The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists
Page 34
That was how it seemed, at first. Hughes stared at the screen. Robert Mitchum advanced on the beauteous Jane Russell, her skin pure cream, his hands black horrors.
Hughes looked away, at his own skin. Dark veins slithered beneath tissue-paper epidermis. His entire body rippled with scars, tiny and large.
Each one was a badge of honor.
Hughes recalled the magician’s smile on the night he revealed all. He recalled the swirling sheets of black paper, twisting and folding as they launched themselves, each one flying through the night with such ease, such grace.
Each one, cutting him so deeply.
Each one, leaving a scar.
Jack and Provo Sam hurried through the hotel lobby. They were close to the elevators when someone yelled, “Look, it’s Howard Hughes!”
Jack sighed. If he’d thought to shed the hat and the bomber jacket, he would have been just another guy. But with the costume, his naturally gaunt figure, his pencil-thin moustache… and this being the Desert Inn…
It was too late for second guessing. The two men broke into a trot, heading for the elevators. They were lucky. The middle elevator whispered open just as they reached it, revealing a bellboy with a load of luggage.
Jack grabbed the kid and shoved him out of the elevator. Provo Sam pulled a revolver, very discretely, so that only the bellboy would see it.
The kid ran. But the crowd kept coming. Flashbulbs popped. People screamed. His back to the crowd, Provo Sam cocked his gun. “You just give the word,” he said.
Fortunately for the crowd, the elevator doors closed.
Provo Sam inserted a key into the control box, flipping the lock that would allow the elevator to stop at the ninth floor.
Jane Russell swooned, falling into Robert Mitchum’s arms, and he caressed her naked shoulders with hands sheathed in leather gloves.
Hughes felt his blood rising. Collapsed veins plumped in his arms. This was the kind of stimulus he’d been missing. No Disney movie could stir his blood the way this picture did. He enjoyed true hunger for the first time in years.
Jack Morton had all but murdered him. It was Morton who had fed him a diet a saccharine cartoons when what he longed for was breasts… and blood. It was Morton who had prohibited films featuring creatures or machines that could take to the air on free wings.
Other humiliating memories of his captivity nearly made Hughes weep. Once, he had demanded some black paper, and one of the lackeys had actually brought a few sheets to his suite. But Morton had managed to intercept them at the last moment, after which he punished Hughes, forcing him to create paper dolls from scented pink stationary, rosy little horrors which danced and pirouetted until Hughes screamed in agony.
And Hughes’ pain didn’t stop there. For years he had subsisted on the blood of the sick and the aged, and he had grown weak battling the diseases of his victims. This too was Jack Morton’s doing.
Jane Russell moaned. Her plump lips parted, alive with warm blood. Mitchum’s hands were becoming more adventurous. His mouth closed on the marble beauty of Jane Russell’s neck, on a deliciously throbbing artery.
A wildfire of hunger burned in Hughes’ belly.
How much time did he have before Morton and his lackeys returned?
He hissed through a tangle of fanged teeth. He didn’t have long, he was sure of that.
Hughes turned to the only living creature in the room. Walter Sands was no Jane Russell, but this wasn’t the time to be particular.
Ignoring his pitiful whimpers, Hughes opened Walter’s shirt.
Using his longest fingernail, he sliced a thin line along Walter’s chest.
“Please, Mr. Hughes, I’ll do anything — ”
Howard Hughes didn’t listen.
He opened Walter Sands like an envelope.
Provo Sam grabbed a rifle from the armory in room 903 and joined Jack Mormon outside Hughes’ suite. Jack had a walkie-talkie in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“He’s in there,” Jack said. “I can hear him feeding.”
Sam tried to ignore the insatiable moans that spilled from the room. He double-checked the rifle. “Tranquilizers,” he said. “The ones the CIA boys cooked up for us.”
Jack ground his cigarette into the plush carpet. “If Hughes gets through the window before you can hit him, don’t fire. We don’t know how much of that poison his system can take, and we don’t want our meal ticket splattering all over the Strip.”
Hughes knew that they would come. In fact, he was waiting for them. He wanted to see Jack Morton one last time. He wanted to spit Walter Sands’ blood in his doppelganger’s face.
But it was another man who came through the doorway, a man with a rifle. Hughes laughed at the weapon, but the man didn’t hesitate. He fired.
Hughes pulled the dart from his shoulder. The stink of the thing scorched his nostrils. It was a tranquilizer dart, but this wasn’t just any tranquilizer.
Garlic. The horrid essence pumped through Hughes’ veins. And now Morton stood before him, smiling beneath his horrible little moustache.
“Jack,” Hughes said, “you’re a real bastard.”
“I had a good teacher, Mr. Hughes.”
Hughes rubbed his shoulder, and then he began to laugh.
Provo Sam chambered another dart, but the vampire picked up Walter Sands’ corpse and threw it in Sam’s direction. Two hundred and forty-five pounds of dead football player bounced the shooter off the wall.
And now Hughes was in a hurry to leave. He ripped at his own flesh, and the sound was that of an eager child confronting a roomful of presents on Christmas morning.
Much too eager. In a matter of seconds, Hughes was an unrecognizable mess. Perhaps it was his eagerness, perhaps an effect of the garlic. Hughes looked like nothing so much as a kite made by an idiot child. But he sprang through the broken window all the same, dragging a bloody tail after him.
Jack Mormon watched Hughes go. He spoke a few short words into the walkie-talkie, brushed broken glass from the sill, and poked his head outside.
He looked to the heavens. Shot a “thumbs up” signal into the air.
A chopper, direct from Nellis, hovered over the Desert Inn.
Jack waved it on, after the vampire.
FOUR
Provo Sam was stunned, but otherwise okay. Jack drove north, alone. He tried to guess how far he’d travel before the call came in over the radio.
It didn’t matter. Not really. All that mattered was that the call would come. Jack was certain of that. You didn’t impersonate someone without getting under his skin. If you were really good, you could slip into your subject’s head and see the world through his eyes. That’s the way it was with Jack Mormon and Howard Hughes.
From the beginning, Jack had spotted the patterns. Howard Hughes was an excitable guy, a guy who took too many chances. He took them with airplanes, with women, with movies that leeched his money… and, once upon a time, he’d even taken a desperate chance with a Japanese magician who wasn’t at all what he seemed to be.
Jack shook his head, pushing the limo’s big engine for all it was worth. The whole deal was amazing. By all rights, Hughes should have died long ago. Crashing an S-43, or an XF-11, or some big albatross made out of wood. The funny thing was, a guy like Hughes probably would have been perfectly happy to make his exit just that way.
Howard Hughes was his own worst enemy. That was why, like it or not, Hughes needed someone like Jack Mormon, a guy who’d protect him from himself. That was a full-time job, and it was obvious that some changes were necessary. Vegas was just too big. The time had come to move somewhere a little more secluded, where there would be less attention from the gentlemen of the press.
Nassau. Paradise Island. With a little luck, the move could be made very quickly. The plan had been simmering on Mormon’s back burner for a while, and now seemed as good a time as any to bring it to a boil.
Jack was really getting in tune with the idea when the call came
“Good. Get him out to Nellis. We’re moving.”
“Tonight? What if he gives us a problem?”
“He won’t.”
“How can you be sure?”
“We’ve got two hours until daybreak. He’ll roast to death in the sunlight. If he lived through his latest crash, he’s not going to want to go out like a piece of meat on a rotisserie. Not when he’ll have a whole new set of scars that he can brag about.”
“You’re amazing, Jack.”
“I’m just a good employee.” Jack laughed. “And when you come right down to it, that’s just a simple matter of understanding the boss.”
Jack signed off, made a quick U-turn, and headed toward Nellis.
Yep. It was just that simple. You didn’t impersonate someone without getting under his skin. If you were really good, you could slip into your subject’s head and see the world through his eyes.
But what happened, Jack wondered quite suddenly, when you looked through those eyes, and you couldn’t even blink anymore?
Jack laughed at the crazy thought. He glanced at the rear-view mirror, and for just a second he confronted a wide-eyed little boy who liked to stare at two steel rails that ran through the Utah desert. Then he blinked and once again found himself staring into Howard Hughes’ eyes.
He saw all the crazy things that Hughes had made of himself — the human things… and the inhuman things. The bats, and the bloody kite, and the other horrors Jack had seen but never shared with another living soul.
Jack pulled over to the side of the road. Howard Hughes. Always running away, but never getting anywhere, because there was no way he could escape the things inside him.
Very suddenly, very clearly, Jack saw himself driving fast, piling into a sandstone formation somewhere out in the desert, and he laughed and laughed and laughed until his ribs started to hurt.
He got his breath, put the car in gear, and lead-footed it into the night. God, this was crazy. He twisted the rear-view mirror at a useless angle, so that he couldn’t see anything at all.
He should go to Nellis. Should, hell. That’s what he had to do. There were arrangements to make. Deals to cut…
There was the road, unfolding before him.
“Y’know” he said to no one in particular, “once upon a time you were a pretty nice guy.” And then he rolled down the window and sent Howard Hughes’ fedora tumbling into the night.
In the distance, somewhere beyond the November wind, came the low whistle of a train riding steel rails.
HARVEST
Arboles de la ladera porque no han reverdecido
Por eso calandrias cantan o las apachuria el
nido…
—Las Amarillas
(Traditional Folk Song)
Raphael Baca split the skin, weeping as he uncovered the skull beneath. He slipped his fingers under a fleshy flap and tugged. The skin peeled off in one piece and he dropped it to the floor, a limp, bloody husk.
He threw the skull into a corner and kicked the skin after it. How many times would it happen? How many seasons would pass before he peeled an orange and found only fruit?
Through the winter, through the spring, he had prayed that things would be different this year. And just this morning his hopes had swelled when he discovered the first orange of the new season, for the fruit had not screamed when he chopped it from the dead branch with his machete.
But in the end it had all been the same as the year before.
Raphael sat at the kitchen table and sharpened his machete. He listened to the wind, heard the woman wailing above it as she wandered the empty streets of C-Town. Raphael prayed that he would look up from his work, through the kitchen window, and see the bruja leading the children’s ghosts through the deserted streets and away. But Raphael did not bother to look up, because the kitchen window was dirty
It didn’t matter. He had never seen the woman — not even once.
He had only heard her cries.
And then, suddenly, he could not hear her at all.
The music of the flies was much too loud.
They came, fat and black, squeezing through chinks in the window, buzzing around the bloody fruitskull, ignoring the other skulls that had been picked clean during the previous season.
A stray fly danced over Raphael’s bloodstained fingers. He listened to its music and did not move. The fly was hungry, and he would not disturb it. He would not raise his hand against even the most disgusting of God’s creatures.
He stared at the dirty window and imagined the woman out there, somewhere, weeping for an audience of ghosts.
The afternoon waned. The flies had gone, their bellies full. Raphael left the shanty. He checked the mailbox at the end of the road, hoping for a reply from the government, but there was nothing waiting for him. There hadn’t been any mail in more than a year. He started along the border of the grove, avoiding the bruja’s domain.
Not far from the mailboxes, a car was parked on the shoulder of the dirt road. Dead trees blanketed it with feeble fingers of shade, printing strange cracks on the white hood and hardtop. Raphael looked inside. He saw keys hanging from the ignition and a wallet tucked haphazardly beneath the front seat. He glanced into the grove but saw no one there.
He hurried away. The wind was rising, and he could almost hear the evil woman weeping again.
This was not the first abandoned car that Raphael had discovered. He imagined the bruja falling upon the driver, an innocent who took a wrong turn off the highway. An innocent who had no protection. These days, people didn’t believe in creatures like the one that haunted C-Town. They had no faith to protect them.
Raphael wished that he could do something to protect the people who came here, but he could do nothing. Gripping his machete, he walked to the west side of the grove, almost to the highway. The sunlight was still strong there. He skirted the dead trees and was happy at their nakedness, pleased by the spindly shadows that were much too feeble to frighten him.
He sat down and thought about the bewitched fruit. The bruja’s bugs had killed the trees when the farmers stopped spraying. Raphael imagined that the insects made her witchcraft possible, even though the trees were long dead. He wished he could find a spray that would kill the cursed bugs, and he decided that tonight he would write another letter to the government and ask if they knew of such a spray.
The sun drifted slowly from the sky. Raphael’s shadow stretched before him, as long and gray as a rich man’s gravestone.
None of Raphael’s children had gravestones. Not Ramona, not Alicia, not Pablo or Paulo. Before his wife left him, Raphael had promised her that he would buy stones as soon as he had enough money to fix the old car. They had to do that first, he said, because they needed the car to visit the cemetery. It was too far away, otherwise.
But it never worked out. His wife left him, and he never had any money. He didn’t have the car anymore, either, and the only time he visited the camposanto was when nobody came for the cars that he found near the grove.
When that happened, he would drive to the camposanto and park nearby. Then he would visit his children. He always found their graves, even though they had no headstones.
Except when the long shadows fell.
And when the shadows turned to darkness and the gravestones disappeared, he walked back to C-Town.
Alone. Crying
Shadows fell across the grove, thickening, stretching toward him. Raphael moved on and found a rabbit trapped in one of his snares. He took it back to the shanty, where he built a fire beneath a dead oak tree.
Sometimes he worried about eating the rabbits. If the lawyers were right, the animals could be sick with the same disease that killed the children.
The idea frightened him. He looked at the rabbit, suddenly afraid of it. But he was hungry, and he knew that the lawyers were wrong. He had eaten many rabbits
in the last two years, and he was not sick.
Still, he was afraid, because he knew that C-Town was bewitched. He hung the rabbit and skinned it, his hands unsteady, his face dripping sweat. And then he laughed and laughed, because it was only a dead rabbit, after all, and there was only good meat in the places where he had imagined that he might find sticky fruit.
That night Raphael lay still and listened to the bruja’s weeping.
He had heard of her as a boy in Mexico. The story had come from the lips of his grandmother. “You must be a very good little nino, Raphael,” she had said. “If you are not, La Llorona will come for you.”
“Who is she, Grandma?”
“She is a very bad bruja. Long ago, someone stole her babies. Now she steals children who are bad, because she knows that their parents will not miss them.”
Raphael wasn’t the only one who knew the story. As the children of C-Town fell ill and the doctors failed to help them, more and more people remembered the tale. Raphael’s neighbors had not spoken La Llorona’s name in years, except in jest. But death made things different, especially the deaths of so many. The priest at the little chapel near the highway tried to stop the talk. He said that it was all superstitious nonsense. But the priest only came to the chapel once a week, and soon it seemed that the stories were more than just rumors.
Epifanio Garcia said that he saw La Llorona in the grove one evening, spying on his shanty. Epifanio and his wife had two babies, and he was determined to protect them. He chased La Llorona through the grove, but he could not catch her. He said that every tree which the bruja touched was instantly blighted, its fruit suddenly heavy with huge black bugs.
Rosita Valdez said that she was walking to Mass when she came upon La Llorona drinking from an irrigation ditch. Rosita was so frightened by the evil one’s muddy leer that she ran home without stopping, and that was something, because Rosita was barely five feet tall and weighed nearly two hundred pounds.