Joe watched as he put the photo down in the wrong spot. Try as he might, he couldn't muster any sympathy for Mike or his family.
Mike might not have been the Mad Shitter, but that didn't mean Joe had to feel guilty about getting him fired. It didn't mean he had to feel sad because the chief source of irritation in his life had vanished from the Earth.
Quite the opposite. And anyway, Joe had other things on his mind.
He sighed. "It's a shame, all right," he said, remembering the filth in the men's room stall. How could anyone make such a mess? It was like Vogel was trying to ruin the stall for everyone else.
"We're taking up a collection," said Jeff, "for Mike's wife and kids."
"Count me in," said Joe, even as he focused his thoughts on the problem of Vogel. He was an important man, a CEO, a pillar of the community...but that didn't give him an excuse to literally shit all over Joe's world.
Mike Shomo was gone, and so what? For the good of Joe Prine and the men of the third floor, the Mad Shitter had to be stopped at all costs.
*****
How To Get Lucky
It was a stupid damn move, he knew it as soon as the change tinkled down into the fare box. The way it was going, after all the bullshit and hassle, just stepping on the bus was not the brightest idea. Hopper squeezed his hand into a pants pocket and groped for what he knew wasn't there--not even a dollar so today was finally it. Time to camp out. He should've walked and saved the quarter, but of course that wouldn't have made up the difference for the room anyhow.
At least he was moving now--in the bus down the street, in the street down the toilet. The scenery was changing, sliding by like a parade--doorways, windows, people, cars crawling past the grimy wide windshield. From the front seat, Hopper watched it all over the driver's blue shoulder and decided he would rather be moving than sitting in his old room and melting into a gummy puddle on the floor.
Hopper yawned, missing some seconds of floating brick and metal ahead as his eyes squinted shut. His colt-brown face folded back and down, pressing skin hard against cheekbones and winching open lips in a sticky round well like a cannon with a tongue. Settling back in the stiff bus seat, he rubbed his scalp, kneading the bare dark skin as he wondered where to get off.
"Teddy! What are you up to in there, Teddy? Come out of there right this minute, you little bastard! Unlock this door!" For some reason, Hopper wasn't surprised to see his mother running alongside the bus. She loped along, easily matching speed with the creeping traffic, bushy mop flapping on her head as she bounced.
She kept screaming, her raspy, powerful voice sounding clearly through the thick bus doors. "Teddy, you've been pushing your luck lately, and I've had it! If your daddy won't show you no manners, then my right hand sure as hell will! Get ready, boy, I'm comin' in after you!"
Hopper just sat quietly and watched her, shifting uncomfortably in the hard seat. Ma was still the same, that was for sure, he could tell just by looking at her. In the crumpled leather face, he could read her old temper, bubbling hot and hungry like a stew. Somewhere in there, he thought there had to be kindness, because after all, don't all mothers love their sons? But as he stared at that twisting doggy face, he could discern nothing that had not been there before.
"Hopper, that's it! You are gonna' learn a lesson right fuckin' here and right fuckin' now! I have had enough!" With that, Ma flung out a beefy brown fist ad blew it through one of the bus's glass doors. Thick sparkling shards licked in fountains through the front, stoning the blue driver with bloody bright rubble, blessing Hopper and the others with glitter like holy water. Then, Ma's bludgeon groped and found the door's edge, the rubber strip where the two sides joined, and she tore. Hopper heard the kitty chalkboard screech as the bus door was mangled and peeled away and spun to the sidewalk like a frisbee.
"Boy, you are gonna' behave after this, I guarantee it. You will know the meanin' of the word respect!" Ma was shouting as she landed on the bottom step, roaring over the throbbing engine and the wind rushing through the door. Grunting, she leaped up the next two steps and pounced on the driver, the blue guy caught between controlling the bus and running away from the busty wild beast. Like a commando, Ma socked him in the chest, broke his neck with a flick of his skull, and booted him out after the shattered door.
Then she stopped and slowly turned toward Hopper. Fluorescent bulbs glowed harshly in her eyes, slid like world globes to settle on her son. Her head tipped down, her neck craned forward, and she crouched, just three feet away from her next victim. Hopper bit his lip, but kept watching curiously, strangely unfazed and detached.
"Now it's time for you to grow up, Teddy bear! Get your goddamn thick head outta' the clouds and learn some responsibility! You're gettin' skinned, and you won't forget this skinnin', so you won't forget this lesson. Pull down your pants, boy."
Somebody in the back of the bus groaned sickly. Ma's head kicked up and she glared like a preacher at the crowd.
"And everybody else just be quiet or I'll kill you! This is between a mother and her son." Puffing angrily, she dug trowel fingers between her sweaty melon breasts, and in a second heaved out a machine gun. Crushing her teeth together, she lashed the gun in a swift arc before her, snarling as chipmunk passengers jumped and ducked and scampered in their seats.
"I love my Teddy bear! Anyone says otherwise, I'll just have to love them, too!" Ma snapped off the safety, nosed the gun upward, and blasted a round through the roof. Everybody screamed while metal pierced and buckled, the gun smoked, and Ma monkey cackled. Hopper twitched, his shoulder muscles flickering as he looked on.
At last, when the chattering zinging crying crackling started to sealike fade, Frankenstein's mother began to hump and rumble toward the busted mousy bum in the front seat. Hopper knew what was coming, had known it somehow from the moment he glimpsed her feverish chestnut face outside the bus. All the good times they had known together, all those fine years of family and dinner and whisper great God fearing all eventually purified to this.
Ma chucked the machine gun out after the driver and door. Stepping toward Hopper, she unbuckled a steely black leather belt that was choked around her hips. She smiled sweetly as her stovepipe right hand slipped the belt away, then looped it three times tightly through a fist. Her gator hide left then viced the other end, snapped it taut with a twang just a foot from Hopper's nose.
"Now, Teddy," said Ma, softly like a boxer. "You must always, always clean your plate. Haven't I told you to clean your plate?" Slowly, sexily, in clear crystal seconds, the stiff bar belt pullied forward. Soon, it was against his face, blocking his eyes with heavy dense hide; then, Ma dragged it downward, scraping it over nose and mouth, stropping it on his chin pushing back and under past jaws and finally snug with the neck. She started to press, force grind grind bulldozing to the spine.
"Say your prayers! Take a bath! Clean your plate!" Ma thundered onward, but Hopper couldn't talk anymore. Even if he could have, there was nothing left to say.
The next thing Hopper saw was the face of the angry blue bus driver. Through the haze around him, he could not understand what the driver was saying, but he saw a wide mouth and felt someone shaking his shoulders. No belt, no Ma after all, luckily or unluckily depending on how you looked at it. No machine gun massacre, only a squeaky rattletrap with bloodless cocky passengers and unbroken doors and a shiny metal fare box where his last quarter rested. A dream. A nap. Just dozed off like he always did, caught forty winks in the middle of the day. He was almost disappointed.
Sometimes, it happened in a restaurant, on a table or a plate of food for variety. Sometimes, it happened on a street corner, or on the toilet, or at the bar, or on a bus, or even once in a while at night in the five-dollar room like it was supposed to. He always fell asleep when he least expected it, stopping, docile, doped and unreachable just like a good narcoleptic.
"Hey, pal, this is a bus, not a goddamn motel." The driver shook him again, harder. "C'mon, Sleeping Beauty! Find a park
bench if you wanna' take a nap! Now beat it!"
Hopper groaned and blinked, felt like his head was stuffed with toilet paper. He shifted in the cramped seat, realized his back had knitting needles stuck down the middle. When he moved, they seemed to jab further into his muscle, his meat, made him wince and flinch away but it seemed like they were in there to stay.
"Did you hear me, buddy?" The bus driver was getting madder, small eyes popping and baggy cheeks wagging above the back of his seat. He steamed and gurgled like a truck, like Ma sergeant waking him up for school. Again arms cabled back and flapped Hopper's shoulders, sending bright shoots of heat up along his spine.
Finally, Hopper managed to sit up straight, pushing his throbbing back against the slabby backrest and waving away the driver's pestering hands. One hand on the seat beneath him, one latching the straight metal rail in front of him, he jacked and angled and wobbled to his feet, then painfully heaved his shoes like cement blocks one in front of the other toward the doors.
"Boy, you guys really get me, y'know that?" The porky hot driver was still fuming at the wheel as Hopper struggled down the steps. "You really give me a pain in my hairy ass, y'know? You ever think about checking into this flophouse on wheels again, forget it! Don't even think about getting on this bus! Get a job, you fuckin' bum!"
Weakly toeing over the last step and settling onto the sidewalk, Hopper found enough strength to turn and raise his middle finger in the air. The bus driver snarled something, sucked the doors shut and mowed the big dirty boat with a rumble down the asphalt.
Some of the toilet paper swaddle stuffing his muffled head began to flush away as Hopper limped across the sidewalk to a brick wall. For a minute, he leaned there, ravaged back against the stony packed surface. He breathed deeply, sifting sugary orange August air into his brittle chest; next, he swallowed, wringing the thistle pinching muscles of his fly dry throat. What a great bus ride, what a great day, plus a blast of a nap and a backache to boot; Hopper was on a roll. On a roll, all right--like a scabby brown mud penny rolling down a sewer.
Propped against the building, Hopper let his head fully dump, unclog and stabilize and for now reawaken. Though the lights could flick off again quick at any second, at least for the moment on the sidewalk he was conscious. Even the sticky freezing poker rammed up his back began to soften, the strong pincer pain finally ebb. Hopper relaxed and uncramped enough to look around and figure where he was.
After his hibernation on the bus, Hopper really had no idea how long he'd been riding, no impression of where he'd gotten off. Now that he knew, he decided he didn't care; one part of town was the same as any other, one street the same, one wall the same, one step, one scribble, one kid the same. All of it concrete and herpes salad, just mangled and tossed and tumbled in a junkyard for sleepwalking babies like him to whack around in. Tonight, in fact, it was all his bedroom a king-sized hideaway for a dimeless guy.
Pulling away from the silent brick wall, Hopper headed off after the bus, looking for an alley or a doorway he could huddle in. It was late in the afternoon, lots of women hauling babies and bags, gibbering chicken kids scattering, old guys creeping close to the walls. Wild jet cars beeped riddled shot sprang past, whipping people with jobs and wallets and pools in the suburbs quickly through the ugly, embarrassing ghetto. Sunlight shimmered off windshields, sunglasses, soaked like urine into sweaty grape neighbors.
After slouching through the jams of hopping kids, Hopper lolled around a corner and down another, quieter street. Not so many marching toughwives, only two children flipping jumpropes, no hungry haunted coots. Deeper in the tenements, the crowd thinned out--not really fewer people, more in fact--just everyone sticking to the plaster, holding out, locked up. A couple of blocks later, Hopper stopped by an alley and rubbed his dripping armpit.
The place looked right, right for a night, a skinny hidden dead-end nicked between buildings. Stubbing back about thirty feet before it bumped a gray wall, the alley held garbage cans, boxes and bags. Sealed on three sides, ceilinged by fire escapes tangled like spiders to the sky, the alley was almost a room, closest you could get outside in the city, safer than a bench or doorway, probably safer snugger even than the five-dollar ratnest Hopper had left. It went back just far enough to mask a big corner from the street, a dark secret cellar he could huddle in and rest. Or try to rest, anyway, if his goddamn freaky body would cooperate.
Glancing quickly down the sidewalk to make sure no one was watching, Hopper strolled into the alley. Carefully, he bent at the waist and padded through the trash, sneaking through the smelly furniture of his new headquarters. He tugged a white full plastic bag out of his way, inched a heavy high garbage can with his foot to break a path. There were probably rats, or would be that night, though Hopper didn't spot any traipsing around the trash; it was something he was used to from the five-dollar room, gangs of squeaky night buddies rippling through pond scum darkness. They were unavoidable alley Samaritans, and the best Hopper could do was cover himself with cardboard, sleep back away from the smorgasbord garbage, and pour some booze on his clothes.
Hopper wrestled a cardboard carton from the peak of a pile, then stashed it in the back for shelter at night. By one wall wadded a sparky plastic pile, a lucky big sheet of packing wrapper he could use. After the plastic sheet, he moved a long plank to the back, a dirty gouged board that was enough to split him from the cold cement.
Next, Hopper tossed back a ragged green throw rug, and, yawning, rifled through a heap. Then he found the dead boy.
The boy was under a can of beans--really just part of him there, the part Hopper saw first. That part was a mouth, and more, other parts no boy would carry; spoonfuls of maggots dribbled from his lips, diamond shiny niblets twinkling on his tongue. Millions of star-white slithers drove beneath his nose, dove between his jaws to swim and nibble in mucky gut pudding.
The worms stood out like silver studs on the rotting black flesh of the boy, magic moving silver chips that tickled his chest and arms and stomach as Hopper peeled away a bloody torn bedsheet. Bigger black insects scrabbled over it all on wiry filing legs.
By now, about half of the flesh was gone, melted into greasy mush, gaping in some spots to show jelly red, in others beach white cords of bone. Under one rib cage, a purée pit gleamed, sauteed buttery gray guts dished simmering like vomit, fingernail tiny worms slithering through it all. His neck had a porthole, cancer black anus below the ear, strung with streamers of cotton thread flesh. He was all pocked and wickered, cellophane evaporating, bony mulch giggling with maggots, filigree and silverware.
Under a filthy sock, the boy's face was ageless, maybe ten or six with the eyes licked out and the cheekbones flashing. He had no hair, just more brown film peeling. He smelled no more like a kid, but a potroast, a potroast cooking in honey and gasoline.
And as he cankered, fluttered, pickled, bubbled, the rotten kid reclining brought puke to Hopper's throat. Goggling down at it, Hopper wildly realized that the body looked like him.
Over by the neck, a pubic beady rat looked up, baby corn teeth soaked wet and red, a frond of mucus membrane dangling from its chin.
*****
"I'm sorry, sir, but we're not buying any blood. We would be grateful if you would still donate to our blood bank, though."
"No thanks." Hopper wasn't in a position to give anything away. He wanted money, just money, to get some kind of room. He wouldn't sleep in an alley tonight.
"We always need donors, sir, and there are sandwiches and Pepsi served up in the welcome room after you give." Elfy lips curled and fluttered, snipping slightly upward at the ends in a cupcake smile. Tapered, tailored, trimmed and buttoned, the pretty prim nurse hugged a clipboard as she chirped. Her satin baby hazel eyes sparkled, focused directly on Hopper's bloodshot, and her buttery skin mint wind limb glowed.
"Thanks anyway," mumbled Hopper, shaking his head as he turned to flop away.
"Come back any day," tittered the nurse, still smiling for her own ben
efit at Hopper's raggedy back. "We always need donors here. Sandwiches and Pepsi, too, don't forget!"
Hopper lumbered away from the desk, scratching his ass and fuming. University Medical Center was a dead end, a typical cheap ripoff hospital groping for bills in hernias and smoky tumors. Just his luck, two places before this were the same, no money for blood but boy did they want blood. Something for nothing, natural happy vultures digging in with scalpels; it was really like the street, more maybe than any other place, knowing and obeying the simple jungle law--take what you can get away with.
So what now? Hopper had been flushed for good, swirled to the bottom of the sewer of his life. For twenty-eight years, he'd been walloped little by little, and today was the bell and a fucking T.K.O. There was no getting up now, just a lot of lying around while the referee counted, but Hopper would rather do his lying in a room.
He didn't have many choices, though, if any. He was broke, and expected no money in the near or far future; his last job had been seven months ago, and he didn't think another one would come his way soon; and he had no people he could stay with at all. Empty all around, his lousy life could fork in only a couple ways: he could mug some bozo or try to knock over a store; he could get himself arrested for the night; he could use a blanket at the Salvation Army; or over the roof like Superman only not so tough or pretty, and pimple splatter down below.
Hopper walked down the hall as he thought about his options, gazing blankly at doors and gurneys, staring glumly past toga patients warbling by the walls. Clipped fitful doctors swept past, flipping ricey papers and swinging doors. Someone wheeled a cart along, chattering with dirty dishes and hospital food leftovers.
At the end of the hall, around a corner, there was an exit sign and a stairway, and Hopper followed them down two floors to the lobby. He was leaning toward the Salvation Army by the time he saw the poster.
6 Short Stories Page 3
