by CS DeWildt
Lloyd took quick aim and chopped into the inside of Zeke’s wrist, using his other hand to slap and weaken the grip of the hand holding the knife. The blade flew away and skidded and clinked into the darkness. To Zeke, Lloyd felt like daddy, a son of a bitch. He dropped to the wet ground, covered and waited.
“We done?” Lloyd said. Zeke shook and nodded his head. His “yes, sir” dissolved into a crumbling gasping cough of sobs. Lloyd saw the shift of an eye and turned in time to meet the knife blade with the back of his open right hand. The blade ripped audibly into flesh, rearranging small bones and connectors. The pain was fire. The look of smug enjoyment, confidence, had left the face of Terry as he bounced on his one good leg. He twisted the knife and then tried to reel it back in. Lloyd’s hand followed, tethered to the blade. Lloyd pressed forward, shook his hand free and grabbed at Terry’s windpipe and bled all over it. The blade still in Lloyd’s palm cut deep into Terry. It frayed major bloodways and opened the trachea. Blood spilled inside the pipe and down into the lungs; the hole sprayed and spittled as he choked. The older Cutter fell to his knees, gravity yanking his throat from the knife. Lloyd ripped the blade from his palm, and again it fell to the road. He watched the blade cool, releasing the steaming heat, already icing over with a mix of blood and sleet. Lloyd moved away, his hand raining a red trail.
Zeke sat beside the car in stiffening, urine-soaked jeans. He did nothing but listen to Terry gasp and choke and die alone. He watched Lloyd shrink until even the white head was invisible in the night.
Chapter 27
Lloyd walked and bled, tick swollen with the life that leaked from him. He grabbed a flapping sheet of newspaper from a curbed trashcan and wrapped the dying hand in the funny pages. He gripped the paper tightly, stinting the blood flow, staining the black and white print, making it red all over.
The spotlight found him as he crossed Van Buren Street, back by Al Ryder’s old card shop, over the bridge where he’d drank with the Bohls the day before. He stopped and stood before the judgment of the high beam.
“Get in the car, Lloyd.” Chief’s disembodied call traveled atop the warm hum and rattle of the old cruiser’s middle-aged engine.
“I need to go to the hospital, Chief,” Lloyd said.
“Alright. Get in the car. In the back.”
Lloyd waited, felt faint; something bad was happening to him, a revolting of functions. He got inside the cab, into the warm, dark womb. The cruiser moved and light flooded the cab in an old pattern. Chief spoke.
“This is what I know. You were at the junkyard today. You had some altercation, messed up your face and painted you up pink and blue.” He held up the T-shirt.
“Where’d you get that?”
“You know where it came from. And we found the boy.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“But you know what I’m talking about.”
“I saw him and left him be.”
“Why didn’t you report it?”
“’Cause I’d be right here either way.”
“I guess you would, for that or something you done. Been a crazy day. More death and violence than I remember for a long time. I just saw the Bohl boys a bit back. They said you were with Terry and Zeke Cutter. That the case? You look a might roughed up. But then, you’re walkin’ around. How’d you leave them?” Chief looked into the rearview and Lloyd saw his eyes staring into the cage. He slid an envelope through the narrow pass-through between the bars. Lloyd took it, the Bohls’ money.
“Hospital’s the other way.”
Chief smiled. “Guess it is.”
He drove slowly, savoring the trip back to the station with a wide-lane claim over the icy pavement. It all belonged to him. The county boys would not take it away. And it was time to put this boy down.
Chapter 28
In the holding cell, Lloyd ran his hand under the cold, weak stream of the sink spigot. He wrapped the hand in the relatively clean skin of a dismantled pillow; the billowy skeleton rested in its place on the detainee cot.
Chief approached the cell and held a bar, pulled it with his weight, rattled the door lightly.
“I’d offer you a phone call, but who you going to ring?”
“Can call my Grandpa. He’s got bail.”
“Your grandpa is shit house crazy. And dead.”
Chief watched the expression. He saw the small, shivering boy. The gray eyes knew all.
“He was a sick old man; nobody’d blame you for being frustrated. You change his shitty diapers?”
“Helped him to the toilet.”
“Well, that’s not worth a sack of sand here, regarding your current situation. I got plenty of death, and your stink is all over it. I don’t think there’s a judge in the county would give you a bond.
“So, why’d you kill that boy? Why’d you take his pants down? You fiddle with his jobbies?”
Lloyd looked up from his hands. Tried to stare Chief down. Could not. “No way. Uh-uh. I did no such thing,” Lloyd said.
“You did. He shot you up with his paintball gun, and you messed with him and dropped him in that freezer.”
“Terry and Zeke shot me up. I told Al Ryder that at the station.”
“Ryder? Hew boy, so you been around him too? Death follows you, boy. You know that, right?”
“Maybe it does. But that doesn’t mean I did anything. I didn’t kill my sister. I didn’t mean to hurt my Grandma. I didn’t put that boy in the freezer.”
“Why your prints on it? Speculate on that.”
“I opened it. That’s how I knew he was there. Kids hide their booze in the dump for partying. I was looking for it.”
“And you said nothing, ‘cause you knew I’d think it was you.”
“Right. And the law isn’t my job.”
“Guilty justifications. But it ain’t my job either. Not now.”
Lloyd settled back onto his cot. “There isn’t any changing your mind is there?”
“My mind sees what it sees, same as yours,” Chief said. He let go of the cage and left to answer the telephone.
“You going to call a doctor?” Lloyd called out after Chief.
“Ain’t a doctor on the planet can help you, Lloyd. Not for what you got.”
Chapter 29
In the bedroom of the taller girl, the smoke swirled in the sugary perfumed air, a pink lava lamp cut the darkness, a black-light poster of a gnome on a mushroom glowed under a UV bulb. The girls lay on the bed in their underclothes and T-shirts, side by side, passed a joint, stared at the glow-in-the-dark stars affixed to the black ceiling.
“I had a dream about your dad.”
“Oh?” The taller girl said, smile audible.
“Not like that, pervo. I dreamed he was my dad and I was you, but still me. Does that make sense?”
The girl thought. “No. Was I in it?”
“Yeah, but you weren’t you. You were my real sister.”
“I wish we were sisters.”
“Me too, but, now I forgot what I was going to say.”
“You had a dream about my dad.”
“Yeah. That was it.”
“Great story.”
“The end.”
The girls laughed dreamily under the cover of smoky haze and dark. They smoked cigarettes for hours and talked the way they learned women should talk: all the dirty boys they’d been dirty with, the men, the other girls. As Al Ryder thought, they were queens, each a high priestess wielding fearsome powers.
Later, as sleep hovered, the shorter girl said: “I lied before.”
“About?” Her dreamland-drifting partner asked.
“About my dream. We fucked, me and your dad.”
“I knew it. After all that sister stuff.”
“That was the dream I had, the sisters thing.” She waited. “And then I really did fuck him.”
“Shut up, slut.”
“Really, while you were in the shower earlier.”
The daughter thought. “
I have those dreams. I used to feel guilty, but you can’t help your dreams. I can’t control who I sleep-fuck.”
“No. You can’t. I dreamt about that older janitor once.”
“Gross.” The girls were giddy with the lingering effects of the marijuana and the hour.
The room became quiet, and sleep teased them again. The shorter girl asked her last question: “You said ‘sleep-fuck.’ You meant ‘dream-fuck,’ right?”
“What’s the difference? Everything that happens at night is a dream.”
The shadows formed by the pink lava moved about the room, took the shape of old desires, young fears. The girls smelled it, heard it breathe. It crept in and slipped between them. It laid hands on their forms.
“Even this, right now, a dream?”
“It will be.”
And the fear took them away.
Chapter 30
Chief had his feet on the desk and the pencil tip in his ear canal before he picked up the phone. He watched Lloyd slip from the cell, sneak up behind, slap and drive the pencil through his eardrum and brain.
“This is Chief,” he said. He twirled the pencil led in his ear, scratching the itch. “Got him. Confessed and everything. I’m tellin’ you, it’s him, no question.” He listened. “Yup. Okay. See then.” Chief rested the phone back in the cradle. Clicked his heels together atop the stack of unfinished paperwork, his final caseload before the unemployment line. He felt more himself as he reached into the long, narrow desk drawer created just for bottles. They didn’t make such desks anymore. Business had forgotten the needs of men.
“Lloyd!” He drank. “Company’s comin’.”
The phone rang again. Chief downed another handful of pills, let the phone ring as he swallowed them and drank.
“Who?” Chief said into the mouthpiece. He grinned. “Both of them?” Chief looked back to the cell hall behind him, as if his prize might be stolen or blow away before its proper time. “Just the one. Okay.” He threw on his jacket, energized and alive through the ritual of the pills and steady effects of the bottle. His rotting insides could not hurt him. He was not the other man, the weak man.
“Lloyd, Lloyd, Lloyd,” he almost sang as he left the jailhouse. “You in a valley flooding with shit.”
Chapter 31
Chief stepped out of the cruiser and approached the still idling Olds. The taillights stained the exhaust red before it could escape into the night. Zeke had moved from pavement to the warm passenger seat. The hot car reeked of his urine. Terry lay freezing solid on the pavement. Chief toed the dead boy, who, in turn, rocked like a rotted tree felled on deep grass. Chief tapped the driver’s window. Zeke didn’t look at him. “Boy!” Chief pounded harder and his voice plumbed Zeke from himself. Zeke leaned over to the driver’s door slowly and rolled down the window halfway.
“Bizbang did this?”
“Yeah.”
“He cut up your brother? You hurt?”
“He did it. I ain’t hurt.”
“Have the ambulance check you out. Leave after they scoop up your brother.” Chief watched the boy’s face turn ahead again, staring at the front of the white house engulfed in the shine of the Cutter’s headlights. White, squinting faces, like deer, stared out the front bay window of the dwelling. They wanted to know what was happening so early in the morning outside their house and had made the call. Chief stood in front of the car and waved them away. The faces turned to one another, talked briefly, and then receded to nothing before the house went dark.
Chief picked up the cold knife from the pavement and returned to Zeke. The boy barely noticed Chief had opened the door until the man ripped at his body with the blade, stabbing and dragging the blade through his insides. He tried to yell, but the sound was quelled, the necessary anatomy slashed. Zeke distracted himself from his failing and watched Chief reach behind the soft, warm seats and grab the plastic bag full of worn bills. Money clutched to his chest, Chief watched Zeke, who couldn’t even begin to put the pieces together. He clutched at his bleeding torso, stemming the flow only to have it migrate beyond the dam of his cold hands and flow over them with hot death as beautiful as a song he wished he’d written.
Chapter 32
Behind the library at Elm and Vanburen, two small, tropical men lay beaten, ambulatory bones shattered. There was a good chance they’d freeze in the night if neither got up or was discovered. They were stripped of their prize monies. The events that had happened since the derby tried to hide, and the boys helped them do so as each forgot and replaced thought with dreams of the next year’s derby. In parallel worlds, each won. In this world, each bled out their dream.
When the cruiser’s lights returned, they felt safe. It was next summer. It wasn’t so cold. Things were back the way they should be.
“I’m sorry we fought so much,” John said softly.
Jason lay quiet.
Chapter 33
The boy’s father stood outside the station. He hadn’t smoked cigarettes in years, but now he lit one after another. He didn’t mind the growing headache. He knew it would recede. And it put his mind on things.
The man’s teeth chattered. He hugged himself though his form had little warmth worth holding. He gazed up at the glowing bulb illuminating the doorway of the otherwise dark police station. He wanted confused moths to flail themselves in unpredictable electron orbits around the light, touching it sporadically, singeing slowly to death with no control as they collided with the sun. It was too cold, however; the area under the awning was loaded with a distraction of cobwebs and exoskeletons with lacy wings and limbs like the finest of threads. The man looked for something to knock the webs down with, any primitive tool. He found nothing but smooth, poured concrete and a bark-lined flowerbed, freezing rose bushes.
The man rolled his eyes and called himself idiot. He was nervous. There was little sadness. The fuel for the emotion had already burned, polluted the man with a blackness that needed to be purged. He did not look academic any longer as he paced and dreamt and time-traveled through his mind’s eye. He’d forgotten his glasses and grabbed a black leather anachronism of a jacket reserved for motorcycle weather. The hair left on his balding head was pressed down here, disheveled there. He looked like a grown up, middle-aged street tough; maybe it’s what he’d been going for, maybe he was an accidental throwing together of elements.
Keith Philips waited for Chief’s headlights to meet him, for the time to see the person who murdered his only boy. Teeth continued to chatter and the man cursed every car that passed by the station that wasn’t Chief, that didn’t pull up and deliver him from his limbo. And then, when it finally arrived, his curses continued. Chief had failed. The boy was still dead.
The men entered the station silently, save for: “Sorry Keith, something I had to attend to.”
Keith stood in the dark while Chief flipped switches and entered the kitchen. The man stood in the dim light of the hallway, annoyed, sorrowed, demanding satisfaction.
“Coffee?” Chief said.
Keith then realized that coffee was the only thing in the world he needed right at that second, and his bitterness turned to gratitude. “Please.”
The foam cups steamed through the halls and then passed the dead-bolted metal door separating the front office of the station from the holding cells.
Lloyd sat up on his cot at the sound of the door, saw Chief and the man he did not know.
“This is him,” Chief said. The man looked at Lloyd.
“You’re sure?”
“As one can be.”
Lloyd stood. “I didn’t kill anybody.”
“Shut your suck hole,” Chief said. “He was at the scene. He’s been shot up by a paintball gun, your boy’s. Don’t listen to any bullshit comes out of his mouth. He’s been up to more than his share of nasty today. Haven’t you Lloyd?”
Lloyd made a tight fist with his wrapped hand until the fire shot up his arm and to his mouth and made him speak again. “I didn’t kill anybody.”
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“Not since you been here. But I got your count at seven on the day. What’s that make? Nine in all?”
Lloyd didn’t answer. He just shook his head and returned to the cot. His head was light, and his hand was dripping again.
“He killed your boy, Al Ryder at the Quik-Stop. Killed the Bohl boys for a couple hundred dollars, plus two other boys he’d been looking for all day.”
Lloyd looked at Chief. He still couldn’t find words. He was too tired, too undrunk. He shook his head again and tried to make heads or tails of the plan he’d become part of.
“What’s the odds, Lloyd? Whose blood we going to find on that knife? Terry and Zeke’s? The Bohl boys?” Chief pointed to the red-wrapped hand. “Yours?” Chief turned to the man. “He’s the one. Don’t you think for a second he ain't.”
The man reached into his jacket. He pulled out a snub-nosed revolver. He rested it between the bars, hand upon the lockbox of the door. Keith cocked the hammer. The barrel shook.
“Tell me you did it,” the man said. The gun shook harder. “Tell me you did it!”
Lloyd looked from the gun to Chief to the man to Chief again. It was the same man in each case. He saw through the man’s violent intentions, to the anguish. It was a light. It was boiling plasma in space. It would eat itself until it was nothing but a dense hole beyond sky and time. But it would not burn out today. It would last for lifetimes, recycling and playing out the same way.
