But I don’t, and he says, “This woman came in alone and so Jules sat her at the bar, right? Total dyke, but she had this whole butch-glam demeanor working for her, like Nicole Kidman with a buzz cut.”
“You’re right,” I mutter at the wall, as if it’s not too late for intervention. “That’s pretty goddamn weird.”
“No, you ass. That’s not the weird part. The weird part was when I brought her order out, and I noticed there was this shiny silver stuff dripping out of her left ear. At first, I thought it was only a piercing or something, and I just wasn’t seeing it right. But then…well, I looked again, and it had run down her neck and was soaking into the collar of her blouse. Jules saw it, too. Freaky, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I say, but I don’t say much more, and a few minutes later, Eli finally switches off the lamp, and I can stare at the wall without actually having to see it.
04.
It’s two days later, as the crow flies, and I’m waiting on a call from one of Her Majesty’s lieutenants. I’m holed up in the backroom of a meat market in Bella Vista, on a side street just off Washington, me and Joey the Kike. We’re bored and second-guessing our daily marching orders from the pampered, privileged pit bulls those of us so much nearer the bottom of this miscreant food chain refer to as carrion dispatch. Not very clever, sure, but all too fucking often, it hits the nail on the proverbial head. I might not like having to ride the Speedline out to Camden for a handoff with the Czech, but it beats waiting, and it sure as hell beats scraping up someone else’s road kill and seeing to its discrete and final disposition. Which is where I have a feeling today is bound. Joey keeps trying to lure me into a game of whiskey poker, even though he knows I don’t play cards or dice or dominoes or anything else that might lighten my wallet. You work for Madam Adrianne, you already got enough debt stacked up without gambling, even if it’s only penny-ante foolishness to make the time go faster.
Joey the Kike isn’t the absolute last person I’d pick to spend a morning with, but he’s just next door. Back in the Ohs, when he was still just a kid, Joey did a stint in Afghanistan and lost three fingers off his left hand and more than a few of his marbles. He still checks his shoes for scorpions. And most of us, we trust that whatever you hear coming out of his mouth is pure and unadulterated baloney. It’s not that he lies, or even exaggerates to make something more interesting. It’s more like he’s a bottomless well of bullshit, and every conversation with Joey is another tour through the byways of his shattered psyche. For years, we’ve been waiting for the bastard to get yanked off the street and sent away to his own padded rumpus room at Norristown, where he can while away the days trading his crapola with other guys stuck on that same ever-tilting mental plane of existence. Still, I’ll be the first to admit he’s ace on the job, and nobody ever has to clean up after Joey the Kike.
He lights a cigarette and takes off his left shoe, and his sock, too, because you never can tell where a scorpion might turn up.
“You didn’t open the case?” he asks, banging the heel of his shoe against the edge of a shipping crate.
“Hell no, I didn’t open the case. You think we’d be having this delightful conversation today if I’d delivered a violated parcel to the Czech? Or anybody else, for that matter. For pity’s sake, Joey.”
“You ain’t sleeping,” he says, not a question, just a statement of the obvious.
“I’m getting very good at lying awake,” I reply. “Anyway, what’s that got to do with anything?”
“Sleep deprivation makes people paranoid,” he says, and bangs his loafer against the crate two or three more times. But if he manages to dislodge any scorpions, they’re of the invisible brand. “Makes you prone to erratic behavior.”
“Joey, please put your damn shoe back on.”
“Hey, dude, you want to hear about the Trenton drop or not?” he asks, turning his sock wrong-side out for the second time. Ash falls from the cigarette dangling at the corner of his mouth.
I don’t answer the question. Instead, I pick up my phone and stare at the screen, like I can will the thing to ring. All I really want right now is to get on with whatever inconvenience and unpleasantness the day holds in store, because Joey’s a lot easier to take when confined spaces and the odor of raw pork fat aren’t involved.
Not that he needs my permission to keep going. Not that my saying no, I don’t want to hear about the Trenton drop, is going to put an end to it.
“Well,” he says, lowering his voice like he’s about to spill a state secret, “what we saw when Tony Palamara opened that briefcase – and keep in mind, it was me and Jack on that job, so I’ve got backup if you need that sort of thing – what we saw was five or six of these silver vials. I’m not sure Tony realized we got a look inside or not, and, actually, it wasn’t much more than a peek. It’s not like either of us was trying to see inside. But, yeah, that’s what we saw, these silver vials lined up neat as houses, each one maybe sixty or seventy milliliters, and they all had a piece of yellow tape or a yellow sticker on them. Jack, he thinks it was some sort of high-tech, next-gen explosive, maybe something you have to mix with something else to get the big bangola, right?”
And I stare at him for a few seconds, and he stares back at me, that one green-and-black argyle sock drooping from his hand like some giant’s idea of a novelty prophylactic. Whatever he sees in my face, it can’t be good, not if his expression is any indication. He takes the cigarette out of his mouth and balances it on the edge of the shipping crate.
“Joey, were the vials silver, or was the silver what was inside of the vials?”
And I can tell right away it hasn’t occurred to him to wonder which. Why the hell would it? He asks me what difference it makes, sounding confused and suspicious and wary all at the same time.
“So you couldn’t tell?”
“Like I said, it wasn’t much more than a peek. Then Tony Palamara shut the case again. But if I had to speculate, if this was a wager and there was money on the line? Was that the situation, I’d probably say the silver stuff was inside the vials.”
“If you had to speculate?” I ask him, and Joey the Kike bobs his head and turns his sock right-side out again.
“What difference does it make?” he wants to know. “I haven’t even gotten around to the interesting part of the story yet.”
And then, before I can ask him what the interesting part might be, my phone rings, and its dispatch, and I stand there and listen while the dog barks. Straightforward janitorial work, because some asshole decided to use a shotgun when a 9mm would have sufficed. Nothing I haven’t had to deal with a dozen times or more. I tell the dog we’re on our way, and then I tell Joey it’s his balls on the cutting board if we’re late because he can’t keep his shoes and socks on his goddamn feet.
05.
Some nights, mostly in the summer, Eli and me, we climb the rickety fire escape onto the roof to try to see the stars. There are a couple of injection-molded plastic lawn chairs up there, left behind by a former tenant, someone who moved out years before I moved into the building. We sit in those chairs that have come all the way from some East Asian factory shithole in Hong Kong or Taiwan, and we drink beer and smoke weed and stare up at the night spread out above Philly, trying to see anything at all. Mostly, it’s a white-orange sky-glow haze, the opaque murk of photopollution, and I suspect we imagine far more stars than we actually see. I tell him that some night or another we’ll drive way the hell out to the middle of nowhere, someplace where the sky is still mostly dark. He humors me, but Eli is a city kid, born and bred, and I think his idea of a pastoral landscape is Marconi Plaza. We might sit there and wax poetic about planets and nebulas and shit, but I have a feeling that if he ever found himself standing beneath the real deal, with all those twinkling pinpricks scattered overhead and maybe a full moon to boot, it’d probably freak him right the fuck on out.
One night he said to me, “Maybe this is preferable,” and I had to ask what he meant.
&nb
sp; “I just mean, maybe it’s better this way, not being able to see the sky. Maybe, all this light, it’s sort of like camouflage.”
I squinted back at Eli through a cloud of fresh ganja smoke, and when he reached for the pipe I passed it to him.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I told him, and Eli shrugged and took a big hit of the 990 Master Kush I get from a grower whose well aware how much time I’ve spent in Amsterdam, so she knows better than to sell me dirt grass. Eli exhaled and passed the pipe back to me.
“Maybe I don’t mean anything at all,” he said and gave me half a smile. “Maybe I’m just stoned and tired and talking out my ass.”
I think that was the same night we might have seen a falling star, though Eli was of the opinion it wasn’t anything but a pile of space junk burning up as it tumbled back to earth.
06.
I’ve been handling the consequences of other people’s half-assed mokroye delo since I was sixteen going on forty-five. So, yeah, takes an awfully bad scene to get me to so much as flinch, which is not to say I enjoy the shit. Truth of it, nothing pisses me off worse or quicker than some bastard spinning off the rails, running around with that first-person shooter mentality that, more often than not, turns a simple, straight-up hit into a bloodbath. And that is precisely the brand of unnecessary sangre pageantry that me and Joey the Kike have just spent the last three hours mopping up. What’s left of the recently deceased, along with a bin of crimson rags and sponges and the latex gloves and coveralls we wore, is stowed snuggly in the trunk of the car. Another ten minutes, it won’t be our problem anymore, soon as we make the scheduled meet and greet with one of Madam Adrianne’s garbage men.
So, it’s hardly business as usual that Joey’s behind the wheel because my hands won’t stop shaking enough that I can drive. They won’t stop shaking long enough for me to even light a cigarette.
“You really aren’t gonna tell me what it was happened back there?” he asks for, I don’t know, the hundredth time in the last thirty or forty minutes. I glance at my watch, then the speedometer, making sure we’re not late and he’s not speeding. At least I have that much presence of mind left to me.
“Never yet known you to be the squeamish type with wet work,” he says and stops for a red light.
Most of the snow from Tuesday night has melted, but there are still plenty of off-white scabs hiding in the shadows, and there’s also the filthy mix of ice and sand and schmutz heaped at either side of the street. There are people out there shivering at a bus stop, people rushing along the icy sidewalk, a homeless guy huddled in the doorway of an abandoned office building. Every last bit of that tableau is as ordinary as it gets, the humdrum day-to-day of the ineptly named City of Brotherly Love, and that ought to help, but it doesn’t. All of it comes across as window dressing, meticulously crafted misdirection meant to keep me from getting a good look at what’s really going down.
“Dude, seriously, you’re starting to give me the heebie-jeebies,” Joey says.
“Why don’t you just concentrate on getting us where we’re going,” I tell him. “See if you can do that, all right? Cause it’s about the only thing in the world you have to worry about right now.”
“We’re not gonna be late,” says Joey the Kike. “At this rate, we might be fucking early, but we sure as hell ain’t gonna be late.”
I keep my mouth shut. Out there, a thin woman with a purse Doberman on a pink rhinestone leash walks past. She’s wearing galoshes and a pink wool coat that only comes down to her knees. At the bus stop, tucked safe inside that translucent half-shell, a man lays down a newspaper and answers his phone. The homeless guy scratches at his beard and talks to himself. Then the traffic light turns green, and we’re moving again.
This is the day that I saw silver for the third time. But no way in hell I’m going to tell Joey that.
Just like the first time, sitting on the train as it barreled towards Camden and my tryst with the Czech, I felt my ears pop, and then there was the same brief dizziness, followed by the commingled reek of ammonia, ozone, and burnt sugar. Me and Joey, we’d just found the room with the body, some poor son of a bitch who’d taken both barrels of a Remington in the face. Who knows what he’d done, or if he’d done anything at all. Could have been over money or dope or maybe someone just wanted him out of the way. I don’t let myself think too much about that sort of thing. Better not to even think of the body as someone. Better to treat it the way a stock boy handles a messy cleanup on aisle five after someone’s shopping cart has careened into a towering display of spaghetti sauce.
“Sometimes,” said Joey, “I wish I’d gone to college. What about you, man? Ever long for another line of work? Something that don’t involve scraping brains off the linoleum after a throw-down.”
But me, I was too busy simply trying to breathe to remind him that I had gone to college, too busy trying not to gag to partake in witty repartee. The dizziness had come and gone, but that acrid stench was forcing its way past my nostrils, scalding my sinuses and the back of my throat. And I knew that Joey didn’t smell it, not so much as a whiff, and that his ears hadn’t popped, and that he’d not shared that fleeting moment of vertigo. He stood there, glaring at me, his expression equal parts confusion and annoyance. Finally, he shook his head and stepped over the dead guy’s legs.
“Jesus and Mary, we’ve both seen way worse than this,” he said, and right then, that’s when I caught the dull sparkle on the floor. The lower jaw was still in one piece, mostly, so for half a second or so I pretended I was only seeing the glint of fluorescent lighting off a filling or a crown. But then the silvery puddle, no larger than a dime, moved. It stood out very starkly against all that blood, against the soup of brain and muscle tissue punctuated by countless shards of human skull. It flowed a few inches before encountering a jellied lump of cerebellum, and then I watched as it slowly extended…what? What the fuck would you call what I saw? A pseudopod? Yeah, sure. I watched as it extended a pseudopod and began crawling over the obstacle in its path. That’s when I turned away, and when I looked back, it wasn’t there anymore.
Joey curses and honks the horn. I don’t know why. I don’t ask him. I don’t care. I’m still staring out the passenger side window at this brilliant winter day that wants or needs me to believe it’s all nothing more or less than another round of the same old same old. I’m thinking about the woman on the Speedline and about the scuffed toe of the Czech’s shoe, about whatever Eli saw at the noodle shop and the silver vials Joey and Jack got a peep at when Tony Palamara opened the case they’d delivered to him. I’m drawing lines and making correlations, parsing best I can, dot-to-fucking-dot, right? Nothing it takes a genius to see, even if I’ve no idea whatsoever what it all adds up to in the end. I blink, and the sun sparks brutally off distant blue-black towers of mirrored glass. Joey hits the horn again, broadcasting his displeasure for all Girard Avenue to hear, and I shut my eyes.
07.
And it’s a night or two later that I have the dream. That I have the dream for the first time.
I’ve never given much thought to nightmares. Sure, I rack up more than my fair share. I wake up sweating and the sheets soaked, Eli awake, too, and asking if I’m okay. But what would you fucking expect? That’s how it goes when your life is a never ending game of Stepin Fetchit and “Mistress may I have another,” when you exist in the everlasting umbrage of Madam Adrianne’s Grand Guignol of vice and crime and profit. No one lives this life and expects to sleep well – leastways, no one with walking-around sense. That’s why white-coated bastards in pharmaceutical labs had to go and invent Zolpidem and so many other merciful soporifics, so the bad guys could get a little more shut eye every now and again.
This is not my recollection of that first time. Hell, this is not my recollection of any single instance of the dream. It has a hundred subtle and not-so-subtle permutations, but always it stays the same. It wears a hundred gaudy masks to half conceal an immutable underlying face. S
o, take this as the amalgam or composite that it is. Take this as a rough approximation. Be smart, and take this with a goddamn grain of salt.
Let’s say it starts with me and Eli in our plastic lawn chairs, sitting on the roof, gazing heavenward, like either one of us has half a snowball’s chance at salvation. Sure. This is as good a place to begin as any other. There we sit, holding hands, scrounging mean comfort in one another’s company – only, this time, some human agency or force of nature has intervened and swept back all that orange sky-glow. The stars are spread out overhead like an astronomer’s banquet, and neither of us can look away. You see pictures like that online, sure, but you don’t look up and expect to behold the dazzling entrails of the Milky Way draped above your head. You don’t live your whole life in the over-illuminated filth of cities and ever expect to glimpse all those stars arching pretty as you please across the celestial hemisphere.
We sit there, content and amazed, and I want to tell Eli those aren’t stars. It’s only fireworks on the Fourth of July or the moment the clock strikes the New Year. But he’s too busy naming constellations to hear me. How Eli would know a constellation from throbbing gristle is beyond me. But there he sits, reciting them for my edification.
“That’s Sagittarius,” he says. “Right there, between Ophiuchus and Capricornus. The centaur, between the serpent in the west and the goat in the east.” And he tells me that more extrasolar planets have been discovered in Sagittarius than in any other constellation. “That’s why we should keep a close watch on it.”
And I realize then, whiz-bang, presto, abracadabra, that the stars are wheeling overhead, exchanging positions in some crazy cosmic square dance, and Eli, he sees it too, and he laughs. I’ve never heard Eli laugh like this before, not while I was awake. It’s the laughter of a child. It’s a laughter filled with delight. There’s innocence in a laugh like this.
The Ape's Wife and Other Stories Page 18
