Chaingang

by Rex Miller

  The Rileys and Mrs. Lloyd signed the statement that had been prepared, but when they were told that they needed them to go to Maysburg with Mary and Royce, and be present when the thing was notarized, Owen Riley said he didn't think it was a good idea.

  “If they've got the gumption to do this, we've got the gumption to go with them,” Alberta Riley scolded him. He got a sort of caged animal look in his eyes, but to his credit, he went along.

  There would be two sets of photos—35-mm shots, which would need developing, and the set of Polaroids they'd use for the notarizing and as a safety copy. The photographer would do them ASAP, and they'd pick them up after they went to the bank.

  The caravan went on its way immediately, sans Mrs. Lloyd, and once again there was no problem getting the papers and photos notarized and witnessed, this time in front of bank personnel. They had to wait around for an hour before they could get the shots, and took the Rileys to lunch, Royce feeling like brown shoes with a tux the entire time.

  Fifty miles and two hours later they were at PRINT-WHILE-U-WAIT, and they were doing as the sign said—they were waiting. Royce, meanwhile, was back on the phone, having his dream dashed by a crop duster pilot.

  “I couldn't allow somebody in my two-seater like that. It's against the law.” Royce had never known what a richly lucrative profession crop dusting was until he started getting prices.

  “Well, could you drop the leaflets?"

  “Nope.” Eventually he found a man who owned an ancient Piper Cub that he kept tethered at the Charleston Emergency Airfield.

  “I understand you drop leaflets?” Royce asked of the man.

  “Sometimes. I have a time or two. What you want dropped?” Royce told him about the circulars.

  “Do you have your license?"

  “License?” Royce asked, and learned about an entirely new aspect of the circular-dropping biz. Apparently you had to get a license from the city. Where did one go to get it?

  Marty Kerns's office. Couldn't they “work something out?” Royce wondered.

  “This baby is a J5—one of the rarest Cubs in private hands, my friend. My father won it from ‘Wings of Destiny’ in 1940! It was Grand Champion Antique three years running at the aeroplane show. I could never do anything that might jeopardize—"

  “I understand.” Royce said, thanking him. Royce's picture of himself dumping leaflets from two thousand feet, his white scarf streaming over the side of the cockpit, was in tatters.

  By early evening, the ink barely drying on the print job, they were no longer trying to get the circular dropped, but were still shopping around for a way to get it into the Waterton homes. The Maysburg Weekly Dispatch was out. The Jackson Grove Star was out. There was one way they could get it into area homes tomorrow morning, and that was to give a great deal of cash to one Fred Finch, who put out something called the Tri-State Shopper. They would be an “insert,” sandwiched in between coupons for discounts on rump roast (USDA choice boneless: $1.99 a pound) and hog jowls (SPECIAL! Only 59 cents a pound!).

  Fifty thousand leaflets, Mr. Finch assured them, would be tucked into his two-page, two-color throwaway.

  “I ain't never done this for nobody before! Hope I ain't making no mistake,” he said. Not at these prices, he wasn't.

  Royce was a worrier. He worried that Mr. Finch might just dump the leaflets, which he swore would be “tucked by high-speed insertion machine into each and every Tri-State Shopper” that went into the mailboxes. Who would be the wiser? Mary was even more worried than he was.

  “This whole idea was lunacy, Royce,” she raged, using his name like a knife blade. “We didn't use our heads. I'm going to be sued from one end of the country to the other—we didn't think about that. I can't believe I've been such an idiot!” Wisely, he kept still and let it pour until she wound down.

  After shed calmed down considerably, she picked up their mail.

  “You got these,” she said, handing him a stack of envelopes, bills and junk mail. There was something with a Memphis postmark. He felt a surge of excitement as he ripped the envelope open and read the communication.

  A clerk without a name, a faceless nonentity seated in his/her workspace area in front of a flickering green screen, had processed the number search he'd requested, and the search, trace, transfer procedure had imprinted the results, sending the data back to Memphis.

  Another faceless bod at the Tennessee end of ELINT's daisy chain had punched up Hawthorne's code number, got an active clearance, retrieved his mail drop particulars when they couldn't find a telephone contact number, and the printout had been forwarded, in an unmarked (except for franking stamps) government envelope to Waterton, where it had in turn been forwarded to Mary Perkins's post office box in Maysburg. A no-no. Something that was never done without prior consent by the case handler. An error that could have put somebody's tit firmly in the wringer. But it hadn't.

  The communication had come the day after Royce stopped near Waterworks Hill and called the phonemen to ID that frequently dialed D.C.-area disconnect showing on Sam Perkins's telephone bill.

  The printout listed the number. Gave its status as having reverted to Intercept. The official user: North American Medical Research Consultants. ELINT's probe identified it as “Control cover for military counterintelligence operational unit. Parentheses CLASSIFIED OPERATIONS slash DOMESTIC end parentheses.

  “What is it?” Mary asked, reading something in his face and long silence.

  “I'm not—hell, I don't know. Who did Sam know in a military counterintelligence operational unit?"

  “Nobody.” Her pretty face was blank of expression for a second, then began to appear more thoughtful. “Unless ... no. Nobody. Not that I ever heard about. Why?"

  He showed her.

  “It was probably Christopher Sinclair. Does this mean he was in a military counterintelligence unit?"

  “This wasn't Christopher Sinclair. Those calls were to New York—remember? We figured those out. This was someone else. Somebody Sam had a lot of contact with."

  “Mmm.” She shook her head. “I don't have a clue."

  “If it was World Ecosphere, Inc., one of their dummy phone fronts, we're in a dilly of a mess. That would mean that Ecoworld is a U.S. government drug lab. Which makes no sense whatsoever."

  “But it would explain one thing: why the FBI and the local cops haven't done anything. It would mean there was a government curtain of protection around it. As you said—it makes no sense."

  The next morning Mary checked in with her neighbor Alberta, who informed her she'd already had calls from her sister, a friend of her son's, and two women she and Owen churched with—all of whom had seen her name on a certain “ad,” as her sister referred to it. The circulars had indeed been delivered. The rest of the day was as uneventful as Mary and Royce could keep it.

  The following morning, Friday, the Maysburg Weekly Dispatch was delivered, and they were a tiny footnote to the big news—which was a story about area drug arrests.

  “We have to buy a paper,” Mary said excitedly, coming out to the car after touching base with the Rileys.

  “Yeah?"

  “There was a big raid on drug dealers."

  “You mean—"

  “I don't know. Alberta said she hadn't had time to digest it all—something about a bunch of people arrested for dealing drugs yesterday—but the story mentions our circular by name."

  “Does it mention you by name?"

  “She said it didn't name any of us, but it told what ‘CRAC’ stood for.” CRAC was a name they'd made up to give them an official sound—Mary, Mrs. Lloyd, and her neighbors were the Coalition Rallying Against the Conspiracy. Royce thought “Coalition” sounded serious.

  “I hope this isn't a game somebody's running on us. If the names Fabio Ruiz and Luis Londoño are in that story, I'll breathe a lot easier.” They spotted a newspaper dispenser, and he pulled over and jumped out, getting two papers. They perused them in silence.

  Royce
read the story twice, fuming. He knew some of the people arrested. Nobodies. People chipping. Happy, of course, was not among those under arrest. He read the words a third time:

  MASSIVE DRUG BUST NETS 16

  Maysburg—A major drug raid Thursday netted 16 arrests on nearly 50 counts of trafficking in illegal substances, according to authorities.

  The raid was coordinated by the Tennessee Narcotics Task Force and utilized 12 law enforcement agencies operating on the municipal, state, and county levels, as well as supervisory personnel from federal agencies.

  According to a statement issued by the task force director, Gene L. Niswonger, the massive raid was the “end result of a long and continuing investigation into area drug dealers.” He described the raid as “a major success. It just shows you how many different agencies can work well together when everyone coordinates their efforts."

  Niswonger stated that property seized totaled in excess of thirty-five thousand dollars, and that the task force would use a “substantial portion” of the income derived from the sale of the property to help fund other drug-related operations.

  The 16 defendants were arraigned in Maysburg Thursday afternoon. Those arrested were:

  Beryl Crites, 27, three counts of sale of cocaine; Jimmy Frye, 31, two counts sale of methamphetamine; Thedra Jones, 24, four counts sale of cocaine, Bobby Tatum, 33, four counts manufacture of a controlled substance; Donny Ray Wagner, 29, two counts sale of marijuana..."

  Royce skipped down to the last paragraph of the newspaper article.

  Niswonger said the drug sweep was unrelated to rumors of a possible clandestine narcotics laboratory allegedly under construction in the Maysburg-Waterton area. “The idea that this community is the victim of some kind of a conspiracy is just plain ridiculous. It shows how people can act unwisely when they don't have any expertise and try to take the law into their own hands,” he stated, referring to leaflets which were mailed to homes throughout the Waterton area by a group calling itself CRAC, the Coalition Rallying Against the Conspiracy. The leaflets, sent inside supermarket shopping circulars, claimed that the group had found evidence of chemicals used in drug manufacture at a local construction site.

  “Those lying fucking pricks!” He wadded the paper and flung it into the backseat. “It's all a big shuck. They have this kind of thing ready to go at any second. Anytime they think they're going to get any heat—they've always got X numbers of small-timers they can round up.” He shook his head, gritting his teeth in disgust. “This is their way of defusing the stuff about Ecoworld—see? The War on Drugs, Chapter 763. It's bullshit."

  “What now?"

  “You tell me.” He started the car and began driving aimlessly. Mary felt as lost as she'd been since Sam had vanished. She reached across and squeezed Royce's hand for comfort, and he caught hers and held it.

  “Your hand is like ice,” he said. “Do you have any blood circulating in your body? You are ice cold."

  There were a dozen reasons why she shouldn't put her head on his shoulder:

  1. Men borrow money.

  2. Men are trouble.

  3. Men get jealous.

  4. Men take drugs, and drink, and gamble, and get sick, and die, and sometimes they just up and disappear.

  5. Men don't always smell good, and sometimes they have bad breath.

  6. Men will tell you that they love you when they don't.

  7. Men tell you they respect you when they don't.

  8. Men promise they'll be true and sometimes they won't.

  9. Men can be overcritical, ungrateful, sloppy, and mean.

  10. Men interrupt you when you're talking, don't like your friends, leave their dirty socks on the floor, tell you you're gaining weight, and make a mess in the bathroom.

  11. Men complain when you eat in bed.

  12. Men don't take you out enough.

  A dozen? There were a thousand reasons why she shouldn't put her head on his shoulder.

  But she was too tired to think of them, and she was ice cold.

  29

  WATERTON

  John Wayne Vodrey lived catercorner from Mathis Cotton Gin. He had him a nice little place with a sweet soundproofed living quarters so he wouldn't have to listen to them big ol’ reefer trucks rattle while he tried to get hisself some shut-eye. He drank a bit now and again. He was taking forty winks in his nicely soundproofed cottage when he awoke, drenched in a nightmare litany:

  “Gommle-grabber, gommle-grabber, gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble,” repeated over and over, spoken very fast, the name of a strange cat toy he'd once had, a gommle-grabber, it was called—a chase ball this one kitty cat had liked.

  He was a cutter and a slicer and a castrator. He had a mean streak wide as a four-lane highway, and he hated four-legged things of all kinds. The nonsense inside his fucked-up head inserted itself into his booze dreams, and suddenly he'd be soundlessly repeating gommle-grabber, gooble-gobble, like in Freaks, you know? The ratcheting of train wheels and the noise of the cars over the amputator's night sweats.

  “Pachyderma-dromadery pachyderma-dromadery, gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble,” Oh, my land's sakes, he was going to die from this hangover. It had its big fat hand over his nose and snoring mouth while he slept, and suddenly he was choking and being lifted, lifted out of the nightmare by a hand, and he saw the pig eyes burning in the doughy face and smelt human and flailed around for the .45 he kept under the bed, but he was in the air, all 208 hard, mean pounds of John Wayne Vodrey, trying his best to grab, claw, hit, smash, rip, get hold of his night monster, a big fat assailant looked like he might go six or seven hundred pounds stripped out.

  Big ol’ mean John Wayne tried to holler something, but a hand the shape of a blacksmith's anvil hammered his dirty yap shut.

  For some reason Chaingang recalled that official executioners work in groups called execution teams. He chuckled, remembering the look of “Violent C10,” the only time he'd got a look at the sign on the outer door beside the one-way glassed viewing port. He recalled with some pleasure the large stenciled word imprinted in black bold font on the institutional beige paint: V I 0 L E N T, it said, simply.

  John Wayne jerked at the sound of the thing that was the beast's laugh. It spoke to him in a deep rumble:

  “I am the execution team, Mr. Vodrey."

  “I don't—” The blow sent him into blackness. When he came to, he was nude and on his back, and the big fat crazy was over him with a-holt of both his feet. He was in his bathtub, in about three or four inches of water.

  “I—” Preemptive pressure.

  “No."

  “Please, uh—"

  “No!” Chaingang said, smiling his most dangerous and evil grin. “Don't open that shithole. You need all your strength.” He put pressure on the amputator's ankles, watching him try to muscle his way out of the tub. “Just ... to ... survive.” Mr. Vodrey was going to commit suicide in his own bathtub. And he was going to take all day to do it.

  He would not allow the red tide to flow over his mind. Not this time. This time he would work for his fun—and he planned on spending hours and hours with Mr. Vodrey.

  Imagine that you are a large man. Strong. Your hands aren't tied—right? Just reach up, grab the top of the tub, and pull yourself up. Easy—eh?

  Try it. Go run three or four inches of water in your tub. Get a four-hundred-pound man—or, if that's not practical, two two-hundred-pound men will suffice. Have him/them grasp your feet firmly by the ankles. Oh, make sure these are men who can lift their own weight, by the way—big, strong men. While they are putting downward pressure on your feet, you pull yourself up out of the water. Eventually, as you grow tired and more tired, you'll begin to realize the plain and nasty truth. You are drowning in four inches of bath water.

  It is a rather graphic physics lesson, and Daniel had the entire day to teach it to Mr. John Wayne Vodrey, torturer of dogs, cats, horses, hamsters, gerbils, goats, sheep, mules—God only knows what all—who kept cussin’ and fussin’ a
nd grabbin’ at the slick tub, straining with every ounce of strength in his body.

  Finally all the man could do was blow bubbles, and they were coming out of the wrong end. Another accident in the bathroom.

  30

  MAYSBURG

  Royce felt Mary snuggle against him and put her head on his shoulder. His heart went out to her. He was beat, and he could imagine how she felt. She suddenly seemed cold and vulnerable and very small. Her body shivered, or perhaps he only imagined it.

  He'd been driving aimlessly for miles, realized suddenly that he'd crossed the bridge to Waterton. Pulled in to the first paved road that ran parallel to the river, stopped, backed up, turned around, and headed back across the bridge to the Tennessee side.

  He's seen the billboard and it registered subconsciously, but he was too tired to say anything or do anything about it at first.

  “Let's take a motel room here. Just for the night.” She didn't protest, and he pulled in and registered, but when he came back to the car, it was nagging him.

  A billboard by the river road, advertising “Inexpensive, safe, year-round cold storage” had gnawed its way through to his brain.

  “When we were at the cabin, you said something about putting Sam's grandfather's gun in cold storage."

  “Sam did. I didn't."

  “Do you have other things in cold storage?” She just sat there looking like she was twelve years old. Blinking in the sunlight. “Anything else that you all stored? You didn't ever mention cold storage when we were talking about Sam's papers and things."

  She came alive. “I don't know what else is in there. If you want to look, it's over in that little shopping area near the bank and the drugstore."

  “Let's go,” he said, and started the car.

  Back over the bridge they drove a second time, heading down Jefferson in the direction of North Main, but stopping when they came to the cold storage facility, two doors down from his old buddy at Drexel Commodity Futures.