by CS DeWildt
“Mr. Business, is it?”
Neil nodded and turned away before he’d change his mind and do something he’d regret. But in his experience most choices led down that path anyhow. Just had to choose which regret you felt like living with.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
After Rinthy was gone, Neil took to tailing Davey day and night. Most of the following was nothing more than Neil camped out in the wooded lot across from the house, an ancient dump, living among the generations of waste and decay, resting on it and feeling no different than some rusted, thrown away artifact. When Davey did leave the house, it was on foot, usually going only a quarter mile to the general store for beer and peanuts. On these jaunts, Neil followed a parallel path through the woods, stepping lightly as if trailing squirrels, remaining as invisible as one of the ghosts he no longer saw, blind to that kind of fear, or perhaps they were blind to him, just another soul wandering lost with its kind.
Neil observed Davey for weeks, gathering little information about his habits, finding no redeemable quality, no mourning. Davey seemed to have no interest in seeking out Rinthy, content to consider her simply a runaway, taking no responsibility for the withering mummy and child entombed in limestone, calcifying like the rest of the inanimate forms in the darkness. There was nothing to stop Neil when the idea finally came, or when he finally acknowledged it. It was always there, since each man was born, a steady vector gaining speed until finally unstoppable, unavoidable, necessary.
Neil crept up to the house under the cover of night and new moon, the satellite hidden. It was cave dark aside from the blue glow of the TV, throwing erratic patterns of light into the world. Neil stepped onto the porch and looked into the house, through the fog of the muslin curtain and saw Davey’s form laid out on the couch, dead still except for the rise and fall of sleep in his lungs. Neil uncapped the gas can and took in the fumes as he slopped and sloshed the liquid around the perimeter of the house, drenching the porch and doors, the gray-green molding walls, opening windows and splashing gasoline inside the house. When Neil completed the circuit, he stood in front of the porch and struck a match, watching it burn, a final opportunity to go back, to go home. The choice was made for him as the fumes ignited and the fire bit him like a hungry dog unable to differ between hand and food. Neil stumbled back, hot and without air as the fire devoured it all. He fell to the ground in flames and rolled the fire out in the cool grass, pained, getting air tainted with the smell of burnt hair. He opened his lashless, browless eyes and watched the fireball burn. Inside the house, the fire ravaged and raged, feeding on years of waste and grease. Neil listened and heard nothing but the cracking of wood lapped up by uncountable tongues of fire, hungry devil dogs unleashed. And then under the sound of flame he heard coughing, then screaming, the crashing sound of a desperate blind man in a world of unfamiliar space and objects. Then silence. Neil looked at his own body, lit up orange by the raging star he’d made. His skin was black with soot and the remains of his charred clothing, a few sluffing patches of skin, scars that would heal.
Davey burst from the front of the house, fully engulfed. For a moment it was if he were coming for Neil, a fire beast come to collect him and take him inside, but Davey went to the ground and began to roll as Neil had in the cool grass, smothering the flames until he lay on his back, moaning, smoking like the ashen remains of a cook fire. Neil went to him, looked down on him. Davey’s moans were not the withering calls of death, but of pain that was just beginning to take hold, a visitor settling in for a long stay, a visitor you thought you knew, thought you wanted, until it arrived. Davey’s eyes were open, overly white against the black backdrop of his skin. He looked at Neil, saw him, mumbled words that would have meant just as little to Neil had they been intelligible.
“She’s dead,” Neil said. He kicked Davey’s smoldering torso and retreated to the woods to nurse his own wounds. He limped over the pavement, felt the heat at his back and heard that familiar rhythm of someone following close behind. There was only darkness ahead as Davey called out in every kind of pain.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Neil was aware of the headlights behind him well before the bump came. He’d led the tail way out east on the thirty-one, playing a game in which he made half-hearted attempts to lose it without actually doing so. If he could lead this individual someplace secluded for a talk, he might get a new lead instead of more mess.
Neil took a sharp left up Collins Road and watched the headlights pan through the night until again they lit up the interior of his vehicle. He was thinking about what a bad job the tail was doing of hiding their intentions until the blue lights came up fast behind him, ramming the rear of his vehicle and forcing him to reanalyze: Sheriff had no desire to hide any intention, and merely following Neil was not the assignment. Neil punched the gas and created some distance for about a quarter mile, but the cruiser behind him kept coming. The second bump came just as the road curved to avoid a giant sink and the rear end of the Cutlass fishtailed through the narrow turn. The car slid to the gravel shoulder and Neil saw nothing out the window but blackness hiding the steep incline below. Neil spun the wheel and the front tires caught a piece of pavement, yanking the car free from the slide and the void below. Neil watched the headlights behind him shrink momentarily before growing again as the road straightened out to a series of smooth rolling rises cutting through farm land. The cruiser bumped him again, backed off, and then hit him again, harder. Neil held on and so did the cruiser. He watched in the rearview as the car changed lanes, punched the gas and drove the front fender into the Cutlass’s rear quarter panel. The scraping metal sound of the impact was coupled with an explosion as the rear left tire blew. Neil manhandled the wheel to try to control his skid, lost it on the shoulder drainage where he became weightless, a zero gravity experiment, the hypothesis being that Neil’s body couldn’t handle more than seven or eight rolls inside the cockpit of the tumbling Cutlass.
The vehicle rocked to a rest in the earliest moment of steel blue dawn, the ringing in Neil’s ears atop the sound of the fleeing cruiser, its rumbling engine burning off in the rising sun like frost on grass. Neil pulled himself from the supine Cutlass, the wheels spinning and slowing like the scaled limbs of a dying turtle. Neil pulled himself to his feet and staggered back toward the road. Spooked cattle regrouped around the car. Neil looked at the animals who stared back with big black eyes and rotating jaws of festering, half-digested cud. The animals followed as Neil exited the field through the gaping hole the Cutlass had cut through the barbed wire. He stopped at the shoulder of the road, the sound of the cruiser finally evaporating to nothing. He looked at his arm; saw the jagged tip of his radius bone poking through his skin like a tooth cut from an infant child’s gum line. Opposite the field the land sloped sharply down and in the distance Neil could see the I-65 winding through the exposed limestone. He got his bearing by the two billboards, equal in all characteristics but the messages posted upon them. On the left side of the interstate was the promise of pleasure at Eddie’s Adult Books and Peeps, the yellow text popping from black. On the opposite side of the interstate was the warning, Hell is Real! Repent!
Neil stood on the shoulder, the cattle moving past, parting around him, ambling toward freedom and grunting, groggy flies buzzing around them like drunken electrons. Neil walked among the cattle like a cowboy who’d lost his horse. But to any who looked on, those invisible agents of judgment, he was just a battered man walking a path paved with steaming piles of cow shit. He had a hunch, that occasional benevolent muse of all who seek answers, but first he needed to get his arm tended to.
***
Neil was high on glue and the Vicodin the ER doc had given him as he entered the adult book store. The place was empty except for a few lonely truckers browsing the nudie mags and video shelves. The clerk behind the counter looked up at Neil over his book of poems. His eyes went back to scanning the pages. Neil looked at the items hung behind the man, pocket sex toys, inflatable w
omen in cardboard boxes with their red circle mouths gasping in disgust next to chains of anal beads strung for a deeper penetration that Neil could have imagined without the visual aid. And that thought made him smile, as old as he was, as dirty, he was still subject to corruption. He spun a book carousel, eyed the titles and found books for every sexual appetite imaginable, the things people could still write about but not do, bestiality and incest appearing to be popular subjects due to the sheer number of publications. All of the items were wrapped in plastic, no browsing, you had to buy, had to judge the book by the cover. The covers weren’t very informative, a cut and paste model baring all and leaving it up to the reader to insert him or her into their own fantasy. On the back left wall was a heavy dark curtain hung in the doorway. Above it, a cheap marquee board with white plastic letters spelled out what lay inside the black hole beyond: t0Nite L0tta
“When is Helen dancing?” Neil asked.
The cashier looked up from his book, eyed Neil with a kind of misunderstanding, as if confused he couldn’t read him like the Plath paperback he held.
“Don’t know no Helen.”
“You know who I mean.”
“Can’t say I do. Want to see Lotta? Ten bones.”
Neil thought about feeding the guy his book after cracking his skull with the cast on his arm, but found himself fishing a twenty out of his pocket. Instead of change he got an orange carnival ticket from a roll hanging on the wall.
“What’s this?”
The guy smiled. “You’re the dick, yeah? More valuable than your change. Private dance. After.” He winked and nodded to the curtain, went back to his book. Neil parted the curtain and immediately stepped onto the concrete ramp that lowered all who entered into the sunken screening room. On the screen was a washed out film with women wearing flower costumes, planted waist deep into a box covered in artificial turf. The woman wore petals of cheap fabric on their heads and green mittens like leaves on their hands. They were topless and swaying like a real flower might, if it had tits. Men dressed as farmers entered the scene, pulled the women up by the leaf hands and proceeded to penetrate them from behind. Neil looked over and saw men masturbating in their seats. A woman stroked the man she was with and Neil couldn’t help but feel lonely. He continued down and took a seat in the empty front row, waited for Lotta to appear. He remembered the tube of airplane glue in his pocket, found an empty candy box at his feet. He squeezed the tube over the box, contorted the mouth of the box into an approximation of a circle like the mouths of the inflatable friends. He brought it to his mouth and nose. The fumes burned his eyes and nose and through tears he watched the flowers get fucked.
There was no tease when Lotta appeared, no costume or pageantry. She came out naked and lovely and jumped on the pole before the music began and the light show started. Neil watched from the darkness as she suspended herself upside down, legs wrapped around the filthy pole. The smile on her face didn’t touch her eyes and hanging there, the smile was a true frown. She lowered herself from the pole and began to writhe on the floor, grinding smooth skin into the dirty stage, and when she turned over her legs were red as if rubbed down with sandpaper. She put herself into a crab position and began to play with her three-show-a-day, raw, irritated, dry button, rubbing it and exhibiting a pleasure only Neil could recognize as fake, having seen the real thing upon her, the rapture of true bliss with Heidi Skaggs between her legs. He watched her eyes in the darkness, licked her up and down in his mind. He tongued the candy box, tasted the airplane glue, inhaled, bit into her thighs, drew blood, made her weep with joy. Around him the audience made the guttural noises of animals, members exposed and worked with a frenzied, desperate vigor, the funk of oily sweat wafted about the dark room, raising the temperature, heat escaping the friction, vibrating away in thermal waves, heating the wet air to an oppressive degree. Under this force, Neil began to sweat, dropped his box of candy and watched through shrinking tunnel vision as Lotta moved across the stage on her knees, animal like, pulling in the crumpled bills that littered the stage like hailstones, and then stone stones, pelting her from every angle, knocking her down as she continued, her fingers long raking prongs scratching the stage, the rocks drawing blood and covering her smooth form with wicked red welts, creating a spotted beast with a ravenous appetite for paper money, too hungry to save itself from the onslaught of the raining blows. And the rocks grew as the empty space between them shrank until only glimpses of flesh were fleetingly visible through the stone curtain of judgment dropped down by the crowd, cheers in strange tongues blanketing all other sound until silently, Lotta lay on the stage, frozen and framed by the recessed cutout where the performance lived, the colors still wet, and her dead hand still reaching for the reward, blood red nails captured in mid-scratch.
***
Neil woke to the sound of flesh on flesh. He opened his eyes, confused as to his location, unable to recognize the empty theater from the one still haunting his memory. He turned to the sound. A single man remained behind him, crying as he worked his flaccid penis with an angry fury of both love and betrayal.
“Please,” the man begged the mocking specter between his legs. “Please.”
Neil stood, shook the sleep from his legs and hopped onto the stage. He looked out upon the theater, eyes assaulted by the spotlight, anonymous within his own blindness. Still he heard the plea, soft, desperate, and true. A plea built upon a common template of want, the same desire, the only desire. Man begging for something beyond indifference in the casual cold of his reality.
Behind the curtain Neil found a door and entered. Lotta looked at him, surprise trailing behind as if the visit was not so unusual, but the visitor. She was not at all battered, she did not look sad. Her face was a blank that looked incapable of anything but what was required of her. A few five-dollar bills mingled among the singles on the worn vanity. Neil figured she may have cleared thirty dollars.
“Give me your ticket,” she said. Neil looked at her as she lifted her leg to the padded stool, pulled down a bow topped stocking from her thigh, bunching it at her small foot and removing it, wiggling her painted toes. She lifted the other leg, to repeat the act, paused and eyed him.
“Is not a free show,” she said. “You have ticket?”
Neil pulled the orange ticket from his pocket. Lotta smiled, took it from his fingers and then took his good hand, sat him on the stool. She dropped the satin robe and straddled him naked, she reached past him, her hair in his face. He smelled the mix of faded perfume and sweat that woke the primal in him and he smiled despite himself. Lotta stretched and reached her quarry, turning on the small radio, a band of girls singing about bedroom eyes. Lotta looked at him, smiled like a professional trained in diffusing uncomfortable situations; she rode his lap, arms around his neck. She leaned in and whispered.
“What happened to your arm?”
“Car accident. Where is she?”
“Gone away.”
“But where?”
Lotta laughed and ground herself against him harder.
“Don’t you like me?” she said.
“I’m preoccupied. Where is she?”
Lotta became still, looked in his eyes. “Can’t you love me? Can no one?” And for a moment, Neil did love her, until he didn’t, until he grabbed her by the throat, lifting her from him and thrusting her back, embedding Lotta in the thin plaster wall of the dressing room.
“Enough of this noise. You tell me something. You tell me something I can use.”
Where her face had shown fear, her eyes flickered with a self-satisfying memory, a reminder that she’d been through worse and that another angry man was nothing. She smiled.
“I’ll take you to her.” And her eyes shifted to something behind him, pupils widened. Neil turned in time to see the blackjack out of the corner of his eye, just before it came down and closed them.
***
He woke in darkness and by feel and smell knew he was in his own apartment. He smelled Lotta and r
emembered her dance. He held his head, the dried blood thick in his hair as he tried to run his fingers through. He rolled to the middle of the bed and shot back the opposite way, a stranger’s warm skin affecting him like an electric shock. He slapped at the nightstand for the lamp, managed to knock it to the floor. He followed the crash, groped for the light, heard her laughing before he found the knob and illuminated her face. Lotta, naked in his bed. They looked at each other, silent, inside a shared dream that had led seamlessly into reality, or perhaps just another dream.
“How’s your head?” she said, taking a cigarette from Neil’s pack.
“What the hell are you doing here?” He tried to stand but stumbled back, groggy and head throbbing.
“You wanted me to leave you? They would keel you but for me.”
“Whose?”
“I don’t know them. Muscle men.”
“Who’s?”
“You ask a lot of questions for detective.”
“That’s what we’re supposed to do.”
“I mean you don’t know so much.”
“So enlighten me. What’s Heidi’s girl doing at Eddie’s?”
“I’m not her girl. I’m her employee.”
“Paul runs Eddie’s.”
“You know he can’t anymore.”
Neil thought on this. He needed to know how everyone seemed to have more information than he did, knew his moves before he did, why everyone seemed to know the score, or at least a piece of it, but him.
“Okay, maybe not. But why are you helping me? What do you have to do with all of this?”
She smiled and brought her hand up from her side of the bed. She held Neil’s silver .45, pointed it at him. There was a moment when Neil thought she was going to do it and he knew it was real, that it may not have been her intention before handing it over, but the thought crossed her mind, that she was the type to do it too, if it suited her game. She handed it over.
