by Steve Vernon
I liked to watch the faces going by. They came in so many different flavors, like soup, only deeper. This one was ready for a fight while that one was just thankful for a warm place to hide. This one wanted to talk, and that one didn’t want to listen anymore.
They were always different.
You never could tell completely what was going on inside of them.
They always surprised me.
Montezuma stood at the grill, flipping burgers. Briarchild broke the bread. Robert Bruce handed out paper napkins.
We were a good team.
The umpteenth hungry man of the night held his bowl out to me.
I ladled the soup up, digging deep for the meat that had sank to the bottom. This was always a good time for me. It was kind of a Zen moment, just letting myself get lost in the stirring of the soup. There was no need for stress. Nobody pushed in line and there were few fights or arguments here at The Shambles. Everyone knew that troublemakers found themselves back out on the street.
Just then Montezuma pushed me aside. He was a big man, and he got his weight behind the push.
I stepped back, catching myself against the counter before I fell.
“What gives?” I asked.
Montezuma wasn’t listening. He grabbed both sides of the soup pot. His hands had to be burning, the metal of the soup pot was that hot.
He looked at me before he spoke.
“Sacrifice,” he said. “Do you savvy?”
Then, like a kid bobbing for Halloween apples, Montezuma dunked his head into the steaming pot of soup. For a moment, I froze. I watched him struggle, the white half-moons of tension etched upon his fingernails as he tried to force himself up, but another part of himself kept forcing his face back down into the soup.
He pulled himself back up, and I’ll swear he was grinning. He was biting and chewing on his tongue and lips and any part of his face that he could catch hold of.
Through it all, his words on cannibalism kept haunting me.
I just liked the taste of it, is all he’d said.
Then he got his face back down into the soup again.
I grabbed him by the shoulders, trying to pull him back up. There were a lot of us there. I felt hands all over me trying to help, so many and so close that I damn near couldn’t breathe.
We might as well have been trying to beach a whale.
That’s when I saw the shape hovering behind Montezuma, bending him over, forcing his face into the soup. There was something standing there behind Montezuma, a shape, an entity forcing him under.
Montezuma’s knuckles knotted in effort. I think he was trying to force himself up. That was the hell of it. He kept trying to raise himself up, like he was trying to save himself, while something else kept forcing his face deeper into the boiling soup.
Nothing was moving and that was what was wrong with the whole picture. The soup wasn’t churning. It ought to have been bubbling like a witch’s cauldron. He should have been snorting and choking like a drowning water buffalo. Yet there was nothing but an awful absolute silence.
He wasn’t making a noise.
The shape kept holding him down. I tried to grab at the shape, but I might as well have been trying to grab a handful of smoke. I felt a tingle running through my fingers as they brushed the shape. I pushed closer, trying to catch hold of something that wasn’t there.
And then I saw the face.
I saw the face leering out of the shape that poured itself around Montezuma. It was the face of Robert Bruce’s father, pale and blue, his smile a thin razor blade trapped between garrote taut lips. Rope burns and heavy dry heaves, undertones of talcum, concrete and bone, with a pair of eyes as bright blue as stained glass shrapnel.
And then he was gone.
We lifted what was left of Montezuma easily from the soup pot.
We laid him down upon the ground. His face was scalded a bright beet red, yet beneath the burnt skin I could see a bluing haze, like old paint peeking out from beneath a second peeling coat. His face was mottled with pinpoint hemorrhages, like flea bites. As his jaws sagged open, I could see no sign of soup inside. He was either a very neat eater, or he hadn’t swallowed a drop.
I looked up and saw Robert Bruce, standing a few bodies back in the lineup, smiling in a soft kind of way, like he wanted to laugh and cry at the same damn time.
I looked back into the pot. I saw a shape swirling down deep in the broth, like a slow vortex of eels, all hungry and sucker-mouthed.
Then it was gone.
Everybody was standing there, looking around, seeing nothing.
I picked up the soup pot and I carried it to the sink and I tipped it out, every last drop.
CHAPTER 7 – Night of the Living Dumpster Demon
There was a big, round moon staring down over the city when we got ready to bury Montezuma. It might have been the eye of God, or it might have been a circle of moldering green cheese. I didn’t really care. A friend of mine had died and I had a promise to keep.
It was a bad death.
There aren’t many good ones.
We held the funeral that evening. It was a quiet service. Funerals are best presented as a glorified pantomime. Why mess with useless dialogue when a good man has died?
Mind you, there had to be a bit of music to carry the soul home. A sad-eyed man with a gray and grizzled droop of walrus moustache banged out a tune on a three stringed guitar, while Amos Briarchild blew his harmonica, sweet and low.
Robert Bruce stood beside me, as silent as a shadow’s whisper. He kept watching it all, watching everything like he was soaking it in. I wondered what he was thinking. I wondered who he was thinking about.
I looked down at Montezuma, lying on the concrete of the alley outside of The Shambles, just next to the dumpster. We had wrapped a couple of tea towels over his face to hide the burns.
The tea towels stuck to the scald like a terry cloth caul.
There was no weeping. This close to the street you understood how transient a thing life could be. Nothing more than a handful of shiny coins that you hang onto for a while and then let go.
We slid Montezuma into the dumpster, and then a half dozen of us braced our feet against the wall and shoved the dumpster safely away from The Shambles. A half-filled jug of kerosene that had been liberated from a conveniently unlocked shed was emptied into the dumpster.
I said a few things. Some of the onlookers listened. Others were too tanked to care. At least three wine bottles had been opened and emptied. Death was best faced in a state of perfect numbness.
All of us lit our matches and heaved them in. It was important that we all did it together, so nobody could take the credit or the blame for the destruction of Montezuma’s remains.
I was pleased to see Robert Bruce lit a match of his own and threw it into the kerosened dumpster as well. It was the proper thing for him to do. He was one of us, now.
Within five minutes, we had ourselves a fat and roaring crematorium.
I stood there lost in a reverie, until about ten minutes later when the bucket brigade of civilization arrived. A policeman, complete with a badge and a billy club. The policeman’s partner stood nervously at the end of the alley, shifting from foot to foot, wishing he were anywhere else but where he was. Max Sennett would have been damn proud.
“What’s going on here?” the policeman asked.
I looked for Robert Bruce, but he had already faded into the crowd, demonstrating a surprising instinct for survival.
“We are giving our friend a Viking funeral,” I said.
The cop gave me a hard stare, like I was some kind of a public animal. I wondered if he had any idea how many dangerous offenders he stood in front of?
“He was a Viking in his heart,” I added.
“You can’t be burning a body,” the policeman said.
“It’s all right officer. It’s just trash. We’re only joking about a body. See, we even have a public burning permit.”
I showed him the
permit, trying to think Jedi mind-control thoughts. These are not the droids you are looking for. The permit was printed up all nice and legal and impressive looking.
I had called up a city counselor who owed me a favor. He personally printed the permit up for me and couriered it over. It paid to have friends in middle management.
“It is a religious rite,” I gobble-de-gooked. “We’re celebrating the turning of Venus’s sacred vernal solstice.”
I was leaning on the collar just as hard as I could, praying that the policeman had a few squibs of good Catholic guilt lurking somewhere deep in his bones. The cop looked at the permit warily, with a pair of pavement eyes, all gray and flat and lacking in pity.
“Are you responsible here?” he wanted to know, looking for a safe place to lay blame.
“I am responsible,” I said, stepping forward. I was counting on the collar to give him pause, but he didn’t seem impressed.
Perhaps he was an agnostic.
The policeman made some low and threatening sounds. It looked like he was thinking about chucking our bogus burning permit straight into the burning dumpster. It might have made for a grand theatrically ironic gesture, but it would also mean I’d be spending the night in the city lock-up, before or after I beat the shit out of him.
Then Briarchild stepped up beside me.
“I am responsible here,” Briarchild said.
The policeman eyed him warily.
Briarchild wasn’t all that much of an impressive sight, but right then he looked like a shining angel to me. He put his harmonica to his lips and he wailed out a pretty good spaghetti western riff. Ennio Morricone would have been proud to call him blood brother.
The guitar player stood beside Briarchild, brandishing his three string guitar, ready to swing on anyone within g-string range.
“He’s a liar,” the guitar player said. “I am responsible.”
“Testify! Testify!” A Sterno bum waving a fresh tin stood up beside the guitar player. “I’m here to testify. Take my confession. I am responsible.”
“No! I am responsible,” another added.
Faster than you could say “Spartacus” there were nearly two dozen proud confessors, eagerly forcing themselves on the law. While the policeman was distracted, I prudently retrieved our burning permit.
“All right, all right,” the policeman hollered, waving his hands in the air for some kind of order.
I shrugged.
“The way I see it, officer,” I said, trying to sound reasonable, “you can call the riot squad or call it a day. Either way, it is your decision.”
He scowled at me. His face was nearly hidden beneath the fine, prematurely gray lines of his Korean War flattop. He looked like a petulant four year old that could not get his way. He didn’t want the hassle of running us all in, but he also hated to let go of the fight.
“So who will put the fire out?” he asked.
“We will put it out. It is our dumpster anyway. Nobody has moved it or dumped it in half a dozen years. We just keep it here for ambience.”
He gave me another flat pavement scowl. Not an ounce of hee-haw in the guy. He was one tough bastard. I expected he’d be thinking about me all night long, while he was making love to his barbed wire blow-up doll.
He looked up over my shoulder. His eyes grew wider, and he lost every vestige of his toughness. He took a few steps backward, before turning and running. His partner followed close behind
“Ha,” I said. “We sure scared those two.”
I watched the two of them scuttle away. Nobody else seemed interested in the forces of the law.
They were too busy staring at the dumpster fire.
When I looked back, I saw what everyone had been staring at. There, perched on the rim of the dumpster and swinging his heels like a boy on a swing, was Marcus Bruce, or what was left of him. He had a flat kind of look to him, like a paper doll, and he was bending in some directions a body should not be able to bend in.
“Guess who?” he said, and then he laughed like a Woody Woodpecker nightmare in stereo.
The laughter echoed through the alley.
Nobody smiled.
I looked down and there, standing beside me, was Robert Bruce. I could feel the energy singing up from his thirteen year old body, up to what was left of his father.
“I am responsible,” Robert Bruce whispered.
And maybe he was.
Markie stuck his eyes out at us, waggling them like something out of a kid’s cartoon. I kept expecting him to make kahooga sounds, and maybe howl like a wolf. It should have been funny, but I was scared shitless.
“Fuck this blind terror,” I said. “I am going to go talk to the bastard.”
“But he’s dead,” Briarchild said.
“Maybe he doesn’t know that yet. We ought to talk with him. Don’t you ever watch Ghost Whisperer?”
“Man, if you go to talk to him then you’ll wind up dead too.”
“Death isn’t contagious, you know.”
Briarchild stared up at what was staring down at us. “You tell that to him.”
“I plan to. Aren’t you listening? You seem awfully talkative for somebody who don’t say much.”
I tucked my fingers inside my collar and I fished out my crucifix.
“You figure that’ll protect you?” Robert Bruce asked.
“It’s sacred,” I told him. “My mother gave it to me.”
That was a lie, but life is a con job. We believe what we’re told, and little else. I’d bought the crucifix at a pawnbroker a year after I’d left the church. I’m not sure why I bought it, but maybe I was about to find out.
“Hey, Markie,” I shouted, walking toward him holding out my crucifix. I didn’t know if it offered much protection, but it was better than nothing. “Have you heard the word of the Lord today?”
It wasn’t much of a line.
What exactly do you say to a dead man?
How’s it hanging?
Is it hanging?
Has it rotted off?
I stepped closer, feeling a bit like Gary Cooper stepping out into a High Noon showdown. I felt the roaring heat of the dumpster blaze. That kerosene and all of Montezuma’s three hundred plus suet-filled pounds were throwing out a hell of a lot of Fahrenheit. It didn’t bother Markie much. He stared down at me, the ghost of a buzzard’s shadow eye-balling a dying man’s last desert crawl.
If he was worried he didn’t seem to show it. He looked like he was waiting for something. I wondered if Montezuma was getting set to pop up and join him. Maybe the two of them could sing a revenantial harmony.
Burning, burning, disco inferno.
Markie laughed that Woody Woodpecker laugh one more time, and then he leaped down from his perch with an agility that would have made Spiderman look like an arthritic rust patch. He landed directly in front of the guitar player, who swung the guitar like he’d been living off of batting statistics and Baby Ruth chocolate bars. I had to give him two merit points for blind-ass balls, but a negative thirteen for aim.
Markie took a step forward. A big guy grabbed him from behind, squeezing him in a bear hug. Markie flexed and I heard the big guy’s arms crack. The big guy fell to his knees. He was weeping as he knelt. Markie mule kicked backward, like he was trying to kick a field goal in reverse. He took the big guy’s head off. The severed head rolled in front of me, mouth still gaped open and screaming soundlessly, tears glinting in its bleeding eyes.
I stood there, watching, trying to remember just what the big guy’s name had been. Meanwhile the guitar player kept backing up, holding his guitar out like an out-of-tune shield. Markie didn’t blink. He rammed his hand straight through the guitar player’s three remaining strings, driving the splintered soundboard into the guitar player’s gut. The guitar player opened his mouth to scream and a gout of red blood welled out.
Markie opened his mouth as well. I could hear the guitar’s off key tones humming in the back-from-the-dead bastard’s triumphant howl.
Then his gaze fell on Robert Bruce. I could see the naked want burning in the spirit’s eyes.
“Save the kid, damn it!” I shouted.
Give them credit. Those bums tried, but Markie cut through them like he was built out of buzz saws, buckshot, and hand grenades. They didn’t stand a chance. He peeled one man’s skin off, right over his head like a set of dirty long johns. He yanked another man’s skull out from his face, just by hooking him Three Stooge’s style through the eyeballs and nostrils. Then he tore a third man’s arms and legs out of his sockets, loves me, loves me not, leaving him flopping like a flipperless seal.
The defending team decided it was wiser to explore the better part of valor and Markie turned back toward Robert Bruce.
“Come here, boy,” Markie called. “I want you. Here. Now. Savvy?”
I’ve stared dozens of dying men in the face, some of them in excruciating terror, and I’ve never seen the kind of fear I saw in Robert Bruce’s face.
I was damn glad I didn’t have a mirror handy to see my own.
“Come on, you bastard,” I yelled, running for Markie, crucifix held out in front of me like it might mean something.
I might as well have been waving a watermelon-flavored lollipop for all the good that half-hearted crucifix did me. Markie caught hold of me and pushed his face up against mine. I felt his face moving through me, sucking my face up into his own.
I saw a rat once, trapped by one of those so-called humane sticky glue traps. The damned thing had pulled its own face off trying to work itself free of the gummy snare, and stared accusingly up at me with a kind of a back from the dead Mickey Mouse of the Opera stare.
I felt like that was what was happening to me, my face turning inside out, until I was somehow looking out through Markie’s eyes.
I didn’t like it in there.
It was a dark and scary place.
I could see the film of a plastic bag being pulled over my face, as I fought for my breath. Then I saw lines of light laced across the darkness. I felt roaches crawling across my face. I smelled sawdust and dirt and solitude. Then the hammer coming down, and the reek of the abandoned infirmary, and then I saw myself standing over myself, getting ready to pour the acid down on me.