The Holy Terror

by Wayne Allen Sallee

  Evan Shustak, Chicago’s American Dream, had been dead for one week, with only a few knowing the true circumstances surrounding his life and death (like in a comic book, he supposed) and the wheelchair he had ridden in, along with the beige blanket, was stored in a room marked EVIDENCE in the basement of the James J. Riordan Police Headquarters at Eleventh and State.

  Maybe it was: sitting alongside Mike Surfer’s old MediaComp chair, down there in the evidence room, joined again in death. Along with bags of controlled substances and other sundry things.

  Control was something Tremulis was losing, as every minute stomped by. “You always thought that we would have stopped him, Evan.” His voice rang as hollow as a side view of his face.

  “We. Us.” The two words sounded like a weak gas leak.

  It was only him and Reve now. Shustak’s corpse wasn’t even around: when the ghouls at County were done with it, an Aunt Kim Something paid for his body to be flown back to Tempe, Arizona. It seemed fitting that the relative lived on Ash Street.

  How the hell was it that Evan Shustak had ended up in Chicago? Now there would be no future episode where someone stood over a Chicago graveside and recounted, “The Secret Origin of The American Dream.”

  And the minutes kept stomping on by, reminding Tremulis that he was still part of the passing parade.

  * * *

  Reve Towne worried about the man whose name she still thought to be Vic Tremble. She suspected it to be a nickname, and also expected him to never have the courage to tell her his real name. And her grief over Evan’s death had not scarred over, as well.

  The city he had lived in had forgotten him in the wake of Dean Conover’s funeral. But she would always remember, as Vic would, perhaps a little too much. Since the incident, Vic had stopped going out on patrol. She didn’t blame him. Shit. She was certain that even the Painkiller was leery of showing his face after the publicity his last attack had garnered.

  Reve also wondered, sitting alone in the living room of her apartment, if Evan had been any kind of a hero back in Arizona.

  And now she was thinking about the only other survivor, a man behind another mask. A man currently contemplating the end of he knew not what.

  She took the bus to the Marclinn, knowing he would be there. A man on the street accused her of looking full of piss and vinegar.

  Walking through the doors of the Marclinn, she found the lobby vacant. It was like the Marclinn’s “family” was unraveling. With individual threads weren’t being sliced away by the Painkiller. She looked across at the leering faces of the Fates.

  Edgar Chuso sat in one chair, watching a blank television screen. What destroys people’s lives so easily?” Reve said aloud, and it kind of jumpstarted the old fart.

  But all he had to say was, “Eddie come Beddy come Freddy come Steady...”

  * * *

  Victor Tremulis was to descend one last time before going back down into the subway. It was too cold for the Painkiller to go anywhere else. Evan Shustak was dead and there was nobody else on the streets to kill. Badaboom. badabing, simple thinking, really.

  He would be waiting.

  Tremulis descended in a way such as this:

  There were parts of the American Dream in this room the small one window room with its view of the neon Magikist lips was as cluttered with parts of a whole as Tremulis’s own mind. Makes sense if you let it.

  He looked at the arm bands, the surgical gauze and the rolls of Scotch tape. But it was the fragments of fiberglass casts that interested him the most, out of all the medicinal carrion that lay in the beveled shadows. He had forgotten how long it had been since he last spoke. With Etch at the Coke machine. That must be it.

  Now he had to ready himself for the pain ahead, or rather, below. Self-mutilation was the only thing left, now that Shustak was dead, that would give him the needed strength. For he was too cowardly even now to ask Reve to help him through to the end.

  Mutilation. And he knew how to do it. What Chuso had said so long ago had made sense. He sucker-punched Shustak into playing the ultimate hero, while he, Tremulis, capered in the tunnels. And for what? In Chuso’s own sage words, why didn’t he just corner Reve for a sympathy fuck and get it all over with. Then move on, go back to washing glasses at the Hard Rock Cafe, go back to being shit on by everybody and their aunt.

  He fumbled amongst the ruins of Shustak’s life. One of his lives.

  “I’m pathetic,” he said. One last time and then it was past. He found what he wanted and it was just his size. “I’ll make it up to you, Evan.” He spoke in afterthought, like Bruno Bicek might’ve to his gal Steffi Rostenkowski in that Algren book, Never Come Morning.

  Morning would come, all right. It would come down there in the subway tunnels. After he was through with this.

  christ oh christ give me strength

  The fiberglass cast—pressed for an answer under different circumstances, he might have guessed that they stopped using plaster around the turn of the mid-eighties—was as simplistic in design as paper mache, yet as tough as, well, as fiberglass. As a child, Tremulis had been in an art class where the kids blew up balloons and plastered strips from the old Chicago Today afternoon paper around them. They were then painted in primary and secondary Tempera colors. Miss Camit called them African masks. Damn it, Camit, cram it. The chant of the third grade class, led by Sturenfeldt and Sabatino. They had called him Bean-Head.

  The cast was loose enough to fit over one arm, the hardened mesh crisscrossing between his thumb and forefinger. Only slightly heavier than the “African masks,” after the balloon had deflated. It ran up his arm the length of an evening gown glove. The cast was a remnant of a “case” Shustak had referred to as Reflections In A Golden Jumpsuit. Tremulis had forgotten the specifics, if there ever was any.

  But he remembered his. Shustak had his patrol logs, and he had his journals. He was thinking of a specific one. A discipline. Constant learning, good or bad. Perverted or logical.

  Tremulis began sweating, or maybe resumed sweating, as he thought about that journal, the one labeled “This Is My Body.” He looked at the cast and tentatively flexed his muscles underneath and he was sweating inside the cast and he remembered identifying the body not Shustak no Mather had, done that right after he eyeballed his own partner. Hell Street Blues. His own body this is

  my

  and he sweated more still and now the cotton behind the mesh was sweating as well and it felt moist and stale as any of the Fallon Ridge whores or the Club Cheetah table dancers no no he didn’t no he didn’t want to think of Reve throw the cast away cast the stones into the sea oh he had the stones to do this he didn’t see the hamper

  his pants were down then too around his ankles shit-stained underwear skids his dick flaccid as the faces walking in the lobby downstairs his testicles clinging together he was scaring them with his thoughts he reached his arm out his elbow pointed outwards

  Lowered his hand to the space between his shorts and his penis.

  Grabbed his cold dick roughly with his free hand.

  Moved the crack between the fiberglass cast and palm closer.

  Closer still, a stray wisp of cotton tickling his penis head in the foreplay of the deranged.

  He pushed it in gently, the dead thing flopping back in half, like an inflatable clown. Soft always soft he winnowed the flesh in winnowed the minnow and the weather started getting rough he was kneeling like a bum with a good friday face terror piss dribbling clear and vitamin-free inside the cast and he felt wetness red wetness on his supplicating palm.

  * * *

  “Bet your friend Vixtor is down the hall pretendin’ youse gots a chicken leg,” Chuso was saying.

  “Excuse me?” The man totally baffled her. He stood next to Reve, almost blocking her path. Grinning sickly. He was holding a pack of Chux disposable diapers.

  “I knows,” Chuso said in his sage way. Reve wondered where Slappy and Karl and everybody else had gone. It was like everyone w
as gone, fleeing away from the Painkiller. Everyone except Vic Tremble.

  The only one left who didn’t leer at her like a construction worker.

  The only one...

  “He be in the Dreamer’s room,” Chuso said, rocking back and forth, gumming his lips. Smiling.

  * * *

  She knocked on the door and maybe it was a mistake or maybe it was fated to happen but she opened the door then as the blood made a tiny pooi and there was blood in the fiberglass mesh so little blood, really, and blood on the tips of Vic’s right fingers where

  he

  was

  pushing

  and panting he tried to stand, knowing full well that the gaping Reve couldn’t possibly know the affirmation of his actions, his pants pulled down around his ankles from his humping air and he wobbled

  opening his mouth nowhere near his climax of pain and tripped over his clothing and fell to the floor fracturing his wrist and mashing his testicles into pulp. ‘

  Ass up, blubbering to the floor, his teeth on the tile.

  She would never forget the stare that he slivered into her or what he said then for as long as she lived. Vic Tremble AKA Victor Tremulis AKA Bean-Head

  said: “This is my body and I can do with it as I want.”

  * * *

  Reve Towne backed away then, kept backing away until the red became a blessed black. Backed into the darkened hallway like the last, strangled whisper of a onenight stand.

  I never saw her again.

  The Epilogues

  Epilogue One:

  And of the Son

  Never saw her again, huh? How long you say it’s been?

  I don’t know. I lose track of time down here. Guess it’s still cold up on the street, huh?

  Like a bitch’s stare, dude. Weird story, I tell you. Shit, I tell you, my buddies I hang with, they’re waiting for me at Tommy Guns, on Wabash...

  You don’t have to explain to me. I’m not your keeper.

  Well, take care, uh, what was your name?

  I didn’t give it. And thank you for the dollar.

  Worth it. Maybe I’ll see you again sometime.

  Maybe.

  Shit. Gotta book if I’m gonna make it on time.

  * * *

  I’ve got a book, as well. It will be my last journal. I am calling it Beside Myself, With Fear. I write it most of the time, like now, but sometimes I talk it. I know this because people tell me to shut up.

  The swelling has gone down in my balls, but my wrist is fractured. I am wearing one of The American Dream’s wrist braces but I know the healing is bad.

  I used to believe that my life was such a novelty. By that, I mean, well. Let me put it like this: I never had to answer to anyone. Not a living soul. Thirty-six and single. Though I still live—lived—with my mother and father, I am—was— as independent as the men steepled against the outer walls of the parking lot separating the Pacific Garden Mission from the 666 Lounge.

  Oh how I used to envy them. Only intangible things like the weather and lost hope slowed them down. And even then, not for long.

  Just weeks, or maybe it was months, ago, I could be so cocky, standing there on the Sheridan bus like a CEO with dirt on a competitor, looking down at a seated woman, staring at the pink ridge where her eyelid met her contact lens. Metaphors spinning in my mind like my mother’s own lost hopes, expectations that would most certainly keep her corpse spinning in the grave, as well. To calliope music, no doubt.

  I read once that no house exists that was not first built on human bones. My past, the foundation of my present—

  I peel back a rind of flesh from my finger to enunciate NOW!—is laid atop a carnival of souls. Both living and dead, mind you. Mike, Reve, Evan. All gone.

  Except for me and the Painkiller.

  I once applied for a job as town clown of Elgin, Illinois. Bingo by name; smirk now and charge with your sanity express gold card. Then watch the crowd demand payment in full. I babble on in Babylon because my fingers have gone numb in my right hand. I think I really fucked up that famous final scene with Reve.

  My thoughts revolve and evolve. Motes which, instead of tumors, were simply bloated memories. A domino line of girls: Donna and Sharon whose parents own the textbook store and Natalie and the blond girl on the Belmont bus with the cleft in her chin. I wanted them to be fatal things. But they were parasites. And now I am beside myself, with fear.

  I am a fetal thing. I stand by my fetal, infantile self. Breathing adult guilt into baby ears knowing not to expect playful grabs in return. I bring my knees up to my chin, but still my dick is exposed. The testicles lie dangerously close to the shadow of my right thigh. They are raw with the sting of the subway touches and other horrors, the ones witnessed by Reve Towne in the last seconds of our life together.

  * * *

  The subway ads are for the Gala Holiday issue of Penthouse. I thought it was already 1989 when I came down here. I eat chocolate and read graffiti. MARCOS, HE IS BAD MAN. niggertown that way++++÷+ Stacy Fucks Anything, Even Freaks. 641-C UNT. DENNIS CASSADY SLEEPS IN PERDITION 11-11-1985. THIS TIME FOR KEEPS.

  allinthewristwithadeckoracuecanyoureadthisatall ???

  I have a bottle of Stress-Tabs that I found in Shustak’s room. I remember up in The City, the iron or beta carotene would turn my piss bright yellow. Down here it looks the color of a beer that has been nursed too long. But the damn pills keep my hunger away. Maybe they’ve got caffeine in them, I don’t give a fuck either way to look on the label.

  I saw one of the police officers down here a few nights back. Mather, I think his name is. I’m not certain that we ever met, but I remember Reve... someone talking about him and the dead one, Conover.

  Warned me to be careful. The Painkiller came up for air again. Probably missed reading the paper that day, ha-ha. I asked him how the guy was getting away with so much. Mather said the guy was the luckiest fucking man alive, is all. He’d have to slip up sooner or later.

  I almost told him who I was, asked how... well, how it was up in The City. But I didn’t. He did mention that I should get my wrist checked out. I smiled at him, nice-like.

  A newspaper on the ground says to me that it’s March 12th.

  * * *

  Does Mather really think that the Painkiller is normal enough that he could make a mistake? He certainly hasn’t met Lullaby and Goodnight. What would he say if he was presented with the opportunity to stick his thumbs under her eyes and then fuck the empty sockets? Would he still think the Painkiller like Every Mother’s Son?

  * * *

  There was an autistic boy with blond hair who would be dropped off by an adult almost every day. He would always wear striped shirts, invariably with hues of green or blue in the patterns. Perhaps the vertical stripes were supposed to make him look thinner. See, most everyone I’ve ever seen in a wheelchair gets a bit of a paunch. Nobody would call them “love handles.”

  There is an underground pedway—pedestrian walkway—that leads from the State of Illinois Building all the way to the ICG-South Shore railway line. At one point, it intersects the subway entrance just above me. The autistic boy would sit in his chair for the duration of the adult’s workday, at least I’m guessing, and would turn on this huge ghetto blasting radio. Rural writers would call the thing a “boom box,” because, to them, the city will always be an alien thing.

  And the boy would whip out a tambourine and slap at it for as long as it interested him. He could do this for hours and never say a word. This has gone on for days.

  The Painkiller is coming closer. Earlier today, the Marlboro clock above the Monroe Street entrance had said it was a quarter of three, the banging of the tambourine stopped.

  * * *

  Was it the babysitter deSade that put the first layer of calluses over my body? Was it the neurolgists or the therapists at Childermas Research? I mocked my father’s love of simple things, his awe of new products like a spool tape recorder I got for Christmas in 1972. He taped a
n episode of Hee Haw and laughed at all the jokes twice. I am such an asshole. I never saw his demons, but they are beside me now. Poking in their obscurity.

  My mother, on the same hand, was truly traumatized by my birth. Perhaps I was the Hiroshima of her young adult life. That is, the aftermath unbelievably worse than the white orgasm of the birth’s impact. My little breach form hitting ground zero at Lutheran Deaconess, now St. Mary of Nazareth.

  Breach baby, breach baby, there on the sand... She loves me inconsistently and sometimes unconvincingly, but it is more than I have ever given myself in return. She frets about me when I am on the street—at least, she used to. God knows where they think I’m spending my Daze now. While I lie with my ink pen because it builds my character and separates me from the bovine faces in this city’s abattoir. Chewing their cud nine-to-five-to-oblivion.

  I should instead slit the sac of my testes with the pen and lap at the juices while I am waiting to die.

  Oh say, can you scream?

  * * *

  I don’t need a wheelchair.

  Tha’s good. (Voice belongs to a Mexican laborer from Maxwell Street.) .

  Once I envied people in wheelchairs like this one.

  Tha’s good. Que?

  No,I— (The Mexican waves me away like he would an ill-thought racial comment on the street up above.)

  * * *

  You! (To another.) I did. I envied them. And you know why?

  You gots blood on yo’ hand.

  Yes, I do. It was because I had to have everyone know my Pain. (train goes by on opposite tracks northbound, layers of clothing flap) because they received all the sympathy and I got nothing not one damn thing.

  Mo’ excuses than Carter’s got pills, man.

  My mother says that! How about that. Now, if I can’t kill the pain, I’ll kill the Pain.

  Shee-it, man, yo’ rectum bleedin’.

  * * *

  Sometimes I feel that I must inhabit the last continuum of pain, It’s a place where you are uncertain that if you try to kill yourself, you get into thinking that your entire existence maybe asuicide’s afterlife. Who’s to say? Tonight, the only background music is love themes of the damned.