by Steve Vernon
This is where we lived, the homeless and the lonely. You saw us in the street and you learned to look away and we grew a kind of invisibility. You ignored us and we put up with you. We leaned against death, calling it shade as we lit our last cigarettes and said “Fuck you all!” to the rest of the world.
It was a living, of sorts.
* * *
The walls of The Shambles stank of piss and regret, and I’m not sure which smelled the worse.
There was a lot of blood in The Shambles. There used to be a sausage factory here. The walls reeked of forgotten slaughter. I worked in the kitchen, serving up soup and slabs of fresh baked bread. We got a discount on floor sweepings from the local flour mill.
“Have you been fighting, soup man?” Amos Briarchild asked, noticing the soft blue-gray mouse that Maugham left me with.
Briarchild was a quiet fellow who understood bruises. He’d been beaten regularly as a child with a wooden coat hanger and there were places on his face that didn’t quite fit together. He baked the bread. Tonight, he lumped out mashed potatoes.
He was versatile.
Somebody once told me Briarchild spent six years in a sanitarium not saying a thing. That sounded about right to me. Briarchild was a quiet comfortless quilt of a man. He kept silent as death listening to the world turning slowly around him. Words from Amos Briarchild were a cherished gift. Yet when the man picked up a harmonica you would have sworn he’d sold his soul to the devil to gain such musical talent.
As a young man, Briarchild had blown through backwoods Kansas like a bitter killing wind. Twelve people were found dead in their bed without a mark on them. He’d burked them, pinching their nose and mouths closed and holding them down until they’d breathed the last bit of air left trapped in their lungs. They’d die in silence, struggling beneath his firm gentle death grip. At the end of it, he’d seal their extinction with a tight goodbye kiss.
“I was just trying to catch their last breath,” Briarchild told me one night over a long bottle of bourbon. “There is a special and personal kind of magic in that kind of closure. If you catch enough last breaths you can live forever.”
He said it with all certainty, and maybe he was right. God doesn’t tell us all of the rules.
They never caught Briarchild because the Kansas authorities in charge of the investigation hadn’t wanted to admit that they actually had a serial killer on their hands. Death by misadventure, they called it. Folks just died in their sleep. In the backwoods of Kansas you got away with living behind lies like that.
“You should have seen the other guy,” I said.
For an instant I saw the face of Lucius Maugham floating in the broth, melting from the inside out like a rustle of old snow slipping down a steam grate. Real or not, I stirred it back into the soup.
Briarchild nodded. He had said his sentence for the day. It was almost mystical, like he was saving his breath for some greater cause. I might go a week before I would hear him utter another sentence. It was enough.
Montezuma laughed out loud at my wisecrack. Montezuma was the cook, and would have been at home in a five star restaurant if he could have learned to keep his mouth shut - and if it were not for his unfortunate predilection for forbidden white meat.
“I just like the taste,” he explained to me. “The same way that some people drool over cheeseburgers.”
That was all there was for Montezuma.
He liked the taste of human meat and he made no excuses for it.
“A reporter asked me if I ate human flesh for a spiritual reason,” Montezuma told me once. “He had this theory that I gained the strength and courage of anyone I ate. Theories are damned dull dry things, but they taste right nice with a bit of hunter’s gravy and some fresh green peas. So did he.”
Montezuma was named by his father following an ill-fated Mexican vacation, in which Montezuma’s father returned with a case of the flying axe handles, an unexpected groinal infestation, and a pregnant wife whose womb had been quickened by some other man’s seed. Montezuma’s father never found out who the other man was, but a door-to-door Jehovah Witness had handed out cigars for a week following Montezuma’s birth.
Montezuma’s father wasn’t happy about any of these south-of-the-border repercussions, and decided they were some kind of a revenge of fate. He’d hated his son, and made no attempt to hide his feelings.
“I’m going to go back and get that bastard someday,” Montezuma said. “My dad, I mean. Once I get big enough to take him.”
I looked at Montezuma, big enough to give a large-sized Sasquatch a run for his money. How big did he figure he needed to grow? I guess every child has got to have his own kind of dream.
That was the kind of people that The Shambles attracted.
People with a touch of darkness in their soul.
We served them all indiscriminately. The Shambles was a purgatory of lost souls who weren’t particularly interested in finding themselves. None of us looked for a cure. I was a mass murdering vigilante. Briarchild, a quiet man with a taste for breath. Montezuma, a follower of the darkest of fad diets. There were many others.
“No kidding? Did you nail somebody?” Montezuma asked, pantomiming an ass kicking, his four hundred pounds of muscle and meat performing as supple as a fish fed sumo wrestler. “Don’t fuck with the soup man.”
“From the mouth of the cannibal to the ears of God,” I said.
It was an old joke.
We laughed, just the same.
Old or not, giggles trumped angst, every time.
Except tonight. Tonight, I was too busy staring down into the eyes of a thirteen year old boy, who stood there staring up at me from the front of the soup line. Briarchild saw the boy and he stared just as hard.
Montezuma looked too.
The three of us stood there -– the cannibal and the suffocant and the avenging angel -- staring like a trio of deaf and dumb wise men at this thirteen year old boy who looked like he knew way too many answers.
* * *
I sat with the boy over a bowl of soup.
The boy ate slowly and seriously, like he meant every spoonful of it. He ate with the purposefulness of a famine victim. He had something to tell me, but not just yet. I sat and waited him out. The edge of his spoon scraped a soft song against the side of his stainless steel soup bowl.
“It is good soup,” he said as he finished.
“Try the bread,” I said. “Briarchild is proud of it. He bakes it fresh every morning. He claims it’s as light as an angel’s breath.”
The boy didn’t need to be coaxed. I refilled his bowl, stepping in front of the others, while he worked on his bread. I figured he’d been out of doors for a few days, judging by his appetite. I figured this was his first meal in a while.
He thanked me when I returned.
“Do you have a name?” I asked, handing him the second bowl of soup.
“Robert Bruce, sir.” Then he looked startled. I’d caught him off guard with the second bowl of soup. He hadn’t meant to tell me his name.
“Now that’s a name to conjure with,” I said. “Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland in the early 13th century. His body was buried in Dunfermline Abbey while his heart was kept in Melrose Abbey. Eventually his heart was taken to the Crusades to bring them luck. I guess that they couldn’t find themselves a good luck rabbit’s foot.”
Too much information, I guess.
The boy looked a little disconcerted.
“I haven’t seen you here before, Robert Bruce, sir,” I said with a grin.
He grinned back. For a minute he looked like any other thirteen year old boy, but there was something wrong with that grin. Like it was broken in the corners, somehow sitting just shy of center. And then the grin was gone. He picked up his poker face, and held it out like a shield.
“I am a priest, Robert Bruce,” I said. “My ears work one way, in and not out. What you tell me, I won’t tell anyone. You savvy?”
He flinched when I sa
id ‘savvy’.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“My dad says that. Savvy. He says it when he doesn’t think that I am listening hard enough.”
“Do you miss your dad?” I guessed. There was a chink in his armor, and I was determined to work at it.
The boy grew quiet again.
I suppose I guessed wrong.
“Where do you live, Robert Bruce?” I asked.
He told me the address. Either he trusted me, or he wasn’t clever enough to lie. He seemed clever, so I assumed trust.
“That’s a good neighborhood,” I said. “Why in heaven’s name are you slumming way down here?”
He wanted to tell me. I could see the truth hammering behind the flat of his stare, like a drowning man pounding beneath a frozen pond. We talked and I worked at him.
People generally want to tell their stories.
Secrets are hard things to hold on to.
Finally it came out.
“I ran away,” he said.
“Any particular reason?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
I looked at his eyes. They were shadowed, like he’d been socked in the soul a few too many times. Not real bruises. Just sorrow, run deep. I figured it was night fears. Kids grow fear at this age. They marinated in night sweat and wet dreams and a world of secret shame that adults could only guess at.
“Do you get nightmares?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“I just can’t sleep,” he repeated.
I looked at him. He was just a kid. Kids have trouble putting things together. They can’t see that far down the road. I took it one step further.
“Has someone beaten on you?”
He shook his head.
“I just can’t sleep.”
He kept playing the same song, only I didn’t know the words.
“Have you talked about this to your family?”.
He shook his head, a little too fast.
“No one believes me, since my mother died. I’m thirteen. They think everything I say is a lie.”
I nodded. I remembered thirteen. My mom was dead as well, and my father vanished. I told everyone that an angel had taken him. Nobody believed me. I knew what I’d seen. Nobody listened. Kids can be nearly as invisible as the homeless, I guess. There is a wall in this world that thirteen year old legs just can’t jump over.
“What about your father?” I tried to keep the question delicate. These days you never foresaw the many ways a family could fall apart.
“My father won’t let me sleep. He comes into my bed at night. He does things to me.”
The words fell out of his mouth like hammer blows. I didn’t push for details. His eyes told the whole story.
I squeezed my soup spoon, holding my anger in.
How could I fix this?
I only knew one way.
So I told Robert Bruce a few things.
“I am not a real priest, not like how you think,” I said. “I work differently. Maybe I can help you with this.”
He looked up at me with those thirteen year old eyes of his.
He was cold and hungry and I had given him soup.
All that he wanted was someone to believe in.
I kept squeezing the soup spoon.
“Go home,” I said. “Go home and sit it out. The police will come and talk to you again. If you’ve been away for long they’ll want to talk to you. Don’t tell them anything. Keep it a kid thing. You ran away to join the circus. You wanted to see a rock concert. Make something up. Say nothing. They won’t want to listen anyway. You’re only thirteen.”
He nodded, listening intently.
“Tell me about your house, Robert Bruce. Tell me where your bedroom is. What your backyard looks like.”
He told me. I listened, planning the whole thing out.
“After three nights, leave your bedroom window open,” I said. “I’ll be there. I’ll fix this. I’ll fix this so it stays fixed.”
He nodded, and then I got Briarchild to see that he got home all right. I handed Briarchild twenty dollars of Jacob Leyburg’s blood money for a taxi cab. I trusted Briarchild knew how to keep himself out of sight.
I was already thinking on what I had to do.
I was already planning it out, step by step.
I looked down at the soup spoon. Uri Geller and the Hulk couldn’t have bent that bit of cutlery back into shape.
I had ruined it.
I let the spoon drop into the garbage can at the end of the line.
Don’t fuck with the soup man.
CHAPTER 3 – In Between the Cradle and the Coffin
“Did you have a good talk with the kid?” Montezuma asked.
I nodded.
“So how are you going to help him?”
“Who said anything about helping him?”
Montezuma shrugged. He had a good shrug. He really got the weight of his shoulders into it.
“I like kids,” he said. “They’re really sweet.”
He licked his lips, thinking about things I didn’t want to think about. He was a good man and a good friend when you got right down it, but he definitely wasn’t anything remotely close to one of the good guys.
“All right,” I said, holding my hands up in surrender. “I’m helping him.”
“So what’s his problem?”
I touched the collar.
“Don’t give me any of that confessional seal bullshit,” Montezuma said. “The two of you just sat down over a crummy bowl of soup.”
“Don’t bad mouth my soup,” I warned. “I make good soup.”
“I’ve gargled better backwash,” Montezuma said. “So what’s his problem?”
He was kidding and I was kidding and we both knew what he was really saying to me.
“He’s got no problem,” I said. “He’s with me.”
“Safer than angels,” Montezuma said. “So are you ever going to tell me or am I going to have to beat it out of you?”
I laid the story out for him.
He scoured his cutting board with lemon and salt, like he was working out some unseen stain.
For a while, neither of us said a thing.
Finally he spoke. “Do you want me to drop over to this asshole’s house for a midnight snack?”
I had a little fun imagining Robert Bruce’s father waking up one night to the sight of Montezuma looking down upon his bed.
“This pisses you off too?” I asked.
“You got to ask? I may be a cannibal, but I don’t fuck kids.”
I nodded. “I’m doing the right thing.”
“I expect you are.”
“It’ll fuck him up, but it’s the right thing.”
“I didn’t disagree with you, did I?”
“Yeah, but it’ll fuck him up really badly,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s the right thing or not.”
Montezuma stared at me, his eyes as flat and murky as a leech filled swimming hole.
“He is a kid,” Montezuma said. “He is supposed to be fucked up. It’s in the contract God makes you sign before you get your walking papers. We are all born fucked up and we all die fucked up and in between the cradle and the coffin there isn’t a goddamn thing we can do about it.”
I dropped the vegetable cuttings into the soup pot, half-filled with water. We’d leave it simmer all night, and in the morning I’d have a fine broth to start with. Half of a good meal lay in the prep work.
“Unless we don’t die,” I pointed out, playing Devil’s advocate for the hell of it.
“Everybody dies,” Montezuma said.
“You ever think about it?” I asked. “Death, the end of all things?”
“I thought you preachers believed in life eternal?”
“Sure,” I said. “Life eternal, free cable television, and a chicken boiling in every stewpot. I believe in it, but that doesn’t make it any more believable now does it?”
“Shithead,” Montezuma retorted.
He
didn’t really mean it.
I watched Montezuma put the last of his pots away.
“It scares me sometimes,” he said. “The thought of me dying, with all these souls inside me. All the souls that I’ve eaten. I can hear them talking to me sometimes, did you know?”
This was the part of our friendship that always tested me. Being the father confessor to all of these men I had no right to judge. I’d killed my share of men since I’d started into the vengeance business.
So what if I hadn’t eaten any of them.
What difference did that really make?
“I hear them, sometimes,” Montezuma said. “I hear them talking to me in the nighttime. If I didn’t like the taste so much I’d probably stop. That reporter never shuts up some nights.”
“You sure he wasn’t a preacher?”
“Maybe in a past life.”
“Did you ever give any thought to those voices being nothing more than your imagination?” I asked.
Montezuma shrugged. “Did you ever give that same thought, thinking about your God?”
“You’ve got a point,” I admitted. “The voices are real. They have to be. It’s a law of science, you know. You can’t destroy anything. You can’t eat it. You can’t burn it. You just can’t hide it away for very long. There is always something left over.”
That cheered him up.
He looked me in the eye.
“Do you know what I want, when I die?” he asked me. “I want to be burned. Just like a Viking. I figure all those souls I’ve eaten would be set free.”
“You told me that before,” I said. He had, too. Every time he got to feeling down he’d start talking about it. He had killed so often that thinking and talking about death was just kind of a habit.
“I figure I ought to repeat myself to a preacher. Those collars cut the air off to your brain, you know? They fuck up the short term memory real bad.”
I gave him a grin to show him I wasn’t being all that serious.
“So how are you going to fix his problem?” he asked.
I looked at the knife, lying innocently upon the counter.
“I’ve got a plan,” I said. “It’s just going to take a little time, is all.”