Plantation of Chrome

by R. J. Coulson

  De Gracy coughed, and a short-lived whirl of dust was brought to life off the ground and killed again. He stood and beat his coat clean, watching the slowly disappearing truck in the distance. The dead policeman was laying by his feet. De Gracy looked coolly down at the corpse, watched its wretched, dead face pruning as if still moving. A splotch of blood was growing from the policeman's stomach, leeching out into the uniform's fibers like a cancer.

  De Gracy dragged the body away from the road and behind a row of bushes and rocks. He could barely see the brightest lights of Plissbury flicker in the distance. He took off his hat, and carefully peeled the uniform off the dead policeman; the shirt, the pants with the belt, the rattling holster, the slightly damp socks and the mud caked shoes. De Gracy then took off his own coat, his shirt, shoes and pants. He looked down at the dead, naked body, a cool breeze blowing around him. There was a scar along the dead policeman's chest, and De Gracy felt along his own chest where the scar would be had it been on his own body and he imagined the pain. His body was pale as paste in the faint moonlight, his ragged, wounded skin hanging down his ribs like little caves, carefully carved with some crude tool to hollow him out, and as he looked at the dead policeman he felt like a carapace of a man.

  He put on the policeman's pants and shoes, put on the belt, clicked it into the innermost hole, whereafter he put on the still stained shirt. He left the dead body and walked back to the road, covered the blood stain with the policeman's cap, and waited.

  After a while a small car pulled up the hill. De Gracy signaled the car to stop, and the driver quickly pulled over. The driver was forced outside, lured to stand up against the side of a huge boulder, and, ignorant to why he had been pulled to the side, De Gracy had already taken his car, turning it and driving back towards Plissbury.

  When Stone arrived at the hat store, he chose to wait outside a while. His coat and hat were still wet, but the rain had long since stopped. He was dripping onto the street, and his eye caught the end of a drainpipe and he followed it with his eyes, up and up. A window opened, and Julia's faintly lit head popped out. She squinted her eyes to better see in the dark.

  "Noah?" she asked. "Is that you?"

  Stone looked up at her, for some reason not believing that it was her he was seeing. He then nodded slowly.

  "Well, come up then," she said, waving him up.

  Stone walked towards the door, his coat still dripping. He could hear the humdrum of Julia rushing down the stairs as he got closer. He imagined if she was to fall down and break her neck; how it would look like to have her collapse at the feet of the stairs. He imagined how he would call her name in terror, and break the door down, embracing her dead, broken body. Or maybe he would stay outside, thinking how impossible her death would be to him, how impossible it would be for a woman like her to die down a flight of stairs.

  Julia came down the stairs and walked across the store, smiling at Stone as she opened the door for him. She kissed him, and even as he was moving inside, thinking only of her, it was as if he didn't notice her at all.

  "Noah, are you all right?" asked Julia.

  Stone looked at her, still nodding slowly.

  "What were you doing out there in the rain?" she asked. "Your coat. It's all wet. Where were you?"

  "I was out," said Stone. "I was out with De Gracy, out of town, but our truck broke down, and we had to walk back."

  "Oh dear," sighed Julia.

  Stone looked at her with an empty gaze. He hated lying to her, that he had to keep doing it.

  Julia took off his hat and coat and led him up the stairs and into the bedroom.

  "Take off all that's wet, and I'll make sure it dries."

  "I think you've got all of it," said Stone.

  Julia put Stone's hat on top of a mannequin and hung his coat across the frame of the open window. Stone walked inside the workshop. He was lumbering around the room, all too conscious of his own breathing. Julia was looking at him, but he didn't notice.

  "What about your pants?" she asked. "Are your pants dry?"

  Stone looked up. He shook his head, not even sure what the question had been. He then sat down by the table. The newspaper lay open next to him, but he didn't notice it at first.

  "Give me your pants."

  "Don’t worry, they're almost dry," he said.

  "'Noah', you just told me that they weren't dry."

  Stone shook his head and drew the newspaper closer. He was moving entirely as if of mechanical construct. He flipped through the pages with a rusty jerk of his hand, all the way from the back of the paper to the front, page by page, the amputated headlines from each of the stories adding up inside of his head into nothing.

  Julia sat down on the other side of the table.

  "Terrible, isn't it?" she asked when Stone had reached the front page.

  Stone looked down, not sure what she had meant.

  "I'm sure it's news in the entire state," she continued. "Not just in Plissbury. Don't think I've ever read anything like it."

  Stone now read the headline, and as the words formed in his head, it seemed as if the entire building came crashing down around him. Stone was dizzy and he had to steady his head with his hand to avoid vomiting everywhere.

  "Noah?"

  "It's... It's terrible," he said quickly. He was overwhelmed. He read the headline once more. "Terrible." He tried to create a consistent recollection of the night they dug the graves. He remembered how bone chilling cold it had been, but other than that, it was impossible to see himself as the character by the trees, hiding in the shadows of the raised shovels. He couldn't have been there.

  He looked up at Julia; she looked worryingly at him, his coat flapping on the window behind her.

  No, he thought. It couldn't have been them. Eckleburg was there and Messenger and Grundy, and now they were dead, and they were all there, and now they weren't, so it couldn't have been them; it couldn't have been them lifting the shovels at the moonlight. And there, for a moment in Stone's mind, he saw no one but De Gracy standing knee-deep in the ground, shoveling away the dirt and grime to dig out five all too small graves.

  Julia was still looking at Stone.

  "Please Noah, tell me what happened,” she asked.

  Stone looked up at her. He folded the newspaper and slid it away.

  "When are my clothes going to be dry?" he asked.

  Julia stood, walked over the other side of the table, and took Stone's hands.

  "Please tell me that you are okay, Stone. That we are ok."

  "There is nothing to worry about," he said. "You've got to believe me. Things aren't going too well at the Pit, but it's nothing I won't be able to take care of. And then it'll just be you and me, I promise."

  "I know, but promise me you'll be safe," she said.

  "I promise," he said, forcing a smile. "I promise."

  The wheels of the car rattled against the gravel outside the Pit. The car cruised in from the street and slowed down to a halt just by the front entrance, its engine brought to a stop. De Gracy stepped out of the car, the door closing behind him with a fierce clasp. He could already hear high-pitched, tempered voice reverberating from within, giving the building a perverse sense of life.

  De Gracy walked inside and just barely noticed the five people when Vodeni turned and thundered towards him. The other men seemed panicky at first, realizing that a man in a police uniform had just stepped into their nest, but when they saw the faintly filled uniform, the slouched face crowning above it, they immediately stepped back in relief. Vodeni was approaching De Gracy, his eyes dyed with subtle rage.

  "What happened?" he asked.

  De Gracy took the opportunity to scout the room before answering. Björn was there, smoking in the far corner, and another two by the ring, and the one he and Stone had left to guard the Pit; he looked bruised, clutching his left arm and leaning slightly to the right as if favoring that leg over the other. De Gracy figured that he was the reason that Vodeni already knew.
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  "That's why I came," said De Gracy. "It was Stone. We were stopped by a cop and he threw me out."

  Vodeni was shaking his head in disbelief.

  "He threw you out?"

  "Yes, threw me out of the truck. Then drove off. Can only imagine he emptied it, came here, and ran off."

  "God damn it, De Gracy," screamed Vodeni, his voice echoing all through the hall. "We talked about Stone, Frank. You vouched for him, and I sent the two of you away. I even let you go without Björn, thinking you'd be off earlier, thinking it'd all resolve, but instead now I've got a crippled man in here, an empty truck outside, five niggers out in the hills somewhere, and a hanged nigger that’s now gone.

  De Gracy's eyes slit. "Hanged nigger?"

  "Yeah," said the guard that was clutching his hand. "He attacked me while I was here, saw the empty hatch and then, right when I woke up again, he was just hangin' there, twitching, his face blue, even for a nigger."

  "He disappeared?"

  "Yessir," murmured the guard. "One minute hangin', the next minute gone. I saw that Stone character come up to him. Probably took him down and hid him somewhere."

  Vodeni turned to De Gracy. "Why would Stone do that?" he asked.

  "He must've come for Grundy," said De Gracy.

  "No, no, no," said Vodeni. "There's no reason why he'd come back for a nigger janitor."

  "For Stone there is," said De Gracy.

  "Oh yeah?" asked Vodeni. He walked closer to De Gracy, his nostrils flaring. "And why is it that Stone has a reason for something like that?"

  De Gracy looked up at Vodeni, his eyes blank. Then he nodded over towards the injured guard. "Because Stone knows that there are people like him in the world, and he wanted to--"

  "And what the hell that supposed to mean?" asked the guard. "Huh, what is that? It's you who can't control five niggers and some delinquent or another."

  De Gracy ignored the guard, turning towards Vodeni instead. "Stone wanted to break out the slaves ever since he got into that truck. He wanted back here to get Grundy, and after that, he'd--"

  "He'd what?" asked Vodeni.

  De Gracy took a deep breath and swallowed. He knew what he'd wanted to say, but for some reason his throat clasped around the words.

  "He'd have escaped with Grundy.”

  "Out of Plissbury?"

  De Gracy nodded solemnly. "Perhaps out of the state entirely. I know you'd want us to find him, but maybe we should just let him get away. Go on without him. Get more weapons, cars, booze, anything... Expand our territory, maybe."

  "No," said Vodeni. He walked up to De Gracy and took him by the shoulder. He spoke to him so no one else in the room would hear. "I know you two have history, Frank. Anyone knows the value of a friend, anyone, but there is a maximum capacity for every friendship, Frank, believe me. There isn't a friendship in this life that can stand the pressure of the world around it, and the sooner you realize that Stone didn't just fool me, fool Björn, but you too, the sooner you'll realize the true enemy here. You want us to expand and move on, but the truth is - and you know it - that we can't move on with Stone being out there."

  De Gracy was watching Vodeni's marine blue eyes as he spoke. He watched them very carefully, as if waiting for them to change color or disappear completely.

  "This isn't the first time he's talked you into something, is it?” continued Vodeni. “Not the first time he fooled you for the sake of his own hide, his own life. I can see you want to defend him, Frank, but you can't. And I understand why you can't. You're important to us, Frank. Important to this entire organization. No man is born equal, and you understand that, you get that. That's the difference between you and him. And that's the only thing you need to understand."

  De Gracy was like a child, getting told by his father not to run in the house. He felt there wasn't a string of words he could say that would adequately express what he was feeling at the moment.

  "I understand,” he said.

  "I know," said Vodeni. "And that's why we have to do what we have to do."

  Frank De Gracy was alone in his apartment. He was sitting by a heavy, dark wooden desk, supporting his droopy head with one hand and scrambling through a pile of empty pages with the other. The light in the room was a damp yellow and it was flickering on and off, but De Gracy didn't seem to notice. He was just staring at the empty pages and listing through them. His shirt hung loosely around his chest, revealing his ribs protruding through his skin. His chest slowly rose and fell at the whim of his slow heartbeat.

  The room was crammed with furniture, and every piece of it was dark and shadowy, heavily resting as if the room, the furniture, and De Gracy himself had been carved out from one big block of wood. As the light flickered, it radiated small bursts of orange and yellow, as if the room was on fire.

  De Gracy felt the heat rise in the air around him. He was sweating profusely, long beads of sweat curving down the tips of his silver gray hair. He kept looking through the empty pages, and as the heat continued to rise, and his fingers began blistering from the sharp edges of the paper, he began seeing a face in the air between the pages. The lights flickered and the face changed. He listed through the pages, the lights flickered, and more and more faces showed up in front of him. He blinked for each face, his mind remembering, his mind racing only to stop and rewind back to the beginning. When he reached the last pages, the last faces, he slowly let all the papers fall sliding to the floor. He looked at them as they lay on the floor, scattered and faceless.

  He unbuttoned a few more buttons of his shirt, revealing more of his pale body. His breathing was intermittent and wheezy. He unbuttoned his shirt all the way down, took it off, and threw it on the floor next to the papers. He rubbed his knees, took out a cigarette from the coat on his chair, and lit it. The smoke rose high, and the lights flickered through the smoke.

  De Gracy moved his chair a little to the left. He opened the top left drawer of the desk and took out a pile of letters that had been bound together neatly with a piece of string. There was a letter opener on top of them. The envelopes were yellow in a way as if they had been stained throughout many years of storage. De Gracy carefully untied the string and let it fall to each side of the pile, and the top three letters slid right off and onto the table.

  As de Gracy finished sorting the letters, he was left with an entire grid of yellow envelopes. He looked at all of them at once. Then he grabbed one of them at what seemed like random, peeled off the envelope very gently, lay it by the edge of the table, and unfolded the letter. The letter was in fragments, each piece of it glued onto a stiffer piece of white paper, and there was a little red stain near the top edge.

  'September 5th - 1914'

  'Paris, France'

  The letter was in French, the handwriting incredibly neat, and as De Gracy read it once more, as he let his eye slide down each familiar curve and climb up each edgy consonant, he was pulled back to the date of September the 5th. He read the first line.

  'Joyeux anniversaire, Frank!'

  He was able to hear the joyful voice in his inner ear.

  'Merci," whispered De Gracy as he had whispered then, locked up in his room, unable to come out, the only joy in his life this feeble piece of paper that had somehow survived in his greedy grasp. He had read the letter over and over then in that little room. He hoped the day would never end, he remembered thinking. He only wanted to stay and die in that room.

  Young Frank's face was already pale with age. He heaved for breath, frightened, looking nervously at the door. He looked at the date in the upper right corner of the letter. It had been 20 years now, he thought; 20 years since the day he had killed his mother and brother; 20 years since he himself had died. And now he trudged on, this letter of fine Parisian paper in between his dead, undeserving hands. Frank bowed his head and his long, grey hair fell down around him like a bowl of smoke. The door opened and a man stepped inside, the soft creak of his step reverberating throughout the entire floor. Frank looked up, s
eeing only a silhouette of the man standing there. He had already hid the letter in the front of his shorts.

  "You can come out now," the man said.

  Frank nodded and stood, the rickety floorboards now creaking under him as well. As he stood up, several horizontal scars were revealed on the inner part of his right leg. They started at his ankle, right above his sock and went up his shin to his knee. He started walking across the room, towards the door, and with each step he could feel the letter shush in the front of his shorts.

  But as he neared the door, the letter started to crawl down his leg. Frank panicked. He looked up at the man, knowing that it was impossible to stop walking. He tried to keep the letter in his shorts by tightening different muscles around his thighs, abdomen, and groin. He moaned as he walked on and grabbed his belly as if to fake a stomach ache.

  "What's the matter with you?" asked the man.

  Frank moaned again. "My stomach hurts," he said.

  Frank continued in through the door and out into the living room, still clutching his muscles, the sharp edges of the paper boring into his inner thigh. The man closed the door behind them, and then, as Frank stopped walking, the piece of white paper slid down the lower edge of his shorts and on the floor. Frank looked shamefully at the letter on the ground; he thought it looked like a stain of spilled milk. The man bowed down and picked it up, gave the letter a quick glance and then looked sternly at Frank.

  "Why do you have this?"

  Frank didn't answer.

  "Do you know what this means?" asked the man. "Do you know what this makes me do?"

  Frank looked up between his bangs, seeing his father as if through a prison cell.

  The man started tearing up the letter. "Do you know what this makes me do?!" the man screamed.

  "No!" cried Frank and ran towards the man. He tried taking the letter away, but the man punched him to the ground. Frank looked up as the rest of the letter was torn up, the small pieces falling to the ground, some of them dwindling between the cracks of the floorboard. Frank started picking up the pieces, digging his long nails into the cracks of the floorboards, but some of the pieces were too deep to salvage. The man raced out the room. Frank desperately scanned every loose piece he picked up for anything to recognize, but the torn lines had no mercy; paragraphs and sentences, even words, had been struck asunder, and even as Frank held the fragments between his fingernails, the words still faded away. A strike of panic overwhelmed him when he saw his father returning, carrying the razor.