by Drew Stepek
“It’s okay, man.” I put up my hands to relax him. “We—you and I—we can make this okay. What do we need to do?”
He wiped a tear off his left cheek. “Sadly, I believe that we have come to the end of our passage. We must release the child.”
I scratched the tip of my nose. Turning Pinball over to the cops made me feel like I was having an allergic reaction. “Here’s maybe a better idea. Who do you know in Austin?”
“I worked with Stephan Rodderick on the second Nightshayde Chronicles film,” he bragged.
“That’s lame. Come on, star fucker. Someone who isn’t that guy.”
He hammered his fist into his palm. “He is one of us, RJ. I told you when we escaped from Los Angeles. He is a very trustworthy and beautiful soul.”
“Didn’t we also hear that he just OD’d on heroin?” I shot back. “Think of someone else.”
“He did OD, and is recovering, which makes this a beneficial situation.” He got up, walked to the barn door and flicked his cigarette outside. “He will be looked at as a hero during his darkest hour, and we will safely be able to liberate the child.”
I ran my fingers through my hair, or at least tried to. It was hard to plow through due to all the gunk in it. “Fine. How do we get in touch with this Nightshayde bitch boy?”
Eldritch picked his phone out of his back pocket and walked back toward me.
Sweet, I thought to myself. This was going to be as easy as ringing him up and dropping the kid off at the pool.
Then, he showed me the screen. Apparently Eldritch called him several times in the past few days, including when we were in Arizona.
I grabbed the phone. “Amateur, Eldritch. Did you leave a message?”
“Several.”
“And you don’t think that was the reason I was attacked by those Chaplin guys?”
Eldritch raised his finger. “He is an actor. A performer.”
I threw the phone at him. “And, if you’re right, he’s a fucking vampire. Which means he really is a drug addict, and what follows drugs and vampires? Gangs, you shithead. What are we going to do?”
“We need to go into the city and retrieve some medication for Paulina. There is an emergency letter in her purse. She has been complaining a lot. It might not be anything serious, but we will need to embezzle it from the appropriate apothecary. We just need the medicine to control her recovery and prevent her recovery from derailing. We will speak with some of the local organizations—”
I interrupted and stood up. “Gangs.”
“Gangs.” He pounded his fist in his palm again. “They will escort us to Rodderick.”
“Why bother? Why can’t we just go get an Austin star map and go to his house? He’s your boy.”
“I do not believe there are star maps in Austin.” He looked at his phone and began typing.
I pushed his hand away. “He’s an actor.”
“Yes, an excellent artist and—”
I grabbed him by the wrist. “And?”
“And he’s the biggest narcotics dealer in the Southwest of these American States. If your friend King Cobra were three people, they would not control as much as Rodderick does.”
“That can’t be true.” I released his arm. “He’s a dumb actor, just like you said. He makes shitty vampire lovey-dovey crap movies.”
He looked back at his phone and swiped down. “He controls more than you could possibly comprehend.”
“I can comprehend quite a lot.” I swatted the side of his head. “And this is your plan to save the girl? Hand her over to another crummy gang leader?”
“You asked me if I knew anyone in Austin and if I had an alternative plan, good sir. He needs something positive to divert the press away from the overdose. The only other choice is to turn ourselves over to the authorities.”
“Let me talk to Pinball and see what she wants. There is no way I’m just going to hand her over to this D-bag. Besides, what is going to prevent him from killing us to prove to the cops that the cretins who did this to her parents are dead? Don’t you think that a show of bravery will be much better for his career than turning over some little girl? Once I talk to her, then we’ll decide on step two.”
Strangely, even though this part of our adventure was one hundred percent on his shoulders, Eldritch reluctantly agreed.
I delicately pushed the barn door open, still feeling the disgusting sting of Eldritch’s clove cigarette pollution tightening my lungs and agitating my wounded face. Yes, we heal at a superiorly rapid pace, but when you get as ravaged as I had over the past few days, the process takes a tad longer than it should. Damn off-the-grid Catholic slits. They got us halfway there with their illegal super-steroid. I wish they would have gone a step further and created a drug that completed the healing process instantly.
To my annoyance, the hinges on the door screeched like an alarm. Pinball, who had been napping by the fire, jolted awake. She might have given herself an unguarded minute, but Eldritch was right: she was scared out of her mind.
I put up my hands. “Shhhhh. I’m not going to hurt you, Pinball.”
She wriggled to her feet.
“Take it easy,” I said, offering assurance that I came in peace. “Take it easy. I really need to speak with you.”
She desperately clutched a stick she had been using as a teddy bear. Her eyes centered on mine. If she was her sister, she would have made a comment about my current crumbled state and then bashed me in the nuts fifteen times with the stick; the stick, most likely, scorched from the fire and dowsed in glass. I had to learn quickly that she was not her sister. Rather than go on the offensive, this one expected the worst and waited for that to play out.
I kept my hands in the air. “I really need to talk with you. I just had a conversation with our big friend in there.” I pointed to the decrepit barn as I took a straggled step toward her. “We have every intention of doing what is best for you.”
Her index finger rubbed on the stick for a second, then she loosened her grip and batted her eyes. Her actions seemed like a greenlight, so I shuffled two steps closer.
Before I had a chance to take cover she yelled, “Monster,” and hurled the stick at me. Immediately, she spun around and peeled out like a dune buggy.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” I tried to assure her as I took the thick side of the stick on the bridge of my nose. “There is nowhere to run to, Paulina.” I ran after her to the best of my ability.
She pumped the breaks on her ballet shoes and stopped. She didn’t turn around.
“Paulina, right?” I asked in my most relaxing voice. It was difficult for my voice to sound like anything other than years of smoking, hard drinking and heroin abuse, but if I pitched it correctly, it didn’t sound like Tom Waits with an aluminum can stuck in his esophagus. “That’s your name, isn’t it? Paulina?”
She looked at her shoes that now showed the wear and tear of being abducted and forced into the hot southwestern desert.
I focused on the shoes in an attempt to build a sense of trust. “Those are pretty cool shoes. Are you a dancer?”
She continued to stare into the darkness.
“My name is RJ,” I continued. “Like I told you before.”
She brushed sand out of her eyes with her forearm and mumbled, “My momma got ‘em at K-Mart.” Her voice sounded like Bait’s baby talk voice that she used when she wanted something.
“What was that?”
“My momma got ‘em at K-Mart. They ain’t real.” Her voice quieted. “I wasn’t s’pose to dance because when I tried, I spit blood all over them other kids.”
I swiftly decided that ballet, dancing or anything fun that normal kids did probably wasn’t the best thing to point out. I changed the conversation. “I’m friends with your sister, Bailia.”
Pinball half turned her head back toward me. Then, she looked back down at her shoes.
“Do you remember your sister?”
“I hated Bailia,” she finally
shouted back. “Cause a’ all the bad things she did, I got sick.”
Eldritch was right. She didn’t understand her illness at all. That buzzard’s cock of a stepfather of hers led her to believe that she was being punished for all the bad things that happened in his life. I’m sure if he couldn’t pay the rent on his trailer, it was her fault and resulted in his pants being unzipped.
“Paulina, that isn’t true.” I kicked at a rock. “Bailia loved you very much.”
She half-turned back to me again. “Then why’d she leave me?”
Selfishly, I wanted the conversation to end. I hated what an insensitive shit I had become. In my defense—or so I told myself—I had never been qualified to speak to children about the repugnance of the world. Going beyond my inherent lack of compassion for anything beyond getting a fix, I was, after all, a serial killer, a junkie and a monster.
I turned my head back toward the fire, hoping that Eldritch managed to teleport behind me and offer his support. No luck. He needed me to suffer through this laborious exchange on my own.
Thinking back to the home invasion in Peoria, I didn’t know if I expected Pinball to be a carbon copy of Bait to replace the empty feeling I had when I saw her die, or if I just wanted another pet to wait for me to say sit, stay, rollover. The mobile dog catcher’s truck I hotwired pointed to the latter.
Again, I took a few short steps toward her. “Bait—ummm—Bailia left because your father was doing some very mean things to her.”
Her legs popped together as if she was preparing to do a jumping jack. “He does ‘em to me, too.”
Not anymore, I thought.
“He does them things ‘cause he loves me.” She began braiding her wig on the side. “He doesn’t want me to be sick anymore because I cost too much money and he wants to spend that money on dolls for me. He never did buy me a doll.”
As I managed to creep up closely behind her, she turned around to fully face me. Her pasty cheeks had turned red and her eyes turned downward. I don’t know exactly what remission from leukemia entailed, but this child looked like she had just fought every second of her life to be standing in front of me.
Her wig tilted slightly to the side. I wanted to reach over and fix it, but I didn’t want to alarm her again or point out that she didn’t have any hair. That pissed me off. Her mongrel parents kept her head shaved to get attention from the community. They were probably trying to sue the doctors who saved her life.
Pinball took two steps away from me to get to what she considered a comfortable distance to continue the conversation.
“Paulina, that’s not true. What your father… stepfather… did to you is a really, really bad thing.”
She put her hands in the pockets of her magenta pants and blew her uneven bangs off her forehead. “Is Bailia gonna meet us out here? That’s what the other stranger tol’ me.”
Fuck you, Eldritch, I thought. He could have warned me before sending me on this journey into heartache before I started trying to chum up to her.
I sneezed into my hand and I tried delicately to drive around the subject of Bait’s death. “I’m sorry, Paulina,” I said. “Bailia couldn’t make the trip with us.”
Her face crumpled up for a second like a rotten apple and then exploded outward with tears. “Is Bailia dead, too?” She began side-stepping, as if she wanted to take off again but her legs got tangled and she tripped on her K-Mart ballet costume shoes.
I hopped toward her, immediately offering my hand to help her up. She smacked my hand away and the flavored jewel on her Ring Pop broke off into my palm. She squirmed on her butt, unable to brace herself to stand on an unstable patch of Texas ground.
I held the oblong gemstone from her Ring Pop out as an offering of peace. “Please. Let me help you.”
She spit at my hand and yelled, “Why’d you kill my mommy and daddy? Why’d you kill my sister? You’re a monster.” The constant stream of watery hatred on her face mixed with all of the sand and ash from the fire that had built up over the course of the last couple of days. As she gasped for air, I noticed that one of her front teeth was missing. The combination of her muddy, gaunt face and her missing tooth made her look like a rotting pumpkin. She howled and rammed the top of her head into my nuts. Maybe she was more like her sister that she let on.
I buttoned my eyes closed, dropped to my knees, and lifted my hands together, praying for forgiveness. “I didn’t kill your sister,” I said, then regressed to lying between breaths. “She told me to rescue you.” It wasn’t really a lie, but it wasn’t true, either. I was positive that if Bait had lived, rescuing Pinball would have been our next mission. I opened my eyes again to see the wig between my knees.
Pinball grabbed the wig and haphazardly tried to reconfigure it onto her little bald head. The bangs hung embarrassing and sideways over her left ear. Acting on impulse, I unclasped my hands and reached out to straighten the wig again. She stepped back, grabbed the two sides of the fake hair like hoses and slipped it back into a sufficient position.
I crawled toward her. “Please, Paulina. You have to let Eldritch and I help you. I know that it wasn’t a good thing to kill your parents, but I do want to help.” I spoke for Eldritch, “We need to help you.”
She scuttled to a rock, sat down and readied her legs in a launch position, warning me that another ball-ramming was in the works. “I hate you! You’re a monster!”
“I know. I know you don’t understand. I will stay as far away from you as you feel comfortable. But I need to protect you. Eldritch wants to protect you, too.”
She began crying again.
“Do you have any grandparents?” I asked. “Do you have any aunts? Uncles? Is there anywhere we can take you to be safe?”
She stood up from the rock and started stomping her feet. “No!”
Oh boy. I certainly didn’t prepare myself for any part of this conversation.
“Okay. Okay. No to grandparents and no to aunts and uncles. Can we take you to a friend’s house?”
“I don’t have no friends,” she wailed. “They all call me ‘Ugly Head’ and spit on me at the bus stop.” The cycle of misfortune came full-circle as Pinball’s confessions mirrored the awfulness that Bait left behind when she escaped bullying to enlist herself into the glamorous world of prostitution. “Bailia used to protect me. And she left me alone. And then… and then… and then,” she stuttered. “And then, all my dumb hair fell out ‘cause God was punishing me for letting her leave. And then… and then… and then you killed my daddy. He was the only one who ever loved me.”
It was time for me to step up and set things straight. Time to explain my rude interference into her life. Even though I was still wishing that Eldritch had handled this rather than me, I needed to feel the lifting of my guilt as I told her the truth. My head rang like it was in the mouth of a gigantic church bell at midnight. I realized that I hadn’t done anything for this kid. I did it all for me. I was nothing but a selfish derelict who felt so much guilt for letting Bait get killed by Dez that I took it upon myself to kill her parents.
I rubbed my fingers across my eyes to dry them up before I broke down during my confession. “I can’t take back what I did. What I did was a horrible thing.” I stood over her and gently moved a strand of her synthetic locks that had strayed across the part back into place.
She batted at my hand and got back up. “I hate you,” she whimpered as she ran back to the barn.
“I don’t think you have an ugly head,” I called out to her as she slammed the door shut, leaving me alone again in the middle of the desert.
I sighed. I had no idea what our next move should be, but I was making no progress with Pinball. Eldritch was thinking clearer than me at least. If he decided that making this actor prick a hero would draw enough media attention to make Pinball the feel-good story of the year and get her placed into a loving new environment away from the shit world of fake vampires, then I had no choice other than to comply. I figured that the child was si
ck and needed proper care. It was wrong to take her from her those fucking reptiles. As much as I didn’t yet trust this Rodderick guy, and as much as I hesitated to hand her over to another bag of feces drug addict, I had to believe that someone, someday would smile on me for doing the right thing. Eldritch needed to take the lead on this, making right of my mistakes, and I needed to trust him as well. Pinball seemed to trust him, and he had come up with the only idea that didn’t compromise who and what we were.
“Try to get some sleep, Little One,” Eldritch whispered as he waved goodnight to Pinball and closed the barn door. He crept over to my seat near the fire and sat next to me. “She has been sleeping on the back seat of my automobile.”
I took a swig from a bottle of water and swished it around in my mouth, trying to dissolve some of the dried blood around my gums and cheeks. “I got that.”
He looked at me. He must have detected the agitation in my voice. When you’re a junkie and you don’t have heroin, everyone either annoys you or makes you want to punch them. That is unless they are getting you high. For example, Eldritch calling Pinball “Little One” made me want to step on his throat.
The thing is that the meth and heroin combination that he gave me back in the Salton Sea and the two days of tripping my nuts off on PCP only made me feel worse. There never was and there never will be a replacement for the taste of heroin. Stimulants like speed and synthetic hallucinogens like angel dust only make you tired and sick. Putting anything besides the devil’s honey in my body is like having a mosquito bite you on top of a chicken pock. It only makes the itch that much worse. The Gooch was my internal reminder that there was only one drug, and nothing even came close to satisfying me like it.