Side Effects
Page 37
“How much?” a tubby man at the bar said.
“Stay out of this,” Mayor Crimmins snapped. “Mind your own business. Simon, come sit down in the corner there. We’ll talk about your predicament.”
Simon got himself a bottle of Bud and squeezed between a wooden bench and table.
“You look wedged in,” the mayor said. “I call this table the John Wilkes booth. It’s the quietest spot in this dive but it is a narrow squeeze. Take off your jacket. Stay a while.”
“I’ll keep the jacket on,” Simon said, “because something tells me I won’t be welcome here for very long.”
“Well, you never know. You could go out and collide with an iceberg. Then again, you might leave town with a nice bundle of severance pay in your wallet, enough to pay for a classy motel room. ”
“How might that happen? Do you know somebody buying lost souls?
“Please lower your voice. What is about to be said is entirely confidential. Understood?”
“You have my full attention.”
“A shame those losers at the bar don’t have their TV to watch. You heard all the TVs quit? It’s a terrible deprivation. Our conversation is the only amusement in town.”
“And no drug commercials.”
“This isn’t funny, Simon. You don’t have to comment on everything I say. Just sit and absorb. Now, let’s weigh your options. You could drive off into the sunset with nothing but lint in your pocket. Or you could choose another direction. Free will is the Lord’s greatest gift. Unfortunately not much else is free. Did I mention to you that I happen to own the former watch factory?”
“You mentioned it. You want to build Condo Nirvana but there’s the small matter of a toxic waste dump.”
“It’s a rotten feeling to have your vision put on hold by misinformed zealots. Tell me, do I strike you as a person indifferent to the health and safety of family, friends, tenants, cats, dogs, birds? Evan Crimmins, a devoted public servant? Yet he stands accused of putting profit ahead of his humanity. It’s such nonsense. To be victimized by the toxic phobia of those idiots who dare cast themselves as saviors of the race. That site is entirely safe.”
“A batch of independent experts said—”
“There are always so-called independent experts ready to question everything. As much as I admire our justice system I cannot keep from feeling utter disgust at the corrupted process of appeal after appeal after appeal that results in nothing but social stagnation. And let us not forget the shameful matter of inflated income for shyster lawyers. The cycle must be broken.”
“Is this relevant to where I might sack out tonight?” Simon said, shifting his weight to take pressure off his erect penis; the extended tumescence didn’t alarm Simon; after so many months in Limpville it was no wonder his organ refused to relinquish its newfound splendor.
“Very relevant. I’ve been waiting for someone like you. Bright, alert, but at the end of his tether. A desperate hunter, if you will. And I’ve been waiting for a night exactly like this when in just a few hours nothing with wheels will be able to move out there.”
“Mayor Crimmins, I still don’t make the connection to—”
“That factory has got to vanish. It must burn. Fire is my only ally, the great purifier. There is nothing like flame to resolve irresolvable conflict. The building must be transformed into ashes.”
“I thought your plan was to convert what’s left of the factory into—”
“Better to start from scratch, build a new tower and endure endless frustration in the courts. Even a five-alarm blaze would leave some of the foundation intact, possibly even usable sections of brick. That structure is built like a fortress. Here’s the irony: the minute the factory collapses, the same Serene Harbor preservation crowd that’s been driving me insane with their nostalgia will beg me to clear the lot of whatever debris remains in the interest of civic pride.”
“What about the land underneath the building?” Simon said. “Isn’t there some cherub-dissolving syrup flowing toward the bay?”
“I’d be the first to admit, that was once true. But American know-how came up with techniques to neutralize that slop.” Mayor Crimmins’s eyes blazed with passion. “Simon, I’m tired of praying for a stray bolt of lightning to do my work for me. A man must create his own opportunity.”
“Are we talking arson?” Simon said. “Because if we are . . .”
“Arson is a vile word. Vile. We’re discussing assisted conflagration. We’re talking about a clever but destitute young man who can do the modest hamlet of Serene Harbor an enormous favor in exchange for the welcome extended to a shabby stranger who violated the trust of his benefactor. Expiation is in order. All it would take is one match accidentally dropped onto a strategically placed pile of oily fabric or newspaper. Notice that I used the word accidentally. I certainly would never ask anyone to deliberately destroy a cherished landmark. What would happen on a night when our phones are out of order and our streets are snowbound? A night when fire trucks are moribund. Poof! No more factory, no more experts, no more lawyers, new prosperity for this forgotten neo-Hampton. Simon, you can leave here absolved of guilt, flame-laundered, your possibly shady past cremated. And you’d go richer than you were when you came. There are decisions to be made motivated by informed impulse. And made quickly.”
“For the sake of argument, Mr. Mayor, before informed decisions are made, suppose somebody like me did decide to accidentally drop that match. You said yourself the roads would be impassable. How would a conflagration-assister avoid, say, ten years in jail?”
“If a tiny fire were kindled in a remote corner of that enormous building it would take hours for the flames to spread. The main highway is still negotiable. I’ve arranged for certain side streets to be plowed. A person could be miles away from here before the first curl of smoke was visible.”
“Before I say anything, I want to repeat that my business with Martha Marie was two hundred percent consensual. I swear she levitated off her seat and literally flew across the room and landed on my privates.”
“You could tell that story to a judge when they charge you with statutory rape.”
Mayor Crimmins reached into his jacket and pulled out a blue envelope stuffed almost as full as Simon’s underwear. “There’s two thousand dollars here, all in small bills. I don’t usually pay in advance for services rendered but I believe you’re an honest young scoundrel with a great future. Getting inside the factory shouldn’t be too much of a problem. The doors are hanging by a thread. But you already know that.”
“How do I know? Because I saw what I saw. There’s somebody living in there.”
“Are we back to that nonsense? Let’s suppose you’re right. If there is some kind of phantom, some impish creature residing in that ruin, wouldn’t it be out of there at the first hint of danger?”
Simon hesitated, then reached for the envelope and peeked under its open flap.
It was filled with currency enough to pay for a lot of life. He picked up the hoard and slipped it into his jacket.
“I’d offer to buy you a drink,” Mayor Crimmins said, “but my feeling is you should get the show on the road while there is a road.” The mayor pushed a pack of Skull & Crossbones matches across the table.
Simon, whose erection remained rigid as a tree trunk, stood, discreetly bent, and headed for the door. The feel of all that cash against his chest was amazingly comforting. Any barbed qualms gave way, tilted like the pinball machine in an incendiary direction.
75
Arctic air that migrated from the polar cap came whistling over Long Island Sound freezing breaking surf into shapes that lined the jetties like letters from a dead alphabet as Simon’s minibus crunched over cracked pavement and black ice, dipping and skidding toward a hidden corner of the factory lot where a wooden fence that guarded its perimeter had split apart leaving a gap the bus could easily exploit. That fence was papered with no parking no loitering no trespassing violators will be towed warnings
but Simon was pretty sure he was safe from the pair of police guarding the town. They were probably loading up on anti-freeze, playing gin rummy in the converted warehouse on Lincoln Lane they used for a station.
Simon squeezed the pack of matches in his pocket, coping with second thoughts. He lit one of the midget torches and watched it flare, consume itself, and fail, leaving a twisted black worm of ash between his fingers. He needed more time to think things over so he settled back in the driver’s seat watching snowflakes the size of moths cover the minibus windshield. A half-hour of drowsy meditation might enforce or demolish his shaky resolve to burn baby, burn. A brief delay wouldn’t make much difference, whatever he decided.
Without warning, Simon’s thirty-minute nesting plan was rendered null and void. His minibus heater gave out an asthmatic wheeze, then a metallic shriek, and died. Thin, tin ribbons of wind, sharp as the flaps on sardine cans, were already slicing into the bus’s air vents and slashing through cracks where windows and doors never did seal shut.
Simon tried to insulate the leaks with bits of newspaper and rags from a backseat mound of junk he’d meant to discard someday but nothing stopped the thuggish cold. He pulled the remains of a beach blanket around his shoulders and over his head. In minutes his eyelids drooped; in twilight sleep he imagining himself stored inside Polly Moon’s automatic ice maker, waiting his turn to slide down its chute and plop into a martini shaker. Inside his dream, a voice told Simon that if he let himself doze he could easily freeze to a cube that wouldn’t thaw until late spring.
Hearing his teeth rattle like dice snapped him awake. Simon quit his mobile ice tray and tried his luck at finding a warm, dry place inside the factory. Despite Wanda Hubbard’s and Mayor Crimmins’s strong efforts to convince him that he must have been hallucinating, Simon knew he’d been attacked by a spindly ancient who’d skittered inside the condemned pile of brick, mortar, wood and radioactive debris, rushing toward someplace hospitable enough to sustain his peculiar combination of flesh, bone and beard; there had to be sanctuary someplace inside that disaster of a ruin.
Simon scanned the building, trying to remember which window it was that had caught his eyes, but there wasn’t a clue. Every pane was broken or blacked out. He searched through rising drifts and snow devils until he found the door that had swallowed up the feisty goblin who’d challenged him. Like that apparition, Simon forced the door open as far as he could, inhaled deeply enough to flatten his gut, pushed aside his persistent hard-on and managed to squeeze his way inside.
The factory inside wasn’t much warmer than the winter world outside but at least it provided protection from stinging snow needles and offered a shield, however porous, against the diabolical winds that moaned down from the Northland.
The shivering intruder followed a beam of yellow light from a flashlight he kept for just such emergencies in the Volkswagen’s glove compartment. That battery-drained wand had barely enough strength to define the obstacle course he faced.
Simon saw that he stood at the foot of a steep staircase lined with broken crates, pieces of rusted machinery, burnt-out motor parts, and a line of barrels, bottles and steel drums that must have held ingredients for the virulent soup now oozing below the tidy shops on Revolution Street. Those abandoned containers—the barrels, the bottles wrapped in moldy burlap sacking—looked like stragglers from a beaten army attempting a vestige of symmetry in numb retreat from wherever it was that staircase led.
Simon headed up the flight of narrow steps, testing their stability before committing his full weight, feeling the factory’s carcass shudder and groan under his boots. While he climbed, he covered his nose against malevolent fumes—sinister genies peering from the jugs and tubs of stinking chemicals that fueled the polluted plume corrupting the roots of Serene Harbor’s struggling gardens and curdling the sea.
Mayor Crimmins had assured Simon that money from the Superfund was used to reclaim the tainted real estate by sucking up all traces of radioactive muck, trucking away a residue of sludge deadly enough to melt the planet. Crimmins insisted that any opposition to his plan to transform that wasteland into upscale housing was based on fear and superstition, not scientific fact. But Simon couldn’t shake the acrid smell of death from his nostrils. It was a heavy smell of vomit. Like sniffing the armpits of angry ghosts.
When he reached the second story landing, Simon’s cautious feet began to detect a subtle vibration, a tremor, a purr, as if the building had turned into a giant alley cat. At first he attributed the buzz to some quirk of the winds slapping at the factory’s walls, sneaking through broken window glass and the cracks between rotting bricks, prowling abandoned corridors. But the hum was too regular, too deliberate to blame on nature’s whims. The higher he climbed, the more intense the ohmmm; the soles of his feet tingled as if he were stepping over a carpet of angry bees.
On the third floor, halfway along a hall as cluttered as the staircase, behind a massive double door, the sensation peaked. Simon heard a sound like the whine of a dental drill cutting through a molar. He switched off his flashlight and searched the door’s border for some hint of light, but a tight seal blocked any spark from escape. Simon was sure the source of sound was a machine, but that was impossible—the factory was a dead building, doomed, disconnected, deserted for nearly half a century.
According to the burghers of Serene Harbor, Simon’s story about seeing a gnome vanish into the factory’s embrace was the prattle of a lunatic. To be fair, Simon had to allow that it was logical for Wanda and the mayor to conclude that the little man who wasn’t there wasn’t there. He had almost been ready to accept that, in his agitated state, the meeting was a mirage brought on by stress. Reaching for a more mystical explanation, Simon considered that his boggled mind could have conjured up a rescuing ancestor from deep within a troubled half-Jewish subconscious—some really distant robed relative might have come forward to offer the balm of Old Testament wisdom, a wisdom marinated in time’s mellowing brine for over five thousand years. Any explanation of his encounter, however bizarre, was more reasonable than its reality.
Simon knew he might have lost touch with sanity, but he also knew what a drill sounded like from his days in metal shop at Glenda High. Somebody was definitely doing something behind that door. And that somebody was a smoker.
The high, sweet smell of a cheap cigar managed to waft into the corridor. Robert J. smoked the same brand in the days when everybody past puberty puffed on something before the habit became taboo. Serene Harbor’s founders, who once rowed little dories toward thrashing whales, hurling harpoons at frenzied mountains of rage, now skulked outside in every weather to take a drag on a Marlboro. The factory could be a gathering place for smokers plotting a strategy of return, like early Christians in an above ground catacomb. Simon discarded that theory as too exotic for such a quiet town.
He grabbed the doorknob, turned it, and pulled hard. The door was locked tight. He knocked with a fist, then yelled a loud “anybody in there?” He got back nothing but a hollow echo. Scanning the hall with the fading beam from his flashlight, his eye caught sight of a rusting crowbar the size of a baseball bat and he went for it. The weight of iron felt good; he took a few swings with it as if he were back at Munchkin Academy hitting fungoes during recess.
Simon found a slight crack in the door’s frame. He jammed one end of the crowbar into the sliver and leaned his weight against it. Nothing happened. He tried again and again, using all his strength, his foot propped against a cement wall for leverage. The crowbar bowed, but the door didn’t budge. From some trench of instinct, Simon cupped his hand around his mouth and screamed, “Delivery!”
The machine stopped. He thought he heard movement behind the barrier.
“Delivery!” Simon yelled again.
“I didn’t order nothing,” said a crinkled voice. “Get lost.”
“I can’t stand here all night,” Simon yelled. “I got other stops to make.”
“Hold your horses.”
“It’s my turn to ask a few questions,” Simon said. “Can I come in? It’s freezing out here.”
“I suppose,” the elf said. “I hope you didn’t bring dried fruit. I got enough apricots and prunes to last a year.”
Simon pushed his way past the door. He was in a room with ceilings twenty feet high. A bank of windows, boarded or covered with heavy curtains, lined a wall. One of those windows must have leaked the faint light that Simon had seen. The source of that light was a square of hanging fluorescent tubes. A line of kerosene heaters rimmed a square table, their heat as intense as a slap. Simon unzipped his jacket and watched the little man who wasn’t there jump back in horror. “Don’t worry, this erection has nothing to do with you,” Simon said.
“That’s good news,” Simon’s hallucination said, relighting a thick cigar.
“You’ve got light and heat in here. All the amenities. At least I know I’m not crazy.”
“Nobody knows that about themself. What’s with the boner? You always walk around like that?”
“I think it has to do with a medication I take called Stalagamide.”
“You got any extra?”
“Not funny.”
“Funny. Hard-ons are always funny. Ask Milton Berle.”
“I want you to know I was sent here—”
“By Mayor Cocksucker, right? To burn me out? Your friends call you Nero?”
“My name is Simon Apple. And you happen to be exactly right. I’m a professional arsonist.”
“I expected to see you back here. I was warned to vacate. Tell your boss I’ll drop dead before I vacate.”