The One-Eyed Man

by Ron Currie

  “My dear,” said the object that had crashed into me. “Could you check my back? I believe I may have been shot.”

  I looked and saw the khaki-clad celestial object on the floor next to me was, of course, Theodore. Whether he’d been shot by the FBI agent—whether, in other words, he’d taken a bullet for me—was unclear, but in any event he’d certainly been shot, a fact I did not need to check his back to confirm, since an exit wound, in his upper right abdomen, was evident from where I lay.

  I pointed this out to him.

  “Oh my,” he said, looking down at himself and pawing at the fabric of his safari shirt. “That does not look very good at all.”

  It didn’t. A peculiar black blood pumped from the wound, thick as crude oil.

  “I think,” I said, “that maybe it hit your liver.”

  “Sweet Mongolian Barbecue,” Theodore said. He laid his head against the floor. “Where is Claire, my dear?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I pointed to Gus. “He might.”

  Gus was crouched against the wall, arms enveloping his head, AR15 forgotten on the floor beside him.

  “What the fuck was that?” he said, peering at me through his forearms.

  “What the fuck was what?” I asked.

  “You fucking shot Frank!” Gus said. “You’re supposed to be a hostage.”

  Outside something exploded, a concussive wallop followed by several rumbling waves like the approach of a thunderstorm.

  “I didn’t have any choice,” I said. “It was Trumbull’s idea.”

  “What?” Gus said.

  “He didn’t tell you?” I asked.

  Gus dropped his arms and stared. “No, he didn’t fucking tell me,” he said. “Because I would have said he was out of his goddamn mind. We’re just making a point here. Nobody’s supposed to get killed.”

  If Gus didn’t know, I realized, then no one knew. Light dawned: Trumbull’s threat to kill Claire had been a bluff. We’d all—me, the FBI, and Trumbull’s men—been victims of the same con.

  “My dears,” Theodore said, still clutching at his belly, “where is Claire?”

  “The girl?” Gus asked.

  “Of course, the girl,” Theodore said.

  “Fucked if I know,” Gus said. “Upstairs in the bedroom. Full of fucking holes, probably.”

  “I’m not sure I’ll be able to climb any stairs,” Theodore said to me.

  “Forget her,” Gus said. “We have to get to the bunker.”

  Outside, the Bradley chain guns roared to sudden life, a sound like God panfrying the universe, signaling with spectacular, Fourth-of-July finality that the FBI had taken stock of the situation and decided their only immediate concern was surviving: public relations were no longer a consideration and so none would be spared.

  “There’s a bunker?” I yelled at Gus over the sizzling of the guns.

  Theodore coughed up a smear of blood. “My dear,” he gasped, “what kind of self-respecting survivalists would not have a bunker?”

  “I thought they’d gone out of fashion,” I said. “More of a Cold War thing.”

  “If you assholes are done?” Gus said. “It’s under the shooting range. Let’s go. Now.”

  Gus and I each grabbed one of Theodore’s hands and, with no small effort, pulled him to his feet.

  “For Christ’s sake, who is this guy, even?” Gus asked.

  “I’m his friend,” Theodore said.

  Either this was sufficient explanation for Gus, or, more likely, he didn’t care enough about the details of my relationship with Theodore to inquire further. Without another word he led us into the dark, cramped network of hallways on the main building’s first floor, bent at the waist to make himself as small a target as possible. Men hurried in every direction, seemingly without any real purpose, their faces wild with rage and terror as they pushed past us. The more hardy members of Cold Dead Fingers held positions and attempted to fight back, poking their weapons through shattered windows and firing blindly at the FBI. Here and there we encountered men who lay prone and bloodied. Some cried out for help—from God, from their companions, from their mothers. Some sat dying silently, white with shock, eyes fixed in blind stares, no longer concerned in the least with the proper interpretation of the Second Amendment or the offense of federal overreach. Still others breathed no more, their bodies already beginning to attract flies, which swirled down into pools of blood and drank at their leisure, undisturbed by the tumult.

  We picked our way through the gruesome scene as quickly as we could with a wounded and corpulent Theodore in tow, eventually reaching the door that led to the interior courtyard and, beyond, the firing range.

  Gus placed a hand on the doorknob. “We ready?” he asked.

  “You go,” I said. “I have to find Claire.”

  “She’s dead,” Gus said. “But suit yourself.”

  “Be careful, my dear,” Theodore said. “I’d accompany you, but I’m afraid I would, in my current state, be a liability.”

  “That’s probably true,” I said.

  “I want you to know,” Theodore said, “how very sorry I am about all this.”

  “It’s alright, Theodore,” I said.

  “The fuck it is,” Gus said. “Let’s go.”

  They fled into the daylight. I retraced our steps back into the main building, ducking bullets and stumbling over bodies as smoke began to fill the hallways, noting the sequence of turns so that I’d be able to find my way to the courtyard again. A growing number of Cold Dead Fingers members, particularly in the rooms with windows, had entered the state their club name referred to, though mostly their ARs and AKs rested on the floor rather than in their stiffening hands. Deeper into the building the smoke thickened into great billowing clouds that poured down the hallways like a black liquid, closing my throat and stinging my eyes. It smelled like gasoline and burning plastic and also, faintly, the sickening sweetness of charred flesh. By now not only was it difficult to breathe, but I could barely see more than a foot or two in front of me, which was why, when we finally met by complete and utter accident, Claire and I literally ran into each other.

  The collision sent her careening into a wall. She ricocheted but somehow managed to keep her feet. We stared at each other for a few seconds. She was coated in blood, hair tangled into wet dreadlocks, face streaked crimson, shirt hanging heavy and wet.

  When our surprise melted away she called me several nasty names and pounded on my chest with her fists. I tried to grip her upper arms, but my hands slid around in all that gore.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked.

  “It isn’t mine,” she said, still hitting me.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I think so,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked.

  “First let’s get down on the floor,” I said. “Then follow me.”

  We dropped to the pinewood boards, which by now were strewn with broken glass and shell casings. “You should be aware,” I said, “that you’re going to see some things. You will likely have to crawl over bodies.”

  Booted feet passed us at a run, barely missing my hand.

  “K.,” Claire said.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “Look at me. There won’t be anything worse than what I’ve already seen.”

  We made our way back to the courtyard exit, Claire following with one hand on my ankle so as not to lose me in the smoke. When we reached the door I stood, turned the handle, and peered out to see the roof of the firing range in flames.

  “That’s not good,” I said

  “What’s not good?” Claire asked.

  I closed the door again. “The building where we’re supposed to take shelter,” I told her, “is on fire.”

  “Remind me why we’re supposed to take shelter there?” Claire said.

  “It would be impossible to remind you, given that I haven’t told you yet,” I said.

  “
K.”

  “Apparently there’s a bunker,” I said.

  Claire absorbed this for a moment. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” she said, “but bunkers are usually made from fireproof material, right?”

  “I’m no expert,” I said, “but one would imagine so, yes.”

  “So that leaves us with two options. One, we can stay here and burn to death. Or two, we can take our chances with a reinforced concrete bunker that was probably designed to withstand a direct hit from a nuclear bomb.”

  “That’s almost certainly overstating its functionality,” I said.

  Claire pushed past me and opened the door again. “For God’s sake,” she said, running out into the bullets and sunlight, a streak of red against the bleached-out beige of the prairie.

  27

  THE SOLUTION TO ALL PROBLEMS

  Pimp House,” Theodore said. He sat on the floor of the bunker with his legs splayed and blood pooling on the concrete underneath him. “We’d been in Miami for about four months. That’s when I met Arnulfo, so I will always have a fondness for the show, and the city. But my dear. What monsters we were. I mean, the next summer I’m onstage at the Shrine Auditorium, and I’m saying thank you, thank you all so much, but what I’m thinking is, if you people saw everything we shot you wouldn’t be giving me an Emmy, you’d be throwing me in prison for life.”

  He paused, gulped air, wiped his pallid brow with one hand.

  “It was our second season,” he said, “so by this point we’d seen plenty of not-safe-for-prime-time behavior. Everyone was guilty of it sooner or later. The hos, the johns, but of course, as you might imagine, primarily the pimps. They all engaged in violence nearly every day. They smacked the hos when the hos got out of line. They punched and stomped johns who failed to pay for services rendered. Derrick did all this, the same as the rest. It wasn’t as though he’d shown any special acumen for cruelty, relative to the other pimps in the house.

  “But then one night he called and asked me to meet him, saying he wanted to talk,” Theodore said.

  The heat was almost literally unbelievable. Beyond the dome of white light cast by the camping lantern at our feet, the bunker’s steel bulkhead door glowed red-hot. Not only was the air uncomfortable to breathe, but I’d begun to suspect that the oxygen content was falling as the inferno outside burned. Claire’s head rested heavy against my shoulder.

  “Maybe it was the sudden celebrity from season one, gone to his head,” Theodore said. “Or maybe he’d just been hiding the fact that he was a demon from an altogether different circle of hell, as genuine psychopaths are said to do.”

  Theodore paused, caught his breath, glanced toward the corner to his left, where Gus’s body lay in shadows, torn by bullet wounds sustained crossing the courtyard.

  “I thought my humanity had completely expired,” he said. “I thought I didn’t care about suffering. Or rather, that I did care about suffering, but only insofar as it could be used as entertainment. Derrick proved I was wrong about myself.

  “He had the girl—whose name I never learned, by the way, I’d never seen her before that night, though as savagely as he beat her they must have had some sort of professional relationship—facedown on the floor in front of me. He held an aluminum baseball bat over his shoulder. Other instruments were arrayed on the table beside him. A length of electrical cord. A straight razor. A nail file. A butane lighter. Half of a broken pool cue.

  “He’d planted one of his big alligator-skin boots—which we’d bought for him before season one, so he more closely resembled the white suburban notion of what a pimp looks like—squarely on the girl’s behind, so she couldn’t rise from the floor. When I entered the room she was making this sound, over and over. The Germans probably have a word for it. The anticipation of certain agony, and the terrible uncertainty of how long one will have to endure it. Do you know that sound?”

  I shook my head, slowly.

  Theodore went on. “I asked Derrick what he wanted to talk about, and he told me he had no interest in talking. He just wanted me to see what he was going to do to this girl. He never said why he wanted me to witness this. Perhaps it was habitual for him to seek an audience for his cruelty. Or perhaps he thought if he demonstrated something that set him apart from the other four pimps, I might make him the centerpiece of the second season.”

  Theodore stared at the bunker’s concrete floor. He slapped the side of his head, once, as if trying to jar the memory loose from his head.

  “‘Just sit there and watch and keep your fucking mouth shut,’ Derrick told me. One of his eyes was bigger than the other and it was staring right at me. The other eye had wandered off to the side. I’ve never seen anything like it. My skin almost literally crawled.”

  I looked down. Claire’s eyes were closed. With my right hand I searched for and found the pulse in her neck. It throbbed steadily.

  “You know, my dear,” Theodore said, “maybe he just wanted me to be afraid of him. Maybe that was his only aim. If so, he certainly succeeded.”

  Theodore took a deep breath and let it out again, his chest and belly expanding and contracting like a massive bellows. He coughed several times, and when he drew the back of his hand across his mouth it came away black with blood.

  We were quiet for a while. Theodore let his head hang; he might have passed out briefly, though it was impossible to know for certain. Outside the volume of gunfire increased suddenly, like the moment when popcorn reaches its flash point, and I surmised, listening to the cacophony, that the flames must have ignited a cache of ammunition somewhere in the shooting range. This would prove to have been the case, later on, after the ashes were sifted through by both hand and bucket loader, the charred bones inventoried, the shell casings discovered and their calibers identified.

  Theodore lifted his head and coughed again. “Now,” he said. “Where was I? Young, evil Derrick. He was about to commence torturing the prostitute. Although you know, now that I really think on it, the fact is we’re assuming she was a prostitute. It’s more likely she was a former prostitute, trying to get out of the life, as they call it, and this was the reason Derrick treated her so viciously.”

  Claire stirred against my shoulder. She murmured a bit, almost conversationally. Wherever she’d gone in her dreams, it was not, apparently, too unpleasant a locale.

  “Derrick hit the girl two or three times with the bat, then stopped suddenly and said he wanted me to film what was about to happen. He wanted something to show the other hos and keep them from getting any ideas about how much leeway they had in their dealings with him. By now, my dear, the girl was most definitely crying. She would cry so much, eventually, that she ran out of tears. I wanted to leave, but I was too frightened to do anything other than what he told me. So I got out my cell, as we called them back then, and recorded him beating her with the baseball bat, and then recorded everything he did after.”

  Outside the bunker the exploding ammunition cache began to exhaust itself. Theodore paused and looked down at his khaki shirt and enormous cargo shorts, which were sopped with blood.

  He drew another long breath. “I am going to be dead soon, my dear.”

  I nodded.

  “Anyway,” Theodore said, “Derrick beat and cut and burned that girl until she wished to die, and said so out loud. Eventually, Derrick granted this wish. When he was finished I handed him my phone so he could show the video to his hos whenever he felt the need, and then I walked out and went to Mango’s.”

  Claire caught her breath for a moment, then exhaled and adjusted her head against my shoulder without waking.

  “Mango’s pays pretty girls to dance almost naked at all hours of the day and night,” Theodore said. “I wanted, quite desperately, to see them smiling in their samba costumes. So I went to the bar and ordered a margarita and watched them dance. I sat through two shift changes. I drank until the barroom started to twirl like a religious ecstatic. Eventually, Arnulfo rescued me. The next morning I came to with the air
conditioner blowing so hard I had goose bumps even with the blankets pulled over my head. And for the first three or four seconds I was awake, I forgot all about Derrick and the girl, and I believed the worst thing I would have to deal with that day was my hangover, which was formidable enough. Then it all came back.”

  A rivulet of blood spilled suddenly from the center of Theodore’s mouth and trickled down over his chin. I nudged Claire a bit, shook her shoulder gently, thinking she might want to say good-bye to him. But she remained asleep.

  “Here’s the thing, my dear,” Theodore said. “Yes, I felt awful, and I regretted that this girl had died so horribly. But what is it worth, to simply feel bad? I still finished filming the show, and if Derrick wasn’t a stand-out cast member, he at least figured prominently in the story line. I let that be so. I pretended my fear justified inaction. I built a firewall between what I’d seen him do and what he could do for me. I paid for the discreet disposal of the girl’s body, and season two of Pimp House aired to dreamlike ratings. We made millions on merchandising alone. There were action figures, my dear. A one-to-ten scale model of Derrick, ivory cigarette holder between his teeth, holding up his pimp hand in preparation to slap someone.”

  Theodore paused and sighed, causing a reddish bubble to form and pop on his lips. “We collected our money and our Emmys. End of story. Everyone wins—except for her, of course.”

  Outside the bunker, very faintly, I heard shouting, then several bursts of gunfire, then more shouting.

  “Flash forward to several months ago,” Theodore said. “I weigh four hundred pounds and haven’t made a decent episode of television in a decade. I will pass the rest of my days sitting by one pool or another under one cloudless sky or another, slurping cock and cocktails, watching as my own personal field of gravity continues to grow without limit. Then you appear, goose and golden egg in one, and suddenly I rediscover my conscience, which prior to that had last been seen outside the entrance to a bathhouse in Providence, Rhode Island, my junior year of undergraduate studies.”