The Plant
Page 22
“Think we hit the jackpot, Rid?” Bill asked, grinning. “I think we hit the jackpot. In fact, I think you're a fucking genius.”
There was a length of yellow tape strung around the cluster of blue capsules, with KEEP OUT KEEP OUT KEEP OUT repeating endlessly in big black letters. Stuck to it with a lick of electrical tape was a note written on a piece of cardboard in big hasty letters. I got out and read it by the glow of the panel truck's weak headlights:
TURK! These are the ones I told
you about, City of Para. Please get that
damn Mintz off my back and CRUSH
THESE SOME-BITCHES MONDAY
1st thing! Thanks Buddy, “I owe you 1.”
FELIX
Bill had joined me and was also reading the note. “What do you think?” he asked.
“I think Carlos Detweiller is going to rejoin the universe as part of a City of Paramus Port-a-Potty reject,” I said. “Early Monday morning. Come on, let's get it done. This place gives me a severe case of the creeps.”
A gust of wind blew through, rattling trash and sending cans rolling with a sound like rusty laughter. Bill looked around nervously. “Yeah,” he said. “Me too. Hang on while I kill the truck headlights.”
He popped the lights off and then we went around to the back of the truck and pulled out the rolled-up rug with our compadre Carlos inside. The moon had dived behind a cloud and as we ducked under the yellow KEEP OUT tape it re-emerged, once more flooding the wasteland. I felt like a pirate in a Robert Louis Stevenson novel. But instead of “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum,” the tune knocking around in my head was that damned John Denver thing about how good it was to be back home again. In this moonlit memorial to the gods of conspicuous consumption, I heard new words, my own words: There's a crusher softly rumblin, rats are in the trash; gee it's good to be back home again.
“Hang on, hang on,” Bill said, reaching behind him with one hand and propping the rug up with a raised knee. He looked like some bizarre species of stork.
At last he got the door of a Port-a-Potty open. We muscled our burden inside and propped it up between the gray plastic urinal and the toilet seat. The place still held the vague smell of urine and the ghost of old farts. In one high corner was a cobweb with the corpse of an ancient fly dangling from it. On the wall, by moonlight, I read two scrawlings. “For X-CELLENT BLOJOB BE HERE 10 PM SHOW HARD I SWALLOW,” read one. The other, infinitely more disturbing, said: “I WILL DO IT AGAIN & AGAIN & AGAIN. UNTIL I AM CAUGHT.”
Suddenly I wanted to be miles from that place.
“Come on,” I said to Bill. “Please, man. Come on.”
“Just one more second.”
He went back to the truck and got the bag with the General's final effects in it—buckle, pacemaker, osteopathic pins. He raised the lid on the toilet, then shook his head.
“Collection bin's gone. It'll just fall on the ground.”
“You don't have the damn briefcase, either,” I said.
“We can't leave that here,” Bill said. “Something in it might identify him.”
“Hell, his fingerprints will identify him, if anyone finds him in there.”
“Maybe. But we don't know what's in the case, do we? Best we drop it in the Hudson on our way back. Safer.”
That made sense. “Give me the bag,” I said, but before he could I snatched the Smiler's bag from him. I jogged to the edge of the drop-off and threw it as far out as I could. I watched it turn over and over in the moonlight. I even imagined I could hear the pins which had held the old warrior's bones together rattling. Then it was gone.
I jogged back to Bill, who had re-latched the Port-a-Potty door. For a wonder, it was one of the less battered ones. It would keep the secret we needed it to keep.
“It's all going to work, isn't it?” Bill asked.
I nodded. Had no doubts then and no doubts now. We are being protected. All we need to do us to take reasonable precautions ourselves. And take care of our new friend, as well.
The moon sank back into the clouds. Bill's eyes glittered in the sudden gloom like the eyes of an animal. Which is, of course, what we were. Two junkyard dogs, one with a white hide and one with a brown hide, skulking in the trash. A couple of junkyard dogs who had successfully buried their bones.
I had a moment of clarity then. A moment of sanity. I'm a Cornell graduate, aspiring novelist, fledgling editor (I can do the job to which Roger Wade has promoted me, of that I have no doubt). Bill Gelb is a graduate of William and Mary, a Red Cross blood-donor, a reader to the blind once a week at The Lighthouse. Yet we had just deposited the body of a murdered man in an acknowledged mafia graveyard. The General stabbed him, but are we not all accessories, in some measure?
Perhaps only John Kenton escapes blame on that score. He did tell me to throw the ivy away, after all. I even have the memo somewhere.
“We're mad,” I whispered to Bill.
His whisper back was soft and deadly. “I don't give a shit.”
We looked at each other for a moment, not speaking. Then the moon came out again, and we both dropped our eyes.
“Come on,” he said. “Let's get the hell out of here.”
And so we did. Back to Route 27, then back to the turnpike, then back to the George Washington Bridge. No one was behind us at that hour, and Carlos Detweiller's case with the combination lock on it sailed away into the drink. No problems; smooth sailing. Saturday night and we didn't even see a cop. And all the way, that song went running through my head: Gee it's good to be back home again.
From John Kenton's diary
April 5, 1981 1:30 A. M.
Riddley just called. Mission accomplished. The General is gone, and now the Mad Florist and his attache case are gone, as well.
Or maybe he's not.
I just leafed back through these pages to the conversation Roger and I had with Tina Barfield, and what I read there, while not completely accurate, is hardly encouraging. She said we'd be reading Carlos's obituary; what she neglected to tell me (probably because she didn't know) was that I'd be writing it myself. She also told us to go on behaving as if Carlos were alive even after we knew he was dead. Because, she said, he'll be back.
As a tulpa.
Even now I don't know exactly what that is, but I tell you this with absolute certainty, utter conviction, and complete clarity of mind: the six of us haven't gone through all of this to be stopped by anyone living, let alone anyone dead. We are going to make Zenith House the talk of New York, not to mention all the publishing world beyond.
And God help anyone who tries to get in our way.
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