by John Prindle
“Jesus,” Ricky said.
Moe had this weird look on his face: a pinched grimace that he never wore in life.
Then there was a sound like something from outer space—a warp-speed drive, a rubbery thhhmmmmp—a sound I somehow knew. Ricky cried out. I spun around and saw Clayton Shaw propped up on one elbow, holding a pistol with a silencer.
Some moments really do play out in slow-motion. It must be a thing with the human brain. If you've ever been in a car wreck, you know how those crunching, glass shard, metallic seconds go on for years. Yet they're also over in a second. The mind makes slow work out of fast and scary data, and that's how it felt as I raised my Beretta and fired three rounds at the scrawny kid. They tore right through him, and he withered into a bloody mess on the hallway floor.
“Goddammit!” Ricky said, “that big-eared mother shot my leg.”
The pink-haired broad crawled right on top of that scrawny piece of dead meat, and she sobbed and howled like a demon, and the things she was babbling would have fit nicely in a padded room at the nuthouse. Maybe she really did love that kid. I guess we all need someone to wrap our arms around, even if you have stretched-out earlobes and pink hair.
She stood up and looked at us. I think she must have taken a snort or two of something before we got there. She sprinted toward us with her hands stretched out. It looked like Satan himself had given her a push, and I swear if I'd have seen actual claws coming out from her fingertips I wouldn't have thought it unusual.
Ricky blasted her like he was shooting a rat in a junkyard. Pop, pop, pop: he put three right into her. Then he limped over and kicked her corpse in the gut.
“How's about that, you pink-haired nut,” he said.
He grabbed a dirty dishtowel from the kitchen and tied it around his leg. Then he plopped down on the sofa.
“I always hated that kid,” Ricky said.
“What about Wade?” I said.
“He's gotta go.”
“Tonight?”
“Figure it out. I'm going to Mac McDyer's. Get this leg taken care of.”
Mac is a veterinarian, but he's not opposed to doing unlicensed medical work for some extra cash. Ricky stood up and limped down the hallway, cursing his luck for having to step over the corpses he'd helped create.
“Get Dan the Man,” Ricky said. “He'll know what to do.”
That was how I ended up sitting alone in the West Virginia Boys' house, my only company the corpses of Moe and Clayton and some pink-haired, nameless broad. I talked to Moe just to pass the time. I asked him if there really was any tunnel of light, and if we ever get any answers. But that grimace on his face sure wasn't selling me on the afterlife. If he'd seen anything on the other side, he sure didn't like the looks of it. I watched a housefly walk around on his nose and lips. Sometimes it stopped its fidgeting, rubbed its legs together, and prayed.
Then I pictured Marcia, at home on the sofa with a glass of wine and her chump husband rubbing her feet. I thought about all kinds of things, like whether or not there are parallel universes bumping up right against our own, and if there are, maybe in the other one I'm some kind of famous ichthyologist, well-respected and published in scientific journals.
I thought about that summer when my foster Mom dropped me off at my Aunt's house in the country, because she was just too busy and sad to deal with me. Then I revised that whole part, and made it so she kept me with her because she loved me so much.
I can think my way into all kinds of swell worlds where I've done important things. I bet that's what everyone does. Hell, the grease-covered guy who's changing the oil in your car is probably living a whole different life in his head. Maybe he's a famous photographer, or an actor on the big screen. This life is far too short. There are so many things we'll never be.
I kept my gun on my lap and I daydreamed that way for quite a while, just watching that fly work its way down into Moe's open mouth and back out again.
Then my phone rang, and I answered it.
“It's me,” Dan the Man said. “Make sure the door is unlocked.”
I crept down the hall and turned the deadbolt. Ten seconds later, Dan the Man was inside of the house. He put his hands on his knees, leaned over and studied the corpse of Clayton. Then he walked over to the girl, crouched down, pulled out the silver Cross pen he carried in his coat pocket, and pushed it through a swatch of her hair like a forensic scientist who'd just found an important clue.
“What is it?” I said.
“Pink hair. Where's Moe?”
We went to the living room. Dan the Man studied Moe's troubled corpse.
“That kid was a good earner,” he said. “Let's get these bodies into the kitchen, so the brother don't see 'em when he moseys in.”
We finished dragging the bodies, and we found some bath towels and wiped up the hallway blood. It was the kind of housework that can only be done on your hands and knees. No cutting corners. Dan the Man found a blue plastic bucket in the pantry, and we filled it with hot soapy water.
“I'm gonna use the wire,” he said when we were done cleaning. “When we hear his car pull up, I'll get by the door. You wait here at the kitchen table. If you hear anything at all, the slightest peep, get out there and blow his brains out.”
Dan the Man flopped into the recliner and took out his garotte. Each end of the tarnished wire was bolted through a stubby dowel, and the tool looked like some kind of antique toy, or something to slice through a giant block of cheese.
“It's a Low-E,” Dan said as he pulled it taut.
“A Low-E?”
“Old bass guitar string. My kid plays music.”
“Is he any good?”
“Not really,” Dan the Man said.
Headlights flooded through the little window near the front door, and the engine of Wade's Chevy Nova may as well have been a phone call letting us know he'd arrived. You could even hear the arthritic crunch as he engaged the parking brake.
Dan the Man disappeared. I took my spot near the kitchen table, gun drawn, heart beating.
The sound of the key in the lock.
The twist of the deadbolt.
The creak of the door.
I waited and waited, thinking that I would at least hear some footfalls, a quick gasp, a struggle. The silence was awful. After some ponderous seconds, I walked into the hallway with my gun drawn.
Wade was up off the floor by about a foot, trying desperately to stop the wire that was taking the life from him. But the E string was too deep into the flesh; his fingers just danced along the wire's edge, caressing the fine metal grooves, walking the length of the string, attempting to decode the death-song.
Dan the Man's eyes were sharp and cruel. His tongue rolled out like some strange lizard, and it curled downward and licked the stubble right above his chin. His nostrils flared. He grinned like a snake. Wade's fingers stopped plucking at the string, and his arms dropped to the sides of his body like the soft wings of a killed bird. Dan let the body fall to the floor. A cold breeze sailed through the hallway and carried his words.
“Problem solved.”
Dan the Man said we'd have to take Moe, since the body would get tied back to us. The cops knew Moe, they knew his associates: it was too risky to leave him there. So we rolled him up in a blanket, and Dan the Man backed his Camry up into the driveway, and we tossed Moe into the trunk. I said that we should just wipe things down and get out of there, but Dan had other ideas.
I scoured the garage for flammable liquids, and the West Virginia Boys didn't disappoint. Hillbillies and dangerous chemicals go together like oysters and hot sauce. I found two cans of lighter fluid, and a one gallon square can of kerosene, in a damp cardboard box.
I soaked the upstairs. Dan did the ground floor.
“My life has come full circle,” I said, imagining Bing Crosby crooning into a purple wooded night, while I lay in the snow, an infant, slowly dying.
“This might be good for you,” Dan the Man said. “Catalytic.�
��
“Cathartic,” I said.
He handed me the box of matches.
On the drive back to the office, it felt like the long fingers of the trees were reaching out from the edges of the road, and Moe's corpse haunted me from the dark of the trunk.
“What are we gonna do with him?” I asked Dan the Man.
“You know,” he said.
And that was all we said about it. In some rundown apartment building, Moe's Mom or sister or brother would never really know what had happened to him. They might spend years putting up flyers and asking questions. But he would never be found. I kind of wished I could tell them he'd be gone forever, just so they wouldn't waste so much time.
I asked about Ricky's leg.
“Getting shot is the least of Ricky's problems,” Dan said.
I asked him what he meant. Dan the Man rolled his fingers across the steering wheel, looked over at me, and in the soft light I could tell there was something he didn't want to talk about. I didn't press. You can't convince Dan the Man to tell you anything. He either does or he doesn't.
“You know Jim Steeves?” he finally said.
You couldn't so much as turn on a television without seeing a Red-White-and-Blue Jim Steeves for Congress commercial. He was running against Roslyn Wyer, the Democrat with short hair and thick glasses. I hated both of them. Jim Steeves looks just the way you'd imagine. Thick brown hair and a Superman jaw-line.
“Ricky's been hanging around his daughter,” Dan the Man said.
“So what,” I said.
“Steeves don't like it.”
“So he tells him to knock it off.”
“Eddie's in a real jam now because of it.”
“How so?”
“Frank Conese is pumping money into the campaign. Birds of a feather.”
We rode for a minute in silence. Dan the Man coughed, a real wet jag, and then he spoke with a voice that sounded like it had been run through an old stone mill.
“Eddie's weighing his options.”
That was all he said. That was all I needed to hear.
BING CROSBY
Christmas Eve, 1975. I was six months old, spending the holiday at a drug dealer's house out on state route 52. My Mom had a nose and arms that worked overtime. Her dealer was a loser named Rhett DeFoe: a guy who'd spent more time in the clink than out on the street. He'd just been paroled, and was living back at home with his elderly father. I guess it's hard to see that your own kid is rotten.
My own Dad was spending the holiday at his home away from home, The Hitchin' Post Bar and Grill, where he was well-known for falling off of stools and passing out in the vestibule. Everyone knew that Rhett DeFoe was giving my Mom a little something extra when she stopped by for the stuff. Some of the gossip ran that Rhett was my real Dad, and it's entirely possible.
So my old man was pickled at the Post, and my Mom was scoring nose-candy from her not-so-secret convict lover (you'll never see an episode of Leave It To Beaver with that storyline). Rhett's seventy-three year old father was napping in his recliner, listening to Bing Crosby's I Wish You A Merry Christmas album, when the guys in black leather coats knocked on the front door.
I've heard so many versions. Just like a ghost story, the wildness of the detail depends entirely on the imagination of the teller. Here's what's certain: Rhett had shorted them some of the money, and it wasn't the first time. See, the criminal world works a whole lot like the regular world. Honor, integrity, follow-through—these things matter. Of course I never knew Rhett, but I've met plenty of other guys stamped from the same mold. They cheat and lie, and they'd rat you out for a hundred dollar bill.
They plugged the elderly father first. Then they walked far to the back of the house and into the bedroom, where, according to some versions of the story, my mother was on her knees and Rhett was standing in front of her. They blew a few holes into Rhett and ended his earthly fun. Then the boys had a little holiday party with my Mom before ending her illustrious career as a wife and mother. I was on a blanket on the bed the whole time, crying and doing the things you'd expect a baby to do with a whole lot of racket going on.
Then they did a burn job, gasoline, like me and Dan the Man did to the West Virginia Boys. Lucky for me, one of those thugs had a soft spot. He wrapped me up in the blanket and carried me outside, far away from the house, and laid me down under a pine tree. If it weren't for him, I'd've burned to death before I ever got a chance to grow up and die the right way.
Before they struck the match, one of the gang ran an extension cord from an outside socket, plugged in the turntable, and set it out in the snow. He dropped the needle and forced Bing Crosby to croon into the vacuum of the wooded night.
Then came the firefighters, aiming hoses as flames licked the sky. The house burned. One of the firemen, a guy named Noah Lynch, thought he heard a baby crying. The other guys said it was just the wind; the squeal and hiss of water meeting its foe. But Noah left his post and wandered out and into the darkness, where he found me wrapped up and dying in the cold. I wonder if the Star of Bethlehem was shining that night.
About a month after the incident, my old man stumbled home from The Hitchin' Post, swallowed a dozen Libriums, and went off to the land of eternal sleep. I guess things are easier over there.
Noah Lynch and his wife Miriam took me in. When I had questions, they gave answers. Not that they could've ever brushed it aside. In a quaint Indiana town, people don't just know your dirty laundry: they know which corner you throw it in.
Mr. Lynch described that eerie night—how his firetruck pulled in and Bing Crosby was singing, unaware that a house was burning down right behind him.
“I am a poor boy too, pah-rum pum pum, pum,” he said. “The Little Drummer Boy. I'll never forget that song.”
He'd call me Bing sometimes, when he was proud of me, and it made me feel good, like I was living up to something, even though I didn't know what exactly it was. If I was working on a school paper, and I wrote a particularly good passage, he'd wrap his arm around my neck and say, “that's it, Bing. You're doing fine.”
But those were the good times, early on.
In the sixth grade I punched Darryl Oliver (for calling me “Murder-House”), and when he was down on the ground, I kicked him in the head so hard that he went deaf in the left ear. I got suspended, but the bullies backed off. People will treat you however you let them.
That summer, Miriam drove me into Pennsylvania and dropped me off at her sister's farmhouse. She kissed my forehead, and that was that.
I hated my Aunt Stella and Uncle Carl. He was a country dolt, and she was a witch—right down to her missing teeth and devilish cackle. Uncle Carl looked like a grasshopper, spitting out black juice from the plug of tobacco in his lower lip. When I was done with my chores, off I would run to the pond near the tattered white barn. That was my secret world, and in there among the tall reeds, with my hands in the mud, I was at home with the snakes and frogs and turtles; quiet creatures who don't know a thing about gossip.
The neighbor's boy came over once to play, and he took the bullfrog tadpoles we'd caught, large and plump, the color of olive oil, and he raised his baseball bat and said that we would play a game. He tossed a tadpole high in the air, swung the bat as it fell, and the poor thing came undone.
I pushed him down and grabbed the bat, and when I was just about to give it to him like he gave it to the tadpole, my Uncle Carl showed up and plucked the bat from my hands, and cursed and yelled like he was exorcizing a demon.
Then, around my fifteenth year, Aunt Stella walked in on me while I was lying on the floor, pumping up and down like there was a lady underneath of me.
“I knew it, I knew it!” she hollered, looking more like a witch than ever before. She slapped me so hard across the face that I could taste the sweet sting of blood in my mouth. She tore my room apart, and when she found the Club International magazines that Sam Forsythe had given to me, she ripped them to shreds and said we'd have to pra
y all night if there was to be any hope for my eternal soul.
We sat at the kitchen table, the only sound the nightbirds cooing in the dark, and every so often Uncle Carl would stand up and go pour himself some more coffee from the tarnished metal pot. We all held hands and Stella led us in prayer, and by midnight she said that my soul had been redeemed of its wickedness, and wasn't I thankful for it?
Uncle Carl died my senior year of high school, and with him gone it was easy for me to go away too. Aunt Stella couldn't stop me. I was finally bigger than she was. Miriam called me up, and I'll never forget what she said.
“What are your plans? Heading off to school somewhere?”
What a hoot. Like I had the grades or the dough to go to college. I told her as much.
“We love you, Bing. Just remember that. We know you're gonna do great things.”
I could feel myself starting to cry. They had never visited me. Not once.
“Can you put Dad on the line?” I said, forcing the tears out of my voice.
“He's out in the garage,” Miriam said.
“Do you think that… that, maybe… that I could come back home. Just for a while?”
“Your father doesn't think that's a good idea,” she said. It struck me as funny right then how they were still saying Mother and Mom, and Father and Dad, even though they'd washed their hands of that whole dreaded experiment long ago.
I left the farmhouse the following day, hitched a ride into town and bought a bus ticket for San Diego. I only stayed there for a year and a half. The people are terrible, and the weather really gets to you. Sometimes you need a rainy day.
Miriam and Noah sent me a check for five hundred dollars when I wrote them with my new address. They do care. They love me. It's just not like it is in the movies—but is it ever?
I send my foster parents a Christmas card, every year. I used to send one to Aunt Stella, too, before she died from a stroke, because I hated to think of her walking that long driveway back and forth to the mailbox, hoping for something besides the electric bill.