Black Angel
Page 12
The little creature whined and cringed, and lifted its arm to protect its face. Its skin was papery and flaky, the color of wasp’s-nests.
Houston said, “What happened to her? What could have done that?”
“Will you stop asking damfool questions and give me a hand here?” Larry snapped at him.
“What do you want me to do?” Houston asked. “Christ, lieutenant, this is unreal!”
“Yes, it’s unreal,” Larry agreed, testily. He leaned back and called, “Medic! Let’s have a stretcher in here, please!” Then he turned to the creature that was Edna-Mae, and said, “Come on, Edna-Mae. We’re not going to hurt you. Just come out of there, okay? Everything’s going to be fine.”
The paramedic pushed a gurney with squeaking wheels into the washroom. “You need some assistance in there?” he wanted to know. His offer sounded distinctly unenthusiastic.
“Come on, Edna-Mae,” Larry coaxed the little shriveled creature in the corner. “Nobody’s going to hurt you, I promise.”
He knelt down on the wet tiled floor and reached around behind the toilet-bowl. Edna-Mae suddenly scratched him and scuttled and twisted away, and Larry shouted out, “Ah!” more in surprise than pain. But he managed to snatch the sleeve of her dress, and then the chicken-bone arm inside it, and her skull was too big for her to squeeze past the pipe at the back of the toilet. She struggled and scratched and fought and squealed, but eventually Larry managed to drag her out, and lift her kicking into the air. She weighed almost nothing. She was only the size of a five-year-old child, and her dress was tangled around her in purple bunches. He felt as if he could crush her ribcage like a bird’s-nest.
All the time she kicked and scratched and spat, and hissed at him between clenched teeth. He could scarcely recognize the bawdy, hoarse-voiced woman who had first accosted him at the bar.
Between them, Larry and Houston and the paramedic managed to strap her on to the gurney. Her eyes darted furiously from side to side, and her thin wrists quivered in their restraints. Her slimy blue tongue writhed between her lips like a fat slug half-crushed under the wheel of a car.
“Cover her up,” Larry ordered. “Cover her right up. I don’t want anybody to see her.”
The paramedic unfolded a blanket. As he tried to drape it over her, however, she raised her scrawny head and snapped at his hand. He shouted, and twisted his hand away, but not before she had ripped a large piece of skin and muscle away from the bone. Bright red blood suddenly stained the blanket, and spattered across the washroom floor.
“Oh God,” said Larry. He yanked the roller-towel off the wall, bundled it up, and pressed it against the paramedic’s hand. The paramedic had gone gray. He leaned back against the wall, panting and swearing in Cantonese. Almost immediately his colleague appeared, a big crewcut man with forearms like Popeye.
“What the hell’s going on here?” he asked. He squinted in bewilderment at the flickering light.
“Don’t ask,” Larry replied. “Just get us to the hospital. This woman, your friend here, and me. My sergeant will follow behind.”
“Ong, you okay?” the crewcut paramedic wanted to know.
“He got bit, that’s all,” Houston explained. “This woman bit him.”
The paramedic leaned suspiciously over the gurney. Then he lifted the blanket and stared at Edna-Mae with an expression that was hewn out of solid corned-beef.
“Be careful,” Larry warned him. “She could be dangerous.”
The crewcut paramedic paused for a moment, then let the blanket drop back. “This is a woman?” he asked.
Larry nervously rubbed the palm of his hand. “This is kind of a woman, yes.”
“Kind of a woman. Shit.”
“Just get her out of here,” Larry told him. “And don’t say a word to anybody. You understand? Otherwise I’ll have your guts.”
“Yes, lieutenant, sure thing, lieutenant, whatever you say, lieutenant,” the crewcut paramedic replied. He laid an arm around his partner’s shoulders and said, “Come on, Ong, let’s go.”
That night Larry said hardly anything at all over dinner. Linda had sent Frankie and Mikey to bed early because tomorrow they were going on a Cub Scout outing to Kirby Cove. They had already laid out their T-shirts and their sneakers and their lunchpails, and Mikey had bought a magnifying-glass with his pocket-money in case they got lost and needed to start a fire to attract attention.
They finished the wine, and Linda started collecting up the dishes. “What’s wrong?” she asked him. “You look like you’re out of it.”
“I don’t know. Something happened today; something weird.”
“Dan Burroughs said something nice to you?”
He didn’t even smile. “No, no. Weirder than that.”
“Weirder than Dan Burroughs saying something nice to you? I can’t imagine anything weirder than that.”
He raised his left hand, palm outwards. “Do you believe that—” He hesitated. “Do you believe that—”
Linda stood still, with dirty dishes in each hand. “Do I believe that what, Larry?”
“I don’t know. Do you believe that somebody could have pictures on their skin?”
She frowned. “I’m not following you. What pictures? You mean, like a tattoo?”
“Well, kind of like a tattoo. But moving.”
“Moving?”
“That’s right. Like, moving pictures. Pictures of somebody’s face.”
She looked at him for a long time. Then she gave him the smallest shake of her head. “I really don’t understand you. Whose face? Where?”
He tilted his chair back. “We went down to a Mexican bar today, on Front and Green. We think our boy made his last telephone call from there. Anyway, there was a woman in the bar, and she said that she’d seen him, or somebody who looked like him.”
Linda put down the dishes, pulled out a chair, and sat down, listening, her chin in her hand. It was obvious that she could sense how disturbed he felt.
He lifted his hand. “She offered to read my palm. It sounded like a joke, that’s all. But while she was reading it, these marks appeared, right on the skin, and they were moving.”
“You’re sure it wasn’t a rash, anything like that?”
He shook his head. “They were more like shadows. To begin with, I thought they were shadows. But then they all gathered together and formed into this face.”
“Was it a face you knew?” Linda asked him.
“I don’t know. No, I don’t think so. It was very indistinct. It could have been anybody.”
Linda said, “It sounds like some sort of hallucination.”
“That’s what I thought. But then the woman had a fit, like an epileptic fit. She kept screaming about my hand, and telling me to keep away from her. She locked herself in the can and wouldn’t come out. In the end I had to break down the door.”
He hesitated. He could still see that shrunken tufted head. He could still feel those chicken-bone arms. He could still hear that rasping, high, malevolent voice.
“Go on,” Linda urged him.
Larry gave a dismissive shrug. “When we, er—when we broke down the door, you know, and found the woman in the toilet—she’d shrunk.”
“Shrunk,” Linda repeated. Then, “Did you say shrunk?”
“That’s right. She’d shriveled up, so she was scarcely any bigger than a child. She’d lost her half of her hair, and her skin was all dried up, and it was disgusting. She looked like one of those kids you see in those Ethiopian famine pictures.”
“How long was she locked in the can?”
“That’s the crazy part about it. Four, maybe five minutes at the most.”
“How could anybody shrink up like that? And as quickly as that?”
Larry stood up. “I don’t know. I never saw anything like it in my life. I mean, I’ve seen dead people. I’ve seen dried-up dead people, like mummies practically. But nothing like this. I need another drink.”
“It’s so bizarre,” said Linda.
He peeled the gold plastic from the top of the bottle, and dug in the point of the corkscrew. “She was shrunk, but she was still alive and she was vicious. Snapping and biting at everybody. We called the paramedics to take her away and she bit one of the paramedics.”
“Where is she now?”
“SFG, under guard. I’ve asked Dr. Jensen to take a look at her. You know, the endocrinologist. Houston Brough thought she may have suffered from massive adrenal insufficiency. Like a huge blast of AIDS.”
Linda watched him pouring wine. “What do you think happened?” she asked.
Without looking up, Larry gave a grim smile. “I don’t know, sweetheart. I really don’t. I’m trying not to believe what I saw with my own eyes. I’m trying to persuade myself that I’m suffering from overwork; or stress; or maybe even Manilow’s Syndrome.”
“Manilow’s Syndrome” was what the SF police had dubbed a refusal to believe what was right in front of your nose.
Larry lifted his left hand again, and inspected his palm, as if he half-believed that the shadowy face would reappear. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s something from the other side.”
Linda said, “Do you want to go to Muir Woods this weekend?”
He glanced at her suspiciously. “This is a change of heart. Wild horses wouldn’t have dragged you there yesterday.”
She stood up, and hooked her arms loosely around her waist, and kissed his cheek. “I know. But maybe you need all that awe and nature and beauty.”
He kissed her back. Every time he looked at her, he was amazed how pretty she was. Really pretty. Cute pretty.
“Well, okay, if I can spare the time,” he told her. “The way things are going, this assignment is sprouting like mushrooms.”
“Just one condition,” Linda insisted. “We don’t go to Basta Pasta.”
“I like Basta Pasta.”
“But I want to go to Monroe’s.”
“On my pay?”
“Ask for a rise. Tell them you won’t catch the Fog City Satan unless they pay you another ten thousand a year.”
He laughed, and kissed her. Right now, that was just the kind of silliness and affection that he needed.
*
But as he lay in bed that night, on a dark hill in a dark sea-circled city deadened by fog, he thought he felt an irritation in the palm of his left hand. He squeezed his hand into a fist, but the irritation grew sharper, as if somebody were clawing at the palm of his hand with ragged fingernails.
He reached across and held his hand close to the illuminated dial of his digital alarm-clock. Gray shapes and shadows were passing across his skin, forming blotches and shapes. He gripped his left wrist in his right hand to steady his palm, and stared at the shapes intently. They looked like floating birthmarks; patches and fragments and splatters. An uncanny Rorschach pattern, opening and closing in front of his eyes.
After a while, the shadows began to cling together, like skeins of wool and dust and cobwebs blown across a pale stone floor. Gradually they gathered themselves into the same face that he had seen on his hand in “Alphonson’s Cantina”. A placid, smiling, self-satisfied face, existing in some time or place that was beyond imagination. It looked almost as if the wind were ruffling his hair, as if there were sunlight behind him.
Time to feed, Larry’s hand whispered.
He cupped it against his ear, and listened, like a child listening to a conch shell to hear the sea.
Time to feed, my friend. Time to feed.
He opened his hand; and instantly the briefest of blue-white flames flickered on his naked palm. He thought he could smell something bitter and aromatic; like burned grass. But the smell faded, and the darkness poured back into the room, and all he could hear was Linda’s breathing, and the sounds of the night.
Foghorns, sirens. The cries of people with no place to go.
For a moment, he was tempted to wake Linda, and tell her what had happened. But then he rested his head back on the pillow and decided against it. Although he didn’t understand why, he had the feeling that it was safer if she were not to know.
4
He met Dogmeat Jones on the corner of Valencia and Sixteenth. It was late morning, still foggy. Dogmeat looked as if he had been sleeping in his clothes. As usual, he was wearing his huge embroidered sheepskin jacket with its filthy matted fur and its clusters of buttons—“Impeach Nixon” and “Suramin Sucks” and “Horse Badorties For Ever.” Beneath his jacket, his spindly legs were tightly encased in moth-eaten jeans of maroon velour, and he wore brown cowboy boots whose heels were worn down at such sharp diagonals that he walked bow-legged.
Originally a native of Crete, Illinois, Dogmeat had come to San Francisco in the first blooming of the hippie era and twenty-two years later he had left neither Valencia Street nor 1966. He was well over forty-five now, although his face was strangely boyish, almost angelic, like a brat-pack actor. He wore octagonal pink-lensed Byrds sunglasses and his gray hair was tied in a pony-tail at the back. He knew everything that was going down in the arts and crafts community, and Larry counted him as one of his most productive informants.
“Hungry?” he asked Dogmeat.
“I could sit and admire something Mexican, mon pal,” said Dogmeat.
“How about ‘La Cumbre’?”
“Nein, nein. The lines are always too long. Let’s go to the ‘Pancho Villa Taqueria’ and entertain some burrito vegetariano with guacamole and whole beans.”
“You’re the boss.”
They squashed into a table at the “Pancho Villa” next to a girl who was talking loudly about her last abortion and smoking something fragrant but illegal. Dogmeat began to get serious with his huge vegetarian lunch while Larry sipped without any appetite or thirst at a cup of strong black coffee. Larry hadn’t slept well after that face had reappeared on his hand last night, and he was feeling jagged and frustrated, as if he had a hangover.
“Believe me something very heavy is about to manifest itself,” said Dogmeat, with beans and guacamole churning around in his open mouth. “I hear it here, I hear it there. It’s like birds, when there’s a tremor on the way. Everybody’s a-twitter. Everybody’s uneasy, you know. It’s all highly Selassie.” Dogmeat had an idiosyncratic habit of using names as adjectives.
“And you think it’s something to do with the Fog City Satan?” asked Larry. “What makes you think that?”
“Well, it’s more of a rumor than a brass-plated reality,” said Dogmeat. “It’s more of a buzz than a specifical warning, if you dig my meaning. More of a thickening sensation in the city’s arteries, n’est-ce pas? A Muhammad in the alley. More in the way of extra gravity. Like there’s thunder on the way; but nobody knows from where.”
Larry set down his coffee cup. “Tell me,” he asked, patiently.
“Two things. Thing the first, you know David Green the artist? He was painting last week when all of a sudden he turns around and sees a face on the window of his loft. A face, like a photographic negative, that’s how he described it, like it’s not outside looking in or anything, it’s in the glass. Not only that, it’s actually moving and staring at him, and he thinks he can hear it talking, too. Not just the Gettysburg address, either. It’s saying those same words that the Fog City Satan said on the radio. All that shit about the other side and time to feed. Anyway what’s the explanation? It may be that David’s been overindulging in that new Colombian crack they’ve been shipping in. He was always a little cavalier with the nose candy. But he swears it’s vrai; and what’s more his lover Tim Terry disappeared the same day, vanished and never came back. Not even a phone call. Not even a billet doux. Left his cold cream, his tennis shoes, and his Commes des Garçons evening shirt, the one with the spots. At first David’s not too worried. He reckons that a George in the hand is worth two
in the Bush. But then he sees the face in the window twice more; once at night, which scares him totally merdeless, and he goes to stay with Harry and Barry Kuzdenyi on Mission.”
Larry said, “What about thing the second?” He did his best to keep his voice steady. A face, actually moving, and he thinks he can hear it talking, too.
Dogmeat wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and sniffed loudly. “Thing the second is at Hana’s Restaurant, right, opposite the Japan center. Michael Leibowitz who is an engraver at the U.S. Mint is having dinner with his cousin from Seattle, Bill Freberg. He’s drinking a bowlful of yose nabe, when all of a sudden he sees reflected in the soup this face which isn’t his. He keeps staring at it but it’s somebody else, he doesn’t know who, and this face keeps smiling at him. He practically checks in to the Harp Hotel there and then, at table five.
“Anyway his cousin Bill Freberg takes him home and gives him a handful of sleeping-pills and Michael sleeps like he’s dead. When he wakes up the next morning, though, Bill’s gone; left all of his bags, but disappeared. Michael calls his folks, calls his ex-wife. He calls the cops. Nobody’s seen him. And the rumble and the bumble is that this is happening all over. People keep seeing these faces where faces don’t have any right to be. And people are disappearing like they’re ants disappearing down a crack in the sidewalk.”
Larry was tempted to tell Dogmeat what had happened at “Alphonson’s Cantina”; but Dogmeat was such a wildfire gossip that by the time it was happy hour at the Cadillac Bar, everybody south of Market would know that even the SFPD were getting jittery about faces appearing where faces didn’t have any right to be.
In an odd way, however, he was reassured. If other people had been seeing moving, living, talking faces, then perhaps the shadows on his hand were part of a natural and explicable phenomenon. Maybe it was some kind of hallucination induced by this unnatural August fog. Maybe it was something in the water.
Dogmeat pushed his plate away. “I could die for this stuff,” he remarked. “If I didn’t give me such bad gas, I’d eat it all the time. I mean, who needs meat? Did you know that they inject cattle with meat tenderizer before they kill them? They gravity-feed about a pint of some stuff made out of paw-paws right into their jugular vein. While they’re still alive, man! Can you imagine the agony? No, you can’t imagine the agony. Give me beans, give me beans; at least beans don’t feel the perpetual punishment of perverse pain. Who said that? Spiro Agony.”