Butcher

by Rex Miller

  Alma Purdy would spend these nights quietly in the living room of her small frame house, all the lights off, the curtains and blinds pulled tightly shut, an ancient but trusty revolver loaded and clutched in her lap. She would sit this way for hours, fearing to make a sound, praying to her harsh gods they would not come to her door again—the loud banshee children, cloaked in their disguises—mean snickers stabbing through her as they threatened “trick or treat."

  So when she found no noisy kids clamoring in the aisles of Bob's Discount, her first sight of the man brought only gratitude. She went on about her business, an old cripple homing in on the cheap toilet tissue.

  He had a purchase in his hands and was on his way toward the cash register to pay when they met, almost colliding, two ships in the same lane, between School Notebooks! Special! and Big Chief Tablets—Save!

  There was a second or two of recognition, shock to her nervous system, a startled shudder through his, no doubt or question in either of their minds. She'd seen the Boy Butcher. He had been recognized. He knew it. She knew it. He was smoother, and managed a flicker of a smile. She could feel her body jerk in frightened reaction as she forced herself to keep going.

  He waited until the old woman had paid and left the store, as he fought to get himself back under control. Adrenals in overdrive, heart thumping like a long-distance runner's, he stood in back of the far aisle, his back to the round security mirror. All he could see was that shocked flash of recognition in the woman's eyes. He forced himself to calm down and put a smile on his face, moving up to the counter to pay.

  “That be all today, Doc?"

  “Mmhm,” he said, paying. “How's the missus doing?” The man at the register began yammering about his hypochondriac wife, and Royal nodded as if he were interested in her welfare.

  “Say, that older lady who just left ... was that Helene Caulfield?” He used the name of a former patient now living over sixty miles away.

  “You mean Mizz Purdy? That's old Alma Purdy. She's the one shot at them trick-or-treaters that time. Everybody knows her. She's got about half her oars in the water,” he said with a wicked chuckle, pointing at his skull for emphasis. Solomon Royal anticipated the five-minute dialogue of moronic banter that would follow any anecdote about her activities.

  “Oh, goodness, that reminds me,” he said quickly, pointing a preemptive finger in the clerk's direction, “I need to get Miss Caulfield on the phone.” Royal mumbled something about tests as he paid and made his way out the door. His face felt red in the air.

  There was a Bayou City directory, an absurdly small booklet, chained to a pay telephone outside the store. Purdy, Alma, was listed on page twenty-four, complete with address. Three or four blocks away!

  He caught himself hyperventilating and willed deep breaths. He started his car and pulled out into Main Street. The crippled woman was hobbling along less than half a block away. Plenty of time.

  Royal turned at the end of the block, found the street she lived on, turned again, counting house numbers. It was a small frame dwelling on a postage-stamp lot, the house badly in need of paint. The small town street appeared empty of people, only one truck coming from the opposite direction. He saw no one in his rearview. He backed into the nearby alley, parked, killed the engine.

  His heart was hammering. Too late to worry about that now, he thought, getting out of the car. No traffic, no watchers. Dr. Royal opened the trunk and looked in a small canvas carrier in the corner of the neat storage space. Removed a few items: surgical gloves, a long screwdriver, the thing he always carried for emergencies, and a small black syringe case.

  He estimated about a minute to a minute and a half and old Alma Purdy—who shot at Halloween pranksters—crippled, half-demented Alma, would come dragging around the corner, see him, and scream.

  But Dr. Solomon Royal would be nowhere in evidence. He was already on the way to the back of her house, moving between the Purdy house and another dingy frame dwelling. Both structures shut up tight as drums. If neighbors peered through dusty curtains they did so surreptitiously.

  Doctor Royal walked up to the back door of the little house and turned the knob as if he lived there, knocking very gently as he did so. His heart still pounded in his chest and he would later recall that at that moment his hearing seemed unusually acute. He could hear several different faraway vehicle sounds, machinery noise from a small business a block away, a distant car horn, bird noises, a kind of whir not unlike a furnace noise, the sound of a small dog barking across the street, his breathing, the noise of the screwdriver in the cheap lock, the crack of the door.

  Inside, he moved silently and quickly out of sight, through the back porch and kitchenette, into the hallway, past the phone, living room, back through the bedroom, squeaking loudly across her bare wooden floor. Each room was alive with the strange pervasive odors of age, of garbage, of the woman herself, all offensive in his nose. She was not fastidious but, as best as he could tell in this cursory pass through, she apparently lived alone. Not even a parakeet chirped in the house.

  He assumed she'd come in the front door. But what if she entered through the rear door, found the puny lock compromised, and began screaming for the police? His mind ran many steps ahead of her, planning his exit routes, cobbling together some plausible construct of lies should the unthinkable happen. He sensed his own panic, controlled it. He moved one of her kitchen chairs away from the window, where he could wait unobserved, and sat down.

  Out of view from either door he prepared his syringe, which he carefully placed on the kitchen countertop, and arranged the other items he would need. With the weapon in his right hand he practiced standing a time or two, but he could neither stand nor move across the kitchen floor silently. He decided to remove his shoes and did so, standing again. He moved a couple of steps. Better. Pleased with the results, he sat down again, working to calm himself in the remaining seconds or minutes before she showed herself.

  A younger woman, a woman with a more normal background, a less totally frightened woman, a woman whose emotional gyro had not been impaired by the horrors to which Anna Kaplan had been subjected, a woman with a keener olfactory sense might have detected some vibrations, sensed something out of place, felt another's presence, intuitively realized she was not alone, smelled the cologne of a stranger.

  But it was all she could do to get her key to work in the lock and move directly toward the telephone in the hallway.

  To the man who waited for her in the shadows of her small kitchen the key in the door had sounded like a gunshot, and it was as if her screeching voice began its high wail the moment she burst through the front door.

  She'd flung the door open and lunged at the phone, dialing almost as she opened the phone book to the first page where the police numbers were printed. That page was all she'd focused on since she started the long, frightening walk home, how she would open the Bayou City book and see that number listed on the Fire-Police-Ambulance page. It never dawned on her that there were two small books issued to residences, one for the immediate city limits, one for the surrounding communities, and she'd grabbed the book with the county sheriff. Sheriff, police, they were all the same.

  As the words tumbled out of her mouth and she heard the laughter in the man's voice she knew it would be useless. Even before he'd finished questioning her she knew what she must do.

  The thing that prolonged Alma Purdy's life was not saying goodbye. When the call to the authorities had come to an end, and the man taking her call had said they'd look into it, she simply said, “Yes,” a monosyllabic grunt in the same dead, emotionless tone she'd used all the way through the conversation. As she set the phone down on the slim directory and began rummaging around in her desk drawer for a newspaper account she'd saved, the man listening patiently in the next room had no way of realizing the line had been disconnected.

  There were the few seconds it took for the woman to dial when he heard the unmistakable sounds of another call being made, but he
decided against a quick move, assessing it as excessively risky. There was always the chance he'd be implicated in the moments it would take him to spring from the kitchen and strike her down.

  “Mrs. Talianoff?” Her screech broke the silence of the house. “It's Alma Purdy. You know the package I gave you for safekeeping? ... That's right. Please go ahead and send it. Yes. That's right. Just tell him to mail it now. Okay. Thank you.” She broke the connection and he was out of the chair, moving on his stocking feet, but she'd just dialed the 0 this time, and her high whine was already speaking again as he reached the doorway. “Operator?” He froze.

  “I want to call a man in Kansas City,” she demanded. The woman's voice then dropped back to the dead monotone she'd used during the rambling call to the local authorities. “No. Please get the number for me. I don't have the number.” He heard more conversation about how it was an emergency.

  He'd put himself in incredible jeopardy with the inane business of waiting for the woman in her filthy home. What an idiot he'd been to react in such an illogical manner. A hundred times he'd curse the fates, and himself, for not having simply run the bitch down in the street. It would have been so simple. A traffic mishap.

  “A mentally defective elderly cripple lurched out in front of his car,” he imagined one of his defenders would say. No one would have suspected him for a second. He goaded himself with wish-fulfillment scenes as he listened to the crone's lies, heard himself described, stood in this simpleton's kitchen fighting for composure, when he could have painlessly deducted one more bitch from the female Jew population with his front bumper.

  “Is this Mr. Kamen?” he heard her ask. “Are you the one who looks for Nazis from the war?” Regrets mounted. How many mistakes had he made in the last ten minutes? He felt perspiration in his right palm, the hand gripping the weapon. He never perspired. The situation would have been ludicrous had it not been threatening. He must kill her and leave the “elderly cardiac arrest victim” to rot. “I'm calling because I know where there's a Nazi."

  He heard her say his name and realized he now would not even be able to wash his hands of her simply. Now he must also make the meddlesome old bitch vanish. That meant coming back after dark, taking more chances, somehow moving the dead weight to his car. Nothing insurmountable, but each element compounded his risk factor.

  By the time she finally replaced the phone and walked into her kitchen his pent-up fury lashed out at her and she died without knowing that Emil Shtolz had smashed her to death like the wrath of the devil itself.

  Ignoring her frail, fallen body, he checked the directories and then tried local directory assistance for new listings. The hurried search failed to yield a Talianoff, Taliakoff, or anything close. Emil Shtolz moved on to other more pressing matters, and never found Lenore Talianoff, Bayou City's only other old Jew, and the closest thing Alma Purdy had for a confidante.

  Mrs. Talianoff lived with her son and his family, the son having taken his stepfather's name, and it was to the son she spoke.

  “Are you going to the post office today?"

  “Not today, Mother. Whatcha’ need?"

  “I'm keeping a package for a woman. She called me and asked me to mail it for her, so I'm mailing it already."

  “I'll get it after a while. I'm calling in a UPS pickup. Will that be all right, if it goes out tomorrow?"

  “That's fine, honey. So, are you coming home for lunch?"

  The package, about the size of a small book, was rectangular and wrapped in thick paper obtained by cutting apart a grocery sack. The label, printed in a somewhat shaky hand, bore the address of a man in Kansas City, Missouri. The UPS center in Earth City would, in fact, misdirect it, but so far as Lenore Talianoff was concerned the matter was ended and she'd discharged her responsibilities in full.

  Now

  23

  New Madrid Levee

  He sees the white line through fever, aching jaw, tooth, squinting and hurtling through the night in purloined iron. The broken white line, the yellow line, something about the car. Probably its figurative heat. It was on a hot sheet, maybe that was it.

  It held the day's heat like a kiln, and he breathes in stuffiness, keeping his conscious mind on track with whatever hard grit is left to him.

  He does not remember wandering away from the car, nor the protective vibes that pushed him to seek cover. He will not recall camouflaging the ride or the force of concentration it took to persevere.

  A huge, injured monster lies in thick woods, his superhuman life-support system working overtime to save him.

  Illinois seems galaxies away. He is a dying man, drowning in deep, black water. The whirlpool pulls him back under before he can sort his situation out.

  Just as Dr. Emil Shtolz was a monster, he is a monster. Daniel Bunkowski had killed, some said, more than any other living human, but some said that about the good doctor. Each had taken hundreds of lives. Shtolz might have won had the body count included animals.

  Neither man had a normal conscience. Each considered himself to be far above rules or laws. Each had only disdain for mankind. Each man was, in his own way, of superior and, in fact, unmeasurably high intellect. Each had enormous talents. Each found pleasure in the act of mutilation. Each had murdered in terrible ways and performed the vilest acts imaginable.

  The psychiatric bibles, the continually revised diagnostic statistical manuals, found ways to describe such men. They were “sick.” Such descriptions reflected society's lack of willingness to define, quantify, or even recognize, the existence of clinical evil. It underscored a massive oddity: many of the same human beings who believe in God refuse categorically to believe in the devil.

  But perhaps there are good monsters as well as bad.

  A clear image drifts past the battered memory banks: seven paramedics, cops, monkey men and women, straining to roll his dead weight onto a gurney. The barking noise that is somewhere on the audio scale between a loud lawnmower and a powerful outboard motor starting—the closest sound he makes to a human laugh—escapes his throat. Two of them drop their handholds in fear and this convulses him further, even though the result sends his immense bulk to the hard surface.

  Black clouds of pain relent, he hears a siren wail, sees an unfamiliar vehicle roof He is crammed into an ambulance. The authorities have found him—had he not escaped? It must have been after the beating—his head roared and one eye was firmly shut. The muddled chronology is all too confusing. His monitors sign off.

  The darkness puddles into dappled green and gold fuzztone. The wounded bear is curiously mortal feeling, trembling, but from neither fear nor trauma. Cold? Surely not. Time nudges a sticky inner clock and one hand ticks through coagulated fogsleep, moves the inert gigantus forward one square, back two.

  "Are we awake?” A nurse, black as his mood, and wide as a living-room sofa, white teeth smiling. “You gots to eat. Keep up your strength, big boy!” This convulses the room and he hears several persons laughing. He studies a blur in front of him. “Eat, now,” she says, trying to poke something in his maw. He is ravenous and inhales the puny portion and part of her meaty hand and arm. He would like to barbecue her and pork out. Chaingang Bunkowski, gravitationally challenged by a quarter ton of baby fat, is not what one might term a picky eater. Even he will not swallow this trash and he spits it in the fat chocolate face. She growls at him, which he ignores, focusing in on a plate of overcooked liver, something that might have been Jell-O, a tapioca-like puke. He hurls the plate in the direction of humanity.

  “Food!” he demands, in a Hammond organ bass. He wants a couple of dozen pizza supremes, a few hundred blueberry pancakes swimming in hot butter and sweet syrup, a couple of sides of ribs, nurse-kabob, a hundred of those little White Castle bellybombers. He could eat wood.

  He careens to his feet and against some hospital crap, bounces heavily off a wall, people are shouting, pawing at him, one massive arm knocks fools this way and that as he stumbles out into the hall. A woman recovering
from cataract surgery peers out into the hall through her good eye. He sees her with his good eye. Turns, bends over. The hospital gown that barely covered his balls, much less his behemoth flanks, is wide open. The hairiest back and nastiest nether regions she has ever seen on anything, man or animal, shoots her the grossest moon in Christendom, as he shakily waddles through the screaming hospital personnel, pushing his tonnage full steam ahead, moving in the direction of vulnerability.

  He grabs a small doctor, his ticket out, and together they find the biggest XXXL white coat in the building. With that halfway covering his butt, and the gown halfway covering his nuts, he and the frightened man negotiate the steps to the parking lot.

  A parked vehicle feels right. The driver gives off the proper victim scent; the beast reacts, acts, locks onto the heartbeat, strikes, and drives.

  Daniel dreams all of this—in deep limbo.

  Aaron Kamen and Sharon Kamen

  24

  Kansas City

  It had been a weekend of killer headaches, the worst he could recall, and he could remember some dillies. Aaron Kamen arched his neck up, then stood and stretched, putting his hands on his hips and swiveling from side to side. Saturday morning services, he'd been saying Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, when a Godzilla-like migraine had enveloped him. It had stayed with him for two days, one of those things that neither medication nor sleep seems to shake. He had to wear them off. This one started somewhere down in the shoulders and worked its way up the spine, across the top of his head, and settled above the eyes. Maybe that was it, he thought, taking off his glasses and rubbing his aching eyes. He cleaned his glasses with a tissue and put them back on. His head was throbbing. Maybe it wasn't a migraine, maybe he needed to get his prescription lenses adjusted. He glanced at the time. The two extra-strength Tylenol hadn't had time to kick in. He'd busy himself.