Steve Vernon Special Edition Gift Pack, Vol 1

by Vernon, Steve

  I remembered an old man who stood on a street corner every summer afternoon. He made sculptures out of coat hanger wire. Dogs and bicycles, and once, I even saw him fold out a belly dancer, complete with a camel and a caravan.

  I untwisted the coat hanger wire. It was tough and held its shape well. I gave it a few experimental flexes. I wondered if I could make a living at bending coat hanger sculptures. The old guy had never looked that hungry.

  I kept trying to be quiet. It takes lots of patience to be quiet. Maybe not as much as it takes to make coat hanger sculptures, but it takes a lot. You want to scratch, or shift your feet, or sigh. You have to remember not to fart out loud.

  I was good at being quiet. I'd had a lot of practice, back in my church days. Priests are expected to maintain a certain degree of quietude and dignity.

  I was never really cut out for the priesthood. I kind of fell into my calling. It was a reaction to the way the sisters raised me at the orphanage. Those mad penguin bitches always treated the local priests with such fear, respect, and deference that it seemed like the ideal vocation.

  It was dark in the closet. It reminded me a bit of the confessional. There was nothing but a thin slice of illumination, like some kind of borderline hidden just underneath the closet door.

  I tried not to move too much. I didn't want to rattle any coat hangers.

  I'd come in through the bedroom window. I had to jump and pull myself in. Robert Bruce had the window propped open with a twelve-inch wooden ruler. There was an old-fashioned sliding screen to keep out mosquitoes. It had holes in it, where the wind and rust and time had worked their way through. Now the mosquitoes could get in if they were patient enough to worm through the holes. I had a bit more trouble getting in than the mosquitoes.

  And now all I had to do was wait. Waiting takes a while, especially in the dark.

  I loved the dark. There was something about it that felt so big, a blind swallow of forever-nothing-meaninglessness. I felt a little closer to my God.

  Shall I tell you about my God? My God looks a lot like Charlton Heston on an NRA rant. My God is an angry god and a righteous god. My God can chew up thumbtacks and fart out tenpenny nails. My God is a thundercloud, and he's getting set to rain all over those who do not walk in his undeniably righteous ways. My God is mad enough and man enough to eat the Devil, tail and all, and spit out the hooves and the pointy parts. My God is a cold-hearted fucker, and it's up to me to accomplish his work.

  I'd been doing his work most of my life. Raised in an orphanage by a platoon of combat-trained nuns, I'd fallen easily into the path of the priesthood. I figured that putting on the collar put me that much further ahead of those nuns.

  Being a priest had never been enough. Sitting in the confessional, listening to a laundry list of broken rules didn't help. The Hail Marys and the Our Fathers weren't enough to appease my need for retribution.

  I remembered the first time. It started simply. A morning spent sitting in the confessional. The old woman came in. I recognized her voice.

  "Forgive me father for I have sinned."

  I asked her what she'd done. She told me. Her room was burglarized because her landlord refused to replace her broken door lock. The city couldn't or wouldn't do anything. She'd begged me for forgiveness for her anger and resentment.

  I remember sitting there in the darkness of the confessional, staring up at the tiny blue light that lit the closet-like space. I remember moving my mouth open and closed, trying to come up with another forgiveness-by-rote. Then something else took over and this came out.

  "Fuck them. Fuck their fat and heartless asses. Fuck them with a fragmentation crucifix. Fuck them with a fifty-foot flamethrower. Fuck them between both of their fat, lying cheeks with a bucket of hot, frying fat."

  I was babbling, and I knew it. It was like being possessed or speaking in tongues. I went on for a full fifteen minutes, until the old woman ran out of the confessional. I followed her down the aisle of the church, to the big wooden doors. I remember standing there in the doorway watching her hobble down the long stone staircase.

  "Fuck them with God!" I'd shouted after her. "Fuck them with forgiveness and fuck them with a cauldron full of the curdled and clotted milk of Christian kindness and fuck them all!"

  I let her run. Why not? I knew where she lived. More important, I knew where her landlord lived.

  I visited the bastard in his office, late at night. I tried reasoning with him. The bastard laughed at me. So I slammed the bastard's fingers in a door until my arm got tired of slamming. I prayed while I was slamming, to keep the whole thing holy. Then I emptied out his office safe.

  I had to work the combination for him. His fingers weren't working all that well. Still, he was glad to give me the numbers after a few more encouraging slams. We had a big bonfire, right in his office wastebasket. I burned the old woman's lease and I thought it was over.

  That was stupid. Half-measures never worked. The bastard evicted the old woman several weeks later, breaking her skull open with his arm cast and throwing her into her front door. I should have known that evil wouldn't die so easily. The old woman did, though. She died of a concussion, leaning there and bleeding out over her brand new deadbolt.

  So I rewarded the bastard by throwing him off of a tenement roof. I can still see him flapping his arm cast on the way down, hoping for the miracle of flight. I wasn't worried. He didn't look a thing like Clark Kent.

  Afterward, I went back to his office and opened his safe. The bastard hadn't even bothered changing the combination. I burned the remaining leases and every scrap of potentially incriminating financial information.

  It seemed I was in the vengeance business.

  I left the church that night. I walked away from her doors without even a goodbye note. I wandered the streets for nearly six weeks. I was nothing, motor reflexes operating on half a memory. I was a zombie. A revenant. Anathema. All I needed was a bell to ring.

  Unclean. Unclean.

  Until I came to The Shambles.

  I stood there in the closet, smiling to myself, a high school football coach finding solace in the memory of his one big touchdown, when the bedroom door opened and Robert Bruce's father stepped quietly into his son's bedroom.

  The bastard was humming a lullaby.

  You won't like this part. I don't like it much myself.

  I let him get at the boy. I figured Robert Bruce had been hurt often enough that one more time wouldn't make much difference. I knew his father would be careful sneaking into the room. He wouldn't want to make a sound. He'd be alert, ready for a surprise. Guilt breeds caution.

  So I stood there in the darkness of the closet, staring at the clothes hangers, listening to the sounds of a thirteen-year-old boy being raped. I know John Wayne wouldn't have stood for it. He would have kicked the door down and punched the bastard in the jaw.

  I wasn't John Wayne. If I kicked the door down a neighbor might hear me and call the police department, and they'd come and find a homeless ex-priest lurking in the bedroom closet of a freshly raped thirteen-year-old boy. DNA be damned. I had no illusions as to how that would turn out. I'd wind up behind bars, and this bastard would go free to keep on raping his son.

  So I waited until the first sound of grunting. I knew then Robert Bruce's father would have his attention away from anything else but his dirty, stinking fun.

  I stepped out of my shoes. I opened the closet door quietly.

  Then I tiptoed across the floor. I'd already checked for squeaking boards.

  He had the boy face down into the pillow, probably so he couldn't scream. His back was to me. He had his pajama bottoms down to his knees, in case he had to pull out and pull up fast. He was pumping hard. He was enjoying it.

  I looped the coat hanger I'd bent in the closet over the father's neck and twisted it around on itself.

  "Now you're fucked," I whispered into his ear.

  He was a big bastard. Beefy, for a man who sat behind his desk all day. Ma
ybe he went to the gym regularly. Maybe he liked to hang with the iron crowd and flex his testosterone when he wasn't raping thirteen-year-old boys.

  He kept reaching back at me, turning, trying to get a hold of me. I kept moving one step in front of him. I wasn't that strong, but I was fast.

  That was the gamble in this business. I wasn't Superman. There was always the chance that somebody would be faster. A random knife blade chanced into the flush of an artery, a broken bone, a thumb to the eye. There were a lot of ways to get caught. To be bagged, tagged, and slabbed.

  Thoughts like these kept me cozy and warm in my sleep.

  Besides, I had the bastard. He was definitely fucked.

  He got in a pretty good elbow that I'd feel tomorrow, but I didn't have time for pain. I kept twisting the wire tighter, every chance I had. His head and face seemed to swell. His eyes bugged out like something in a kid's cartoon. Then he made a sound like Donald Duck with the hiccups, and he fell to his knees.

  I twisted a bit more, but carefully. I didn't want the wire to snap. I also didn't want him to be dead. Not yet.

  "You son of a bitch," I swore. "Don't you dare fucking die on me."

  Somebody once wrote profanity was the final refuge of ignorance. I don't know about that. Sometimes you got so pissed off the words seemed to come out four letters at a time.

  He stopped moving.

  I knelt in front of him. There was a small bubble of saliva in the left corner of his mouth that slowly swelled and popped. Then everything was still.

  "I don't want you to die yet," I told him.

  He started breathing again, as if on command.

  I put a couple of strips of duct tape on him, making sure to leave his nostrils open.

  I looked at Robert Bruce. He was staring, his eyes just a little too wide and bright for my liking.

  "Are you okay?" I asked. I didn't want to think about what had been happening to him. I wasn't brave enough to face that kind of darkness.

  He nodded his head. I guessed that meant yes.

  "Come on." I led his father, by the clothes hanger garrote, over to the open window. His pajamas hung about his ankles like a pair of flannel leg irons.

  Robert Bruce tugged up his own pajamas and followed like a puppy.

  I pushed the father out of the window. It was only a floor down, but he landed hard. I jumped out after him, making certain to land feet first on something soft. He felt that. I heard him groan beneath the duct tape. I'd probably broken one of his ribs.

  It was a start.

  I held my hands up toward the window and Robert Bruce jumped down. I caught him in my arms. He trembled. The night was cold but not that cold. I wanted to hold him. To tell him everything was okay, but I hated to lie.

  "Come on," I said. "We're going to fix this the best way I know how."

  I dragged Robert Bruce's father to his own car and laid him in the trunk, making certain to take the tire iron and ball peen hammer out of the trunk before I stuffed him in.

  I would use them later.

  I drove the car to an abandoned hospital infirmary. Robert Bruce sat beside me, saying nothing.

  We got out.

  The infirmary had been condemned years ago. Occasionally the homeless crept in, and the police broke down the door and dragged them out. They'd lock and board up the door again, until the homeless crept back in and the whole process restarted.

  Some things never died.

  The infirmary should have been torn down, but the city felt that the state ought to pay for it and the state felt it was the city's problem. The two layers of government played tug of war with responsibility, the infirmary grew moldier and more dangerous, and the homeless kept on coming.

  But it was summer. There wasn't much chance of there being any homeless inside. It was handier just to sleep in the cemetery. Besides, I had already put the word out. The infirmary was mine that night.

  I led his father by his coat hanger leash into the bowels of the infirmary cellar where everything was nice and quiet. A gurney would have been easier, but anything resembling furniture had been stripped and sold or burned for warmth. I duct taped Robert Bruce's dad to a scrap pallet. His arms and legs stuck out as far as they could in a kind of St. Andrew's cross.

  There's an interesting story behind the St. Andrew's cross. It seemed that when St. Andrew was sentenced to a martyr's death, he decided that he wasn't worthy to be crucified on regular cross like Jesus had been. Instead, St. Andrew requested that the Achaens crucify him on an X-shaped cross. Apparently the Achaens were all too happy to oblige.

  I'd thought about carpentering Robert Bruce's dad up an honest-to-Calvary crucifix, but I didn't want to lay that much religious symbolism on the boy.

  The father groaned. I kicked him square in the balls, making certain Robert Bruce was watching. I had a pretty good kick.

  "What's your father's name, Robert Bruce?

  "Marcus," the boy said. "Momma called him Marcus."

  I looked at him lying there. Marcus seemed like such a pompous title for an asshole like this. "How do your balls feel, Markie?"

  Markie was beyond groaning. I figured I'd impacted his testicles, jamming them up somewhere inside him. You can kill a man that way. There are soft spots that break pretty hard down there.

  I wasn't that worried about Markie's physical well-being.

  "Do you feel small, Markie? Do you feel helpless?"

  I kicked him again. I wanted to laugh, I was having such a good time, but I didn't want to frighten the boy any more than I had to.

  Markie puked behind his gag. I tore the duct tape off of his face and tipped his head, letting the puke spill out. I slapped him on the back of his head, hard, two or three times, making him spit up. I didn't want it to be that easy.

  Then I wrapped a fresh length of duct tape, right around his head, in case the wetness of the puke interfered with the duct tape's stickum. I wrapped the tape hard about the bastard's hairline. It was going to hurt coming off.

  I wasn't worried.

  "Come here, Robert Bruce."

  I wasn't sure about the right or the wrong of what I was about to do. I just knew that this bastard had hurt his son somewhere deep inside. I knew that Robert Bruce wasn't going to forget this bastard if I just killed him. This bastard's ghost could do a hell of a lot worse to Robert Bruce in death than he could ever dream of in his shit stain of a life.

  So I handed Robert Bruce the ball-peen hammer.

  "I'm probably fucking you up in a million different ways," I said. "But I don't think I could fuck you up any worse than your father has."

  Robert Bruce stared at the hammer. It was sort of like Arthur first grasping Excalibur. Or like Lizzie Borden getting her first peek at her axe.

  "Your father hurt you," I said. "He's hurt you in a way that shouldn't ever happen to a thirteen-year-old boy. You've got to pay him back."

  Robert Bruce turned to look at his father, lying duct taped to an abandoned wooden pallet. Robert Bruce's eyes filled with tears and ice.

  I figured he was as ready as he was ever going to get.

  "You can do this slow or fast. I can show you how, if you'd like, but it's probably better if you use your imagination. He's your father, after all."

  I stepped back, and Robert Bruce stepped up.

  It took some time. When the boy was finished, his father couldn't touch him or kiss him or look at him or talk to him or fuck him ever again. The boy was that thorough. I'd give him points for his imagination. Some of it even scared me.

  Robert Bruce had learned something tonight. I didn't know what he'd do with that knowledge. It wasn't for me to see that far into the future. I'd fixed his world for now, and I'd see to it that what was left of his father's body was never seen again.

  Markie moaned a little.

  "You go on outside and wait for me," I told Robert Bruce. Keep yourself hidden. No telling who might be watching out there."

  When I heard the door slam, I knew that Robert Bruce w
as in the clear.

  "Hey Markie," I said.

  Markie's one eyelid slitted open. He was waking up. I took the acid out of my backpack, along with one of those acid testers that look so much like a turkey baster.

  "Let's take our time, shall we?" I squeezed the first baster-load out.

  CHAPTER 5

  * aftershock *

  Back at The Shambles, I watched Robert Bruce closely, waiting to see if he was going to lose it. He just sat beside me, saying nothing. Not quiet enough to call him catatonic. Not still enough to call him dead.

  What had I done?

  I had done the only thing I could figure to do. I'd figured Robert Bruce had needed to take some of his self-respect back. It wouldn't have done much to see me finish his father off. He had to do it himself.

  The only thing that could buy his humanity back was blood.

  "I like it here," he said.

  I looked down. I was surprised to hear him speak.

  "It's a nice enough place as far as abandoned abattoirs go," I agreed.

  "Can I stay?"

  I thought about it. Where else could he go? I knew there were plenty of organizations built to take care of kids like him, but I didn't have much confidence in their results. I remembered the nuns.

  I looked around at The Shambles. We offered nothing but serial killers, homeless bums, psychopaths, and an assortment of varied degenerates. They were no worse company than his father, I supposed.

  "For a while," I said.

  "Forever?"

  "We'll see."

  He didn't like that.

  "That means maybe, doesn't it?" I heard the anger in his voice.

  "Yup," I said.

  "Maybe always means no."

  He seemed to swell in size, bunching all of his thirteen-year-old muscles, or maybe that was just my imagination.

  "Maybe," I said.

  His eyes grew flat and angry. I could see a little of his father in there.

  "Maybe," I repeated. "Now get some sleep."

  He closed his eyes grudgingly.

  I sat and watched him. After a time, his chest began to move up and down.

  I watched for a while longer.

  He stopped pretending and fell asleep.