But on that night there was no escape. We were the dark.
I heard a scratching sound. A lighter came to life a few feet from me and an orange halo flickered about Caleb’s face. “This is where he hides,” he said. “I’ve been doing some reading about the hobo culture. People think it ended back during the old days of The Great Depression, but it didn’t. There are people still riding the rails, more than you think. They’re here. Look.” He moved the flame toward the wall of the cave to reveal several symbols that had been painted there in what looked like colored chalk. The first was a pound sign. “See this one?” Caleb looked back at me to be sure I was still conscious. “It means this area isn’t safe, that crimes have been committed here and they should move on.” The flame went out but quickly returned; this time aimed at a circle with an arrow through it. “This means the area should be avoided altogether. They know there’s a killer in their midst, and they know he’s been here.”
The storm raged on, the flame died and my head whirled again as nausea gripped the back of my throat.
“I’ve seen him here. The Ragman, I’ve seen him. Here, do you understand?”
I coughed, nearly vomited and flirted with the very brink of consciousness. “How do you know it was him? It could’ve been someone else, how do you know—”
“I know.” He moved the flame toward the ground. The remains of what had once been small animals were scattered about. They’d been torn to pieces. Caleb’s eyes lifted, peered at me through the sparse light. “I know.”
Thunder rolled in over the ocean.
I never wanted this for you.
A whisper in my head…or had Caleb said those words just then?
“The Ragman,” I said, my entire body trembling. “Is he coming back?”
The flame was extinguished.
“Caleb! Is he coming back?”
From darkness came his answer. “Yes.”
* * * *
“I’m sorry,” Caleb sobbed. “I—Christ—I’ve messed myself, I’m sorry, I—”
“It’s all right.” I put a hand under each of his arms and hoisted him to his feet. “None of that matters right now. We have to get you out of here, OK?” Before I could wrap my arms around him he fell against me. I caught him, holding him upright with virtually no effort. He weighed next to nothing. “I’ve got you. Lean on me and just try to move your feet. That’s it, good.”
We moved slowly out of the cell and along the corridor toward the stairs. Once we’d made it to the top of the stairs I saw Officer Pearl had turned off the video surveillance cameras in the lobby. She sat behind her glass partition doing paperwork and acting as if she hadn’t noticed us, and Sonny was holding up the opposite wall, arms folded over his chest and a wiseass smirk on his face.
“You tell Gleck—”
“I’m not telling him anything,” Sonny snapped. “Because neither one of you were ever here. Now fuck off and take that stinky bag of piss and bones with you.”
Holding Caleb tight, I glared at the punk. “You can beat on someone sick and defenseless much as you want, Skippy, but you know what? End of the day you and Gleck are still gonna have peckers the size of thimbles.”
The cop’s face flushed but he said nothing.
“We’re leaving town soon, but you hear this and hear it good. If Gleck or you or any of his other flunkies come anywhere near either of us, you’re gonna find out what it’s like when you pick on someone who isn’t sick or defenseless. I know a lot of people back in Mass. Lots of lawyers, lots of cops, plenty of politicians and people in the press that’d just love to get a hold of what’s happened here. I work with them every day on any number of my cases, and most of them owe me favors. Fuck with us again and I’ll rain more shit down on you and your boss than you’ve ever seen.”
Sonny stared at me, his smirk weakened but still there.
I motioned to the exit with my chin. “Now hold that fucking door open before I break my foot off in your ass.”
To my surprise, the stupid bastard actually did it. I hustled Caleb out to the parking lot and into the rain. He smiled a little, and with eyes squinted, looked to the sky. “I haven’t seen daylight in a while,” he said softly. Trembling, and on the verge of more tears, Caleb seemed to fully realize for the first time that he was truly out of that awful cell. “I…I didn’t want to die down there.”
“It’s all right,” I told him.
“You shouldn’t have come.” He looked at me, his sunken eyes stricken with panic. “But I knew you would.”
The Ragman was already with us, his dead and sour breath tickling the backs of our necks. And we were with him, our terror and pain feeding him, making him stronger, drawing him closer. An unholy trinity, we’d come here for each other.
And God help us, we’d found what we came looking for.
NINE
In my dreams, my memories, he’s still running—and me with him—across the dunes and into the storm. And the past is there too, sprinting alongside us like the vile and wonderful plague it is, reminding us of countless times over the years we’d come to the beach at night, drinking, smoking pot, taking pills or snorting coke while at once embracing and murdering our fears, running to and from them fast as we could, caught in weighty conversation for hours on end or sitting in the sand with no need for further chatter, pensively watching the moonlit waves or the ghostly lights in the otherwise dark harbor across the bay as if somehow all our demons might be exorcised if only we studied them long and hard enough.
“The police,” I said, struggling to remain on hands-and-knees in that awful little cave, “they must’ve found this too, they…”
“But there wasn’t any evidence of him,” Caleb told me. He got the lighter going again and appeared to my right in the darkness. “Not when they were here.”
He held the lighter down by his waist to better illuminate a section of cave wall that had been marked with more symbols and glyphs. But these were different, more erratic and fiercely composed. Unlike anything I had ever seen before, they were scrawled not in chalk but what appeared to be blood. Lower still Caleb revealed more sprays and spatters of dark crimson that looked as if whoever had left it there had been in a frenzy of sorts, painting the walls in a fit of rage and ecstasy.
“I don’t know what they mean yet,” he told me, “but he left them here. He wants them to be found. He wants them to be seen. Not by the police, Derrick, by us.”
Despite my best efforts, I collapsed. My face came to rest against something wet and soggy that smelled of rot. A piece of decaying trash or the remains of an animal carcass, I couldn’t tell, but with bile bubbling up into my mouth I managed to roll over, turn my head and vomit. My eyes rolled and the darkness took me. But I could still hear everything happening around me. Was this what being blind drunk was?
Caleb was talking, telling me more, but I couldn’t seem to comprehend any of it. His voice was clear but the words were as if from some language I’d never heard before, and though I fought hard as I could to break through the darkness, my vision refused to return. Instead, more memories came looking for me.
Swimming…night swimming…the two of us had gone in late at night here many times. Caleb was a stronger swimmer than I was, and I remembered marveling at how he’d go so far out, even beyond the buoys more than a mile from shore. I’d go less than half that distance and already begin to worry about not making it back. My mind would race and I’d suddenly become terrified of what might be swimming out there with me. I’d tread water like a beginner, peering through the night in the hopes of catching a glimpse of him in deeper water. But I could never see him, never hear him. It was like he’d vanished each time, stolen by the ocean, the night and all those unseen things that dwelled in both. Terrified, I’d frantically swim to shore then collapse on wet sand, exhausted and certain this would be the time Caleb didn’t come back, that he’d just keep swimming until his body gave out.
Drowning wouldn’t be such a bad way to go, he’d o
nce said to me. Water doesn’t scare me. It’s fire that frightens me. I don’t want to burn.
But despite my fears, Caleb returned every time, walking out of the surf nude, dripping wet and laughing; the conquering hero back from battles on distant shores. And just for a moment all was right with the world. He was happy. I was sure of it. We both were, and in that hint of peace, the fear and uncertainty that so drove our lives quieted, receding like those gentle waves rolling back out to sea. “I feel so alive and free when I’m swimming,” he’d say. “I don’t even know if I believe in God, but if He does exist it’s out there as Poseidon.”
One evening, as late night became early morning, we sat in the sand watching the sunrise, smoking the last of our dope and drinking the last of our vodka. We’d driven to Boston earlier that night and caught a showing of the classic film Midnight Cowboy at a small art theater famous for its late night screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. We’d both seen Midnight Cowboy before but only highly-edited versions on snowy UHF channels in the middle of the night. This had been our first exposure to the complete film, and we’d both been deeply moved by the experience. Certainly our lives weren’t so very bad after all, were they? Compared to the doomed characters in the film, our lives seemed downright Disney. But it wasn’t so much about literals as it was realizations. It was the sorrow we connected to and shared, the sense that no matter what we did or who we became it would never be quite enough, it would never quite work and we’d never quite make that leap into the usual, every-day world others seemed to inhabit so effortlessly. In the end, maybe even our reliance on each other wouldn’t be enough.
After hours of cursory discussion about the film, Caleb turned his eyes from the sun and said, “I wish you loved me.”
“I do love you.”
“You love me the way Joe Buck and Rico Rizzo loved each other in the movie.”
“They were friends, what’s wrong with that?”
“They were more than that. There was a romance between them, a connection that never became sexual but was far more profound than mere friendship.”
“That’s what we have.”
“Yes, and that’s how you love me.”
“OK, so what’s wrong with that then?”
“Nothing at all. But sometimes I wish you were in love with me.”
“It’s probably not a good idea to be in love with your best friend, Caleb.”
“That’s the perfect person to be in love with.”
“Are you in love with me?”
“No.” He sighed. “Would it matter if I was?”
I had no real answer for him. Then or now.
* * * *
By the time we reached the strip, Caleb was barely conscious.
The sun, struggling to burn through the fog and misty rain, gawked down at us from a gray horizon suspended over the ocean like a giant alien mother-ship, ominous and mesmerizing all at once.
Caleb fought to stay with me against the sheer exhaustion pulling him down to darkness, a rack of bones draped in clothes from a Good Will bin, reeking of piss and torched heroin, slow death and cigarettes.
I ended up carrying him from the parking lot to Maggie’s place. He lie in my arms limp and barely conscious, eyes opening for short intervals, rolling about then going quiet like the rest of him. From a distance it probably looked like I was carrying a corpse.
Maggie emerged from her room out back even before I was all the way through the door. “Cops still on your ass?”
“It’s OK,” I told her. “The police aren’t following us, there won’t be any trouble.”
She looked half-asleep, like she’d just rolled out of bed, her hair a rat’s nest and her eye makeup still in place but faded and smudged. One false eyelash was only partially still attached and looked like a small caterpillar struggling to hold on. Her expression screamed pure pissed-off, but her Tweety Bird pajamas and bunny rabbit slippers pretty much made it impossible to take any of that seriously. When she got closer and saw the shape Caleb was in, she softened. “Follow me.”
We negotiated our way through a kitchen and storage area then through a steel door and into a sparsely furnished studio apartment. A dark and gloomy little room with a lone window that faced an alley, it had all the charm and panache of a carny’s trailer, but it was warm, quiet and bunker-like private.
Maggie stripped her bed of sheets and blankets with one quick tug, letting them fall to the floor in a heap. I placed Caleb on the bed carefully. He stirred a bit, let out a soft moan then lay still. Within seconds his body began to shiver and buck and his eyes opened and found me, sorrowful and filled with need that could only be described as ravenous. I sat on the edge of the bed, took his hand. It was clammy.
Although he’d broken out in a cold sweat, his eyes slid shut and he again fell silent. I looked over at Maggie, who was standing by a small table nervously puffing on a cigarette. “You gotta keep him warm as best you can.” She retrieved one of the blankets from the floor and placed it over him. “If he don’t fix soon he could die.”
“Can you help him?” She just stared at me. “Please Maggie, can you help him?”
With the cigarette dangling from her lips, she grabbed a coat from a hook on the wall, slipped it on and buttoned up tight. “Give me fifty bucks and fifteen minutes.”
She was back in ten.
Before, while we were waiting, I returned to Caleb’s side like some restless midwife, holding his bony hands and telling him lies about everything being all right. He opened his eyes at one point and gazed at me as if for the first time, then licked his lips and whispered, “Is Jill here too?”
“No, she’s back home.”
“Good, she…she shouldn’t be part of this.”
“Try to rest. Maggie’s gone to get what you need.”
He looked at me questioningly.
“She’s a friend.”
“When this is over, you go home to Jill and you have your life with her.”
I nodded but even in his state he could tell I was placating him.
“What’s happened?”
“Jill and I separated a while back.”
He grimaced. “Why?”
“She doesn’t love me anymore.” It even hurt when I said it.
“Why?”
“Just happened, I guess.”
“You don’t believe her, do you? Don’t, Derrick, don’t believe her, it—it isn’t true.”
“She’s not in love with me anymore, hasn’t been in a long time apparently.”
“Did she tell you that?”
I nodded.
“Did something happen?”
“Time,” I told him, “just time.”
His eyes brimmed with tears. “The anger, it—it was the anger, wasn’t it? She couldn’t take your fits of anger anymore, she—”
“It’s all right, try to be quiet.”
“She’s afraid, that’s all, she—she needs you but you need her more.” His hand tightened on mine. “She knows you’d never hurt her, not physically, but the rages scare her and take so much out of her emotionally, that’s what you don’t understand. Don’t let her go, Derrick. Don’t. Your grandfather had the anger too, just like your father, just like you. There are things in this world but not of this world that can smell that anger. You have what they need, what they use to do what they do and—”
“Take it easy,” I said, afraid he might lurch up into a sitting position at any moment. Caleb had known my grandfather but not well. Or at least I hadn’t thought so. Now I found myself wondering if perhaps he’d known him even better than I, that their little chats and Caleb’s claims that he enjoyed talking with him because he was older and so fascinating had only been a cover for deeper discussions they’d been having all along. Discussions no one else knew about. “Calm down, it’s OK, I’m right here.”
“Don’t let Jill go,” he said again, head back on the pillow and his eyes closed. “That love keeps it at bay, understand? It’s the only thing t
hat gives you a fighting chance, and even then…”
He left me a while. There, in the horrible silence of that room.
When Maggie returned I let her take my spot next to Caleb. I stood near a bookcase crammed full of ratty John D. MacDonald paperbacks and back issues of old motorcycle magazines, and with Caleb’s words still rattling around my head, watched her tie off his arm with a scarf then administer the heroin he so desperately needed. As blood backed up into the syringe, slinking and floating, a graceful dream in crimson, Caleb’s shaking ceased and his breathing turned shallow. In seconds he’d drifted off to sleep, or something similar.
As she left his side, I returned to it, but this time remained standing and studying the byzantine canvas Caleb’s body had become. He’d had several tattoos the last time I’d seen him, but since then nearly his entire upper body had been covered in them. Many were simply numbers or letters done in gothic fonts which clearly had some sort of point but were lost on me. There were the other symbols as well, familiar symbols of five pointed stars and pentagrams, crosses and Ankhs, inverted triangles within circles, tribal bands and strange glyphs I knew I’d seen before all those years ago in the cave on the beach back home. And then, the animals and demons, ravens roosting on his forearm, a serpent eating its tail, a grim reaper in full hooded garb watching me from one shoulder, a satanic-like winged creature holding a human skull in its talons and grinning at me demonically from the other. The phrase Forgive me my trespasses was written in cursive along one wrist and across his upper chest in thick black letters it read: Belly of the Beast. All of his tattoos had been done in black ink, no color, and against his pale and emaciated flesh seemed even darker. On his left hand, in the small space between his thumb and index finger were two small wavy parallel lines. None of it fit the man I knew, or had known, and yet in some ways it looked as if he’d branded the nightmares of his life—past, present and probable future—across his skin like a visual history, a living documentation of his martyrdom, the devils nipping his heels and the hell he had for some reason felt compelled to immerse himself in.
Dreams The Ragman Page 7
