He crossed the river at Dearborn; Verbeerst had lived behind him, the woman just down the block. Now they both lived in the glorious everlasting heaven. Let us celebrate the mysteries of life...
A Star-Spangled cabbie blew the yellow light and gave Haid the finger because he almost got himself run down.
He passed the Merchandise Mart, and was in the shadows of a Skid Row that was being regentrifiedwith yuppie loft apartments. The Michael Todd theater at the corner of Lake and Dearborn, which had shown such wondrous movies as Fantasex Island and On Golden Blond at five bucks a crack, pun intended, was now the cutesy-named Dearborn Station, where those upwardly mobile couples who didn’t want to deal with Facets Multimedia or the Fine Arts could brave the fringes of the Loop battleground and plop down their twelve bucks a head, no pun possible, and nod those heads thoughtfully to the world according to Woody Allen and go to their stupid jobs the following Monday in their power ties and buttons and bows and talk like they actually knew one fucking thing about the reality of day to day, hand to shit to mouth, life in Chicago.
You could erase the ghetto or the slum from the equation, change the denominator from a black man in a Rowls Invacare wheelchair who had forgotten his social security number when Nixon was still president with a shitgrin-shined face who wears his color-coordinated scarf outside of his overcoat and drinks diet wine coolers like someone in a J.
D. Salinger novel gone wrong, but the answers to the problems wouldn’t really change at all.
Sometimes, he didn’t know what the hell he was trying to think about. But he did know this: he cherished life as well as afterlife. He had been shown the afterlife for several minutes thirty-one years ago. In the holy fire where he had been reborn as the only son. And Jesus had wept for Francis Haid not to go back.
But the crucified man had allowed young Haid to finish his life by bringing others before him. From the world where men died senselessly every day. He’d give their passing meaning.
It wouldn’t happen today, he was just walking the route. No one in a chair out tonight. Father would be lonely were it not for Haid talking to him.
He continued on towards Daley Plaza, where there were more theaters showing the current conquests of Rambo and Jason Vorhees. Fuck and die, the choice of a new generation. Too bad Pepsi-Cola had dibs on that slogan.
Haid had his own slogan.
This is my body.
* * *
The wheelchairs were beautiful. But that would change. Murdy had to have pulled a few strings to get the chairs. Neither Shustak or Tremulis would ever know that the small man had paid eight hundred dollars cash for them.
Everest & Jennings, Shustak’s jet-black, Tremulis’s Doevin Blue. That’s what it said in the owner’s manual. Powder blue like on an air freshener can.
Tremulis felt guilty: Mike Surfer had never had anything this good. Padded naugahyde 24" molded rear wheels with plastic metal spokes, 8" molded caster wheels “for a sporty look” and detachable footrest and butterfly strap. “Move away from the clinical look of the past,” it said in the brochure.
He plopped himself into the chair and ran his hands over the tires. Damn comfortable chair. Give him one of those vibrating pillows for his back and he’d be set.
“They look too new,” Shustak said.
That was obvious, Tremulis thought, but did not say.
“We’ll take them through the alley, let them sit in the weather for a day or so. Scrape them up a bit and cover them with blankets. We’ll fool that bastard Haid.”
Tremulis hoped so. He wondered what kind of scars they would be left with.
* * *
PALESTINE: MURDERS OF COMMIES AND FAGS!
let the uprising of stones pave the way for PEOPLE’S WAR!!!
KHOMEINI POPE FALL WELL NORTH
SI DIOS ES TAN GRANDE CUCARACHAS
Y CHI-CHIS
WHAT? WHAT?
Tremulis looked at the small courtyard, at the squalor just beyond the confines of the Marclinn. It seemed to have been swept regularly, most likely by Nutman or maybe even Reve. But the graffiti was incredible. Much of it faded by months and years had the artists’ and writers’ ideals changed since then? He read on, looking closer at torn white flyers.
WHEN YOU SMOKE YOUR BABY DOES AS WELL. WHEN YOU DO DRUGS
WHEN YOU ARE PREGNANT, YOUR BABY CAN GET AIDS, TOO.
COYOTE GOSPEL RING MY THING PAP MY PLIP
IN MY SHIVERING CHAIR
GANGSTER CITY
L’IL SKULLY LIMBO ME, MINE LIMBO
ALLLUSTREISBLAK AUNQUE
EL REMEDO PARA
SIDA ESTA
MUYAJENO
PREVENCION
ESTA ALREDOR
DE LA ESQUINA.
RIDE THE CTA FREE ON NEW YEAR’S EVE 8PM-6AM courtesy of BUDWEISER.
“They’ll be safe here,” Shustak said. The courtyard was bounded by Callan’s Flowers, the Treasure Chest arcade, and an abandoned building in disrepair.
“Are you ready for this, Vic?” Shustak looked at him.
“Yes,” he replied. The image of the deformed hooker was still in his mind, fresh as a scattershot wound. He had long ago stopped wondering about the Givers of Pain and Rapture’s mysteries. He simply accepted their idiosyncrasies.
“This is my world,” Shustak said. “Where I am is what I am.”
Tremulis had never believed otherwise.
* * *
Reve Towne sat on her Murphy bed, grimacing over what she had to endure earlier that day. She had gone to the Chicago Avenue station to get a list of witnesses and potentials, they were called, from Dean Conover. The guy had practically undressed her with his eyes.
She planned on talking with some of the people while Evan and Vic were doing the wheelchair stakeouts. Christ, how she hoped they weren’t doing the wrong thing, or going about it the wrong way.
But she knew they were too far into it now.
She massaged her toes as she rocked back and forth, scanning the pages. Conover had kept running his hand over his gun holster, like it was supposed to turn her on. That was right up there with the boys of summer cruising down the street and turning up their car radios at the stoplights, right, like hearing REO Speedwagon bleating “157 Riverside Avenue” was supposed to give women the screaming thigh sweats.
And she about gagged when Conover told her how he didn’t need to wear a Kevlar vest because his skin was tough enough to stop bullets.
Reve could not understand why the killings had gone on so long and there was so little to piece together. It was like Ed Gein killing everybody up in Plainfield, Wisconsin; a town whose population could live on the first seven floors of any building downtown. No one knew that Gein was robbing graves and making belts out of nipples because no one in town cared what the hell happened to anyone. It was the same thing here, only updated to the late eighties.
She wondered if the Painkiller would continue on with his grisly work until he finally slipped up, or if he would die in a car accident or be arrested for something else. Her father had been a cop and had been involved with the search for the DeSouza boy in 1972. A guy arrested for D&D in Minnesota during the Bicentennial, out of the blue, told the Faribault County sheriff about all these trees that had little boys stuffed in them, DeSouza being one of thirteen skeletons eventually found.
Would Evan or Vic encounter the Painkiller? Could that really happen? Would they have the element of surprise, the use of their legs being the hole card in a fast game of murder?
Could they run fast enough to avoid whatever the Painkiller chose to use on them?
She didn’t know. She couldn’t know.
Chapter Forty-Four
Haid crossed Clark Street against the light. This time of night on a Wednesday, the streets were deserted anyways.
The silence and the beauty of the winter evening belonged to the junkies and the con men now, the orgasm of the moment torn from him with the harsh intimacy of a gold necklace ripped from the neck of the
Berwyn secretary who picked the wrong damn night to work late. Unlike the night, the chain would be offered with a whisper of jive in the alley that separated the Burger King from the Marclinn House.
The night would only be offered again to those who resisted, the gangbangers maybe tossing in the moon on a knife, a star in every slice.
Soon, it would be over for him, as well. Martyrs did not fear death. Leave this stupid city to those who took drugs but never had a day of pain in their lives. The con men and shuckers, who would have strong legs, yet work the elevated trains instead of someplace honest.
No, Haid would follow in Father’s footsteps. “Let them crucify me on the Miro sculpture,” he whispered conspiratorially. He stared up at the thing situated in the Brunswick building alcove on Washington, its extensions making it resemble a Lost In Space monster reject more than a cross, but the idea still stayed in his head. And in Father’s head, as well, the severed part that lived in Haid and guided him toward gloryland.
Haid turned back toward the plaza, toward the Picasso sculpture. If one wanted to think such a thing, the two sculptures—Miro’s “Woman” and Picasso’s “Head of A Woman”—faced each other off, one looking like a pimp-slapped whore, the other a mutated lioness. “And you could be my whore, Mary,” Haid addressed Miro with a tip of an imaginary hat.
Father found his antics amusing. As in life, Haid continued to do things to impress Father.
July, 1965.
Francis Madsen, there is nothing wrong with two men pissing into the same bowl at the same time. There’s no need to flinch, boy.
It’s just flesh.
Flesh of my flesh.
Touch it if you want, Francis. Go on now.
This is my body, given up for you.
You know, son. You are really beginning to develop.
Con men, junkies, jackrollers, and whores. That was why he couldn’t save all of his first few souls. Father had taken only the parts that hadn’t sinned.
A No.20 Madison westbound droned by, empty as erotic foreplay. It was an isolated sound. The air was frigid. With Father’s hair tonic shining in each stroke of his hair, well, it made him shiver so.
He read a sign on the outside of the bus lengthwise. Solo digita a la operada. AT&T Espanol.
“Damn P.R.s,” Father, with all his prejudices, mumbled inside him like a second heartbeat.
* * *
He watched the metal wink at him, unsure. Looka me Unca Vince, an echo of a younger voice in the newly christened burn ward at Lutheran Deaconess. Haddon and Leavitt Streets, Stanislaus Miklas was the man in charge. Never could explain the black smudge in Haid’s brain on the x-rays.
Haid recalled Vince Janssen’s weeping, but was it for his sister’s last hope of an unscarred child or for his own wicked tendencies? He had found the scars, unbearable for so long.
Stepping closer, tentatively. Haid never once thought that the liquid-looking glint could have been a gun barrel fluidly pointed his way by some, combat-happy spic like Father had always warned him about after the Humboldt Park neighborhood changed hands. It wasn’t the niggers’ fault until after Martin Luther King was killed.
Stepping closer. He was arcing around the back of the Picasso sculpture with the wind in his face. Father in his heart. An aching in his soul. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy
(terror)
ghost. Amen.
Haid faced the hollow wedge at the back of the Picasso’s base; the pillars of the Daley Center and the dying neon of Randolph Street were to his back. He waited until a black man in an army jacket hawking those same gold chains, passed by. Tell them where you got it, and how easy it was. Or, tell them where you lost it and never saw it coming.
Yesterday’s news was ashes blowing around Haid’s ankle as he approached the metal sculpture. Late for someone to be out, late for a cripple to be out. There was no time clock in Heaven. It was like Las Vegas. Haid thought that one up on his own. Father just wanted the new soul.
Four garbage cans stood around the angled corners of the Picasso like sentries. The front of the burnished brown thing inclined upwards at, he guessed, a thirty degree angle. The glint Father was curious about came from within the crevice.
It wasn’t strange that Haid would find a man living in this crevice, a handicapped man whose wheelchair had been the source of the wink. What was strange was the story the man told him.
Haid bent down, his eyes adjusting to the blackness within. When the man shot a pencil flashlight at him, one of those Kool cigarette promotional jobbers, the fearless Painkiller about jumped out of his skin. Because of the man’s cramped position, Haid saw his face, stubble on his chin like shadowed porcupine needles, and black lines under his eyes like streaks of tar.
Father was curious, as was Haid.
“Hello?” A weak voice from the crumpled man. Looked like he had no skeletal structure. “I have a gun, you know, so don’t try anything.”
The threat sounded as sincere as Oliver North during the Iran-Contra hearings.
“I’m not a crook,” Haid almost laughed. From North to Nixon. “I’m just... wondering.”
“Well, stop wondering,” the weak voice answered. The tiny flashlight flickered. “My name’s Martin. Martin Last. Sit down and I’ll tell you about the aliens.”
Haid got down on his knees and crawled into the wedge. What the hell, right? It was warmer in the confined space. The man smelled like his bathing habits consisted of liberal splashes of Aqua Velva.
Martin Last had set the flashlight up against his torso; it made his nostrils seem like cave entrances. His eyebrows were shadowed flames. He was layered in old blankets. Stacked next to him were packages of Slim Jims and a silver canteen.
The folded wheelchair was between them, like it was a fortress for Last. Haid maneuvered around it.
“Tell me about what?” He wrinkled the skin around his eyes when he squinted with interest.
* * *
In a nutshell (or nutcase, as it was), Martin Last was a twenty-five year old paraplegic who blamed his paralytic disease on small grey beings from a planet forty light years from Earth, circling a star in the constellation of Reticulum.
“My mother was agoraphobic all her life,” he had said with complete seriousness. “A shrink at Michael Reese was able to get her to say that something had happened to her in the parking lot at Riverview during the summer of 1963.” Riverview had been a large amusement park on Chicago’s Northwest side, bounded by Western, Belmont, Roscoe, and the river. It had closed in 1968 and the land was now shared by a strip mall and the DeVry School of Technology.
“She was pregnant with me at the time and so it wasn’t rape or anything.” Haid figured that right; raping pregnant women wasn’t in vogue in this city until recently. Last paused again, as if uncertain about continuing. Then he barreled right into it.
“The aliens, the greys, they touched her and made me unclean in the eyes of their god. They know about me still and this is the only place I can escape from them.” He looked at Haid, his eyes pained. Haid wasn’t quite certain if what the boy was saying related to him and Father. What did he mean, their God? He could accept the idea of space people, there were stories like that in the newspapers Father had brought back from the supermarket. There was only one God, one true Father, and he was trusting and giving and he loved all of his creatures great and small.
“You.. .you’re saying you... live here?” In this city, there weren’t a million stories, but a few core natives took care of making the actual tales original. Even nearing the age of forty, Haid thought that he had seen it all. Seen everything once.
He always ended up being wrong about such things.
“Yes,” the man said, a tic shivering across his face. “They stuck a rod into my mother’s womb. I’m not sure if their intention was to have it cripple me, something went into the placenta.”
“You live here?” Haid asked again, thinking maybe the first time, he had only thought the q
uestion.
“Not always.” Last fell silent. Haid knew that the man was recalling the past. He wondered if he would reminisce aloud. “I was born breach. Breach baby, breach baby, there on the sand,” he sang, and laughed a nicotine laugh.
“My legs never healed correctly. My mother blamed the breach on her anxiety. This was long before Oprah and Geraldo had people like her on their shows. People with agoraphobia, I mean. Not CE4s. Abductees. Maybe I’m a CE5.”
Haid wondered just what the fuck this guy was talking about. Codes or something. He had seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but didn’t make the connection. He felt like saying something equally bizarre and notional, like, use the shivering phone and ask for handmaiden. She knows of fanciful ducks.
Or something like that.
“She, my mother, was shopping in Lynch-Giddings when she came across this book called Visitation Rites. She told me about it, how the faces and the eyes scared her so much.” He stopped, making a sound like he was sipping at the stale air. “She was obsessed by things in that book and last year she drank some mercuric chromide and died and now I live here.”
Haid opened his mouth, more to clear his throat, when Martin Last’s voice dropped to a hoarse whisper.
“I think that the greys are angry that I let her die before they were through with her.”
Haid thought about how fucked up his own childhood was.
“At least now I understand my childhood nosebleeds,” Last said. “The book tells how they have sex with women and when they found out my legs were weak they let her keep me.” He stared at Haid for ages and a single blink. “The greys will be responsible for reuniting Germany and causing a war in the Middle East. It will be renamed Saudi America and martial law will be declared here. They won’t be able to find me here.”
Haid did not know which “they” Last was referring to. Father had no answer, either.”I believe you,” Haid said.
“You do?” Last slumped back as he expelled a frosty breath.
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