A Blood of Killers

by Gerard Houarner

  “Tee … Tee?” he said weakly. A grunt answered him. “Tee, I’m sorry … I didn’t mean to … I wasn’t laughing at you … I’m not playing a joke on you, if that’s what you’re thinking … it’s just that … I’m talking about a man, this guy they call Jason … you go to movies … a man that likes to hurt people before he kills them … and you’re talking about … Ways … roots and potions…spells and curses … Tee, this is the kind of man who laughs at the Way … this man is the Devil himself …”

  “Sounds to me like the Way might reach him, if he’s all that,” Tee said, her voice more distant than all the wire that was between them.

  “This ain’t Allenville, Tee. Ain’t nobody up here talking about the Way—”

  “There’s plenty of southern folk up there, Mickey,” she said, flat and quick. “Plenty that’s heard of the Way. And there’s different Ways, too. You got them Haitians, West Indians. You got folks from all those islands, and those Spanish countries on the other side of Mexico.”

  “Yeah, Tee. We got those people up here. They cut up roosters and leave them in Riverside Park, or sing and make altars in the basements of abandoned buildings. Yeah, we got them, Tee.” Mickey suddenly felt exhausted. His arms and legs tingled with weariness. He yawned and rubbed his eyes, trying to scrap away the lead that seemed to have lined his eyelids. “Yeah, we got some of them in this neighborhood. Mama Aponte got one of them. I heard she used a witch to put a curse on Horse, and on Jason, when they were warring last year. Never worked, though. They’re all still here. Jason’s as bad as ever.”

  “Sometimes it takes a while to work,” his cousin said. “You go to them, see if they can’t help you. It’s all I got, Mickey. If you don’t want to come back home, it’s all I got to give you.”

  “Yeah, Tee. I know.” He paused, not knowing what to say next, and not wanting to hang up on her. For some reason, he felt that as soon as their line was disconnected, he would die.

  “Mickey …”

  “I got to go now, Tee.” He couldn’t bear her distance, or her helplessness. It was as if he had already died and received God’s judgment, and had come back to haunt someone he loved. “Things to do. You know. My love to your folks. They took good care of me, after my ma and pa went. My love to you, too, Tee, and to your kids.”

  “Bye, Mickey. You take care of yourself. Come down, when it’s over, when you’re through. Come home, please.”

  The line went dead. After a while, an insistent beep signaled the need for the phone to be hung up. Mickey let the received fall through his fingers. It clattered on the floor.

  The apartment darkened. Voices and music rose up and down outside as people passed by the small, barred kitchen window with its drawn blinds. A mouse scrabbled across the floor. A water bug crawled across the hand he was using to prop himself up as he sat on the floor. A police siren wailed, and faded.

  It was the sound of shots being fired that finally roused Mickey. The sound, a series of pops announcing a small caliber weapon, came from close by, and Mickey turned to stare at the window, expecting glass fragments to fly in and the blinds to jump. The window remained intact. Next, he looked at the door, waiting for holes to appear in the smooth metal surface. Nothing happened.

  Mickey got up. He wobbled taking his first few steps, and he had to walk around the living room several times, rotating his shoulders and moving his head from side to side, to regain a sense of his limbs. Tension was a snake coiled around his spine, squeezing.

  Cautiously, he left the apartment, wearing a hat he found on the street with its brim low over his face, and a big, shapeless old coat he’d pulled out of a Salvation Army donation box that turned his body into a vague lump. After checking for anyone standing above him on the stairs, he looked out into the street. Dusk was giving way to night. Most of the bulbs in the lamps on the street were out. The huge pre-seventy-three gas guzzlers and the late eighties foreign cars parked up and down the block appeared empty, and there were no double-parked cars. Boys were playing basketball with a bottomless garbage can tied to the last rung of a fire escape, and girls were skipping in arcane patterns over twirling ropes or dancing the latest club steps to music blaring from the radio. Heavy beats and song spilled from windows above the street. Men and women leaned out of other windows, craned their necks as they looked up and down the block, as if looking for the source of the shots Mickey had heard. Voices speaking English and Spanish drifted down, some in conversational tones, others in heated argument. No silhouettes stood against the dark grey sky on the roofline.

  Mickey finally ventured out, opening the building door slowly, then quickly losing himself in the shadows. He walked blindly, a part of him screaming at the thought of being out in the open, another part relieved to have escaped the obvious trap his apartment had become. The first time he crossed a corner, Mickey wet his pants. But no one paid any attention to him. Cars drove by on the hurried business of their drivers, figures gathered around liquor stores and corner bodegas, steel roll gates stood sentry before the store windows along the main avenue.

  Mickey discovered that he had missed his appointment with death, and that he was on his way to Mama Aponte’s witch.

  He tittered to himself at the thought of seeing the old woman, imagining the effeminate fortuneteller he had once watched on the Spanish station lisping his way through the zodiac signs. He lowered his head and pulled the coat lapels up. He wondered over his own desperation, and comforted himself with the knowledge that, if Jason caught him out in the open, at least his body would not have to wait days to be discovered and buried.

  The way to Mama Aponte’s witch brought him to the edge of the park that marked the border between the housing projects and the rest of the neighborhood. A line of teenagers and adults wound around the swings and ended at a hole in the fence, where two young men dispensed vials in exchange for cash through the cut wire from the back of a van. There were a few other figures standing listlessly by the monkey bars, watching the transactions with open jealousy, but it was the figures on the benches that surprised Mickey. It had been a long time since the homeless had found the place locals called Dead Man’s Park safe enough to spend the night. The frequent gun battles between drug dealers, and the dumping of bodies by the local gangs including Horse’s posse and Mama Aponte’s outfit, had discouraged all normal and most unusual uses for the park as well as inspired its popular name. It seemed that even the birds and squirrels avoided the open space. The presence of the homeless signaled a change in the area. Though few in number, the attitude, size and groupings of the figures told Mickey that there were at least two mothers with children, and several younger men, probably discharged patients from Manhattan State, using the park as a safe haven. Though no one had felt secure enough to start any fires against the chill, fall night air, they all seemed comfortable enough under their layers of clothing. The gang controlling the territory was associated with House, but they wouldn’t know him and Jason might not think to search so close to his employer’s home ground. Spending the night among them seemed safer than returning to his apartment.

  Mickey hesitated by the park entrance, then resolved to finish the plan Tee had planted in his mind and which his feet had followed almost of their own volition. He would come after he had given Tee her satisfaction, no matter how crazy her idea had seemed.

  Near the witch’s building, young voices were raised in hot dispute. A figure danced out from around the corner and started running towards him. Mickey flattened himself against a wall. The boy he had taken to 3G ran by, his legs high-stepping, his mouth wide open as he gulped for air. Mickey almost reached out to stop him. But a gang of other boys turned the corner, too many for him to try and stop, and Mickey remained silent. He watched the gang chase the boy from 3G back the way he had just come. He thought of the sickle-shaped blood cells, like instruments of death, spreading through the boy’s arteries, gathering around his organs, preparing the way to pain and oblivion.

  Mickey shud
dered. He closed his eyes, trying to shut out the sight of the feeling boy.

  He moved on to the witch’s building.

  Mickey was surprised to find the building entrance open, and the second floor apartment door unlocked. He was even more surprised by the half-dozen people, mostly Puerto Rican men and women in their fifties and sixties, sitting in the living room watching a Spanish station comedy on television. Through a partition of beaded string, he could see in the dim, flickering light the short, plump figure of the witch sitting across a kitchen table, bobbing her head as she spoke to an older woman.

  Mickey found a place to sit and wait for his turn. Around him, voices whispered in Spanish and glances darted in his direction. There was much talk of a prieto. Despite the relative safety the apartment offered, Mickey was relieved when his turn came.

  The witch did not look up at him as he passed through the beaded curtain and entered the candlelit kitchen. He sat opposite her and stared at her round, expressionless face. Her eyes were closed, as if she were contemplating a profound mystery. Wisps of black hair had escaped her head wrap and lay across her forehead and ears, while her hands lay on the table, fingers intertwined. The flame atop the tall, glass enclosed candle between them danced as if caught in a whirlwind. Shadows flashed across the witch’s face in shifting shapes that snagged in his memory, but then tore loose before he could catch their names.

  Mickey cleared his throat. The woman opened her eyes and fixed him with a hard, black stare. Her fingers untwined and spread themselves across the Formica top. Her nails were painted crimson, and pointed towards him like blood soaked knives.

  “Yes?” she said, arching an eyebrow with mock surprise.

  Mickey’s gaze roved across the tabletop, the cabinets lost in gloom behind her head, the ceiling. Suddenly, his intentions eluded him. Tee’s faith in the Way seemed silly. There was only one Way, Mickey thought, and that was the way to dying.

  “What are you looking for?” the witch asked. Her accent was thicker than Mama Aponte’s, marking her as a recent immigrant.

  Mickey wondered from what backcountry village she had emerged from.

  “Ah, well, I don’t rightly know—”

  “What made you come to me?” Her eyes stared straight at him. Her lips moved, but the rest of her face remained impassive.

  Mickey laughed and passed a hand over his hair. He leaned his elbows on the table and rested his chin in the palms of his hands.

  “Jason’s after me. You know him … word was that you put a curse on him last year for Mama Aponte.” Mickey chuckled, but kept his eyes focused on the expanse of table between them. “Guess it didn’t work too good. A friend … my cousin told me I should go to someone who knows the Way, you know, witching, to get me out of this mess. But you couldn’t help. Sorry. Don’t know why I came.” He started to push himself away from the table.

  “He buys big brujo,” the witch replied. “Jason, and Horse, they find big magic in the islands. It protect them against the white police, makes it hard to reach them. But they dead, now. Don’t waste your money, man. They already dead.”

  Mickey stood. The witch did not raise her head, but followed him with her eyes. He turned to leave.

  “It’s the custom to leave an offering,” she said before he could take a step. Her voice froze him.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a ten and a few singles, and put them on the table. “It’s all I got.”

  “It’s enough.” She put a hand over the bills and closed her eyes. Mickey fled the apartment, feeling the same rush of relief he had felt the day of his release when he had passed through the prison gate and boarded the bus heading back to the city.

  The cool night air unsheathed the edge of fear in Mickey. He scanned the street and started back the way he had come. He paused once more by the park entrance. The van and the crackheads lining up for hits had disappeared, and the homeless had gathered in greater number. Every other bench provided a seat for at least one shapeless bundle of flesh and clothing. He noticed none of them had relaxed and laid down for the night, and even the children stuck close by their mothers. Mickey continued, understanding from their alertness and silence that they were waiting for something to happen, and that Dead Man’s Park was not as safe as he had thought. He hurried past, expecting Jason’s angular shadow to spring out at him with each step he took.

  Mickey did not go back into his building, but instead went from alley to doorway to store front, trying to mimic the random movements of a homeless man searching for shelter. The locals ignored him. Jason did not appear.

  Then a shriek cut through the quiet night. Mickey looked up at the lighted windows of his building, trying to identify the apartment. Someone sobbed upstairs. Then the woman from 3G exploded from the building.

  “Where’s the ambulance?” she screamed, looking up and down the street. “Where’s the goddam ambulance?”

  The father came out after her, cradling their boy in his arms. He was limp, twitching occasionally, and moaned and rocked his head back and forth. Tears flowed freely down his cheeks.

  “He’s in crisis,” the mother shouted. “Does anybody have a car? We have to get him to the hospital right away. Please … where’s the ambulance?”

  A crowd of teenagers began to gather around them, staring mutely at the father and his son. A few men from in front of the liquor store staggered over to investigate, and one offered to hot wire one of the nearby parked cars and take her to the hospital.

  Suddenly, a popping sound cut through the mother’s cries and the boy’s muted suffering. Bystanders scattered. The popping sound came again, twice in succession, then three more times, slowly, separated by shards of silence.

  A tall man in an open leather trench stood over a prostate young man in his twenties. He held a 9mm pistol in his right hand. The left hand was in the coat’s pocket. His dreadlocks were gathered up under a large, knitted cap. The beard covering his lips and chin was ragged and spotted with spittle. Smoke drifted from the gun barrel. Blood flowed from the groin, stomach and limbs of the boy sprawled on the cement at his feet. The young man opened his mouth to scream, and blood flowed out. He gurgled instead.

  Jason looked up from his work and found Mickey as if he had known exactly where the superintendent had been standing all along.

  “I got something for you, too, man,” Jason said. His smile was broad, and his eyes burned like almond-shaped pools of acid.

  Mickey took a step back. Jason looked back down at his victim, shot him once more in the ribs. “This one, he don’t pay for his play. He pay now, eh, Mickey?” Jason shot his target again, shattering a knee. The young man coughed up blood, rolled over on his side, choking and gagging. He stretched a trembling arm out towards Mickey, as if trying to drag himself out of Jason’s reach.

  The boy from 3G cried out in pain again. Jason looked at the mother, then at the father holding the boy. The mother screamed and pushed the father back into the building. Jason held the gun up, glanced at Mickey, laughed. Then he fired.

  Dust flew from the hole in the cement pillar by the building entrance where Jason had turned his aim at the moment he pulled the trigger. The father’s curses carried from the stairwell out into the street.

  Mickey found himself alone with Jason and the dying young man on the pavement.

  He took another step back. Jason let the gun swing by the trigger guard on his finger.

  “Don’t have no bullets for you, Mickey,” Jason said. He pulled out a closed knife with his left hand. “Got me a ratchet for your ass.”

  Mickey ran. He turned a corner, crossed the street, turned another corner, slipped through a pried metal barrier at the entrance to an abandoned building. He stumbled through the darkness and came out through a broken wall into an alley between two rows of buildings. He made his way through an obstacle course filled with bricks, concrete slabs, broken bottles, twisted metal parts from broken appliances and even a few car hulks. The constricted landscape further comp
ressed by looming walls on either side was lit by a few fires, around which faceless figures huddled.

  Mickey gasped for air as he ran. He slipped and tripped on the jagged terrain, cut his ankles and calves on sharp, invisible edges, fell and came up with bleeding palms and fingers. His chest hurt, his thighs burned, his vision blurred. He had to climb a fence to escape the alley, and he let himself fall to the other side of the wire fence, too drained by panic and extreme exertion to continue running. The hat was gone. Just as well. Jason would recognize it, now.

  Cars passed by, and he twitched, expecting each one to stop at the alley mouth. He watched the shadows for movement, listened for footsteps. His breathing slowed, the silence thickened around him. He hung his head down and brought his knees up to his chest. For a moment, he was back in his aunt’s house, a child waiting to be punished for some prank, his cousin Tee beside him sharing the loneliness of the guilty and the anticipation of the condemned. Mickey laughed, remembering the seriousness with which they had treated his aunt’s punishments. And he winced as he recalled the sharp pain of the switch as his aunt’s judgment was delivered.

  But Tee wasn’t with him this time, and it was not his aunt who was looking for him with a long-bladed knife. Mickey stirred, climbed the fence hand over hand to rise to his feet. He was safe enough in the alley for the night, he thought, but morning would find him huddled against the fence, trapped, waiting for Jason or one of his street watchers to find him. Dead Man’s Park at least offered anonymity among the homeless that were gathering there. And if Jason showed up to look for him, he would have to inspect the homeless one by one to find him, giving Mickey a warning and a chance to escape.

  Unless, of course, Jason decided to kill everyone in the park.

  He needed to move, to do something, to try and save himself. Mickey headed for Dead Man’s Park.