Hank just stared. The old guy slammed the empty glass down.
“Another,” he gasped.
Chapter 31
Sticks and Stones
It was early morning - that cold gray slice of time that hovers right before the dawn. The liar’s hour when all cats looked black and you couldn’t trust the shadows.
Maya was gone.
The trapdoor was gone too.
Or was it?
Carnival didn’t know. He didn’t know much of anything.
Open your eyes, Val my boy. Will you lay beneath the pennies forever?
“I have to make up my mind, Poppa. That’s just what Maya told me. So that’s just what I’m doing.”
So flip a coin.
“Gypsies don’t flip coins. You taught me that. Flip a coin, you might lose it.”
Good boy. You remember. Gypsies don’t flip coins. We throw rocks.
Carnival remembered. It was one of the few good memories he had of his Poppa. He saw it now, clear as photographs. His Poppa standing in a field beside the wagon.
“We throw rocks and why not?” Poppa said. “That’s how gaijin dealt with us for centuries. See a gypsy? Throw a rock. A cure-all better than fresh bottled snake oil.
And then he’d showed Carnival how to do it.
“To start, you lay a stick in the dirt. Can be any stick. That’s the beauty of it. No fancy tackle needed. Then you pick up a rock. Any rock. Then throw it. Or drop it, if you’re not feeling particularly aggressive. If it falls to the right of the stick it’s a yes. To the left, a no. And there you have it. Instant free choice.”
Yet Carnival knew, even then, that not all questions are yes and no. Some questions were like knives. Like dissection. Some questions cut you, like interrogation. Others you got to cut, finer and finer. If there’s a point to this you’ll probably want to count how many angels are dancing on top of it.
So Carnival thought of a question and said it aloud.
“Do I want to see Poppa?”
Hell. Did he even need to see Poppa? It had been so many years. He didn’t need to throw a rock to figure out this one. Carnival and his Poppa did not part on good terms. They didn’t part at all. History’s a long rope, and family’s a chain. It’s blood that ties you, blood, and a whole bloody mess of knotted viscera. Half a thousand times he told himself he wouldn’t think of poppa.
Let him die.
Only he couldn’t.
He didn’t know how to.
So he had caged him next to his heart so he could talk to Poppa whenever he wanted to – without bothering to actually see him.
Only problem was, Poppa never shut up long enough for Carnival to forget about the old bastard.
And now he needed to see his father face to face.
Or at least he thought he did.
So he threw a rock.
This wasn’t the only way that Poppa would have done it. Poppa had a pair of rocks. One dark, one light. He’d drop them on the ground like clumsy dice. If the dark one fell close to him the answer was no. If the light was nearer, it was yes. Equal distance meant maybe or it meant maybe try again. It was all a game and simpler than parliament. Poppa showed Carnival how to throw rocks to make decisions. Then, when he saw Carnival use it too often, he did a very Poppa thing. He hit Carnival with a rock.
“Decide!” Poppa shouted. “A gypsy moves. He doesn’t stop to consider. Rocks don’t consider. Sticks don’t consider. Move. Act. Decide.”
So Carnival decided quickly and moved before Poppa threw another rock. That’s what Poppa was trying to teach. How to act without thought. Funny. That’s what got Carnival into this mess, acting without thought. Opening Olaf’s throat like it was a faucet he could turn off. He’d let his heart do all the talking.
Hell. He ought to be honest and call it lust. His balls had struck thirteen o’clock at the sound of a vampire’s laugh.
He wanted Maya.
Do you? Are you certain?
He wasn’t sure. Maybe he should have thrown a rock or a stick.
Or a stake.
It seemed to take forever. Slow motion, like in the movies, only this was happening for real. Frozen molasses crawling uphill. Finally the rock hit the ground. Is it on the left of the stick? The right? Hell. Carnival guessed it depended on which side of the stick he was standing on. This is no good.
There’s not much choice here at all.
He had to do this Poppa’s way.
Come and see me boy. You know you want to.
Carnival wasn’t all that certain if he really wanted to or not.
But he knew one thing.
He needed to see the old man.
So Carnival pushed his fingers tight together, like he was getting ready to say his Boy Scout oath.
Then he took those two fingers and pushed them deep into his chest.
Chapter 32
Cancer Kills
It was way past late. It was practically morning. Hank had thrown the last drunk of the night out into the street and locked the door. But the old guy was still here still drinking zombies. It was damn near time for the alarm clock to ring good morning and the old guy was still drinking. And Hank just couldn’t find the words to let him go.
He shook his head in disbelief. Legally, he wasn’t supposed to serve a customer more than two zombies a night. Legally he wasn’t even supposed to be open this late.
Or did he mean this early?
“Depends upon what side of the clock you’re standing on,” the old guy said as if he could read Hank’s mind.
And then the old guy kept on drinking.
“The last guy I seen drink that fast stepped into the washroom and put a bullet through his skull. It took a whole bottle of Lestoil to scrub the brain worms off the tiles. A whole can of Glade to spray over the stink.”
That wasn’t true. The Glade hadn’t helped one bit. Hank could still smell all that blood and jelly, those thoughts splattered on the tiles of the washroom. These days, he usually pissed in the alley. The winos didn’t mind and the junkies didn’t care.
Hank looked at the guy meaningfully.
“You aren’t going to be trouble, are you?”
The old guy shook his head. Halfway through the shake the old woman was back.
“Stop that.”
“Stop what?”
Hank didn’t know what to say. The old guy rattled the empty glass.
“How about another?”
“Celebrating?”
“Born again.”
Fuck. A religious nut. Hank made the drink.
Bang. Another zombie disappeared.
Bam. The old guy blinked back and forth.
“Make up your mind, why don’t you?”
Bam.
Hank’s bad eye started ticking right along with the guy’s sex changes. Like a bongo beat. It gave the whole bar a nice disco-ish strobe look. He blinked hard, trying to lose the tic but blinking only made it worse. He wanted to run but there was money in the drawer and the booze wasn’t locked up and he needed this job. You get this close to the grave, you start thinking about where the next pay check’s going to come from.
“Another,” the old guy croaked.
“That many zombies, this fast, gonna leave you dead drunk,” Hank warned.
“Dead already. Drunk wouldn’t be bad.”
Hank thought he was getting the picture. The old guy had probably just been bit by the Big C. Cancer. He bet the old guy had just heard a doctor’s goddamn diagnosis. Surprise, you’re going to die. That’s how they did it, damn their Harvard-educated asses. It took Hank’s mother three years to die.
“Yeah sure,” Hank said.
He mixed another drink but he took his time. He wondered where the old guy had got it? Prostate? Lungs? Maybe he’d got in the dick. Hank had heard about that. Maybe that’s why he kept changing back and forth. One sex dying, another taking hold.
He was tired. Thinking crazy. The thought of cancer made about as much sense as anything
he’d seen or thought tonight. He started the mixing the next zombie. The old guy, or girl, kept chuckling wetly.
“Three parts rum, light, dark, and in the middle. Three’s the charm,” he said.
It made sense. Hank could see the cancer cells moving in like an army. Taking over his body like the winos and junkies had taken over his piss stained alley.
“Three’s the charm,” Hank agreed.
That’s how cancer worked. Like termites eating your house down to build their own. That’s how it happened. Cancer was like one of those quiet little guys you read about in the papers. An accountant or a bank teller going quietly about his life, just doing his job, never yelling, never getting laid. Until one morning he snaps. Something changes inside him, like it had been happening all that time. All the pieces come together and he comes to work with a pistol tucked in his pocket, a sawed off shotgun in his briefcase, a knife. The hand grenade in his brain goes off and anybody standing too close is going to catch a chunk.
“Three,” the old man whispered.
Yeah, three.
The tic kept getting worse. And every time that bastard nerve jumped, Hank could see the old woman sitting in front of a campfire.
Bam. Tic. Bam.
Ice cubes rattling in a glass.
Tic.
He saw the flames in the campfire, high and crackling.
The amber mixing with the clear.
Tic. Bam.
Were there bones in that campfire?
Tic.
The old woman was talking. The flames were talking. Hell, even the bones in the campfire were talking. Long tubular sucking sounds like a group of skinny backup singers, crooning blue moon tunes to the bongo back beat of Hank’s madly ticking eye.
Tic.
That long red scarf, draped about her throat like a noose, stood up above her like a soft felt cobra. And above that a tall red figure, reaching out towards Hank, arms and hands and fingers like long red ropes. Reaching. Pointing. Touching him.
“Three.”
That was the hell of cancer. You were born with it. It was in you, just ticking away, just regular cells gone crazy. Yet even while they’re going crazy, they’re just doing everything that regular cells are supposed to do. Just going along and doing their job. Just eating, sleeping and fucking, except they’re eating you.
There was the old gypsy woman and the campfire. There was a wagon, of course. All painted like a Mexican bordello. Hex wheels, evil eyes, charms against snake bite and moon madness.
Bam.
Not a wagon. A hut. A hut on stilts. Like that house in the Lethal Weapon movie. Which one was that? Part two? Part three? Fuck. He could see Mel Gibson, howling like a snake bit dog, revving his truck and hauling at those stilts like he was fixing to yank the whole house down on himself.
Hank felt tired, like he could not go on any further. He leaned down against the bar counter. Fuck. What a mess. He ought to clean this dump up. Chunks of him fell to the floor. The crimson lipstick puckers and cigarette burns of carcinomas crawled across his face and under his shirt and down his pants.
Tumors clustered and bundled like bunches of swollen black grapes. Hank’s nipples bled and blistered, dripping blood and puss and staining what was left of his heart. Polyps sprouted from his nostrils and ears and the down drooping corners of his mouth like soft pulpy barnacles. In one mad metastasis the sarcoma ran wild through the tinker toyed framework of bone, cartilage and muscle, eating through his inner structure like termites run berserk.
“Just before you die,” Momma softly whispered, holding her nose as the peristalsis rippled and ripped through the clotted mass of what was left of Hank’s intestines, covering his feet and floorboards with a green runny mess. “Tell me where I can find a Ouija board?”
Hank told her, just before one final pineoblastoma erupted in his skull and Hank forgot about everything he’d never dreamed off, just before his lungs stopped moving and his heart forgot how to beat.
Momma smiled. It felt good to have a couple of drinks after all that dryness.
It felt like she was getting over a long Lent fast.
And it was really good to find someone she could talk to.
Maggots crawled, fresh blown from the rotting meat, sucking on the cancerous tissues, rotting and dying before reaching for the gift of buzzing wings.
Momma looked at the entrails.
They didn’t tell her much.
Which was why she needed a Ouija board.
Chapter 33
Regret and Reruns
Carnival kept on pushing as hard as he could, jamming and rooting his two extended fingers into the meat of his chest.
It was harder work than cutting a throat with a knife.
Push boy. Like being born. Reborn. If you want to see where you put your Poppa, you have to pay with some pain.
And this hurt. Skin didn’t like being invaded. Ribs didn’t like being asked to part but it had to be this way. There had to be pain. A price needed to be paid. There’s always a little blood that needs to be spilled.
Maya would know.
Carnival pushed his fingers deeper, both of them, through the hole in his chest he’d cut long ago with a magic knife.
Two fingers deep.
There’s no going back now.
Then he pushed his whole hand in, fisting his chest. It had to be done. There were two stones, hidden beneath Carnival’s heart. One to the left and one to the right - Poppa’s yes or no stones. Carnival stared at the stones. He picked them up. It’s hard work picking something up inside yourself. You have to think in different angles; had to learn to feel in different colors.
Carnival squeezed the stones together, pushing them into a single stone. It all went dark, and then that voice, slicing out, like light from out of the darkness.
It took you long enough to decide.
“Hello Poppa,” was how Carnival made up his mind to begin.
Poppa reached out from inside Carnival’s chest. For a moment the tips of blood reddened fingers looked like the fringe of a long red scarf. He grabbed Carnival’s hand and dragged him in, fast, like a swallowed rock
Carnival heard and felt his chest slam shut behind him, and then everything went black and red. He was inside his insides, and feeling right at home. A movie was playing on a television set somewhere in the darkness of Carnival’s mind. It was almost like a barroom joke. See, there were these two knives. And a long red scarf. Ah. Carnival was getting ahead of himself.
Don’t put the cart before the horse, or you’ll give the beast a headache from it having to push.
Poppa was right. Everything had to move in its own time at its own pace. He’d tell the story soon enough. There’s something else Poppa used to say. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. So that’s what Carnival did. He kept his friends close, his enemies closer, and his family closest of all.
Deeper. You have to go deeper.
The soul of a gypsy runs deep as a dozen rivers. Like an old house, all dark inside, with secrets hiding in the shadows. There are always secrets, basements within basements within basements. Carnival was down in one of those basements - the sub-sub-cellar of the soul.
Down to where his Poppa dragged him. Down, to where he’d dragged his Poppa.
Carnival didn’t know Poppa’s real name. He didn’t even know if Momma knew. It was more than a Gypsy thing, it was a magic thing. Poppa believed in keeping secrets.
Carnival knew Momma’s name. It was Magda. Say it softly, like the midnight wind over a wild lily petal. Magda, short for Magdelaine, but Poppa was never anything else but Poppa. Now here he was, down where he wanted, no, not wanted, down where he needed to be. Down deep, inside himself. Deeper than that here again gone again cellar where he’d left what was left of Elija; growing maggots and wistfully dreaming of unemptiable bottles and bottomless kegs.
The beating of Carnival’s heart sounded like the rolling of wet thunder, high over his head. It’s an introverted procedure.
Climbing inside yourself like a turtle getting into interior decoration - a little gingham, a coat of fresh paint, a tattering of viscera.
Voila! The rabbit is out of his hat.
There was Poppa, chained to something that might have been a rib. He wasn’t pretty. He never had been, but he was getting worse. Now he was nothing more than rot and bones and a lot of tightly wrapped memories. There was a television in the corner, playing ceaselessly.
Regret and reruns. Nothing sticks worse, you know?
“Regret, Poppa?”
Sure, regret. You think I like doing it this way? You think I wouldn’t prefer a tidy little bungalow in heaven. Maybe something high up and close to the sun’s good eye, overlooking the angel’s dressing rooms?
“You made your choice, Poppa. You wanted it this way. You asked for it.”
Choice is a road that you decide to walk upon while you are walking upon it. You made choices too, boy. You asked as loudly as me.
He tossed the red scarf out towards Carnival. Carnival stepped back but just a little. He wanted to walk away but there just isn’t that far you can go inside yourself, especially not from Poppa. A bit of that tattered red scarf wound like a burning silk noose about Poppa’s throat. His flesh was rotting away, what was left of it. The right side of his face, hacked off like a dark wet cave of moldering meat.
Your work, boy.
Carnival touched the scar on his cheek.
“You were good with your knife as well, Poppa.”
The old corpse smiled.
Long red piano keys.
It wasn’t pleasant.
If you want to use a sharp tongue, keep your knife sharper still, hey boy?
More wisdom from the dear all knowing Poppa, “You’re home,” Carnival said.
You expected me to be out?
Of course Poppa was here. Carnival had chained him here after they’d fought. The two men, those two knives, that red stained scarf. He still wasn’t sure if what he’d chained down here was a memory, a ghost, or Poppa himself. He’d done the magic a year after Momma died. Got the spell from a demon who had traded in dreams. He’d found the dream in the heart of a passed out drunk. Not Elija, but another drunk.
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