Bug Jack Barron

by Norman Spinrad

  “Bet your ass I’m gonna tell him what to do!” Barron told him. (Fucking Luke owes me plenty for not shafting him today, let him do what he’s paid for, for a change, give him less time to mess with my head.) “Bigger men than Governors are gonna do what I say when I get back to New York.”

  Abruptly, he remembered what had really dragged him to Mississippi was not Franklin at all, was Benedict Howards. First time in nearly a month I’ve gone a whole day without thinking of that fucker. But there’s the stink of Bennie all over this, he half-threatened to do me in over it, scared shitless I’d find out something from this cat. But what? He’s just a poor dumb fucker don’t know his ass from his elbow. Makes no sense. Not unless…

  “You okay, man,” Franklin said as he got up from the table. “Y’know that, ol’ Jack, you’re pretty fuckin’ all right for a shade TV star…Who knows, maybe you got black blood back there somewhere, maybe you are a black shade?”

  Outside, King Street had passed over the midnight line: people coming from more than going to, junkies either fixed or in the deep shakes, quick-throw whorehouses past their peaks, winos far gone or sleeping it off in pools of vomit, paddy wagons raking up the fallen human leaves, a London-fog of pot-smoke rancid grease spilt beer drunken piss settling down on the buildings, gutters, alleyways in a funky-spent film.

  Beside him, Henry George Franklin was stone-silent, like a hunched-forward wino who had made the price, passed through the flash, and was now out of it whether busted in the tank or pissing in his pants blotto in an alley; he had done his thing for the night and till the bleary dawn came entrusted his fate to the hands of the gods. And Barron, picking up on the wasted roach-end mood thought: throw the whole damn thing in Luke’s lap and forget it. What else is there to do?

  He stared up the street looking for a cab—nothing in sight but a paddy wagon, couple trucks, and two funky old ’70s cars. New York reflexes, Barron began walking up the street, some reason you never get a cab in the ass-end of nowhere just standing around, and besides, on a street like this, gotta keep moving, is all. Franklin trailed after him, a glassy-eyed zombie.

  Half a block up King Street, Barron got a flash. Something was wrong, out of tune, blowing a cold wind down the back of his neck. It made him break his stride, twist around to look behind him—

  Like a sudden slap in the face, an unreal firecracker-backfire sound, a hard metal bee buzzed by his ear, and a sharding scream of tin as a garbage can between him and the wall of a nearby building exploded in a flash of metal, gray slop and wet orange peels.

  Barron dove to the sidewalk face forward, arms covering his head, rolled behind a parked car as another shot split the air around a low sickening moan, saw Henry George Franklin clutch at his belly as he folded; then a third bullet smashed Franklin’s skull, flipped him backward to the sidewalk like a bloody ruined doll.

  Across the street people were shouting as they ran in both directions from the mouth of an alley, and he saw a man resting the barrel of some kind of snub-nosed assassin-rifle on the lid of a rusty garbage can behind which he crouched.

  A smoke-flash from the rifle, and a bullet exploded through two layers of car-window, ricocheting off the wall behind him and blowing the tire by his leg with a soft cush of air as it sprayed him with glass. Another backfire-sound, and the car body shook twice against his cheek as a bullet tore through the double metal walls of the far door, then spent itself in the door against which he huddled.

  Down the street two cops were running toward the alley from the paddy wagon, and the siren sounded as the paddy wagon began to back jaggedly up King Street.

  A clatter of metal as the gunman fled up the alley, kicking over the garbage can.

  Barron got to his feet, both pants-knees torn and the flesh beneath abraded and bleeding lightly. He was shaking. Five shots in as many seconds—the first five bullets he had ever faced.

  A yard or two away lay Henry George Franklin, blood pooling on his stomach, his smashed face mercifully hidden by a clot of amorphous red. Barron retched once, turned away, saw one of the cops racing across the street toward him, and, in a flash of adrenalin, the reality of the moment penetrated the time-delay circuit to his head.

  First shot was for me! Me! Déjà vu gunshots cowboys Indians racing up the hill at Iwo Jima Eliot Ness Zapruder film capgun-marching soldiers Oswald folding Viet Nam-headline war-images echoed in his mind…but the blood on the sidewalk in gallons and quarts was the same stuff in nicks on his own face cut shaving, same as the light redness on his skinned slightly-burning knees, pieces of Henry George Franklin white slivers of skull in sickening red wetness was same stuff inside him, just as sticky-soft vulnerable bag of pulsing slimy organs was him, kept him alive.

  Dead…I could be dead, laying there a lump of decomposing meat, no difference except he missed me. And he didn’t mean to miss me, first shot was at my head, and after he got Franklin he went after me again, the motherfucker tried to kill me, really tried to make me dead. Some son of a bitch wanted me dead!

  How’s that for your nitty-gritty street-reality, smart-ass? Some Oswald-Ruby-Sirhan loonie whips out a—

  Image of man resting a gun on a garbage can flashed on the playback screen of his mind, zoomed in on the gun: a cool piece of lightweight, high-powered, purposeful steel. High-powered, rapid-fire, no mail-order .22, no Manlicher-Carcano. A pro gun.

  And a pro job.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! Five shots just like that, first one right on the old button, if I hadn’t moved off-rhythm, next two right into Franklin, and then right into the car. A hit-man contract job for sure!

  “You all right?” The cop had reached him, taken one quick look at the ruined body, then ignored it like the rest of the ugly refuse littering the street. The cop’s square face like any other cop’s face, hardly noticed it was black.

  “Nothing broken…” Barron muttered, his thoughts elsewhere, back in the apartment, Benedict Howards saying, “Don’t talk to Franklin, or else—” Howards scared shitless, Hennering’s plane exploding, his widow smashed by the wheels of a rented truck…Or else…or else…

  Only three people knew I was coming down here time enough to arrange a hit, he realized thickly, Sara. Luke. And Howards. No one else. Howards killed Franklin like he killed Hennering, tried to kill me. Had to be Howards!

  The Foundation bought Tessie Franklin. The flash seemed to come from nowhere, but in the after-image wake of the gestalt-inspiration the train of logic behind it stood out hard and clear:

  Howards is the only man in the world could’ve contracted for the hit in time. Howards wanted me dead, wanted Franklin dead, something he was scared enough of coming out in public to kill me for, kill Franklin for, and the only thing that made Franklin any different from twenty million other losers was he’d sold his kid. So if Bennie wanted Franklin shut up, Bennie’s outfit had to have bought the kid…

  And if Bennie bought Tessie Franklin, that’d sure as shit be reason enough to make double sure I didn’t find out, and if I did I wouldn’t get it on the air. Hit-man maybe really did his job after all, maybe only supposed to scare me. Anyway, Franklin’s dead, I got nothing live to put on the air…

  “Hey,” said the cop, “ain’t you Jack Barron? Sure, I see your show every week.”

  “Uh…” Barron grunted, lost in convolutions of snake-dancing logic, remembering the first bullet right at his head, two more college tries after Franklin was dead…No doubt about it, that cocksucker Howards wanted me dead, Franklin or no Franklin, and that don’t make sense with the only cat I could do a show around dead, unless…

  Unless there are other people who’d sold their kids to the Foundation walking around loose.

  “Yeah, I’m Jack Barron,” he said, coming out of it fighting, “and I’m staying with Governor Greene. How about getting me a lift back to the Governor’s Mansion muy pronto? Got a whole lot of checking to do.”

  “You got any idea who wanted to kill you, Mr. Barron?” the cop said.

&n
bsp; Barron hesitated. No thanks, he thought, this is between Bennie and me. Too many tangles, in too deep-immortality, three murders and my name on a murderer’s paper, the show, national politics, and Christ knows what else, all balled up in a writhing glob like a mob scene at a convention of spastic octopuses, too many waves to risk ringing in any dumb local fuzz.

  Yeah, and something else too, admit it Barron, something maybe only the Sicilian in Vince’d understand. Vendetta’s the name of the game, Bennie, just a two-handed game of Russian roulette for all the marbles between you and me. Your boy blew the opening move, and now it’s my turn, Howards, don’t walk past any dark alleys. I’ll nail your ass to the wall or know the reason why! Nobody takes free pot-shots at Jack Barron and gets away whole!

  “Haven’t the faintest idea, officer,” he said. “Far as I know, I haven’t got a real enemy in the world.”

  15

  Wonders of Modern Science, Jack Barron thought as he turned the rented car off the access road and back on to the highway to Evers. As the car picked up speed he glanced at the thin Manila folder beside him on the leatherette seat.

  Take school-attendance records and birth certificates for the last fifteen years, punch ’em on cards and put ’em into the old computer for a cross-correlation, and you get the cards of all the kids who should be in school but ain’t; much smaller pile you feed back into the computer and run ’em off against death-records, out-of-state-transfer records, for the same fifteen years, and you get maybe a couple thousand cards of kids truant from school, alive, and in the state for more than a month; and you whittle that pile down against hospital and loonie-bin records, and down again by running a cross-correlation with parental destitution, and after a final shuffle of the old cards for a fifty-mile-from-Evers radius you get four little cards, four little visits, four nitty grittys out of the whole fucking state. Simple as that.

  Four cards, four Negro children, ages seven to ten, with parents either on the edge of broke or on some kind of welfare. Four kids that disappeared from the face of the earth.

  Four visits to four crummy slat shacks. Four new cars outside four traditional Southern niggertown shitholes, ranging from a Buick to an honest-to-Christ Rolls. Four crazy fairy tales: another “Educational Foundation” schtick, one kid supposedly visiting relatives for six months, a none-of-your-fucking business, and that incredible dumb motherfucker actually believed his kid is now the adopted heir to the kingdom in some nonexistent black African state. And four satchelfuls of untraceable cash money left by four different high-class shades.

  No doubt about it, Barron thought as he moved over into the lefthand lane, whoever’s doing it is flush as hell. Plenty of cash and a mighty smart operation, five tries and five sales and in situations all carefully selected to make the fewest possible government paper-waves. Adds up to someone with private access to a mighty expensive computer, rich enough to buy an expert on the Mississippi State Records filing system—or even to buy a top man on the inside. At an average of fifty thou a kid, that’s a quarter million right there, not to mention what it takes to buy the computer or the computer time, at least five flunkies, grease to get hold of government records…millions of dollars just to make off with five kids!

  How could it be anyone else but that crazy fucker Howards?

  And why did he kill Hennering who didn’t know a thing about this? Or did he? Hennering found out the Foundation was buying kids so Howards killed him…? Millions of dollars and dangerous murders just to get hold of children super-cool-like? Bennie just ain’t the frustrated father type! Only one thing could make Bennie act like such a paranoid spender—immortality, his life, gotta know his hide’s somehow at stake. But why risk his precious immortal life over…?

  “Schmuck,” Barron grunted aloud. Sure, that’s gotta be it—only thing that would make Bennie risk murder-death-sentence is covering up prior murders, and the only thing would make him risk murder in the first place is his goddamned immortality. Jeez, it figures…he must’ve used those kids like guinea pigs to develop that immortality treatment, whatever it is, and that’s why he gets so uptight anytime anyone gets near the subject. And that’s why it was worth three murders to keep it cool!

  For the first time in years that he could remember, Barron felt a flash of pure feral anger, a selfless, uncalculated anger that served no cause but its own. Murdering children to buy his own rotten immortal life! Murdering Hennering and his wife and Franklin to keep it quiet! Buying a Congress and maybe a President soon to cool it, to stand on a pile of bodies on the neck of the whole country for paranoid nightmare million years! Yeah, and buying me to ram it down their throats—sell snuffing out lives in Frankenstein laboratories for the secret of life eternal for the fat-cat few to Brackett Audience Count estimated-hundred-million suckers!

  “And if you don’t, Barron, I just hire a hit-man to kill you too…!”

  Barron slammed the accelerator to the floorboards in a spasm of fury, held it there, and fought the car mano a mano as it screamed down the highway like a scalded cat.

  Everybody’s got his price he thought and immortality buys anyone, eh, Bennie? Think you know it all? But that’s ’cause you’re shit, Howards, pure shit clean through. Don’t dig that there are men aren’t like you, men you can push just a little too far. Well you pushed, you motherfucker, and you’re gonna find out the hard way what happens when you push Jack Barron too far. Immortality…sure, what’s done is done, can’t bring back those kids paid for it with their lives by throwing it away. But my way, Bennie, not yours—over your dead body, is all. Try to make me a murderer like you, Bennie, okay, you made it, so now I’m a killer, but the corpse is gonna be your own!

  His hands on the wheel seemingly sensing every crack in the pavement as the car tore down the highway, Barron felt a strange déjà vu Berkeley attic Jack-and-Sara exhilaration, realized it was nothing but hate had made the Baby Bolshevik bag go ’round. Yeah, just where it was at, we hated everything that wasn’t the way we wanted it to be. Our strength and our weakness—we knew just how to react, black versus white, to everything. Anything wasn’t totally right was totally wrong, and you could hate it, had to hate it knowing Us Anointed were on the Side of the Angels, everything against us was on the side of wrong. Not to hate, we called a cop-out. Never trust anyone past thirty—’cause when a boy becomes a man he stops seeing that sharp hate-line between right and wrong, and if you stay in the Movement then, you’re an opportunistic phony, a fucking politician…a hag-ridden Lukas Greene.

  There’s your definition of politics, grown men playing kid games, hate-games, to get same simple kicks I get off Bug Jack Barron, living-color, man-up-front, self-image is all. And that’s cool. But the real difference between show biz and politics is nothing fancier than hate. Think you could understand that, Luke? You’re the cop-out, not me, playing the politics-hate game, dead Berkeley-game you can’t even feel.

  Yeah, but there’s something about hate that comes on like junk—thinking about it, you know it’s a loser, but oh how good that dirty old surge feels! Gives you something certain to build your whole schmear around—go get what you want, and feel it in your gut. Pure dumb groove to nail Benedict Howards’ head to the old barn door…

  Driving the car at a reckless speed which demanded full physical commitment, the wheel alive and deadly in his hands as the flat land flashed by, Barron grooved on the heady feel of life-and-death riding on his reflexes, his consciousness not trapped in a point behind his eyes but diffused through his hands and through prosthetic metal linkages to the car body and wheels.

  Through electric circuit feedback loops, he anticipated the parallel kick of total total commitment reaching out through satellite-network-vidphone senses to the coast-to-coast hundred million Brackett Count audience, to Luke, Morris, S.J.C., Republicans hot for his bod, all integrated by amplified-power circuitry into his electronically-extended Bug Jack Barron being, alive in a new way, jaw to jaw with death (with Howards as with the highway), in tot
al war of total commitment for total revenge, and immortality, the most total of stakes.

  I’ll do you a show, Howards, you’ll never believe. I’ll chop you to pieces, and be alive and immortal when you’re nothing but a lingering bad taste in a hundred million mouths, fried to a crisp in the electric chair, you Frankenstein ax-murderer you!

  He eased off the throttle as he felt the heat of the moment pass through him leaving a wash of post-adrenalin warmth behind. You’re out of your mind, you know that, man? Only schmucks and Sicilians hate like that…

  Yeah, he thought, clinging to the memory of total hate, but a cool head should know how to use even his own glands.

  “My mammy told me about these here Smoke-Filled Rooms, but this is getting ridiculous,” Lukas Greene said. The smoke level in the conference room, air-conditioned though it was, was beginning to get rather impressive as Sherwood Kaplan lit another of those godawful mentholated filtertipped (“They get you high and they keep you kool”) Kools Supremes, and Deke Masterson rolled another Bull Durham (where in hell they still making that stuff, Greene wondered) tobacco cigarette, and Morris’ cigar smoldered wetly in the cut-glass ashtray opposite Greene, at what in his mind was the foot of the square table, like the rotten green cock of a decomposing corpse.

  Now that, thought Greene, is what we call in the trade symbolism—the G.O.P. is indeed a slowly-decomposing corpse, and green or no, Greg Morris is certainly a rotten prick. But at least a rotten prick I got in the old bag.

  “I zuppose you are all vundering vhy I zummoned you here tonight?” Greene said in a thick Lugosi accent. Morris scowled at him primly, but he didn’t count now—Kaplan and Masterson were the real targets for tonight—and Woody’s petulant, aging-cherub face cracked a faggoty false smile. But Deke was still a pudgy-faced black sphinx.

  “Cut the crap, Luke,” Masterson said in that cultivatedly-gravelly voice of his. “You dragged us here to sell us on Jack Barron we all know that. Where in hell is your so-called Black Shade?”