A Bomb Built in Hell

by Andrew Vachss

  “You didn’t learn nothing from that?”

  “The next time, as soon as I got out of the Hole, I went up to another big one and told him I wasn’t getting my ass whipped for nothing. I told him I’d run again but he had to leave me his radio when he went home ... and I told him I wanted some money, too. He said okay—probably laughing himself to death—and I went over the fence the next damn night. I told him I’d meet him by the big tree just about a hundred yards outside the fence. I was waiting for him up in the branches. I dropped a cinderblock right on his skull and split it wide open. I thought he was dead and I was going to hat up ... but I could see him breathing, so I dragged him back to the fence and screamed up at the guards. They threw him in the Hole when he got out the hospital, and I got to go home.”

  “That was good.”

  “Yeah. But I didn’t have no home, so they put me in this foster home upstate. It was just like the joint—they fucking beat you and you worked all day on this fucking farm. They told me I’d have to stay until I was eighteen. I split from there, too. I was going to burn down the motherfucker’s barn, but I didn’t want to get a freak-jacket if they ever picked me up again.”

  “You learned a lot earlier than I did,” Wesley told him. “Yeah, the only way we get to beat them even a little bit is to beat ourselves. It’s like...”

  Wesley pulled a soft pillow off the kid’s cot and held it in front of him.

  “Here. Punch this, as hard as you can.”

  The kid viciously slammed his fist into the pillow, deforming it but not tearing the cover.

  “You see how it comes right back?” Wesley asked, fluffing it up. “You see how you can’t hurt it no matter how hard you hit it? That’s what their system is like, I think ... I think now, anyway.”

  “You can blow up a pillow.”

  “Not a real good one ... it’s so soft and flexible, it keeps readjusting ... but it fucking stays a pillow—like that bitch marrying that general. There’s got to be another way, but I can’t figure it. That’s what you’re here to do. Me, I was here to clear the shit out the way for you.”

  “This means you’re going home?”

  “No. Not now. There’s still some of it I do understand ... some more shit to clean up. When I go home, I’m going to leave you a clean piece of paper to draw on. You stay in from now on—I’m going out and I’m going to look around. The next time I leave here with stuff, I won’t be coming back ... a whole mess of motherfuckers not going to be coming back then. I know this: it’s gonna be right here—no more of this overseas stuff for us. Right here, right in our country.”

  “It’s not our country.”

  “Then whose is it? If we can’t have it, maybe nobody can have it.”

  “Nobody can blow up America....”

  “No? I can sure as hell make them think somebody can.”

  81/

  The next morning, the Firebird slipped out of the garage and made its way up Water Street and then over to the FDR. Wesley followed the Drive to the 59th Street Bridge and crossed into Queens; he took Northern Boulevard through Long Island City, Woodside, and Jackson Heights, watching the neighborhoods change past his eyes.

  He crossed Junction Boulevard and into Corona. By the time he reached 104th Street, it was as much a slum as anything Wesley had seen in Manhattan. A young black man, built like a human fire hydrant with huge tattoos on his arms, crossed in front of Wesley’s windshield. He glanced into the Firebird and caught Wesley’s eye. He’s going to do the same thing as I am, Wesley thought, but the black man’s expression never changed.

  Wesley crossed 114th, passed Shea Stadium, and followed the signs to the Whitestone Bridge. As the Firebird climbed over the bridge, Wesley saw LaGuardia Airport on his left. He threw two quarters into the exact-change basket and followed the signs to Route 95 North.

  Wesley saw the giant crypt they called Co-Op City on his right and thought about dynamite. It’d take a fucking nuclear attack, he thought. Anyway, it was full of old people, and they couldn’t breed anymore.

  Wesley kept driving at a sedate fifty-five until he saw the signs for Exit 8. He turned off then; right to North Avenue and then right again, driving through downtown New Rochelle. Moving aimlessly, guided by something he didn’t understand but still trusted, Wesley drove past Iona College on his right and then turned right on Beechmont. He followed this up a hill surrounded by some lavish houses until he reached a long, narrow body of water.

  This was Pinebrook Boulevard and Wesley noted the NO THRU TRUCKING signs near the large 30 m.p.h. warnings. He followed Pinebrook until he reached Weaver Street. A furrier’s truck passed him, doing at least forty-five. He turned left and followed the street to Wilmot Road, then he ran across a pack of long-haired white kids with SCARSDALE ENVIRONMENTAL CORPS lettered on their T-shirts, aimlessly hanging around an open truck with a bunch of earth-working tools in its bed. Wesley saw a light-green Dodge Polara police car, its discreet white lettering tastefully proclaiming its functions and duties. Wesley saw St. Pius X Church just ahead and turned left onto Mamaroneck Road. He drove steadily down this road until he saw a sprawling, ultra-modern structure on his left. He swung the car between the gates and motored slowly toward the entrance. The sign told Wesley all he needed to know: HOPEDALE HIGH SCHOOL.

  The kids hanging around the campus hardly glanced at the cheap-shit Firebird. They sat on polished fenders of exotic cars and looked at Wesley briefly. They were creatures from another planet to him. But he didn’t need that excuse....

  It took fifty-five minutes to get back into Manhattan and only another twenty to get into the garage. The kid was waiting for him. “I went to your place to see if the dog wanted to go upstairs and run around,” he said. “I couldn’t even get in the door.”

  “I know—he’s like me. This time, I’ll take him with me.”

  “What do you need?” the kid asked.

  “I need a refrigerator truck with some very professional lettering on the sides. I need a dual exhaust system on it and flex-pipe connectors to reach them from the back up into the box.”

  “Who’s gonna be in the box?”

  “They all are, this time. Now listen to me; there’s a lot more. I need a two-hundred-gallon tank with a high-speed inlet valve, and I need a mushroom of plastic explosive from the roof down ... so everything in the truck explodes toward the ground, not up into the air. I need fifty hundred-pound bars of pure nickel and I need about twenty of those pressure bottles they keep helium in. Now listen: buy this stuff if you can. If you got to steal it, leave anyone you find right there. This is the last time and it’s got to be perfect.”

  “I’ll get it all, Wesley.”

  “And find out when school opens each day at Hopedale High—it’s a 914 area code—and class hours, if you can. The Westchester Library’ll have a floor plan of the building, too.”

  It took the kid almost five weeks to assemble all the equipment. Inside the garage stood a huge white refrigerator truck with PASCAL’S FINEST BEEF FROM ARGENTINA lettered in a flowery, blood-red script. The tank was installed inside. Wesley and the kid screwed off the top, laid it on its side on the floor of the truck, and carefully loaded in the nickel bars.

  “With the meat shortage, those assholes won’t think nothing strange about a rich man ordering a lot of beef,” Wesley said. “This is what we do now, we extract the carbon monoxide and fill the tanks, then we—”

  “Just from the truck’s exhaust?”

  “That crap is only seven percent carbon monoxide—we need pure stuff.”

  “I guess seven percent can snuff you all right,” the kid said. “Like when those kids checked out together ... in their car?”

  “Yeah, but not quick enough ... and it don’t work in the open air. When we play the right stuff over the pure nickel inside a pressurized tank at exactly fifty degrees centigrade, we get perfect nickel carbonyl, right? That’s one million times as potent as cyanide. It’ll work in open air and it has an effective range
of about five miles if there’s no wind. But the explosion’s got to be light—we might blow this stuff all up in the air and the extra heat would screw things up, okay?”

  “You want a steady fifty degrees centigrade, right?”

  “Yeah,” Wesley confirmed. “Can you get this truck to reach it and hold it?”

  “Sure. That’s only about one-hundred-and-twenty-two Fahrenheit—I looked it up. These rigs work both ways—they can heat as well as cool ... no problem.”

  “Okay,” Wesley said, “here’s the deal. Under pressure, this gas’ll set up in about ten minutes ... enough to fill the big tank after the small tanks of carbon monoxide are emptied. I need the explosive so that when I blast it all open, it’ll mushroom low. It gets too high, it won’t do the job for us. This is a nice, heavy gas—it should stay low.”

  “How you know it’ll work?”

  “We’re going to test it first. In one of the small tanks with just a small piece of the nickel. We’ll stuff it into this,” he said, holding up the pressure tank for the miniature blowtorch. “You’ll be with me on the test. And then that’s all, right?”

  The kid was already silently at work and didn’t answer.

  82/

  Two days later, the experiment was ready. The cab pulled out—Wesley driving, the kid in the back. The kid was dressed in chinos and a blue denim work shirt. He carried a duffel bag over his shoulder. In his pocket was a roll of bills totaling $725. It was 11:15 p.m. when the cab pulled up past the corner of Dyer and 42nd. The kid stepped quickly out of the back seat and walked toward the Roxy Hotel.

  The kid looked nervous as he approached the desk clerk, a grey, featureless man of about sixty. The kid pulled a night’s rent from the big roll—the .45 automatic was clumsily stuck into his belt, not completely covered by his tattered jacket. The clerk gave him a key with 405 on it and the kid turned to climb the stairs without a word.

  Wesley entered the hotel just as the kid disappeared up the stairs. He wore his night clothing, the soft felt hat firmly on his head. Under the hat was a flat-face gas mask of the latest Army-issue type. It had replaceable charcoal filters which could be inserted in the front opening and could withstand anything but nerve gas for up to thirty-five minutes. It was held on top of Wesley’s head by elastic straps and was invisible from the front. Wesley approached the clerk, whose hand was already snaking toward the telephone.

  “Remember me?” Wesley asked.

  The clerk didn’t know Wesley’s face, but he knew what those words meant. He whirled for the phone again as Wesley slipped the gas mask into place and pressed the release valve on the miniature blowtorch. The greenish gas shot across the counter and into the clerk’s face. He coughed just once as his face turned a sickly orange. The clerk slumped to the floor, his fingers still clawing for the phone. As he hit the ground, the kid came down the stairs with a gas mask on his face, carrying a Luger with a long tube silencer. He walked deliberately past Wesley, who had already stuffed the now-exhausted gas cylinder into his side pocket and pulled out a pistol of his own.

  The kid slipped the gas mask from his face as he climbed into the front seat of the cab—the chauffeur’s cap was on his head, and the flag dropped as Wesley hit the back seat.

  The cab shot crosstown, toward the East River. The kid spoke quietly. “I had to waste one of the freaks upstairs—he came into my room with a knife before I could even close the door.”

  “You leave the room clean?”

  “Perfect—I never got a chance to even sit down. Anyway, the charge in the duffel bag will go off in another few minutes.”

  “That clerk was gone before he hit the ground,” Wesley said. “The stuff is perfect.”

  “Was he the same one?”

  “I don’t know. But he was guilty, alright.”

  The cab whispered its way toward the Slip. It was garaged by midnight.

  83/

  Thursday night, 9:30 p.m. Wesley and the kid were completing the final work on the truck.

  “Tomorrow there’ll be a full house. The Friday assembly period’s at 11:30, and there’ll be almost four hundred kids in the joint.”

  “Wesley...”

  “Yeah?”

  “How come you’re taking the gas mask?”

  “I’m not going out that way, kid. The gas’s for them, right? I won’t leave them a fucking square inch of flesh to put under their microscopes—no way they’re coming back here to look for you. You going to keep this place?”

  “I don’t know,” the kid said. “I guess so. But I’m going to find a couple other places, too ... and fix them.”

  “Yeah. And be out there, right? Everything you learn, teach— there’s a lot of men out there who’d listen, and you know how to talk to them.”

  “Women, too.”

  “They already know, kid. You see how the pillow snapped back into place in Haiti? It was a woman who held it. She must of been the one behind the old man, and the kid, too.”

  “Maybe.... It don’t matter anyway—I’ll know who to talk to.”

  “You got to be different from us, kid. We never had no partners, except in blood. I never could figure out how all those freaks run around calling each other ‘brother’—all that means is that the same womb spilled you, anyhow.

  “You’re not going to be alone, kid. You know why? ‘Cause if you are, you end up like me. Carmine thought he built a bomb, but he didn’t. I’m a laser, I think. I can focus so good I can slice anything that gets in the way. But I can’t see nothing but the target. When I was in Korea, I thought I’d be the gun and they’d point me. But it didn’t make no sense, even then. It don’t make sense to have any of the other assholes point me either....”

  “What other assholes?”

  “Like them Weathermen or whatever they call themselves—writing letters to the fucking papers about which building they going to blow up ... and blowing themselves up instead. Bullshit. But I know how they feel—they got nothing of their own to fight for, right? The blacks don’t want them; the Latinos don’t want them; the fucking ‘working class,’ whatever that is, don’t want them.... They don’t want themselves.”

  “Why didn’t the blacks want them?”

  “Want them for what? All those nice-talking creeps want is to be generals—the niggers is supposed to be their fucking ‘troops.’ The blacks can see that much, anyway.”

  “I talked to a few of them—the revolutionaries. I can’t understand what the fuck they’re talking about.”

  “Nobody can but themselves—that’s what they should stick to. It’s like a fucking whore everyone in the neighborhood gangbangs, right? You might get you some of it, but you damn sure not going to bring her home to meet your people.”

  “I would, if—”

  “—if you had people. But you not like them. Now listen; that’s what their asshole politics is like—good enough to fuck around with, but not good enough to bring home, you understand?”

  “Yeah. I guess I did even while they was talking.”

  “They’re out there, kid. Driving cabs, working in the mills, mugging, robbing, fighting, tricking ... in the Army ... all over ... there’s a lot more of us than there are of them, but we don’t know how to find each other. You got to do that ... that’s for you.”

  “Why me?”

  “Carmine had two names, right? And Pet had one and a half ... Mister Petraglia? How many names I got?”

  “One, Wesley.”

  “And how many you got, kid?”

  “I see....”

  “But they won’t. I got another name someplace—I had one in the Army and I got one in the records up in the joint and I had one that the State gave me until I really didn’t have one no more. You ever see a giant roach?”

  “No. Wesley, what’re you—?”

  “One time Carmine and me decided to kill all the fucking roaches in the joint. We made this poison, right? It was deadly, whacked them out like flies. But after a few weeks we saw all kinds of strange ro
aches around. Some were almost white-colored. And then we saw this giant sonofabitch—he musta been six inches long. And fat.”

  “That was a waterbug, Wesley.”

  “The fuck it was. I seen too many roaches to go for that—it was a goddamn mutant roach. They breed much faster than humans and they finally evolved a special roach that ate the fucking poison, you see?”

  “No.”

  “That giant roach would’ve died if Carmine and me hadn’t fed him, kid. All he could live on was the poison, and we didn’t have too much left. When we ran out of the stuff, he just died.”

  “How is that like your name?”

  “I’m like that giant roach. I can only live on the poison they usually use to kill us off ... or make us kill each other off. That’s why I’m going home tomorrow. But the poison can’t kill you—you don’t need it to live on, so you’ll be the ghost who haunts them all.”