by Rex Miller
A particular sound, look, or odor triggered the most intense memories from childhood, or from his institutionalized years of concentrated horror. What for you or me might be only unpleasant, a smell of cigar smoke, the feel of a chalky eraser, the aroma of sachet, the hospital smell of antiseptic, could goad him into a killing frenzy. And the waves of hate and madness would sweep over him in a blinding raging red tide, kill lust taking him, pouring down on him in a scorching effusion of liquid fire and it was then he would require all of his concentration and skill and control because it was then that he would do the bad things.
The smallest most inconsequential thing. Like a finger pointing on a direction sign. The sound of wind rustling through leaves or metal-cleated footfalls and distant voices on the landing and he was back in the closet huddled in icy fear waiting, praying to gods that only he could summon, promising begging them to hear him and spare him as the loud footsteps and the quarreling voices drew closer and he saw the snake man again and the little boy Danny peed himself knowing fearing that it would be him again and then and then oh oh aaaahhhhhhhh nnoooooooooooo not oh oh don't hurt me oh don't let him Mommy Mommmmmmmy urinating in little uncontrollable spasms wetting himself there in the foulness of the closet, daring only a brief peek through the crack, holding on to his little dog in the blackened space, hoping the snake man would not find him again.
And the memory does not come from that back center of the brain within the hippocampus, it comes down a toilet flushing in a high-rise, yes flushing out in an effulgence of liquid gold flushing and circumfusing, surrounding, enveloping his memories in the shit stink smell as it gushes, flushes, rushes down through tubes down to the sea in shits, down to timeless bowels down to Danny Boy oh Danny Boy the pipes the pipes are flushing down down down it comes flowing and circurmfluent down through the caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sewer and clay and concrete and chemicals and the pipes and tubes and tunnels and submains and declinations of defecations into the main flowing under him and he is back in the closet and the hate the putrid mean bitterness of it drowns his mind in the memories of the dreaded snake man.
And Danny is waiting in the closet as the snake man rages and he catches words and threats as the arms with the snakes the serpents coiled around hairy muscled awful arms smash out knocking his mommy from the chair and the booze stink from a broken bottle and he sees the frightening blue writhing snakes and guns and scorpions and dragons and skulls and scarabs and eagles that coil, fly, crawl, levitate, creep, slither, stampede and explode around the smelly, rubbery, matted pelt of hairy flesh and scaly skin of the snake man whom he detests with a child's loathing, abominating and fearing him with all the contempt a little, tortured boy can feel in his bursting heart. And the snake man vows he will kill the little dog tomorrow and he will throw it out the window and maybe the punk too he laughs as he stomps toward the closet for something but in that instant as he starts to open the closet where the boy and the dog are cowering together the boy has stopped him somehow, and he tells the dog you will be safe speaking in his mind and all of this is happening on some inexplicable mental plateau that you and I will never travel in our comfortable chairs and clean, neat, orderly lives free from the mind-exploding childhood terrors that were the daily regimen of the little boy Daniel.
In the basement his memory lingers on the two bottles there in the row of dusty chemicals on the shelf down in the basement, the two bottles he always remembers as the smoking bottles because when they are unstoppered a dangerous, acidulous wisp emanates from the small, thick glass bottles and he takes them both and when the snake man is asleep, his eyeballs rolled back in his head, dead drunk, his small hands wrapped in rags take the bottles and his mind, HIS MIND oh, God, Jesus his mind warping the curves destroying the graphs lightning bolts of kinetic mystery, powerful energies on an uncharted level of will NOOOOOO THE ACID pouring the smoking liquid into the eyes and face of the sleeping blue snake man and knowing even at age nine what payback is and savoring it as the sleeping, drunken filth screams awake blindly plunged into an anguished world of mindless, unutterable horror.
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! AAAAAAAAAA AAAHHHHHHi ACID" The snake man's screams have a lovely, nourishing echo even now. And he is in The Max again back in Marion hearing the two blacks go over the side hearing the screams as they plunge off D Tier. He is back with the most incorrigible bad asses in all of the entire federal system, back in the bull tank in D Block where a white effigy pincushion man hangs with BAAD sprayed on him, voodoo hoodoo admonition of the Black Afro-American Defenders who control D, and the two black bosses who run it brace him and light flashes on the knife and pipe and on some level of energy beyond understanding he destroys them.
Their arrogance to think they might threaten this force this presence who draws on a power source beyond any witless muscle or martial skill an all conquering, indomitable energy flowing out as an implacable physical law of mass and motion and will twists rips splits breaks rends cleaves destroys snaps maims mutilates ruptures tears through spines like twigs, crushing bones like dry limbs, chainsnapping them breaking their weight-lifter necks which to him are the nothing pencil necks of geeks fools hulking bull morons.
"DIE!" he screams.
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! AAAAAAAAAAAA HHHHHHH!" The scream again the scream of the snake man as this human garbage goes off the high tier in a stinking blackness of deathscream smashing down into the dumb mass of guards, inmates, snitches, killers, sissies, wardens, hacks, cons, jailhouse lawyers, fish, rapos, short-eyes, jerks, parole boards, and then the other one, still remembering the sewer stink of him as he died, and then he is down in the hole waiting execution, bread and water and rotting food and his own filth and roaches and the occasional rat for pets.
And his mind takes him back to The Nam where he is waiting in a quiet, one-man ambush on the grassy hill above a crossroads, a huge X of bandoliers over his mammoth, obvoluted gut, waiting under a tarp the size of a bedspread with a beer-belly spare tire of deuce-and-a-half proportions, black stony eyes hard and obdurate in a doughy face of baby jowls. And he feels no insect bite, suffers no heat stroke, has no thirst, experiences only pleasurable anticipation as he sees movement coming from down below but not from where he was expecting it, coming along the roadway. Instead, this is a movement he senses oh so that is why he has not seen it—he feels in the first pinprick of intuition and animal awareness it is not below him he only assumed that because he "saw" it as a physical precognate, sensing not seeing it and naturally concluding it was there in his field of vision but it was BEHIND HIM and he turns and sees the soldiers there next to him raising their AK-47 and whatever else and his weapon is blasting them without a quarter second's hesitation tearing through the tall grass in a strange noise as it spits its song of death out at the men.
"(THWOCK-KLLLAAAAAKKKK-THWOCK-KLLLLLAAAAAAKKK-THWOCK-KLLLLAA-AAKKK!)"
He fires carefully, firing on semi-automatic, and he feels the burning as he takes an inconsequential wound, his adrenaline pumping, concentration focus laserlike and relentless, taking them all down in the hundred ballpeen hammer strikes as the weapon shoots its deathstream puncturing and penetrating their bodies with nice red, wet holes as the NVA regulars fire and scream and it is the
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH" of the snake man, eyes blinded by the acid, and he loves it he fucking loves it, only wishing he didn't have a suppressor on so he could hear the full, explosive power of the weapon as it fires its searing nails of pain into these arrogant, little men, the expulsion of gas blasting out in fast, anvil hammers, the hundred indistinguishable KLLLAAAAKKKKs of the bolt slamming another one into the spout in the metallic clatter, escaping gas, two-hundred-decible thwocks in one hundred strikes fired in four, five, six-round bursts so fast they sound like one long hammer blow echoing over a lake.
"(THWOCK-KLLLAAAAAKKKKKKK!)" Like a single, indivisible sound, and the metal smashes and explosions and the gas cracks and the screaming and the gunfire all mingling together in the screa
m of the snake man:
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!" And he knows he must get out of here tomorrow, to the storm-drain catch basin he has prepared, and then he will go to the trap in the submain again. But he must leave the sewers before this smell drives him mad, he decides, not without irony.
Now the bourbon and the effort of the mind has tired him to the point where he can sleep, and he curls up under a filthy army blanket and a huge tarp, a humongous, deeply breathing mound snuggled down in the wooden trap, and he allows himself to dream of an LZ where the smirking pilot digs the skids into a paddy dike flipping him out and how he relished the moment of fear as the three men on board saw him almost pull the pin and toss one in, almost-catching himself just as he let them hold one for good luck, tossing in a short-fused grenade and telling them:
"Here, autorotate on this." And smiling to himself from ear to ear as he fantasizes what it would be like to hear the bird explode in a bright red ball of flame and silver metalstorm and he dreams he can hear the delicious screams of the dying as it blows.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" And the screaming is a symphony that is music to his ears and he falls into a deep and lovely sleep, a great, snoring, beached whale, sleeping clown man, hybernating bear under the rising, falling mound of tarpaulin and blanket, asleep in the foul stench of the sewer, one massive paw curled around the thing in his special pocket just in case one of the giant rats might come near him while he sleeps.
The Jack and Queen of Hearts
He sat in Edie's kitchen drinking strong, black Yuban and running it all through the tangle of his head again, over and over, sorting the pieces. Rearranging. Trying to get some kind of a fix on this Bunkowski. He had the dossier memorized. He'd look at the photographs till his eyes burned from them. Now he was chewing it over. Sifting. Looking for the hidden common denominators. Mistakes. Feeling for the weird rhythms of the killer.
True to his word, Sonny had slammed all the doors down tight. The commissioner was about to tack somebody's chestnuts to a door over this thing. The brass couldn't believe that neither the top cops in Chicago nor the heavies on the Major Crimes hook-up could blast loose more background on a plague of heinous murders that had picked up this much national ink.
But that was because they didn't know from MAC-VSAUCOG and the tight, little band of hardcore headhunters who'd discovered Daniel Bunkowski in the beginning. It was a burned bridge. Tantalizing. Maddening. But staring down into the chasm couldn't accomplish much beyond giving one a migraine.
He had made sex with his lover. He couldn't think of it as making love because it didn't deserve that appellation. Once he'd heard two hillbilly types back home who had a memorable predilection for crudity of speech talking about getting laid. One of them turned to the other and mouthed the ultimate redneck phrase for fornication, a turn of phrase so gross that it had seared itself into Eichord's brain.
"Ah shore 'nuff dumped a fuck inner," he'd said.
Jack shuddered as he thought to himself that was precisely what he'd done and nothing more. A kind of physical catharsis unrelated to love beyond the sense of desire. It was only a momentary cleansing and restorative to the nervous system. The kind of sex one had after death in the family. A defense mechanism. A release. A life-affirming knee-jerk response to pressure.
My God in Heaven, this woman could do it to him. Edie could take him and turn him around no matter where his mind was. He could be immersed in the bloodiest carnage of the Kasikoff homicides, his brain working overtime as he fought to tie into the wavelengths of this strange and horrible killer, strained to feel the nuances of the city's pulsebeats, concentrated on the subtle rhythms of the dark world that was his professional environment.
And inside the shadows of this world, deep inside where nothing human lived, the thought of her could light up his innards like a shaft of the purest, golden light. She was goodness to him. And her sweet and unexpected sexy ways could set him afire in the most unusual settings, and at unpredictable moments.
She stood with her back to him, stirring herbs into something, her hair as she turned swirling just as it had that day Chicago Lifestyles had taken the picture and he flashed on the experience of seeing the real and the photographed Edie simultaneously, the picture having been thumbtacked to a paper on their cork bulletin board, the photo trimmed and pasted with about a pound of mucilage to a neatly crayoned frame with the caption MOMMY AND JACK. Lee Anne's work, meticulously and lovingly rendered.
But it was a picture that had caused him to nearly go insane with rage when he saw it and the story that had gone with it. He'd said nothing to Edie about it, but he wondered if she suspected how he'd reacted when he saw the story. He wanted to guard Edie and Lee Anne. Shelter them, and keep this thing they had private. A clever woman reporter for Lifestyles had put two and two together and run the photo into a semileering piece about the supersleuth and the widow of the victim. There'd been a brief exchange with a woman named Vicki Duff whose name appeared as the byline. She had said he was overheated, he recalled.
"You're going to think I'm getting overheated when you find out what is legal to print and what is not. You're going to find yourself in a caldron of some extremely hot water, and you're not going to like it." He was getting even more torqued as he heard her wise tone of voice.
"So you're implying that I broke the law by running that piece?"
"I'll let you know what I want to say to you in clear, understandable English. I think this is the height of irresponsibility for a journalist to run that sort of an unthinking, carelessly researched, insensitive piece of tabloid gossip in the middle of an investigation of this seriousness."
"It wasn't carelessly researched and you know it. You're a public figure, Jack, and you might as well get used to it. The First Amendment gives me the right."
"The First Amendment doesn't give you the right to put someone in a life-threatening situation by exposing them to unnecessary media attention just to sell papers. And not only is it irresponsible as hell, it may even be actionable. You have a right to put a fist in the air, but if it hits my nose, Vicki, that's battery. You also can't use the First Amendment as a shield for malicious gossip-mongering, defamatory misrepresentations of relationships done to hypo circulation, or— "
"If you've been slandered, you have the same recourse as any other citizen under the law, you can—"
"I know what I can do, and you know what you can do. I can see how very interested you are in being a conscientious reporter. But I want you to know you're skating on some thin and extremely hazardous ice. The bottom line is that— "
"I'm sorry, I don't have the time to listen to this, Jack. If you think I've misspoken in print, I'm sorry, but I didn't do anything other than report what I saw. Thanks for calling, and have a good day."
And the line was buzzing in his ear. What was done was done. He shut it all out as he looked at her silky, lustrous hair. Downtown that day the wind had caught her lovely hair and swirled the tendrils around her face and he'd felt such an unabashed and deep pride that it had filled him like wine, making him drunk with her availability and sweetness and caring. He had never quite become accustomed to the fact that she was his. And as Edie stood there on those long, slim legs of hers, still in high heels, cooking, her back to him, those sleek legs—the backs of those beautiful knees so tantalizing below the short skirt (thank the Lord those were coming back in fashion again) and the little apron tied so demurely around her tiny waist—it was over-powering and wonderfully exciting. He wanted her again now as he sat there drinking her in, and he thought of this lady as so very beautiful indeed.
She turned and looked at him, saw him watching her in that way he had, with what she had called his smoldering eyes, so darkly attractive and serious and sexy, and she read his mind.
"Not before supper," she teased, "you'll have to wait and get your dessert at the end of the meal just like the rest of us."
"Scandinavian peoples sometimes eat their dessert before the me
al."
"Well, we're not in Scandanavia at the moment."
"Always quibbling about something."
"Ummmm." Some of the tendrils had worked loose again and it was getting to him. He stood up and walked over, moving up close behind her, snuggling up against this woman he cared so much for now, and encircled her small waist from behind, holding her against him.
She smelled so great, like—what was the fragrance? A combination of musk, fresh bread, and the sexiest perfume imaginable. He nuzzled against her neck and pressed himself into her.
"Oh, Jack."
"Dessert, you say."
"Ummmmm."
"You're something else; you know that?"
"Jack." She wasn't having any more of it right now. Something on her mind. And he watched her eyes harden with a question as she turned.
"Yeah. What?"
"The man."
"Huh?"
"The man."
"What man?"
"You know—who—who he is and everything."
"Umm. More or less."
"Do you, uh, have a picture of him?"
"Ung." He nodded halfheartedly.
"Do you think—" She let the question hang there in the air. The kitchen and the dining room, just a small open space with table and chairs, were empty of Lee. He was suddenly aware that she was over at her friend's house, and he thought it was odd that when Edie had asked about the picture of the killer he'd thought instinctively of Lee Anne, wanting her isolated from this.
"What?" he said.
"Could I see it?" she asked in a tiny, very soft voice.
"Oh. Well . . . yeah. I—uh . . . I guess you-uh, are you sure that's a good idea, babe?"
"I want to see, what he looks like," she whispered in her quietest voice. If he hadn't been watching her lips move, even as close as they were standing he wouldn't have been sure what she said.
