghosting across the snow in my direction.
*
You may remember I told you earlier on that there were a couple of living people helping me tell this story. Ben is one, but as you might already have come to suspect, he is not much of a writer, and of all the suspensions of belief I’m asking you to take over the course of this book, expecting you to believe he helped compose the text you’re reading now is just too much of a stretch.
The other dude, the one who is, for better or worse, my true literary collaborator, is Fred, who published several novels under the more literary-sounding name of Frederick H. Muttkowski. Maybe you’ve heard of him. But it’s likely you haven’t; his most recent book, Leaving Circe, has been out of print for more than two decades. A few years ago, even the autographed first edition hardcover copy at the library in the town where he lives was sold for fifty cents at a clearance sale. Its purchaser was Fred himself, who, though distressed to discover the novel being disposed of, was too embarrassed to complain. It goes almost without saying that neither of the two clearance-sale volunteers who accepted his pair of quarters for the cash box recognized him or had even the remotest inkling that they were selling the unloved book to its own author.
But as Fred himself would say, Boo fucking hoo. He readily acknowledges that even without any but ephemeral success, his life has contained many moments of sweetness. In particular, there had been an especially delightful and fairly prolonged period during which the mere illusion of achievement had brought him a modest but gratifying amount of attention, including the admiration of a number of interesting women, along with a deceptively promising handful of paychecks healthy enough to fund a year of hi
gh living in South America, and a motorcycle trip across Australia. It was toward the end of those early years of happy ambition and giddy hallucination that he had gotten married and fathered a pair of beautiful daughters, identical twins named Hope and Iris who, at the time I first “met” him, were just shy of their twenty-second birthday.
Even after it had become excruciatingly clear that no publisher could be expected to gamble on yet another money-losing, ready-for-the-remainder-pile Muttkowski novel, his heavens only sagged slightly, and did not fall. He still had the best things, after all: health, wife, daughters, relative youth. After much discussion, his wife, Cici, convinced him that what he needed was to lash himself to the mast of a different dream. For instance, he’d grown up in the country, out in the Midwest; hadn’t he always had a deep interest in the idea of rural life, and doing some organic farming? Why not give it a try? Who knew—perhaps a large garden, a herd of heritage-breed swine, and a handful of rustic neighbors who went around saying pithy things would end up providing rich material for that singular, watershed work of fiction the gods truly intended him to write.
However, as years and youth went by, his sky, though still more or less in place above him, did gradually darken, until one day Fred, whose nature it was to be a wary optimist, finally was forced to conclude that, while he’d been busy looking heavenward, wondering when it might get bright again, hell had grown up from the ground and woven itself around him. Nor was there a path of escape: By then, having long before relocated his family from Manhattan to Maine in order to pursue the rewards and romance of small-scale livestock husbandry, he was now mired, ass deep and seemingly for good, in an ocean of organic pig shit, every sloppy dollop of which came from animals that represented what had become painfully apparent was the only truly marketable talent he had. The pigs—anywhere from sixty to one hundred and fifty of them at a time—were pure-blooded Berkshires, a mostly black, piebald breed prized by chefs the world over, which, under Fred’s intuitive supervision, bred enthusiastically and grew like happy weeds on the fifteen acres of electric-fenced, pig-pounded playground that opened out from the back of the insulated, ventilated barn in which they fed and slept.
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