The Holy Terror

by Wayne Allen Sallee

  Now that entire mess was overshadowed by a greater evil, one he felt kin to. Who didn’t want to end suffering in this profession? What had he become? Pray that their suffering was quick.

  Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

  He looked at the upcoming January First prayer.

  EPIPHANY

  OPENING PRAYER

  Let us pray

  (that we will be guided by the light of faith)

  Father,

  you revealed your Son to the nations

  by the guidance of a star.

  ALTERNATIVE OPENING PRAYER

  Let us pray

  (grateful for the glory revealed today through God made man)

  Father Dennis wished he could weep.

  * * *

  Nick Desmond was sitting at the door of Murdy’s, his tired face washed in holiday colors, the front window being lighted with bulbs that were mostly the color of chili peppers. The bartender’s eyes were pinned by the off-red light. Still, it was the most festive atmosphere on the entire block, the entire neighborhood. Maybe things were different on the Gold Coast and thirty stories upward, but this was North Wabash, and the temperature outside was ball-shriveling. The entire month there had been little snow for what little sun there was to reflect heat off of. Maybe, with the Seeberg juke playing the same lonely drunks’ lonely songs again and again, maybe Nick Desmond’s heart was shriveled up as well.

  Unlike owner Ben’s sister bar, M.C.’s, up near Diversey Parkway, Murdy’s was a straight bar that catered to the encyclopedia salesmen or conventioneers that often invaded the Allerton or the Delaware Towers.

  Dion was singing if anybody here had seen his old friend John when the three of them came in, Tremulis holding the door open for Reve and looking like a happy puppy. Reve was wearing cream-colored leg warmers over her jeans, yet there were no whistles from the tables, no turned heads at the bar. One guy in a polyester suit did try bobbing for cheese curls, though. It was that kind of night.

  Dion, evidently out of touch for quite some time now, asked if anybody here had seen his old friend Bobby. Tremulis wondered what pair of eyes in the Christmas-colored shadows had played the song. The whole time they talked to Desmond, with Shustak strangely silent through it all, he kept thinking about how large the bartender’s nose was. Maybe he did coke.

  Seems Murdy was out of town, the diminutive man had left for sunny L.A. to test shoot a Jay Tarses pilot. Dabney Coleman running a collection agency in Miami, with Murdy as a process server. When Desmond returned to the bar to serve a customer and Shustak excused himself to go to the bathroom, it was then that Tremulis had his only real talk with Reve Towne for the duration of their relationship.

  Chuck Berry lamented for Nadine. A beer glass overturned to a smattering of applause.

  “There but for the grace...” Reve said. “That’s why Evan is so quiet. He hates drunks. And junkies. The only pain they’ll ever feel, physically, is from withdrawal.”

  “He makes me feel guilty,” Tremulis said.

  “Why?”

  “Reve, I just feel that I can’t possibly live up to what he is. And I can’t help but blame myself, I know that sounds stupid, will sound stupid, I mean, that Mike is gone, and, like how I have this shitty attitude sometimes—”

  “Lot of people hold things in all the time, Vic.” Reve’s brow was creased. “I do. You’re in the majority.” She touched his hands then. Her flesh weighed down upon him like concrete. The girl with the concrete hands.

  “Wish my folks would understand that,” he snorted. “Yea, that’s me, living at home”.

  They both stopped talking as their companion returned. Shustak sat down, fumbled in his coat pocket for a pill capsule and rolled it into his mouth on his tongue. Trernulis thought of a kid from when he was in high school caught smoking a doobie in the guy’s john, and how he was able to conceal the fact. Shustak informed them that he didn’t want to chance dropping the pill on the dirty tiles of the bathroom.

  “Tylenol,” he explained further.

  There was an awkward silence for a moment. Tremulis thought of how his mother dry-swallowed three Excedrins first thing every morning. For the caffeine kick, ever since he was a kid. Then bitch at him after she took another three during Search For Tomorrow, or the weekend installment of Lamp Unto My Feet. Then he thought of how little he knew of Reve, how little she knew of him.

  They would have to remain strangers, run the road of their days together in parallel lanes, as would the killer to the girl next door. To collide would be paralytic. What would she think, what could she think, if he described her imaginary deformities. Neck tumors to be lapped at when a more skillful suitor would settle for a hickey.

  What would she think of the self-mutilations that gave him succor in the cold nights?

  Gene Vincent sang on about the man who shot Liberty Valance, and that lawman, the bravest of them all, was evidently in the bar.

  Someone cheered at the chorus, at any rate.

  Tremulis noticed that Shustak’s eyes looked jellied as he slapped his fingers against his pant leg. The cold stiffened his joints as well. Looking at Reve—What the hell was he doing still here in Chicago? Living like the fugitive. In a Quinn-Martin production. Roll the commercial about the laxative.

  Or let Victor Tremulis AKA Vic Tremble just keep on running.

  Surely Reve saw Shustak’s vacant stare. Understood the concentration behind it, as the man dug with spastic care into his pocket for that elusive other Tylenol. Tremulis read a sign for a comedy team that called themselves Mitch Flotsam & Max Jetsam, playing The Funny Firm that same night, the 29th of December. Behind the bar, he saw something that looked like a revolving ferris wheel. Wilted hot dogs hung from metal prongs like bloated condoms. He was vaguely aware that Reve had asked him something.

  “—can’t your family accept your problems.” He missed the first part and couldn’t tell if she had asked a question or made a statement.

  Shustak was making a sucking sound as he dry-swallowed his bitter pill and why didn’t he just get something to drink? Because it was better discipline. Like masturbating with a gym sock on was better discipline. Or nicking his eyelids with a razor blade. He had done that the night of his tenth high school reunion. “They know I have spasms,” he said, diving in and hoping it made sense. “They just try to ignore them, thinking that I could do that—put them out of my mind—if it was what I truly wanted.”

  The grin of pain was great as he said this, and Reve would remember that Cheshire cat grin for as long as she lived, especially after what happened later. It was a smile you got by merely thinking of where it hurt, the sensation, like how she flinched at a girl getting her breasts kneaded in a horror film whose ending was apparent even as the opening credits rolled.

  Thirtysomething and living at home with his parents because he felt himself a prisoner of his own body. They both thought of this simultaneously, and both with a different degree of conviction to their emotion.

  Reve saw so much in the men she’d met this past year and a half. Trying not to smile, because it would certainly be misconstrued, Reve thought of an old song by Mike Douglas, the talk show host, of all people. “The Men In My Little Girl’s Life.”

  Dad, there’s a boy outside, his name is Rod.

  He wants to play in our backyard. Can he, Daddy?

  Shustak, saner than most, but driven by the pain to the fringe. Tremulis’s own guilt at not living up to the pain threshold others have expected of him. Mike Surfer, as cyclothymic as the rest. Dead or alive, how did the human race get to the point where they could be so intimate and yet distant in the same breath? Everyone at the Marclinn had accepted Mike’s disappearance like a gaggle of clinicians at Our Lady of Lost Causes.

  “Hyperactive,” Tremulis told the two who knew him as Tremble. “That’s what they used to call it when I was a kid, always slapping the fridge or screen door shut. That just keyed me up more. Always telling me to slow down, like that would s
olve everything since birth. I was forever spilling my milk. . .”

  “Your dad was like this, too?” Reve asked.

  “My father said I did things like I had a candy asshole.”

  “I don’t remember my parents, at all.” Shustak said without further explanation. Tremulis assumed Reve knew the full story.

  “Sometimes,” he continued, “sometimes my father called me a holy terror, back when I was a kid.”

  “Speaking of terrors,” Shustak’s voice rasped from swallowing the tablets dry. “Haid’s never been here, I asked Desmond on the way back from the bathroom. But he has seen him around Washington Square.”

  “How can he be sure?” Reve asked.

  “Reve, for as many ravers who gargle with the twilight, there seems to be only one who has shouting matches with the Lord.” Shustak told them of how Desmond overheard the man’s ramblings one night before Halloween. “Plus, he’s always crossing himself. Haid, I mean.”

  Reve summed it up best, talking about the Painkiller, not Haid, and Dion again asked somebody, anybody, if they’d seen his best friends John, Bob, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and Sacco and Vanzetti, as well.

  “Like he’s the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”

  “Or judge, jury, and executioner,” Tremulis said.

  And the lonely drunks played their melancholy songs, their worlds revolving like the black discs with the bright but faded labels.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Later, Haid would think back on it ironically.

  He’d think on how, if he had been asked by anyone who had told him to take the boy, he would only be able to reply in one way.

  He’d have to say: did it In The Name Of The Mother. And leave it at that.

  * * *

  It was eleven o’clock on New Year’s Eve, and he stood outside the townhouse where Devin Verbeerst lived. This far north it was called Dearborn Parkway, and most of the buildings had wrought iron gates surrounding tiny front yards and walkways.

  The gates had buzzers affixed, and one had to be buzzed to enter. Unless the gate happened to be broken, as the one to 1111 was. Vince Janssen had known the widow Verbeerst during his life, and he knew that the gate had long been broken.

  The white labels next to the buzzer read:

  Gerberding

  Osier

  Verbeerst

  Mother and son lived on the third floor. From the way Father had spoken of her, the widow Verbeerst, would certainly be away from the apartment this night.

  Devin Verbeerst was twenty-four years old and suffered from Lesch-Nyhan disease. Haid walked through the lobby door without looking back. The disease struck only males, and caused them to be self-destructive. They had to be strapped into their chairs. Devin’s front teeth had been pulled after he had bitten through the skin of his upper lip. The apartments on the first two floors were quiet.

  The widow Verbeerst had told Father that the worst thing about her son’s disease was that he knew too much. Haid used another bit of Father’s knowledge to jimmy the door to #3F open. Fast and fluid. To the left of the doorway was the kitchen, to the right, the living room. He saw a flicker from the television screen, and a distorted shadow of a wheelchair against the wall and ceiling.

  He had been ready -- oh Christ! he had been ready—but the sight of the crippled man before him made Haid expel his breath. The living room was dark, the sole illumination came from the black and white RCA television against the west wall. A Marx Brothers movie was on. Channel Nine always played Marx Brothers movies on New Year’s Eve. A clock above the television read 11:27. He was going to have to move, to shake the sadness from his brain.

  The shadows flickering in mad pavanes across Devin’s face provided the initial shock. The gaps where his teeth had been pulled made him resemble a cackling, drooling old hag. The Witch Queen of New Orleans. On the screen, Groucho said something funny to a group of socialites. Devin muttered something, it might have been a laugh. A minute passed. Harpo honked his horn.

  Pulling his upper gums across his lower lip, Verbeerst watched the movie in honest rapture. Haid could see three pillows in the boy’s lap. A childhood memory of “The Princess And The Pea.” From beneath the pillows, he saw a tube running from the boy’s abdomen to an opaque, quivering bag near the center of the wheelchair’s right tire. The tube was spattered on the insides. Haid thought of Father’s snuff bowl. A commercial came on the television, and Cellozi and Ettleson told you about their auto dealership, “where you always save more money.”

  Haid now stood before the crippled form of Devin Verbeerst. His eyes adjusted slowly to the things in the room beyond the television’s light. There was darkness in the other rooms of the apartment, only a night light above the kitchen sink glowed amber. Like a faraway beacon on Lake Michigan.

  He looked down at the boy, his ankles tied to the ankle rests. Haid bent over and lifted the first pillow, then the next. The movie came back on. He placed the third pillow on the floor with the others.

  And looked into Devin’s hazel eyes. The boy tried to speak. Clucking noises came out of his mouth along with the drool. Haid moved closer. Then, Devin surprised the holy hell out of him by speaking, slurring his words no worse than a working man who had stopped off for a few beers.

  He said: “Will it go on forever?” With the last word coming out like fowewer. But Haid understood.

  He couldn’t answer yet. Instead, he focused on the shelf behind the boy. At the boxes on the shelf. A Batman and Robin Colorform. A box of Lincoln Logs. Games like Ker-Plunk and Head Of The Class. Bought before he contracted the disease, to be sure. Will it go on forever?

  “No,” he finally answered.

  And Devin Verbeerst let loose with a low, ululating moan. Without the pillows’ support, his palsied head flung forward, smashing into Haid’s chest. Verbeerst gummed at Haid’s jacket.

  The suede of the jacket shushed as Haid reached his arms around the boy. He pressed his palms into the flesh of the boy’s neck, the knob of his spine.

  Under the flesh.

  Haid took a deep breath. This was always the most difficult part.

  “God wants you home. . . Son.”

  The boy’s moan was cut off like a set of headphones being slammed shut.

  * * *

  He allowed himself a fresh breath. When he looked up and saw the widow Verbeerst staring at him, he thought that his heart was going to explode.

  How much did she see? She stood there in the light of the bathroom, the light he missed, damn it. A portrait of impassivity, a woman in a simple white nightgown, no more than forty, not caring that her legs were apart and the light was behind her.

  He did not speak. Her eyes bore no questions. The seconds grew heavier, unbearable.

  He saw her gaze shift to a point beyond him. Haid turned and saw a photo of Devin in a Little League outfit. There was a dark patch of dirt on the red-and-white pinstriped uniform. The exact spot where, years later, a colostomy bag tentacled out of his abdomen.

  The woman, Devin’s mother. She had spoken something, softly. It had sounded like...

  It had sounded like she had said...Go.

  Sounds from the other room…the bedroom? He spoke towards the hallway. “I’ve saved your son.”

  He walked towards the bedroom, saw the woman with her face buried in a pillow. A lamp was on next to the phone, she had not called

  911. Thank God for that. She weeped in small whimpers. “I said, I saved your son.” She continued sobbing, louder now.

  He walked swiftly to the front door then, feeling dizzy. The last sight of the woman was that of the calloused soles of her bare feet as she lay prone on the bed. Was the crying an act, for when she phoned the police? She would certainly phone the police, wouldn’t she?

  Go. She had told him to go. He was sure of it.

  He left before the sirens came, if they would ever come, remembering the soles of the widow Verbeerst’s feet. And the photo that maybe had made her final decision
.

  Haid would remember the smiling face in the Little League uniform for as long as he lived.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Tremulis met up with Reve and Shustak at Navarro’s, a bookstore at 2909 North Broadway. Murdy’s bar, M.C.’s, was down the block at 2850 North. It was Friday, the 6th of January, 1989.

  When he stepped off the No. 36 bus, he looked down at the wet pavement, where the little snow they had gotten the evening before had melted overnight. With no wind, the temperature actually climbed overnight. A looming apartment building on Oakdale reflected the sidewalk at his feet. A giant El Marko proclaiming to anyone who cared YOU ARE HERE.

  The temperature was still in the thirties, the sun bright, and so Tremulis was unzipping his grey jacket even as he opened the door to the bookstore. A little bell jingled like a memory in an insane person’s head.

  Shustak was wearing his Hell’s Kitchen sweatshirt over black cords. He carried a pea green jacket folded over into one fist. Reve was wearing a blue blouse, black skirt, and black boots. Stylish enough that he hardly noticed the limp caused by the metal plate in her hip.

  She was holding a copy of the new Zen bestseller by Daemon Winter-Boston, and handed it to him at his request. He again marveled and fell in love with her unpolished fingernails. He wanted to flaw the people and things he let enter his world, and’ mutilate himself in the name of self -knowledge, but he felt the stirrings of his weak heart only when the woman of his immediate desires—it hadn’t always been Reve Towne—was not hiding behind makeup.

  The page flipped open to a quote by Heraclitus:

  Everything flows.

  Tremulis thought of things that flowed. The Chicago River, acetic acid, blood, piss...

  Shustak bought nothing. “I read faces,” he told the girl at the cash register even though she didn’t ask.