by Brian Hodge
Cassady would remember later dreaming of the sound that the knife made when it ripped through the woman's tongue. It was like the sound the dentist's air hose makes when it is in your mouth and you have to swallow. Violet blood flew out of the mutilated mess that had been her mouth a moment before. The smell of blood filled the air and worked its way into Cassady's mouth. He tasted copper, and his own bile, deep in his throat.
The woman hitched out a cough. Another, convulsively. The man sliced her throat from ear to ear. He was smiling. The wind caught the sharp odor of pickles and onions from the Wendy's up on 25th. Black pools welled up in the sockets of the woman's still staring o God why couldn't he have just raped me and masturbated in my face instead of KILLING me eyes. One hand clawed lifeless etchings into the mud. The man replaced the knife through his belt loop into an invisible holster, its blade grinning wickedly, and he walked away. He simply walked away. Twenty minutes had passed, according to the flashing neon Seiko sign down the block.
The train pulled in several minutes after the red basketball sneakers had shrank first to a pinpoint down the aisle of the last car, his ankle-length trench coat slapping against the seats. He was surprised that it was crowded, filled with simpering suburbanites intent on following Governor Thompson's orders. Because of the rail strike, leave work a little early or stay a while longer, so we can all spread the rush hour out more, and hopefully, etc. etc. I'll be re-elected in 1987, was what he didn't say on the TV spot.
And so, no doubt about it, everybody piles onto the 7:03 out of Cicero-Berwyn. Cassady nearly tripped over a toad of a man sitting virtually on top of the doors. Thin, a scarecrow of a man in a three-piece suit. Sunken shoulders, bony knees and ankles touching, eyebrows perched atop black plastic frames from Sears Optical. Neck muscles protruding from an ill-fitting collar stitched together in a mad fugue. A Cermak Road businessman working late. He smelled of Brut 33 cologne.
In the last seat, next to the conductor's booth, a pregnant black woman gazed out at the rooftops passing just below eye level. A small boy with huge brown eyes and a Walter Payton T-shirt sat tugging at her faded blue sweatshirt, vying for supremacy over the dirt on the tenements for his mother's attention. Their clothes said off the rack Zayre's blue light special, and their faces had 18th and Hoyne written in every sad wrinkle, and in the dirt under their fingernails as well.
Cassady was able to get a seat in the back of the car. He slid down next to a man in work boots reading (most likely with some degree of difficulty, he thought) the new Robert Ludlum novel. Across from him sat two elderly woman, one with a purple babushka wrapped around her head, both their faces buried deep in The National Enquirer.
"My, my, that Prince Andrew going out with the Koo actress what appeared nekked in those movies," purple babushka said. The cloth was wrapped so tightly around her head, her eyebrows were pulled back on her forehead like Mr. Spock's on Star Trek. Her withered hand touched her cheek in actual concern. "What is this world coming to?"
Look around you and see, lady, Cassady thought. See if anybody cares that some woman was cut to pieces tonight and you all passed her right on by and I saw it happen!
None of you even bothered to look out of the window. Too damn caught up in your own damn lives and your own damn problems. Somebody could have seen the—her—body.
Hell, nobody was even looking at him.
Down the aisle, somewhere, a kid had his Sony Walkman turned on too loud, and John Cougar was singing about Jack and Diane sucking down chilidogs outside a Tastee-Freez. Go for it, Jacky-boy.
Cassady shut his eyes.
"...say, hey, Diane, let's go off behind a shady tree..."
How about an El overpass, Jacky-boy; that'll do the trick. Cassady could almost hear the sound of his own thoughts. He had an insane urge to laugh, loud and without reason. A maniac's laugh.
And what could he have done anyway? His ears rang. "...oh, yeah, life goes on..."
You talking to me, Jacky-boy? Cassady's mind was a black hole, and, except for the song, every single sensory feeling, the cold metal he rested his hands on, the smell of a pipe three seats up, even the old ladies' murmurings, was sucked into his brain and pulled into swirling blackness at thought speed. It was like when you are walking down a street, maybe thinking about the girl you're seeing, and you don't even realize that you're walking or that your legs are moving up and down at each curb and you turn down the right street without looking at the sign and you only know that when she wears her red headband it drives you crazy...
Outside, away from his mind, shadowed buildings passed by at breakneck speeds. The floor of the car vibrated with the tempo of the rails underneath. Except for the armchair-espionage spy next to him and the two mental cases across the aisle, everybody sat with vacant stares, their heads bobbing in rhythm with the motions of the car like empty beer cans floating in the water off Oak Street Beach, their eyes staring uncommittally at their reflections, washed black by night beyond the rhomboid-shaped windows.
Inside, Cassady saw the woman's face, the man's face, with its twisted grin, grotesquely out of proportion, as if an egg beater had been stuck in the middle of their faces, funhouse faces leering like the ones at the beginning of Rod Serling's Night Gallery...
"...long after the thrill of livin' is gone..."
Go to hell, Jacky-boy.
The train made a hissing sound as it slowly pulled into the Central Park station, jolting Cassady's awareness as abruptly as a cop's nightstick jabs the wino on the park bench out of his drunken slumber. Cassady found that he had been staring at the “Life In These United States” signs lining the car, furnished by The Reader's Digest for your reading enjoyment.
He was one of a handful of people who were either poor enough or stupid enough to get off the train, the quality of the neighborhood being what it was, sprawled beneath him in two-dimensional decay, gang slogans —Vice Lords, Black Gangsters — in carnival colors sprayed on every shuttered building. He stood alone, hands gripping the railing, the wood rough on his fingers, and let the wind that carried the copper smell of blood into his nose twenty blocks east blow gently through his hair.
He looked down at his hands. They were strong, able hands; nails neatly trimmed. He began to examine a small scab on his right hand, just below the knuckles, a product of a careless slip of the razor while shaving. Methodically, like an old man whittling wood, he scratched at it until a tiny sliver flaked off. He stared at the ugly red skin beneath. Stretching the skin tautly with his other hand, he watched a small bubble of blood rise to the surface. The blood was thick; Cassady felt the sharp sting of nausea begin a slow pulse in his nose. Black patches grabbed at the corners of his eyes and his stomach heaved. Now he was running down the steps two at a time, dumbly thinking that every time his feet hit the stairs and then the concrete, his socks were sliding further down his calves.
He felt his throat getting all gummy, and he knew it wouldn't be long before he threw up, like the time he had downed a pint of Yukon Jack on Vic Raciunas' dare and gave his erstwhile friend's AMC Pacer a new set of seat covers. That had been outside of Lorenzo's, a Greek lounge on Halsted Street, where the owners called everybody "my friend" and the whole block smelled like gyros, and Cassady wished to fuck that he were there right now.
He fumbled for his front door key, his bladder doing a fast boogaloo. Blood poked through the scab again. The light in the foyer reflected off it, made it look like spittle in a baby's mouth. He retched all over himself.
It rained the next day. Cassady threw up several times in the morning; the taste of bile stayed in his mouth. He could taste it when he belched. He stared vacantly out his window at life progressing down Cullerton and Ridgeway. Faces stood in doorways, kept dry by yesterday's racing forms, waiting for the rain to stop so their daily crap games could begin. A hunkered down old man, the rain seemingly beating him into the ground, waited patiently for the Ogden Avenue bus, his eyes gently watching two young boys who did not know what rheumatoid a
rthritis was splash playfully in the puddles. The sky did not have a horizon: it was a bowl of smokestack-grey that was smacked down on everything, and as the afternoon died into early evening, the rain quickened, ripping its way through the trees, tearing autumn's last remaining leaves and smashing them to the ground in lifeless piles.
Through all of this, Cassady sat and watched as the rain beat against his window and eroded lines onto his reflected face. Behind him, on the Quasar television he had bought hot the previous summer on Maxwell Street, Eddie Haskell was calling the Beaver a little runt.
He was holding a cockroach in his hand. Had been for quite some time. He held it firmly between his thumb and forefinger; its legs hung limp. Cassady raised it to eye level, and the roach met his stare with little disdain. He had found it creeping through his kitchen. "Remind you of someone you know?" a dark voice asked. "No!" Cassady's mind overrode the dark voice and his eyes squeezed shut.
When he opened them, a million years after the sight of the knife's grin became too much to bear, he saw that he had ripped one of the roach's legs off. The roach's attitude had not changed.
The tiny leg resting on his right finger resembled a woman's false eyelash. Cassady then tossed the roach behind him, hardly heard it hit the floor. "Let it bleed to death."
Four-thirty. Channel Seven gave the best account of the death of the woman. A voluptuous bottle blonde read from the prompter the victim's name had been Quita McLean — Quita after the heroine in a Harlequin Romance her mother had once read. She would have been twenty-three, and her sister said that she always cried when the puppies were burned in the barn fire in Lad: A Dog. The camera focused on a withered old man who would not stop crying.
After a commercial break, the blonde came back on to talk about a hostage situation in a European embassy. One woman had been released because she had told the terrorists that she° was pregnant. Would that revelation have stopped Quita McLean from being raped and murdered?
Cassady walked into the kitchen, reaching for a full bottle of Seagram's, thinking that if he were lucky he would get liver failure. Out of the corner of his eye, his hand still on the bottle, Cassady saw his friend limping erratically towards the safety of an empty Jays potato chips box. Taking a dirty fork from the sink, Cassady stepped forward, lunging a fork into the roach's midsection. It sounded like a taco breaking in half. He kicked it out of the way.
By the time the fast money round came on Family Feud, Cassady was sprawled in his living room chair like a discarded rag doll. A rusted spring stuck out of the top of the chair, coming closer with each of Cassady's deep breaths to piercing his shoulder blade. The empty bottle lay on the floor beside him, and he dreamt.
"...as The Beaver." Mommymommy, Denny was playing with my Barbie dolls again! Janet, his older sister, was singing, her voice like the broken record it still was. They were sitting at the dinner table and his mother — no, it was Barbara Billingsley, Beaver's mom; no, it wasn't at all, this was getting confusing — turned her head sharply at the revelation. She was wearing a pink housecoat, and a pearl necklace dangled from around her neck. The housecoat was missing several buttons. From the chair he sat in across from his mother, who was now staring at him from behind a fortress of Teflon, Cassady thought that he could not remember June Cleaver ever wearing a housecoat on the show before...
His father peered over the edge of his paper in slits. He took their clothes all off, Mommy! the stupid bitch was saying, and why didn't she just shut the hell up? Did not did not! Cassady became a broken record of his own, but his father was already standing, looming over his chair like an ogre, his belt coming rapidly off, making rough sounds as it passed through each loop of his pants. His beer belly fell forward, giving way to gravity now that the belt was not holding it back, and it sort of plopped into his potatoes. The belt made a flapping sound as it hit Cassady in the back right where the spring in the chair poked through...
Faggot! Lousy faggot! Prissy Denny's playing with Corky the Retard! The words were ritualistically chanted by several male voices which he couldn't see because he was scraping mud out of his eyes. He tasted dirt on his tongue. He blinked his eyes open, and no one was there except Sarah Dunleavy, and wasn't that strange because he hadn't met her until college, long after Jimmy Corcoran and he left the old neighborhood. "Sarah!" His baby voice shrieked. "They hurt me, Sarah!" He felt embarrassed at the smallness of his voice. "C'mere, you," she soothed, cradling his head fell away from the rusted spring and he awoke in darkness.
Kee-rist! What a Grade A bitch of a nightmare that was! He remembered parts of it, but not all, just like certain parts of songs keep floating through your head ("long after the thrill of livin' has gone") while you're walking down the street or waiting for a local. Sarah, Corky, even a vague image of Sister Veronetta making him recite "The Lord's Prayer" in kindergarten back at St. Vitus. And the dolls...
Shit... he sniffed the air. Smelled like, no, he hadn't crapped himself. Smelled like grass. Wet grass, how the inside of a lawnmower bag smells after you've cut the grass when it was damp with dew or rain.
But it was more than that.
He smelled something decaying. The roach?
It was dark out — how long had he been sleeping? — and Cassady reached over to turn the lamp on. The tallow light flickered beneath a lampshade that depicted a panoramic view of Niagara Falls, and he screamed.
Cassady's screams echoed through the thin walls and bare floor, but Audrey and Willis Fenton, who were watching Magnum, P.I. below, didn't hear anything.
Because the scream never made it to reality; it was a sob welled up in his throat like so much phlegm. It was the sound that the woman had made just before the man had let the knife drop into her mouth.
And she was lying on his living room couch.
She was naked. And she was dead. Her skin had become green and cheesy-looking, like a person who had been receiving advanced cancer treatments. Her eyes were open, both were sunken down into their sockets, the mucous and membrane running over the sides like badly prepared eggs, leaving dried yellowed pus lining the rims of her eyelids. One eye stared lollingly at the ceiling, the other focused above and to the left of the television, which was sputtering in static. Her hair was white and alive with maggots. The skin was pulled back tightly around her lips, a death-grin of dried leather. Mud was caked on her gums and her cheeks. Blood spattered her teeth. Her hands clawed...
Cassady felt a sharp tingling in his crotch. At first, he thought he had urinated. A pain shot through his testicles. Sharp and quick, like when he sometimes rode his ten-speed when his shorts were too tight, and he pumped his legs too fast.
He looked down.
There was movement under his pants.
His testicles drew up. Cassady pulled the pants away from his waist.
A cockroach the size of a half dollar was tangled in his pubic hairs like a fly in a spider's web. Its legs backpedaled madly; with each revolution the skin below Cassady's naval tugged outward in small, flesh-colored tents as the cockroach became more tightly entwined.
It looked up at Cassady, and the shadow of its antennae slashed a huge V across his chest.
Cassady screamed again. This time, it was real.
He awoke in a cold sweat. Shaking. It was evening; the lamp was off. A talk show was on television, Barbara Walters interviewing Bruce Willis about his role on Moonlighting.
Dennis Cassady did not move from his chair for hours. He sat like someone in the later stages of senility, eyes glassy and vacant, lips quivering. Later, he would tell Sarah what had happened to him. He would tell her everything.
But, that evening, he sat.
He scratched at the scab on his hand.
He let it bleed.
Chicago:
22 May 1982.
Revised 1 February 1985
Take The 'A' Train
Cassady spent the rest of October in his dingy, three-room hovel, submerged in his own guilt, self-exiled from the city. He ventured
out rarely, and then only for food. His phone was disconnected on the twentieth, three days after the girl's murder. Commonwealth Edison hadn't taken care of the lights yet, so he was able to spend the days watching television, safe from the prying eyes of the neighborhood. He watched situation comedies from the 1960s, mostly shows with father figures.
The scar on his hand was healing nicely. And on Halloween, Cassady stayed in the corner tavern for three beers and nobody had asked him any questions. That made him feel better, feel as if he could tackle the world again.
When he went home from the bar, Cassady spent long, quiet moments contemplating the Terri Welles centerfold, five years old now, hanging on his living room wall. He decided he would talk to Sarah about the murder the next afternoon.
The first of November, 1986, came in with a freezing downpour, but the rain did not deter Cassady from waiting the half-hour for the El to Sarah's flat on the north side. The four car elevated train was delayed, by what the conductor said was a police and gang-related incident, and when it finally did arrive, icicles were forming in Cassady's beard. He cursed an elderly woman for not boarding the train faster. She had begun to say something in return, but stopped when she saw the hatred in his eyes.
He stood commando style against the sliding doors washed in graffiti. Let someone try and make him move out of the way! He scanned the faces of the others in his car carefully, but did not see the killer's face or anybody else's that was recognizable. This was a city of strangers. He would leave soon, yes oh yes. No one knew him anymore. He would go to Boston or New York City. It was a grim resolution.
The train wormed underground, avoiding the rich bankers and pretty, underpaid secretaries who lived and/or worked on Rush Street and The Gold Coast. Cassady knew in his mind that it was not always this way; the fatcats and moneymakers had forced the city government to change the tracks to fit their needs. But Cassady didn't think it was an eyesore. The pretty stewardesses and waitresses who lived on Sandburg Terrace could fuck themselves. He was glad that the Tylenol Killer had been able to poison at least one of them. Whoever he had been, if Cassady had known him, he would have told the killer to put all the cyanide in the Walgreens on Rush Street, instead of just in that one bottle. Then they all would have died. Forty minutes later, Cassady stepped off the train at Addison. He was humming Van Morrison's "Brown-Eyed Girl."