Burn, Beautiful Soul

by William J. Donahue

  “I don’t even know why you want this thing here,” says Ned Lavender, the church’s music director. Sweat beads his brow. “It’s purely for show.”

  “Not if I have anything to say about it,” she whispers. “I hope that damned devil vomits when he sees this, boy.”

  She steps back to admire her handiwork, the horizontal beam blocking out the morning sun. The sight makes her smile, but it’s not quite good enough. Not yet.

  “Anything worth doing is worth doing to the Lord’s satisfaction,” she says. “This”—she waves at the unsteady cross—“this will not please the Lord.”

  Officer Pierce, who has been patrolling the parking lot since dawn, steps toward Edna’s group. Keys jangle at his belt.

  “Do you have a permit for this?” he asks.

  “This isn’t hurting anyone,” Edna tells him. “Now move along, Barney Fife. What you should be doing is marching right inside that building to arrest that flipping brute. Raping that poor girl and all. Did you ask him if he had a permit to do that? He’s not even American, you know.”

  “No one said anything about rape, Edna.”

  “Oh, what in the blazes do you know about anything?” Edna wears a new accessory: a figurine of Christ liberated from a foot-tall crucifix that she yanked from the wall of her home. The Christ figurine dangles from her neck by a thick nylon cord, an eyebolt bored into the center of the Nazarene’s thorn-pricked head. She massages the wooden Christ with the fingers of her right hand to ease the weight of this new burden. Her body demands sleep and sustenance, but first she must appease her god.

  She’s too busy thinking of how to pin the demon to the oversized cross to notice the disturbance. It’s far off at first, riding the wind, but the din builds into a deafening rumble that shakes the earth. The sound reminds her of a fleet of semis strafing the highway. She turns to see an unbroken line of leather, chrome and black paint, approaching from the south. A black-and-orange Harley-Davidson with a passenger in its sidecar leads the procession into the lot.

  Edna’s feet remain firmly in place. Her acolytes make subtle moves to hide behind their peers, edging toward the safety of the office building. Officer Pierce takes a reluctant step forward and perches his hands on his belt buckle.

  The lead Harley rumbles to a stop a mere fifteen feet from Officer Pierce. A crush of Harleys file in behind the leader, clogging the lot—no coming or going for anyone. Two motorcycles brush past Pierce and ride the sidewalk to its end at the building’s main entrance. They park in front of the doorway, a makeshift barricade. Across the lot, four more motorcycles skip the curb and chew up the grass, presumably taking up residence at the building’s two other entrances. The motorcycles—thirty of them in all, by Edna’s best guess—kill their engines in unison, more or less.

  “I want three of you at every exit,” the man on the lead Harley barks to the rest of the pack. His voice, friendly and calm, carries a hint of Georgia or Texas or Tennessee—some red state far below the Mason-Dixon Line. He removes a pair of black leather gloves and tosses them into the lap of the helmeted skeleton sitting in the sidecar. Unlike his ghastly passenger, the man wears no helmet: only mirrored aviator sunglasses, scuffed black boots, a short-sleeved black T-shirt, tattered blue jeans and a road-weary denim vest with the word FANG patched onto one breast and the word CLAW patched onto the other. He steps off the bike and approaches Officer Pierce.

  “You can’t park here, not like that,” Pierce says, a bit sheepishly. He shuffles his feet, trying to stand tall, likely because the biker has at least six inches on him.

  “Sure thing, Officer. We’ll be out of your hair just as soon as we tend to some private business.”

  He steps toward Pierce, arm outstretched and palm open. Pierce moves to accept the gesture.

  In one swift stroke, the man in the Fang and Claw vest pulls a Buck knife from his belt and thrusts the glinting tip into the soft space beneath Pierce’s chin. Pierce goes rigid, eyes wide, as the man advances the eight-inch blade through the soft palate, the septum, the brain and, finally, the crown of the eggshell-soft skull. Pierce’s lifeless body falls to the ground, the blade still in place, dug in up to the hilt.

  Nearly a dozen bikers stride past Pierce’s body, past the klatch of shocked Methodists, showing no emotion. The bikers encircle the building. Some stop at points of ingress, while others venture inside.

  Edna, unfazed by Pierce’s murder, stands by her oversized cross, arms folded under her well-hidden breasts.

  “I don’t know why you had to go and do a silly thing like that,” she says to the man in the denim vest.

  “No one’s going to get hurt who doesn’t deserve it,” he tells her. “You all right with that?”

  “That all depends,” she says.

  “We’re here for the demon.”

  Manna from Heaven, she thinks. Manna from Heaven.

  “Get in line,” she tells him.

  He smiles and bows courteously. He extends a callused hand for her to shake.

  “I’m Ronald,” he offers. “My brothers and I have come to collect a debt.”

  “I hope you take his head and leave the rest to burn.”

  The Lord has answered her prayers, though she expected God’s messengers to look different than these hooligans. Then again, why should she care how they look if they’re able to slay the damned critter or at least send it hobbling back to Hell, preferably in small pieces?

  “Ronald,” she says, tasting the word on her tongue. “I thought you’d have a Biblical name.”

  “Well, honey,” he says, pausing to light a Camel and suck smoke through its marbled filter, “I’m no angel.”

  “I like your sidecar skeleton. What’s the significance?”

  He leans in and whispers, “I like to tell the boys that death rides with me, and they like it when I say things like ’at. But to tell it right, I just like the way it looks.” He nods toward the building. “He in there?”

  “The beast? It might be, but I haven’t seen it today. Sneaky bugger. If not, you’ll find plenty of coconspirators inside who carouse with it, enable it, help to spread its poison. Subhumans, if you ask me. Let them sleep in the beds they made, as far as I’m concerned. Start with the hussy attorney on the first floor.”

  “We’ll see what happens.”

  “A favor, Ronald,” she says. “Make the bastard suffer.”

  “Count on it.”

  “And once you’ve beaten it to a pulp, I’d be honored if you’d permit me an indulgence: Drag it out here so I can spike it through the heart, if it has one.”

  Ronald drops the Camel to the asphalt and extinguishes the butt beneath the toe of his boot. He strides toward the building and steps inside, five or six of his Fang and Claw brothers filing in behind him.

  Edna looks to a cloudbank sailing in from the east, the only break in an otherwise all-blue sky. She sinks to her knees and clasps her hands together, grateful for the gift delivered by her bloodthirsty god.

  * * *

  When the telephone’s obnoxious ring stirs Basil from his meditation, he’s surprised to see the clock has advanced the time to nearly nine thirty. He can count on one hand how many times the phone has voiced its raucous rings since he moved in, and every one of them had been a wrong number. He holds the receiver to his ear and hears labored breaths, followed by whispers. A few seconds pass before he realizes the man on the other end of the line is Herbert.

  “I was just thinking about you,” Basil tells him.

  “You have to get here now,” Herbert says. His voice is unsteady.

  “Bulcavage riding your ass for the new Devil Smoke copy?”

  “They have the place surrounded. They might have a bomb. They’re looking for you.”

  “More Edna nonsense?”

  “Not Edna. Bikers. Dozens of them, by my count. They call themselves ‘Fang and Claw,’ or something like that. Basil, they have guns. Hurry.”

  “Is Melody all right?”

  �
�I don’t know, but—”

  The phone goes dead in Basil’s ear.

  His thick fingers dial the office number, but the call does not go through.

  The number you have dialed has been changed, disconnected or—

  He hangs up.

  Was this Herbert’s idea of a joke? A ploy to get him to delay his return to Our Fiery Home, to make him stay in Beak? If so, he considers how harsh of a punishment his well-meaning friend deserves. But … what if? He scours his memory for proof that he told Herbert about his run-in with the bikers at Beak Tavern. No, not to his recollection. So, what if the Fang and Claw Motorcycle Club had tracked him down and come to exact vengeance?

  He clops into the kitchen and steps in a curled-up pile of shit left by his impish houseguest, mashing the feces into dimples in the linoleum. He rifles through some loose papers on the counter until he finds a piece of paper bearing a poem he wrote, with Melody’s business card stapled to the upper left corner. He takes the phone in his hand, wavering over whether to call, just to be safe. If he dials and Audrey Pernie picks up, he can just hang up—mystery solved, crisis averted.

  He punches the digits into the keypad and hears the same ominous refrain: The number you have dialed has been changed, disconnected or—

  “Just forget it,” the voice tells Basil. “Just forget them. You have enough wars to fight.”

  The voice is right. He has a kingdom to reclaim. He’ll never see Herbert or Melody or Bulcavage again, so why should he care? He could drive out to Patriot Rock, crash his noisemaker into the nearest ditch and wander across the golden field until he finds the mouth of the cave that will lead him back to Our Fiery Home.

  The voice reminds him: “Whatever problems the humans have manufactured are theirs to solve.”

  After all, Herbert thinks his copywriter is an asshole.

  Melody couldn’t care if he lives or dies.

  Bulcavage is scum.

  Leaving them all behind is the only choice.

  At least, it should be.

  Sense retakes him. He panics, not for himself but for the humans—his humans. If the Fang and Claw has tracked him to his place of business, they likely know where he calls home too. He scoops up Boothe and rushes from the apartment to the next door down, banging frantically on the cheap wood. He scans the parking lot for signs of an ambush. Finally he hears the lock being undone, and the door opens to reveal his neighbor, the bleary-eyed, messy-haired Chester, still in his sleeping clothes: a sleeveless white T-shirt, plaid pajama bottoms, a single argyle sock.

  “To what displeasure do I owe this great insult?”

  “You’re in danger, Chester. On my account, I’m afraid. Put on your shoes and come with me.”

  “The apocalypse isn’t scheduled for another twenty years, give or take. Wake me when we get to critical mass.”

  Chester closes the door.

  Basil’s hurled fist separates the door from its hinges. Chester sprawls to the carpet. Basil grabs Chester by the ankle and drags him toward the exit.

  “Okay, dickhead, I’m awake now,” says Chester, calmly. Boothe finds a perch on Chester’s gut, chirping with glee. “What the fuck is this little maggot?”

  “His name is Boothe. Unimportant. We must go. Now.”

  “I assume you think you have a good reason for this intrusion, so I’ll refrain from trouncing you, but please don’t drag me across the concrete. I have two working legs, you know.”

  Basil lifts Chester off the floor and leads him to the parking lot.

  “There may be bad men coming here, looking for me,” Basil says. “I don’t pretend to know what they might do. Tell me someplace safe I can take you.”

  “The tavern opens at ten.”

  “Climb on.”

  Basil mounts his noisemaker, and Chester gets on behind him. Boothe inserts himself between the two. They speed off, Chester barking in Basil’s ear—“Turn right, turn left, another left, I have to throw up”—until they arrive at a single-story all-brick building with three pickup trucks in the parking lot. A gray-haired man as squat as the building itself keys open the front door, and four men in ball caps line up behind him.

  “You can drop me here,” Chester says.

  Basil pulls up to the front door and lets Chester off the bike. Basil eyes his friend—stained white shirt, threadbare pajama bottoms, shoeless—and smiles.

  “I’m taking leave of you, my friend,” he says. “Time for me to go home and see what’s left of the place. I’ll miss our talks. Please do take care of yourself.”

  Chester inhales deeply, offering a smile of his own.

  “I’ll drink to that,” he says. “May the gods, or whatever power compels you, assist you in your journey into the cold fires of Hades.”

  He claps Basil on the back. He then yanks off the sole argyle sock and hands it to Boothe. The imp promptly shreds the fabric.

  As Chester disappears into the darkened doorway of the public house, Basil angles the noisemaker onto the road and speeds toward the office. His mind races between worlds, imagining the fights that await him in each. First things first: the Fang and Claw. He knows he can best a hundred men, maybe a thousand, but not their weapons—their cherished firearms. He recalls his wounded horn, where the bullet bit him. Even now he can feel pieces of the bullet lodged within him, something unnatural that has been working to poison his blood and deaden his flesh.

  His thoughts take him back to Our Fiery Home, back to Kamala. He knows Lubos would not have been kind to her.

  Something lies in the road ahead, right on the faded yellow line dividing northbound from southbound. As the noisemaker slows, he studies the smashed carcass of a redbird—a northern cardinal. Its fleshy parts fill every crevice, its broken feathers pointing up at perverted angles. The sight recalls a conversation he had with Chester during one of their wine- and whiskey-soaked evenings on the patio. Twenty minutes into one of his drunken rants, Chester recounted the alleged origins of Beak.

  “This was the Eighteen Twenties, maybe the early Eighteen Thirties,” Chester said. “Back then there wasn’t much to do here but work in the fields, pray in the churches and hunt the shit out of any living thing that came within blasting distance. Back then, Beak … well, it wasn’t Beak just yet, but regardless of the name the town went by at that point in history, the place was overrun with birds of every sort: robin, cardinal, jay, bittern, thrush, bunting, woodpecker, hawk, egret, owl—you name it. Something about the wind patterns and migratory routes and the copious vegetation on the edge of the Sand Hills. Flocks of every feather, with so many birds taking wing, the sky looked black rather than blue. The embarrassment of avian riches didn’t last too long, of course.

  “The morons killed everything, as morons tend to do. Farmers poisoned anything they suspected of spreading disease or harming a hair on the head of a single steer. Hat makers issued bounties for birds with the brightest, most intricate plumage, which, of course, the birds didn’t give freely.

  “One day a man named Osmond Ricketts walked into a public house at the edge of town. Word has it he got into a dustup with the barkeep, the barkeep telling Mister Ricketts he wasn’t welcome back until he could settle his considerable debts. Imagine. So the next morning the barkeep comes in to open up the pub and finds a dead goshawk nailed to the front door, its wings outstretched and the dollar amount Mister Ricketts owed—let’s call it ten bucks, which would have been a fortune at the time—stuffed right into the bird’s bloody kisser. And that’s how Beak became Beak, or at least that’s how it got its name.”

  Basil can’t help but wonder if he should look for meaning in the smashed redbird—a lone wanderer, a casualty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, its corpse left to rot on the sheet of warm, black rock. If he is to meet his end, either at the hands of gun-toting bikers or at the talons of demons on the eve of all-out war, he hopes to do what the poor little smashed redbird could not: take as many of his enemies along with him, to share his fate.

/>   The landscape changes, from cornfields and lonesome tractors tilling earth to lightly crowded storefronts. He enters downtown, or what passes for downtown in Beak, and estimates he’s less than a mile from the office. He decides to leave the noisemaker behind and go the rest of the way on hoof, surreptitiously, to avoid getting torn up in a hail of bullets. He pulls the noisemaker into an unused spot in front of the feed-and-tack store and lets the front tire glance the curb. As he kills the engine, a massive vehicle pulls up alongside him, horn blaring. He nearly shits himself.

  “It is you!” the driver yells in a shrill voice.

  “My God, Basil!” He recognizes the woman’s voice, knows her face, but he can’t quite place her.

  “Mary Jane!” she reminds him. “Mary Jane Pix, from the unemployment office! It’s been an age!”

  “Of course, Miss. Pix,” Basil says, calming. “How nice to see you.”

  “Who’s your little friend?”

  “Oh, him,” he says. He motions to Boothe, prancing on the leather seat behind him, a strip of argyle dangling from its mouth. “Just an imp.”

  “You’ve been on my mind. When I heard you got the job at Savage, I was so happy. How’s everything going?”

  “Oh, you know. Keeping me busy.”

  “Wonderful. I’m so pleased I was able to help in some small way.”

  “Immensely.”

  “Listen, you look busy, so I’ll let you get to wherever you’ve got to get to. Don’t be a stranger.”

  She prepares to back out of the spot.

  “Miss. Pix!”

  She presses the brake, and the brake pads squeal against the rotors.

  “Do you know the way to the office building where I work?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t suppose you would mind giving me a ride.”

  Chapter 29

  Counting

  Basil leans into Mary Jane Pix’s ear and explains his theory: Heavily armed bikers have overrun the office building and taken hostages in an attempt to lure him to his death. Some of Beak’s finest citizens are likely in grave danger, “including the woman I love,” he adds, mostly for effect.