Quest SMASH

by Joseph Lallo

  “From where?”

  “From my father’s casket, where I left it ten years ago.”

  Major bent down, his knees creaking. He grabbed Samuel by the shoulders and stared at his face. “Do you still have it?” he asked in a hushed whisper.

  Samuel nodded. He reached into his front pocket and gripped the contents. He opened his fist to reveal a paperclip and several coins, but no knife.

  “I felt it just before I came into camp,” Samuel said, his words trailing as he brushed the dirt and leaves aside, expecting to find his knife where it had fallen from his pocket.

  “It’s a reflection. It’s gone,” Major said.

  “I had it with me during the hike.”

  “Are you sure you had it?”

  “I don’t know,” Samuel said. “I guess I’m not sure of much anymore.”

  Major stood and rubbed his chin. He gathered a few items together and nodded at Samuel, instructing him to do the same.

  “I’d feel better if we got moving, put some distance between us and the cloud. We can talk as we go. I’m guessing we’re a five- or six-hour hike from the Barren. I can explain a lot before we get there.”

  Samuel brushed the dirt from his pants and put both hands to his ears as if trying to keep his head together.

  “Whatever. I think it would be easier if I just ended it. I’m tired of dealing.”

  “That’s what got you here in the first place.”

  Those who fell from the noose after a suicide had a certain look about them. After speaking with many people through many reversions, Major could identify them by the look in their eye. The majority of souls in the reversion were suicides and the ones that weren’t, like Mara, remained a mystery to Major.

  “C’mon, let’s move. I still worry the cloud hasn’t gotten to all of the wolves yet.”

  ***

  “Seven.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “No, I’m not. Seven women.”

  “At one time?”

  Major smiled. The laugh lines in his face told Samuel the man had enjoyed the finer indulgences in life.

  “It was mostly me watching, but I jumped in when I could. Needed to recharge the battery a few times. Those little pills sure helped with that. The only problem was getting it back down. That’s where the whiskey on the rocks came in handy. I’d wake up and they’d all be gone. It would take my brain thirty or forty seconds to recalibrate, determine where the hell I was and what happened the night before. I never remembered everything, but enough to know the high-grade call girls don’t come cheap, and I’d have some explaining to do to my accountant.”

  Samuel pushed ahead as the path widened. He came up on Major’s right as they curved around the base of the mountain. The path descended with a gentle slope Samuel assumed would empty them into the Barren. Samuel felt a renewed bounce in his step as he let the reversion take a backseat to Major’s tale.

  “How far back?” he asked Samuel.

  “Huh?”

  “Childhood? High School? The drug years? How far back do you want me to go?”

  “How long until we reach the Barren?” Samuel asked.

  “Long enough to get into the good stuff,” Major said.

  He pushed his headband up on his forehead and looked over a shoulder as if measuring the progress of the cloud advancing from the west.

  “The path turns southwest for a bit before straightening out back to the east. Just want you to know I’m not walking us straight into the cloud.”

  Samuel nodded. He drew a deep breath and exhaled an exaggerated gust of air into the otherwise silent surroundings. “I can’t get used to the silence.”

  Major smiled. He paused for a moment while his brain decided what he would share with Samuel. “We grew up in East Harlem, Spanish Harlem, before Clinton moved his office there and made it trendy again.”

  Samuel frowned, becoming impatient with his own memory. The names struck a familiar chord, like recognizing the face of a lost acquaintance but not remembering his name. He decided to let Major continue, and he hoped his memory would eventually catch up to fill in the gaps of the world he once knew.

  “My dad was a son of a bitch. He’d come home from the corner bar and beat the shit out of my mom. My brother and I, we’d hide under our beds. Not because he didn’t know we were there. He knew. We stayed underneath it because he couldn’t get his barrel-chest far enough in to grab us. Anyway, my mom was from the barrio, and I don’t ever remember finding out how they hooked up. Quite a scene, right? Some pale, red-haired Irishman with a sassy, Latina girl on his arm.”

  Samuel looked at Major’s face and saw the mix of cultures. The man’s nose was bulbous and red, but roots of black hair snuck out from under the ponytail.

  “By the time I was sixteen, I was running with all the wrong folks. You know the story. We’d break into bodegas and go right for the register. Later on, we’d even take a crack at those little ATMs shoved in the corner of the market. You remember those? The ones that would nail you with a five-dollar fee on top of what your bank would charge?”

  Samuel sniffled.

  “School sucked, and by the time I was seventeen, I’d had enough of the petty shit. I got greedy, just like everyone else. The subway stop at East 90th would provide us some sweet marks, the assholes that lived on the Upper East Side in their multi-million-dollar townhomes with iron bars on the doors and a blinking security pad at the front. We’d jump ’em and get the cash when they came out of the station. Not sure why so many got out on the wrong side of Broadway, but we’d make the most of it.

  “Summer of ’88 I headed to the Jersey Shore with the guys in the crew. They had a few dago contacts in Atlantic City getting into the hooker and blow trades. Seemed like slapping bitches around was easier than risking a cuff in Manhattan. That’s when I first realized I had it.”

  “Had what?” asked Samuel.

  “The nose. I could smell deals a mile away. Drug deals at first, which I eventually turned into legit businesses, like used cars.”

  Major laughed at his own joke. He looked at the confused look on Samuel’s face and decided to continue. “I was great at the table games, too. Five- and ten-dollar blackjack led me to the high-roller rooms. I played where winnings came with a chick on your arm and a vial of blow. AIDS was breaking then, but when you’re strung out on crack and cards, it’s not much of a concern. Not sure how in the hell I escaped that, but I did. You tag so many asses without a jimmy hat, you’re rolling the dice.

  “I wasn’t much of a family man. I mean, I had a wife and kids, but I wasn’t part of the family. My money provided housekeepers, pool boys, nannies, whatever we needed, but the money couldn’t listen to my wife or help my kids with homework. The family made me legit, somehow gave me the air of a responsible citizen. That’s the thing with the white-collar criminals. They sit next to you at the PTA meetings, you see them in the grocery store, you wave at them as they walk their dogs. Hell, some of them even pick up dog shit with a blue plastic bag, yet they were robbing taxpayers blind.”

  “The bailout?” Samuel asked. His face twisted, as if someone else had used the term.

  “Oh, you bet I got a chunk of that. We all did. By the time the mid-2000s rolled around, I had several business holdings in various countries. I had secret offshore accounts and enough capital to pay my mid-managers hundreds of thousands in bonuses. We had holiday blowouts that made the gangster movies look like children’s birthday parties. Women everywhere, and not the skanks from the street. I’m talking top-notch girls, good pussy. The kind that makes you forget your name.”

  Samuel smiled.

  “By 2008, I had offices in Manhattan and Newark. Jersey was a dump, but it was easier to hide assets there than it was in the five boroughs. I had departments trading mortgages for years, and we all knew that shit was going to crash. Anyone—including the Fed—that claims they didn’t know is a bullshitter. An unspoken p
anic rippled through our ranks about six months before the shit hit the fan. Guys were getting out fast, selling assets, liquidating the adjustable-rate loans. We all knew those were going to kill us. By the time Goldman Sachs became the media’s whipping boy, I had stashed four hundred million I thought would be invisible. That’s what I thought.”

  Samuel noticed a hitch in Major’s throat. His pace on the trail quickened as they turned directly into the path of the cloud soundlessly rolling over trees as it approached the east.

  “But then a few of my guys turned. They had been working with the FBI the entire time. I had no idea. These were guys that had been with me a long time, going all the way back to our private bordellos and roulette wheels in the shadow of the boardwalk in Atlantic City. These were guys I trusted with my life.

  “My wife had left and taken the kids with her by then. My new girl tipped me off. I was shacked up with this broad in one of my Manhattan penthouses. I can’t remember exactly how we got together, but she was doing some hardcore porn at the time. I saw her in a film and knew I wanted a piece of that ass. Anyways, she rang my cell about 11:30 in the morning, which I knew was trouble because she never got out of bed before noon. She told me the Feds had been there and were on their way to my office. She said they had warrants and paperwork and all the bullshit they needed to put me away for a long time.”

  Samuel stopped. As the path curved to the right and descended down the gentle slope of the mountain, he saw the tops of several cabins. They looked exactly like the others, and the curvature of the land would no doubt reveal more as they approached. Major followed Samuel’s gaze.

  “Yep. That’s it. The Barren. We still got another hour to reach it.”

  “So what did you do when the cops arrived?” Samuel asked.

  “I had to take care of things before they did. There was no way I was going to rot in a cell, become Bubba’s girlfriend. I couldn’t do that. Plus, the lead prosecutor was a dickhead from way back. In fact, I think I may have jumped him in a subway station, back in the day.

  “After I got the call, I went to a hidden panel in my office. I didn’t even have time to open the safe. Even if I did, what was I going to do? They were coming. I couldn’t find the bullets to the revolver under my desk, so I pushed through a drawer of sex toys until I found the velvet rope. I had glass walls in my office that gave you a stunning view of Manhattan. That turned the ladies on, and they’d even let me tie them up. Some of those lays got crazy.

  Anyway, I stood on a chair and pushed the ceiling tile to the side. With the rope in one hand, I tossed it over a steel beam. The end came back to my other hand, and by that time I could hear them coming. The private elevator dinged a single tone. Footsteps in the marble foyer. If I had more time, who knows? I might have reconsidered. But I didn’t. I tied a knot at the top underneath the beam and took the other end and twisted it around my neck. I wasn’t schooled in the knot-tying, Boy Scout bullshit, so I triple looped it just to make sure it wouldn’t give. I remember standing on the chair with that noose around my neck, and I was laughing. Maybe it was the absurdity of it all, or maybe I had lost my mind by that point.

  “The door to the waiting room slammed against the wall, which meant the raid was seconds from reaching me. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and leapt off the chair. I think they came through at the same time, because I remember someone shouting and I felt hands grasping my legs. But they were too late. Those knots held better than they were supposed to because they snapped my neck.”

  Samuel stopped walking and turned to face Major. He shook his head and coughed. “Is that all you remember?”

  Major shook his head. “I remember waking up at the foot of a tree. I remember looking around and seeing other ropes hanging from branches and dangling next to streamers of yellow caution tape.”

  “You woke up here, in this place?” Samuel asked.

  “Not far from your swingin’ tree, my friend. But it wasn’t my first rodeo. I quit counting how many times I’ve dropped from that cursed tree.”

  Chapter 9

  Samuel peered down the path at the Barren. He saw three cabins. Although not identical to the two he already discovered, they looked the same.

  Major led them through towering trees and into the valley. He had gone quiet since finishing his story, and Samuel wondered if the retelling put an emotional drain on the old man. Major looked over his shoulder as he walked, measuring the pace of the cloud as it approached from the west.

  Samuel could see two people at the Barren, but they were still too far away for him to make out features. The shapes appeared to be gathering things off the ground.

  “A week, maybe two.”

  The comment caught Samuel by surprise. He stopped walking and shifted his weight to one hip, waiting for Major to elaborate. When he didn’t, Samuel spoke.

  “Until the cloud arrives? Until this, uh, reversion gets here?”

  Major didn’t answer. He kept maneuvering down the path, stepping over jagged rocks and debris, trying not to twist an ankle in the process.

  Samuel followed Major. As they approached the Barren, the shapes began to take form, a man and a woman. He noticed the eyes first. It wasn’t their gazes so much as the hurt behind them. Samuel shivered and felt an ache in his heart. The woman appeared to be in her twenties, thin yet magnetic. He imagined she was once an actress or possibly a singer. She had scraggly, black hair that hadn’t been washed in days. Remnants of makeup were brushed across her face in random places. Eye shadow ran down her cheeks like cracks in a porcelain cup. She held her lips together, creating the single line of her mouth. The woman’s pointy nose sat in perfect symmetry with the rest of her face. Samuel flushed, realizing he had been staring longer than was socially acceptable. He looked at the ground and then back up at the woman—this time, his eyes locked on her neck. Underneath her jaw and across her collarbone was a diagonal black bruise. The discolored skin made a line toward her heart, and the bruise looked recent, but not fresh.

  The man stepped in front of the woman and broke Samuel’s gaze. He sneered at Samuel and shook his head. “Who’s this?” he asked, directing his question at Major.

  Major walked up and placed a hand on the man’s shoulder. He smiled. “It’s speeding up, Kole.”

  The man shook his head and nodded his chin toward Samuel, who stood behind and to the right of Major.

  “Find him in Aokigahara?”

  “Yeah,” Major said. “He landed in the Sea of Trees, like the rest of us.”

  “We don’t need his help,” Kole said.

  The woman stared at the top of the path, through Samuel, as though he didn’t exist.

  “Posturing,” Major said. “He’s trying to act like a tough guy.”

  Samuel watched as Kole put his hands on his hips. His dark, rich hair crept far enough down on his forehead that it could have been fake. He wore a tattered, white T-shirt that accentuated the taut muscles underneath. A black belt fastened black jeans on his slender waist. Black leather completed the outfit. A sleeve of tattoos full of cryptic symbols and half-naked women circled his right arm, and a needle track ran up his left. The top three punctures sat atop a blue, swollen vein that oozed pus. Two red lines bisected both of his earlobes where earrings once hung.

  “We’re wasting time. Did you find anyone who can slip?” the woman asked Major, indicating Samuel could not be the man for the job.

  “I was hoping someone else would here, at the Barren.”

  “Well, nobody’s here but us,” Kole said. He kicked at the dirt with the toe of his boot.

  The woman stepped past Kole and Major until she stood face-to-face with Samuel. He caught a whiff of vanishing fragrance, masked by natural body oils, and then it scuttled off, leaving the vacant emptiness of this place with its silent stillness. He felt her eyes latch onto him again, and he could not turn away. Samuel’s mouth went dry, and he felt a tingling in his feet.

  “What’s
yer name?” she asked.

  “Samuel.”

  The woman nodded. “I’m Mara. That charmer over there is Kole.”

  Samuel dropped his head to Mara and then turned to look at Kole.

  “He’s a dick. You’ll get used to it.”

  Kole glared at Mara. “Fuck you,” he said. “And fuck you.” He pointed at Samuel.

  Major laughed, tossing his head back and grabbing his abdomen with both hands.

  “Kids, kids, stop. You’ll have time for your schoolyard scraps tonight. For now, we need to get our supplies in order. Kole, make sure we have enough wood. You know how hard it is to maintain a fire here. Mara, get the gruel going. I think it’s been days since Sammyboy here ate, and he’s going to start feeling it soon.”

  Kole waved a hand at Mara and Samuel. He shuffled past the cabin and toward the edge of the tree line.

  “Whatever you say, old-timer. Apparently someone put you in charge when we weren’t paying attention.”

  Major smiled and put his arm around Samuel. Mara turned and headed into one of the cabins, shutting the door behind her.

  “You and I need to examine some things, see if we can punch a hole in this place. Based on the speed of the death cloud over there, we’re running out of time.”

  Samuel shook his head, trying to use the physical motion to make sense of the situation. After several more attempts, he realized it wasn’t working.

  “We have to get out of here,” he said.

  Major turned and looked at the cloud, then toward the cabin with Mara, then beyond the path to where Kole was picking up firewood.

  “Without a doubt,” he said.

  ***

  Major poured the steaming liquid into a filthy clay mug, where it bubbled with a light froth.

  “Drink,” he said to Samuel.

  Samuel sniffed the mug and wrinkled his nose. “A hint of licorice?” he asked. “I hate licorice.”

  “It’s one of the few things in this place you’ll still taste. That’s gotta be better than a colorless, bland drink.”