The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

  “See?” He sounded almost defensive as he let the van glide to a stop in front of two forklifts and some more heavy machinery I had no name for. “Happiness and money. Don’t know about you, but I’m thinking I haven’t had my share of either, yet.”

  Reaching under his seat with both hands, he pulled up the first assault rifle I had ever sat beside. It was flat black and spindly except for the chamber, or whatever it was called, that ballooned off the back of the trigger area. The barrel pointed straight at me. Randy did something that made the whole thing click, swung the stock to his shoulder and sighted down into the dash, then returned the rifle to its hiding place.

  “Is that an uzi?” I whispered.

  “Not a Corps man, huh, Big Screen?”

  “You were?”

  “Six severely fucked up years. Wait here. I’ll introduce you properly from your own van tomorrow.”

  He opened his door and hopped down, assuming point position in the phalanx of van drivers that immediately formed around him. My eyes kept wandering from the phalanx to the shadows under Randy’s seat to the Safety Clown crouching in the corner of the side mirror, right above the OBJECTS MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR warning. My father’s ghost kept floating up in front of me, too, so it didn’t occur to me that we hadn’t reopened the back of the van or dug into any freezer bins until Randy returned, dropping a small, square cardboard box onto my lap.

  “Count those, okay?” This time, he didn’t even wait for his colleagues to reach their vehicles, and he didn’t wave as we u-turned and blew by them. Seconds later, we were speeding north on the freeway.

  I pried the duct tape off the top of the box. “Seemed like you trusted Jaybo,” I said.

  “That wasn’t Jaybo.”

  The box lid fell open, and I lifted out the topmost plastic baggie, zipped tight, packed with white powder that shifted when I pressed, like confectioner’s sugar. I knew what it was, though I’d never done any. Dazed, I started counting bags, got most of the way through, and looked up.

  “How many?” Randy said. I could feel his eyes on me in the mirror.

  Don’t react, I thought. Don’t react, don’t react, “This is fucking cocaine!”

  Randy grinned. “Appreciate the appraisal. But I need a count, there, Bubba.”

  My brain scrambled back to the pier. I’d barely paid attention. I didn’t even remember seeing anybody but Safety Clown drivers.

  “Thirty-seven,” I said dully.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “Positive?”

  I nodded.

  “Guess you’re not going to find out what kind of gun this is yet.” The note of open disappointment in his voice drew my gaze, and my gaze made him laugh. “Got ya.”

  The next three hours passed in a blur. The marine layer had burned away, leaving a bottomless blue emptiness overhead. We stopped at two law offices and one dental practice in Sorrento Valley. By the time we reached the dentist’s, I’d started getting nauseous and rolled my window down, which is how I got to hear the receptionist with the white, winking hair yell, “Hey, Doc. Here comes the cavalry” through the open office door.

  Our next stop was Ripped Racquet and Health Gym, where a pony-tailed tai chi instructor halted the class he was conducting on the circle of grass fronting the building to stop Randy. “Hey, guy, do the clown.”

  “You’re doing him just fine,” Randy answered, then gave the instructor what looked like a brotherly chuck on the shoulder of his robe as he breezed past. He was inside almost half an hour, and when he returned, he waved at me to pass him the cardboard box from the floor. He fished out three more baggies, tucking them carefully into the waistband of his jeans. “Walk-up biz,” he said happily, and trotted back indoors.

  From there, we cut over to the 101 and up the coast, stopping at Del Mar Plaza and the Quesadilla Shack five minutes from my condo door, where I laid myself flat on the front seat and told Randy I was known in this place. The real reason for my hiding had more to do with the number of dinners I’d eaten with my mom on the red picnic tables in the sand outside the Shack.

  Randy gave me a long look, and the fear I should have been feeling all along finally prickled down my scalp. But all he did was pat my head. “You should eat, Big Screen. I get so caught up doing this, I forget half the time. Doesn’t mean you should. Want a carne asada?”

  Just the thought made me gag. He came back ten minutes later with a Coke for me and nothing at all for himself.

  “Okay,” he said. “Ready for the good stuff?”

  I leaned my head against the window and kept my eyes closed, and we drove a long time. When I finally opened my eyes again, we were juddering over a dirt road just a bit narrower than the van, crushing birds-of-paradise stalks on either side as we rumbled forward. Still nauseous, increasingly nervous, I scanned the fields and saw red and orange and blue flowers nodding in the wind we made like peasants at a passing lord, but no buildings anywhere. I thought of the poppy fields of Oz, the witch’s voice and her green hand caressing her crystal ball. Randy downshifted, and I sat up straight as the van coasted to a stop.

  No one on this planet knew where I’d gone today. Certainly, no one other than the Safety Clown people had seen me arrive downtown. Training, Jaybo had called it. What if it was more of a test? And I had not accompanied Randy on a single sale.

  “Get out,” he said quietly, and popped the locks on both our doors.

  I did, considering bolting straight into the flowers. But I had little chance of outdistancing my companion. I watched him remove his not-uzi from under his seat and step down and swing his door shut.

  “Listen,” I said. He was already halfway around the front of the van, using his gun machete-style to chop flowers out of his path. I’d meant to start pleading, but wound up standing still instead, gobbling up each tick of insect wing, every whisper of wind in the petals. I swear I could hear the sunlight falling.

  Arriving beside me, Randy stared into the distance, dangling the rifle by the trigger-guard. For a few seconds, we stood. Above us, the blue yawned wider.

  “So what do you think, Big Screen?” he finally said. “Just you and me?” In one motion, he swept the rifle butt to his shoulder and fired five quick bursts into the sky, which swallowed them. Then he grinned. “Better get that door open.”

  Before I’d even unlocked my knees and gulped new air into my lungs, people sprang from the flowers like rousted pheasants in a whirl of dark skin and tattered straw hats and threadbare work shirts open to the waist. Several of them chirped enthusiastic greetings at Randy in Spanish as I stumbled back against the van. He chirped right back.

  “Hurry up, Big Screen,” he barked, and I reached a trembling hand between clown slats and grabbed the handle and twisted. I was grateful I hadn’t drunk any of the Coke from the Quesadilla Shack. If I’d had any liquid in me, I would just have pissed it all over my legs.

  As soon as the door was open, Randy jumped in and threw back the nearest freezer lid. The field hands nuzzled closer to us like pups vying for suckling spots, though they avoided so much as nudging me. One, a boy of maybe twelve, met my eyes for a moment and murmured, “Buenas dias.” Several others nodded as they edged past. I climbed up next to Randy.

  “De nada, Hector,” he was saying, handing a chocolate nut Drumstick to the nearest worker, whose spiky streak of dirt-grey goatee looked embedded in his skin like a vein of ore in rock. Hector handed Randy a dime and retreated to the back of the group, peeling eagerly at the paper wrapping.

  Distribution to the whole group took less than five minutes, but Randy lingered another twenty, dangling his legs out the cabin door, talking only occasionally, smiling a lot. The workers clumped in groups of two or three, leaning on hoes and wolfing down Igloo Pies while gazing over the fields. Their dwellings, I realized, might well be hidden out here somewhere, along with any other family members who’d somehow made it this far and managed to find them. None of them spoke to
me again, but every single one tipped his sombrero to Randy before melting away into the fields they tended. They left neither trash nor trace.

  “This stuff sold for a dollar when I was ten,” I said. “And that was ten years ago.” My voice sounded strained, shaky. Randy’s rifle lay seemingly forgotten between freezer bins in the van behind us. I almost made a lunge for it. But I couldn’t for the life of me figure what I’d do afterward.

  “Cost me a buck-twenty per,” Randy said. “But see, I figure I can afford it. Starting tomorrow, you can make your own decisions. Beauty of being a Safety Clown, dude. Ain’t no one going to know or care but you.”

  Clambering inside, he collected his rifle, hunched to avoid banging his head, and began swatting freezer lids shut. He didn’t seem thoughtful enough to be deciding whether to mow me down.

  “Why not just give it to them?” I asked. “The ice cream, I mean.”

  Randy cocked his head. The gun remained tucked under one arm against his chest. “You like insulting people, Big Screen?”

  I gaped at him.

  “Didn’t think so. Remember, they don’t know what it costs me.” He left me to slide the door shut again, and we rumbled out of the fields and returned to the coast.

  Another two hours passed. We stopped at an antique shop and some accounting firms, a bowling alley and a retirement home. At the latter, I finally emerged from the van. Partially, I did so because I thought I’d better. Partially, I wanted to get away from the freon I’d been breathing virtually non-stop for the past eight hours, and which by now had given me a sledgehammer headache. But also, I’d gotten curious. The experience in the flower fields had shaken something loose in me, and I could feel it rattling around as I stepped into the mid-day heat.

  Randy had already been inside fifteen minutes. I wondered if he’d received the same joyful, personal greeting there that he had everywhere else we’d gone. Edging forward, I reached the sidewalk fronting the main entrance, where my progress was blocked by a bald, pink-skinned marvel of a man whose curvature of the spine kept his head roughly level with my navel. Jabbing the legs of his metal walker into the ground like climbing pitons, the man dragged himself toward the brightly lettered sign at the edge of the parking lot that read BEACH ACCESS. Below the words on the sign was the silhouette of a longhaired bathing beauty laid out flat with her breasts poking straight up in the air. The man didn’t acknowledge me as he inched past, but he did remove the cherry lollipop from his mouth, and it hovered in front of his lips like the dot at the bottom of a kicked-over question mark. I thought about lifting him, ferrying him gently to the sand.

  Only then did it occur to me that the man might well have hauled himself out here for Randy. Help people, my mother had commanded, since the day I first started working. But help them what? Which jobs, exactly, qualified, and who got to say?

  By the time Randy returned, I’d stumbled back to my seat, more confused than scared for the moment, and the question-mark man was well on his way to the bathing beauties.

  “Two-thirty yet?” Randy asked, though he was the one with the watch. He checked it. “Right on.”

  Leaving the coast, he drove us across the freeway, over El Camino Real and into the maze of white and salmon-pink condo communities and housing developments that had all but enclosed the eastern rim of North and San Diego counties during the course of my lifetime. Any one of them could have been mine. Blood beat against my temples and massed behind my forehead. I closed my eyes, caught an imaginary glimpse of my mother bent over her potted plants at the nursery where she’d worked, better paid and sunscreened than the workers in the flower fields but nearly as invisible, and opened my eyes again to find Randy’s hand hurtling toward my chest.

  I twisted aside, but he didn’t seem to notice, just grabbed the knob on the dash that I’d assumed was a glove box handle. Now I realized there was no glove box. Randy twisted the knob to the right.

  For one blissful moment, nothing happened. Then the air shattered into winking, tinkling shards of sound. My hands rose uselessly to my ears, then dropped again. The van slowed, stopped on the curve of a cul-de-sac, and Randy shouldered his door open, nearly banging his head on the ceiling as he jumped out and rubbed his hands together.

  “Watch the master, Big Screen. Learn.” Striding around front, he stood with his hands on his hips, gazing into the yards like a gunslinger as the sound rained down on him. Then he bounded around the van, pulled open my door, flicked the lever on the control panel, and danced backward as the clown leapt off its stilts and started unfolding.

  I staggered from the van as the first children of the entire day swept around the curve of the cul-de-sac on their skateboards and bore down on us. My ears finally filtered enough distortion for me to register the tune the van was blaring.

  “Classical Gas?” I babbled, as Randy stepped carefully around the clown. It hung still now, STOP sign jabbed over the street.

  “What about it?” Randy threw open the sliding door and began pulling up multiple bin lids.

  To my amazement, I felt my lips slip upwards. “I’ve got a friend who claims this is the only music on earth it’s impossible to make a girl have an orgasm to.”

  If my own smile surprised me, Randy’s nearly blew me backward with its brightness. “Wish I had enough experience or knowledge to challenge that statement. Always been kind of shy, myself. And lately, I’ve been too busy making money. My man, Joel.”

  He stuck one huge hand past me, and the first skateboard kid to reach the van smacked it with his own. “Pop Rocket, Randy,” the kid said, straightening the cargo shorts from which his watermelon-striped boxers billowed.

  “Cherry, right?” Randy had already handed the kid the popsicle without waiting for an answer. “What-up, Empire?”

  The reasons for that nickname never revealed themselves to me. What became immediately apparent, though, was how much this second kid liked that Randy knew it. He gave his board a kick-hop and wrapped it in his arms and stood close to the van, looking proud, as Randy gave him his ice cream. By the time that group had departed, twelve more kids, ranging in age from maybe five to no younger than me, had emerged from houses or backyards or neighbouring streets. No one seemed to mind the racket roaring out of the rooftop speaker, and a few customers even turned their bodies and faces to it, arms outstretched, eyes closed, as though accepting a cooling blast from a garden hose. Every single person knew Randy’s name, and he knew most of theirs.

  “You Randy’s new helper?” said a soft voice so close to my ear that I thought for a second it had come from inside me.

  Turning, I found myself confronting a freckle-faced girl of maybe fifteen, with a yellow drugstore whiffle bat over her bare shoulder. Self-consciously, she wound the wild strands of her strawberry-blonde hair back into her scrunchy with sweaty fingers. Her eyes, green and soft as the squares of over-watered lawn fronting the houses of this block, never left mine.

  Too much time passed, and I had no answer. I wanted to borrow her bat, dare her to try to pitch a ball past me. I also wanted her to stop flirting with me because she was too young and only adding to my anxiety. I thought of my mom peering down from the Heaven she didn’t believe in, and had to smother competing impulses to wave and whimper.

  “You should be,” the girl finally said, in that same breathy voice. “Hey, Randy.” From her pocket, she withdrew a wad of bills, palmed them, and passed them into the van. Randy ducked inside and returned with a baggie, which disappeared into the girl’s shorts pocket.

  “Go easy, Carolina,” said Randy. “Say hi to your sis.”

  The girl wandered away, wiggling her bat once at both or neither of us.

  I sat down on the curb under the Safety Clown’s arm, and the sunlight dropped on my shoulders like ballast. For the first time, I let myself ask the question. Could I do this? Did I want to? It’d pay for next semester, all right. And it’d certainly qualify as a story to tell. Once the statute of limitations ran out.

  We
were close to an hour in that one cul-de-sac, then nearly two in the fire lane of the circular parking lot of a little league complex with four grassless fields that looked stripped bare like shaved cats. Kids just kept coming. Mostly, they bought ice cream. Every now and then, one or a little group would lurk until a lull came, then dart or sidle or just stride forward and pop $75.00 or sometimes an envelope into Randy’s hands.

  At one point, feeling oddly jealous as yet another group of kids clustered around and jabbered at him, I asked Randy, “What happens if you’re not sure?”

  “What’s that, Big Screen?”

  “What if it’s a kid you don’t know? You wouldn’t want to make a mistake.”

  “Oh.” He turned to me, grinning. “I’ve got a system.”

  Not twenty minutes later, I got to see the system in action. The kid in question looked about eleven, despite the pimples peppering his forehead and leaning off the end of his nose. He hovered near the swing-set just off the parking lot, sweating and jumpy in his long-sleeved, webbed Spider-Man shirt. Finally, he came forward, eyes everywhere.

  Randy glanced at me, mouthing Watch this. Then he stepped from the van to meet the kid, folding his arms across his cliff of a chest, and said, “Yo, friend. What’s your name?”

  “Zach.”

  “Yo, Zach. Did you need ice cream or . . . ice cream?”

  I stared at Randy’s back. He swung his head around and beamed proudly before returning full attention to his customer.

  “Ice cream,” the kid said, flung $75.00 into Randy’s hands, and fled with his treat.

  Randy employed exactly the same technique a little later with a pale, teenaged girl with black lipstick and what appeared to be at least five different henna tattoos applied one on top of another on her bare ankles under her long skirt. The resulting mess looked like hieroglyphics, or a gang tag. When Randy asked his question, her mouth unhinged, as though he’d bonked her on the head. He gave her two Drumsticks for her dollar, called it his “Welcome to Randy special,” and directed me to shut down the music and reel in the clown. I did both, leaned out the window to watch the clown fold, and nearly slammed into the scowling woman’s face with my own.