Wasn’t his name Marion?
“You’re tweaked.”
Marion?
“You should lay off that stuff.”
Marion?
“Everywhere he went,” the unsmoked spliff in the side of Big Duke’s mouth bobbed up and down as he spoke, “he took his Airedale Terrier,” up and down the way some men walked around with a cigar in their mouths, never bothering to light it, “Terrier’s name was Duke.”
Didn’t he wear a hairpiece?
“Firemen used to see him going to school with the dog,” Big Duke concentrated his gaze on each shell he fed into the semi-automatic shotgun. Kane and Damian looked at him briefly, wondering what the man in the cowboy hat was talking about, what had brought it on. “Fireman called him, said hey little duke. Name kind of stuck.”
Marion’s a girl’s name, though, ain’t it?
“He didn’t like being called Marion.”
You ask me, Marion’s a fag name.
“Keep it up.”
Kane looked up from his plastic explosive to Damian, who was watching Boone standing there as Big Duke finished loading his shotgun.
“It doesn’t bother either of you two guys—” Big Duke tapped a shotgun shell on the table top, addressing Damian and Jonah, not even looking at Boone “—that this guy here is walking around strung out? We’re supposed to depend on this guy for what’s coming up?”
“Boone will have his head on straight when we go in,” Kane remarked. “Won’t you, son?”
“Oh yeah.”
Big Duke looked back down to the task at hand, not pleased.
“If we walk in the light, as he is in the light,” Kane quoted scripture again, “we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Christ purifies us all.”
“He was married three times, right?” Damian asked of John Wayne, Damian sitting back in his chair, big arms folded over his chest. “How many was it,” the cleaver on the table in front of him, freshly sharpened, “Seven kids?”
Seven kids by different women, Boone tried to burn holes through Big Duke with his eyes, Big Duke looking down, hand on his fancy Italian shotgun. No wonder niggers like him.
“What’d I—” Big Duke’s lower lip was quivering as he looked up at the younger, larger man standing there. “What’d I just say to you?”
“What gives with this guy?” Boone looked from Big Duke to Kane. “You see he’s provoking me, right?”
“I’m provoking you!” Big Duke drew back the bolt on the shotgun, chambering a round.
“Let’s take it easy here, gentleman.”
Red River was the fag cowboy film, wasn’ it? Boone thinking, Rock Hudson was one of his best friends? And he got along real good with that other queer, Monty Cliff too, no?
“Keep pushing me,” Big Duke got up from the table, stepping around it, leveling the 12-gauge at his waist, the barrel centered on Boone, “You son of a bitch.”
“Duke.” Kane warned. “Duke, he’s going to kill you.”
Damian sat back in his chair, arms folded over his chest.
“Whoa! Hold on there a second pal,” Boone held his hands out, palms flat towards Big Duke. Oh that is sweet. “No need to get all up in my grill. Look—nice belt buckle, okay?” That just makes it easier. “You’re real proud of that shit, ain’t you?”
“Makes what easier you punk—”
Boone’s hands moved faster than any of the men in the room could see. He flipped the barrel of Big Duke’s shotgun back around at the cowboy’s midsection and the Benelli discharged, the blast deafening in the confines of the room. Big Duke collapsed, his Red River belt buckle and most of his midsection obliterated.
Kane rose from behind the table of plastique.
“So much for fellowship.” Damian put the legs of his chair back on the floor.
Big Duke lay rasping under his cowboy hat.
“Dumb nigger.” Boone tossed the shotgun aside and reached down, taking the spliff that hung limply from the corner of Big Duke’s mouth. “Dumb nigger would have got us all killed.” He wiped the spliff on his pants leg before putting it in his own mouth. He took the cowboy hat from the downed man’s head, Big Duke’s eyes trying to follow what he was doing, losing focus, Big Duke lying there in his own blood and innards.
“Seven is too many anyway.” Boone smelled the inside of the cowboy hat. It smelled like the man. He threw it away and looked to Kane. “You know what I mean.”
“No, son. I don’t.”
“I’m goin’ out. Get some fresh air.”
“Might be a good idea.”
Big Duke’s breath caught and rattled as he expired on the floor.
36.
2:43 P.M.
Even with the driver’s seat pushed back as far as it would go, Father Mark was a tight fit in the Monsignor’s car. Three hundred pound priests didn’t make the best subjects for stakeouts. Mark had his Fromm resting on the steering wheel and read through it, occasionally casting an eye towards the house down the street.
Jennifer lived in the suburbs with her husband and two children. Mark had known Jennifer for as long as he’d known Boone. He’d known Derrick since Jennifer’s husband came into the picture. Mark had even been at their wedding, as Boone’s “date,” a fact he never let his friend forget. You can bring one of those skanks occasionally takes pity on you and lets you bang her, the newly minted priest had explained it to Boone, or you could bring along a humble servant of the Lord, make mom and dad proud. Boone had opted for Mark. His choice had made his family happy.
At the reception, when Jennifer had gone to toss her garter into the crowd of single women, Mark had encouraged his “date” to get in with the crowd. Fuck you, Boone had told him, the way a friend could say it to a friend, no hate. The way they spoke to one another to this day, the way they’d always spoken to one another, from their days in the group home to their days as adults when one of them donned the collar.
Mark had spent most of yesterday afternoon out here in the car with Erich Fromm. Nothing appeared suspicious. Derrick and Jennifer came home from work; Jennifer went out somewhere with the kids and came back. Mark stuck around until after dark and then split. He was cool with the Monsignor, but he didn’t want to keep the old man’s Lebaron out too long at any one stretch. He also wasn’t so crazy about the new guy at work, Father Tad. Kind of wanted to be around when he could, not leave the guy with the altar boys.
He’d woken up early, served the 6:45 and 9:00 a.m. masses and come on back out. No idea what he was waiting or looking for. Boone had asked him to protect his family. Mark knew his friend well enough to know when the other man was messing around with him, and Boone hadn’t been messing around with him. Mark had no clue what was going on, what Boone had gotten himself into, where the man had disappeared to for the last few weeks or even the other day after he’d left the confessional. All Mark knew was his friend asked him a favor and been dead earnest in the request.
Mark would see it through as best he could.
He knew Boone pretty much better than anyone aside from maybe Jennifer, but Mark didn’t kid himself. There was more he didn’t know about his friend than he did. There were things about Boone he didn’t want to know about. Mark judged that Boone’s heart was ultimately in the right place, or headed in the right direction, and that was all that mattered.
Like Fromm. Fromm’s heart was in the right place.
What Mark appreciated most about Erich Fromm was the German-American’s work on character structure. Fromm got how the bourgeois revolution brought in capitalism but also introduced a concept of freedom that continued to pervade their lives down to this day. Fromm showed how, following feudalism, the individual was freed from his lord and the land, yes, freed from all the economic and social ties that went along with a manor economy. And yeah, those ties might have bound the individual in time and place, but they’d also provided a sense of security and belonging. Under feudalism, you were going to work for your lord, but he was going to watch out for you too:
his stores would feed you in case of crop failure; his knights would protect your ass in case of attack.
With that feudal bond erased, a man was freer than ever before, “more independent, self-reliant, and critical,” as Erich Fromm put it, but also, as Fromm pointed out, “more isolated, alone, and afraid.” Free to starve if he couldn’t provide for himself and his family. He found himself “threatened by powerful supra-personal forces, capital and the market,” forces originating within human beings, but reified to stand above them like gods. Suddenly the individual couldn’t count on counting on others any longer, the market pitting him against everyone else.
“His relationship with his fellow men, with everyone a potential competitor, has become hostile and estranged,” was the way Fromm summed it up, “he is free—that is, he is alone, isolated, threatened from all sides.”
Boone could count on Mark, which was why Mark was out here in the Monsignor’s Chrysler. Fromm was a guy Father Mark would have liked to have met, if the guy hadn’t died back in 1980.
Yesterday he’d considered briefly walking up to the door, ringing the bell. But what would he say? Oh, hey there Jen, Derrick. Hey Mark, what brings you out to Westchester? Well your brother asked me…your brother asked you what? What would Mark have said? What could he say? Boone hadn’t said much. Was Mark going to say, don’t worry about it—just let me camp out here on your couch overnight? No. So instead he’d waited around and saw nothing, read his Fromm with a mind to his dissertation, eventually gone back to the rectory in Brooklyn and returned today.
He looked at the book in his hands. Cramped in a borrowed car, sticking out like a sore thumb in a suburban residential neighborhood. None of it conducive to studying. He’d worn his black shirt and collar, just in case anyone came over to talk, cops responding to a neighbor’s complaint. He knew his sheer size made him a suspect in many people’s minds, suspect to something. Same way darker skin would make you questionable in some people’s neighborhoods.
Mark was done with his course work at the City University Graduate Center. He’d passed his first and second exams. His Ph.D. committee had accepted his proposal and Mark needed to start writing his dissertation. The classes had taken him three years to knock off and he’d mulled over dissertation topics. Two or three had come and gone before he’d settled on his current project, an exploration of character structure in pop culture characters. Don Johnson’s Sonny Crocket on Miami Vice. Pink in Pink Floyd—The Wall. The grue in the Zork trilogy, the game Mark had first played on a Commodore 64 when he was a kid. There were a dozen others he could have tackled, but he had his reasons for these three. Maybe later, after he’d defended, he could look at fleshing his dissertation out into a book, include the others.
Jennifer was a school psychologist, had her PsyD. Mark didn’t know what her husband did but he knew Derrick worked down on Wall Street. Made a good living at it too. Their house was nice, a split-level with two-car garage, jungle gym in the yard for the kids, picket fence surrounding the property. They probably could have sprung for something bigger and more secluded, in one of the tonier sections of Westchester, but neither Jennifer nor her husband was like that.
The Monsignor’s car was parked down the block, resting in the shadows cast by a neighbor’s wall of pines. Its interior was littered with wax paper and tupper ware containers. Mark would have to clean it all up before he returned the car. What he needed to do was get to the gym, work out.
Hard to focus like this.
Back to Fromm. The individual had achieved bourgeois freedom, a freedom of abstract individuals. A bad kind of freedom. Kind of freedom where you’re cut off from all others, couldn’t trust no one. Mark imagined how exciting this new found freedom must have been, exciting yet daunting-- even nerve wracking—all at the same time. Some were in a position to accept it, others, lacking the economic and political means, found it a threat, a “freedom” they’d gladly abandon. Fromm spoke of the “mechanisms of escape” people turned to, ready to submit, to trade freedom for certainty and security.
It was 3 o’clock. Mark was hungry. He looked up from his Fromm to the house. Nothing out of the ordinary. It didn’t look any different than it had earlier. He doubted much would change if he shot over to a deli or something, got a bite to eat. What would that take? Ten-fifteen minutes? Mark couldn’t imagine anything could happen in that time.
He cranked the Lebaron up and pulled away from the street, Fromm on the dashboard. Mark took a left at Jennifer’s house and meandered down the twisting blocks, passing a couple of landscaping crews and their ride-on mowers. He set off towards what he’d established the day before was a strip of shops, wondering if there’d been a bagel shop.
He found a Dunkin’ Donuts. It’d do. They sold bagels, although Mark didn’t think much of the bagels they sold. But he didn’t want to be away from the house for too long, so he pulled into the parking lot and turned the car off. As he got out, a sedan pulled in alongside the Monsignor’s Chrysler and parked.
There was no line at this time of day and Mark ordered his toasted bagel with cream cheese. Not good bodybuilding food, true, but everyone was entitled to a cheat meal here and there. He stopped with his coffee at the fixing area to pour some out and add a healthy dose of milk. When Mark walked back outside an Asian man was leaning against the car next to his, between the two vehicles.
“A word with you, Father?”
Mark looked the man up and down. His hands were empty. Medium height, thin, short dark hair. Might have been Korean, Mark couldn’t tell. A tattoo on the inside of one forearm, an elaborate cross. A bald white guy with mirrored shades sat behind the wheel of their car.
“How can I help you?” Mark was suddenly very cognizant of the fact that he was unarmed. He stayed on the sidewalk, let the other man get up off his own car and join him.
“Peace be with you” the man said, and Mark found himself responding automatically: “And also with you.” He frowned when he’d finished and the other man spoke to assure him, “Have no fear, Father. I come to you in the name of the Christ.”
“In the name of the Christ.” Aside from the elaborate cross tattooed on the man’s forearm, Mark saw no evidence of religious affiliation. In the name of Christ. Who talked like that? “Is that right?”
“You’re Father Mark Vachss. Parish priest at St. Ann’s.”
“You’ve got me at a disadvantage.”
“I followed your college football career, father. Thought you might go pro.”
“Me too, one time.” Mark grinned, his guard still up. “Let’s just say I had a different calling.”
The other man smiled approvingly. “My name is Ezekiel. Call me Easy.”
“Easy?”
“Yes. You know, Father,” Easy nodding towards Mark’s car, towards the book there on the dashboard, “Liberation Theology was officially condemned by your Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith back in the mid-80s.”
“Yeah, I’m aware.”
“What’d I’d like to see,” Easy continued, “is more scholarship linking Liberation Theology to the Frankfurt School,” nodding towards Fromm on the dash again. “You know, Metz,” Easy showing he knew about Johann Baptist Metz, “had some interesting correspondence with Walter Benjamin,” pronouncing Benjamin Ben-ya-mean, Easy showing he knew how to pronounce the man’s name. “But what I’m wondering at the moment, I’m wondering if I might have a moment of your time, to show you something.”
“Actually,” Mark gestured with his bag and coffee. “I’m kind of busy.” The fact that this guy knew exactly what game to talk with him only made Mark more suspicious. “There’s some place I need to get back to.”
“Father, I promise, only a moment.” Easy stepped from the sidewalk to the asphalt, making to move around to the trunk of his car. “Please?”
“You want to show me something in your trunk?”
“Yes.”
“No. I really have to be going.”
“I promise you
, you have nothing to worry about. Look at the size of you,” Easy gestured from Mark to himself, “and look at me.”
“That don’t mean anything. What about him?” Mark nodded towards the bald man in the car.
“Sam’s nothing for you to worry about. Please.”
Against his better judgment, Mark stepped around his own car and joined Easy.
“Your caution is well advised,” Easy remarked, tapping on the side of the car. “It’ll suit you well in what is to come.”
“What’s to come…?” Mark’s words trailed off as the man inside the car hit the trunk release and the trunk popped open. Daylight fell on a bound figure in the trunk, the thing there writhing against its restraints. A cleave gag did little more than muffle the figure’s growls and protestations, its fanged incisors clearly visible on either side of the gag. The sunlight brought from its exposed flesh.
“Who…” Mark stared down into the trunk. “What is that?”
“It’s a vampire.”
“I see it…” Mark continued to stare, the vampire looking back at him. “But I can’t believe it.”
“The Christ said to Thomas, ‘Do you believe because you see me?’” Easy was looking up, right into Mark’s eyes, he could see how fixated Mark was on the creature, knew what it was trying to do to the priest. “‘How happy are those who believe without seeing me!’” Easy shut the trunk and Mark continued to stare. “Mark.” The Asian held up his hand, snapping his fingers. “Father Mark.” Mark blinked, looking around. “Bet you’re happy not to have to look at that anymore.”
“What—” The comment was lost on Mark. “What just happened to me?”
“It tried to get inside your head.”
Mark’s palm went to the side of his skull. “How?”
“You’re familiar with the myth about vampires, how they’re able to hypnotize humans with their gaze?”
“I watched all the Hammer films when I was a kid…” Mark rubbed his eyes. “I can’t believe you’re showing me this in…” He averted his eyes from the car, even now feeling the draw of the thing trapped in there, forcing his mind from it, gazing at his surroundings, “…in the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts.”
I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2) Page 22
