by John Shirley
They passed buildings without doors where men squatted, muttering; they passed a church from which clean and formal families passed, leaving Mass; in the same block an almost fleshless man in a sailor cap chanted, “Get the good works here, your clean works, t’ree dollars for chew’ buddy, good points, nobody use, clean works…” And just beyond him they passed a laundromat where sweating, stocky Latin housewives fanned themselves in the steamy interior and laughed and gossiped. Lanyard and Jo-Jo passed a long, dark car in which two black men in suits took turns counting a fat roll of bills; and they passed a group of children playing tag, shouting “You’re it—” in Spanish.
Then they stopped in front of a high stoop, the stone chipped so that some of the steps weren’t quite there; to either side Spanish Marxist posters were peeling from the façade; posters for rock bands, posters for Latin music shows, posters for discos, posters overlapping and muting one another the length of the block, between doors; the trash cans stood, bent and blackened like giant cigarette butts in ashtray groups near the bent NO PARKING traffic sign.
Across the street black men and a mulatto woman stood passing reefer around in the front door of the Suffolk Social Club, Members Only. At intervals along the block shopkeepers rolled metal-link door covers down to block the storefronts for the night, locking them twice.
Jo-Jo tilted his head toward the stoop. Lanyard leaned against a brick face in his best imitation of nonchalance. “So,” said Jo-Jo, “Papa Merino, he’s up there. Now, this is what the old man”—Maguss—“say we do: They got a shooting gallery up there too, right? So we go up, we buy the shit, some works, then we go in the shooting gallery and do up a little; that way we’re inside. Then they see we’re cool, we’re not cops, we’re doing it up. So then maybe if I give the green, then maybe we gettuh see the Papa. I talk to ’em for you, then you talk to the Papa. He speaks good In-glish. Right?”
“I’ve got to shoot the stuff up?” Lanyard whispered. “I can’t do that. I’ve never done it, and anyway I’ve got to be able to think clearly.”
“It’s cool. I be makin’ your hit for you, my man. I give you a hit of water, nothin’ but water, an’ it won’t hurt you. No dope in it. They won’t see. An’ I’ll do you up, guys here they do each other all the time. I just hope they don’t ask to see your tracks. I show ’em mine. Sometimes they want to see your tracks if they think you might be a pig, right?”
“So let’s get it over with.”
Jo-Jo said, “Come on,” and led him up the broken steps. Endless scenarios of catastrophe were staged for Lanyard’s inner eye: he and Jo-Jo make the buy just as the police raid—the police raid only when a pusher hasn’t paid the precinct bagman—and Lanyard goes to prison for possession; some clumsy movement causes his gun to fall from his pocket, and the nervous junkies inside take him for a hit man and descend on him with lead pipes; someone insists Lanyard shoot up where they can see it, so they know he’s all right, and he’s forced to mainline a heavy hit of China White, after which he pukes and babbles; they are set upon and robbed and murdered and dumped in the East River. All credible possibilities.
Jo-Jo and Lanyard stepped inside the doorless hallway lit only by an unshaded bulb on the landing above. The hall reeked of piss, the floor sagged; the wallpaper was indistinguishable from graffiti, and phantasmagoric whorls of mold. A man with a beard and thick glasses—the right lens was cracked—blocked their way, stepping from the shadows beneath the staircase. His mouth drooped, showing blackened teeth; a half-empty Coca-Cola bottle in one hand. Lanyard’s fingers tightened around the gun in his pocket.
Jo-Jo said, “Yo, wha’s happenin’,” and continued in telegraphic bursts of Spanish. The two conversed for three minutes; the bearded man now and then indicating Lanyard and asking questions. Then he shrugged, and opened his hand, palm up. There was a moment of awkwardness, as Jo-Jo waited for Lanyard to produce the money and Lanyard waited to be told to produce the money. Was it the right time?
Jo-Jo turned to him and said, “Wheresuh green, man?”
“Uh—how much?”
“Forty for two good bags, six more for two sets uh works. Right?”
“Yeah.”
Lanyard took the money from his left-hand jacket pocket and, carefully detaching his right hand from his gun, counted forty-six dollars into Jo-Jo’s palm.
Jo-Jo counted the money out for the street connection, who went down the hall with it. He knocked on the door of the only apartment on the first floor. There was a hole cut in the door, at eye level, the size of an apple. A panel slid back, and someone looked through the hole; another interchange in Spanish. Then the bearded man passed the money through the hole. The panel shut. They waited two minutes more. From somewhere came the sound of water dripping in an upper hallway. The halls were unheated, dank; Lanyard gradually became aware of noises, from the upper stories; Latin music, people laughing, the shuffle of feet, a woman shouting at someone, the someone shouting back in gruff male tones, a few Anglo-Saxon expressions, like “cunt” and “fuck off,” mixed with Spanish.
The panel slid aside again; two foil packages closed with green plastic tape were passed to the bearded man. He waited, and then two finger-length paper-wrapped sets of syringes were thrust through.
With a jerk of his head the man with the beard led Lanyard and Jo-Jo up the stairs; sometimes they had to step over gaps in the wooden staircase—where there should have been stairs there were rectangular holes into darkness. Lanyard had had only a few hours’ sleep; for a moment he thought that the darkness in the stair gaps was somehow thickening, rising in tendrils like mist off a subterranean lake to entwine his legs.
He shook himself as they reached the third landing. Exhaustion was catching up with him. He felt as if he were struggling through layers of tepid liquid wax.
Down a hallway with a floor so raked it might have belonged to a funhouse, and at the end, a metal door with a peephole opened to inspect them. The bearded man spoke something that might have been “Open sesame” in Spanish, for all Lanyard knew, and the door swung inward. Lanyard resisted the impulse to put his hand on his gun as they went in. A haggard middle-aged woman stood by the door, looked each of them over once, and moved aside for then. She didn’t seem surprised to see Lanyard, though he was the only Caucasian there.
Through a barren hallway, into a barren central room, a turn to the right through a sagging doorway, and into a long, narrow bedroom—the “shooting gallery.” You need someplace to get off, man? We got a place you can go, cost you just two bucks more. The place? Splintery wooden floor. No furniture. Boarded-over window. One person using the room, a woman who sat hunched on a blanket against the far wall; part of the tree-patterned, once-blue wallpaper had peeled and curled protectively, like a palm frond, over her bleached-blond head. Her face was hidden in her drawn-up knees; she rocked slightly, her scarred arms locked about her shins. She wore red pantyhose and black stiletto heels and a sweatshirt printed with a slogan he couldn’t see. Her works, the syringe in a water glass like a spent insect, were on the floor beside her left foot. The pink baby blanket was sealed to the floor at one corner by a dried puddle of vomit. Lanyard was relieved no one else was in the room. They sat on their haunches in a corner opposite the girl. The haggard woman left them. Hands shaking only slightly, working with thrifty expertise, Jo-Jo opened the packages, balancing the syringes across the open top of an aspirin bottle of water he took from his coat pocket. From the other pocket he took a spoon and a bit of dirty cotton; he frowned over the cotton, “Fuckin’ cotton is too dirty innyway.” He tossed it aside, then carefully opened the foil wraps of heroin; he glanced up to see that no one was looking in the door. The girl was still nodded out across from them. So Jo-Jo slipped one of the foil packages into his coat pocket, and filled Lanyard’s syringe with water; he recapped the syringe’s needle and handed it to Lanyard. “Hold dat, man,” he whispered, “cover up the inside with your hand so they can’t see it ain’t got nothin’ but watuh.” Lanyar
d nodded, took off his jacket, rolled up a sleeve, and took the syringe in his hand, cupping its chamber.
As Jo-Jo used a cigarette lighter to cook the yellow-flecked white powder in his singed spoon, Lanyard watched the girl across from them; she was beginning to lean to the right, and looked as if she might collapse entirely. She might be more than nodded out. She might be overdosed. Lanyard thought about calling an ambulance. But that would jeopardize the meeting with Jesus “Papa” Merino. And there were a great many more lives to be considered. How many potential victims? Thousands. Because if Maguss were right, if the ritual worked—or even if it only seemed to work—there were numberless people, hordes and hidden armies of people, who would be willing to sacrifice a stranger if they thought it would turn their fortunes. More people than would ever admit it. It could become a national disease, like Nazism had been for another country, once.
Jo-Jo had filled his syringe, had tied up with a piece of lamp wire that lay on the floor for just that purpose, and now a tiny red splash, oddly like an attenuated nuclear-blast cloud, blossomed into the chamber as he worked the needle into one of the few unscarred veins on his forearm. He’d struck blood.
Lanyard looked at the red blossom, and remembered the blood he had seen on the subway platform and in the cellars, blood splashed on women and little girls, and wondered what the connection was; somehow he knew there was a connection with the blood in the syringe.
Jo-Jo was pressing the plunger home. Lanyard looked away. It was too personal to watch. He sat on the cold floor, feeling the chill seep into his buttocks and spine, and waited. He could have fallen asleep, except for the cold.
He heard water trickling from a drainpipe somewhere outside the boarded windows, and sounds from another apartment: music and laughter. This one was so barren…everything that could be sold had been. “You gimme a dollar for this chair, man? Okay, a half-dollar. Okay, a quarter.” Jo-Jo was nodding beside him, murmuring to himself, head drooping. Scratching his face, scratching his crotch with lazy motions of his dirty-nail fingers, Jo-Jo squinted at Lanyard through deep-set eyes. “Soon,” he said, to Lanyard’s unspoken question. And then, “Take the cord, tie up.”
Gingerly, Lanyard unwrapped the wire from Jo-Jo’s biceps, and, trying not to think about it, wrapped it about the biceps of his own right arm. He tightened the cord, and pumped the arm to make his veins bulge. Moving slowly but deliberately, his rush over, Jo-Jo took the syringe from Lanyard, uncapped the needle, shook it for bubbles, spritzed a little water from the glistening point, and probed Lanyard’s arm. Lanyard hardly felt the puncture. Jo-Jo was smiling; he took his time, enjoying it, apparently, when Lanyard’s blood formed the tiny mushroom-cloud in the chamber.
There were footsteps in the hall; the tired-faced woman, overweight, wearing a soiled blue-flower-print muu-muu, leaned against the door frame to watch, just as Jo-Jo pressed the plunger home. Lanyard shuddered as the cold water dispersed in his veins. He waited, half afraid that Jo-Jo had put something in it after all—and perhaps a little disappointed when it was clear he hadn’t. He pretended to nod, drooping slightly, not wanting to overdo it.
The woman went away.
Jo-Jo removed the needle and set it aside. He took out the second foil package and started to unwrap it.
Lanyard glanced at the woman across the room. She’d fallen to her side, her left cheek on her arm, her face exposed now. A gaunt face, pocked, familiar.
“Julie,” Lanyard murmured. The woman who’d taken his money. The woman who’d seduced him when he was lonely and stoned, had pretended to befriend him. Had used him. Had sacrificed him, in a way. She’d used him to get money for junk.
An anger Lanyard had held-in check for a week rose in him. He put his jacket back on, feeling to be sure the gun was in place. He stood and walked directly to her, hissing, “Julie—remember me?”
What would he have done? Would he have kicked her? Would he have pulled the gun and threatened her, maybe shoot her kneecap away? Would he have slapped her? Would he have tried to drag her down the hall to the police? Would he have simply shouted at her, tried to humiliate her, to give her a sense of the humiliation he’d felt when he’d awakened and found himself ripped off?
What would he have done if he hadn’t found that she was dead?
She was blue: one of her eyes was open, crusting as he watched; the other was shut, and sticky-edged. Blood and vomit leaked slowly from her half-open mouth. She was quite dead. He could see the lettering on her sweatshirt now: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.
And Lanyard was ashamed. When she’d stolen from him she had been just a machine, programmed by drugs, beyond compunctions. Just another victim. And he’d been seriously considering kicking her in the kidneys.
Gagging, he turned away—and found Jo-Jo cooking up another shot of heroin. Lanyard strode across the room and kicked the dope aside. He drew his gun, and with the other hand put a finger across his lips. “That’s my money you’re shooting,” he whispered. “And if you do it you won’t be in shape to help me. Maguss said you were reliable. I think he knew you before you were strung out.”
Jo-Jo was staring at the spoon on the floor, the splash where dope seeped between the floorboards. He made a small sound in his throat. He looked up at Lanyard, blinking, his face twitching; he stood, slowly. Lanyard took a step back.
Jo-Jo teetered, and took a deep breath. Mechanically, he rolled his shirtsleeve down. Scratching his face, his arms, his crotch, his face again, he said, “Pudduh gun away an’ we go see Papa.”
Lanyard slipped the small pistol back in his jacket pocket. But he left his hand in the pocket, and the angle of his wrist made it clear to Jo-Jo that he kept the gun ready. “Take me to see him. Hundred dollars fee, right?” He had to repeat the whispered question; Jo-Jo wasn’t hearing clearly.
“Three hunnerd.”
“Bullshit. Maguss said we could see him for one hundred.”
“We try it. One hunnerd.” He held out his hand.
Lanyard shook his head. “No, you just make the deal and I give’em the money.”
“Hey, you know I better…”
“I said forget it.”
“Shit, I don’ care.” He scratched his nose. His cheek. His neck. His crotch. His nose.
He shuffled out the door. Looking as needled-out as he knew how, Lanyard went with him; he didn’t look at Julie’s corpse, but out of the corner of one eye he thought he saw eel shapes swirling in the air above her, whirling to converge…
The haggard woman in the shapeless dress and mules sat on the floor in a corner of the front room, reading a Spanish language newspaper, El Diario; her chunky arms were bare, and Lanyard saw no track marks on them. He supposed that she didn’t live here, that she wasn’t into junk. She was an employee. Whose?
Jo-Jo spoke listlessly to her, nodding toward Lanyard. She shook her head and said a word that sounds the same in Spanish, English, and French: “No.”
Lanyard sighed and slid five twenties from his pants pocket; he crouched to count them out for her on the floor. She made a cone of her lips, thinking, and for the first time he noticed that she wore bright red lipstick and dangling seashell earrings. She grunted, swept up the money with one pudgy hand while tossing the newspaper aside with the other. She took a set of keys from her bodice; they hung on a leather string about her neck, She pointed to the door. They waited for her in the hall as she locked the door. She led them down the stairs, muttering to herself obscurely.
They went outside, and to the basement. She took them down the stoop and down into the stairwell to the right of the stoop, below street level; a walk-down basement flat. The woman knocked on the door. It opened a crack, a chain dangling between the door and the frame. She spoke to someone Lanyard couldn’t see, and handed the money through. The door shut again. They waited another minute in the drizzle and the shadow from the stoop; the street lights had come on while he was in the building.
Lanyard thought about Julie. The shadows seemed to thick
en in the stairwell. “The Empire Strikes Back,” he muttered, ignoring the quizzical looks from the other two.
The door opened, unfolding a yellow fan of light onto the concrete step at Lanyard’s feet. The woman from upstairs gestured briskly for Jo-Jo to leave, for Lanyard to enter. He went in alone. Inside, he faced a slender young woman dark as the black-iron fence around the stairwell, wearing an indigo wrap resembling a sari, a red scarf over her kinky black hair, and no shoes. She spoke to him in what he supposed was a Haitian dialect. He spread his hands to show incomprehensible, smiled, and said, “Papa Merino? Can I see him?”
She said something else foreign to him, and pointed along the hallway. It was a shock after the desolation of the upstairs. The walls were well painted in dull gold trimmed in red. The crushed-glass-coated ceiling fixtures were new; the earth-umber rug was clean and thick. Lanyard walked down the hall, toward a tinkling of soft music, the girl just behind him. To his surprise, the music was an “easy listening” FM station playing from a desk radio in a room that he thought of as an “office.” The woman motioned for him to wait there. She moved silently from sight, down the hall to his left, leaving the door open. There were no chairs, no place to sit but the floor. He stood, stretching, rocking on the balls of his feet, his gut tightening with uncertainty.
The walls were lined with bookshelves filled with as many paperbacks as hardbound books, of all varieties. There was a shelf of leatherbound books, their spines printed with a lettering he didn’t recognize, as foreign as Sanskrit.
A desk against one wall was the only item of furniture. He felt exposed in the light from a tall stainless steel floor lamp beside the desk. The plastic radio on the desk top cooed a watered-down version of “I Got You Under My Skin.” Behind the steel bookshelves, the wails were cork. The concrete floor was bare, painted white. Here and there were red smudges, as if chalk lines had been hastily wiped away. The floor sloped slightly toward a white-painted drain. For catching blood? The Santeria cult frequently got in trouble with the ASPCA for sacrificing animals. Mostly chickens and rabbits.