by Riley, R. Thomas; Zoot, Campbell; Chandler, Randy; Kauwe, Faith
Helen.
She’d been only mildly sauced the night of their one and only tragic encounter, and hardly enough that she wouldn’t be able to remember the way to James’ apartment. They’d cut across the woods to get to his car, another wrong turn that might add hours to the window of grace before Pete the Peacock and his pals showed up, seeking a pound of flesh in retribution. That pound perhaps including James’ dick and bollocks, neatly severed from his crotch.
He had to get out, to run, and he didn’t have much in the way of time to do it. It’s pretty hard to run with busted kneecaps, that inner voice reminded. Or worse than shattered knees. Far, far worse.
V: Hangovers
The pounding at his temples trumped just about any hangover James had ever suffered through, with the exception of the Big One at sixteen that almost killed him and had left him at the mercy of a serious case of the DTs—Dead Things.
James pulled the car into the driveway at an awkward angle between the snow banks, the kind of unpardonable abuse given the already-limited amount of parking space that would surely invite holy hell from his upstairs neighbors. He didn’t plan on being there long enough for them to bitch or lodge a formal complaint with the slumlord.
From the car to the front door seemed to take an hour; getting the key into the lock, a hundred times that. The rest passed in a frenzy: clothes in duffel bag; what didn’t fit into duffel bag into plastic shopping bags from the kitchen. Like a lot of alcoholics, James had a collection of favorite empties—champagne bottle from a wedding whose bride and groom had since divorced, the Jack D. from his first night in California, a trio of mixer empties he would, some day, fill with food coloring and water, like he’d done to that long-ago bottle of melon liqueur. Only he knew he’d never get to it, not now. The empties went into a bag, but the bag broke, spilling its contents to the floor, and most of the empties broke.
There wasn’t much in the kitchen he wanted, except the non-empties from the fridge. Those, he stacked with greater care for transport out to the car. A Bible, its pages hiding twenty-dollar bills between gospels, his grandfather’s sailing ship, crafted from driftwood and stray threads with a pocket knife. After a generation of neglect and riding cross country in the trunk of a different shitbox car, the old thing looked like it had run into the rocks. It was junk now, but it was his junk and joined the bags on the floor, which he would soon toss into the backseat before driving away from Simms College and the restaurant and Earl and the goddamned Shallahans.
Enough clothes, the only book he cared to take with him—the stroke rags under the bed were collecting dust, and he hadn’t gotten off with them anyway since the old schooner lost its main mast, just like Granddad’s sailing ship—and the booze. A few bottles of cheap wine, some whiskey, a couple of tall ones. As for the rest of it…
Get the fuck out, now!
James blinked, reached for his bags, only to stop, bent over in that position, paralyzed by the creak of the closet door.
He blinked again and the closet door slammed shut, and the world went dark, because he was now inside it. A smell like fruit or flowers past their prime filled his next shallow breath.
“…ella,” the dead cop roared in James’ ear.
The icy, fingerless arms clamped around his chest and waist sent a horrific chill through his guts and his nuts. “Let go of me, man,” James shrieked in a voice filled with equal parts anger and revulsion, his gorge threatening to rise.
“…ella.”
“I mean it, man. Let go, or else.”
“Ella.”
The two voices slammed together, creating a third, half-living, half-deceased. It spoke but one word: Cella.
***
While contemplating the fact that he’d never consciously gone in search of Oliver’s remains in the house, apart from several treks through the closet, under the carpet, seeking chinks in the walls and floorboards but finding none, it also occurred to James that his bedroom closet lurked over the darkest corner of the apartment house’s cellar. That, along with how badly he wanted a drink.
He pulled the flashlight out of the kitchen junk drawer and all those other things he planned to leave behind, and the first bottle neck his fingers grasped from the pile. Red, a merlot, twist-cap. He took a swig, choked, and cleared his throat with another gulp.
James exited the apartment through the door to the common hallway. The air stunk of muddy footprints and standing water, old wood and a hint of mold. Three slotted mailboxes, one for each of the building’s tenants, and one for outgoing mail, separated him from the single fluorescent ring humming over the rickety stairs leading down to the cellar.
He followed the dozen steps, flashlight in one hand, wine bottle in the other to the dark expanse where the junk of tenants past had accumulated, ghosts of a different nature. Broken bikes. A canoe. Bed frames. A mattress covered with stains.
James moved closer to the area of cellar beneath his apartment, pulling on lamp chains, activating bare bulbs in sequence. The last one in the line, he discovered, wasn’t merely dead but broken. His work boots crunched over the remains of the bulb.
James glanced up, seeing cobwebs and the pipes running along the ceiling. James wasn’t beneath the bedroom closet yet, just as far as he could go. He’d reached a wall of fake wood paneling.
“Where is it? Where-?”
He brought up his flashlight, aimed the beam across the faux knots and swirls. He didn’t realize the door was a door, because the knob was missing. Another glance up confirmed his suspicions: whatever was behind that door, its location placed it directly beneath his bedroom closet.
After taking a swig, his hands shaking, James set down the bottle and coaxed the door open. It was a storage closet. A bitter, rusty smell assailed his nostrils. James swept the floor with the flashlight and saw a stain on the dirty concrete.
“Blood,” James whispered.
The only other obvious element in the closet was a wooden chair, lying on its side, beside the blood stain. Stone and cement walls. No windows. A chamber of horrors, hidden from clear view. He found one other thing in the corner.
“…adh…adh…”
“Badge?” James huffed. “I see it, dude.”
The dead thing in the closet with him repeated the invocation. James held the badge by the scrap of cloth it was still pinned to and aimed the flashlight at the shield. There, stamped right over the top of it was a single, clear fingerprint, encased in dried blood.
VI: Wine
James walked past the line of mailboxes, his heart pounding, his throat so dry it hurt. His flesh crawled for reasons he both could and couldn’t identify. He didn’t realize he’d stopped blinking until his wide eyes started to burn.
He approached the apartment’s door. The sound of an object falling, breaking, from inside reached his ears. James back-pedaled to the mailboxes and slid the badge through the slot for outgoing mail.
He almost made it to the car, but one of Pete’s boys was waiting outside, leaning against the bumper of the van that now blocked the driveway.
“Hey, he’s here,” the young goon bellowed. The goon was armed with a length of mountain ash.
“Holy shit,” James said. He started to run, only to go down when Pete’s boy swung one that would have launched a baseball out of the park.
“Fuck with me, will you? Well, how do your nuts feel now, asshole?” Pete the Peacock Shallahan roared into his face.
The joke was on him, though, and not very funny because James could no longer feel his nuts. “Dude, lay off the garlic, will you?” he settled for instead.
His last conscious memory was of catching a look at the back end of Third Base after they dragged him out of the van. James only recognized their location because he’d staggered out there to puke following his last visit, lamenting at the time that one of these nights, the booze was going to be the death of him.
VII: Spirits
“…new evidence linking a local businessman and his family to
the disappearance of a police officer,” blathered the talking head on the TV screen above the bar.
James blinked himself out of the spell of thoughts he’d fallen prey to and glanced up from the pitted slab of honey-oak, upon which so many beers and cocktails had been set over the years to quench unquenchable thirsts.
“Hey, can you turn that up?” James asked. When the Nordic-looking bartender didn’t respond, he shouted the request. The man ignored him.
“That’s right, Craig. We’ve just learned that the badge that Officer Oliver Rivas was wearing at the time of his suspected murder was discovered by a postal worker making a routine delivery to a Congress Street apartment building. Authorities were able to match a fingerprint on the badge in what is assumed to be Officer Rivas’ blood to that of controversial business owner, George Shallahan. Shallahan, no stranger to police authorities, has been a person of interest in the Rivas case, as well as several other, as-yet unsolved crimes. The police raid on Shallahan’s palatial King’s Hill home led to the arrest of five other family members, including Shallahan’s nephew Peter, a student at Simms College…”
The exterior of his shitty apartment house, its front porch ringed in crime scene tape, briefly flashed across the screen. James licked his lips and called out for service. A beer, some wine, anything at this point to douse his thirst.
The Nordic bartender, focused upon the screen with a look that could have been relief or worry, maybe equal parts both, ignored him.
“Are you fucking deaf?”
James considered reaching across the bar and shaking the man, but grabbed at the beer in his hand instead. James’ fingers passed right through the bottle.
He tossed back his head, his throat so dry that it burned, and laughed at the irony.
THE CUNT NEXT DOOR
By Zoot Campbell
I’ve been on the Caspar Police force for over seven years and made Detective Grade 2 about six months ago. To celebrate, the family took a camping vacation in Marleybone State Forest. The last night of three that we were there, something crawled into my sleeping bag and got inside me; it’s not important where it made its entry. But it got in and it’s still in and I’ve told no one. Just thinking about a doctor makes the pain so severe that a hundred Oxycontin wouldn’t help. Well, maybe a little. But my life has changed in many ways. Don’t you think?
If they had looked in the kitchen drawer by the back door they would have found the needle-nosed pliers I used on her eyelids. But they didn’t because I wasn’t a suspect—not even a person of interest—just a neighbor next door to where a terrible bloody killing took place two days ago in the “dead of night.” Or was it “life of night?” Is there such a thing? Maybe it was life as the light faded after her eyelids were torn off. Her eyes had a real way of irking me although it amounted to much more than that and it took almost a week to get my goat. Which I didn’t know I owned until that fateful, fartful day back in September. Besides, I’m a cop; a good one.
I’ll back up a few months to when we went house-hunting. I have lousy credit so ironically I have to buy everything for cash. I can do this and believe me it is not an inconsistency to be cash rich and credit poor but the why and how is none of your business. So I find a house I can pay cash for and it’s quite nice and exactly what we are looking for. But there is always a problem with this type of thing—this cash buying. You see, I have to buy in a middle-class neighborhood where the neighbor jerks have to work every goddamned day to pay the bills even on a crappy house just like the one that I am stuck with because I must pay cash. Get it? I have to live in a neighborhood where the peeps couldn’t afford to eat my doo-doo. So right away we have class problems, them being in the lower classes and me in the upper. It’s a long financial story but like I said, it’s not for your ears.
We look for pleasant places where the neighbors are not diverse, if you get my meaning, a term used by wily fat middle-aged housewives who take a test a donkey could pass to get a real estate license. Now they can use their spare time which is all day because their husbands are out working and after work or at lunch are licking the snatch of the waitress at the diner or some secretary that is twenty five years younger than fatso the wife who has more hair on her upper lip than the beaver that hubby is chowing down on every Tuesday and Wednesday of the week and sometimes on Friday when he’s out with the guys at a meeting—or should I say meating?
Right after the closing, we’re standing on the front lawn of the new house admiring its lousy paint job and the corroded rain gutters and dry rot around the windows. The front door of the white colonial house next door opens and out comes what I assume and later confirm is the wifey. She’s a bean pole. Tall, thin as a rail with tits like raisins on a breadboard, as Granny used to say. She’s got one of those papoose carrying things on her chest with a nasty looking little baby in it. And a four year old little boy is in tow along with a Fido, a shaggy, smelly retriever or some other yuppie type dog. Several strides bring her within talking distance.
“Hi,” she says. “Welcome to the neighborhood. I’m Laurie, this is Parker and this little baby girl is Cecile.”
I handle the reciprocal introductions and it’s the first time I say to myself, “What am I doing here?” I’m looking at her the way I’ve been trained as a detective to look at her. She has no make-up on; very plain, milky face, gaunt, one could say, with pale blue eyes, dirty hair tied up in a rubber band and round brass-rimmed glasses. She reminds me of the old hag in “American Gothic,” the painting by Grant Wood. You know, the two geezers, one with a pitchfork and standing looking at you like you might be a democrat that they’d like to skewer and burn at the stake.
Right away, I’m looking at those eyeglasses and thinking I’d like to see them behind her eyes, with the balls stretched out of the sockets and then the glasses put back in place. She’d be a real “4-eyes.” That would be interesting. And the lack of make-up? I know right away that hubby likes to do her bottom-style, which orifice I have not determined, but he presses her face into the pillowcase hard and she has learned that it is easier all round if she does not wear mascara and lipstick and such because it takes too long to get the stains off the pillowcase that her face has just been mashed into. Let me tell you, I can read a great deal into things that most people such as yourself would never notice. It comes with the territory, especially after the sleeping bag thing which I try not to dwell on. In fact, when I do, I get a headache, a splitting one that’s like really splitting, like maybe a wedge has been driven between the two hemispheres of my brain and is being slowly, ever so slowly, pressed down and in; a melon splitter, I’d call it.
A few weeks go by and my little dog is in my backyard chasing a squirrel up a tree. The squirrel makes it and chatters at Conrad. I like that name for a dog even if it’s a girl dog. But she’s no bitch. Cool pooch and I love her to death. Conrad starts barking at the squirrel and I’m laughing because she’s trying to climb the tree. Cutest, funniest thing you ever saw. I like the way dogs see the world, like they can do anything because they don’t know the forces at work on us like gravity and time and stress and…
“Hey, can’t you keep that dog quiet?” The husband next door shouts from his back porch. Never met the fucker and he’s telling me to keep Conrad quiet.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Did she bother you?”
“Yeah. That barking is a pain in my ass. Why don’t you get one of those barking collars?’
“What’s that?” I pretend.
“It’s a collar that shoots some wattage into a dog that barks. It works. Let me tell you.”
“Good idea,” I say. “Thanks.”
“Sure,” he says. “And welcome to the neighborhood.”
That night I look him up on the department computer system. Nothing unusual. A forest ranger, works for the state. No record, nothing at all. Oh yeah, a shorty. He’s 5’6”, a good half a foot shorter than beanpole. Name of Jack Gibney. Jack and the beanpole, I think and laugh out loud. Not LOL, eithe
r. I hate that crap. No, I laugh out loud. But I begin my plan. I call it Operation Conrad.
I’ll admit I’m pretty lucky and sometimes it even seems like a fluke, a real streak of good fortune which I need especially since the sleeping bag incident. But I don’t want to think about that, so don’t bring it up.
I keep a camera handy either on or off duty; it’s a good tool that can make a difference. Nothing fancy. Just a quick point and shoot. It’s near Halloween, about two weeks after Conrad and the squirrel. I’m looking out the front window over the kitchen sink at the wooded vacant lot across the street and see two boys, aged ten and seven, I’m guessing. One of them has a BB gun. They’re just running around being boys. Nothing bad about that. But I take a quick snap. Something in my spine tells me it’s important. Pieces in a puzzle, you know, a puzzle that you lost the box to so you don’t know what the final image will be.
Forest ranger has odd work hours. Gone for four or five days at a time. Home for the same time. Not a nine-to-fiver like yours truly. I’ve already calendared his days and know that this week, mid-November, he’ll be gone from Tuesday to Saturday. I figure that Thursday is a good day. When I was in school, they called Thursdays “Mo Day,” although I didn’t know then that it meant “homosexual day.” I was just a kid but I had heard that on Thursdays it was great sport to beat the crap out of gay people. It’s a great country we live in. A high holy day for anything and everything. Anyway, it’s mo day for me. On Tuesday, I go to Wal-Mart and buy a BB Gun. Pay cash like I do for everything. My spine tingles in the parking lot at how well the pieces fall in to place.
