Count Geiger's Blues

by Michael Bishop

  But where Xavier found solace in opera, drama, symphony performances, ballet, and painting, Mikhail gravitated to rock ’n’ roll, movies, and comics. Better a long session with Up Periscope, Spike Lee, or the DeeJay, he clearly felt, than with the politicos jawboning on C-SPAN. In fact, what most exercised The Mick in late February was a power struggle at Uncommon Comics. UC’s publisher, F. Deane Finesse, had fired Bowman. A story about this firing, by Lee Stamz, dominated a front page otherwise devoted to a gruesome pokeweed murder.

  “They’ve canned him,” Mikhail said when Xavier came through the door that evening. “The greatest innovator in the history of comic books, superhero subdivision. A wild man, a nutzo—but still a fucking genius.”

  “What?” Xavier had attended a print exhibition at a gallery in Sinatro Heights. He just wanted to peel off his Reynolds Wrap underwear and marinate in soapsuds.

  “UC’s arrogant Führer has purged Tim Bowman,” The Mick raved on. “They’ve run him off.”

  “Really?”

  “You’re wearing silver long johns that Tim Bowman designed, and all you can say is ‘Really?’ Jeez, that stinks.”

  “I thought Howie Littleton, couturier-model-and-professional-pain-in-the-rear, designed my Suit.”

  “Littleton designed your costume from one he saw in the first Stalwarts-for-Truth comic, and Bowman should get the props for that—just like he deserves credit for every other stalwartly costume in UC’s books.”

  Mikhail thrust Stamz’s story into Xavier’s hand, demanding that he read it. Xavier did. He learned that Bowman had lost his grip on the Unique Continuum by making heady financial demands of Mr. Finesse, viz., paying his artists and writers wages akin to those of their counterparts in New York, and urging Mr. Finesse to endow several Southern art colleges with UC “Special Achievement” scholarships. He’d alienated some of his own artists by micromanaging projects and allegedly refusing to compromise even on obvious nits. Two other things underlying Finesse’s decision to sack Bowman, said Stamz, were a broken deal between UC and Blackguard Pictures for a Yellowhammer movie, and recent issues of Mantisman accusing Plant VanMeter of causing mutations in Placer County livestock and wildlife. Also, a recent issue of Gator Maid had caricatured F. Deane Finesse as a baboon in a seersucker suit and a Panama hat.

  “Mmmm,” Xavier mmmm’d.

  “Finesse is a greedy old fart with a Yahweh complex,” The Mick said.

  “He’s also Bowman’s boss. So you’d think Bowman would cut the verminy old tightwad some slack. But no. He went after him like the Orkin Man.”

  “Not smart, Mick.”

  “Classy, though. Head up, heart out. Now what’s he going to do?”

  “Bowman? He’ll sign on with another comic company.”

  “But one way or another he’s trashed them all. Parodied them in UC’s books. Badmouthed them in, like, interviews.”

  “Maybe he could host a late-night talk-radio program.”

  “UC was Bowman’s life. He created three quarters of their characters. He got UC off the ground.”

  “Residuals,” Xavier said, bored with the topic. “He’s got all his financial problems licked, sounds to me. He can do anything he wants.”

  “Can he fly? Leap tall buildings? Or take on Con-Tri’s fat-cat powermongers?”

  “He’ll survive,” Xavier said, massaging The Mick’s shoulders. “Settle down.”

  The Mick kept grousing, indignant that such an injustice could have occurred. It was as if the members of Smite Them Hip & Thigh had drummed Gregor McGudgeon out of their group rather than following him into seminary. The Mick’s compassion for Bowman was profound. Never mind that Xavier, the truth to tell, didn’t give a bullhead’s whisker for Bowman’s fate.

  “Forget it,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do. Better to stew about ozone loss, the Greenhouse Effect, the silverfish population in your bedroom.”

  “Radioactive drift?”

  “Sure. That too.”

  “At Ephebus, I am worrying about it. I’m building a radiation detector in my physical science class.”

  “Honest?” The Mick was building a Geiger counter? Gee. Had the comics and his own coerced impersonations of Count Geiger inspired his nephew to undertake a bona fide science project?

  “It’s really a Geiger-Müller counter, but just about everyone forgets old Müller.”

  “I hope you’ll let me see it when you’re finished,” Xavier said uneasily.

  “I plan to write this Finesse turkey,” The Mick said, reverting to the upheaval at UC. “In words of one fucking syllable. To tell him where he can . . .”

  Xavier slipped away to skin out of his Bowman-Littleton BVDs and to wrinkle pleasantly in a steamy bath.

  34

  A Garage Party in Philippi

  For over two months, the stolen go-truck that Elrod Juitt had bought from a pair of junglebunny gangbangers out of Satan’s Cellar had stewed in his garage at the Auto Parts Reservation outside of Philippi. Juitt had neither painted the truck nor torn down for scrap the Therac 4-J in its loadbed. Every three or four days, Juitt would have Larry Glenn Wilkins throw back the tarp covering the truck and start up its engine—just to exercise it. Mostly, though, Juitt ignored the vehicle and the Therac 4-J.

  One afternoon in early March, Larry Glenn roared up from town on a beat-up Harley—he’d totaled his Camaro—and found Juitt cradling the telephone receiver in his tobacco-scented office. Larry Glenn waited for Juitt to hang up.

  “They’s a couple of Salonika cops, plainclothes guys, at the Philippi Inn, Elrod. Jim Percy”—the inn’s owner—”says they’re here to investigate a stolen security-cop truck. They’ve spent the whole day axing about you, pumping folks.”

  Juitt blinked. “You think they plan to come see me today?”

  “Who knows, Elrod?”

  “We better get humping.” Juitt led the way back and through an auto-parts aisle toward the garage. “Fisher,” he yelled at an employee, “keep an eye on things here! Me and Larry Glenn got work to do.”

  In the garage, they unveiled the truck and set to work, sanding off security-firm logos and filing off the identity numbers on the engine block and chassis. They filled and sanded. Wearing goggles, plastic caps, and stained coveralls, they spray-painted the truck candy-apple red—every part of it, but the loadbed and the Therac 4-J.

  “What you gonna do wi’ that whatzit?” Larry Glenn nodded at the Therac 4-J.

  “It’s no bigger a worry than the truck. We got to finish up and get ’em both out.”

  The garage stank like a turpentine factory so badly that Larry Glenn couldn’t even drink a beer for the reek. Finally, the truck was like new. Larry Glenn wished that it was his. He could take his Harley to dirt-track races in it, haul pine straw or new potatoes or horse manure, and make him some extra money.

  “Here.” Juitt tossed him the keys. “Hide the sucker behind the smokehouse on yore place. When we sell ’er, I’ll give you a third of the take.”

  “Jeez, Elrod. Thanks.” A wish come true.

  Larry Glenn drove the go-truck down a narrow country road to the half acre he’d inherited from Daddy Wilkins last October. He had family there, his wife Missy and their daughter Callie-Lisbeth, a four-year-old going on forty, but they probably wouldn’t be waiting up for him at six A.M. He would not’ve wanted them to either.

  It was just soothing, somehow, to stand out behind the collapsing smokehouse, sixty feet from the used doublewide where Daddy Wilkins had had his stroke—soothing to be gazing on the candy-apple-red truck that might one day be his. Eventually, he covered it with canvas, cut some evergreen branches, and laid them atop the canvas as camouflage.

  Inside the trailer, he lay down on Daddy Wilkins’s bed, so as not to disturb either Missy or Callie-Lisbeth, and slept until almost noon.

  35

  Big Mister Sinister

  Tim Bowman had been incognito ever since his firing. Like a villain in a Decimator comic, he had gone u
nderground. There actually were mephitic-smelling, interconnected sewers, dank and intricately bricked, under the crowded alleys of Satan’s Cellar. On the day after his firing, Bowman prised up a manhole cover not far from P. S. Annie’s, lowered himself into the opening, pulled the manhole cover clankingly back into place, and worked his way rung by rung into the dripping caverns of the undercity.

  The sewer was surprisingly like the sewers Bowman had drawn as a comics-infatuated kid: echoey, wet, claustrophobia inducing, rat haunted. With a flashlight beam, he carved a path along a concrete ledge on the main tunnel’s inner wall. Ahead of him lay catacombs, grottoes, tributary tunnels, slopes, niche-in-the-bricks hideouts: safe places for drug smugglers, pokeweed addicts, and gangsters of the notorious Nick City crime syndicate. You could also probably find madmen, losers, and failed suicides down here. Bowman, psychically aseethe, had come below to think about his meteoric descent into a category encompassing all three types.

  First, he had no family now that F. Deane Finesse had cut him loose. A foster child through his thirteenth year, he had fled a poultry farm near Tuscaloosa to make his way to Salonika, where, for three years, he had survived squeegeeing, for extorted pay, the windshields of cars stalled in traffic. He’d also sold hubcaps, boosted office supplies, and slept in the pews of unlocked churches from Sinatro Heights to Chattahoochee Park. While a vagrant, Bowman had taught himself to draw, copying the figures in shoplifted comics, on humorous billboards, even from the photos and funny papers of wind-tumbled Salonika Urbanite pages. Without a tutor, he’d served the apprenticeship that one day brought him to the notice of F. Deane Finesse, who, at Bowman’s urging, incorporated and funded the home-grown enterprise known as Uncommon Comics.

  Now, hiking a sewer pipe or wading in the slop crawling like blackstrap molasses about his ankles, Bowman was on his own again. He knew how to cope, he’d learned as a kid. But the image of what he’d achieved, and the full-color grandeur of what he’d lost, rode him like stones. He thought seriously of submerging himself in the underground sludge and fatally inhaling it. Why not? He was the world’s—well, at least this city’s—redheaded stepchild, and he saw no future for himself apart from the wonder and security of UC’s Unique Continuum.

  Hours, maybe days, passed as Bowman vacillated on the crucial issue of self-extinguishment. Pondering, he threw a broken brick at a water rat the size of a Pekinese. At the intersection of two tunnels, he stole the soggy French fries of a snockered bum asleep there. He scarfed the dregs of a bottle of Strawberry Street Wine that he’d found in a rusty grocery cart capsized in a tunnel under Satan Cellar’s trolley terminus. He kept his eyes open for victims to roll, rodents to stone, and organized human predators to dodge. He brooded on his options.

  Don’t off yourself, a voice advised him. Get the creep who did this to you.

  F. Deane Finesse?

  Hell no. He lifted you out of poverty. If you’ve fallen back into it, it’s because circumstances beyond your, and old F. Deane’s control, worked to pull you down.

  What circumstances? Who?

  Think. Tuck your carroty hair up under your thinking cap and . . . think! He did, and it came to him—the exact Who responsible for his descent into the smelly depths. His memory of the event that had sabotaged him, that had made everything go blooie, set him moving again, slogging through Satan Cellar’s syrupy muck toward a ladder up and a manhole out.

  *

  Bowman emerged in an alley. A stray dog fled, ki-yi-yi-ing as if he’d kicked it. A whore, in laddered black hose and a skirt not much larger than a dish towel, gasped and ducked into a doorway. Bowman trudged past, shedding oily ropes of toilet paper and braided waste matter, a living replica of the Mulch Creature from issues 47-54 of Mantisman. He met other people in the midnight alleys, but none tried to mess with him. They all used the avoidance strategies of the yelping stray or the startled hooker.

  There was an all-night gun shop in a cul-de-sac just off West Bush Street. Bowman schlepped down this alley and caromed into the shop like a mud-plastered tackling dummy. The faces of the wizened owner and his three patrons, one in full Klan gear, revolved toward him with looks ranging from doubt to full admiration. Bowman approached the owner, whose crease-lined mouth reminded him of a ventriloquist’s dummy’s, and declared, “I need a pistol.”

  “How many?” the owner said hopefully.

  “One. A small one I can hide on my person.”

  “I’ve got a two-for-one special tonight. Or buy three makes of different caliber and get twenty percent off a twelve-piece Syrian assault rifle.”

  “A pistol. One pistol.”

  The owner showed Bowman stub-barreled, silver-plated, pearl-handled, double-hammered, and half-cocked pistols. Bowman chose the smallest, and cheapest, Saturday-night lethal. He also bought a box of bullets and loaded his pistol on the premises.

  “Twenty-seven ninety-eight,” said the owner. “Plus tax.”

  “Shit,” Bowman said, spinning the dented handgun’s chambers.

  “Well, you look like a decent sort. I’ll knock off five. And you can forget the tax.”

  Bowman pulled out his wallet. Sleezer and his friends recoiled from this strange object, but the limp bills in Bowman’s hand soon calmed them.

  *

  Next stop: SatyrFernalia.

  Griff Sienko and his pet gerbil were on duty in the upper-story costume bay, Griff watching the Pornucopia Channel on a wrist-corsage-sized TV, the gerbil sitting paws-up on the checkerboard on which Griff had arranged sunflower seeds, some Hartz Munchy O’s, and a tiny playground of toilet-paper tubes and empty match-books.

  “That any good?” Bowman asked, nodding at the tiny TV.

  “Hard to say,” Griff said. “It’s like watching finger puppets across a football field. What can I do you for, Mr. Bowman? You look a little grimy.”

  Behind the costume bay, in a bathhouse with polished wooden slats crisscrossing its floor, Bowman stood a long time under a spray that started lukewarm and finished as cold as a Phosphor Fog waterfall. But as he laved away the past, preparing for a collision with the lout who’d destroyed his career, the water sprinkling from the showerhead did not match the deafening seethe of the storm inside him.

  Later, Griff brought him the zoot suit that Howie Littleton had designed from Bowman’s drawings of Big Mister Sinister, a crime overlord from the Decimator series: wide, striped, pleated trousers bulging at the hips and tapering toward the ankles. A jacket that hung so far below Bowman’s butt it was almost a dressing gown. A hat that Zorro would have loved (except, maybe, for the lavender band).

  “Costume party?” Griff apparently had no idea that Finesse had let him go.

  “Sure.” Bowman found his freshly scrubbed wallet, tipped Griff, slid his pistol into a jacket pocket, and sat down on a shower-room bench to think. According to Griff, it was almost dawn. Soon the city—not just Satan’s Cellar, but Salonika proper—would be alive again, and Bowman would have work to do.

  *

  At nine o’clock, he presented himself to the receptionist in the lobby of the Ralph McGill Building. A security guard appraised him as if he’d fallen off a wardrobe truck from the touring company of a Guys and Dolls revival.

  “With whom do you have an appointment?” asked the receptionist.

  “Somebody. Anybody. Lee Stamz, probably.”

  “Your name?”

  “Big Mister Sinister.”

  “Sir?”

  “Tell them—tell Lee Stamz—that Tim Bowman is here dressed like a character from a Decimator film.” Bowman nodded at the switchboard, the front brim of his hat an insistent edge.

  The receptionist relayed his message to Lee Stamz, who said, audibly even to Bowman, “Well, get some ID and send the joker up.” Of course. At the height of the shakeup at Uncommon Comics, Bowman had refused Stamz’s every request for an interview. This change of heart was gratifying.

  On the newsroom floor, Stamz did a comic boggle, mostly intentional, at the s
ight of him, then took Bowman into the dayroom, where nearly everyone gave him a gander. He was hard to miss. Did they know his character from the first two Decimator movies? Or was he just a diversion to gawk at on an otherwise humdrum morning?

  “Come into my cubicle.” Stamz leaned Bowman in that direction.

  “Not yet.”

  “What, then? You got an agenda? I’ll show you around if that’s your druthers.”

  Bowman tilted his Zorro brim, and Stamz led him among the thocking keyboards and half-walled offices of the dayroom, introducing him to every drudge—faces blank, suspicious, or fascinated—as “Big Mister Sinister, heh heh heh,” as if the three-note tag of his giggle were a college degree.

  “And here’s a colleague of mine in entertainment,” Stamz said. “Xavier Th—”

  “Thaxton,” Bowman said. “I know.” He pulled his pistol and fired three quick shots into Xavier’s gut:

  Bang! bang! bang!

  Heh-heh-heh.

  36

  “Adios, Superman”

  Xavier heard the reports as widely spaced notes in a symphony of three movements, each movement a year in length. The impact of each bullet was a one-note crescendo. Why was a man outfitted like a 1940s barrio hipster trying to kill him? With the exception of Ricardo’s Mexican Restaurant’s radio ads, he loved all things Mexican. He found the talents of Orozco, Paz, and Valenzuela muy simpatico. Some days, he could even tolerate mariachi music. So why had a son of that noble culture just shot him? Thrice?

  “Eat this, you s.o.b.!” the man cried. “And this! And this!” Or had cried. Time was out of joint for Xavier. Events no longer had reliable sequence, and he was lying on the floor. Everything happening above him happened in blurred slow motion. This wasn’t just a murder, but an assassination. He was being removed for murky ideological reasons. His views, as expressed in “Thus Saith Xavier Thaxton,” had led this assassin, who sure looked like Big Mister Sinister in a Decimator movie, to walk in and shoot him.