by C M Muller
June’s muttering changed back to words I was plenty familiar with, and I almost drove us into a light pole when he said, “Don’t ever fuck with me, Johnny.”
“What’re you talkin’ about? I thought me and you were on the level.”
June eyeballed me strange. “Maybe we are, maybe not. I heard you all those nights, whisperin’ I was a loony.”
My heart could’ve hauled itself outta my mouth and swan-dived into my lap, and I wouldn’t have been more surprised. “I’ve never said anything like that about you!”
“You’ve been warned, Johnny. Oh, yes, warned I ain’t loony at all.”
“Yeah, okay, I’ve been warned.”
I thought to ask if he’d been drinking a Mickey Finn of formaldehyde, but the way June’s pallid forehead popped beads of sweat in the cold air made me keep my tongue.
I ain’t told you yet, but our pick-up that morning was to be in a mobster’s mechanic’s garage. See, we were going to a warehouse owned by Bugs Moran for his hatchetmen to use in chopping up hot cars, fencing stolen booze, turning stool pigeons to sausage, whatever…and here I was, more nervous by the old man sittin’ next to me.
It was Father who’d taken the phone call last night, though when June heard about a pick-up at the garage, he offered to do the job with the haste I never seen a dog beg for porterhouse steak. Father said fine, but to take me along, I needed more field experience. June might have nodded his assent, ’cept you could tell he wasn’t happy about it, way his lids slitted down the tiniest of bit.
Father didn’t tell me squat about the pick-up, just gave me the address, and said to let June do the talkin’, and for us to use the truck, so I knew it as another backstairs affair.
Reason we used a stake bed delivery truck instead of the hearse was that it blended in with the city, nothing memorable about it, just a rattletrap rusting at the edges of its doorframe, could have been a regular delivery of lumber or some hayseed cartin’ his wares to market. Half the corpses we picked up, the men who hired us wanted to keep the matter quiet. Forget about the movies, nonsense like “sending a message to the enemy”; that only inspired guarantee of reprisal. It was better an unliked man simply vanish, and no one knows nothin’ about it.
So here comes the brick face of S.M.C. Cartage Garage. I slowed as I drove past, to make the first right into an alley and circle around to its rear entrance, while that impression of being shadowed still lingered ominously, like something leaping through the air after us, one leg at a time, the way a child takes great strides over cracks in the sidewalk.
Halfway down the alley, June says, “Stop the truck,” and I did.
He climbed out, clenching his fists. “I’m going in the front.”
Once he left, I didn’t feel that sense of being followed anymore, and only later did I consider it was waitin’ for June.
At the time, I was nothing but relieved to be rid of both him and that spooky vibe of bein’ watched. June walked toward the street past moldering tires and bags of trash, and I continued through the alley to park in the garage’s dingy rear lot, backing up so the tailgate faced the rear steel door.
Since the door was closed, I stayed in the truck, checking things out through the side mirror.
My father usually did all the talking with customers, me and June and the other help doin’ the legwork, but I got to know our clientele by face, by name, by rep, even if they didn’t know me from Shinola. Like I said, sooner or later every outfit came to do business with Daddano & Co.
Which is how I recognized the man right away who opened the garage back door: Al Weinshank, one of Moran’s men. You see a mug like that, ya don’t ever forget him. He was a gorilla, near six feet and a couple hundred pounds of muscle, with a towering pompadour of oiled hair that added another half-foot in height.
I got out to meet him.
He says, “Kid, you with Daddano?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Truck ready?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right.”
Then a fat guy dressed to the nines comes to the doorway, smokin’ a snipe. Weinshank turns to him and they whisper to each other. The other guy nodded.
Past them, through the open door, I could see inside the long narrow garage there were four or five other men, only one of whom looked to be doing any actual mechanic’s work, his head concealed under the hood of a dismantled coupe.
Weinshank and the fat man whispered something else, and I overheard a bit, “...comin’ here to booshwash with Kachellek.”
Kachellek.
Like I said before, we ran a tight operation at the Daddano business. We kept our mouths shut, did our part, and people knew to come to us for sensitive disposal matters.
But that don’t mean business was always hunky-dory, either...
Some months back, Weinshank and a Moran lieutenant, Albert Kachellek, had cornered June in the stairwell outside our shop.
They pushed June around, slapped him, affirmed the usual threats for a debtor to pay up. Seemed June had run up some gambling dues with Kachellek, and the tardiness in payment turned issue.
I saw the fracas through a window and told my father, and he went out and ran them off. Not that I bore any love for June’s well-being, but it was bad for business. And not that the men feared my father so much to scram, but they respected him enough to not worsen the scene.
Before they left, I overheard Weinshank sayin’, “Don’t make us open the side of your face again, Juney. And Al Kachellek’s still got your last tooth.”
Then they had a big laugh.
Is this what June was talkin’ about, getting “fucked with”? Was he in over his head with debts? Were the threats gettin’ to be too much? I wondered why in hell he’d want to come here, if he knew the garage held men who were leaning on him...I wondered too if the sick feeling rising in my guts meant every guess I made about that question ended in a bad way...
Someone from in the garage shouted, “Close the goddamned door, Frankie, whyn’t you give the world an eyeful!”
“Aw, loosen your girdle,” the fat man shot back, with a hint of foreign accent, before returning inside, slamming the door after him.
Weinshank came to the back of the truck, inspectin’ within.
“All right,” he says, “Your pops does good work.”
Then he walked to the alley I’d come through, peering both ways to see if anybody’d been watching.
The garage door opened again, and a new guy comes out, half-readin’ a newspaper. He was slim, balding, normal as any Joe accountant. The door closed automatically behind him. “Hey, your father said you need something?”
“My father? He ain’t around. He’s back at the shop on Halstead.”
Accountant-Joe lowered his paper. “Old man you came here with, white hair, chews on his tongue real funny-like. Said you’re his son?”
I made a face at him, confused, and maybe it’s ’cause I didn’t say anything back that the guy felt obliged to add, “I dunno. Old man said, ‘My son is coming for us.’ Took that to mean you were lookin’ for something...What the hell’s he got me runnin’ around for?”
I shrugged, like what-the-fuck was I supposed to do about it? Though the next thought crossing my mind was a given, that because June told me not to think him loony, I immediately started judging he really had cracked a lid.
Weinshank comes back around the truck, as if readin’ my mind, “Who you talkin’ about, Adam? Loony Juney in there givin’ you crap?”
It was then the first scream roared so suddenly from the garage that my heart almost burst outta my ribs. The other two men’s eyes went big as dinner plates, and the one who looked like an accountant dropped his paper. He pulled back the lapel of his suit coat, and out came a revolver from his shoulder holster, though he didn’t look in any hurry to go use it. That scream sounded...I don’t know, unholy, pitched too high, too gurgling, and finally cut off too quick. The ensuin
g silence pretty much seemed as terrifying as the scream itself.
Weinshank shoved past us both as a second scream erupted. There was this barrage of submachine gun fire inside the garage, shouts, curses, the slapping sounds of revolver slugs hitting cement. Weinshank flung open the door and bolted inside.
The garage door hovered open just a second, before closing again on its own. And in that one glimpse, I saw the closest to Hell I’d ever care to know.
My impression of the scene was a raging whirlwind, one of those small dervishes that blow up off the lake sometimes, swirling leaves and shit into the air, only here it was blood and shell casings and a couple severed heads, all of it fuzzy, like how a blob of dust and grime clumps together. You ever look real close, there’s no hard edges to dust, it just seems to fade in and out of existence at the edges.
Now imagine that fuzzy dust in the size and shape of a man, but every part of it always moving, as if an invisible wind blew over it from every direction at once.
Yeah...it was something like that.
The fat man who’d come out with Weinshank—Frankie—was squirming over the hood of the dismantled coupe, only it wasn’t really Frankie anymore, but a severed gut spilling its insides and a pair of legs kicking up like a Rockettes routine.
Someone fired a Tommy submachine gun at the swirling dust man, and the roar was deafening, louder than a factory of dames at their Graybar sewing machines, just rat-a-tat-a-tat. The bullets ripped into it, passing through without doin’ jack squat, like you’re shooting at air. Someone else stumbled past, minus a head, his arms flailing around like all he’d done was lose balance.
I’ll give credit to Weinshank, he must’ve seen the same things as me, and he didn’t even blanch, just rushed right at the...whatever it was...his gorilla hands curled to battering ram fists, though I knew exactly the fate awaitin’ him.
And I ain’t even told you the worst of it. June—June was just standin’ there with blood raining over his face, watching the whole thing and laughing and laughing, a horrible shriek you couldn’t ever imagine coming from someone’s voice. And that look of goddamned glee on him...it’ll haunt me the rest of days.
Then the door closed shut.
I backed up real slow, and this panic took over. I turned alongside the tail of the truck, and all I wanted to do was hide, I couldn’t even make it another ten feet to the cab to drive away, so I just dropped and crawled underneath between the tires.
Meanwhile the balding normal guy—Adam, Weinshank had called him—stood there, pointing his revolver in two hands at the door.
The shooting inside abruptly stopped, the screams, the cries, all those sickening sounds ended like a switch got thrown off.
I thought the machine gun fire had been loud, but that was nothin’ compared to the rat-a-tat-a-tat of my pounding heart, and we’re not even done yet. A voice calls out to me from the garage, and my nuts just scrambled up into my stomach.
“Oh, Johnny-boy, where are you? Johnny, come meet my son—”
The door slammed open. There stood June in all his loony glory, that snow white hair now soaked red and standing on edge, his eyes glaring near to poppin’ out of his head, and him chewin’ on the side of his tongue. Blood and gore splattered over his coat and his face, and his arms were outstretched like he thought I was right in front of him and he was gonna grab me up in an big happy embrace.
I don’t think he even saw Adam. The gangster pulled the trigger of his revolver—Pop! Pop!—and June’s eyes went bulging even more. His legs sorta gave way real slow, and he dropped to his knees in the doorway, two neat little smoking holes added to his chest. The life seemed to fade from him real quick as his mouth went slack and his head rolled down, and a bubble of blood popped at his lip right where the crescent moon scar connected...
Then it came out.
The whirlwind was silent as clouds, but if it had a voice, I knew it would’ve been howling. It twisted around June, straight at Adam who fired the pistol again, each shot carefully aimed into the center of the dust man. For all the good it did him, he might as well have been slappin’ it with a wet noodle.
That swirling form of soot and grime sorta surrounded Adam, and then it expanded outward, and took Adam with it, expanding him I mean, so he came apart at the seams as if nothin’ but a rag doll, his legs and arms and head all pulling off in different directions. Adam’s gun fell to the ground inches from me, though I knew it didn’t matter if it landed right in my hand and the trigger under my finger, cocked and loaded; it wasn’t gonna do any good. I stayed where I was, frozen.
After that, the whirlwind kinda slowed, hovering there awhile, gazing down at Loony Juney’s corpse, and it almost seemed like the wind holding it aloft began to soften, as if some despair got the better of it. I took a closer look than I would’ve wanted...the swirling dust was still in the form of a man, yet seein’ it nearer, I realized it wasn’t just any man, but a thousand men, ten thousand men, a horde of faces all sifting and overlapping each other, layer upon layer upon layer that you could see through, but fuzzy too, and mucky and wet and ethereal, and Christ, it’s just so hard to explain, y’know?
It wasn’t no ghost, not like that, but it wasn’t no human either, and it didn’t seem right for a demon or some boggieman...it was something else entirely, which even now I still only vaguely comprehend.
See, there was somethin’ fluttering around in that whirlwind’s figure, and I don’t think anyone else would have recognized it, though bein’ raised in a mortuary I knew right away the small string-wrapped slip of cardboard for what it was: A toe-tag.
And after all these years tryin’ to settle it out, the best I can tell you is it’s something there ain’t a name for.It’s the little scraps of death and residue that accumulate together the way motes of dust collect to form clumps under the hutch, or the way grit always seems to build in the same board cracks until it overflows to spill across the floor. Give it chance, and that buildup keeps going, those dust clumps grow in no time at all.
You ever neglect sweeping beneath a couch or bed for awhile and then amaze at the mass of gunk that’s festering down there?
Think of that gunk in your home, how it happens to us all—dust bunnies you might call it. Now think of that gunk in my home, Daddano & Co., decades upon decades of death filling our halls, and the worst kind of it, the remains of mob men and pushers, wife beaters, assassins, pimps, whores, thieves and all their ilk and leaders. Flakes of their skin, drops of their blood, strands of their hair, remnants of their hatred, their viciousness, their corruption, all slipping under a loose floorboard and growing together.
Looking back, I think it’s June all along, hardworkin’ employee that he was, stayin’ late and closing up the doors after me and Father and the others gone to bed. June found that mass...or maybe it found him. A gust from the fan, a dropped nickel rolling past the crack...a scent of something moldering, or maybe June lookin’ for that lost toe-tag, whatever it was, he found the creature, made cause with it, and tried to control it like a pet dog. Loony Juney who’d probably been beaten down all of life had found his chance to rise up, as fleeting as that chance was.
Anyway, my story about the massacre that day ain’t even finished yet. ’Cause I was still cowerin’ under the truck while watchin’ the dust man continue to swirl over June’s body. It hung in the air a few minutes, kinda circling June, touching him, waiting for I don’t know what. Then real carefully, like trying on a new suit, the thing sank down into June and filled the old man back up with itself.
There was a twitch of limbs, a fluttering of eye lids, and June pulls himself up, as if he’d been faking death all along. Only those two bullet holes over his heart don’t lie.
He opened his mouth, and a little puff of dust billowed out, and he only says one word, “Johnny...”
It was June’s voice too, but aloof, like our work here was done, and we needed to get back to the shop, bein’ on the clock and all..
.only it wasn’t June’s voice either, ’cause it was dry and wispy as bones rubbing against each other. June began to walk toward the truck, so as he got closer, my perspective of him changed by scale, my line of sight falling from his air-holed chest to his waist, then his legs, and finally just a pair of scuffed black loafers a foot from the fender.
I was tryin’ not to cry or piss myself, when I heard sirens in the distance, gettin’ near fast. June’s feet turned away, hesitated, and he—it—walked off down the alley.
Afterward, the police didn’t have any clues, never mind what I told ’em. There were seven dead men torn to pieces, and I mean literally, a hand here, an ear there, a pile of guts draped over someone else’s legs.
So they framed it all on Al Capone. It was convenient since him and Moran had been warring, and the coppers wanted him bad. Capone was a thorn in everyone’s ass back then, he was so popular with the public that judges wouldn’t sentence him ’cause fear of backlash. Capone gave people jobs, donated to schools, set up soup kitchens for the poor, all out of his own pocket, for God’s sake. Chicago loved him, all except the cops who knew where he was getting all that money from in the first place.
Yeah, that garage massacre pretty much put Capone outta business, ironically blamed for something he wasn’t responsible for in the least. He was never convicted of it or anything, but the media crucified him, and people began riding him for the crook he was. The federal government took notice too, and they’re the ones who ultimately got him, trumping up tax offenses.
I’ll tell you somethin’ else too, that I don’t hardly tell anyone. To this day I see fellas lookin’ like June once in awhile, out of the corner of my eye, never aged, just blending in with the crowd but for that snow white hair and crescent moon scar, and I don’t like to think where they’re going, what they’re doing...