Clearing his throat, and without flushing, the fat man exits the stall and finds you standing there in front of him. An instant passes where you feel nothing but love for the guy because he is, as he must be, your father, your brother, and your son. He's a friend who plays a part in your needs. He's willing to give you what you must have, and in the greater scheme, it really isn't that much. If you were slightly more insane than you are, currently, you might slash his throat, or chew on his eyes, or rape his chunky ass. There are evils in the world that you cannot conceive, and that's a positive pronouncement on your character. Maybe.
Instead, you haul off and slug him once, on the point of his yielding chin. His eyes roll back in his head and he starts to fall backwards, but you grip him, gently, and draw him close. You hug him to you and press the side of your face against his well-titted chest. He's your mother too, and a sob breaks inside you and you go, "Oh Goddamn, Mom, Ma," before champing your teeth together. A moan writhes inside without release and eventually crawls back down into your heart.
You gently lay the guy on the bathroom floor and riffle his pockets. As you suspected, he's got a wad on him. Probably doesn't believe in banks, keeps his cash in a shoebox at the back of the closet. He doesn't trust his government or his neighbors and has a pistol stashed in every room of his house. You check and sure enough he's got a .38 and a .45 stuck in his suitcase, both on safety but loaded. You leave them there, prop the dude back up onto the john and ease the stall door shut again.
You're tired and crazy and hungry enough that time is starting to skip out. Without knowing how it's happened you're at the ticket window like a bad splice-cut has jumped you into the middle of a scene. The unloved girl behind the counter scowls through her tangled orange bangs doing her best to appear as unlifelike as a clown marionette with a painted sneer. She's been practicing for years and has gotten pretty good at it by now.
You hand the girl all the cash and ask how far it'll take you. She gives you the mechanically pleasant smile reserved for the people beneath her contempt and you don't blame her much. You haven't shaved or showered in five days either. The hinges of her jaw snap up and down and you know she's talking but you can't make out what she's saying. Her arms and legs tilt at odd angles as if yanked by cords. You're starting to get the feeling that you may be repressing some things.
The ticket she hands you is blotted by your blunted vision. She points and you wander loosely in that direction, find a bus just rolling in. You have the patience of God and wait calmly while the passengers ease off, unload their luggage, and drift into the streets meeting family members and hailing taxis. You watch the driver walk purposefully away, grumbling about hemorrhoids as he goes get a ham sandwich and a triple shot of scotch.
This is how it is. Your stomach stopped grumbling two days ago and ever since you've had a crimson tint at the edges of your sight. It seems to be shifting to gold now and you wonder what it'll change to next after that.
Others congregate. The lost, the innocent, and the meaningful cluster together. Some giggle, more are serious-minded, intent in their direction. You're working up a fair burn standing in the sun like this and the fact scares you a little. This thing you do is a thing of shadow.
Before your travels you always believed madness was an occurrence, a circumstance, or an event of the night. You may be crazy but you're not a lunatic, and that doesn't sit as well as it might.
Time to go.
You climb aboard the bus and take an empty seat about halfway back. The other passengers appear only as real to you as you do to them. In five minutes you're five miles further on down the road. You scope out which wayfarer might have a wad of bills in his pocket and already you start thinking of how you'll take him down three or four days from now.
A pretty girl with ratty mussed hair and a dirty skirt slips next to you. She isn't Mariel but she carries Mariel's pain, the pain Mariel carried before you paid the bill. The black smudges around her eyes are almost dark enough to make her appear blind. The dead glint of her gaze is purposeless but not without meaning. Her belly has a tiny bulge to it but that doesn't mean she's pregnant. But you hope, you still have a little hope.
You reach over and place your palm on her stomach and wait for her to start yelling. She doesn't. She puts her hand over yours and together you remain like that as you travel, mile after mile until the moon flashes against your lips, and she soon begins to whisper-too low to hear at first but gradually growing louder-saying all that you need to hear but have never heard before, as she hisses the names of all the children she will bear into your scarred and trembling hands.
Introduction for "Jesus Wrestles the Mob to Feed the Homeless"
by James Moore
What can I say about Tom Piccirilli? Tons. Most of it would be rumors and innuendo, however, so let's try to stick to the facts as I see them. First, it's important to know that Tom loves cheese puffs. I tend to think that they may actually be the primary source of his talent, much like the yellow sun gives Superman his amazing powers, cheese-coated puffs of corn seem to be integral to Tom's ability to pour out the most amazing works of fiction and make them seem easy.
He must have a secret, but I haven't figured it out yet. I tried the cheese puffs routine, but it didn't work for me. I just wound up with orange colored stuff all over my keyboard. I tried reading all of his books back to back——I figured what the hell, it was a good excuse to read them again—but all I got was a mild embolism from thinking too hard about how this sentence was built or why I hadn't managed to hit just the right imagery in one of my stories when he made it seem so damned effortless.
Tom Piccirilli is one of those disgusting writers who makes me stop from time to time, read over a sentence, and wonder how the hell he made a perfect work of art from just a few words. It's really very annoying. I can't just read through his works, I have to read them, savor them and go back again to make sure I wasn't just dreaming.
However he does it, I hope he never stops. Sure, it causes migraines trying to understand how he does it. Okay, I put on fifteen pounds trying to understand the magnetic pull that cheese puffs have on Tom—word to the wise, wash those hands before typing—and, okay, I have come to accept that I write stories and that bastard Piccirilli writes literature, but I can live with all of these things as long as Tom keeps writing. He's one of the best.
The story you're about to read is one of his more...unusual pieces. Well, okay, most of his writing falls into the unusual category, but "Jesus Wrestles the Mob to Feed the Homeless" takes it to a new height. The title told me nothing, so I plunged in eagerly and I was far from disappointed. But, damn it, he did it to me again. There are five separate occasions where I read a line and just had to stop and savor it. I won't tell you which ones. This is an introduction. Find them yourself. But try to finish the story first. It's worth resisting the urge to diagram the sentences out in an effort to see how he did it.
–James Moore, author of SERENITY FALLS and POSSESSIONS
Jesus Wrestles the Mob to Feed the Homeless
for my goombahs, Michael Bishop & Paul Di Filippo
The Ganooch, with most of his cranial bone removed and frontal lobe exposed, computer chips inside firing beneath the transparent plastic dome, rolled towards me with a bottle of wine while the old ladies in black wept their novenas.
It was the kind of thing my father had warned me about, but it still made a hell of an impression.
You could make the argument that Don Vincenzo Ganucci had been dead from a stroke for the past three months. Mama Ganucci sure believed it. She'd been upstairs wearing a veil and doing the rosary for weeks, and she even put in a personal call to the Pope and left a message on his machine. He phoned back yesterday but Mama was too busy with the exorcists, who were calling demons out of the Ganooch while he ate a bowl of pasta fagliogli.
I took the Pope's call and we chatted for a while, mostly about the oil embargo and his recent trip to Tokyo, where he was trying to thwart the war
between the New Buddhists and the Yakuza. It wasn't working. He offered me eighty grand to push the button on Emperor Mitsomosho but I had to pass.
The family medical team had done a pretty good job with the old man. The sutures, where they'd opened his brain cavity and rewired his cerebral cortex, could barely be seen anymore. Not much scarring on the overall and what little there was just looked like more gray wrinkles. They'd finally managed to get a partial rug over the flexible casing in the event there was any sudden raised intracranial pressure, and it gave him a fairly dignified appearance.
Tommaso, he said.
The back of my neck grew warm and my hackles pricked up. I could feel his thoughts, his very personality, down in my blood. "Hold on, Ganooch, give me a second to get dressed."
I know you hate me, I know—
"Relax, we'll get into it, just let me throw my pants on."
Tommaso, aiutilo…
"Oh hell, Grandpa, you sure can be a pushy bastard."
I gestured and Joey Fresco and Bone wheeled him into my suite, poured him a glass of the wine and let him sit. Our bulldog, Barabbas, wandered down to the end of the hall and peered around the corner suspiciously. He panted and started to whine. I didn't blame him.
"Nice place," Joey said. I lived an hour outside the city in West Nyack with the rest of the family members who weren't involved in the business. His eyes flashed on a birch beyond the window and he seemed confounded by the leaves and all the green. He probably hadn't been outside of Brooklyn more than twice in his life. For him, stepping over Flatbush Avenue was more adventurous than trekking through the Andes.
Bone gave me his death gaze. I didn't take it personally. He wished murder on everyone, even himself, and he couldn't help walking around daydreaming about jamming a switchblade in somebody's throat.
"What's going on, Joe?"
"Listen, Tommy…ah…we got a little situation here…"
"That much I figured."
He was nearly as wide as he was tall, with a natural, almost graceful sense of brutality about him. He could snap a baseball bat in half with his bare hands and he was the only guy I knew who could aim a shotgun and not just point it. He had a sawed-off 12-gauge under his jacket right now. I knew it even though I couldn't see it. He, like everybody who worked for the family, had his clothes specially made to help conceal the hardware beneath. He wore a hat size 9, and I'd once seen him take a ball-peen hammer to the head and all it did was make him sneeze. The guy who'd hit him tried to run but Joey got one hand on him, made a fist, and that's all it took.
He was distracted and kept looking at the ceiling, puzzled by the noise up there. "Ah, yeah, well, ah—"
"It's always easier if you just drop the bomb and run, Joe."
"Yeah, I know, but…what is that?"
It was my cousin Dante, who was walking the halls dragging a six foot cross around on his back. Dante had some issues. Most I knew of, a few I could guess at, and there was a whole cart full I didn't have any clue about. I'd taken him to Jersey City once on a double date, but my night crashed out about the time he nailed his big toe to the dance floor and started singing the aria from Il Crucifixion Di Jesu.
Ganooch's thoughts roiled against my skull, thumping hard. The boosted electrical current in his brain had hyped up the neurotransmitters and high frequency waves. They'd told me he spoke telepathically now, and that it would be rougher on his relatives.
It began to hurt bad. I stepped away from him. In a few seconds the aching grew so intense that I let out a groan and backed up to the far wall. "Grandpa, stop!" I shouted, but he couldn't. He'd been tapping the computers of Columbia University's art department again, downloading archives on the Roman Empire. He kept thinking about the days when Rome took over from Florence as the center of art, about 1495 until its sacking in 1527. He was giving off waves of anger as if it had happened a week ago and he'd been personally involved.
I went to one knee and Bone came as close to smiling as he'd ever come in his life. His long white face looked only half-formed, like candle wax pressed into shape by somebody's thumbs. I knew for a fact that his blood ran cold—when he was a kid most of his plasma had been transposed with a variant of amphibian hemoglobin. That was back when the government sub-agencies were doing experiments that would've given Josef Mengele the night terrors. There wasn't any reason for it, they were just in the middle of viscera and tooling around on orphans.
Bone couldn't spit poison or regenerate new limbs or live underwater. The only side-effect I knew about was that he breathed like a toad. Infrequently, only when his body needed the oxygen. He killed efficiently and without emotion, and I knew in my heart that he'd take a run at me one day.
The grin was unintentional and only something I could see. The barest lilt of his lips. It was the kind of thing that started wars, and it pissed me off so much I gritted my back teeth and stood against the blazing pain. Barabbas barked and stomped forward and pressed his shoulder to my leg. His jowls swung back and forth and his bottom fangs pinched his cheeks and gave him dimples.
Ganooch's mind was a chaotic whipsaw of colors, images, and knowledge without context. I saw the interplay of light and shadow in Da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks. Donato D'Angelo Bramante's architecture, including his redesign of St. Peters in the Vatican. Classical High Renaissance ideals: proportion and balance. It was as if my grandfather's brain had recorded a hundred museums and now fast-forwarded through the tapes. His outdated sensibilities didn't jibe with the data. Raffaello Sanzio, who disliked the dark subtlety of Da Vinci and preferred lofty idealism, had stolen Leonardo's pyramid concepts. I could feel the conflict going on inside the old man as each new learned style, form, and abstraction struggled with another.
The link-up was through a hacked environmental satellite, and I kept getting weather reports and heat indexes from around the country. Four inches of rain in northeast Pennsylvania, a low pressure system working out of Tampa Bay. If the Ganooch wasn't already insane, this would throw him off the pier.
"What've you guys been doing to him?" I asked.
"His orders," Bone said, and he let the words ease over his tongue so he could squeeze off a hiss.
"Unplug him."
"He wants to learn."
"This isn't the way."
"You ain't the boss."
"You're overloading him. It's like mid-term cramming taken to a whole new level."
"Why is it I never have any idea what the hell you're talking about?" Bone asked.
"Because you're stupid. Unplug him."
He settled the death gaze on me again, but he couldn't get any more mileage out of it than he already had. The trouble with always looking homicidal is that you had nowhere left to go when you really wanted to carve somebody up.
Joey stepped between us and said, "He wants to paint."
I looked at him and then glanced over at the Ganooch, who was nodding happily. His head bobbed at just the right angle so that sunlight glared off the edge of his plastic casing and scattered a patina across the walls.
"You've got to be kidding."
"You think I'd be out here in the sticks if it wasn't the truth? He wants to paint. He wants you to teach him how to do it. You know. With brushes, the easel, all that shit."
I couldn't quite grasp it. My grandfather's only creative urges so far had gone along the line of imaginative body disposal. "Why?"
"Like I should know? He said he's unfulfilled. Has no aesthetic in life, which ain't true. We got plenty from the doctors in case we ever need it. For bullet wounds and such."
"That's anesthetic."
Joey blinked a couple of times. "You hear him better than me. When he talks now it's like a whisper in the wind. But he's still the boss. What he wants, he gets."
Tommaso, il mio nipote, aiutilo—help your old grandfather, my good boy, my grandson—
"How am I supposed to help? I'm not a painter."
"You been to college. You know more about art than anybody else in the f
amily."
Joey talked like one of the family soldiers from the old days, but I knew he was a high-tech wizard and had at least two Ph.D.'s in molecular biotechnology. A lot went into protecting his image.
"We can hire somebody," I said.
"He wants you."
The Ganooch's hypothalamus had been shoved aside to allow more room for the enhanced cerebrum. I couldn't be sure that his temporal lobe was still where it was supposed to be.
Dante kept hauling his cross all over the place upstairs. I looked at my dead grandfather's leering face and shrugged. He slung himself forward out of the chair and hugged me. It felt like being covered in dust.
Joey Fresco was making a break for it when he turned and said, "One more thing—if the Rossi family learns about this we're all dead."
That stopped me. "What? The Rossi's? Why? We've never had any trouble with them before."
"Here's the bomb, Tommy. I'm gonna drop it and run, like you said. Carla Rossi is taking over her family and I hear the first order of business is to get rid of the Ganooch."
"The hell for?"
"Second order of business is to put a double tap in your head."
Bone let out another hiss of laughter as Joey trundled towards the door and said, "We'll be downstairs if you need us. Jesus, I always thought the sticks was supposed to be quiet. This place is louder than Coney Island on Labor Day. There any pasta fagliogli left?"
I stared at the Ganooch and he gazed back at me with a puppy dog expression of tentative joy and fear. When I was five, I had seen this man kill one of his own capos for betting against the family racehorse, even though it ran like a wounded water buffalo and liked to chase after flies. My grandfather, who was tall and lean and filled with an assertive smug power, shot the capo in the face with a nickel-plated .38 during Sunday pasta. Now I could barely recognize the Don, lost inside all this hardware and infirmity.
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