Sautin said nothing. He just sat there, not even breathing now, like some granite statue misplaced on a leather chair. He bent and pulled the desk’s pencil drawer open, the chair emitting a single squeak as his weight went forward. It was the only sound for miles. When he spoke his voice was already dead behind the light. “This your idea of a joke, Jesse? You know I don’t play. Now you tell me the TRUTH goddammit! WHERE’D YOU PUT THE FUCKING BODY!”
“There’s no fucking body, Aldo. I think you already know that. Can’t you feel it?”
And with that Sautin pulled the gun from the drawer so quickly it seemed a rehearsed act. Jesse never moved. With no thought to the next moment, enveloped completely in an icy-hot wave of raw hatred, Sautin pointed the .357 across the desk and pumped six hollow-point, steel-jacketed bullets through Jesse’s jerking body and the ticking of the expensive leather chair.
It took a long time for the echoes to fade away in the closed office.
Chapter 21: The Stadium in the Desert
I don’t know when I came back to my senses.
It was almost like a dream of drowning. First there was a bright flash of pain, a stab of light which quickly dwindled, and then, immediately thereafter, nothing. No sound, not even the dull throb of vacuum. Merely a complete release, an endless drop into oblivion.
And now there’s this.
I have no idea where I am. Nothing but wasteland stretches out before me. A vast barrens. The only thing visible is sand. Just as far as I can see, nothing but sand. Not a tree not a bush, not even a shadow. But the sand…it’s a brilliant orange, almost as if the sun were reflecting off it on a blazing summer day. But that’s not the case. The sky’s nothing but gray turbulence above. No clouds, no wind.
I can hear my thoughts if I try.
***
The only thing which convinces me that Time is passing is the big plume of dust rising up from the desert, heading my direction. I say this only because it was not there before and it is now. I don’t remember having discovered it, and now it seems like it could have been forever ago when I did. Or perhaps, mere seconds, depending on how I think it through. It’s very confusing…
There’s no change in the sky and the sand continues radiating its electric-orange hue.
***
“’Lo, buddy.”
I squint into the face behind the voice, but I can’t make out any solidity of features. I shake my head to clear it while the guy continues. “Looks like ya could use a lift.”
I shrug my shoulders and pat my empty pockets.
“No money, huh?” The cabbie laughs as quick and sharp as a mallet striking steel. “You’re not quite that far gone yet, kid.” The back door on my side swings open. It’s empty back there. “Get in,” he says. “I know where ta take ya.”
For just a moment I consider not, but after taking another look around I don’t find much reason for denying his offer. Drab barren gray sky and sand in all directions. I climb inside.
The same totality of silence fills the cab. The cabbie rolls up his window and drives off like any regular cabbie on any ordinary day. And as I gaze out the window I still have no hold on what’s happening, where I am. I didn’t think I was crazy before, and I don’t feel like I’ve gone crazy since, but let’s face it, enough is enough.
“Where we headed?” I say to break the terrible silence.
The cabbie looks in the rear view mirror and smiles. “Only place we can, Jesse.”
“You know my name.”
“Yeah, it just sorta always comes.”
“What is this place?”
“Tha Barrens, a course. Gotta start somewhere, and you figured as much, dint’cha?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, course. The very definition of the word, right?”
“Yeah,” I say a little more warily. “The Barrens. Just what I expected.”
“Aim ta please. That’s the course a action.” I try to tune him out then, out of a need to gather what thoughts I can together, and look outside at the phantasmagoric emptiness.
One thing’s certain: things have definitely changed.
***
At first the stadium is only a smudged point growing on the very edge of the burnt orange haze. The cab veers over a few degrees and when I look behind there’s just swirling dust behind as if everything is being wiped clean with our passing.
I knew it was a stadium before I even saw it, but I have no idea why. I’ve never seen it before. It shakes loose no memory from my brain. We get closer still and I don’t see any parking lot, just an old, red-brick football stadium, open at both ends. We pull up to the closest side and the dust swarms up around us from behind.
The cabbie snaps off the engine and for just a moment the silence grows huge. The dust twists and dances against the stadium’s façade. He makes as if to turn around and suddenly slumps over on the passenger seat. When I look over the headrest he’s gone. No sign of him whatsoever; no clothes, no smell, not even a key in the ignition.
And at that very moment the dash begins to undulate slightly, giving up its color as if the outside dust has pushed inside through the windows, squeezed through every crack. Everything looks as if I’m staring at it through the murkiest of water. The passenger door handle is fading too, and I pull on it and lunge outside. In terror, really, because with the fading of the dash I can suddenly see nothing through the windows, not even the swirling dust, creating in me the eerie premonition that Time inside this particular ghost crate has played out. That to stay any longer would be to find an interminable oblivion.
***
I go face-down on the familiar, orange sand, roll over twice to get away from the vanishing ride. And as I raise myself on hands and knees, I see the stadium is still there. The car, however, and as I figured, is gone. No more swirling dust, no tire tracks in the sand. Nothing. Just as if it’d never existed at all.
That’s when I hear the crowd. A throaty roar rises up suddenly from inside the stadium, reminding me of the noise I remember from week-ends on Chimes Street during football season at LSU. You could always tell when something big was happening; the sky rained it down upon you. This is the same.
I turn to study the barred entranceways. Must be ten on this side alone, even though all of them are inaccessible behind high razor-wire fences and heavy gauge chain. I make my way over to the closest one, even now listening to the initial cheer fading off. I touch the lock and it falls away with no complaint whatsoever. The chain follows suit and the gate swings open. The last of the cheer dies away.
Nothing moves inside. Trash and broken furniture litter every square inch except a thin strip of concrete which leads to the access tunnels. It rises at a forty-five degree slant, a little steep without the aid of stairs, and nothing but the swirling gun-metal sky is visible at the other end. I walk up to the arched exit and grip the wooden rail I find there, staring out across the field.
It is a football or soccer field (I‘m not sure about the dimensions), though it’s being used for neither now. Across from me stands an identical set of bleacher seats in what appear to be the mirror-image of this one. Both sides are completely full of people. The lights, high atop five tall poles arrayed with massive light racks, are not on.
I turn to face the stands above me. And the jolt I receive is like a punch to the face.
Just to my right, stuffing his face with popcorn sits Johnny Hobbs, a weird bespectacled little kid who’d lived next door to me when we first moved to Baton Rouge, all those many years ago. His mother is anchored rigidly alongside and neither pays me any mind. The dentist who’d pulled a rotten tooth from my mouth when I was eight is three seats farther down from them. Others I see strike me as vaguely familiar but I can’t place their names.
I look higher up.
Peggy Schneider, a girl I had a crush on in the sixth grade is there, and Paco Bryson, a punk I’d fought in seventh sits right beside her. Blinkie and the Chimes Street crew smoke cigarettes in a tight cluste
r five rows to their left.
I put my foot on the first riser, completely oblivious now to what is obviously preparing to happen on the field. After all, I doubt these ghosts from my past are here for nothing. An older woman’s profile strikes me curiously and I start toward her, pushing through a row of people seemingly hell-bent on slowing my progress. Their eyes speak strangely to me but I don’t say anything. Not yet.
“Mrs. Metterton!” I finally yell when close enough. For just a second I think I recognize the man turning to whisper in her ear, but when she turns to face me I lose that scant thread of memory. She scrutinizes me up and down before deciding I’m somehow ‘wrong’, then looks away back across the field; somehow it is not Mrs. Metterton…couldn’t be the former duplex manager with whom my grandmother had traded money orders for pies. What would she be doing here? Wherever here is.
I stumble back down the aisle, letting the people jostle me along. Absolutely nothing makes sense. The deepest glimpse into my past is the recent ride with the ghostly cabbie. And that is just not enough in the way of explanation. Not for this.
Maybe (and my mind chases itself like a dog pursuing its tail) I’m in some Mid-Town hospital in New Orleans, high on Thiamine and Morphine, dying amid a profusion of ramshackle memory fragments. Because New Orleans…there seems to lie some fleet answer—
Gunshots pull me away. Coming from somewhere above. I jerk my eyes toward the fence-backed wall at the top of the stadium in time to see a one-handed fat man trading shots with someone who can be no other than John Brady. No one around them appears to take any notice. I start toward the isolated commotion as a hand comes down hard on my shoulder, staying me. I turn and the man from The Salvation Army squints down, Chubbs, the one who’d introduced me to—
“’Ave a seat, kid!” he says, dropping the butt of the cigarette from his lips and stomping it with his foot in one fluid motion. “Good part oughta be comin up any minute now!” He claps me on the same shoulder again after releasing me from his vice grip and I go to one knee. As he turns away someone in the row ahead shoves me back with a violent elbow. His jutting chin matches identically that of a postman I’d been acquainted with in the CBD for a short time.
I stumble into the aisle and fall across a short stretch of empty bleachers. I see several teachers I’d had trouble with in grade school point their fingers at me around the knees of a peanut vendor I swear used to run the convenience store on the corner of 5th and Ivy.
And that’s when the drums start.
They seem to come from the direction of the field, although the crowd’s rise to echo its excitement makes the source hard to pinpoint. I peel myself off the bleachers into a sitting position. My head pounds from the roar. All I can see are people’s backs and I stand up on the bleachers to get a better view.
As if by instinct the two people in front of me push away to either side, as if for the sole purpose of affording me an uninterrupted view. And then, amid the wild mishmash of pounding drums and straining voices, this is what I see:
A flurry of activity is taking place on the unmarked field though none of it expressly athletic by nature. In fact, through the bustle of moving bodies the action seems more stage-directed than natural. Oddly cloaked figures rush pieces of furniture, rugs, potted plants, and area lighting to centerfield, thirty yards away from where a wild and similarly dressed drum corp beat a syncopated rhythm the ‘stagehands’ have a hard time keeping up with. But from no lack of effort it seems. They move like ants on speed.
I can’t tell where these items are being carried from; the crowd obstructs my view down toward the level of the track which rings the field. And the workers continue to pour onto the grass, headed for midfield, carrying one thing or another as if newly-emerged from some secret hole I can not see. The crowd stomps its feet and claps its hands in primal joy.
I alone watch in silence, already aware of the room they are building a representation of. The furniture is unmistakable even from here. The carpets, the leather chairs, the way the lamps cast their shadows—everything begins coming back. A deep ache wells in my chest and steadily grows.
The crowd quiets down as the crew begin wrapping up its work. The drummers hit a final fractured note, tuck their sticks into pouches or simply drop them where they stand and march single-file away into the middle distance. Mindlessly, I follow them until they pass from view. Only then do I realize how dark the area has become. It is also at that moment I notice I am alone.
A huge CHUNK! of a massive relay switch sets all eight racks of lights, both on this side and the other, bursting to life. They illuminate the field in a ghostly dull white, completely erasing from view everything outside their influence. I am completely thrown off balance momentarily.
But only momentarily.
Then I see the field as before. Only now it has completed its transformation. About mid-field sits a massive mahogany desk. I know this because Sautin had mentioned it in passing while we discussed other business one day. Every other thing is exactly where and as I remember.
The only thing missing is walls. But the two occupants seated across from one another seem to pay no mind. The one by the desk lamp gestures and points madly in the other’s direction though the target of the harangue doesn’t move. Of course I know who he is, or was; this perfect replication seems to have called the true tale of ghosts. I begin watching for the moment when Sautin pulls the gun, because it will always be unchanging, unchangeable; I suddenly know that now. I want to see if I flinch.
So, alone in the stands, the only sound a shriek of wind knifing through the guard rails near the silent announcer’s booth, one facet of whatever I’ve become looks on in silence as the reel of my last seconds on Earth transpire. Because by then it’s concrete…wherever the hell I was before has absolutely nothing at all to do with what or where I am now.
The conversation grows more heated as I remember it had. I can’t hear what Sautin is saying but I already know. Even though the two arguing phantoms are well across the field I can make out every expression on their faces. Mine, I’m glad to see, never changes, seemingly resigned to the outcome. My replies are short and pointed, only serving to fuel Sautin’s increasing fury. I remember him standing up so quickly the wheels on his leather chairs squeaked loudly, but that was about it.
Now I’m to see the rest.
Indeed, Sautin does burst upward and back as the memory proscribes, and I see my own face tense as the bigger man’s image is lost behind the desk lamp’s glow. From my new vantage point I have none of the problems I’d experienced before. There is no movement shadowed from my perception.
I watch in slow-motion silence as Sautin rips the gun free of the pencil drawer, the rage standing out on his face, clear and deadly as if carved by a sculptor out of stone. Then, crystal clear, I hear the familiar, lost click as the barrel glances off the desk’s edge and watch as the hammer draws back. At this lost moment I’m pleased to see my face doesn’t change; I can see no flinching. Perhaps it’s because my killer is hidden in the light from the lamp, but the lack of sound does not make for lack of memory. I remember seeing the gun, and already know what the outcome will be. Though, of course, I’ve never expected a replay.
When Sautin fires I see a gout of flame punch out of the end of the .357. The only sound to reach me is a muffled thump that could have just as easily been the sound of my heart in my chest. But the repeated bursts of smoke and flame from the end of the handgun, and the way my body jerks violently away amid a cloud of floating chair stuffing and sprayed blood leave nothing unimagined.
I watch my lifeless body collapse backward in the punctured chair. Blood runs out of several holes in the back near the floor and I hang limp except for a momentary tremor in my left foot that pats out a fast beat on the thick Oriental rug. Then my body reels over to the right as I fold over the armrest, the fingers of my right hand dragging through the blood.
Sautin still stands monstrously huge across the table, punching with the g
un even though the cartridges are spent. His mouth moves but I can hear nothing now, no beating, nothing. Absolute silence. He brings his gun hand up and wipes the bridge of his nose. Tears slide down both cheeks; I clearly see that. His lips continue to move.
Surely he isn’t praying?
Then he sits down heavily, like an exhausted runner after the last mad sprint to the finish line. The pencil drawer is still open but he doesn’t look inside. He keeps his eyes on my leaking body in the chair across the desk, idly fumbling in the drawer for something. Then he withdraws a single bullet and lays it on the desk blotter alongside the .357.
In the profound silence that continues he slowly packs the hollow-point into the cylinder and punches it home and leans back in the leather chair, the gun hanging limply at his side. He stares up where the ceiling should be, his mouth still moving as if entreating something within the stillness of the pantomime office to make itself known. Apparently nothing does because his eyes never change. And still mumbling he brings the gun up, never looking at it, and places the end of the barrel in his mouth. He pulls the trigger and his brains heave out in an astonishing spray from the back of his head. And with that the drama ends.
It appears the letter to the D.A. was unnecessary after all.
***
When I come back to my senses I am once again alone in the stadium. The lights blaze for another, crystallized brilliant moment, obscuring what little is left around me, and then begin a slow fade, the edges dulling around their icy-white cores. Within moments they’re gone completely, drawing back the drab cloak of gray that sits above the stadium (extending in all directions) like a buzzard waiting patiently for the last few breaths of the dying to cease.
I look down at my hands, find them clenched tightly against my thighs. Then, convinced I’m suddenly real again, or as real as the dead get, I look up, surveying the field.
Everyone is gone.
The bleachers still squat on the other side but the field itself is completely empty. No tables, no chairs, no arguing men. No bloodstains. Just short-hewn grass coughing up a plea for water.
Trigger Man Page 21
