by Lee Lamothe
She was inside the shed, watching the slaves goof. There were tattered comic books. Bottles of sweet athletic drinks were being kicked around. Chocolate-bar wrappers and cookie packages littered. A man was receiving enough of a handjob from another man to create an acceptable vein on his penis, his eyes anxious, a needle waiting in his hand. Two women were having a speed dialogue involving cartoon characters and an astronaut. A speeder who’d brought his baby girl with him was huddling her in the crook of his right arm while he clenched a length of tubing around his left bicep. He looked Jaggeresque in a body-fitting horizontally striped T-shirt that seemed to constrict his narrow body under his oversized skull.
When she heard Chyna Lily’s cowbell bell tinkle up at the house, Aurora arranged her face into slack desire and left the madhouse of the shed. Walking slowly up the path, she kept her eyes on the ground. Chyna was terrified of snakes. Finding a snake and killing it meant endless taps. She was pretending to kill one when a van pulled up at the main house and Jerry Kelly climbed out of the driver’s seat. He went to the rear of the van, opened the doors, and pulled a young man out by the arm. The young guy, like Jerry Kelly, wore a black T-shirt and black jeans. He had a red bandana tied around his eyes. Jerry Kelly pulled the bandana down around his neck. “Unload the fucking things,” Jerry Kelly said, keeping his eyes on Aurora’s progress. “Get them down to the shed.”
An unwrapped money-counting machine leaned against the side of the house. There was a cardboard box of red elastic bands, another of industrial tape dispensers, a box of black felt markers, wads of clear plastic kitchen bags, and a compression device wrapped in thick bubble wrap. A row of flattened canvas bags were littered in the yard. Bundles of stenciled cardboard cartons were stacked beside the van.
Jerry Kelly was jovial. “Chyna, how are our minions?” He didn’t look at her. He kept his eyes on Aurora. “Behaving?”
“Fine, Jerry.”
“And this? Who’s this morsel?”
Chyna Lily looked with dread away from Jerry Kelly’s examination of Aurora. “Aurora. She came up early for the harvest.” Her voice was reluctant, distant.
“Wow,” he said. “Turbo.”
Chyna slowly led Aurora around him. “I’m going to hit Aurora up and play some music.”
Jerry Kelly was bland and smiling. “Far out.” He let Aurora pass closely, as though sniffing her and the air her anxious motion stirred up. He watched her through the open door and said, “Mmm. Stinky.”
Chyna closed the door and leaned against it and thought about getting the shotgun. She felt a foreboding emanating off Jerry Kelly and knew the grinning wrecker was going to damage some part of her good life.
“Chy? Chy?” He thumped on the door. “The kid’s putting the stuff down at the shed. We’re heading back out for a bit. You and Aurora okay until we get back? Anything we can get you guys?”
She wanted to say: double-ought shotgun shells, two sleeping bags, twine, and a new shovel, but she called out: “We’re okay, Jerry.”
“Great, pal. See you in a sec.”
She watched out the window as Jerry Kelly blinded the clone with the red bandana and shoved him into the rear of the van.
The nearest lake was dead from acid rain and no one fished there. Aware of his own stink, naked except for a pair of cheap plastic flipflops, Marko Markowitz sat dozing in a rowboat tied off the dock, beer cans scattered in the leaked water at his feet. His fleshy and no-longer boyish body was smeared with after-bite and stinging sweat. Angry branches at the stash had had their way with him, leaving long red rips on his shoulders and arms.
A few yards out his floatplane bobbed.
It had taken serious logistics to get two of the slaves to the stash, load the float plane, run the money to the dead lake, and return to get another load of dough. Jerry Kelly masterminded it. It took a lot of trips. On the last pickup, Markowitz made Jerry Kelly come with him. He didn’t want Jerry and the money alone in the same place at the same time any more than necessary. Jerry’s clone, Gary, arrived at the dead lake with the rest of the slaves in the van in time to start the runs to Chyna Lily’s compound. A skinny speed freak followed the van up from the city in Jerry’s Saab, told under pain of death that he’d better not leave a blemish on or in it.
Marko didn’t want Chyna Lily to see him. Rumours of the fabulous Marko millions were rife. Even the ditzy old dyke would quickly figure out what product the slaves were processing if she recognized him. As far as she knew, Jerry Kelly needed slaves to do some heavy lifting.
Waiting, Marko foggily evaluated his endeavour to date. The transit to Chyna Lily’s was just about done. The next phase would require patience and the application of Jerry Kelly’s people skills: whipping the slaves into some form of efficiency and superintending the sorting, counting, compressing, packaging, and transport of the dough to the city where it would be available for boiling. Then the money would be brought to wherever the Presto wanted it for shipment into Canada. There, Presto would insist on a simultaneous swap for Zoe. Somewhere, there at the end, crazy Jerry would off the Presto and split with his end. Somewhere in there crazy Jerry would probably make some devious move against Marko, but Marko would be expecting it, whatever it was, and somehow avoid his gambit. Marko would then gather together Zoe and Julia Gurr, hug his precious little family, and together they’d all make a fresh start.
He was halfway through another dreamy fat joint, wondering if Jerry Kelly still had the parts to make everything work, when he heard an engine on the road. He stirred and put his hand on a pistol in his lap. He sat up, recognizing the sound of the van.
Jerry Kelly stopped the van behind his silver Saab, energetically hopped out with a piece of cord in his hands, and opened the rear doors. He guided blindfolded Gary out of the rear. Jerry Kelly waved at Marko and put his finger to his lips. He seized Gary’s arms from behind and suddenly slammed him against the side of the van. He twisted his arms behind his back and secured them with the piece of cord, and dragged him to the water’s edge, yelling at him to keep the fuck still, you fucking pussy rat motherfucker. His voice was harsh but he was smiling widely at Marko. He made a gun of his forefinger and thumb and raised his eyebrows. Marko got out of the rowboat and handed him the semi-automatic, his face saying What-the-fuck? Jerry Kelly forced Gary to kneel and noisily operated the slide on the gun. He pressed the end of the barrel at the back of his head.
“You fucking rat. You fucking rat cocksucking douchebag. Who’d you and Mona fucking tell?”
“Jerry, Jerry,” Gary screamed trying to twist his head away from the gun. “No fuck no Jesus Jerry fuck.”
“Lying motherfucking prick. Who? Who? Who’d you tell, you scumbag scuzzy fuck?” Jerry Kelly’s face was a paroxysm of glee. His head seemed too small to contain his good humour. He pointed out to Marko with his free hand where Gary was wetting himself and made a face of appreciation. As Gary blubbered, Jerry Kelly made his own silent face of pantomime blubbering, bobbling his head back and forth pathetically, his mouth in the upside-down smile of a desolate clown. His eyes were merry. “Tell me now, or you’re going under the fucking lake.”
Gary made bubbling sounds.
“Lying fucking prick,” Jerry Kelly said, looking around at the empty lake and was unable to contain his mirth. Laughter snorted from his nose. He aimed the gun past Gary’s head and fired, with his other hand back-handing a blow where the tip of the gun barrel had been. Gary’s head jerked and his body went spasmodic and he fell forward into the scrub, his face in the dirt and his ass in the air. He toppled over onto his side. The gunshot echoed through the lifts and hollows of the landscape. A flock of blackbirds aimed themselves at the sky and erupted out of faraway tree.
“Get up, c’mon, get the fuck up. Quit fucking around, Gary, we got work to do.” Jerry Kelly handed Marko the gun, and reached forward and untied Gary’s hands. He pushed the bandana down off his eyes. He tapped with increasingly less gentleness on Gary’s cheeks until his eyes opened
. “Gary, you okay there, bud? Yikes, that was a close one. Sorry, pal. I was having a rare Cambodian moment.”
Gary said fuck a half dozen times, Jerry Kelly’s hand on his neck, massaging. “Don’t worry, Gar’, you’re cool, man. Take a break, have a smoke, then we’re into heavy-lifting time. This’ll be the last load.”
Marko reached into the lake beside the rowboat and fished out a beer. He snapped the tab off and brought it to Gary. “Jerry, that was … Well, wow. Fuck.”
Jerry Kelly gave him a proud smile and watched Gary bubble at the beer. “Gary, you ever heard the expression: eat a toad for breakfast and the day can only get better?”
“No. No, Jerry. Yeah. I think.” Gary was eager to get it right and seemed to be wishing he spoke even a little Cambodian. “Maybe.”
“Well, pal, you just ate the toad. Grab up your nuts, finish your beer, and let’s quit fucking around. A better day ahead, trust me.”
Marko was still shaking his head in admiration. Jerry Kelly still had it, no question. He still had his chops.
The knapsacks were piled inside and outside the slaves’ quarters. Jerry Kelly busied himself smoking joints and trying to picture Cambodia on a map that glowed inside his head. He went up to the house and banged on the door. Above him, Marko’s plane buzzed the main house, did a wide circle as though conducting an inspection, then with a wag of its wings reluctantly disappeared, west.
“Chyna? Chy? You there, girl?” He laughed and pounded heavily on the door. “C’mon, Chy, get your tongue out of that outstanding chick and let me in.”
The door opened a crack and Aurora peeked out at the smiles wreathed on Jerry Kelly’s face. He sparkled his eyes at her and said, “Yum.”
Marko Markowitz, smoking a resinous joint and drinking a can of beer, headed west for a few minutes after buzzing Chyna Lily’s main house. It looked like an idyllic scene, a long log house surrounded by deep dense trees. A scattering of outbuildings, a haphazard of sudden little shingle roofs, some lean-tos, then a winding stream and the brief white foam of a waterfall. It looked like a place where gentle souls toiled happily in a silence of peace, leaving their workshop in the evening for a pleasant communal feed around an iron-bellied stove. Nights of distant string music and flutes. Ghostly dances around flickering bonfires; jumping glowing sparks. Poetry. Fireflies. Butterflies. Markowitz sighed.
But he knew there was a certain unhealthy softness beneath the thin crust of that tranquility. At the farthest corner of the property he thought he saw tiny figures dashing for cover under trees, their arms pointed at the sky, at him. He thought of dive-bombing them in friendship, feeling bad that he had no bales of nourishment and essentials aboard to toss down. But he brightened at the thought of Jerry Kelly down there, making moves to hook up Chyna Lily. Jerry Kelly was the penultimate wrecker, an ape. But Chyna was no joke, in her own right. Jerry Kelly might be cheerfully crazy, but Chyna was intense in her insanity. Marko, balancing Jerry Kelly’s Cambodian caper with Chyna’s seemingly endless appetite for doomed and lethal love, predicted interesting times for all those little folks down below. He made a solemn sign of benediction to them all, to his people.
But it was, he knew, none of his business, as long as Jerry survived his games with pal Chyna. Sucking at the joint, Marko started smiling, thinking about Jerry Kelly telling the wet kid he was having a Cambodian moment.
As Marko adjusted his course over lands and lakes to his cottage compound, he wondered what his other palsy-walsy, the Presto, was up to. Moving around in his shadow life, putting together a variation, Marko assumed, running a little on panic at the thought of Zoe helpless in Mexico at the hands of drooling beaners.
And then he started giggling when he realized two things at once: that he was still naked except for his flipflops. And, alarmingly, that the fuel gauge was leaning left at a decidedly unfriendly angle.
He flicked his fingernail at the glass dial and giggled louder. “Whoops.”
Chapter 20
The naked slaves sat on broken furniture or on bags and boxes of money piled against the walls of the shed. They were just high enough to function but not so far gone they’d start emitting speed riffs without punctuation and shouting laundry lists of their inner dream experiences and hopes and secret details of intergalactic conspiracies. They stared at the creature of their salvation, Emperor Jerry, and appeared to be listening intently as he organized them into a count crew.
Haig, the skinny speeder who’d driven up in the Saab, was put in charge. Patient Jerry Kelly took him a half-dozen times through the procedure before he mastered it. How to supervise the slaves as they took bundles of bills and removed any elastic bands and paperclips; loading the feeder of the currency sorter, then removing the sorted bills from the sort pockets, stacking them by denomination, and re-feeding them for counting. After noting the total in each bundle, Haig’s chore was to copy the number off the display onto a yellow sticky note, stick it to the top of each bundle, then put it through the compressor, flattening and banding it. Haig thought the whole concept of technology was cool. Naked Aurora watched. She’d been warned by Chyna Lily of the carnivorous dangers of Jerry Kelly and was deeply attracted to him. She’d learned in life that the most ruthless could deliver the most. In Jerry Kelly’s shadow Chyna Lily was just a mark in a muumuu.
Through the open door, Jerry Kelly could see Gary sitting in the porch, eying the shotgun leaning on the steps. The ground around the shed was strewn with heaps of slaves’ clothing.
Jerry Kelly slapped his hands together. “Okay, team. Everybody got Chyna’s vitamins pumping, doing their good works? Enough chocolate bars? We’re ready to work here, folks. When we’re done, Chy’s got treats for all. Chyna’s a good woman, eh? Like the mom we always wanted.”
He was bursting with bonhomie, enjoying the concentration camp aspect of the shed, the naked malnourished frames, the big eyes eager to please. “It looks like a lot of work, sports, but really, it really isn’t. Let’s give it a shot, okay?” He stood with his hands on his hips, looking from face to face. “One last thing. Pay attention now.” He reached behind himself and picked up an axe. He hefted it like a baseball batter and gave a wide sad smile. “Any of you fuckers steal a single fuckin’ nickel, try to put a five dollar bill up your ass, I’m going after it with this. So don’t fuck around, don’t get fancy. You want to get creative, find a new vein.” Lumberjack Jerry put the axe back behind him and smacked his hands together. “Okay, let’s get at it. Love your work; work your love.”
Admiringly, Aurora said: “Heavy.”
Marko Markowitz, mindful of the ramifications of a lack of fuel to the engine, took the little plane lower. Far ahead he recognized the curves and bays of his lake. From the air his cottage compound looked like all the others, happy safe places for recreation and relaxation. He took the plane lower still and listened with growing unhappiness as the engine began stuttering its hunger. He came in low over a sailboat, the almost recognizable folks aboard waving at first, then pointing up at the hesitant motor music of his distress. The boathouse became visible, then the finger of his dock. There was no hopefulness in the engine’s sounds, which went from stutters to coughing. The sounds of silence between the noises seemed to be getting longer.
Naked Marko on the bottom of the lake, he thought, trying to focus through his weed-cured brain. Naked Marko a long leisurely lunch for the tiny crayfish he sometimes found inside the bass he caught in the evenings. Naked Marko the thing of jokes and snickers, his eyes and genitals munched by all species of little things that lost their innocence and weren’t so cute when they had at you in the dark deep when no one was watching.
He amazed himself. His eyes and his hands found the common purpose of survival. It was as if they knew the little chewing things at the bottom of the lake would go for the blanched fingertips and the gawking eyes first.
At the last second, as his ears recognized the absolute silence of the engine, water surface and plane met with a smoothness th
at astounded him. If he’d been straight, he believed, he could never have made such a kiss-down. The little plane rode forward on leftover thrust and stopped, bobbing on the gentle waves. He sat until he was certain he’d actually stopped.
He unlatched the wing door, stepped onto the strut, and slipped into the water. His cottage looked to be a quarter mile away, maybe a little less. A point of land stuck into the water off to the left and was much closer than the compound. It would be hard going between the point and the cottage but he decided he’d be safer reaching the first land available, even if it meant a stroll through rough brush. He struck out gently, deciding the swim would become the first step in a disciplined regimen of health and fitness, if not to a buff and sculpted Marko, then certainly something a little more presentable when squiring Julia Gurr about the town. His strokes were powerful and rhythmic and it seemed he reached the point in very little time. Trudging heavily out of the water he decided that maybe he was in pretty good shape after all and he adjourned the idea of workouts. The brush and branches worked him over as he made his way in the direction of his compound. He was careful to avoid stepping in poison ivy, although he had no idea what it looked like.
There were cottage clothes in the boathouse and he carefully pulled on a pair of zany shorts and a faded T-shirt from Jamaica. He climbed into a twelve-foot aluminum boat, untied it from the dock ring, and fired up the engine. Running out to the floatplane he appreciated nature. He tied off the plane and motored back to the dock.
The crayfish were little friends once again.
Showered and shaved, Marko Markowitz used a strong astringent to paint the rips and bites on his body. He wandered naked through the sunlight flooding into his white apartment in Stonetown until the stinging faded. His chest and shoulders ached; he’d picked up a combo sun and windburn across his balding scalp and back. He dressed but clothing irritated his skin. He found a billowing white shirt and eased it on, untucked.
