by Ward, Robert
Jeremy’s face loomed in front of mine and he kissed me on the forehead. “My boy,” he said, “you’ve done it. You’ve saved our lives!”
“For which I will probably die in hell,” I said. “I’m afraid I’ll never match the master.”
“But you did,” Jeremy said. “You snatched victory from the clenched jaws of defeat, so to speak.”
“Yeah,” I said, laughing in pure relief from anxiety, “but underneath I’m still a guilty liberal.”
“Well, John-boy,” Lulu Hardwell said, “looks like Identi-Card is still in the hands of the good guys.”
“Why don’t you shut the fuck up, you big-titted dyke cunt?” Johnny said most ungraciously as he leaned on the laminator.
This put a damper on the celebration, and Eddie Eckel slammed his hand down on the embosser.
“You know?” he said. “I’m getting real tired of you, fat boy. Real tired.”
“That so?” Johnny said. “Well, what inna’ world you going to do about it, you hippie shithead?”
Eddie’s eyes went red and without saying a word, he rushed Johnny, but Johnny was quick, much quicker than I would have believed possible, given his size. He stepped back, pulled out his gun, and in one smooth motion brought it down on the back of Eddie’s head.
I had never seen anything like this. I suppose none of us had, except on television or in the movies, and this was much different than those feeble exercises in fantasy. This was ugly, personal. I could actually feel my friend’s bones and vessels turning to bloody mulch as he fell hard on the basement floor.
Johnny waved the gun around the room now, and there was pure madness in his eyes. He stood amidst the swirls of plastic that coiled at his feet on the floor, like some crazed, technological serpent. Indeed, standing among the ruined, twisted coils, it was difficult to determine where the cards ended and his greasy flesh began.
“I’m sick of the lot of you damned beatniks. I don’t care if you do make this payment. You’re all loafing scum and I’m taking over this here operation as of now, and if anybody don’t like it, I’ll blow their brains right out their fucking ears.”
I looked into the chamber of that big .38 and I felt the most serious fear I have ever known. Val gripped my hand, and I watched Lulu and Babe shrink before my eyes.
Then, there came a strange sound. It was the grinding of the laminator. Jeremy had hit the switch so casually with his right hand that none of us had noticed.
The laminator growled, spat, and chugged, and suddenly Lulu Hardwell hit the switch to the old iron ore machine, which groaned and clanged like some old dying ghost locomotive, and it was then that I noticed panic in Johnny M.’s eyes.
“Hey,” he said, “what in hell’s going on? You turn off ‘ose machines.”
He aimed his gun right at Jeremy’s head.
“I’m warning you,” he said.
There was a terrible tension in the room. Then, suddenly, hardly aware of what I was doing, I picked up a box of cards and threw it at the rotund thug.
Miraculously, I made a direct hit on the side of his head. His gun went off, fired wildly into the floor, and then Johnny fell right into the great sheet of boiling, steaming, melting plastic that had once again begun rolling furiously out of the laminator. And as he went down, he hit his large, dark head on the side of the cast-iron embosser. He got a stunned look on his slab of a face and made a little sound, the sound of a small animal being run over by a barreling semi. Then he disappeared into the great, swirling, rolling folds of burning plastic that coiled themselves like a great, fiery serpent around his neck, nose, and mouth.
I suppose one of us could have done something. The switch was nearby; it was only a step or two to turn it off and save him, and it wasn’t as if we actually wanted him to die. No, later when we spoke of it, all of us had serious regrets that we hadn’t moved.
But it was as if some unseen hand held us back, some great secret identity in the sky who held us in thrall at his own handiwork, for I knew then that the coiling, circling serpent of plastic that mummified sleeping Johnny was indeed another being, not our creation, not Jeremy’s, but the creation of the Great Blankfaced I.D. Being above us, who moved in the famed Mysterious Ways, who laughed and chortled and was occasionally even moved by our wild little embroilments in the row house city by the Chesapeake Bay.
In any case, we did not move and we watched impassively as the unconscious Johnny Martello was ensnared in the melting, twisting I.D. cards. We watched as the great stream of plastic wrapped round his legs, his fat hands, bending his right one grotesquely behind his neck.
His body flipped and flopped like a harpooned whale. Right in front of our eyes this fearsome hoodlum was becoming a mummy from his oversized, ugly head to his pasta-bloated stomach, right down to his five-inch black-and-cream Cuban heels.
And only after he was sealed as completely as Ramses II did Jeremy turn off the laminator.
“I think,” Val said quietly, “we’re all murderers.”
“No,” I said, “I killed him. You’re clear, Val.”
“I want Lulu, and I want her now,” said a voice.
That made us all stop again. Slowly, fearfully, we turned around to face the steps. Had Mr. A. sent another of his goons? If so, we were dead meat. But God had been merciful. There, standing at the foot of the steps, was none other than a greasy, hairy man with a Big Cat hat on and a crowbar in his hand.
“Dan the Trucker!” Lulu screamed.
“One anda’ same,” he said. “What’s wrong with ‘ot guy ‘ere … ‘onna floor. Is this one a’ those happenings I seen on the news?”
All five heads nodded “Yes” at once.
“Of course,” Lulu said, walking toward Dan with a hip-swaying bounce. “That’s exactly what it is, Dan.”
Dan’s gorilla eyes darted back and forth to each of us, and then he stared with a confused gaze down at the hermetically sealed gangster.
“I dint know ‘ey had happenings in Bal’mere,” Dan said. “I thought that was jest something ‘ey did up in New York.”
“Oh, no,” Lulu said. “They’re very big in Baltimore now.”
“But ‘at guy dere, he looks kinda dead,” Dan the Trucker said.
“Which is the whole point, Dan,” Lulu said. “We’re making a statement here, a statement about, ah …”
Here she seemed to run out of lies, and I found myself moving shamelessly forward, as big a bullshit artist as Jeremy Raines.
“A statement about the increasing plasticization of our culture.” I said, my knees shaking as I spoke.
I quickly moved to the very dead Johnny and picked up one limp, plasticized arm.
“You see the way the I.D. cards are melted onto his arm? Well, that’s our way of saying that the … government is reducing us all to nameless drones and that none of us has any real individualism left. Because of the encroaching spectre of plasticizing Communism.”
“Damn, that is ‘zactly what I beleef, too,” Dan said. “This happening stuff could be okay after all. But you sure he ain’t really dead. I mean he ain’t breathing in there, is he?”
“Well, no,” I said, unable to stop myself. “Because he isn’t real. That isn’t a real person at all. That is … a puppet. A wonderful lifelike puppet.”
Oh, God, I thought, thank you for visions of the Evil Hand Puppet.
I picked up the very dead Johnny’s arm and let it flop to the ground. It was already becoming quite stiff.
“A puppet,” Dan said. “Damn. Looks like a real guy to me.”
“Realism,” I said. “There’s nothing like it!”
“You all are too weird,” Dan said, taking off his Big Cat hat and scratching his balding head. “Come on, Lulu, let’s you and me go over to the Harford Road and get us a chicken potpie atta’ Hot Shoppe. These people are too darn weird. And by the way, I know none of you is really priests. You was jest putting me on. Now come on, Lulu.”
Lulu shot us a parting look. There wa
s no arguing with him.
“Be right with you, Dan,” she said. “As soon as I finish some business with Jeremy here. You wait upstairs, okay?”
“You ain’t gonna run out on me again are you? Ain’t no use. I love you and you are mine and you got to get away from this place … and this here damned plastic puppet.”
We all smiled like madmen. Dan shook his head and walked slowly back up the steps.
“I’ll get him out of here,” Lulu whispered. “And don’t worry, he won’t say anything.”
“You think he bought the puppet thing?” I said.
“Maybe,” Lulu said. “God, I must have been horny to ever hook up with him. But he’s not that bad a guy in bed. Anyway, I’ll keep him busy for a couple of weeks, until this all blows over. Then I’ll be talking to you.”
“You’re a princess,” Jeremy said. “But are you sure you’ll be okay?”
“Don’t worry about me, sweety,” Lulu said. “But what in the hell are you going to do with the puppet there?”
“No problem,” Jeremy said. “I know just the place for him. Well, good luck old girl. And keep in touch.”
“You’re aces Jeremy,” she said. “The King of Cards.”
Then she turned, winked, shook her Ripleys one last time and headed up the steps.
Feeling a little under the weather?” Jeremy said.
“That’s an understatement,” I gasped as we drove out the York Road toward the beltway. The elms and oak trees hung out over the road, and their limbs looked like the waving arms of starving children. I was holding my stomach, which felt as though there were nails inside.
“Jesus, I can’t believe this. The goddamned guy weighed a ton. I was sure somebody was going to walk out on their back porch and see us carrying him to the car.”
“It would have been a great deal easier if we could have gotten him out of the plastic, but it seems to have embedded itself into his skin. Gives him a weird sheen, don’t you think? He looks healthier, really.”
“Ha, ha,” I said. “Cut the shit. You’re as scared as I am. Ask me how I know?”
“Okay, how?”
“Your hands are shaking and your knees are knocking. And you’re rubbing your nose and chin. Also, you’re drooling even more than usual.”
Jeremy sighed deeply.
“This is true,” he said. “Yes, this is very true, my boy. I’m feeling a modicum of anxiety. But never fear. I have the perfect place for this lad, the place where he’ll never be found.”
“Really?” I said. “And where might that be?”
“Well,” Jeremy said, “I’ve always wanted you to see the old family mansion. Tonight’s the night.”
“We’re going to your house?” I said, my heart in my throat again. “What in the hell are you talking about? Jeremy, this has all been too much for you. You’re out of control.”
“Relax,” Jeremy said. “You’re a student of history, and hey, there’s a whole world of history there.”
He laughed then in a way that was more than a little mad and stepped down on the accelerator.
The Raines family home was a great stone place on the Severn River at Cape St. Clair. I had driven by the turnoff to the cape a hundred times on my way to Ocean City. I even remembered asking my father what it was like. The name had a kind of special allure for me: It sounded exclusive, mysterious. My father’s typically blunt reply was that it was a place where rich assholes sat around flattering each other. So I had never been down that dark road, and it seemed strange to me that I had at last made it, with a body in the trunk.
Now as we drove toward Jeremy’s old home, I opened the window and smelled the country, that old sweet honeysuckle vine, and heard the sounds of crickets. In the pitch country dark, I could make out the shadows of great oaks and tall waving sawgrass. Nature only the rich could enjoy.
“No houses around here,” I said in a small voice, which I barely recognized as my own.
“Right, because my father wouldn’t sell. He didn’t want any more development.”
“You mean you own all this out here?”
“We used to. There’s a kind of legal battle over who owns it right now. Deeds, wills, all very boring stuff.”
“Oh, right. Very dull.”
I wanted to say more, make him tell me the story behind all the mystery, but suddenly we rounded a bend and turned down a narrow dirt road, and the old Nash bounced wildly up and down. I hit my head on the roof top and felt the shock down my neck and back. I gripped the armrests and braced my knees under the glove compartment. Then, just as suddenly, we were out of the dark woods and headed up a circular driveway big enough to stage a track meet. And in front of us was an expansive brown-shingled house, three stories tall, with a classic screened front porch. I gave a little shudder of a laugh because although the place was the quintessential WASP home, it also perfectly reflected Jeremy’s character. That is, it seemed to sag a little on one side, and the proud high turret sat off at a jaunty, cockeyed angle, like Jeremy’s cocked head itself. Now that I looked closer, even the magnificent front porch was a little higher on one end than on the other, and I thought of a house I’d seen in a children’s book when I was a kid. This was a place called the Crazy Mirror House, which was at the end of a maze in a town called Tooneyville, where all the citizens looked like insects with top hats, waistcoats, and knickers. And sitting in my row house bed, I was frightened by the looming insect faces on those eighteenth-century clothes.
And now, God only knows why, I thought of Dr. Spaulding, and he seemed that way to me. Like a waistcoated insect, perhaps a giant ant, with a top hat and a monocle, and I nearly laughed from the absurdity of it. God, what would he think of me now? How would he regard my potential as a gentleman and a scholar now that I was a murderer? Jeremy pointed to a light in a second-floor window, and I felt my stomach tighten into knots.
“Christ, there’s not someone here, is there?”
“I doubt it. There’s only Farlow, the caretaker. But don’t worry, he’s about five hundred years old and deaf as a doornail,” he said.
“That’s very, very reassuring,” I said. “Too bad he’s not blind too.”
“We better establish just where he is, though,” Jeremy said. “We don’t need any more ugly little surprises tonight. Let’s go in for a second.”
“Heck, yeah,” I said. “Say, we’ll fix us up a crab feast, invite in some of the neighbors. Hey, we could even prop Johnny up at the table.”
Jeremy smiled and pretended to hit me in the stomach.
“You know, as a cynic, you just don’t make it,” he said. “Just stay the sweet guy you are and you’ll do fine.”
I wanted to slug him then. I was that wired, but he had already started up the rickety steps toward the old house.
Inside, the place was a museum .Half of the furniture was covered with dustcovers and the other half looked like pure Chippendale. There was an ottoman with gold brocade, an ancient grandfather clock, and a rose-colored fainting sofa, which somebody had carted back from Imperial Russia. The rug was a faded Indian print with black dancing Kali goddesses on it, and on the walls near the grand piano were pictures of men with pith helmets holding a great gutted rattler above their heads.
Jeremy pointed to a small muscular man who held the head of the serpent in his hands.
“My uncle Steve,” Jeremy said. “Wonderful man. He spent his life traveling, making the world safe for democracy. Got a commission from Teddy Roosevelt and ended up with a chest full of medals. When I was young, I adored him. Then I found out he was behind the B and O scandals of the 1940s. Cost most of their little investors their life savings. The shit.”
He laughed and wandered through the cavernous room and then came to the great, winding staircase.
“Farlow,” he shouted through cupped hands. “Farlow, where are you?”
His voice echoed eerily through the empty house, and as it grew fainter, there was a greater air of desperation to it. Finally, he tur
ned around and came back to me.
“He’s not here. He does that more and more. Just doesn’t show up. Who can blame him? There’s no reason to be here anymore. My uncle uses the place a couple times a year, that’s all. I tell myself I keep Farlow on because he’s attached to the place, but the truth is once a place is in disrepair, servants and caretakers can’t wait to leave. It’s the owners who need to feel their servants still want to be here.”
There was a great sadness in his voice then, a kind of longing for something unnameable. He walked over to the wall and looked at the photographs.
“Over here’s my father,” he said in a casual way.
I walked to the photo. Of course, I’d always wanted to meet his family, and now, in spite of the plastic-coated corpse in our trunk, I found myself unable to resist.
He pointed to a lithe strong man with Jeremy’s own crooked nose, even the cocked head. In the picture his father was shaking hands with Mayor Edward Mareno in front of City Hall.
“Your father really did know the mayor?” I said. “He must have been a very important man.”
“Yes,” Jeremy said. “He was. Until they chopped him down.”
“Why?”
“Well, it was simple. Mareno wanted to build highways, tons and tons of them, and it just so happened that he was also the silent partner in a concrete company. My father was treasurer on the city council, and he found out about the sweetheart deal. The mayor offered him money and position to keep quiet about it. But my father wasn’t tempted by such things. He decided to go public with the story. But he had a lousy sense of timing. Because of their friendship, he warned the mayor first. I suppose he was giving him one last chance to drop the plan. Mareno said he’d think it over. Meanwhile, he divested himself of all his holdings. In the end, he made it look like my father was the crooked one and said he was stealing money to pay for a girlfriend.”