Blood-Stained Kings

by Tim Willocks

  Grimes couldn’t say he was interested. This place hummed with bad vibes. He wanted to get moving.

  “Lenna,” he said.

  Lenna turned and walked toward the gate. Grimes followed, the dog Gul trotting at his heel with every appearance of contentment. They left the building in silence.

  Outside Grimes said, “My car’s at the end of the road. Can you walk there?”

  “Do I look like I can’t walk there?” said Lenna.

  “I was just trying to be polite,” said Grimes.

  “Give me a break,” she replied. “Don’t bother.”

  “Fine,” said Grimes.

  “Are you like this all the time?” said Lenna.

  “Like what?”

  “Like Mr. Psycho-Shrink, calm, cool and collected?”

  That he gave this appearance was news to Grimes. Lenna’s own calm astonished him. Since their earlier meeting her manner had changed, become brittle and spiky. But then a lot of other things had changed too. Whatever way she needed to deal with it was fine by him. It crossed his mind to wonder if this was a realer version of Lenna than the one he’d met before, but he knew that was bullshit. All versions were real in the end; even the most calculated pose.

  “I’m just trying to get through the day,” he said.

  “You’re so fucking rational.”

  “Look, you’re upset,” said Grimes. “Who wouldn’t be?”

  “Jesus.”

  Lenna turned and walked away. She disappeared out of the light thrown by the Mercedes and into the darkness of the road. Grimes shrugged and followed. He could hear her steps ahead but until his eyes adjusted he couldn’t see her. She seemed familiar with this place and he wondered why. It was on her land. But why would a person maintain a small jail—containing an old tin-roofed shack—in the middle ofthat land? Now didn’t seem like the moment to ask. He remembered the flashlight in his pocket and took it out and switched it on. With his path lit he doubled his pace and caught up beside her. They made it to his car without further acrimony by virtue of not speaking.

  “What’s that?” she said when she saw it.

  “It’s an Olds 88,” replied Grimes, and added, “it’s a classic.”

  He opened the passenger door for her. She got in without further comment. Grimes suddenly realized that somewhere during the walk to the car the black shadow had vanished from his heel. The dog, Gul, had gone.

  Grimes shone the flashlight back up the road: nothing. He considered an impulse to go back and get him, then told himself this was no time to be a cornball. If the dog didn’t want to leave his home turf that was his business. When Atwater and the others came back, as they would, they would kill him. Grimes wavered. It’s just a dog, man. You can miss him later. Grimes walked around the car and got in behind the wheel.

  “Where are we going?” asked Lenna. “And don’t say the police.”

  “I don’t know,” said Grimes. “Does ‘the Old Place’ mean anything to you?”

  “I thought I just told you to give me a break.”

  Grimes massaged his eyeballs. A cigarette seemed like a good idea. He found one and lit it. It tasted wonderful. His brain swam pleasantly. A name sprang into his head.

  “Holden Daggett,” he said.

  “What?”

  Lenna stared at him. Grimes dug out his wallet, searched the pockets and pulled out the card. He put the wallet away and shone the flashlight on the card. After he read it he slipped it into his breast pocket. He switched off the flashlight and turned on the ignition. The engine caught. He switched on the headlights.

  “So where are we going?” said Lenna.

  Grimes opened his mouth to answer and stopped. At the outermost edge of the beams he could see two points of light glittering in the dark. Without debating it he threw the door open and climbed out and shouted down the road.

  “Gul! Make up your fucking mind!”

  There was a pause and in the pause the dark clouds high above opened their arms and dropped a sudden drenching deluge all around them. Grimes made to get back in the car but it was too late: his clothes were already plastered to his skin. He squinted again. Through the layered silver curtain that the headlights made of the falling rain the two glittering points could no longer be seen.

  Then, from the downpouring night, came a howl: a mournful yoop-yoop-yaroo that froze Grimes’s blood and at the same time made him ache.

  He waited a while longer, getting wetter. But Gul didn’t show.

  “Good luck to you, man!”

  Grimes wiped a handful of rain from his face. He ducked back into the Olds. As he was about to shut the door a black shape, its body shining lithe in a dripping coat, padded unhurriedly into the lights and up to the car and slithered past Grimes into the rear seat.

  Grimes could not remember when anything had made him so happy.

  “Great,” said Lenna. “You have any idea what a wet dog smells like?”

  In the rear seat Gul shook himself. Lenna endured this in a silence more eloquent than words. Grimes slammed the door and reversed the car out onto the blacktop. GuPs breath was damp and warm on his neck.

  “He saved our ass,” said Grimes. “Show some gratitude.”

  “You didn’t say where we were going,” said Lenna.

  Grimes changed gears and started back toward the highway.

  “I’ve been told that it’s pretty, especially in the spring. If you like that kind ofthing,” said Grimes.

  “What is?” said Lenna.

  “A place in Georgia,” said Grimes, “called the Ohoopee River bottomlands.”

  The fatman burns.

  He waits.

  And as he burns and as he waits, he remembers.

  He remembers the cold of steel and the heat of flame; the crunch of severing sinew and bone; and the crackle of intolerable pangs through the skin of calf and thigh; the teeming multiplication of the microscopic forms that sought to feed on him and perished in the trying. And though he remembers these things, he does not remember cries or groans, yet such, he imagines, there must have been, for the pain was huge. The pain was huge and remains huge still. But his strength has seen him through, and his will; these things and, too, his burning.

  For though the flames have long since played themselves away, his burning has not ceased. Now he burns within; from frustration and the need to know, from the impotence and impatience of the once-was-mighty, from the molten drip, drip, drip of what-might-be, from the endless wonderment of what-will-be? His left hand—his only hand—reaches forth from his fastness but he knows not—though he hopes—what it touches nor what that touch will bring. In any or all of the minutes of each hour passing by, in any or all of the sifting seconds of each month, a lesser will might have jettisoned its sanity and gone gratefully mad. But the fatman, blistered, scarred and bestumped though he is, will not permit himself that reprieve. He will pay in deposits infinitesimal the infinite debt that cannot be repaid until that moment of completion which renders all dues null and void. Until then he will not succumb, neither to the cowardly bleating of his organicity nor the sweet temptations of the psychosis. For there is a higher power than he or they. This he knows even if this he does not believe. He thought—this he admits—he thought he had transcended the human collective by smashing its most sacred taboos each after the other, in hecatombs and orgies needless and wild. Now his waiting, more than his burning, has shown him different. His manifold transgressions—his dancing beneath a pagan sun in the realm of human violence he thought he’d made his own—were nothing more than the curse that blessed: a glorious sacrifice before the altar of the power that condemned him.

  At this the fatman laughs and his body shakes and the burning scalds him anew, and he embraces it for his own.

  His own defiance makes him his mock of mocks.

  And so: the choice stands before him. And in that choice is the knowing, if not the belief, before which he must kneel. His being squashes conscience and consciousness both beneath its
heel, and demands at the last he keep the bargain struck without knowing while gestating in the womb he grew to loathe. His own malediction is upon him now. The full moon wanes. The light begins to glimmer through the trees. And the fatman harbors his strength, once mighty, and waits, and burns, as he has waited, and has burned, for the ones he loves.

  The one and the other.

  The twain.

  And the mystery that accompanies them.

  The mystery that offends, for he believed himself above it.

  The last transgression: the love in which he holds them.

  In his fastness.

  TEN

  THE RAIN fell thick and hard, covering the highway with two inches of water and knocking thirty miles an hour off their top speed. In the passenger seat of the Olds 88, Lenna Parillaud slept. In the rear sprawled the dog, Gul, wet and stinking, in a similar state. Which left Cicero Grimes to peer through an opaque windshield and worry about what to do next. The interior of the car was stifling and getting worse by the minute as water and sweat evaporated from hair and clothing and condensed on glass and wood and Grimes’s forehead. The Olds did not have air-conditioning. Grimes pulled out his pack of Pall Malls. They were too damp to get out of the pack. That decided him. Slugging through the rain at the speed of a mountain bike was an option only a panic-stricken loser would take. He was made of sterner stuff. And he needed a smoke.

  When a blur of hollow light up ahead signaled some kind of roadside mall Grimes pulled over and drove into the parking lot. Lenna stayed sleeping. Maybe she was on something. Gul raised his head and looked at Grimes.

  “Sleep,” said Grimes, hopefully.

  Gul closed his eyes and flopped back down. From the pouch in the door Grimes took out a road map and found their approximate location. They were a long way from Georgia but, as he suspected, not far from the cabin that Grimes leased near the Mississippi line. He used it as a retreat and as a quiet place where he sometimes took clients for detoxification. He hadn’t been there for what seemed like a long time. He figured they could hole up there until the storm passed, dry out a little and recover some composure; or at least he could. He looked up at the lights outside: an all-night, all-everything gas station and grocery. As he opened the door Gul popped his head up again.

  “Stay,” said Grimes. “I’ll be back.”

  Gul stayed and Grimes got wet again gassing up the Olds. He went inside the store. There he gathered up a quart of Tropicana and a carton of Pall Malls, and went over to the refrigerator. As he bent over to grab two pounds of rib-eye steak wrapped in Styrofoam and plastic, the gun in his waistband dug into his belly. He buttoned his jacket over it. He approached the checkout and smiled at the guy behind the counter and hoped that the cops weren’t already on their way.

  “Bad night out there,” said Grimes affably.

  “In here all the nights bad, buddy,” said the guy.

  Grimes nodded sympathetically, paid in damp bills and went on his way.

  When they pulled up outside Grimes’s cabin a half hour later the rain hadn’t eased up any. The cabin wasn’t remote—there was another house only fifty yards away—but it was quiet. Lenna still didn’t stir. Grimes got out and Gul looked at him and waited until Grimes clicked his tongue before clambering out after him. While Grimes found his keys and opened the cabin door Gul roved off into the darkness to look for trouble. Finding none in the immediate vicinity he returned and as Grimes stepped over the threshold Gul followed him inside and shook himself down over the kitchen-living room floor. Grimes accepted this in good grace, switched on the electricity at the mains, emptied his groceries on the breakfast counter and put a pot of coffee on the stove. The place had that drafty, familiar-but-unoccupied atmosphere, but after the rain it felt as good as a suite at the Royale. Grimes found a raincoat in a closet and went to get Lenna from the car.

  She awoke as he opened her door.

  “Where are we?” she said drowsily.

  Her eyes were blurred and drooping and Grimes decided she was on pills for sure. That was okay by him. He nodded over his shoulder at the cabin.

  “Rest stop,” he said. “It’s my place. It’s safe.”

  He helped her to her feet and spread the raincoat over her shoulders and took her inside. He sat her on the sofa and gave her a glass of orange juice. She looked around the minimally furnished room as if she were in a Mexican jail.

  “You live here?” she said with pity.

  “Sometimes,” said Grimes. “Relax awhile.”

  Grimes went into one of the two small bedrooms, dumped the revolver and the contents of his suit onto the bedside table and stripped off his wet clothes. While Gul sniffed the place over, Grimes took a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt from a drawer and pulled them on. From a cupboard he took out his first-aid bag and carried it with his wet clothes through into the living room. Lenna had finished her juice and looked more alert. Grimes put the first-aid bag on the table. Lenna stood up.

  “Do you mind telling me what’s going on?” she said.

  Grimes was getting used to her dry, confrontational style. It’s just her manner, he told himself, it doesn’t mean you’re getting on her nerves or anything like that.

  “I figured we needed to regroup and get our minds right,” said Grimes. “Or at least my mind.”

  “In other words you don’t know,” said Lenna.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” said Grimes.

  “You’re beginning to get on my nerves,” said Lenna.

  Grimes went to the dryer by the sink and threw his suit inside, turned the machine on at low.

  “I’m going to dry my clothes, stitch the dog’s ear back on and work out how we’re going to travel six hundred miles without getting gunned down or worse. Then, if it’s still raining, I may catch an hour’s sleep.”

  “You’re going to sew the dog’s ear back on?”

  Lenna stared at him as if he were mad.

  “It would be easier if you left us alone awhile. He’ll be less nervous.”

  Lenna looked grateful to be excluded.

  “Is there anyplace I can wash off the smell of Jack Seed?”

  Grimes pointed. “The bathroom’s through there. You’ll find a robe in there too.”

  Lenna walked into the bathroom and closed the door. Grimes felt relieved. He ripped open one of the packs of steak. Gul trotted over and sat down in front of him and licked his chops. Grimes took a sixteen -ounce steak from the pack and showed it to him.

  “Stay there,” said Grimes.

  He walked over to the table and Gul watched him go with mournful eyes as Grimes put the meat on the table. From the bag he took out a syringe, an ampule of lidocaine and a suture pack. He drew up the li-docaine, opened a number-two catgut suture and clipped the needle into a pair of forceps. He picked up the meat again and turned to Gul.

  “Okay, pal,” said Grimes.

  Gul ambled over as if to say he wasn’t that interested in the meat after all. When Grimes let go of the steak Gul snapped it from the air and with a couple of strenuous gulps took it down in one. Grimes cleared disturbing images of the concrete cage room from his mind and sat down on a straight-backed chair. He took two handfuls of GuPs neck fur and pulled him between his legs. He looked into the dog’s eyes.

  “Listen,” said Grimes. “We can’t have you walking around with your ear hanging off like that. No one will take you seriously. I’m going to patch it back together. It will hurt but you can take it. Afterwards it will hurt a lot less than it does now. Okay?”

  Grimes was glad Lenna wasn’t around to see this and make him feel stupid. Gul looked at him for a while, then blinked.

  “Good man,” said Grimes.

  He examined the wound. It was clean enough but there was some skin loss and there had to be some dead tissue along the edges. He opened a sachet of antiseptic and soaked a cotton ball. He dabbed at the wound and Gul pulled away and growled. Grimes pulled him back and tried not to look at his teeth.

  “I k
now,” he said. “I know. It won’t take long.”

  Grimes finished cleaning the wound and picked up the syringe. Gul shied away again. Grimes pulled him back.

  “Trust me,” said Grimes. “It’s local anesthetic. Now, hold still and take it like a man.”

  Gul settled down. Grimes stuck the needle into and along one edge of the wound, murmuring in what he hoped was a comforting fashion as he did so.

  “You’re a soldier, pal, a real soldier, and you saved my bacon back there. I won’t forget that, no sir. We need you on this deal, you understand? Yes, we need you. We need somebody who knows how to handle himself. Christ. You and me are the only characters around who aren’t totally fucking nuts. Good man, good man.”

  To Grimes’s amazement and gratification Gul stood stock-still while he infiltrated both edges of the wound with local from each of its four corners.

  “That’s the worst of it over,” said Grimes.

  Gul gave him a how-can-you-do-this-to-me? look. Grimes murmured and petted a little more while the local took hold, then he took a pair of scissors, trimmed the dead flesh from the edges and put in eight stitches. Throughout it all he mumbled away in a low voice without really knowing what he was saying and Gul put up with it without stirring. While he worked, Grimes turned a few things over in his mind.

  By the clock his father had a three-hour lead on them now and had probably missed the rainstorm to boot. They would never catch up with him. And that was presuming they were all heading in the same direction. For all Grimes knew the Old Place was in Mexico and George was halfway across Texas. Holden Daggett was the only link they had but Grimes thought it was a strong one. Clarence Jefferson must have trusted Daggett for many years to have given him the task of delivering his last will and testament. It made sense that Jefferson would not have used some sleazebag in the City. Grimes also figured that if the Captain had confided that much in Daggett, then the old attorney would probably know where the Old Place was too. If he didn’t, then all Grimes would be able to do was sit and watch CNN for news of George Grimes, last of the desperadoes.