by Boston Teran
“Come on. Just one. There’s nothing worse than ruining your liver alone.”
“Well, when you put that kind of spin on it, who could say no.”
As Arthur follows John Lee to the bar at the far end of the living room, he looks up one hallway toward the bedrooms and then down a short hall to the kitchen. “Maureen here?”
“Maureen, no, thank God. It’s the maid’s night out. Bad joke, I know.”
John Lee slips around the bar and puts his hands out like the homey shape of death embracing its next corpse. “What may I serve you, sir?”
Arthur holds up his hand, spreading the thumb and index finger about two inches apart.
“An admirable distance of a choice, sir.”
John Lee pours three hard jiggers of Scotch into a glass and then adds a single cube of ice. “Let her sail.”
The two glasses touch and sound off one clean note.
“Here’s to friendship,” says John Lee.
“Friendship.”
“It’s all we have, you know.” Then, as if he were burned down with disappointment, adds, “Really.”
“Yeah,” says Arthur. He sips his Scotch, then almost as an afterthought, he says, “And family.”
“Family.” John Lee’s mouth sneers into the womb of the glass. “Now, are we talking the Brady Bunch family or the Manson family?”
He laughs, his fingers fumble gathering up his drink.
“Jesus, when you’re loaded.”
“Who’s loaded?” John Lee looks down at his hands. “ ’Cause my hands are stumbling over to my drink? I’m suffering from an early case of Parkinson’s, is all.”
“John Lee, for …”
“I am.”
Arthur just shakes his head. The whole reason he came over is getting sidetracked by the ridiculous. But he knows he’s got to drop the truth on him. He reaches inside his coat pocket and takes out the envelope Bob gave him. He slides it across the bar.
“You need to read this.”
John Lee puts his cocktail down. “What is it? My Dear John letter. You breaking up with me after all these years?”
“Just read it.”
Arthur waits, watches John Lee have at it. He does a little mental accounting while he waits.
You have two men. They’ve pretty much walked their world together. Cut the same years. Bled in rituals. Laughed through their disgraces. Toughed out more than enough downers. Shared crimes, inconsequential and otherwise. Survived all that fast-food social bullshit of the seventies and eighties. But he agonizes over whether, if he met John Lee cold, sat down in a bar with him and had a few drinks, just like now, would they have anything in common? Would there be anything of character to moor their boats to? Probably not. John Lee has slipped away since …
“You didn’t stop him!”
“I couldn’t,” says Arthur.
“Couldn’t, or didn’t?”
“Couldn’t.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“I tried. What do you think, I’d let him just go off—”
“Shut the fuck up a minute,” shouts John Lee. He stands there seething. He flashes on bits of the letter: “She was in a cult … believes she has information … a feeling Gabi is alive …” He checks to see if the girl is named in the letter. She isn’t.
“What’s the girl’s name?” asks John Lee.
“I don’t know.”
“What did she look like?”
“She was a junkie.”
“What did she look like?”
“Medium height. Thin. Large eyes, short hair. Clean her up she wouldn’t be half ba—”
“Well, this is fuckin’ brilliant!” John Lee is dead cold sober. His mind is working through the faces he’s seen run with Cyrus, quick as fingers working the beads of an abacus. It’s not the girl he saw with him the night of the murder. He’s sure of that.
He takes a long drink of his cocktail. Long enough so it eats at the horror that’s setting in.
Arthur sees how bad John Lee looks, and he’s worried now he didn’t stop Bob.
“Just fuckin’ brilliant.”
“I couldn’t tie him down.”
“You could have called me right then.”
“I thought about it, but if there was one chance in a million of getting Gabi back … I mean, we haven’t had one break in this thing and …”
“Jesus, Arthur. How stupid could you be letting something like this happen? She could end up cutting his throat when he’s asleep and dumping him in a hole somewhere, and he won’t be found till some idiot hiker stumbles over a skull and …”
“Alright, goddamn it. Enough. I fucked up.”
18
The Ferryman has pretty much outlined the great myth he planned to ink. Scarified on Bob’s biceps is a video camera humanized to resemble the deformed Quasimodo. From its lens eye, drooping down over the broken lamplight jaw, comes blossoming smoke that shapes up Bob’s shoulder and across part of his chest like a wing, or a shroud. Its black-lined span has talons on seven bony peaks.
Throughout the wing, or shroud, are hideous faces. Above the hunched bell ringer are two tattered flags. The motto on the first is ONE LOVE and on the second HELTER SKELTER.
“It’ll all be in hues of black,” the Ferryman tells Bob. “You got the perfect skin for black.”
Bob sits there, not moving, not joining in conversation.
“It’ll be like the Flashman meets Fra Angelico. You ever read any of the Flashman books?”
“No.”
“No. Too bad. You don’t know what I’m talking about, then. But they have real style. Now about Fra Angelico. You ever see any of his paintings or see a book of his paintings?”
“No.”
“No. Well, shit. We just ain’t got nothing in common to talk about today.”
There is a glint of mockery in the Ferryman’s eyes. As he goes to put needle to the flesh, he can see Bob’s arms tense up. He leans over and with his claw takes a joint from an ashtray made of rattlesnake skulls.
“Great tattoo art does not come from bullshit stencils like you see in those dick shop windows,” he says. “You can preconceive on paper, of course, but in the end the real masterpiece quality shit, like I’m doin’ right here, is drawn. It’s all hand and eye coordination … Like a pilot. Plus vision. You have to have the vision.”
He relights the joint and gives his lungs a good harsh dragon’s worth. He offers the joint to Bob. But Bob isn’t having.
“It’s got to fit the skin,” says the Ferryman, continuing. “It’s modeled to the flesh, and so it becomes the flesh as the flesh becomes it. And it is the only true art that breathes. And like all true art, it dies when you die. That’s how it is circumscribed, since there are limits to the flesh and limits to the art. It’s like a marriage, babe. Which is a black art unto itself. Know what I mean?”
On that, the Ferryman gets a rise out of Bob. A sharp grimace out toward the gray hills. Bundles of muscles already taut along his biceps torque up through the trapezius.
The Ferryman uses his electric needle as a pointer. “You got a lot of anger in you, Bob Whatever. You don’t relax, the body art can’t reach its full potential. You understand?”
Not exactly something Bob wants to hear as Case walks by with two handguns pressed down into her belt and a shotgun free-floating in one hand.
She glances at Bob. “He hasn’t bullshit you to death, has he?”
“He’s working on it.”
“You find what you need, girl?”
“I’m narrowing down my choices.”
The dogs have taken to following her. She lays the handguns and the shotgun on a picnic table.
“I’ll pick out the backup weapons later.” She glances at the house. “I got to use the head. Mind if I go inside?”
The Ferryman has leaned back into Bob’s shoulder. He nods.
She lets the screen door slap closed behind her. Once inside, she watches the Ferryman and Bob. She crosses the room. It’s a sh
abby, lightless hole of a place. There are crates of doodads on the floor and tables. There’s an old hutch in the corner, something straight out of fifties suburbia, that looks like it bounced out of a Bekins storage truck doing about fifty.
She looks over at the hutch to see if the scrapbooks the Ferryman keeps of every tattoo he’s ever inked are still there.
They are, cornered by sunlight, in a pile next to an empty rusting birdcage. Case looks out the window to make sure the Ferryman is still working on Bob’s shoulder. She leans out of the way so she can’t be spotted as she takes the top book off the pile and begins to search.
She bites her lip as her fingers go at it. Page after page of snapshots runs by: Poor-looking chickies with spiders painted near their clits or dragon devils climbing over the hump of their blowhole. A Hawaiian with the portrait of a pit bull named Dylan carrying a woman’s bloody dress between his teeth muscled across a forearm. A bald biker with Sitting Bull tattooed on his thigh. A couple of gringo kids in a lineup, shirtless, with entities that resemble a neo hip-hop version of the Alien creature across their chests. A punker with a red octopus across his back.
But what she’s looking for is a no-show. She takes the next book. Pages of skin surf jobs, but nothing more. She sneaks a look out the window. The Ferryman is still having at Bob. She’s been in here awhile now. She grabs the third book. Nothing.
The Ferryman isn’t one to buy smoke, and she knows it. He’s out there counting the clock. What the fuck. She’s gonna confront him anyway. But she’d rather have the facts to back up the cash she’s gonna try and tempt him with.
Halfway through the fourth scrapbook she nails it. And it doesn’t go down nice. There is a loose snapshot of Lena in a small pile of photos that haven’t yet been glued in place. She’s sitting in the easy chair smacked out of her mind, with a stoned, sloppy slur of a look, her hand held up for the camera like she was showing off an engagement ring.
It’s all right there. Signed, dated, all but notarized on the back of her ring finger: 12/21/95.
Being right is nothing but grief, and grief itself has become a perversity. Chance oblivion. Chance it, girl. It’s all part of the dark creative we call life. There is nothing about being right that death can’t fix.
She sits, a block of window light burning right before her eyes. Everything smells of must and desert. Minutes clock past, and she keeps staring into that blanched space. Her mind is filled with a thousand excuses to be dishonest, but all they really do is make her cry.
Case comes walking out into the sunlight like nobody’s business. She is carrying a small plate of food.
“I robbed your refrigerator.”
“We were wondering what took you so long.”
As she walks past she tries to pick up something in the Ferryman’s tone, a shift in his manner possibly, that might mean he’s suspicious. But he’s just a needle at hard work on his vision. An artisan preparing a prince for a coronation, or a cadaver for Potter’s Field.
She notices the Ferryman has the Book of Changes out, and Bob is stuck there rattling the three I Ching coins in one hand. She offers Bob a taste from her plate, but he’s just a bundle of impatience sipping on a beer, and he turns her down.
“Give me another toss there, Bob Whatever,” says the Ferryman.
Bob tosses the coins as Case goes over to the picnic table where she left the guns. The dogs glide along beside her, following the smell of food. “You’re making that poor motherfucker toss the coins,” she says.
The Ferryman has Bob repeat the toss till he has the proper configuration of lines and half-lines for the correct hexagram or sign, which he then begins to artfully paint onto Bob’s skin above each taloned edge of the wing, or shroud.
When the Ferryman doesn’t answer she hits him with, “Fortune-telling bullshit.”
“Shut the fuck up, girl. I’m doing nothing. He throws the coins. He decides the fate. I only report the facts.”
“Fortune-telling bullshit.”
“You told me to do a good job here and—”
“I know. How much longer?”
He takes another hit off his joint. She can see he’s totally ripped. And when he’s like that he could go on forever, or till he runs out of flesh.
“Shut the fuck up, girl,” he says again, mouthing silently the words.
She sits on the edge of the table and wraps some bread around a piece of sorry-looking spiced chicken. She tries to get a little food down, watching that stoned fuck go about his business. She gets a flash. In her pocket she can feel the snapshot of Lena she stole clip against her skin as the dogs grab at the space around her till they are one beastly shape with half a dozen heads snarfing up the crumbs that fall across her jeans.
Bob watches Case put the plate down and begin a final quality-control check of the weapons. She takes the revolver first. He’s got a pretty good eye for guns and can see the pistol she’s holding might be a Ruger, a 100 maybe, with some kind of modified grip that looks to be partly chipped.
A revolver’s beauty, beyond its durability, is its simplicity of operation. It looks clean enough as she puts the wheelgun through its paces. He watches the cylinder turn, the trigger and hammer click-clock in a smooth crisp motion.
But it’s her hand and fingers that he notices most. She goes about her chore with a grace and ease that is disturbing in its beauty. Her face is not taut, her muscles do not stretch. She is like a moment from some cooled-out Zen school.
Case lays the revolver down and takes up a smaller automatic. Maybe a Smith and Wesson, or a Firestar. It could be a Walther .380. Whatever it is, she’s no fool. She has picked two always guns.
She takes a magazine pouch from her pocket, slides an extra magazine into it, then hitches it to her belt. She takes the automatic and goes through the reloading process. He watches her every move checking the weapon’s performance: palm down on the floor plate, index finger extended down the mag pouch, thumb circled around the body, goddamn her—her hand comes up quick, the index finger offhand and even with the top bullet in the mag, the gun turned in the shooting hand to let the thumb depress the mag release—god-fuckin’-damn, she’s going through your basic government-issue speed reload, and those ex-junkie’s fingers have at it, and she’s not watching the gun, either, she’s doing it like a blind state trooper. Her hand flats the top of the slide and tugs it back, and she’s ready to hot-load some ass.
There is a rawness to how she moves. Hand and weapon turn a series of mechanical moves into some poetic dance. She is sweating from the sun, sweating under her arms. Even the shiny metal of the gun has begun to look a little wet with her perspiration. And Bob’s not immune to it. It’s as if some door marked “forbidden” had opened just a breath and he saw something, felt something, before it closed again.
When she’s done she lays the automatic beside the revolver. She takes another piece of chicken and sticks it between her teeth. She squats down and goes face-to-face with the mangiest scrap of dog in the pack and lets it snap the meat right out from between her teeth.
She stands and, taking a weapon in each hand, approaches Bob. She holds both weapons up. “Well, Bob Whatever, which one of these is you?”
He sees the automatic is actually a lightweight Colt .45. He glances at the revolver.
“That a Ruger?”
“Yeah.”
“It’ll do.”
“How would I have guessed that would be your choice?”
The gun does a half loop between her fingers, and she hands it to him, grip first.
“I see they’re both always guns,” he says.
“If you can’t hide them in your skivvies, they ain’t worth dick.”
She nudges up to the Ferryman. “How much longer this poor bastard got with the needle?”
The Ferryman is working the sixth talon up with a sign of the I Ching. “One more after this.”
Case slips the automatic into her belt, reaches for the pack of cigarettes in Bob’s shirt pocke
t. She lights the cigarette, heads over to the trunk where the guns are kept. “Fortune-telling bullshit,” she says.
The Ferryman kicks back. “Bob Whatever rolls the coins. I don’t ask. I don’t answer. Time does that for me. For us all.”
He leans forward as if to share a secret, but he says nothing. Using his claw as a roach clip, he rubs his nose across the upcurling smoke. His breath chugs through a healthy snort. Then he winks at Bob. “Last stop before the big dance. Right, Bob Whatever?”
“Just get this over with.”
“Okay, Bob Whatever.”
Case balances herself on the rim of the trunk, and sitting there rummages through boxes of ammunition till she finds .45 shells. She starts loading her extra magazines. “Fortune-telling bullshit,” she repeats.
“That’s not what Jung said, girl. Nope. He knew that divining techniques were seen as foolish arcane games. But to him there was a sublime connection. As a matter of fact, he said they were based on the sound principles of synchronicity.”
Case finishes finding a home for the bullets. “That’s a lot of fuckin’ cha-cha. You got too much smoke in your head.”
The Ferryman eyes her coolly. “Let’s look at this by way of example. Take you two. Just a couple of pilgrims driving down from Mallsville to pick up some groceries and be on your way. Who knows what you’re looking for? Who knows what you’ve found? Who knows was this just a random stop?”
Case sees now he’s fucking with her head just enough to let her and Bob know the game isn’t happening without him knowing. Bob’s had it. He sits forward.
“It’s done.”
“One more throw will tell it.”
Case gets up. “Leave it.”
“You won’t be able to leave it undone. No way. You’ll have to know.” Bob pushes away the Ferryman’s arm. The Ferryman twists around like some disordered aesthetic and wipes at the sky with his needle. “I have seen too many helicopters dance through spitfire and not fall. And others yet they fall … I always wondered what is the chance chance plays in any of it. There’s no difference. There’s always more helicopters. And more spitfire.” He begins to riff Dylan: “ ‘And I just sit here, watchin’ the river flow.’ ”