“Fuck you,” the man with the shotgun spat, then he lowered the gun, pivoted around to address the other shoppers in the aisle, and announced, “It’s a legitimate kill!”
“Daddy!” shrieked the ten year old, dropping down beside the slumped, nearly headless man, whose mouth nevertheless spasmed and whose legs gave electrified kicks. “Daddy! Daddy!” the boy took one of his father’s hands and pulled at it, tugged at it, as if to hoist him to his feet, as if to hoist him out of the present, back into the past. It would only take a single brief minute of time travel to restore him to life.
Board had strayed to a third framed poster. This one, from 1941, was for Hawks’ Cab Driver, about a lonely and alienated WW IV vet who takes to driving a taxi at night. Though it ended with an extremely violent shootout, the film was unusually artistic rather than exploitative, and had been Board’s favorite movie to work on, not to mention the Oscar nomination it had garnered for him. It was also one of his last films, before he returned—retired—to the Windy City of Coccyx, taking Judy with him. Filming the cab as it coasted shark-like through hellish mists of steam on back lot city streets had been a rewarding challenge for him. Hawks had allowed him to employ the use of eerie slow motion in some of these shots, and had been so impressed with the effect that he had encouraged Board to use it in other sequences of the film.
In the end of that film, a procurer had his brains splashed across a wall, while a child prostitute hunkered down and wailed. But those brains had been an effect, jetted from an air cannon hidden behind a sofa. That child had been acting. This child was sobbing, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” And Board saw blood speckled all over his face, a gob of brain stuck in the boy’s soaked hair.
Board had reached up a hand to his own face and felt a bead of blood trickling down his cheek.
He had stayed until the police arrived, but no one questioned him as a witness. The gunman showed a paper he had kept folded in his wallet, proving that the murder was his annual allotment. The boy was taken away, and tried to kick the man but the man stepped back and the child was restrained. The man was handed back his shotgun, but he was told he would have to pay for damages to the supermarket’s merchandise. “Sure,” he said.
Before Board had left the blood-sprayed aisle, he had found himself glancing up at the ceiling, turning in a little circle until he located a living camera mounted to a bracket. It was one of several suspended from the large market’s ceiling. Perhaps its footage would appear on the nightly news. But maybe not; it was not so noteworthy a killing. The main thing was that the camera had witnessed the killing as it happened. Modern cameras like this one did not have to record events onto a cylinder, to be downloaded via computer so as to be accessed by the Guests. The Guests could now watch events in real time. Death had gone live.
Before leaving the aisle, Board had raised his middle finger to the unblinking creature.
Now he had poured himself a fresh glass of wine, and had inserted a small cylinder into the orifice of his television. He sat back and watched as the opening credits of the recorded film, 1929's Pandora’s Box starring Louise Brooks, came on. Sadie drifted over, drowsily, to plunk herself down beside his feet, and was almost instantly asleep.
He wished that, right in front of the police officers, he had pulled the .45 auto out of its holster, crossed over to the man with the shotgun, raised the pistol so that it practically touched the man’s nose, and blown wide the back of his head. He would then say, “It’s a legitimate kill!” And he would offer, “I’ll pay for merchandise damages!” He would want to do it before the boy was taken away. Although the boy was already traumatized enough, still he would want the boy to see.
Why hadn’t he done that? Why?
He had ten kills, going to waste. Ten kills, like a kid with ten dollars in a toy store. They were his. No one would question him.
He wished he had used one of them. He was vaguely surprised at how disappointed, how angry with himself, he was that he hadn’t. That he hadn’t killed a man for the first time in nineteen years.
-5-
Sadie’s barking awakened him, and nudged a coiled headache out of its slumber as well. Board groaned. If she wasn’t waking him by pouncing on the bed and chewing on his forearms, often leaving patterns of dark bruises that looked like some disease symptom, it was this: standing on the sofa, nosing aside the curtain at her favorite window (he’d had to throw away the Venetian blinds she’d ruined), and barking at some neighbor’s cat that taunted her by strutting slowly past on the sidewalk. The chewing and wrestling in bed he tolerated, until it just began to hurt too much, but the barking at the window often startled him, set his nerves on edge. From his bed, he yelled, “Sadie! Get away from that window!”
When the barking didn’t subside, and he heard her begin to scratch at the glass, Board instead called out, “House…turn 180 degrees.”
After several moments, the house still hadn’t begun to pivot in its socket. Board called out the same command, louder this time, thinking that maybe the insect he dwelt inside couldn’t hear him over the dog’s din. Again, the house did not respond. Grumbling a curse under his breath, Board sat up on the edge of his bed and groaned again as his hangover uncoiled fully, like a poisonous cobra, or maybe a python unhinging its jaws to slowly swallow his brain whole.
In the bathroom, he did his best to avoid his haggard reflection as he positioned himself in front of the sink and commanded, “House…run cold water.” No water, cold or hot, appeared from the faucets, which were fed by pipelines threaded through the animal’s flesh, behind its shell of chitin. “Damn it,” Board hissed, and turned the faucet manually instead, cupping cold water into his hands and splashing it onto his face several times.
Had it happened, then, just like that? Had his house died a few years prematurely? They should lower his mortgage payment for that, he thought bitterly. Or was the house still alive but stubbornly resisting his orders? Had its mind become sick? The other day, in a newspaper, he had read that a much larger city building had reached down with one of its claws, which a second earlier had been hanging uselessly at its side, and plucked up a pedestrian from the sidewalk. It raised him aloft, screaming, and a fire truck was summoned to get the thrashing man down. Before the truck could round the corner, however, the pincers had closed tighter and crushed the man to death, his blood raining down to the street.
Not a command of the Guests, Board was sure, but a kind of malfunction. The Guests never killed anyone, themselves.
Dragging his slippered feet across the floor, Board entered the living room bellowing. “Get away from that damn window!” As he had known, the white and black Akita had taken a noble, almost bipedal stance on the sofa, her front legs braced on its backrest, her nose to the saliva-smeared pane. She was snorting out air threateningly, turning her massive head this way and that, but no longer barking. Just one half-growl rumbled in her throat.
“What?” Board demanded. “What is it, stupid?” He didn’t try hauling her off the couch by her collar; despite her adoration for him, she’d snapped at his hand once when he’d done that. Instead, on the chance that she had been barking at the mail man instead, Board went to his front door to look out at the street. More than once he’d shooed one of those insolent neighborhood cats away.
He started to push his door outward, but there was resistance as if someone were leaning against it from the other side, though he saw no one’s face in the small square window. Board gave it a more forceful push, and the pressure fell away. He heard a soft thump. Much more noticeable was the invasion of stench which immediately billowed through the opening crack like a cloud of poison gas.
Slumped across his front step was the murdered Asian woman, her empty sleeve of a head having smacked down against the ground, her bare legs looking boneless the way they were folded beneath her. Settling blood, and internal rot as her guts began to liquefy, had discolored the nude body that had formerly rendered a disturbingly sensual contrast to the rubbery smear
of the head.
Like Sadie, now sniffing furiously at the door he held mostly closed behind him, Board jerked his head this way and that, but his quiet back street was empty even of traffic. Still, he could imagine two boys of about twelve crouching behind a hedge nearby, stifling their sniggers.
“Oh yeah, that’s very funny!” Board shouted at the street. “That’s very funny!”
For a moment, he considered rolling the corpse into a bed sheet and dragging her into his house until he could summon the police. He decided to just leave her there, however. Who cared what the neighbors thought? The boys who had done this belonged to one of his neighbors. He had nothing to be ashamed of; he hadn’t killed this woman…
“Haven’t you called us about this body before?” Detective Chisel asked wearily on the other end of the line.
“Yes, exactly, I have. And if the body had been collected before, then it wouldn’t be on my front step now! I can’t leave my house without tripping over this thing! I…I need to take my dog out, and…”
“All right, hey, calm yourself down, sir…we’ll send someone right over…”
“And I want something done about these kids. These monsters…”
A sigh. “Do you know their names, sir? Where they live?”
“No. Not exactly. But it has to be on this block, somewhere…”
“Okay, look—the next time you see them around your house, call us and we’ll talk to them.”
“They’re always on bikes; it’s not like they stay in one place, you know?”
“Then what do you suggest we do to find out about them, sir? Listen…if you see them outside, take a picture of them, and then we can look at the photo and we’ll know who we’re looking for…”
After a couple of seconds, Board mumbled, “I don’t own a camera anymore.”
-6-
When he heard Sadie barking and clawing at the living room window, his first thought—because he was still groggy from dozing off in front of his TV (he had been watching a recording of Cab Driver)—was that the police had finally come to take away the body lying at his doorstep. But then he remembered that they had already come. His next thought, even more irrational, was that the boys had stolen back the body again somehow, to leave it at his door a second time. Or was it another body entirely (third irrational thought)? As Board got up to shush the dog, he finally settled on the idea that it must be a cat she was looking out at, this time.
Then over Sadie’s barking, he heard the screaming at last.
It was the voice of a child, in terror or pain. Board tried to nudge his dog aside but she was rigid in her stance, so he pressed in beside her instead. He saw no one out there in his short, desolate street—not even a passing car, as usual—but then he heard the voices.
“Get out of here!” a man bellowed.
“Go on, throw it, you old fart!” roared a familiar voice, though Board didn’t know which of the two bike-riding neighborhood boys it issued from. It was amazing, frightening, how the boy could make his voice rasp like that to increase its fury and to compensate for its youth.
“Come here and I’ll blow your head off!” shouted the adult voice in response, trying to summon the same level of bravado, but sounding just a touch shaken.
Board left the window, moving toward his door. Sadie jerked her head in his direction and realized what he was doing too late; by the time she leapt from the sofa he was already out in front of his house without her, slamming the door behind him.
One boy flashed by on his bike then, from left to right. The other whizzed past a moment later. They were both so fast that their faces were a blur to him, so fast that they didn’t see him, either. They had to have already noted earlier that the corpse had been removed, or they certainly would have glanced over at his dead house now.
Board looked off to his left and saw a disheveled man with a silvery beard standing on the corner of the street from which the bikes had emerged. The bearded man was glaring after them, clearly the adult with whom the kids had been arguing. Board could only assume the rest. That the child he’d heard screaming was this man’s child. That he had stopped the two boys on the bikes from hurting his child—or worse. That the man had threatened to throw a rock from his garden or some other heavy object after the boys. He had either done so already (Board saw nothing in his hands) or had dropped the object, his threat an empty one.
Board turned his attention back in the direction the boys had gone off in, then. And he made an impulsive choice. One option had been going over to the bearded man and asking him what had happened; if he thought that maybe they could join forces, go to the police together about these two kids. The other option was to follow after the boys immediately, to see if he could find out where they lived. And though Board was on foot, and had little realistic chance of tracking them down, that was the option he went with. His feet were already moving briskly beneath him by the time he realized he’d made the decision. He didn’t take his dog to lead him as she might well lead him astray). He didn’t take his car; it might save him time, ultimately, but his only thought at the moment was that going back inside to retrieve his keys and coming out again to start his vehicle would cause him to lose the scent. And also, he didn’t bring the gun he always wore for protection when he ventured out into the open. There just wasn’t time…
Board’s shoes smacked the sidewalk decisively. He walked smartly past lawns shorter and greener than his own, Technicolor flowers planted in front of insect houses that were painted aqua and pink and robin’s egg blue. At the corner where the boys had vanished, where a white-painted picket fence half-drowned in vines or ivy formed a right angle, he turned. He walked through the restless blue shadows of oak trees. He heard a church bell ringing the hour, but though he wasn’t listening to it closely he could swear it rang too many times.
As he walked, he had begun to fear the obvious: that the boys had outdistanced him long ago. That they would fly and fly, down this street and that, without returning to their house until supper time, hours from now. But in fact, he didn’t end up walking far. He was only just beginning to feel the sweat running down his sides, trickling in the small of his back, and only just beginning to experience shortness of breath when he saw the two bikes lying on their sides on one of the plastic-green lawns.
Board strode up its brick path, bordered by flowers. A porch had been affixed to the front of this insect (obviously one which didn’t rotate in its foundation, not that his did anymore). Board mounted the front steps, entered the shade of the porch. His footsteps clumping across it sounded hollow, disturbing, as if it were a high wooden scaffold. There was a black circle tattooed next to the front door, and when he prodded it with his finger, the huge insect made a buzzing noise inside its body that Board could even hear out here.
After a few moments, a man approached. Board could see him through a screen door that made him look staticky like a poor TV image. The man pushed it open on squealing hinges and looked out at him. “Yeah?”
“Do you have two sons?” Board panted. His heart was chugging from the sheer exhaustion of the walk. Not fear. His voice had been firm, like a policeman’s.
“Yeah. Why?”
“Your kids…those boys…” What? Had just beaten or even tried to murder another child? He hadn’t witnessed it. But he knew what they’d done to him. The Asian woman. “Your boys found a corpse over in the abrasive factory’s parking lot…”
“Yeah, I know…they told me they saw one.”
“Well, they not only saw it…they were playing with it. Doing…bad things to it. And when I told them to stop, they left it on my…”
“That was you?” the man cut in, taking a step across his threshold. “You’re that crazy old man who shot a gun at them?”
“I didn’t shoot it at them…I just shot it in the air to get their…”
The man moved forward again, but this time followed through with his momentum, had a hold of Board’s polo shirt, still kept moving forward, drivi
ng Board backwards across the wooden porch, back to its front steps.
“You ever shoot at my kids again I’ll fucking kill you, you hear me you old fart? I’ll fucking blow your head off!” So saying, the father of the bike-riding boys let go of Board with a final thrust forward. Board half-flailed in empty space for a split-second, a comic pratfall from some movie, and then was falling backwards, down the porch’s steps. When he landed, it was sprawled on his back, almost upside-down on the stairs, his head on the sidewalk and his feet propped above him. “Get out of here!” the man bellowed down at him, and then he stomped back to the screen door and slammed it behind him. Board heard more roaring inside, raspy and furious, though whether the man was berating his sons or complaining to the police on the phone Board didn’t know.
He was in too much pain for clear thought. His back had struck against the edges of the steps, and though he had reflexively tried to draw his head forward, he had still managed to crack the back of his skull against the pavement.
First he rolled his legs to the left, off the steps. Then he rolled onto his side, curled in a partial fetal position. The movement caused him to suck in his breath sharply. It felt as though a railroad spike had been driven between his shoulder blades. His lower right back, just above his hip, felt bruised to the bone. His right elbow was wet; bleeding, he realized. Rolling onto his knees, now, made him feel like his whole spinal column was being pulled through his mouth along with the sound of his groan. But he rose to his feet, staggering back a step. Straightened. And turned his head toward the cloudy metal web of the screened door.
It still sounded as though a monster were raging inside. Had the boys’ two voices joined in? It was a hellish, horrifying sound. A cacophony from Cerberus’ three heads…
For almost a minute, Board stood at the foot of the steps, clutching his gouged elbow in his hand, paralyzed with anger too great to articulate or even act upon. But there was also a fear he had to admit to. It made the anger worse.
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