He lacked any clear recollection of how he'd gotten here. He'd borrowed five hundred dollars from his father's dresser before leaving the house, but since he had no means or intention of repaying it, stolen was the more accurate term.
Adele came out dangling a key from its plastic diamond-shaped fob. She was young and skinny as a guitar string. I've seen more meat on a butcher's blade, Lou Cobb might've said. She led him up a rusted staircase to a small clean room on the second floor and sat him on the bed.
"I got to say you're not looking so hot, cowboy." She drew a circle around her lips. "Your teeth are all shot to hell. Couple of them look too big."
The teeth his mother had "found" were still lodged in his gums. They didn't hurt that badly, though to leave them in much longer was to risk infection. "They were a gift."
"For the man who has everything, huh?" She flipped her hair— a strangely girlish gesture—then squeezed Paul's crotch. "I'll go wash up."
The bathroom door shut. Running water, splashing water. Paul removed his shirt and stood bare-chested before the window, considering the reflection of his body. The flesh over his ribcage was an ugly bluish-yellow mottle. It still hurt to breathe.
The name of the man who'd done this damage was Tom Tully; Lou had given him the name after much prodding. An ex-pro boxer. He and his brother shared a small house in the Love Canal district of Niagara Falls. Tom Tully was at Mount St. Mary's hospital, comatose fifteen days now.
Paul often thought about Tom Tully. What sort of person was he? He'd visited the local library archives and hunted through old Ring magazines. He'd dredged up an article: SAMMY "NIGHT TRAIN" LAYNE & TOMMY "BOOM BOOM" TULLY SET TO TANGO ON HOLMES/COONEY UNDER- CARD AT MSG. A photo: Tully looking impossibly hale beside a cigar- chomping manager. A trial horse, the scouting report said. Loads of heart, little skill. Takes a mean punch.
For the past few days Paul had taken a cab over the river. He idled across the road from the row house off 16th Street. Everyone looked so different. Nobody wore suits or carried briefcases. Everyone took the bus. Though a mere forty miles separated Paul from his childhood home, the distance seemed much greater. Paul Harris and Tom Tully—he wondered, were their lives in any way similar? The prospect gnawed. If they'd met outside the ring, somehow by chance, might they have been friends? Paul remembered the bigger man saying he'd take it easy on Paul. He remembered Tully's awkward, shamed smile.
A trial horse. Loads of heart, little skill. Takes a mean punch.
The whore, Adele, was singing. A sweet voice. She stepped into the room with a towel wrapped around her head and another draping her body.
"So," she said. "Ready to rock and roll?"
Paul realized, somewhat abruptly, that he had no desire to fuck this girl. He wondered if he could ask her to get dressed and leave so he could catch a few hours' sleep.
Adele stared at Paul, fascinated with his body: the lumps and abrasions and bruises. She leaned back on the mattress, a slatternly pose, running her bare feet over the puke-green shag. Paul retrieved his handwraps from a coat pocket and sat beside her.
"Give me your hand."
Gently, the way he'd been taught, he wrapped this whore's hand. Holding firm her wrist, he felt the birdlike bones pulse under her skin. The wraps were filthy, stinking of sweat and blood. Adele didn't seem to mind. Paul worked slowly, applying gentle pressure, testing his handiwork. Again he was struck by just how young she was: the rosy, fresh-scrubbed complexion of a high school girl. He considered asking her to leave—but perhaps her being with him tonight was the lesser of so many possible evils.
"What's your name?"
"Rex," Paul told her. "Rex Appleby."
Adele offered him a soft smile. "And what do you do, Rex?"
"I'm the last good cop on the force. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find him, maybe you can hire...Rex Appleby."
When Adele's hands were wrapped, Paul set them back in her lap. He knew he wanted something from her—not sex, not comfort or intimacy, any of that. Contact, was all. Not loving contact, or even professional tenderness. Something more forceful that would leave him scarred.
He heeled off his shoes, unbuttoned his jeans and shucked them. He removed his underwear and stood before her naked.
"You sure got a big dick."
Paul knew she was lying: his cock was a runty wrinkled thing sunk so deep into his crotch it almost looked like a second belly button. She was no different from the stylist who runs her hands through a balding customer's hair and remarks how lustrous it is.
She was tall: they met eye to eye. Her lips were almost colorless, her mouth big and hard and brutal enough to chew right through him.
Her shaved pussy had a starchy, ruffled look, like the collar of a Victorian gentlewoman's dress. In the room's sulfurous light she looked like a young man. Her breasts so small, slender body roped with taut muscle. Like a teenage boy.
Paul pulled bills from the pocket of his jeans and placed them in the Gideon bible, between pages in the Book of Leviticus.
Adele smiled. "What is your pleasure, sir?"
He considered her and sighed. He could only make a fist and slug his thigh. Adele intuited something in this gesture—his need was as naked and undisguised as the buzzing neon M through the parted drapes.
She said, "I can do that."
They stood close but not quite touching.
"Well," Paul said softly, "what are you waiting for?"
The first blow glanced off his forehead. The room was so dark, visibility so poor, that he did not see it coming. Adele's fist had some serious steam behind it: fragments of shooting light spun before his eyes like formations of burning birds. He was still grinning stupidly when a second punch, this one much harder, rocked his jaw.
Paul tripped backward, startled and unbalanced. His thigh rammed the bedside table, knocking the lamp off as his feet swung out from under him. His skull slammed the wall and he dropped to the floor, crushing the lamp: the cheap cellophane shade crumpled and the light bulb burst with a powdery pop to drive eggshell shards of glass into his ass.
Her hand twined in his hair, dragging him up. Her lips pressed to his ear, breath stinking of sour bananas: "Like that, don't you?"
Before Paul could reply she slugged him in the belly. Twin whips of snot spurted from his nostrils. She punched him under the chin, an unforgiving uppercut that shut his mouth. His new teeth collided. One shot straight up into the air. He swallowed the other one and fell back on the bed.
When the cobwebs cleared he propped himself on his elbows and found her kneeling between his spread legs sucking his cock. She bobbed up and down, her hair—yellow like greased wheat—fanned over his thighs. Her tongue was small and pink, hot and wet, and she kept flicking it over the tip of Paul's hard cock as she sucked him off.
"Wait, now," he said, groggy but alarmed. "My god—!"
She took a swing at him with his cock still in her mouth, clipping his chin, and he fell back again. She grasped his hips, sharp painted talons digging deep into his ass, thick strings of saliva hanging from her lips as she bent to inhale his dick, taking the whole of it into her throat. She gagged around its size, a barfy-burpy sound. Paul had never felt anything like it. She kept pumping the shaft, impaling her mouth on it while at the same time slipping one finger between his legs, between his ass cheeks, pressing that finger against his asshole, circling, rubbing, and he tensed a bit before relaxing to let that raw skinny finger slip up inside him and he squirmed, helpless as an infant as she worked his cock, finger pressing his prostate, and it felt as if his every nerve center had been dynamited until she abruptly removed her finger from his ass and punched him in the kidneys so hard he retched.
She clambered atop him, straddled his hips. She punched him in the face—he could have avoided the blow but elected not to. Brilliant stars pinwheeled across the dark space between his eyes and the ceiling. She gripped his cock, rubbed the head over her clit. He was bleeding now, a to
n of blood spilling from his torn mouth and ass. She ground her pussy against him, thrusting and bucking and slipping his cock up into her, riding him bareback as Paul idly contemplated the many diseases she might be infested with before realizing he didn't give a damn. Her pussy was tight and wet, not loose and used as a first- time customer might suspect.
She grabbed the bible off the bedside table, laid it flat on his face, and smashed her fist into the cover. His nose cracked. She slapped his forehead with the Good Book, as if she were a revivalist preacher and he a possessed worshipper speaking in tongues. In the brown light she regarded him with an interest best described as clinical—a specimen pinned on a dissecting tray.
She slid his cock out of her and stood at the edge of the bed.
"Come on." She was panting like a dog. "Let's see it."
Paul jolted off the bed and hit her as he might a tackling dummy, shoulder driven into her stomach, shoving her back. He had her up against the wall with his mouth hot on her neck, kissing and licking and sucking, hands propped under her ass lifting her a few inches off the ground. She guided his cock into her and he thrust up, slamming into her like the pump arm on an oil derrick, her long legs clamped around his hips, and she was kissing him now, biting his lips, one hand wrapped around his neck and the other clenched into a fist punching him lightly in the jaw, and in a high trembling voice she whispered, "This is great. This is really, really... great" and the realization that she was enjoying it, that the rough goings-on had penetrated her hard whorish soul, flooded Paul's heart with a bizarre species of joy and he orgasmed uncontrollably, the world blanking out for a few seconds, and all he saw was this endless sheet of gray-blue ice as his knees buckled and he slipped out of her. He slid down the slender plane of her body, exhausted and trembling, until his lips came to rest on the bony swell of her hip.
She was breathing heavily. "Was it good for you, Rex?"
Before Paul could say a word she brought a knee up into his chin. His head snapped back, then he didn't know a thing.
When he came to, Adele was gone. So was the cash in the bible.
In the bathroom he managed to tweeze most of the light-bulb glass from his ass with his fingers. He splashed cold water on his face and crotch and in the mirror surveyed the crazed geometry of his face.
A few fresh lumps and cuts. One of his testicles had swollen to the size of a racquetball; a violet spiderwebbing bruise spread over his ballsack. It was hard to distinguish one injury from the other: they all blended, cut-to-bruise-to-scab-to-bump-to-bruise-to-cut, red-to- black-to-purple-to-yellow-to-pink-to-blue. It had become impossible to recall where he'd absorbed them—in his mind they had merged into one single catastrophic injury.
He pulled his lower lip down and bared what remained of his teeth.
"Booga booga."
From the motel he made his way toward Mount St. Mary's hospital. He followed snaking streets and narrow alleyways, crossed bridges spanning iced-over streams on his way to the place that he realized, deep down, he was destined for all along.
He bumped into a guy as he crossed the Rainbow Bridge. His fists instinctively curled before he got a look at the guy's face in the yellow glow of the bridge lamps.
"Jesus," he said. Then, "Hey."
It was Drake Langley, his old prep school chum. But Drake looked nothing like he had: he wore an old army fatigue jacket and sported a clean-shaven skull. And apparently he'd rediscovered how to walk without assistance: the dog-headed cane was nowhere in sight.
Drake was missing a handful of teeth. The dome of his skull was grooved with long slits stitched with catgut. His face looked odd. After a moment Paul realized that his eyebrows and eyelashes had been shaved off.
"How's it going, man?"
"I'm all right," Paul said."...you?"
"Fuckin-A great."
Drake said he'd moved out of his parents' place and was holed up with "a pack of hardcore animal rights activists" in an abandoned house on Paper Street.
"PETA is a little dog with a big bark," he said. "We're a little dog with a mouthful of razor blades. We bite"
Paul was distressed at the mania in Drake's eyes: skull cored out like a jack-o'-lantern, flickering candlelight dancing behind his eyes. Drake showed him the contents of his shopping bag: boxes and boxes of Eddy matches.
"Do you know," he said, "that if you stuff a PVC tube with enough permanganate, Sweet'N Low, and match heads, you can blow up just about anything?"
"I didn't know that," Paul said. "No."
Drake caught something in Paul's demeanor and got agitated. "Know how they skin a fox at a commercial fur ranch? They slit it right here," his fingers made slashes at his own crotch, "and pull its skin off. It's alive when they do it. When the skin's off they chuck the skinless body in a plastic barrel. They don't even slit its throat. You know what a fox with no skin looks like? A newborn baby. A bloody squirming baby. Picture a barrel full of babies, Paul."
"I've got to get going, Drake. Nice to see you."
Drake grabbed his wrist. "Hey," he said softly, "thanks, man. I mean it."
Now Paul stumbled down a white-walled corridor with hospital beds lining the walls. He was shivering, having walked fifteen blocks without benefit of a jacket. His teeth hammered and clashed.
The room at the end of the hallway was spare and antiseptic, its lone window inset with steel mesh. Tom Tully lay on the nearest bed. Shirtless, white EKG disks plastered to his shaved chest. The crown of his skull was swaddled in layers of surgical gauze, below which his eyes stared, wide open, at a spot on the wall.
Tom looked so small and frail, so badly—shrunken. His skin was drawn tight to the bones of his hands, making them appear grotesquely clawlike. Paul pictured a scarecrow with a tear in its belly, straw guts bleeding out in a blustery farmer's field.
Gummy matter had gathered at the sides of Tom's eyes. Paul took a Kleenex from a box on the shelf and dabbed at the sticky accretion. Tully's eyes didn't blink.
A wave of panic, near-hysteric in scope, washed over Paul. The skin tightened over his head, stretched so taut he was sure it would split to reveal the vein-threaded dome of his skull. He wanted to grab Tully and shake the daylights out of him; wanted to scream WAKE UP! into his sweetly smiling face.
"I'm... sorry," Paul whispered, his mouth so close to Tully's head that the downy hairs of his inner ear quivered. "I never saw it happening like this. I never meant to hurt you this way—it wasn't ever about that."
A young man came in. He carried an orange cafeteria tray, setting it down. Seventeen or so: a high school senior, maybe. Not that big, but a strong, compact frame. Dark, short-clipped hair. Eyes the same cornflower blue as Tom Tully's.
"Who are you?" he asked Paul.
"I'm nobody. Just visiting. Who are—?"
"Robbie. Rob. He's my uncle."
"I'm Paul. Were ... are you close?"
"He's my uncle," Rob said again.
They stood across Tom's body. An accordionlike breathing bellows rose and fell. Narcotics dripped through a catheter into his spine.
Rob said, "What are you doing here?"
"I just wanted to see how he was faring."
"So you've seen him."
Rob's fists clenched and unclenched; brachial veins pulsed down his biceps. Paul set himself in a defensive stance, figuring the kid might leap across the bed.
"You look like shit."
Paul picked at the crusted blood on his lips. "It's been a long night."
"You crawl out of a Dumpster?"
The kid was goading him—he had every right. Paul picked a condolence card off the bedside table, skimmed it, and set it back.
Rob shifted from left foot to right. Antsy, ready to explode. "Where are you from? I've never seen you before."
"Across the river."
"You're a ... Canadian? Were you fighting to make ends meet?"
"Would that have been any better?"
"Were you fighting for anyone?"
"I was figh
ting for someone. Myself."
Paul pictured the way Tom Tully had fallen: heedlessly, like a trench coat slipping off its hanger to the floor. He pictured Tom Tully with blood coming out his ears and recalled the rush of pure power that flowed through him at the sight; power born of the knowledge he'd reduced another human being to a thoughtless slab of meat, erasing every trace of history and memory and dream. And while he couldn't quite reconcile the hideous selfishness of these thoughts, neither could he deny he'd harbored them.
"So you didn't need the money?" Rob asked.
"Money's never been an issue for me."
Rob looked at Paul and peeled away the new muscles, bruises, and missing teeth to catch a glimpse of Paul as he'd once been: frail, monied, fearful.
"Can I ask you something?" Paul nodded; Rob went on. "Are you rich?"
"I was never rich. But my parents were."
"So that, with my uncle ... proof of something?"
"I needed to know what I was capable of," Paul told him. "To know I could walk into a room and know that nobody in that room could... fuck with me, I guess."
Rob gave a look of such seething hatred it shocked Paul. "I've heard spoiled rich kids do a lot of self-centered things, but that takes it."
He went to the door and shut it. After a brief hesitation he dragged the chair over and lodged it under the doorknob. He crouched on the floor, his posture that of a baseball catcher. For a full minute he sat that way.
"My uncle was a solid fighter," he said finally. "This shouldn't have happened." He raised his head and stared at Paul with those blue eyes of his. "I want to hurt you, Paul. I think... I think I more or less have to. And I think you want to be hurt."
"We both know a place. How old are you?"
"Old enough."
"If you think it'll answer anything. Maybe I owe you." Paul smiled sadly. "I don't want to hurt you." Then, with perfect honesty: "Or maybe I do."
Chapter 11
Robert Tully dreamed he was in Sharky's on Pine Street. The bar was dirty and dark and narrow, jammed between an off-license bettor's and the Pine Street theater, where a roll of dimes bought you a half-hour in the peepshow booths.
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