Since the victims all met their fates in the Loop, St. Sixtus was chosen for the church of service.
* * *
Before the service occurred, though, a floater came up with the spring thaw in the South Branch of the Chicago River. “The body was spotted as a possible jumper,” Det. Daves was quoted in the April 17th papers. The Fire Department’s First Scuba Team, stationed at 324 South DesPlaines, implemented a Stokes basket to lift the bloated body. This was to avoid having frozen limbs broken off.
The condition of the body left the race and age of the body unknown. The hole where Mike Surfer’s shunt fit into his neck had smoothed over as the skin bloated with gas, and so he officially ended up as John Doe 89-6.
* * *
Frank Haid had time to think in the weeks it took his face and chest to heal. The last one had done him good, Father agreed. But he had learned something important. He could save the souls of all the street cripples, not just those in wheelchairs. The man who severed his arm and muttered names that held no meaning to Haid had shown him that. Father reluctantly seemed to okay the sentiment.
He readied himself for the St. Sixtus memorial during this time. Read and reread the ways of the breviary and the Litany of The Precious Blood. Vince Janssen’s body gathered dust. The mass would be a good one. Damn straight, numbnuts, Father said.
* * *
Dean Conover had been buried at Flat Rock Cemetery off U.S. 60 in Eastwood, Kentucky two months before. Aaron Mather’s new partner was Ileana Cantu and both were in attendance at the Healing Mass, as the memorial came to be called.
Officers Rizzi and Christopher, who had asked for transfers to the 16th District because of the scars the Painkiller had left them, would also attend. Dets. Daves and Petitt were already balls deep in a series of Cash Station shootings in the Atrium Village neighborhood.
Each night after partaking of communion with his uncle’s corpse, Haid thought how the mass would go:
Father Madsen, so serene, his hands clasped over the black chasuble, Father Dennis with his limp within him now. Father Madsen ready for the healing mass and its willing sacrifices. The arthritic and autistic, the retarded and the balding, those with cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis. Muscular dystrophy. ALS. All with fretful Sunday-go-to-meetin’ faces. Good Friday faces.
The aisles brimming with sufferers. He is resplendent in his vestments. The heavy doors of the church pressed shut by the sheer weight of the crowd, He wouldn’t save them all, but he would try his best. All that Father ever expected.
“Let us celebrate the mystery of life,” he’d say reverently. The bowl of chrism lay on the counter before him. Once the mass had been called The Last Rites, but now it was referred to as The Anointing of The Sick and Dying.
God grant to the souls of your service the forgiveness of sins that they may obtain the pardon they’ve always desired.
He tinkled the little bell, anticipating the first to come within his grasp. Father Madsen spread his arms out, the flowing black of the chasuble like wings. Everyone stood and waited for a sign. Several coughed.
In a dream he would soon make reality, the Painkiller said:
“Let us pray.”
* * *
After a time, when the givers of pain and rapture had finally deadened his senses, he lived in the ruins of the old Johnston Building, on Calhoun Place, until three whacks of a beat cop’s baton helped his decision to move.
He then took up alongside a breezeway east of the Schubert on Monroe, leaving the wheelchair behind as a sad reminder of his failure, taking instead a happy thing. Well, two happy things. The beige blanket and a faded fiberglass cast.
The first was a symbol of hope. The second, yellowed by the sun and nicotine from the many smokers who passed him daily, was a necessity. The cast became, months ago, an extension to his arm. His left limb was consumed by the killer of the cripples. The remaining nub of elbow was cauterized in some fantastical way, he still wasn’t certain how. The pain of losing the arm, of breaking the bones in order to kill his enemy, left things at times blurred. Other times, clear as the empty hole in the cast where his hand should be. The cast fit nicely over the nub, you see, and it was a nice thing to bat away memories with, if nothing else.
The cotton around the edges went grey long ago, and one night a rat climbed up into the cast’s open hole and started chewing on Vic Tremble’s arm. He allowed it to happen because it had been awhile since he had felt anything at all for any long period of time.
It was summer, an achingly beautiful day where the sun blazed the ozone away and cabbies didn’t swear and you could smell Lake Michigan in waves of déjà vu. Each office building thrummed with vibrant energy, the inhabitants eagerly awaiting the afternoon’s staggered release. And the cabbie didn’t swear. Was that mentioned?
He had dubbed the alleyway Seizure’s Palace almost immediately after claiming squatter’s rights, after a husk of a middle-aged alkie who oozed cheap bourbon and cheaper carpet cleaner pissed into the cast, then struck a match and chained two unfiltereds, then pissed again. This time in Tremble’s grinning face. He dropped the matchbook, gold and white twirling round and round into the grey and black, bore the name of a Las Vegas casino with a similar name to the one Tremble took for his residence. Way past easy.
The bluest of blues summer day became a velvet purple night with the wind whispering in ways that would have made one think it was cheating on one of the other elements. The flags above City Hall—city, state, and country—whipped against a surreal backdrop like rugs being shaken on the back porch of a Winthrop Avenue three-flat, within spitting distance of the elevated tracks. The subways smelled faintly like salt water and street musicians needed to be coaxed to play something sad. Every corner was layered with the smells of pan pizza, caramel corn, pierogi, and hot dogs with steamed, poppy seed buns from Dudley’s Carry-Outs, Mickey D’s, and restaurants whose names had double meanings to tie them in with the Board of Trade or the Art Institute.
The Theater was previewing “In Bold Blood,” a one-man show of the late-Truman Capote performed by Ben Murdy. Reve Towne, Aaron Mather and Ileana Cantu, and Nick Desmond were in attendance, but while he watched them in the ticket line, Tremble did not recognize them.
As they did not recognize him.
He was at times very talkative, particularly if you gave up a pill or a coin or combination of both. He could hip you to some very weird stories. As he had once said, the givers of pain come in many guises...
He could tell you stories about an American dream and a holy terror. Of painkillers and healing masses, old drinking buddies and concrete surfers until his eyes would glaze over. He had one particular story, hardly believable, even if you had time to listen the full way through. The story, bare-boned, wasn’t long; simply one of man vs. man with homeopathic ramifications.
Maybe you’d think the story to be true because of the way he would twist the cast on his left arm. Grab it roughly near the wrist and scratch his splayed fingers across the cross-hatched surface. Turning it round and round until you started thinking that he might one day whittle the bone nub at his elbow down to nothing.
And where one end of the cast had been crusted by grey dirt, the other end was rust-colored with his blood. Those fascinated by the blood would listen to the story long after the final curtain fell in the theater.
As long as they had coins or pills, he would talk.
And, if you were one of those who could stay and listen to the very end, you would hear the narrator mumbling to himself, a single voice amidst a madhouse defined.
Father Madsen, Arms Upraised
(and, as if in a dream, Mike Surfer’s voice whispered through the pews…)
Well I’m going out west where I belong
Where the days are short and the nights are long
Where they walk and I’ll walk
Where they twist and I’ll twist
Where they shimmy and don’t you hear me
They fly and I’ll f
ly
Well they’re out there having fun
In that warm California sun
Well I’m goin’ out west, out on the coast
Where the California girls are really the most
Where they walkand I’ll walk
They twist and I’ll twist
They shimmy and don’t you hear me
They fly and I’ll fly
Well they’re out there having fun
In that warm California sun
Well they’re out there having fun
In that warm
FADE TO BLACK
Wayne Allen Sallee
Chicago, Illinois
7 November, 1988 * * * 23 October 1990
About the Author
Wayne Allen Sallee’s work ranges from an interview with serial killer John Wayne Gacy to a concordance for the ABC show LOST (BenBella Books). His fiction has appeared in 175 anthologies and been reprinted in at least six languages. Sallee’s stories, five of them finalists for the Bram Stoker award, are collected in WITH WOUNDS STILL WET (Silver Salamander) and FIENDS BY TORCHLIGHT (Annihilation Press).
With a letterhead that read “I will Flatline Before I Go Online!”, Sallee held on to his Galaxie Twelve typewriter and banged out a memoir of Ed McBain as everyone else discovered what a Pentium Chip could do. In October of 1997, he bought a cobbled together computer from a guy named Bulldog and signed up with AOL. The manual typewriter was tossed into the South Branch of the Chicago River, before Sallee realized that computers could break down with regularity.
Currently, he is co-writing a comic series for younger readers, SECRET IDENTITIES, with Michael Fountain, to be published by Kalyani Navyug Publications in New Delhi, India.
Table of Contents
The Holy Terror
Acknowledgements
SATURDAY, MARCH 18th, 1989: TATTERED MOMENTS OF LUCIDITY
When a Prognosis is Just the Beginning
The First And Last St. Vitus Dance
Chicago’s South Loop:
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
PART TWO
Late Winter 1988 – Early Spring 1989
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty Eight
Chapter Twenly-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
The Epilogues
About the Author
The Holy Terror Page 26