Lake of Darkness

by Scott Kenemore

  “Can we get inside?” Flip asked.

  The man shrugged to say it was something of an open question.

  Flip felt around the front of the garage and tried to lift the segmented metal door. It rose easily. Flip noticed a lock on the ground next to it—intact but unused. Perhaps no one would find such a place worth burgling.

  Inside were truly pitiful environs. A single room with a mattress and a wood stove. Clothing kept in metal bins or piled in corners. Spoiled food everywhere. An old couch with broken legs occupied the center of the room. Behind it had been piled pieces of mechanical equipment—parts and conveyors that might have come off a killing-line. Beside the mattress was a pile of pornographic prints on very cheap paper. There was also a massive collection of liquor bottles. The place seemed to have its own smell, even above the pig stench.

  Flip looked at it all doubtfully.

  “When was the last time you saw Rotney?” he asked the man with the awl.

  “I just work here,” the man said. “Sometimes Rotney is around, and sometimes he ain’t. Not a bad man at heart. One time, a killer hog got loose, and he helped us ketch it.”

  “What?” Flip said.

  “Hog from the line went crazy. Knocked a man off a walkway and he died. The hog broke out and we had to chase it down. It was in the paper and everything. We gave Rotney a copy. I can see it over there, on the stack by his lady-pitchers.”

  Flip approached the dingy mattress and saw there was indeed an issue of The Broad Axe crumpled beside it. Flip held his breath to avoid the odor of the bed, stooped, and picked it up. The issue had been turned to a page with a story headlined:

  KILLER SOW APPREHENDED BY STOCKYARD MEN

  There was a photo adjacent to the article. It showed several workers posing proudly with the pig in question, by then deceased. One of the men was Rotney Nash. He was, indeed, a dead ringer for his brother Ed. He manifested a harried, hunted look—his overalls, hat, shoes, and face were filthy and speckled with shit—but otherwise, it could have been the same man. The other workers in the photo smiled proudly beside the dead pig. Rotney Nash’s grin was halfhearted at best.

  Flip handed the paper to Sally.

  Tark was grimly inspecting the empty liquor bottles with the toe of his shoe.

  “I know Sally thinks I drink the cheap stuff,” he said. “But this here? Woo. This the real cheap stuff.”

  “He looks just like his brother,” Sally said, handing The Broad Axe back to Flip. Flip placed the newspaper back atop the pile.

  “You have any idea when Rotney might return?” Flip asked the worker.

  “Rotney’s like a cat,” the worker said with a shrug. “He’ll come around regular for a couple, three evenings. You think you got a new friend. Then you won’t see him again for a month. It is what it is.”

  “You ever hear of anybody wanting to hurt Rotney?” asked Flip.

  The worker looked back and forth.

  “He seems to be getting on with that just fine himself. Don’t b’lieve he needs help from anybody.”

  “Can you tell me anything else about him?” Flip asked, his frustration mounting.

  The man scratched his own head with the tip of the bloody awl. Not hard.

  “Naw, I ain’t got much else. . .” he trailed off.

  Tark finished inspecting the empty rotgut bottles and sauntered over.

  “How did you meet Rotney?” Tark asked the man. “You personally?”

  The man smiled coyly, flattered to find himself at the center of the questioning.

  “I personally came to work here eight years ago,” he said, as though ‘personally’ were a fifty-dollar word. “Rotney was already around. One day he was let go for being drunk on the job. He didn’t leave though. Kept lingering here in his garage. Became like a fixture. We’d see him time to time, just as we still do. I heard now maybe he works maintenance somewhere downtown.”

  Flip asked: “Do you know where he is now? That’s to say, at this moment?”

  “At work?” the man replied. “Same as I ought to be before I get a talking-to. We should close up this garage now. Someone liable to notice we in here.”

  “I’m the police,” Flip reminded him.

  “I’m not,” the man said. “And my foreman don’t care who you are. It’s my hide that matters.”

  The worker prepared to shutter the garage. Flip, Tark, and Sally stepped out. After a mighty pull, the segmented door rattled shut. The worker put his killing-awl over his shoulder, gave them a friendly nod, and disappeared around one of the pigshit fences. Then there was only the pig dust and the cries of the hogs—soloists shrieking in front of a cacophony of background players.

  “Fuck me running,” Tark said. “Who could live like that? I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t just seen it.”

  “I have to go home and bathe now,” Sally said, making clear the matter was not up for debate.

  “Fine,” Flip said, as they turned around and began to head out from the stockyards. “But we meet up this evening at your place, Sally. Six o’clock sharp. And have something on your stomach by then.”

  “The way this place smells, I don’t know if I’ll be eating for a week,” Sally told him.

  “That’s your business, I suppose,” Flip replied. “But we got a long night ahead.”

  THIRTEEN

  Tark went with Sally to the Palmerton, and both enjoyed long baths—at different times—in the same large, claw-footed tub. Tark applied unguents and perfumed soaps usually reserved for women, vigorously and without hesitation. Anything to scrub the lingering awfulness of the stockyards from himself.

  Sally had a meal brought, but—true to her own forecasting—touched almost none of it. Tark managed an appetite, but avoided pork. (He stared angrily, wordlessly at a plate of chops when they were proffered.)

  Flip caught up with them at six on the dot. He had also bathed and changed clothes. He still wore his leather jacket, but his trousers and shoes were different and shabby. His shirt had a frayed collar and a large nonspecific stain extended down the left side. Several buttons were missing. He stood in the lobby of the Palmerton and waited until Sally and Tark came downstairs.

  When Sally saw him, she froze.

  “We’re not.”

  Sally looked Flip up and down in horror.

  “I was thinking we might be, from what that man said, but please tell me we’re not. . .”

  Flip’s face told her that, indeed, they were.

  “What?” Tark asked, looking back and forth between Sally and Flip like a confused child. “What’s happening?”

  “We’re going to the Bucket of Blood, is what’s happening,” Sally said, placing a very annoyed hand on her hip. “And if we are, I’m not ruining another of my better dresses. You two can wait ten minutes for me to change into something I don’t damn care about. Stay here.”

  She stalked up to her rooms with great commotion. Flip and Tark seated themselves beside the golden piano. Girls milled past and smiled politely. The front door to the brothel was open, and the air that evening had an energy to it. The house would do good business, Flip felt sure. It was that kind of energy.

  “You been to the Bucket before, Tark?” Flip asked without looking over at the magician.

  Tark shook his head no.

  “That’s good,” Flip said matter-of-factly. “I’ve been trying—all afternoon—to think of a way that we don’t have to go there. But I can’t. Tomorrow my week is up. I’m due to report to the mayor. Tell him what I have. And I got to be able to look that man in the eye and say I checked under every rock.”

  “What do you have?” Tark asked.

  “I’ll know more about what I have—and what I don’t have—if I can talk to Rotney Nash tonight,” Flip told him. “No use trying to do a full accounting of what you know until you’ve followed all the leads. As far as I can tell, there’s still one left.”

  “What’re you gonna ask him?” Tark wondered. “Sounds like he’s the sort
of man liable to be too drunk to talk.”

  “There’s an art to questioning a drunkard,” Flip told him.

  “And you know it?” asked Tark.

  “I got you interested in this bullshit, didn’t I?”

  Tark waved a hand, dismissing any similarity.

  “I got myself interested,” Tark insisted.

  “Rotney Nash surely has enemies, and it’s likely he’s been attacked at various points,” Flip continued. “Stumblebums, drunks—they often are, sometimes for no reason. Part of me is surprised Rotney has survived this long without a fatal beating.”

  Sally reappeared. Half of her makeup was gone, and she wore a long dress with a high collar that had been in fashion about fifteen years prior. It was as old and as frayed as Flip’s shirt.

  “Oh my,” the policeman said.

  Sally took out a handkerchief and dipped it in a golden spittoon in the lobby corner. Two of her girls passed, and did their best not to gawk as Sally blotted at the front of her dress until there were heavy, deep stains that looked as though they would never come out.

  Then Sally dropped the handkerchief into the spittoon.

  “Let’s do this,” she said.

  They did.

  The Bucket of Blood was a short walk north along State Street and then a little bit west, to the corner of Nineteenth and Federal. A small distance from the Palmerton, but worlds away in terms of character and feel. The Levee District. Or what remained of it after the reformers had got done. That great shuttered wonderland of vice. It held the air of a boardwalk carnival closed for the season, though everyone knew it was likely gone for good.

  Nearly all the bars, brothels, and gambling dens in the district had been put out of business during the anti-vice sweep a few years prior. The Bucket, however, survived, albeit in diminished form. (The campaigners had seemed to accept this. Perhaps, Flip thought, they realized the Bucket was a particularly stubborn carbuncle—one that would require multiple treatments to eradicate entirely).

  Amidst a string of boarded-up bordellos and casinos, the Bucket operated as the lone remaining outpost of sin. The chaos and mayhem and nudity that might have spilled from its doors onto the street in prior years—even on a Monday night—were now safely contained inside. But Flip knew that most of this change was cosmetic only. The Bucket might have dimmed its lights, but they still burned just as hot.

  “I heard they used to call this Bedbug Row,” Tark said, examining the shuttered flophouses. “Maybe this is what happens when the bedbugs are finally through with you. When you’re all et up.”

  “So help me, if either of you bring actual bedbugs inside the Palmerton. . .” Sally said, trailing off into a fury. “Well, I was going to burn this dress anyway. Just see that the both of you burn your clothes as well.”

  “But I like my clothes,” Tark said.

  “I’ll buy you some new ones,” Sally snapped.

  “But these are special, magician’s clothes,” Tark objected, glancing down at his seemingly unremarkable duds. “There’s a hole for a cord to run from my wrist, down my trousers, all the way to my big toe. You wouldn’t understand, but it can put something in my hand that’s not in my hand, even when my sleeves are rolled up.”

  “New ones can be had,” Sally said. “I will purchase them for you. I presume there is some sort of specialized catalog for such clothing, yes?”

  Tark shrugged sheepishly.

  Apparently, there was.

  Sally nodded in satisfaction.

  The Bucket glowed in the darkness ahead of them, red light spilling out from under its shuttered windows. They approached the front door. A kind of a doorman—bald and enormous and mightily crazed from the heat—tottered outside, shifting back and forth. He seemed to be concentrating on a spot on the wall just a few inches above his head. He thrummed in the heat. For the life of him, Flip could not figure out what the doorman was looking at. There was no longer a sign above the Bucket’s entrance. It had been taken down during the raids.

  “Tark, we never talked about this, but you don’t like to do more than have a drink, do you?” Flip whispered as they neared.

  Tark seemed genuinely puzzled by the question.

  “More than?” the magician said. “What more would you do? Drinkin’s plenty.”

  Flip nodded to say this was meet.

  “People in here will offer you morphine, opium, cocaine,” Flip said.

  “I stick to a liquid diet,” Tark said.

  “Well if anyone hands you a drink—especially a woman—make sure you watched the bartender pour it,” Flip continued.

  “I’ll take care of him,” Sally said, putting her arm around the magician like an affectionate auntie. “Show him how to handle himself in a big-boy place.”

  “What?” said Tark, attempting, unsuccessfully, to shrug her off. “Damn. I know how to handle myself. Who do you think you’re talking to?”

  “That’s what a lot of men say before they go inside here,” Flip told him sternly. “Then they end up poisoned, robbed and froze to death in an alley out back.”

  Sally released Tark from her embrace, and patted him encouragingly on the back.

  ‘Big-boy,’ she mouthed, as they walked past the strange, vibrating doorman and inside the Bucket.

  The interior was most immediately defined by its low, wooden ceiling. A very tall man could reach up and touch it. It was like an inn from Colonial times. There were doors and hallways leading away from a large central barroom. Filthy red curtains had been hung here and there, creating nooks and aediculae into which one might duck to perform small, intimate rites. Because it was still so early in the evening, there were not many customers. Against the far wall stood a long, low bar. It was, for most visitors, merely the staging area where they would queue before being whisked off to wonders and horrors in other rooms. In a wicker chair near the entryway sat an elderly prostitute—entirely naked except for her shoes. If a visitor had come to get straight to the point—without a lot of froufrou—she was, presumably, there to accommodate. The naked woman looked Flip up and down, but soon switched her gaze over to Tark, sensing a keener vulnerability in him. Tark glanced at her from the side of his eyes. She made a smooching kiss into the air like a French woman.

  Flip laughed.

  They walked up to the bar. Seated at it was a very drunk man in late middle-age. He was unshaven, and had a red, ruddy face. He was dressed like a sailor who worked on Lake Michigan. Seated beside him was a woman in a flouncy, ruffled skirt like a can-can dancer. She wore too much makeup and had had her nose broken to one side. The sailor—loudly, with much basso—was telling a story about a fishing accident that had left seven men dead. One of the sailor’s meaty hands clutched a mug of cold beer. The other was buried inside the woman’s skirt. Every few moments—when he needed to make an especially enthusiastic point—he would remove his fingers from the woman and hold them up to gesture. Then, the desired emphasis achieved, would return them. (Flip thought the courtesan did a fine job of showing herself equally stimulated by the raconteur’s tale as by his efforts underneath her garments.)

  “You!” a voice suddenly cried.

  It was the barman, half-Chinese and thinly bearded. His body was covered by a sheen of sweat and not-bathing. He wore a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and had a great round belly.

  “I remember you!” the barman called to Flip, as though this successful recollection both astounded and pleased him. “We only allow high-class Negroes in this place. I forget, are you high-class?”

  “Any higher and I’d be hittin’ the ceiling,” Flip said. He reached up and touched the wooden boards above to make his point. The barman laughed and squinted and clapped his hands like a baby.

  “You been here before?” Tark asked quietly.

  “Course I have,” Flip whispered back. “Workin’.”

  The enthusiastic barman laughed again, seemingly at nothing. Underneath the bar was a smoking pipe. The barman stooped and took a long
draw from it. Then he nodded vigorously, as though the pipe had helped him make up his mind about an important matter.

  “Here,” he said. “I know just what high class persons like yourselves need.”

  The bartender took three tall glasses down from a battered shelf behind him. Into one, he poured dark bourbon. Into the next, a sweet amber liqueur. Into the final glass went something thick and mysterious and green, which Flip hoped was Chartreuse. As the barman poured, the wailing cry of a prostitute being fucked behind a curtain rose and fell like the whistle of a fast-moving train. Tark stayed more or less motionless, but his eyes circled in wild alarm. Flip put a hand on the magician’s shoulder to steady him.

  The bartender nodded in satisfaction, as though the drinks had been satisfactorily consecrated by the artificial cries of lust.

  “Here you go,” he said, pushing the glasses forward. Flip got the whisky, Sally the sickeningly-sweet liqueur, and Tark the mysterious green concoction.

  “It’ll give you all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming,” the barman said to the magician. “That’s what I tell people, anyway.”

  He laughed.

  “Thank you,” Flip said, placing a few coins on the bar.

  The bartender immediately pocketed them.

  Flip said: “I’ve never seen a man tending bar who could smoke an opium pipe and keep himself awake. Much less serve drinks. Must take some talent.”

  “Thank you for noticing,” the barman said proudly. “The pipe helps to keep me even. I eat so many snow-balls, you see. Last year, before I found the pipe, I stayed awake for fifteen days on those things. By the end, I was serving drinks to people who weren’t even there. The pipe makes it one beautiful balancing act.”

  “I’m sure it does,” Flip said.

  “Would you like a snow-ball?” the bartender asked, in a whereare-my-manners sort of way. He brought up a small sachet from under the bar.

  “Not quite yet,” Flip told the bartender.

  Tark picked up his green drink. He sniffed at it carefully, and took the smallest sip.

  Flip put his back to the bar, surveying the room. His eyes lit on a darkened doorway. A sign reading “Torture Chamber This Way” was affixed to the wall above it. As Flip watched, a man and a woman—convivial, drunk, and happy as jaybirds—passed, arm in arm, into that darkness.