Plantation of Chrome

by R. J. Coulson

  Julia ran into Stone, and they both fell to the ground. Julia’s hat fell off, and she laughed. Then she looked at Stone and stopped laughing.

  “Noah? Are you ok?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I’m great.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “It just looked like you were crying for a moment there.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said, and they sat up, kissed, leaned back and watched the view in front of them.

  CHAPTER 23

  De Gracy’s body was trapped in darkness, but his mind was immersed in light. A melody, now lost to him long ago, was playing inside of him with blurry notes and ghostly passages. He tried to hum it, but the music was like an ever-escaping phantom, forever stuck in his head.

  “Hmnh, hmnh… Hm hm hmnh… hm hm…” he hummed.

  His fingers hurt right under the nails, and he could feel it as he crumbled away the dry blood by rubbing his fingers together. He felt the inscription that he had written on the back of the chair, and he tried humming his melody to the words.

  “Generation--”

  But then the door opened, and he heard someone step inside. The lights went on, revealing the silhouette of Vodeni, his usual aura of patience and leery anticipation growing with the light.

  “It’s officially been a month now, Frank,” he said. “What have you been doing?”

  De Gracy didn’t answer.

  “I shouldn’t think you’d answer right away. Björn tells me that even Stone needs a good ten minutes before you start talking, but that’s ok,” he said. “I got all the patience in the world.” Vodeni pulled a chair from the corner of the room and sat down. “We’re really fond of your so-called Pit here. It’s been working well for us. Do you even realize how amazing the Pit is positioned in Plissbury? Of course you do. I guess that’s why you acquired it in the first place.”

  De Gracy looked at Vodeni without listening, the humming continuing inside his head.

  “But that doesn’t matter,“ said Vodeni. “Location doesn’t matter, if you can’t use it. We’ve used it, and, as I’ve said, it’s been going really well… In fact, I can show you how well.” Vodeni stood up and took out a long piece of paper from inside his jacket. “Look at this,” he said, rolling out the paper in front of De Gracy.

  “These are all the items that we’ve passed the last month. While you’ve been in here, we’ve made a revenue that you wouldn’t believe. And this is just through the Pit. And the cops?” asked Vodeni, slowly moving the list away from De Gracy’s face. “The cops have no idea.” Vodeni packed the list back into his pocket, took his chair and dragged it so he could sit right in front of De Gracy. “I know what you and Stone have always wanted. And I know how it must feel to always come so, so close and never reel anything in, and then, suddenly, your big break! You eliminate the biggest kingpin in Plissbury, and all the channels are open, but then… out of nowhere,” said Vodeni, his voice very careful and slow. “Out of nowhere comes Stone, and he tells you that you can’t do this, and that you can’t do that, and that you need to wait and blah, blah, blah. There’s always something, isn’t there, Frank? But I know that you’re the real entrepreneur here, and me and my men need that, do you understand? We need someone like you.” Vodeni spat on the floor. “Now listen. We haven’t touched one single thing in your hatch. Not a thing. And now, we’d like you, with the help of all the men you need, to sell it on… to finally sell that pile of weapons that you and Stone have been procuring for what… seven years? And after that, who’s to say it’ll stop there? People need things, De Gracy. They need guns, drugs, booze… women and work. We can do all that, De Gracy. We can make the Pit what you always wanted it to be.”

  De Gracy relaxd his hands.

  “There’s no us and you, De Gracy. And once you understand that, we can let you out, and you can finally live the life that you’ve always wanted. Live the life you've always deserved," whispered Vodeni. "Always and always, Grace."

  De Gracy's eyes sprang to life. "Don't ever call me that name again!" he thundered, sultry rage spilling from his frothing mouth. His eyes, as if raised straight from hell, enveloped Vodeni, who seemed to revel in every minute of it, seeing De Gracy melt from the inside out, his innards molten and red from nothing more than the brief mention of a long since buried childhood name.

  "I didn't know I'd hit such sore a spot, Frank. I figured you'd heard it before. But that's not really a reason to hate me. In fact, there's no reason to hate me at all."

  De Gracy looked at Vodeni, his nostrils flaring, but his mouth silent.

  "It would be an insult to tell you that there's a reason for your anger," continued Vodeni. "You know your own anger well enough. I'm just telling you that there is an outlet for it, and that I can provide you with it."

  "Just leave me in here," said De Gracy.

  "You're no good in here, but fine, if that's what you want."

  Vodeni stood and slid the chair back into the corner. He walked away with a purposeful slowness, convinced that he could hear the creaks and turns in De Gracy's brain. And just as he was about to flick the light switch, his gander proved true.

  "I want 70 % of everything I sell from our hatch."

  "As in 70 for you and Stone, or?"

  "No... Just me. I do the jobs, I get the pay. And after that, I want my own group of people."

  "Deal," said Vodeni.

  Every day since Vodeni and his men had infested the Pit, Grundy had been cowering in fear, mortified that someone would burst into his room. He would curl up into a big ball in his bed, lying awake and sobbing, but no one ever came. Not even to ask him to clean the floors, and without any authority to tell him anything, Grundy had stuck to the schedule that he had received on his first day of employment.

  This is just at the top of my head. The place is new to me, so I might be forgettting something.

  - scrub the toilets

  - keep the showers clean

  - tend to ring after matches

  – keep the place locked up and generally neat and nice

  Stone

  Grundy remembered the words, and how they used to be inscribed with fire and malice, each letter threatening that any mistake he did would inch him closer to expulsion, segregation, rapture.

  He had realized afterwards, perhaps too late, that Noah Stone and the others didn't fear mistakes the way Grundy had been taught to.

  "You broke the vase, you nigger!"

  "Look there at what you did, you little nigger."

  "It's the doghouse for you now."

  Grundy had learned to run for his mistakes, and he had learned to cower out of fear for more mistakes to come. Mistakes had rendered his past untreadable, he felt, and, looking back, he saw nothing but downtrodden daffodils and mudcaked boots and he remembered the taste the best of all, the taste of dirt.

  "Guilt is just God tapping you on the shoulder," Stone had said. "Look at the direction he's pointing and laugh it off."

  Did Stone say that? Maybe someone else?

  Grundy turned in his bed to face the wall. His enormous frame filled out the entire bed, and he could only fit when laying on his side.

  He didn't want to look in any direction at all, he thought. No matter where God was pointing, because now, on his shoulder, he felt not the pressure of one of God's fingers, but the fists of several hundred gods. But what was the difference? Isn't the one God's finger as mighty as a hundred fists?

  Grundy turned and got out of bed. He sat on a chair by his dressing room mirror, uncrumpled one of the many papers around him and started scribbling:

  "Isn't the one God's finger as might as the fists of a hundred gods? Isn't God all gods, and doesn't their power reside in his might alone, since they are him and he is them?”

  Grundy sometimes wished that Eckleburg was still alive. He remembered one of their many conversations, and as the scene unfurled in his mind, Eckleburg seemed very much alive, his breath thrown from a hole in the wall, his glasses reflecting the li
ght from the lone lightbulb in the ceiling. Grundy had been ill, and when Eckleburg had visited him one night, Grundy had asked him if God was in there with them.

  "No,” said Eckleburg.

  "I thought you believed in God?"

  "I do," said Eckleburg. "With all my heart. But I know that he is not in this room with us."

  Grundy started crying, and Eckleburg rushed to his side.

  "Is it..?" muttered Grundy, his voice drowned with emotion. "Is it because of me?"

  "No, no, no, no," said Eckleburg. "No, Grundy. Not at all, please don't think that. God is not here, because I believe he is never here with us men. God is on another side, as if waiting behind a curtain. He waits for all of us, and he can whisper to us, he can help us with the lines that we're supposed to say, but he isn't here. He's not more on earth than the sun is, and yet we feel its warmth every day."

  Grundy smiled with relief, took Eckleburg's hands, and thanked him.

  Grundy really wished that Eckleburg was alive.

  De Gracy looked at the chair by the archives, Eckleburg's old seat of operations. That's where De Gracy had sat once, back when they had first acquired the Pit. He'd sit there, with Stone on the other side of the desk. The boxing ring hadn't even been there yet, and at the time they had no idea that boxing would become the cover of their other operations.

  Now, De Gracy stood in the same office, feeling naked and exposed, as if he had been forced out of his own bed at night. His wrists bore red, chafed rings from the ropes that he had been tied up with. He rubbed them against each other to alleviate the pain, but it only got worse, and he mindlessly continued doing it. Björn came into the office.

  "Where's my coat?" asked De Gracy, his mouth dry.

  "All your things are in the locker room, on one of the benches," said Björn.

  "Can I go in and get them?" said De Gracy. He hated that he had to ask, that he had to feign humility. It felt like spitting up blood.

  Björn nodded. "Just don't leave the Pit, and you can do what you want."

  De Gracy walked out the office, through the main hall, and into the locker room. There was no one inside. He looked down the room and noticed a pile of greyish clothes by the bench that Messenger used to sit on. De Gracy's hat was on the top of the pile, and as he put it on, the door opened behind him. He turned around and saw Grundy standing there, looking as though he had just walked in on two people making love. He swallowed hard.

  "They... They let you out."

  De Gracy said nothing. He put on his coat instead. He felt naked with the shirt alone, and he wanted to cover himself up. He wondered if Grundy was imagining the scene with the hatch in the warehouse over and over and over again, and as he looked at him, studying the poor, big creature, he felt not guilty nor remorseful, but rather as if he had forgotten something; as if he had wanted to admit something to Grundy, but then had his memory wiped. "Don't be afraid," he told him.

  Grundy looked confused, not sure what De Gracy meant.

  "A lot is changing," continued De Gracy, "but the Pit is finally becoming what it was meant to be. I'm sure the others won't mind if you stay or if you go, so don't try to stand out." De Gracy couldn't remember the last time he had spoken this many words to Grundy. He thought back at their pathetic attempt of celebrating the Pit's inauguration, the night De Gracy had realized that Grundy even existed.

  "Are you finally selling the weapons?" asked Grundy.

  De Gracy nodded.

  "Does Mr. Stone know?"

  "Probably not, and I'm pretty sure he wouldn't care."

  "Wasn't it..." Grundy hesitated. "Wasn't it Mr. Stone's idea to begin with?"

  De Gracy focused on Grundy with a sudden alertness.

  "It was never Stone's idea," said De Gracy, his eyes filling with renewed resolve. There was something about being reminded that the Pit hadn't been Stone's idea that rejuvenated him. "The only idea Stone had was to cover it up with all this boxing bullshit. And we haven't been doing a thing since."

  "I just think he wanted to be careful," said Grundy carefully.

  "No, he didn't want to do it at all. He got cold feet, that's what happened. The weapons were always my idea, killing Bishop was my idea."

  "And the children?" asked Grundy.

  "You were there as well as I was, Grundy. There wasn't any ideas there, just actions... Actions and resolve, and we got out, the cops went around us, and we ended up here. None of us would be here now if it wasn't for everything that happened. Everything that happened."

  Grundy's eyes slit. "How can you say that when two of us aren't even here? You, me, and Mr. Stone, yes, but what about the others? Can't you see we're all dying? Can't you see we killed ourselves that night?"

  "When you kill yourself, you die," said De Gracy. "I'm not dead."

  "Yes, because of what happened. No man can live with--"

  "Well I can!" thundered De Gracy. "I've never thought about that night since it happened, and I have never cared."

  "Then you truly are dead," said Grundy solemnly.

  "I told you, no one killed themselves that night. Now move away from the door, I got to..."

  De Gracy tried moving past Grundy in the doorway, but he was held back.

  "I am sure that Messenger, Eckleburg, and Stone gave their lives to God for what we did that night."

  "Let me go!" yelled De Gracy, but Grundy's grip was too tight for De Gracy's scrawny muscles.

  "And I am now, for the first time, certain that I'm not the only one who was dead before we killed Bishop."

  De Gracy looked at Grundy, their faces only inches apart. Grundy was breathing heavily, and sweat rolled down his face in big beads.

  "What happened to you?" whispered Grundy, but De Gracy wrestled free and stormed out of the locker room.

  The next two weeks in the Pit were chaotic, as if the identity of the place was being torn at from two opposite sides. On one side, Stone continued the boxing schedules that he had planned. The other side, the one viciously tearing at the Pit's spine at nightfall, came with De Gracy and his men.

  Grundy would watch them every night as they dragged the weapons out and distributed them among several vehicles waiting outside. Then De Gracy would delegate the grunts to each of the cars, and he himself would often join the one with the biggest load. Grundy would sleep after that, knowing well that he would have a precious period of silence, and as he woke, sure as the daybreak, there they were, back in the Pit, but with empty wooden boxes and satisfied grins across their faces, cigarettes dancing on their lips in the cold December air. This rhythm of night and day continued until the weapon hatch was completely empty. Grundy had looked into it that night as it was left open. 'No key needed for an empty room,' he thought, and the little square basement room seemed almost spacious.

  This was what De Gracy had meant when talking about 'what the Pit was supposed to be' and other than the brief moments of solitude, and seeing the seldom smile across Mr. Stone's face during the boxing matches, Grundy really didn't like this new way of life.

  But after those two weeks of industrial turmoil and organized 'rearrangement' of goods an unexpected calm set between the walls of the Pit. Grundy would go out at night, and most of the time, he would meet no one except for the guard Björn who was sleeping in Mr. Stone's office. Grundy always found himself hoping that it was Mr. Stone snoring from a distance, but it never was. Mr. Stone didn't really come anymore, and this was what made Grundy saddest of all. It was like that, with the hatch empty, there was no more to keep track of in the Pit, and it had become this shell of a building that Grundy had always felt it had been, a home he kept falling out of.

  Late one night, Grundy sat in front of his dressing room mirror. He had opened a drawer full of theater makeup, and he was applying some to his face. He needed a beard, a bit of stubble at least, for the next play he was going to do. The handwritten manuscript lay next to him.

  Grundy smiled looking at it, his first smile that day. He would try performing it
later, when he knew there wasn't going to be anyone in the main hall. He could finally have the boxing ring - his stage! - for himself. He drew the stubble onto his face with a brown pen, very careful to distribute it along his entire chin, to spread it out from ear to ear. But now, looking at himself in the mirror, there was something about the fake beard that made him sad. Grundy sighed and put the makeup back into the drawer and closed it, and as he stood he heard some unexpected voices from inside the main hall. It was impossible to distinguish the words, and Grundy felt an uncomfortable ball of anxiousness growing inside of him. He swallowed and walked to his door. He opened it, and the flutter of voices were still indistinguishable, but there were many, and they moved around the main hall with a theme of cheerful ecstasy. Grundy walked through the corridor and set his ear to the door that led to the main hall. From here he could barely convince himself that one of the voices, the most solemn one, belonged to De Gracy. He also heard the rusty sound of the hatch being opened, and the drum like banging of someone jumping up and down in the boxing ring. But, even though calmed by knowing that De Gracy was just outside the door, a flurry of cold anxiety ran down his back and heart as he reached for the door handle. The main hall was fully lit by the lights above the ring. De Gracy was walking along another man in the middle of the room. Two men were pretending to box against each other in the ring, laughing at each other’s drunk stupidity. They laughed with their big mouths, and the hard light from right above their heads made them look toothless. Yet another man stood by the hatch, walking around it as if inspecting it, but Grundy couldn't get a clear view of his face.

  De Gracy had heard Grundy come inside, looking at him along with the other man. The man next to De Gracy was tall and slender, nicely dressed and he even smiled and said "Good evening" upon seeing Grundy.