by Jack Dann
"I'm going to get up and walk out the door," I said. "If that creature of yours tries to stop me, I'm going to rip her fucking nose off again and shove it down her windpipe."
I threw some vouchers down for the coffee and donuts and started to stand up.
"Thaddeus Grayson is dead," Pupillina said.
I sat back down. "What?"
"He's been dead for three weeks now."
It hadn't been in the papers. None of our mutual friends had called me.
"What do you have to do with it, Freddy?"
"I—that is, the Family—came into possession of the body."
Thaddeus dead. It was true. Pupillina had no reason I could discern for lying. I tried to take another drink of my coffee, but all I got was the bitter dregs. Thaddeus was the oldest friend I had, maybe the best.
"How?"
"Blast job," Pupillina replied. "Something fucking blew his mind."
"God."
"It was a slow burn. Whoever did it wanted something. It must have been agony for the poor son of a bitch."
"Who did it, Freddy?"
I was going to kill them. Option 4 or no Option 4. Thaddeus had taught me everything I knew about writing. And a hell of a lot about living a worthwhile life.
"Good question," Pupillina said. "We don't know."
"Piss in orbit."
"Honestly, we don't. He was accidentally dumped outside of one of our establishments."
Like hell he didn't know. But for some reason, he was being adamant. "Why are you telling me this?" I said.
Pupillina smiled horrendously. Even his teeth were yellowing. "How'd you like that dereliction of duty charge against you dropped? How about that, Andy?"
"I'll win the case."
"Maybe. What if it were to be like it never happened?"
"What are you saying?"
"We need you to find out who killed Thaddeus Grayson."
"You are trying to bribe me to be a snoop?"
"The Family needs an outsider on this one. Somebody with no, uh, leanings toward any one part of us, if you know what I mean."
"Somebody who hates all of your guts equally and indiscriminately?"
"That's it."
"It's out of my jurisdiction."
"Oh, I've already arranged to have you temporarily assigned to homicide here in Birmingham as specialist labor."
"Justcorp cleared this?"
"It did."
"I'll be damned."
"Yes. So?"
"Why Andy Harco? Isn't there somebody else you could rain on?" But I was already planning the investigation. First, I'd have to talk to students and faculty where Thaddeus taught. . . .
"You knew him."
"Eight years ago."
"You've kept in touch through virtual."
"How would you know that, Freddy? That's illegal information for an unlicensed civilian."
"Don't be juvenile, Andy," said Pupillina. "I've got a federal license to conduct certain virtual taps." He looked rather indignant on the matter, as if he were a man unjustly accused. He just didn't get it that I thought he was scum, and that I was never going to just go along with things because "that's how they were," or whatever other fucking excuse a bad element gives for hurting other people.
"So, will you take the job? We're going to double your salary while you're working in Birmingham. We know you like to buy little doodads for yourself."
"How generous."
"Think nothing of it."
"I will."
Pupillina stood up with a great sigh and rustling of clothing. He sounded like a capsized ship righting itself.
"Freddy," I said, neither standing nor looking up at him, "why'd you send the goons? You could have just told me this."
He hesitated in answering for a moment, then snapped his lapel and smoothed down his navy jacket. I wondered what designer made blue jeans big enough to fit around that huge ass. "I was trying to give you a gentleman's welcome," he replied in a regal tone. What an affected asshole. The Italians had come to Alabama to work in the mines in the early 1900s, a little too late to be princes of cotton and land.
He was feeding me bullshit anyway, but I wasn't going to get anything else out of him on that one.
"Where is Thaddeus's body?"
"In safekeeping. But we're going to have to let it be discovered tonight. He was due to give some reading that he never misses tomorrow—"
"Southern Voices. At UAB." It was where Thaddeus had first made a name for himself.
"Whatever."
"You're the picture of cultural refinement, Freddy."
Pupillina sniffed, a great rancid snotty sniff, then continued, "So he's going to be found, and he'll be in the morgue for you to look at tomorrow."
"Okay."
"Have we got a deal, then?" Pupillina said. He held out his hand. He should have known not to do that. Christ, what a loser.
"Freddy, if my junk ever told me it was legal, I'd blow you away in a second. If I had a chance to mace you again, this time I'd stick it up the hole in your dick—if you still have one. I know who and what you are, Freddy."
He dropped his hand. "We have a deal," he said, and walked away. Or maybe slid would be a better way of describing it. Big-boned Bertha followed him out the door, and I was alone with my thoughts once again in the Krispy Kreme. I remembered the first conversation Thaddeus and I had had, in a bar on the Southside.
"I'm going to get this city down in words," he said to me. "I don't give a damn how low I have to sink or how high I have to fly, I'll do it."
"Why?" I asked. "What's so important about Birmingham?"
"I fit into this city, like a key. I can open it up and find a passageway, man. Find the way."
"To what?"
He looked at me, ran his stubby fingers through his beard. "That's the question, ain't it? When I find out, I'll let you know. You'll be the first, okay?"
Thaddeus let us all know, one poem at a time. I ordered another cup of coffee and stared into it until the time came to go to change clothes and attend my grandfather's funeral.
Mom greeted me at the door of the church. She was dressed in one of those iridescent-black grief shifts that are supposed to absorb the alpha emissions of all the nearby mourners and display them in dark patterns across the weave. Mom's wasn't too lively, for there weren't a whole lot of people at the funeral. Granddaddy had kept pretty much to himself these last few years, and before—before he'd licked his drinking problem—what friends he'd had were buddies from the tavern. No close friends. Acquaintances, family. Cousins, creaky old contemporaries, their sons and daughters. Grandma had died before I was born. Mom was her and Granddaddy's only daughter. And I the only grandchild.
We went up front to view the remains one last time, and Mom broke down. Her dress created some interesting swirls as she cried. In keeping with her ecumenical style, Mom had not used the Branching Hermeneutics clergy, but had gotten Brother Christopher, a whiff of a fellow from the Children of Gregarious Breathers, to conduct the service. He held her hand to comfort her.
"He was so handsome," Mom said. "My father was a handsome man."
I could not but agree.
We took our seats in the first row, and the Breather started the service with a prayer to whatever god of human potential his ilk had faith in. Granddaddy would have snorted in derision, but he'd also told me once that I should let Mom do anything she wanted for his funeral. What the hell difference would it make to him after he was dead?
So I sat through it. But despite Granddaddy's stated wishes, I felt like saying something. I felt like giving a proper rest to this man who had shaped me more than any other. When the Breather paused in his homily, I motioned to him that I had something to say. He affected not to notice me, so I stood up and walked to the front. Mom let out a little gasp, but appeared resigned to letting me have my way. I stood in the pulpit and the Breather introduced me with a nervous smile, then sat down behind me.
The crowd shuffled around
expectantly. They all had on ill-fitting suits and dresses. Working people. Elements like Pupillina would think of them as schnooks, as cattle.
"My granddaddy wasn't much of a churchgoer," I said. A few in the congregation frowned at this. I heard Brother Breather huff behind me. "But he always spoke of the Old Master, of how he was raised in that Primitive Baptist home out in Brookside. He was a man of God in his way. . . ."
What was I trying to say? Granddaddy hadn't been to church in fifty years. Until he kicked the bottle, Sundays were six-beer mornings.
"His father worked the coal mines, and Granddaddy went to work in the iron foundries when he was sixteen, as an electrician. When the biostatic plants came in, he wired the broths."
This was going nowhere. My grandfather had survived, adapted. He was no hero of the masses. He had precious little ambition, except to lead a good life and not to hurt anybody. When it was clear that his drinking was devastating Mom, he'd given it up. Just like that. No treatment centers, no twelve steps, no phenyl therapy. It was a damned gutsy move.
"Granddaddy was the quintessential Southern city man. He was wild and he was loving. He was low-down and he would do anything for you. I've never known a better man. If I can be more like him, I'll count my life well lived. But we won't see his like again."
Here my voice caught in my throat. Anyway, that was all. It was enough. I sat down and the Breather concluded the service with some inappropriate reflection on how we should all be grateful to the government for contracting out Maturicell for our senior citizens, so that even the poor could experience better living through virtual.
Afterward, a couple of relatives or old drinking buddies—I didn't know which—told me that they appreciated what I said, and that they, too, had been getting sick of the "preacher's" nonsense. They asked me if I wanted to go get shitfaced with them—well, not exactly in those words—but I politely turned them down.
Mom was having Granddaddy cremated, then shot out of a large air cannon that the Breathers operated somewhere in Tennessee. That was one ceremony I was going to miss. They say that the ashes are eventually distributed around the whole Earth uniformly throughout the stratosphere, but I like to think that the particles don't get that high, or if they do, they come back down again. I like to think that when it rains these days, it's raining ancestors.
"Why don't you stay at the apartment tonight?" Mom asked me. "I have a great deal to do this evening, affairs to arrange." She didn't wait for me to answer, but looked around, spotted the mortuary crew, and waved them over. "Here's the key. I'll see you later."
I took the plastic key and pocketed it while Mom steadfastly walked away to do whatever duties her scattered brain had created for her. It had always been like this with her. She was a combination of steel resolve and will-o'-the-wisp notions. I thought of her as a metallic butterfly bashing about in the flowers. She'd saved my ass more than once, yet I had difficulty being around her. I loved her. But you don't have to like someone to love them.
I went back to my car and breathed out an attempt my body was making to cry. The night was just falling, and a storm was building to the west, where most storms come from in Alabama. Under the storm, the sun had set, but the sky was still burning deep red, like a very slow, very hot fire. The storm cloud spread over this brightness like black oil. Lightning bolts, staying in the air, curled into and out of the cloud, like quicksilver worms. And all of this fury was the backdrop to dozens of flashing biostatic towers, gridding the city as far as the eye could see. The air smelled like tar and mowed grass. It was sultry hot and full of electric possibility. You could almost believe the city was a living thing on an evening such as this.
"Well, son," said a voice—his voice—and I nearly jumped out of my skin. It was the ghost, standing beside me, smoking a cigarette exactly as Granddaddy used to. I expected the smoke to curve to the edge of the projection parameters, then abruptly fade out. Instead, it swirled away into the air, and I would almost swear I could smell it. I looked around and saw two lampposts where a couple of holoprojectors may have been, creating the image. "It's almost time for me to go," said the ghost.
"Mom's not keeping you, huh?" I tried to suppress the feeling that this actually was my grandfather. The physical reproduction was excellent. Ghosts had gotten a lot more sophisticated since I'd last been to a funeral.
"She don't need me. She never really did."
"Yes, I guess she's got her religions. Or they've got her."
The ghost took another puff, coughed. Jeez, this thing was lifelike! Or is that "deathlike"?
"Now, don't underestimate her, Andy. We were all of us too hard on her."
I took a breath, gazed out upon the last embers of the sunset, then looked back. "I guess you're right," I said.
The ghost dropped his cigarette with a quarter-inch left to the white paper, and didn't bother to grind it out. Exactly like Granddaddy. "I want you to do something for me, son."
"What?"
"I want you to get those bastards. I want you to get them all." The ghost's eyes shone like black coal in moonlight.
"Who are you talking about, Granddaddy?" I asked, not able to catch myself before I spoke his name.
"The ones who did this to me," he said quietly.
What? I started to ask. But I knew the answer to that. I'd half known all along. The storm was breaking in the west, and lightning began to snake to the ground. "I will," I told my grandfather.
While I was watching the storm, the ghost faded away. Before I got into my car, I noticed something on the ground. It was a cigarette butt. Probably just one that had already been laying in the parking lot. But when I knelt to pick it up, it was warm.
The next morning a crank street cleaner discovered Thaddeus Grayson's body protruding from a storm drain near Five Points South. Police speculated that the deluge of the previous night had washed it there from wherever it had originally been dumped.
3
I had spent the night before at Mom's place, where she'd fixed up my old room for me. She'd used it for various kinds of religious networking for years, and the place smelled heavily of patchouli, a scent it had never had when I was a kid. Mom came in after I had already gone to bed, but I could hear her in the kitchen. Despite her avowed disbelief in grief, she was quietly crying.
I got up and went to the kitchen. I took a paper towel from the dispenser there and got some milk from the pantry. I sat down at the table, across from Mom, and said nothing. The carton of milk quickly warmed in my hand as the heat-pumping nano activated and cooled the insides.
Mom sniffed a few more times, wiped her nose on her nightgown, then looked around for something on which to dry her eyes. I handed her the paper towel.
"Daddy was so handsome today," she said. "That was what he looked like when I was a little girl."
"Yes, he was."
She used a corner of the paper towel delicately to dab her eyes. After a moment's struggle, she regained her composure—or closed herself off to true feeling once again, depending on how you look at it.
"I suppose you want his ghost turned off?" she said.
"You know I do."
She looked at me, but not like Abby had that night. Mom may have been a ditz, but she was a living ditz.
"How did I produce such a hard-hearted offspring?"
"I don't know, Mom."
"I mean, look at the kind of person I am. I have faith, Andy. Faith in things to come. I believe in keeping love alive as long as possible. Don't you want at least some part of Daddy to survive into the better world that's coming?"
I shook my head. Useless to explain, yet still I always tried. "Even if there is a better world coming, Mom, Granddaddy is dead. That ghost is like a comic-strip version of him. You know that."
"I know that even a caricature is better than nothing," she said.
"For you, Mom. Not for him."
"Can't you have even a little faith, Andy?"
"No. I can't."
"Well." Sh
e suppressed another sniffle, then stood up. "Good night."
"Good night, Mom."
She went off to bed, and I sat at the kitchen table and finished my milk in silence.
In the morning, I headed into the heart of the city, to the biostatic plants and the hulking infrastructure of what was officially known as the University of Alabama at Birmingham, UAB. What the letters really stood for, everyone knew, was the University that Ate Birmingham. It encysted the south side of the city like kudzu takes a tree.
In the midtwentieth century, the iron mills had dominated the landscape, but by the 1990s, they were heaps of rust. Twenty years later, come the biostatic revolution, grossly cheap energy, et voilà—all the towns that had big medical centers became the centers of money and power in the world. Birmingham—after years of a massive inferiority complex—had finally got a leg up on Atlanta in the region. UAB had been a bio mecca for years.
But once again Birmingham had blown it by concentrating all of its hopes in one industry. Biostatics is old tech now, just as iron had become a century earlier—a tech that is waiting to get picked off by some hotshot genius. And the biowaste, nasty as shit because it is shit, deepens. Good old Birmingham was destined to become a second-rate town all over again. Or maybe the Ideals, so much more intelligent and farseeing than the leaders of the past had been, would save us. And if you buy that, I've got a near-Earth C-based asteroid to sell you, dirt cheap.
The plants are massive and bright, even in broad daylight. They shine and flash like giant test tubes full of neon gas, though what they are really filled with is reactive bio-mass—soybeans, pond scum, and human feces. They have a certain gross beauty.
I left my car in the parking garage at UAB and walked the few blocks to Five Points South. As I'd hoped, the Betablocker was still there, in all its shabbiness. Thaddeus had had an apartment over the bar and had practically lived in the bar's murky confines, frequently taking his meals there, such that they were. Even back when I knew him, he'd been a longtime fixture in the establishment—so much so that the proprietor had given him a cigarette lighter emblazoned with the Blocker's crest: a skull with the international nil sign encircling and bisecting it. What did it mean? No heads allowed? No thinking? That last was more likely.
