Slice dje-5

by Rex Miller

  Lee and Eichord left, eventually, with the woman's whereabouts. Lee had, he said, blackmailed his brother. “I told him about the crib deaths. That by sheltering her they were protecting the worst kind of human filth—a child killer. That's what did it. He says anything there was between us is gone. We are no longer brothers. I've forced him to compromise his honor. And so forth."

  “I'm sorry, man.” But he wasn't at all. Not yet. That would come later.

  “Well"—he said, tilting his head—"if that's the way he wants it, that's all right. He never really thought of me as a brother anyway. I was the American cop to him.” Lee looked at Eichord. He wants us to come before the brotherhood as payment for obtaining the information. I'll have to go. You don't."

  “What do you mean, come before the brotherhood?"

  “He wants us to see what giving this information has cost him. He's going to...” And Lee started to choke up.

  Eichord didn't understand what the hell was going on but tried to console his friend. “I don't understand. What do you mean, Jimmie? What HAS it cost him? Why does the brotherhood have to find out?"

  “They know.” He wiped at his eyes in anger as much as sadness. “They already know. He told them what I wanted. He said,” he tried to say something but started crying again. He stopped himself, “He wanted me to learn the cost of my actions by coming to him for this information. He wanted me to know what price he would pay."

  “What do you mean?"

  “He is going to vow his silence tonight."

  “Yeah?"

  “The crazy son of a bitch,” Jimmie said, his eyes filling with tears, “he's going to cut off his own tongue.” Some kind of a joke.

  “Come on, man.” Eichord wanted to laugh in his face.

  “No. He could not live with himself if he didn't. It is his way of preserving his honor. He'll do it."

  Eichord could say nothing. He simply stared at Lee in disbelief while the man told him about the implacable, ritualistic, unswerving code by which his brother lived. His self-discipline, dedication, loyalty to the clan.

  “He has no choice. It's either that or suicide."

  “But shit, man, that's nuts."

  “Not to him. Self-mutilation is part of the Shadow Clan culture. It is quite common in secret societies like you'll find throughout Asia and Europe. Even in America you have the penitents."

  “Nobody cuts their tongue off, pard."

  “You've just led a sheltered life, buddy. In the old country,” he said, gesturing vaguely, “they used to cut their fucking BALLS off."

  “Eh?"

  “Didn't you ever hear of the castrati? The castrators? The Skoptsi of old Russia? Shit, Jack, they believed if you wanted to worship you had to bear the Seal of God. The lesser seal was when you took a knife or razor and sliced your testicles open and ate your goddamn nuts."

  “JESUS."

  “The greater seal was when you reached down there and took the ole pole itself.” He wiped at his face. “Now that took some balls,” he said, without humor.

  “None of this is happening."

  “It's happening, all right. Welcome to fucking China, baby."

  Eichord and Lee found the woman and made the arrest easily. She was just an old woman. She didn't look like a murderer. So often they don't. The thing he'd always remember about her was when she was interrogated. She admitted the husband had been greased for the insurance money: $75,000 was a fortune back in 1957. But why the baby girl and then, in the later marriage, her own baby boy? She told Eichord, through Lee in part, that she'd grown tired of trying to find baby-sitters. It made as much sense as anything else about the case.

  That night, with Mrs. Chan safely under lock and key, Jack Eichord went with James Lee. It was one of the rare occasions when outsiders would be permitted to witness such a ritual. It was admission by invitation only. It was a scene that Eichord would dream about a hundred bloody times, no matter how hard he tried not to. His dream of the Man in Kowloon.

  CENTERBURG

  Jenny Weiss had come out of one disaster of a marriage and wasn't about to leap into another just to bed down with Marc Thompson, cute though he was. She had little Jerry for one thing, a wild and precious two-year-old from the train wreck of a liaison that had swelled her belly with child and left her penniless and bruised and alone in Dayton, Ohio. When the grand and glorious and spectacular Mooney Kyle Shows came through for a week, compliments of the Dayton Jaycees, and Jenny had wandered down with Jerry to take in the sights, she'd seen Marc and Marc had seen her and the idea of a kid was no problem to this fast-stepper and first thing you know she was Cincy-bound in the passenger seat of the aging Thompson pickup, a decrepit house trailer locked to the tow hitch.

  She'd taken to the carny life at first. The family-under-siege mentality had appealed to her and for the first year Marc hadn't let her come up for air to see the one-nighters and fortnighters of shows and carnivals that were their on-the-road life-style. Marc was a ride supervisor, and he'd gotten Jenny work with a variety of flat joints, including an alibi joint that she'd taken to pretty good and she'd worked alibis from then on. But she was starting to get the itch to settle down. Enough is enough. She was going to have to give Jerry more than this constant moving.

  Jenny was twenty-three, with good legs, a great butt, a nice face wreathed in long, auburn hair, a sexy smile spoiled only by a cheapo cap job that dated back to her years in foster homes, and nice, high breasts, still firm after little Jerry. Nice little hooters that made the town creeps and marks drool and come back to drop more coins at the alibi. She didn't know what a bra was, and with her hair combed, some makeup, and a tight yellow sweater she could still make some heads turn and put a rise in some Levi's.

  She saw the man in the car saying something to her but she ignored it. Townies were always yelling some shit—she didn't even listen. She was going to feed their dog and then ... Well, for Christ's sake.

  “Huh?” She couldn't understand what the guy was yelling.

  “...dering if you were with the show.” Something or other, the word “show” triggering a familiar note. She wandered over to hear what he's saying.

  “What?” A big fat guy was sitting in the car, sunburned, smiling a friendly smile.

  “Sorry. I was wanting to know if you were with the Mooney Kyle Shows."

  “Yeah,” she admitted. Not thinking that it would be obvious to anybody passing the rides to see all the cheap trailers parked beside one another in back of the rides. Those would be the spouses of the show employees back there.

  “Your last name is what?"

  “Thompson,” she lied, warily.

  “Doesn't your husband work over there?” He gestured toward the midway area. He must know Marc.

  “Yeah."

  “His name is—what?"

  “Marc."

  “Sure!” His face lit up, “Marc Thompson. I know him. Helluva dude."

  “Really?"

  “Me ‘n him use to work together."

  “You're kidding. When?"

  “Here's a photograph of Marc—I got it here somewhere when we were, uh—” She leans forward to see what he's got and sees him pointing the pistol and her heart almost jumps up in her throat, “HEY!"

  “Listen to me. I won't hurt you if you do exactly what I say, but that sucker you're married to owes me money and if you don't do what I tell you right now, I'll put a hole in your head and you'll be dead in this fucking street."

  “Hey, come on now—"

  “Shut up,” he rumbles, keeping the barrel pointed at her and reaching under with his other arm and opening the door. “Get in here a minute—I want to ask you some questions."

  “Huh uh, I ain't—” She's shaking her head and he raises the barrel up on the back of the seat where anybody can see the pistol.

  “I SAID GET IN THIS CAR OR I'll SHOOT YOU I SWEAR TO YOU."

  “Okay, okay, be fuckin’ careful with that thing,” she says, and slides in and there's people all o
ver the place why aren't they helping me? She's right on the edge of screaming for help, so he lets her have one above the left ear. Not anything serious. Just a good firm slap with the long barrel of the pistol and she goes, “Owwwwwww!” Her head seems to drop to her knees and he rather gently pushes her to the floorboard as he gives the gas pedal a tap and they pull away from the spectacular Mooney Kyle Shows employee parking area. Soon they are where nobody could hear her. Her hand was just about broken as he pulled it back, cuffing it ferociously, all but dislocating her arm as he jerked her to a nearby tree.

  “You shit-ass son of a bitch,” she cries.

  “Get over her and suck this,” he demands halfheartedly unzipping his fly. But he was thinking about where he'd bury her.

  “Fuck you, you fat slob."

  “Suck it or die. Which will it be? You have three seconds and please no help from the audience.” He is just going through the motions and she is too angry to be afraid.

  “Suck it yourself, fatso,” she tells him, straining at the cuff.

  “Right,” he says calmly, pulling out the big fighting bowie and smiling his biggest smile. “You're going to be nice and tasty, I can tell that right now.” And he slashes her open across the front as she screams.

  There is a second before he goes into the chest for her heart while she is still aware and in that beat she has time to think of her little Jerry and that she never got to settle down and she'd just learned to run the alibi and wasn't it a shame to die so young, and unfair and, shit, all of that in the one heartbeat or so, proving that sometimes your life does in fact flash before your eyes at the moment of death.

  BUCKHEAD SPRINGS

  Jack Eichord dreams. He dreams of the icy depths of Sugar Lake. He is clad in rubber, a tight suit of black neoprene, and he spits into a visor, puts the mask on, and dives. There is nothing to see as he swims along through his own bubbles, circling the muddy bottom of the lake, swimming through the frigid underwater shadows. Diving down in the cold lake where the childhood bullies of his nightmares, Whortley Williams and Cabrey Brown, once held him under until he almost drowned. He forces himself to go down in the lake and relive it again.

  But all he can see is a picture of his friend James Lee, telling him about how he took the money at Buckhead Mercantile, making Jack an accessory. And Eichord knows that Jimmie has forgotten something very important. He has forgotten the code of the street: you don't do the crime if you can't do the time.

  He swims into the Kowloon dream. Swimming into clarity he first sees the crown colony of Hong Kong at the mouth of the Pearl River. He sees it as a teeming squall of life fighting for survival, then for economic superiority in the industrial renaissance—a tide of monkey humanity slowly melting in the cultural caldron. The edges of the races blurring with each new generation, the culture changing, amplifying as it resonates into the fuzzy space expander of high tech.

  But he sees it as a colony of cluttering monkeys, yuppies, new-wave pirates, all in a mad race up the steep, sloping sides of a giant rice bowl. The Man in Kowloon does not belong to his world. He is an anachronism. He does not belong to this chittering, squalling, teeming time and place. He belongs in another century, alone and aloof in some mountain retreat, far from the crowd and the marketplace. He does not belong to a world where a woman will roll over onto a crying child to crush it and suffocate it because she has grown tired of finding baby-sitters to watch her babies while she goes out to take a lover. They are not of the same species.

  The night is fire that always burns Eichord's eyes. The color is that of brilliant gemstones or broken glass. The smell is mass, fish, fear, electricity, mob smell. The sound is screaming, chanting, car-horn tympani. Cymbal crash. Oriental singsong lute mandarin samisen songbird fugue for panflute.

  Then he is in the chamber with the drunken, chanting men. Lee's brother scowls fiercely into the face of his ancestors and picks up a short, gleaming sword. The flames from the torches flicker on the walls like dancing demons, ritual remnants of the antecedents who gave the clan its name. Light sparkles from the blade like sunlight on a golden Buddha. He takes his fingers and shapes them into a claw and oh God no don't let me dream this again don't let me see him pull his tongue out like that oh Jesus Christ oh please oh God don't let me see him start that sawing make that first sawing cut across that tongue that will prove so impossibly impossible to cut to sever to oh God don't make me see that first ridge of blood as he slices across his own AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

  DARNELL'S FIELD

  Each month, like clockwork, Daniel would wait until Michael Hora was outside and alone and he would walk up to him and hold out the money. A thousand dollars. This would usually constitute their conversation for the month. There was no contact whatsoever. The few times that Hora spoke to Bunkowski he discouraged any conversation. Chaingang became more and more paranoid as he stayed in one spot for such a long time. The thought had occurred to him that Hora, while probably on the run himself—if only from the U.S. military—might consider a few probes to see if there were any serious money on his head. On the other hand, Hora had established a counterculture reputation of sorts for his “farm.” It had become known as a place where runaways, wanted men, mercs, and similar rogue elephants might seek temporary shelter from the eyes of the law and government.

  But time had a way of eating at security. The greatest hideout in the world was vulnerable to bad luck. And there was Chaingang's natural disinclination to have someone know his whereabouts. Another factor was the regularity of the payments. At what point would Hora decide a thousand a month wasn't up to the spiraling cost of living, and his old pal would have to sweeten the pot? Because he had the precognate's mind he anticipated such events, and they filled him with unrest, while stirring his natural desire to waste Hora. It was just a matter of time.

  Sissy was well along in her pregnancy, and rather than become enraged by it and stomp both her and the fetus out with a monstrous bootprint, he was pleased by it. When he was ready he would go for the cop Eichord and inflict a payback on him beyond anything he'd be able to conceive in his most torturous nightmare, and what better cover than a pregnant wife or—better yet—a wife and a baby. It dimpled Daniel's pockmarked, doughy face in an immense grin—just the thought of his blade of vengeance slashing out at Jack. He would come with something quite delicious. Perhaps render the cop into a living stump, keeping him alive, one of those freaks you see in New York scurrying around on a skateboard. Or one of those pathetic creatures you find begging for handouts in places like Thailand and India. He'd love that. He'd turn Eichord into a freak and give him a tin cup and some pencils.

  It was payday for his landlord again, and Hora saw the man lumbering over in his direction. The protuberance of his belly was nowhere near so obtrusive as it had been only a few weeks ago. Hora was amazed by the amount of work Chaingang, whom Hora secretly called Gangbang, had turned out. How he had leveled that eighty-acre piece of overgrown pastureland with a weed slinger was beyond anything imaginable to him.

  “Hey,” he called out.

  “Yeah.” Chaingang grunted and handed him ten filthy one-hundred dollar bills. Hora, none too fastidious himself, always had the urge to wash his hands whenever he'd had to touch something Chaingang had touched.

  “Listen. Uh, you know that ole barn over ‘tween my ground and the Darnells’ field?” Chaingang said nothing. “It's up to you. But if you're lookin’ for somethin’ to do you can wreck it. Just as soon see it down, but I want the cypress logs and them shaker shingles. Okay?” The big man nodded. He took a double-bit ax and started off toward the field.

  “You ain't gon’ to be able to chop her down. Need to get some crowbars and a sledgehammer ‘n a—” but Chaingang just kept waddling off so Michael Hora shrugged and muttered, “Fuck it then,” and went about his business.

  The Bunkowski wrecking company had its own way of tearing down a barn. He went into the woods and felled a thirty-five-foot ash with the ax, chopping as fast as he cou
ld, moving around the base of the tree with little precise shuffle steps as he swung the sharp ax, watching the blade thwock down into the hard wood. After a few minutes he'd broken through to the center and he smacked it once more and stepped out from under the big falling tree.

  He then chopped all the lower limbs off flush with the trunk and started working on chopping through the tree at about twenty-two or twenty-three feet from the base. Finally he had himself a 221/[2]-foot pole of stout ash, and he was in the wrecking business.

  Hora and the slow wife and Sissy, each on a different part of the farm, could all hear Chaingang working. He was popping boards and shingles and ceiling timbers off the old barn. They'd hear a loud hammering noise and then a kind of fast-fire effect as the smashing sounds echoed from the Darnell place across the flat pasture. WHAP! as a timber broke loose. POW! POW! POW! POW! POW! POW! POW! POW! POW! Shingles flying from the roof of the barn and into the nearby field. Chaingang standing dead center in the middle of the filthy barn, a bandanna over his face and safety glasses over his eyes, standing in a rain of ancient sawdust, nails, dead bugs, rat shit, God knows what, as he pounded timbers and shingles out into space with a 221/[2]-foot ash battering ram, gripping it in a death grip with those extra-large leather work gloves and thinking about how pleasant it would be to tie the cop to a tree somewhere and work on him with the big pole. Breaking kneecaps and crushing the rib cage and the groin and pelvis and thinking these thoughts as nearly four hundred pounds of hell on the hoof smashed its weight up against the roof and timbers blasted loose and shaker shingles flew crazily into the cloudless sky WHAP! POW! POW! POW! POW! POW! POW! POW! POW! POW! Smashing the pole into the man who had sought him out the way you'll seek out a human target in a firefight and dog the man and try to kill him. WHAP! Smashing those knees and pulverizing that arrogant face into scarlet pulp POW! POW! POW! hands that could squeeze a flashlight battery or rip a rib cage loose were ramming that big tree trunk up at the thought of this cop he'd come to hate.