Wetbones: The Authorized Edition

by John Shirley

  "Shiiiiiit!" Lonny wasn't sure if it was him or Orphy who screamed this as he fired the gun impulsively at the dark shapes. Heard a grunt and then a giggle and they kept coming and he turned to run toward the fence but there were others on the walk back there, coming after them, the illin fuckers jerking off as they came. He fired at them, too, and then the gun was empty and there was no time to reload so he sprinted toward the house, his lips drawn back in the rigidity of total fear, babbling, "Orphy come on goddamn come on and -" Gun shots

  behind him. ''And don't waste no bullets we gotta get over here we gotta - we gotta - we gotta -" Not sure what they had to do. And then he stumbled, going down on his hands and knees, grinding his teeth at the pain as a brick-corner smacked into his right kneecap, cursing when the flashlight glass shattered on another brick. His little totem of light snuffed out. He tossed the dead flashlight away as he heard running footsteps behind him, someone calling to him mixed up with a moron's giggles. Lonny jumped to his feet and took off again, chest heaving, thinking he should try to load the gun. But these people (the house was looming up in front of him now, dark and motionless) didn't seem to care if they were shot and oh no where was Orpheus?

  As he reached the front steps he paused, panting, looked back for Orphy - and didn't see him.

  A whisper in his head. "Hey kid, wait up, we wanna parrrrrtay!"

  And then he heard Orpheus's voice. Yeah. For sure. It was him. How could a dude as hard as Orpheus make noises like that? Screaming piteously, from somewhere in the darkness behind the screen of rose trellises.

  Culver City, Los Angeles

  "When's that party you're going to?" Jeff asked, coming into his office. He seemed agitated, Prentice noticed, looking up from the word processor's display. Jeff was putting his hands in his back jeans pockets, taking them out, crossing them over his chest; the lines of his narrow face were tauter than ever.

  "Tomorrow night, Jeff. What's got you so . . .?"

  "My brother is still fucking missing man, that's what!" He chewed at his upper lip; it gave him a bulldog look.

  "I talked to that fucking detective. Blume. He doesn't know shit except that kids are turning up dead. Teenagers, young women. One man so far - his body was all crushed -"

  "Oh, that. Yeah, I read about it."

  "- so they don't know much about him except they're pretty sure he was in his mid-twenties or so which means it wasn't Mitch."

  "Why should it be Mitch? Kids go missing all the time, Jeff - if they were all murdered there'd be bodies everywhere - "

  "Now you sound like that fucking cop. This detective was your idea. Blume went out to Doublekey and just gave up at the gate, the way we did."

  "He didn't circle around the place?"

  "He did. With binoculars. He said he didn't see anything but trash on the ground and a couple of drunk older guys sitting by a dirty swimming pool. He watched for a long time - he claims. From different angles. Waste of time. If they've got Mitch he's in the house."

  Prentice felt a twinge of guilt. What if Mitch really was out there?

  He thought about Lissa. He had mixed feelings about her. He couldn't get over the feeling that she'd manipulated him. He still felt sort of spaced out and odd after the drugs. It'd felt good at the time but since then he'd been prone to brief, bizarre anxiety attacks. Sudden fears of - nothing at all. Still, he hadn't been bothered by a sense of Amy's nearness, since then. The drunken rapture of Lissa's touch had driven it out of him. At times, though, he could almost sense Amy, not quite but almost, just on the periphery of his awareness . . .

  "I'm going to the fucking Feds," Jeff was saying,

  "much as I hate to. And I'm gonna start in with the lawyer again."

  "Tell you what," Prentice said. "Hold off on that just three days. I'm going to talk to this detective, and do a little research on the Denvers." Maybe he could get Arthwright to sign him after Monday. And then Jeff could sue to his heart's content.

  "Three days?" Jeff took a deep breath. "Yeah. Okay, three days. Keep me posted, man." He turned to go, then paused at the door, remembering to be civil. "How's the script?"

  "Finally starting to happen. But slow."

  "Slow is all right as long as it's steady. How's that pussy you been getting?"

  "You're so sensitive, Jeff. A real modern, 'sensitive' man."

  Jeff laughed, paradoxically pleased by the dig, as Prentice had known he'd be, and went back into the living room to catch CNN's Sports Update. After a few minutes of pretending to work, Prentice joined him.

  Near Malibu

  The gunshots had given Eurydice hope, for a few minutes. She'd thought maybe it was the police. But now they'd stopped and there was only distant laughter and a scream from out there, and no sounds of sirens. It hadn't been the police. It had been the More Man and friends - playing.

  There were other sounds, now - from the room beneath hers.

  There was a hole in the floor, near the bed. It was too convenient, this hole being there, looking accidental but somehow punched through two layers of floor. She was

  pretty sure this hole and the one in the wall were put there for her and Mitch to find.

  So she told herself she shouldn't play along; she shouldn't listen to what was going on downstairs. Shouldn't try to see down there.

  She put her fingers in her ears and kept out most of it. Still, she heard the mesh of laughter and wailing, like roses and thorns on the same vine, and she heard someone whimpering, "Don't let it get on me don't let it get on me don't let it -!" and then she heard someone else say in a calm voice, "Plant them in his wounds." And then there was a panting . . . and then a pissing sound . . .

  The crackle of bones slowly breaking. A bubbling wail.

  She started yelling, just a lot of wordless noise to cover up the sounds. She dragged the mattress from the bed and dumped it over the hole in the floor. She could still hear it, faintly. She clapped her hands over her ears and paced around the room feeling she was going to rip open from the razor-sharp unfairness of it.

  Her gaze came to rest on the crack in the wall. She hurried to it and squatted on the floor, thumped on the wall with the flat of her hand. Sometimes he didn't answer.

  This time he answered. "Eury?" Mitch's voice. Sounding far away and unattached, like a voice heard from a TV in the next apartment.

  She flattened herself against the wall, her ear pressed to the crack, head tilted down so she could talk into it. "Did you hear those gunshots? Do you think it's anything . . . ?"

  "I've seen them play with guns before."

  She choked on a sob. She wasn't going to be rescued. Why should she be? It was always the same. She knew

  that from when she'd worked out that her mama saw her as a way to get G.A. and extra foodstamps and then money from white assholes. She was just a lump of flesh that moved around and waited to be used for something. She always had been. Why should anybody come to get her out of here?

  But something in her hissed like an angry cat, made her keep looking for a way out; made her ask, "You talk to that Handy Man like you said, Mitch?"

  "Yeah. Yeah. I asked him. Told him I didn't want to be -" He sniggered idiotically. "- to be, like, a hodad around here. He said maybe I'd be like the More Man someday, and maybe not, and it was something you have or you don't have . . . and we'd know when the time came and . . . I think he was just playing with me . . . He doesn't seem like he's even really here . . . Like in his head he's always someplace else . . . He started talking German to me, once, but dude must know I can't speak German . . ."

  "Mitch . . . You ask him about me?"

  "He wouldn't say anything. But they're going to use us soon. I know it. There's a rhythm here . . ."

  "They give you Reward?"

  "Head Syrup? Not for a long time now. They're saving us . . ."

  There was another way out, she thought. "Mitch - if they busy, it might be somebody could kill theyself, you think, before they git on it?"

  "Maybe.
I wish we could kill each other. Wouldn't that be good?"

  "What?"

  He went on with a hoarse excitement, "We could strangle each other and try to do it so that we each killed the other at exactly the same second. It'd be tricky, because one would tend to fall over before the other but

  - well, maybe something sharp would be better . . . I've got some broken glass . . ."

  "Mitch, what the fuck you talking about? You trying to get into they heads? Is that why you saying this?"

  "We could break through the walls so we could get to each other and then we could -"

  "Mitch, shut up!Just fucking shut up!"

  He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "I'll wait over here on my bed till you feel better."

  She heard him move; and the creak of the bedsprings. Then she heard a plaintive keening from the room below. She thought she could feel the cry vibrate in the boards under her hands.

  Watts, Los Angeles

  It was somebody's apartment, he had no idea whose. He was being herded about by Gretchen, just now, and she'd herded him here, and he was so stoned he hardly noticed anything about it, except that it was almost as bare as Hardwick's. And it was a little bigger and the stove was still there.

  There were also four children in it. Garner noticed them only abstractedly at first. Four black kids, one of them about three years old, sleeping - or trying to - on the bare floor mattress, as Garner and Gretchen and the kids' father, if that's who he was, took hits off the pipe in the kitchen area of the apartment. Little details slipped through to Garner from time to time, when he wasn't hitting the pipe: the floor sagged; the walls were yellow; the light from the kitchen glared onto the dull faces of the black children sharing a single blanket.

  Garner had used his Visa card, the only credit card he had, to get cash, and they were going through that

  now. He was almost out of money again. How long had he been on this run? How long had he been chasing the high? It was late at night. He could hardly feel his arms and legs. He had made a few tentative tries at getting Gretchen alone, ended up looking like a jackass as he tried to fuck her standing in a bathroom; couldn't even get it up. Hadn't tried to argue with her when she said they didn't have time for this, they had to get some more crack.

  And now, once more, the stuff wasn't working. It was just making him antsy for the next hit. He was almost assed out: busted, wasted, unable to buy more. How much money did he have left? Twenty bucks maybe? Maybe if he could get away from these two parasite - this babbling, yellow-eyed, middle-aged man who sometimes sputtered into a non sequitur of cursing like a victim of Tourette's Syndrome, and sallow, shrivelling Gretchen with her darting fingers. He hadn't been able to go ten feet without them following him. That motherfucker Hardwick had his van . . . was either stripping it or ferrying people around for money and selling everything in it piece by piece . . .

  The last of the high seeped away from him, leaving him only tweaky rigidity in his nerves, lust for the pipe no matter how empty its reward, and the aching pit of depression that made him feel cold and hollow as a brass statue.

  Why wasn't he dead yet? Constance was dead . . .

  "You hear dat?" the guy said. What was his name? Charlie? "That de rollers?"

  Gretchen shook her head. "They no cops here. You tweakin."

  Charlie forgot about it, hunched down to pick at flecks of ceiling plaster that had fallen into the cracks

  between the floorboards. Tweaking them up between thumb and forefinger. Tasting them. Spitting them out. Garner had to fight the urge to do the same.

  Thing to do was find a dealer, Garner thought; find a dealer maybe on his way to the set, smash his head with a bottle or something, take his dope and take his gun. That way he'd either get killed or he'd get some cash. Get some dope. Another hit. And then another hit.

  He felt like he was dying the way Constance had died. He was being slowly crushed and cut up, too. By dope and the projects.

  Maybe it was working out.

  "We assed out," Gretchen said, scraping the last of the resin from the pipe with a coat hanger wire.

  It struck Garner again how easily he'd slipped back into the street mix. Years of being away, being clean, teaching others to stay clean. But who could blame him, after what had happened to Constance?

  Oh yes. The addict in Garner had seen its opportunity. And Garner was back out on the street and all the years working in the ministry might not have existed at all. He knew with a calloused certainty now that he had become a drug counsellor to keep himself clean; he had preached at himself by preaching at other people. Now he had come full circle, dumped from the butt-end of the night. A familiar feeling: being a human ashtray; burnt out and choked. Soon, inexorably, he'd be broke. Shot to the curb. This was the way it always happened, of course, for everyone. He could think: I knew it would end this way. It always does. Sure he'd known, and he could say he'd come in with his eyes open . . .

  But it just didn't help much.

  The crack was gone - except, doubtless, for the little bumps of rock that both Gretchen and Charlie had

  craftily pocketed at some point. No use trying to pry that out of them. There was simply no more crack. There was just the pipe and the room and the two parasites calling themselves Gretchen and Charlie and the four children on the floor.

  He saw them now. The kids. He seemed to feel the sight of them lying there in the same room with strangers smoking crack in the middle of the night. None of them asleep but knowing from experience it was best to fake sleep or the crazy motherfucker Charlie with his spluttering curses would kick the shit out of them . . .

  It smacked into Gamer then like a baseball bat: The realization. He was doing this to the kids. He, Reverend Garner. He was contributing. He had paid for the cloud of secondary crack smoke that descended now over that three year old.

  "I wonder can you get you C.A. check now?" Charlie was saying. He was talking to Gretchen. "I mean in the fuckin mo'ning, can you get one, if you show you pregnant."

  Garner looked at her. She didn't look . . .

  He looked at her harder. She was pregnant. The 2nd trimester, maybe. Of course he'd known it. She was emaciated but . . . in the bathroom when she'd tugged those pants down . . .

  She was pregnant. He was giving crack to the baby in her womb. He. Garner. Was helping funnel crack to the baby in Gretchen's womb; was merchandizing the misery of the kids on the mattress.

  Gretchen was watching him. Saw the panic on his face.

  "Let's go get a hit," she said, trying to head him off. "I'm fi'in to find this girl you going to like, she do somethin' for you fo' a ten rock -"

  But he lumbered for the door. Pausing long enough to babble, "I'm sorry - I'm - I'm sorry - " at the children. Before fumbling the lock open, bolting out into the hall.

  Gretchen and Charlie came trotting up behind him as he plunged down the stairwell. Into darkness.

  Oh shit. He was in a dark stairway in the Projects. A fucking maze the cops wouldn't come into unless they were forced to.

  Feet and heart clattering, he descended into the stink of urine; of rotten chicken from a garbage bag someone had left on the stairs. He nearly lost his footing, stumbling over the bag, but found the cold iron of the railing as he fell, caught himself. A light came wobbling behind: Gretchen and Charlie - who was muttering "Motherfucking motherfucker tryin gaff me off, owes me some shit I done let him use my place, I fittin to kick his mo'fuckin ass," - coming down after him, using a Bic to light the way.

  Then Garner found a doorway, was out in the open air. But in the midst of the Projects. He stood there gasping, pulse hammering in his ears, thinking he might have a heart attack. Trying to look for the street, but the concrete walls seem to melt into dead ends of graffiti and trash, wherever he looked.

  Four men were standing together ten feet away, staring at him. They were all wearing baseball caps turned backwards on their heads and identical gold coloured suit jackets and fake gold chains and red
laces in their sneakers. Project gangsters. "Who he wid?" one of them said.

  "He ain't wid shit."

  They started moving toward him.

  Gretchen stepped out of the door behind him, and Charlie. "He wid me."

  ''Bullshit. He ain nobody. Fuck him."

  One of them moved around behind Garner, as he was trying to decide which way to run, and grabbed his hair. That was first. Garner shouted in pain, and yelled, "Gretchen!" The gangster dragged him by the hair back into the stairway. Garner struggled, but it only made the pain worse.

  The others had vise-grips on his arms, were all dragging him along now, though Gretchen was yelling in the background somewhere. Something about how he was hers, she'd found him, they had to give her some of this . . .

  In the ephemeral flare of a Bic he glimpsed the place they dragged him to. It was a basement of the Projects. A furnace room, strewn with trash. Something moved sinuously in one corner. All thoughts of self destruction vanished in the prospect opening before him: He wanted to get away before they did what this room and this time and these people promised they could do.

  It would go on and on . . .

  He screamed and tried to wrench free but someone smashed an elbow into his nose; he felt it pop like a smashed grape. Someone kicked his feet out from under him. He could hear Gretchen yelling something; felt hands pawing his wallet from his pocket. Other.hands skinning off his pants. A low pitched grinding as someone kicked him in the ribs; a squealing sound as someone kicked him in the head. The flicker of a lighter.

  "What he got? He got rock? Lemme see that fuckin' wallet, bitch. He got -"

  "He think he goin somewhere." They started again. Starbursts, flashes of light that were the kicks to his head. Tasting the floor through blood and smelling hot piss splashing around him and hearing Gretchen laugh . . .

  And it did: He'd been right. It went on and on.

  10

  Near Malibu

  Lonny wasn't sure how long he'd been crouching in the old cactus garden between the main house and the smaller one out back. He'd crawled in on his hands and knees and nestled among the yucca spears and he had only been jabbed once or twice. He held the gun lovingly as a kitten in his hand as he peered through the bushes, wishing he'd never come, feeling sure that Mitch was dead. Not wanting to find what they'd done to Orphy.