Fickle

by Peter Manus

  Burly-Bear wasn’t the one on “lurk duty,” apparently—at least that’s the way he told it to me in our last conversation. Escroto was the lurker. Interestingly, Burly-Bear categorically denied that the cops were behind hitman, the one newcomer—now disappeared—who actually did motivate me to reveal myself in a number of instances. I don’t know what to think of that denial. I mean, Burly-Bear had no incentive to lie to me, not in the end. At first I concluded that hitman, and maybe leo tolstoy as well, must have been this fullfrontal creature, but now I don’t know. So many mysteries. So many lies.

  As for the Mysterious Hottie—Guy Ferguson—fullfrontal????—damn, I have no idea what he should be called here, because apparently there is no Guy Ferguson, at least not any brother of murdered cop Guillaume “Billy” Ferguson (who is—was—real). The cops—I think it’s the feds, actually—are busy pacing their way through the other two million Fergusons on the planet to figure out if and where Guy Ferguson is. And when they make him, they’ll shoot him. Unless, of course, he’s already dead.

  But for now I’m just traveling. Riding rail. Waiting to hit the coast. What’s that line again…

  “The train was headed for the ocean. I had this awful feeling it would plunge in.”

  Ah, Mr. Bradbury, such poetry. How you capture my noiry, noiry perspective on life right now. But perhaps I need to take that plunge and get to the point, though, for those of you who are not in limbo just now.

  Burly-Bear. His death. His murder, I suppose I’d better call it.

  Apparently he heard from his partner, who’d heard from us right here on Life is Pulp, that the gig was up and I was aware that my “rock” was married with child. Escroto, of course, did not give the proverbial poop that this might throw me emotionally—his only concern was that the big murder confession that he was anticipating I’d eventually murmur at his rugged partner was now derailed with the station in view.

  Burly-Bear, of course, saw it differently. That night while you guys were arguing about who in the BPD might be Burly-Bear, he showed up at my door. See, you bloggies hit on the wrong cop, but the right secret. Turns out Tony Cunio is—was—married with children. Toddlers, just walking, named Cody and Carly. Love the alliteration.

  I’d gotten home from work late, still fruitlessly attempting to backpedal from my impending pink slip, and so I’d done nothing about making myself comfortable or getting dinner or turning on a light. In fact, I’d cut straight across my living room to blog and was sitting there in just the screen light, still wearing my coat, when Burly-Bear buzzed.

  What with my last experience opening my door, I was wary. I buzzed him in and waited for his knock. He did, identifying himself, and of course there was no doubt he was who he claimed to be. Still, I needed to talk through the door until my heart steadied.

  I asked him what he wanted (he said he thought he might have some information I wanted).

  I asked him why it couldn’t wait until the next day (he claimed he hadn’t been fully forthcoming with me—yeah, the guy got less and less inarticulate every encounter).

  So as to help him to get to the point, I asked him whether he shouldn’t be home with his family.

  There he paused, on the other side of my door, then delivered a pretty moving speech. His wife understood about the job, that it was a twenty-four-hour commitment, and that sometimes there were good people out there, victims who might need real care and understanding. He said that he was lucky that his wife came from a family of cops, because his view was that this prepared her for the way she’d have to share him, his time and energy and his compassion, with the people he came across who needed his support, sometimes desperately.

  I felt pretty miserable hearing him say all that, realizing that it was true, everything he wasn’t quite saying, that there was this essential divide between us—him normal, upright, his life real—me warped, fragile, full of delusions, a burden on the healthy people of the world. I almost got sick, right then and there, but instead managed to fumble the lock out of the way. Figured I might as well let the guy have his say and get his ass home where it belonged. I opened the door and chickened out on meeting his eye, immediately reeling away across the kitchen to the cabinet where I keep the scotch. Heck, why should I worry about him seeing me throw back a fast one?

  He came around the door tentatively, as if fearful he might find me, I don’t know, posing in a negligee? Bleeding from a couple of wrist gashes? No such luck, though. Just your everyday mess, hanging out in her rumpled work duds, a finger of warm JWB wavering in her hand. He was nice, truly nice—man, “nice” is such a bland syllable for such a precious trait. He clicked on the overheads and didn’t bat an eye at what a mess I was. He explained, earnestly and seriously, about how he’s allergic to gold and so can’t wear a wedding band, and how he’d just naturally presumed that I would have a lot of sophisticated book guys barking at my heels and so until, hell, until our ride home from seeing dickel, he had just figured I viewed him as a cop, and a damned pig-headed one at that.

  Not that I believed him, quite. He knew farkin well that he’d charmed me and he knew farkin well that he’d meant to, even if his partner had been keeping my little girl-talk bloggings from him (which I doubt). A guy knows how he’s doing with a girl. He just does.

  But I let him off the hook. I posed against the refrigerator, mugging like a hussy, and threw him my favorite line from Asphalt Jungle: “Experience has taught me never to trust a cop. Just when you think one’s all right, he turns legit.” Burly-Bear didn’t recognize the source, but he cracked a grin and looked relieved.

  Anyway, then he got serious and explained some stuff—how there were no freelance police sketch artists working for the BPD (they’re all either active or retired cops who happen to be artists), and how there’s no cop named Cheryl Archer, and how he was confident that the so-called “Guy Ferguson” will surface in time, but that this was not his immediate concern.

  I offered him a drink and he said, aw, one quick one, and then he announced that he was “officially off duty and it was about damned time as it has been one helluva day.” He seemed so happy that I was taking everything so well, so relieved, that it actually made me rather buoyant, very pleased to not be a “burden.”

  It was when my back was turned, my arm reaching up to take a glass out of my kitchen cabinet, that everything went, well, very weird, I guess you could call it…

  I hear this strange, ungodly snarl and a crash. I turn around, too startled to be frightened, and there’s some sort of large feline creature attached to Burly-Bear’s shoulders, a large, mottled leopard or puma, its back rippling with muscles, riding the cop so that together they fall across my kitchen table, taking that to the floor. Burly-Bear almost goes down flat but he doesn’t, instead stumbling heavily across the dim living room, crashing into walls and furniture as he struggles to get the animal off him. It’s only then that I catch on—this isn’t an animal. It’s a man. A naked man, spare and ribby, yet frighteningly powerful. Wild as he is, he should never be a match for Burly-Bear, except that he’s caught him off-guard. The attack will change at any moment, logic dictates; the victim will wrestle his attacker to my floor, twist his arm behind his naked back, snap cuffs on his wrists…

  The struggling men flail against the wall and roll across my couch, and now I see the attacker’s face, bloated with effort and insanity, glancing over at me with a wicked kindle in his eye. Even as he rides the larger man down to the floor, his sweet blond hair fluttering incongruously around his blood-engorged face and neck. Such pretty hair, I remember thinking, such a vicious face.

  Burly-Bear, as anticipated, is gaining control. He’s gripping one of the crazed man’s arms and seems to be positioning his feet. He’ll flip him have him flat on his back in moments…But it doesn’t happen. Instead, Burly-Bear’s attacker rears ups and hits him. It’s an oddly balletic sort of motion…seems almost inconsequential in the scheme of the battle taking place before my eyes, at the moment it happ
ens. He swings his arm in a full, round pinwheel that arcs over Burly-Bear’s shoulder and ends with a staccato pop to the middle of Burly-Bear’s chest. I say inconsequential because it doesn’t seem like much of a punch. The fact is, I barely notice it. But Burly-Bear emits a momentary shriek, a horrid little yelp like you hear in the dead of night when some urban animals come face to face behind a garbage bin—after which he stops struggling and, without so much as a sigh, sinks gently, his coat draping round him, as if he is deflating. It’s a trick, I think…the bear is playing dead…but I’m wrong.

  His naked killer hulks on top of him, arched like a bobcat, riding him down to his death like some gothic nightmare incarnate, his spine rounded and ridged, his flattened muscles taut, his face buried against Burly-Bear’s neck as if to suck the life-breath out of him.

  I stand there in the background, washed out and colorless, a scotch bottle clutched in one hand, the empty glass still extended in the other, as if waiting for them to finish whatever ritual it is they are performing so that Burly-Bear can stand up and I can ask him if he takes his Johnnie Walker neat or on the rocks.

  Later I will find out that it is the blade of a scissors that did it, one of the pharmaceutical variety, relatively diminutive. Too small to kill a person, you’d think. It is the scissors from my own bathroom that I use to occasionally trim my hair. How can such a commonplace little item kill someone so robust as Burly-Bear, you may wonder, but if you study those little household gadgets, you will understand quite clearly how a cruel, slightly curled blade can slide between the protective bones and slice through fat and muscle, penetrating a man’s heart and killing him in an instant, if punched skillfully enough against his chest. I never see the scissors during the attack, as I later tell the police a million times, but there can be no doubt that Burly-Bear’s killer had the blade of the scissors nested in his palm, the eyelets laced over two of his fingers, when he first leapt out of my back hallway and onto his victim’s broad shoulders.

  It is not until Burly-Bear’s killer rears himself off his victim and stands that I recognize him. He looks across the disheveled kitchen at me, his nostrils flaring wide as he sucks in lungful after lungful of air, and he nods at me and points down at Burly-Bear several times as if this is supposed to be a message I will understand, as if he is assuring me that all of this is my fault…the result of my…disloyalty? My…sluttishness? You know, one of those traits men instinctively blame all women for that’s really a catchword for their ownership of us.

  Then he walks at me, his chest heaving. He’s limping, I notice, but I have no thoughts of escape, no real fear or desire to get out, no instinct telling me to protect myself—hell, wouldn’t that have been a laugh. He flicks his hand forward and swats the empty glass out of my hand. I hear it shatter when it hits the wall. Then he takes the bottle from my other hand and has himself a long, loud swallow. Satisfied, he rams the bottle down onto the counter—I swear I’m so numb I don’t jump even then. He kisses me hard—I’m sure I’d have tasted blood if I weren’t totally shut down—and then he walks away into the black hallway leading to my bedroom.

  Immediately upon his leaving my sight, I sort of “wake up,” and of course my first lucid thought is of the gun, the one I’d taken from Mr. Groin’s office. The one I should have used to save Burly-Bear’s life. I turn and reached for the oatmeal canister where I’d stashed it, but my fingers are thick and I knock the thing over so that it glances off the counter and hits the floor. The cereal splays on the linoleum like so much sand. I look down at the gun lying there and somehow this causes my knees to give way so that I find myself sinking down to a sitting position against the cabinets—I’m not fully coherent, you have to understand, so everything is weird and distant. There are little black turds in the oatmeal, I can now see, although I can’t think how mice could have infiltrated a sealed canister.

  In any event, I know I will not be standing up real soon, except if someone grabs a handful of my hair and helps me along. Still, I can function, more or less, even as I sit there all telescoped down with my knees bumping my chin. I reach over and pick up the gun. It feels heavier than I remember, heavier than its size. I hope that the weightiness means that there are bullets in it, because I’m afraid to check for fear that I’ll be unable to close it again. I knew from reading that you have to cock a gun before you can fire it, or get the safety off, if there’s a difference. Anyway, it has to be made ready to fire—women characters always fuck that up, useless black comedy clowns that we are.

  Yes, and I fuck it up. I’m examining the thing, gently blowing oat dust out from behind the trigger and trying to figure out whether there is some angle from which I can detect whether it is set to go, when somehow I fire it. Goddamn thing doesn’t peep when I knock it from a five-foot shelf and here I am handling it incredibly gingerly and it goes off in my face. Loud, too. Almost makes an Evelyn Mulwray out of me—later I will find out that the bullet actually grazes my forehead and probably lodges in the ceiling although I never think to look up and check. When I say it grazes me I do mean barely—I’m completely unaware of the fact that I’m bleeding (and rather copiously) until I see a mirror in the emergency ward—but apparently that’s the way it is with a flesh wound to the forehead. The assault on my eardrums is by far the worst of it.

  Anyway, immediately after the gun goes off I become aware of some commotion from outside, some very urgent vibrating, and then the front door of my apartment slams open so hard that the lower panel splinters against my couch. Next thing I can understand, Escroto is pointing his own very substantial-looking service weapon everywhere, taking in Burly-Bear, huddling over him for a moment or two with a finger on the dead man’s neck, and then homing in on me, reaching out a foot to shove aside the broken kitchen table and stick his gun at my face. He yells at me and I have no idea what he is talking about or even whether he’s speaking English, but the gun I’m holding topples from my hand of its own accord and apparently that is what he’s yelling about so fortunately he doesn’t shoot me. Again, the gun doesn’t go off on hitting the floor—which I suppose, in retrospect, is lucky for me, since it landed directly next to my left ass-cheek.

  I look across the room, feeling something pushing down at my lashes, some foggy pressure that wants me to close my eyes and make it easy on both of us, me and Escroto. But then both of us hear the thin shriek of my bedroom window, the one overlooking the street. It’s the metal storm sash, of course—damn thing always sticks. Escroto races through to the bedroom and then immediately retraces his steps, scrambling past me and disappearing out my front door—he runs like all fat men, his feet splayed, his knees bent, feet scrabbling like a dog’s. Lard-ass couldn’t catch an ice cream truck in August.

  I can hear a car, its tires screaming, at least a block away, well before Escroto comes back into view, shoving a few neighbors from upstairs out of his way, barking into a cell phone as he puts his attention back to Burly-Bear. But he knows and I know that Burly-Bear is dead. I never see the blood coursing from his heart. I never see the scissors, pushed deeper into his chest by his own weight. My only horror is the abstract one—the fact of death, and of murder. I am awed by the monstrous simplicity of all of it.

  From the moment Escroto reenters my place, whatever else he is doing and from wherever he goes in the room, he keeps his weapon pointed at me. He makes sure I know that the safety isn’t on. I suppose blaming me is his way of confronting the horror that I look in the face.

  So, yeah. Burly-Bear, murdered, my place. “In the line of duty,” they keep repeating on the news.

  What else to say? They keep me under guard at the hospital, where I’m pronounced physically fine, then they hold me for a long time. Overnight? Over two nights? Couldn’t tell you. In a police station, I think. No exterior windows, walls tiled, air thick and hot. The cops are grim and interchangeable, if all of them are, in fact, cops. No one plays good cop—mostly they drill me with the same litany of questions, repeatedly, like one of those
job interview nightmares where they keep harping on that gap in your résumé: “But where were you taking a rest? What kind of rest? Who can we talk to about it?”

  I suck at being a murder witness. I’m not stoic or calm or much help. I babble incoherently. I flame at myself for just standing there. I pull my hair and scratch my face and beat my palms on the table and collapse on the floor, snot and spittle smeared across my cheeks. They don’t like these antics that can potentially lead to my bruising myself—they keep jumping in and reattaching the foolish bandage that someone had taped to my forehead at the hospital. At some point it dawns on me that they are worried about brutality charges so I redouble my efforts to hurt myself because I blame them as much as I blame myself and so they deserve to be in this hell as much as I do. In short, I’m a freaking mess, and their collective disgust shows in their faces. Why shouldn’t I be a mess, though? I’m in mourning. All these deaths over such a short space of days, all the suspicions on me, all the posturing and toughing it out I’ve taken in stride. Well, now it has ended as badly as it can possibly have ended, and I am in acute mourning. Burly-Bear deserves my abject humiliation. I am keening for him.

  I don’t put it together at the time, but I’ve since come to realize that they—some of them, anyway—are looking for me to say that I’d killed Burly-Bear and then tried to end my own life with the gun, but flinched at the last second. Laughable garbage, but they are plenty bent on having me agree with it.

  At some point I guess they decide to face the fact that Escroto himself heard my bedroom window opening, and so they know someone else had been there. Really must have bent him over to have to own up to that. He certainly didn’t condescend to admit it in front of me.

  In the end there is nothing they can do. I lie on the floor, half passed out, my eye fixated on a electric socket as I wonder what kind of fun it might be to lick my finger and stick it in there, while outside they must be tallying up how many of my constitutional rights they can violate before they’ll face charges. Finally someone pulls me to my feet and shoves me into a bathroom where I pee with a dour female cop watching me before they send me out into the streets to find my own transit to hell. The last of them warns me not to leave the Boston area. I stumble through a halfhearted rain, hoping for relief, but no one obliges my need to be mugged, accosted, randomly shot through the brain. Besides, I’m sure that some cop is following me, now that I think about it.