by Brian Hodge
I grunted because I didn't want this asshole in the Giorgio Armani suit to know my teeth were trying to chatter the beat to that Asexuals classic, "Mister Useless." Once my legs warmed up, I looked at him and said, "So why Chicago?" I'd been dying to ask somebody that. "And don't call me boy."
"Sorry," he said, eyes front, no handshake. "Off on the wrong toe. Let's start over." He rummaged around inside his sheepskin coat. "Thai stick?"
I took it from him and fired up. All I'd had since Chiquita's big dive had been a couple of those teeny bottles of Johnny Walker Red and a toot or two in the can, on the plane. I welcomed a draft of sweet smoke. Bauhaus refused my pass and dug out a silver breast pocket flask with a blued dent in the cap. "Got my own insulation'," he said, uncapping and swigging and chuckling again. Jolly dude, this Bauhaus.
We zipped past a lit-up welcome sign featuring the mayor's signature in two-foot high script. After a few inbound miles, Bauhaus said, "I'll tell you why-Chicago, my man. I got another boy–man, excuse–a runner by the handle of Nugget Astaire. Nugget is currently in the slam for porking some fourteen-year-old high school squack from Oakdale. They take Ash Wednesday seriously down there, dude. It's a dry township. No liquor stores, no sense of humor, and a jailbait offense is the pits there. It doesn't matter that the chick was totally blasted out of her gourd on cokesmoke and Lite beer. She and Nugget did it four times on the coffee table and her parents walked in on the climax of Act Five. She wins a bellyful of bambino–strictly dark meat, you hear what I'm saying?–and Mommy and Daddy, being staunch local God freaks, don't know what in hell to do except maybe lock her up in a nunnery after she drops. So Nugget's a gone gofer, because even if I could slide him free, I couldn't run him in Oakdale again…and the Oakdale High footballers need their dope to go ten-for-ten again this season."
I held in my toke and grimaced affirmatively. Rosie had a way with logistics, making something that was useless in one place real important in some other place. And that is how I came to be subsisting in this scuzz-dump, staring down this particular hole.
The building super told me it was a ventilation shaft. I didn't see how the hell it could ventilate anything, unless maybe you wanted to catch a whiff of your nearest neighbor's potty waft. By standing in the bathtub, you can look out a two-by-one casement window, across the drop, at another sealed-up bathroom window about ten feet away. Staggered above and below are other bathroom windows on all three sides, black and cataracted the way windows next to the shower always get, foggy with mildew and rot and soap scum. The shaft is lined with rusty corrugated steel. Whenever anyone in the building bathes, you can hear a tinny dripping noise. From my fourth-floor vantage it was impossible to make out the bottom of the shaft, even with a flashlight, but it must've been lousy with mulch and bilge and toilet leakage. It was an iron-pumper's task to pry the damned window open even halfway, and when I did I sucked in a smell kind of like humid fertilizer. It was impossibly dark in there, and suffocatingly close; you couldn't see a bloody thing up or down. The mouth of the shaft, up on the roof, was tarped over because of the snowfall. "Ventilation," right.
From his hairy nose wart to his webbed feet (his wino style Converse All-Stars looked like toe-goo city, if you hear what I'm saying), Freddy the super was a total pusbag. And I was beginning to have revised thoughts about my good Bauhaus, who had set me up in less than palatial splendor. A whole week of dead, damned nothing had wasted itself without a peep from Rosie. I was unveiled as the new runner to some of the Oakdale boys (a Yuppified zoo of blonde-on-blonde palomitas with firm handshakes, PR grins and eyes like TV sets tuned to static snow). After that, the only times I saw Bauhaus were to either drop off cash or collect new dope. After ten days, I was getting high off my own supply–a business no-no, and always a depressing state. But my ass was bored fartless.
I first heard the building's ghost moaning one day after I'd powered up on powder and decided to start cleaning my bathroom like a maniac. Coke makes your senses more acute; it gives you an edge. You fine-tune instead of getting stuporous. I focused my ears and the sound became…well, the sort of deep-gut, belly-hugging groan an alley drinker makes after blowing a quart of Thunderbird out of an empty stomach. There was a riot of peripheral noise in Freddy's four-story fire hazard tonight–battling stereos, slamming doors, Hispanic delinquents charging up and down the stairs, the black-and-tan newlyweds next door slapping each other toward court. Some derelict old white motherfucker downstairs was bitching about how the Jews were overrunning the country "like rabid rats, storming a ghetto!" Typical Saturday night action. Yet past all this interference I could still pick out that low, creepy moan. It really started to bug me. And I'm a tolerant guy.
I dug my fingers into my temples, rubbing. Then the phone went off. Instant migraine. I was hoping for Rosie and got Bauhaus: "Say, boy, how's your hammer hangin'?"
Some righteous coke freaks experience hallucinations with what doctors call a "clear sensorium." Whatever your mind invents for your eyes to see looks correct because it's not overtly weird, like when you do acid and see chartreuse-plaid, Jell-O-breathing neon dragons. One dude I know got it into his head that there were tiny spiders crawling all over his skin. Normal tiny spiders, lots of them. It was perfectly believable. When he found he couldn't brush them away, he tried to burn them off his arms and legs with a propane torch. Like I said, I knew this guy, past tense. But I also knew the moaning sound was real; my brain had not manufactured it. I know what planet I'm on, and I'm not a drooling drug addict. And the awareness of that subtle, almost subaural distraction began eating into the back of my skull like a runaway dentist's drill. On top of this, I had to suffer Bauhaus: "Well, my Chrysler's all fixed. Even got new keys. How 'bout that?" It was a moronic code–a new stash was in. I'm sure Bauhaus loved playing the Man from B.L.O.W.
Again, that vague hint of moan, of something in nearly silent agony, like cries for help in the middle of the night no one ever answers. It cut past everything else and locked my head up in a woodworker's vise of pain. "Hang on a second," I said, dumping the phone onto the bed since the cord would not reach to the bathroom. In there was the only window that wasn't iced shut, the one looking out into the air shaft, and I smacked the frame with the heel of my hand until the crookedly-mounted, rotting casement squeaked reluctantly open. Then I shouted out into that tunnel of metal amplification loud enough to hoarsen my tonsils: "Shut the fuck up!"
There followed that single beat of dead silence that comes between the time you smash your thumb with a hammer and the time you howl. Then, the whole building responded. The salsa music chugging forth from the floor below was cranked up a good twenty decibels. Babies screamed. The scaly anti-Semite laid into the topic of young, disrespectful, snot-nosed, loudmouthed shitheels. The musclebound black badass next door yelled for me to come on over and make him.
Then my body surprised me by yanking my head back into the bathroom, posthaste. The stench in the shaft was jesus-christ-putrid tonight; it had been like sticking my face into the chimney of a crematorium. Something had died down there, for sure. Something big, and from the smell, rotting merrily away. I know how dead stuff stinks. I found a dead mouse trapped in the works underneath my fridge once in Miami. Here, the upward-drafting febrile odor was similar, but fifty degrees riper. My face closed up all ports in a tight pucker. Even my shocked pores snapped shut. I started whacking the window down to choke off the smell, and it skewed in its track and jammed. This was just frustrating enough to kick my brain over into panic-button cocaine overdrive, and I bashed that fucker solid with my fist, pretending it was the anthropoid skull of the lip-moving asshole next door. Bash, bash, paint slivers jumped away and bash! the window banged shut, tight as an airlock, with a bloody handprint on top of it.
I was sweating and panting now. The individual pepperonis off my dinner pizza were fighting to grease their way up for an encore. But the moaning had stopped. I could deal with my headache, with that slug Bauhaus, with all the other shit minuti
ae of my life.
Rats, I thought. Sure, rats. Maybe they crawled into the sump to eat, and drowned down there.
But what about the ghost?
The phone was still upside-down in a tangle of blankets on the bed. It had a rotary dial; Bauhaus had been too cheap to spring for a touch-tone. With a pointed sigh instead of formalities, I said, "When and where?" I was disgusted now; I ached. Let Emilio pummel the snot out of me. It'd be worth it just to flip Chicago the goodbye birdie. As Bauhaus began to encode his ETA and coordinates, I overrode him. "Wait a sec–you run any girls, Bauhaus?"
He groaned a prissy bitch of a groan. "Jeeezus, Cruz! Don't talk shit like that on the phone, man, I might be bugged!"
Or a cat. Maybe a cat fell in and the rats bit him to death. A big cat…
I knew full well no one was listening to our conversation except the good and bad demons of Bauhaus' impoverished conscience. "Don't dick away my time," I snapped, itchy now. "You're throwing me a bonus tonight, and don't feed me any smoke, because you can afford a party girl. And she'd better not have any diseases whose names are, like, acronyms, you hear what I'm saying? Otherwise, you can pound your stash up your loading dock with a mallet." I hung up.
My ears strained. No ghost. There was nothing now but the drumming of my headache.
Awhile later, Bauhaus made my walking weight heavier by half a kilo of the white stuff–a guaranteed felony bust for dealing, should anyone wearing a badge pat me down. Before I could work up a good invective about his mother, he tossed me the keys to an '83 Camaro with snow tires and 35,000 miles on the odometer. No hard feelings, huh kid? My rented date waited for me in the suicide seat, next to a jug of Chivas that Bauhaus had popped for, gratis. Rosie must have told him. Thank god for Rosie.
Downtown Chicago wasn't worth the drive between blizzards. Cruising Oakdale would be like checking out the bondage action at a Bible study meet. I didn't particularly want to get drunk. Tomorrow was a school day for me.
The girl bit me, giggled, and gave her name as Drea. She had a purple streakjob, Isis eye paint, a Madonna album's worth of tramped out rock 'n' roll lace, and fantastic legs. I made her keep her spikes on while we did it. After she had freebased herself up into the ionosphere, she wrapped those legs around yours truly and made vigorous use of an extremely motile pelvis. She was better than any of Emilio's aerobicized bimbos, and she talked about oddball stuff like auras, and tarot cards, and Buddhist chanting in-between times. While she went to the john, I checked out her bag. Mixed amid a nightmarish jumble of cosmetics, I found a pinky vial barely dusted with lees of coke, a plastic case of good old Ortho Novum, and an Illinois state ID that assured me I had not made the same error in judgment as my predecessor, Nugget Astaire. Her name was really Loretta, and she had turned 22 three weeks ago. The ID mugshot made her look green, like one of the living dead. I refilled her amber cocaine vial from my fresh stock and tucked it back into her bag, to be discovered later as a belated birthday gift. Like I said, I try not to be a bad guy.
Later, as she was dozing on top of me with what was left of my last erection easing out of her, slowly, slowly, I said, "Did you hear that?"
"Mm." She slitted her eyes open. "Hear what?"
"That sound. Kind of a moan." It teased the limits of my perception, and I tried to approximate it for her.
"I don't hear anything except that fucking samba music." She rolled over and lost me. "Oops–sorry."
My slight fix on the ghost noise was erased by the lunatic calliope rhythm and abrasive Latino singing penetrating the floorboards. Drea pushed her ass into my lap, spoon-style, and gave me a place to warm my hands. Outside, past the thick condensation fogging my windows, snowflakes as big as my palm began to meander down from the sky to bury the city.
My first taste of bonafide snow was pretty comical. After four straight weeks of what the imbeciles on the news here called "medium to light flurries," my neighborhood had become a Dantean vision of the Arctic Circle. Lumbering automobiles skidded ass-sideways into each other, providing a lot of employment for Chicago's fender, body and paint people. Dead black slush, like concentrated air pollution mix, obliterated the curbing while the sidewalks simply vanished beneath a four-foot snow-pack that settled into solid ice. Pedestrians pretended it was nothing abnormal. Cursing, they tea-kettled about and broke their bones. No big deal. Everybody slouched along, muffled into anonymity, necks bowed by the forces of nature, defeated and pissed off, avoiding eye contact and snarling at all corners–the Chicagoan in full wintertime flower. It was positively medieval.
I got the use of Drea three times a week, once for each cash drop. Bauhaus seemed to think this little perk compensated for sticking me with far more dope than I was comfortable holding. There was more snow inside my rathole than out.
Gradually, I became convinced that the moaning noise was actually coming from the airshaft, as though the shaft itself was haunted. When I finally got convinced enough to batter open the bathroom window again, to check, it stopped for good.
For reasons I do not totally understand, I didn't flash on this fact until I was making it with Drea. I actually stopped in mid-stroke to say, "It's gone." The silence in the building flooded full-blast into my skull.
She sucked in a breathy gasp. "What?" Her eyes went wide and started scanning around for the police.
"Our ghost. He's gone. Guess he decided to vacate."
Her expression fired up, to hover midway between short-fused anger and utter disbelief. "Jesus christ, Cruz!" She rearranged herself and began a direct assault–the fed-up leading the retarded. "Look–the only thing I want going bump in the night is you."
I pondered the fate of my ghost until Drea started squirming around. Then I forgot it, and did some moaning of my own.
As was her habit by now, Drea recharged her coke vial from the open kilo bag in the second drawer of my dresser. It was part of her preparing-to-leave ritual. But this time she hesitated at the door, and turned back to kiss me. I think I gaped.
"I kinda like you, Cruz," she said in nearly complete innocence. "You're nothing like some of those pigs Bauhaus has made me fuck. I like listening to you talk; you never talk about normal shit. You talk about ghosts in the building and how all the geezers tramping around in the snow look like their bulldogs. It's…I dunno. Kinda poetical."
This really whacked me. It sounded too much like a roundabout farewell. It's been fun, hon, but… I grabbed her by the forearms. "What the hell is wrong with you?"
Without even a pause for dramatic effect, she said, "Bauhaus is setting you up." Her matter-of-factness scared up gooseflesh all over my back. "I heard him on the phone. He said, 'Tell him I'm gonna take care of Cruz, tonight."
"Who was he talking to?"
She shrugged. "Somebody in Miami."
I thought of the Lady and the Tiger. If he'd been talking to Rosie, then his remark was innocuous enough, even benevolent. But if that wimp prick had said the same thing to Emilio…
"Listen, Drea, I need you to find out for me–"
She shied instantly, eyes glazing with fear. "Too late. I gotta go now, Cruz. I'm sorry." And she pulled away.
"Why? What's gonna go down?"
"I dunno–I just gotta go, now, that's all!" She was definitely scared. Now.
Now. I checked the window, scoping out the street below. My Camaro was parked half-under a snowbank thoughtfully provided by some plow pilot with piss-poor aim.
"Sorry, Cruz," I heard her repeat, feebly, before the door closed. Whatever was coming up, she'd pushed herself over the borderline by warning me, and needed to insure her own safety in the approaching shitstorm. I understood that. She didn't want to inhale none. I stayed posted at the window until I saw her crunch hurriedly out into the 2 a.m. snowfall.
Thirty seconds after she rounded the corner, a pair of Metro cop cars crept from opposite ends of the street like stalking wolves, and rendezvoused beside the Camaro. A dark, burly police shape wiped off my license plate and then looked u
p toward Freddy's building. His line of sight was targeted two windows north of my position.
Thirty-two thousand dollars worth of refined cocaine, more or less, was sitting in a drawer five feet away from me. Screw "street value"; that bullshit is just to make drug busts sound more impressive on the evening news. It all rushed together to make a picture in my head, and my heart fell down and went boom. As I watched three uniformed cops head for the downstairs door, I knew the one place I did not want to be was on television.
If I tried to flush the whole kilo, my ass might really be out to the wind. What about the plastic bag? Could a whole kilo clog the pipes? I couldn't take the chance, and didn't trust Freddy's Cro-Magnon plumbing. If could successfully ditch the stash, I could make my normal morning rounds and use the cash to buy my way out of town. I could also make a pit-stop at a pawnshop, and buy a piece of large enough caliber to blow Bauhaus' fucking brains all over his cherry-red pussywagon before I went on an extended leave.
There was no time for a passionate review of my options. They were already clumping up the stairs. I scooped the heavy baggie out of the drawer and dumped it into a plastic trashcan liner. I yanked the adhesive strip, sealed it and dumped it inside another, then sealed the whole package into a third. If water gets on coke, you might as well try to peddle cooking fat. I swabbed out Drea's sloppings in the drawer with a handful of moist paper towels. Those I flushed down the toilet along with two fingers of Panama Red from my smokebox. I took the plastic package (which was now watertight, I hoped) and dropped it (gently, I hoped) down the air shaft. It splashed when it hit bottom, far away, and I prayed there had been nothing sharp waiting down there to jab a hole in it. I heaved the window down and blew away the paint and wood flakes. I made sure the shower curtain was drawn.
The cops outside heard my toilet tank refilling. Sometimes the plunger handle sticks and the damned thing runs and runs until you jiggle it. "Good morning," I said with a smile. My manner told them I'd run around this track plenty of times and knew the drill. But the sound of my toilet tank told them they'd missed instead of hit. I could read the expressions they traded. That's why I was smiling.