“Water is fine.”
Barney flips the lid of a steel Coleman cooler, its retro-red paint worn nearly away. He pulls a wet bottle out and plunges his arm back in, stirring the contents and fishing for a bottle of water. “No water,” he says. “I’ve got pale ale.”
“I can’t get drunk.”
“So you said. Have a beer with me. It’ll wet your whistle as good as a water. And you won’t get a bit drunk.”
Calvert considers Barney, and not for the first time, he finds the big artist’s words full of uncommon sense. “Okay.”
Barney rattles through a drawer of tools, digging for something. “So, this whole dead thing? What’s that about? You’re the first dead guy I’ve spent much time with.”
Since the visit to his old apartment, Calvert has slowly managed to reassemble the pieces of his spotty past. He considers how much he’s willing to admit to a stranger. How much he’s willing to admit to himself. Not knowing Barney makes it easier. He says, “I was hurt because of something foolish I did. There was an incident. I died and never recovered. My doctors tell me it happens now and then. Though rarely.”
“So you are special?” Barney finds a pair of needle-nose pliers and pries the crimped edges of the bottle’s cap.
“I’m a biological anomaly. No big deal. It will run its course.”
“I see.” Barney passes Calvert an open bottle, knocks the mouth of his bottle into the side of Calvert’s. “‘May God grant you the desires of your heart and make all your plans succeed.’ Psalms 20:4.” He slumps on his mattress with a heavy sigh and drinks.
Calvert sits on an ink-speckled library chair. “You know a lot of scripture. I wouldn’t have thought you were religious. I don’t know why. Maybe all the marijuana?”
“Yes. There is the marijuana.” Barney chuckles kindly. “Well, psalms is more like poetry than scripture. I love me some psalms. But—complete disclosure—I grew up very devout. I still believe we have a soul. When I was young, I planned on becoming a preacher. My father was a traveling preacher for The Church of God of Prophecy and Evangelism. You heard of it?”
“Not that I recall.” Calvert drinks some beer. It has no taste, but it’s cold like well water and makes his teeth throb.
“I’m not surprised. Not many that aren’t members have heard of it. But there used to be a lot of us.” The big man drinks beer and gets a far-off look.
“I wasn’t a bad preacher’s kid, like you hear about. I carried a Bible with me everywhere I went. I prayed when I woke. I prayed at every meal. I prayed before bed. If I passed someone coughing, I’d ask if I could pray for them to have a fast recovery. If I met somebody that seemed sad, I’d kneel with them and ask for God to lift the burden from their shoulders. I was a true believer. But it all came apart. I was shunned by my father, my family, and my church.” Barney peeks to see if he’s got Calvert’s attention. Calvert swigs his beer and waits.
Barney picks at the damp edge of the label on his beer. “When I was fourteen, my family landed in North Carolina, Burlington area. We were staying with people from the local congregation, and one night we watched a news show from a nearby town called Graham. There was a disco club on the outskirts where a man got jazzed on drugs and shot another man to death. Shot him lots of times: once in his hand, his side, his foot, and finally in the side of the head.”
Calvert scoots his chair closer to Barney.
“My father was transfixed by the news. That night he stood with the TV flashing behind him, and he touched his palms in the center of each hand, he touched his side, he touched his temple. He said, ‘That dead man was marked as Christ on the cross. The crucifixion marks in his hands and feet, the spear in the side, the crown of thorns at his temple.’ He declared it a message from the Holy Spirit. Three months later, my father had scraped together enough money to rent that disco and started to build a permanent congregation. To his mind, it was a miraculous happening to preach where people used to drink and deal drugs. It was proof of God’s goodness to pray where people once came to fornicate. He liked to say it was a sinful place of vice and violence, and the transformative power of the blood of Christ washed away all evil.
“Sunday mornings, he tore it up from behind a section of the old bar that he’d cut into a pulpit. There was a spinning disco ball in the center of the ceiling, and my dad was happy to leave it as a reminder of the mystery of God’s power.” Barney peels the label from his beer in one wide, damp sheet, holds it crumpled in a curl of his fingers, and tips the bottle to his lips.
“You said you were shunned? What happened?” Again, Calvert scoots a bit closer to the big man, the chair legs stutter across the cupped floorboards.
“The honest answer is sex. Sex with Trina May.”
“Trina May was my father’s favorite kind of congregant. She grew up a church girl, went away to evil Boston, got mixed up in drinking, and bad relationships. Then she came back to the Lord, confessed, was baptized, and was born again, praise be to God. I barely noticed her the first few months. Until, one Sunday service when my father asked her to share her testimony. She rose and that exact moment the sun caught the disco ball. She began talking about how empty all her sins left her, how only the lord could fill her. Her face was marked by slowly spinning colored flecks sliding over her mouth, moving across her throat, slipping down her chest over her blouse buttoned up to her collarbone. I watched her every movement, and I wanted her so hard.
“In a few weeks, we were fucking every which way in her granny’s basement. I don’t mean to be crass, but that’s how it was. It was nothing but naked lust. Next thing I know, she’s pregnant. I’m scared to death. I stole money from the offering so she could get an abortion. But she goes to my father and confesses. He lets her keep the money so she can move. That night at home, he came at me in a rage, hit me with the family Bible, beat me until I couldn’t stand. He disowned me. He told me to pack a bag. He wouldn’t even let me say goodbye to my mother.”
“Did Trina May have your baby?”
“I just don’t know. I never found her again, never heard what happened. I have this feeling I have a baby girl somewhere in the great wide world. A girl like Lyla in there on the couch, curled up with someone she loves. Someone creative. I like to think she gets that from me. Someone wild and brave and passionate, who doesn’t take any shit from any living soul. That she would’ve gotten from Trina May. But it’s all in my head.”
Calvert imagines the baby he nearly had. The unborn baby they called Bump. He always believed Bump was a little girl. My little girl. What kind of person would she have been?
His beer slips from his lax grip and strikes the floor, rolls in an arc, spreading a crescent of froth. He stands and his chair teeters. He rights it. He snatches up the bottle and looks for something to soak up the mess.
“Don’t worry,” Barney says, shoving off the bed. He throws a shop rag on the beer puddle. “It’ll be fine.” He takes the bottle from Calvert and sets it aside. “Let’s check on this shirt of yours.” He opens the drying cabinet and tests the ink with his fingers, pats it with his whole hand. “It’s ready. Try that on for size.” He pulls the shirt from the board.
Calvert holds it out and reads to himself: “The wages of sin beats minimum wage.” He pulls it on over his coveralls.
Barney helps him straighten the shirt. “Consider it a gift.”
“Thank you.” Calvert looks down at the upside-down letters. “You think sin pays?”
“It’s funny with a smidgeon of truth. That’s about my speed. But if I still carry a version of my church learning with me, it’s people’s choices that create their circumstances. A person full of hate and meanness can outrun retribution for years. But eventually they pay. Psalm 7:16: ‘The trouble they cause recoils on them; their violence comes down on their own heads.’ Is karma evidence of God? I don’t have an answer.” He rubs his white whiskers thoughtfully, pulls a rolled joint from behind his left ear, and holds it with the side of his mouth as he
goes on. “I’ll tell you one thing though: I’m celibate. Have been since I was fifty. I figured Trina May didn’t want me. She wanted to feel safe, loved, accepted. She wanted from sex what people want from belief, to be full of love. Don’t get me wrong—we all know there are juicy hormones and physical drives at play. But spiritual fulfillment was what she wanted. Sex did that for me for a while. But it never lasted. I wanted something real and permanent from something fleeting. I thought sex was love. It’s not. You know what a fetish is? It’s when you worship one thing and imbue it with meanings that should be attributed elsewhere. For most of us, sex is a fetish in which we feel its love. I struggled with that for decades. Eventually I stopped expecting happiness from sex. Women were an unhealthy obsession. Giving up sex has made the past decade the most satisfying of my life.”
Calvert stays quiet, letting the big man’s words knock around in his brain.
Barney lights the joint bobbing in the corner of his mouth, draws on it, holds the twist of paper out, and assesses it at arm’s length. He exhales and says, “No sex and lots of weed: that’s my path to enlightenment. Now, let me show you one last thing.”
Calvert travels in a slipstream of marijuana smoke down a narrow hall. He feels muzzy-headed. After the beer and weed smoke, he’s reconsidering his assertion he can’t get drunk or high.
Barney knocks on a closed door. “Christian. It’s Barney. You all set?” In the pause that follows, Barney speaks to Calvert in low tones. “Christian calls this the Blake Machine. It’s a trip. Do you know William Blake?”
“Sounds familiar.” Calvert’s mouth is dry, and he feels nervous and paranoid.
“Transcendence through transformation is the main theme of Christian’s work. He’s been transitioning for years.” Calvert wants to ask from what Christian has been transitioning, and into what. But before he can form the question, a voice calls, “I’m ready.” The voice has a quality Calvert would call “theatrical.”
“This is Calvert,” Barney calls. Then to Calvert: “Go on in. You won’t see Christian. He’ll give instructions. I’ll be in my studio when you’re done.” He shoves his big body by Calvert, leaving a thick trail of smoke like a passing locomotive.
“You may enter,” comes Christian’s command. The cadence is exaggerated and dramatic.
Calvert reads a sign nailed to the door: “In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.” He takes the cold knob in his fingers and twists. The hinges squeak and he enters a dimly lit room.
“Close the door,” Christian calls.
The room has three black walls and one red. There is a waist-high contraption sitting toward the back of the room—an oversized erector set in the shape of a fireplug, surrounded by a rickety scaffold, peppered in light bulbs and draped in a jumble of wires and extension cords. A thick black electrical cord winds its way from the odd object to the center of the space, where it ends in a round, thick rubber pad. The way the cord meanders reminds Calvert of a fuse in a Loony Tunes cartoon.
“Step to the center of the room and face the red wall.” The voice comes from the back corner. Near the contraption, a partition has been made from a shower curtain.
Calvert doesn’t like the anxiety that comes with anticipation of the unknown. I’m dead already. What’s the worst that can happen? He moves near the pad and faces the red wall, the contraption at his back.
“Stomp the foot switch.”
Calvert steps on the pad with no effect.
“Press harder.”
He leans his weight into it. Something gives under his foot. He hears a click. Lights come on behind him. A speaker he can’t locate plays a quiet loop of a distressed infant’s angry cry. Over his shoulder, the contraption comes to life, seems to unfold, lengthen, and stand tall. Small engines whir, gears and cogs spin, counterweights begin to swing, and long arms wave in the air. There is knocking and clacking. A building rhythm of random clatter converges into a syncopated chugging pattern. As if Rube Goldberg designed a semaphore robot, Calvert thinks. Though he can’t recall who Rube Goldberg is or the purpose of semaphore flag waving.
“Don’t watch the machine. Watch the red wall.”
Calvert turns his eyes ahead. Initially, he notices nothing. Then he sees his shadow swell, surge up the wall, and wash back down. Moments later, again, his silhouette rushes into his field of vision, clearer this time, larger than life and dark as the sea rolling on a moonless night: Black figure on red wall. The swinging lights and waving arms behind him cause his likeness to dance in and out of focus, to leap and collapse, to materialize dense and firm, then dissolve into an ephemeral nonentity. The lurching lights are disorienting. The writhing of his intoxicated shadow-self is unnerving. His likeness has been hijacked and manipulated by a schizophrenic puppeteer. Calvert feels nauseous, motion sick. He doesn’t trust he’s on solid ground and rocks on his legs, trying to stay upright. The sounds of the machine fill the space and press like cupped hands over his ears. He tries to look back but can’t turn away from the grotesque spectacle. Now his image swings across the wall with demonic horns. And now with wings of white. Those two incarnations of his body alternate—horned devil, winged angel, horned devil, winged angel—the frequency increasing, the metallic cacophony overwhelming his senses. His devil form bursts from one corner, and his angel self bursts from the other in broad violent movements, colliding and crashing in the center of the red wall. His eyes swing from side to side, following the personified battle of his internal intentions forever raging at cross-purposes. When he can take it no longer, the mechanical rhythm slows. The machine stops. Only one light remains, a bright spotlight capturing Calvert in its heart, displaying his isolated image on the red wall, static. The bulb turns off. Calvert glances nervously to see the device fold back on itself and slump into a stumpy automaton with poor posture.
“Come sit on the stool,” Christian’s dislocated voice demands. The melodramatic phrasing feels appropriate now. Calvert wants to sit. He walks to the corner and straddles a black stool, his left side to the shower curtain.
Christian’s voice comes through the curtain, quieter now and very close to Calvert. “Blake said, ‘Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life.’ Transformation takes work. Share something good you’ve done but never shared, and something evil you’ve done but never uttered.”
Calvert feels raw in the middle. His emotions have been scraped into a gooey mound with the hard edge of a spoon. He’s aggravated. Scrubbed too hard from the inside out. Overstimulated. His innards are in an uproar, as if blasted with radiation. He wants to make the ache stop. He thinks of Rosa, of finding her nearly dead, of how little courage it takes to be brave when one is no longer alive. He’s guilty for the attention he received. But there are other secrets that weigh on him.
He says, “I killed four people because I put my needs above everything else. I can’t think of a good thing right now.” In the pause after his confession, Calvert notices the sound of the screaming infant is still playing low from a speaker over the door where he entered.
Christian’s affected voices proclaims, as if he were the judge at an inquisition, “You have met the requirement for bearing witness to the Blake Machine. You may go.”
Calvert stands quickly, tipping the stool and letting it fall. He bolts from the room as fast as his dead feet will go.
Interview With an Exterminator
After conspiring over shots and tacos, Whistler and Moe agreed it was best to walk a few blocks and buy a dessert of churros and hot chocolate. As they walked back, Whistler decided Moe was sober enough to ride her new motorcycle.
“You’re so cool,” he called as she drove away. Then, as he read the script on the back of her helmet, “Who is Vicky?” But it was too late. She’d gone.
He got home and parked before admitting he shouldn’t be driving.
He slept in his shirt and necktie, boxer briefs, and one black sock. The tho
ught of unbuttoning buttons had simply been too much.
His phone’s alarm penetrates his dream like a sharp pin pushing into the soft belly of a balloon until the moment it bursts. The tail of his tie is twisted around his wrist, and when he moves, he chokes. Awake, frightened, and sputtering, he falls out of bed, landing hard on his tailbone, one knee knocking into the bed frame. He rips the tie over his head and flings it away, convinced it intended to constrict his airway. His hangover manifests as a series of aches and a throbbing pressure under his eyes. “Oh hell.” His breath is rank. The ebb and flow of pain in his skull is in time to his incredibly loud alarm. He taps it off, slaps it on his mattress, and gets to his feet.
He doesn’t remember much about getting home. “My gun. Where’s my gun?” He limps around the apartment, past his galley kitchen and into his tiny sitting room. No gun on the table next to his keys, wallet, and clip badge. No gun on the kitchen counter. No gun when he searches his pants bunched in the hall, only an empty holster. He can’t find his phone either. I had it a minute ago. He locates the phone in a twist of bed sheets. He starts to call Moe to ask if she has any idea about his gun, but his bladder is about to burst. He limps into the bathroom and spots his pistol in the sink. Never did a morning piss bring such relief.
A shower, clean teeth, fresh clothes, three aspirin, and two fried eggs go a long way to making his life right. He’d made big plans while sitting over empty shot glasses the night before. He and Moe agreed that the same killer was responsible for two murders and one attempted murder. The interval between attacks was shrinking, and another attack could come any day. “We need to move like our life depends on it,” he’d said. “Because someone’s does.” He had felt pretty bad-ass when he said it.
This morning, though, the rough start has curtailed his ambitions. First, get coffee. Second, handle Ruther. Third, get enough to bring Allen Schmidt back in for questioning. He holsters his firearm and leaves with purpose, if not vigor.
Half Dead Page 19