Headstone City

by Tom Piccirilli

  The room flashed with wild hands. The kid kept reaching over and running fingers over Dane's scalp. His own jagged stitch marks hadn't completely healed yet. The wounds were still a bright pink, his hair coming in choppy and discolored in those areas. The boy with the sick brain giggled and did a little rumba around the room, excited to see somebody else with a fucked-up head.

  Dane kept rubbing his mother's hand with his thumb. He couldn't stop, the rhythm of his motion timed to the beeping machines. He looked down at the floor, searching for the pool of blackness that shuddered beneath his feet. Sometimes he had a shadow, and sometimes his shadow had him.

  The kid spoke with a beautiful voice, in English and other languages. Occasionally hissing his words, with a deep meaning and an awful emotion. He told Dane that Ma had spent so much time crying that she couldn't stop, not even now, in her coma. Her sleep would never be pure. She'd always struggle, restless and weeping, for the remainder of her hours in the hospital bed, and afterward into purgatory.

  Thumb moving back and forth on your mother's yellow, bloated flesh. The machines speaking in ancient rhymes you can almost comprehend.

  The boy touched your scars, matching them against his own. You're glad that he keeps talking.

  “Was wünschen Sie von mir?”

  “I don't want anything from you. What the hell do you want from me? Why are you even here?”

  “É bonita. Eu quero-a. Você não merece uma mulher tão maravilhosa. É minha. Mãe. Mãe.”

  “She's not your mother. She's mine.”

  “Mère. Mère.”

  “She's my ma, damn it.”

  “Mia madre. La mia madre!”

  “No matter how many times you say it, she's not yours, she's my mom.”

  Thinking about how easy it would be to snap the boy's neck, Dane waited for somebody to come save him. His grandmother, with her red fingers. Uncle Philly, who would be off shift in a half hour. The nurses out in the hall gossiped loudly about possible pay cuts and breast enhancement.

  A doctor who looked maybe twenty-five peeked his head into the room and flashed a brilliant smile at Dane, showing off his caps. His hair had some kind of wet- look mousse in it, sculpted into small curved thorns rearing in every direction.

  In Jersey, when Dane and Vinny were laid up in the emergency room, there had been a doctor with the same kind of haircut who'd wandered around smirking. Did the hospitals hire these guys just to roam the halls like maître d's?

  Dane wanted to pace. He stood and tried to move, but it was like he was fused to the spot. It took him a minute to realize he couldn't stop rubbing his mother's hand, not even if he wanted to. He had to keep this contact, no matter how long he had to stay here.

  A voice came from under the bed.

  Dane couldn't understand it. He lifted the hanging sheets and saw the kid crouched under there, arguing with the floor, pausing between incomprehensible sentences as if the floor was talking back. Maybe it was. Dane tried to listen, but the cruel grating of his mother's respirator kept dragging his attention back to her frail chest.

  The kid's head was coming farther apart, sutures and staples pulling away. He crawled out from beneath the bed and stared at Ma's body, then turned away, beaming, needy but appearing innocent.

  Dane knew what the boy wanted.

  The rage and grief grew inside him until he was grunting and groaning in his seat like a pig. He tightened his free hand around the arm of the chair. He wanted to smash the kid with one of the machines and scatter the shards of his skull across the wall.

  “Go on, damn you,” Dane whispered. “Do it, if you have to.”

  The boy with the twisted head crept into bed with Dane's mother.

  He held her tightly and began to weep, whining and mewling. In time his sobs became a single word, repeated over and over but never growing any louder. “Mama, mama.” His tears rolled off her bony chest each time the machines drove her to take in another breath. “Mama.” He cried for almost an hour until finally, exhausted, he slept.

  Dane sat there watching as her body functions grew even slower, and though it felt as if they would never stop, eventually they did. It really hadn't taken that long, he realized, checking his watch. His hand was free to move again.

  The respirator still forced her lungs to heave, although Dane knew she was dead. The boy with the sick brain grinned in his sleep. His eyelids fluttered as he dreamed. The flaps of his head barely held together, the meat of his mind throbbing, flesh trying to pull open.

  For an instant, Dane saw a black, indistinct shape in there waiting to be born into existence. Perhaps it was the boy's soul. Or Mom's. Or his own.

  Scar tissue could be more alive than the rest of your skin. Itching, dead, but full of answers. Cut it open and it reproduces. Not alive, but giving birth.

  He left before he was certain. There were some questions that should never be answered.

  That leering doctor met him in the doorway again and bared his teeth. Dane looked at him and said, “I ought to kill you, you crazy grinning fuck.” The guy still didn't drop his smile, but he vanished quickly down the hall.

  As Dane drove home from the hospital, it felt as if the neighborhood were slowly growing aware of the death of his mother. As if the streets were learning of it mile by mile, as he made his way to the house.

  Dane stared down and saw his hands were scuffed and bleeding, the knees of his pants dirty. He must've fallen a couple of times in the hospital parking lot, but he couldn't remember. His scars were singing.

  Grandma Lucia's house, which for years had suffered the presence of the dying woman, now expressed relief. The place looked like it was waiting for loud Italian music, parties. The wide hardwood floors where his parents had danced Christmas mornings when he was a child appeared freshly polished.

  The photos on the shelves above the TV shifted at the edge of his vision. Those faces darkening with intent. The names he couldn't pronounce had a power over him, already inside his veins. The face of his mother, once out in front, now hid behind other angry women. Blurred and growing more clouded even as he watched.

  Dane went to his room, and when he looked up, his dead father was walking across the floor. He sat on the bed.

  There were times you wanted to talk to ghosts and times you didn't. Dane wasn't sure what he wanted now. He waited for his dad to speak. Maybe the death of Dane's mother had somehow called the man up, brought him home.

  A cold knot of tension throbbed in Dane's belly. Part anxiety but mostly expectation, thinking that perhaps it was finally time to learn the lessons of his father. Answers might be revealed, if his old man could be handled properly. His father might set him on a course he could understand.

  A dying breeze clawed at the window over the desk. Leaves clung to the battered screen and skittered across the broken bricks outside. Odd to feel himself tugged in this fashion, knowing his father was buried even while the man sat on the mattress behind him.

  You could survive almost any injury so long as you left one version of yourself behind and allowed a different one to continue.

  Dane started a slow turning he would never completely finish.

  His father had been dead for a little less than six months. Dane had found him down the block, parked in front of the Gothic gates at the mouth of the cemetery with his brains blown out, the gun still in his hand.

  The papers gave ambiguous hints about corruption, making it seem like he had to go on the take to cover rising health-care costs for his terminally ill wife. Once he'd been caught, he'd killed himself out of shame. It sounded believable and almost romantic. Tragic without any of the usual saccharine.

  The man's photo was on the news every night, not looking tough at all. Sort of soft actually, smiling a bit self-consciously.

  Anywhere else in the country it might've been true, but not in Brooklyn. This was the town that had perfected the Bounce. Five cops bringing in sixty keys of heroin, a squad room of police officers surrounding the evide
nce, and somehow it disappears in front of everybody's eyes. Nobody worried about exposure in Brooklyn. Graft went with the territory. Phil Guerra had once been caught with an underage hooker, the two of them trading a crack pipe, and all the brass did was throw him into rehab for three months and make him go to Sex Addicts Anonymous.

  Brooklyn cops never ate their pistols over something like possible corruption. It would be like a bus driver drowning himself because he didn't like making left turns.

  As Dane shifted in his seat he saw his old man still seated in the center of the bed, waiting for something no one with a heartbeat could name. Dane couldn't see the gunshot wound in the man's temple from this angle, but it would be there. It had to be. It was as sharp in his imagination as if he'd been shot in the head himself.

  “Is she there yet?” Dane asked. “Where are you? Is that purgatory? Is there anything I can do to help?”

  For some reason, it felt as if it would take time for his mother and father to find each other. Both of them so gloomy and always staring at walls.

  Dad didn't answer.

  “Who did it to you?”

  An enduring silence broken only by the breeze skirting past outside, the soft scrabbling clatter of pigeons on the roof.

  Angling his chin, Dane was unable to meet the man's eyes, which were passionate and alive. His father appeared to be searching for something to say. He opened his mouth and closed it again. He held his hands up in a helpless gesture, like a baby trying to reach for an object beyond his grasp.

  His father gave a sickly grin and lay back on the bed. It had been the bed he'd slept in as a boy.

  “At least try to talk, Dad. Make an effort. Can't you even do that?”

  The window frame vibrated in the staccato breeze. It felt like a ploy to get Dane to turn away from his father for an instant, giving the dead enough time to slip away unseen. He wouldn't fall for it. He touched the back of his head and his scars writhed, the metal plates hot to the touch. When he pulled his hand away his fingers were covered with blood.

  He stared at his father lying there, the man looking up at the ceiling as if remembering what it had once been like to be alive in this room, not so different from Dane himself.

  Sweat dripped through his hair and soaked into his shirt collar. Surrounded by death and connected to the dead, but not quite there yet. Feeling the weight of murder in the dirt and concrete of the neighborhood. Embarrassed by his own excitement, at this moment, of being alive.

  “Find Mom, if you can. And next time, try harder to talk to me.”

  Dane allowed himself to look away, and when he glanced back, Dad was gone.

  There were important words waiting for him. Solutions that his father was unable or unwilling to give to him. Maybe only for the time being or maybe forever.

  Dane was certain he would find his father's murderer eventually, in the angry years laid out before him like the rutted paths that threaded through Headstone City. There was time.

  Grandma Lucia walked in, her pocketbook chiming, a plastic container full of pennies rattling, and said, “Madonna mia, what the hell's that smell? You buy a bad salami? Something die in here?”

  THIRTEEN

  Glory Bishop didn't tell him the movie was premiering in Bridgehampton, or that she expected him to drive the limo. He walked into Olympic ready to ask for the day off, and there it was on the sheet. Her address.

  Fran's voice held a sharpness that he'd never even heard in the can. “She says you can wear that same suit again, but you need a better tie.” Really letting her disdain rule her face, but throwing her whole body into it. Hips thrusting, her chin right in his face. She seemed to have more muscles in her top lip than anybody he'd ever met before. No matter how much a guy hated you, he couldn't let you know about it as well as a woman could. “She picked one out for you. She thinks burgundy is your color.”

  You did what you could to hide what you were thinking, but sometimes it still slipped out. “Shit.”

  “So, Miss Super Titties has got herself a new pet to play with. If you're lucky, maybe she'll pick you out a nice diamond-studded collar. I guess the stink of prison on you must remind her of her husband.”

  “Maybe she just likes my eyes.”

  “Yeah? But not enough so she lets you ride in back with her though, eh?”

  Dane killed a few hours driving his patterns around Brooklyn, down Rockaway Parkway and around the circle to a broad cobblestone pier sticking into Jamaica Bay. The cold wind came off the water and made him think of Maria Monticelli when they were teenagers, and how he'd come down here with a couple of six-packs and pine for her. She'd talk about how she wanted to act on the New York stage and eventually make it to Hollywood. He'd listen and imagine her on the screen, that face sixty feet high and looming over him, a smile so much larger than himself he could waft away on her lips.

  Your thoughts could break off one of your own ribs and jam it into your heart. He went home, changed into his suit, but didn't bother with a tie.

  Dane took the 59th Street Bridge into Manhattan again, but drove a little faster than usual, like he might actually be on a date. If he thought about it too much, the slow surging anxiety would start tightening his belly, so he let it go.

  This time he pulled up in front of her building and parked in front. The doorman mashed his lips but must've sensed the score. Maybe because Dane wasn't wearing a tie. He walked up and the little fireplug of a guy squared his shoulders and said, “Miss Bishop will be right down.” He held his hand up in front of Dane's chest.

  Someone else who thought you could stop the world by putting your palm up.

  Dane got back in the limo, lit a cigarette, and turned on the radio. A blue spark leaped from his fingers and a sudden squawk of voices started berating him. It snapped him up in his seat because he thought, for a second there, that he could hear his father and JoJo Tormino among them. Upset but not angry. He could feel their frustration. Static rose up and drowned the agitated muttering, then regular music faded in. He switched the radio off and finished his cigarette.

  Glory Bishop stepped out the front door and now she looked more like she did in Under Heaven's Canopy. Beautiful and with the sensual aura turned all the way up. Twenty-five feet away and he still felt the pressure of it. Whoo baby.

  The doorman held the rear door open for her and she slid in with the supple movement she'd shown on the dance pole. It put a hitch in his breath but he said nothing. He gave her one look over his shoulder and she knew what was on his mind.

  “Look,” she said as they pulled away. “We're going together, this is just so the media doesn't blitz us too early on. You get to be the ‘mystery man' when they do their write-ups tonight.”

  “Couldn't I be a mystery man in the backseat with some other mook driving?”

  “This is more mysterious. Besides, I thought you liked to drive?”

  “I do when I'm not getting paid for it.”

  “That doesn't make any sense whatsoever.”

  He went, “Uyh,” and tried to play it off. Not take it so seriously, but he had a bug up his ass about it. “Listen, if they see me driving the limo, all they have to do is call Olympic and get my name.”

  “They're not that smart,” Glory told him. “But they'll follow us around and take plenty of photos, so try not to look too unhappy or punch anybody out, all right?”

  “I'll do my best, but you're asking me to go against my grain.”

  “I get the feeling that going against the grain is going with your grain.”

  “That makes no sense whatsoever,” he said, and let out a chuckle. He felt a nice flush of victory at the rimshot.

  “And don't be mad if I'm unresponsive,” she said. “We'll talk when we get inside the theater.”

  “I thought that's when we watch the movie.”

  “Nobody's really going to watch it. We've all heard it's a piece of shit.”

  “Even the lesbian scenes?”

  It got her laughing, and the
three-hour ride out to the Hamptons went by fast. She talked about how she went from modeling in her teens to bit parts in bad horror films where guys wearing rubber suits with tentacles chased her around sorority houses wearing only her nightie or a towel. She'd had her throat cut in three flicks and been stabbed in three others. She thought screenwriters were mostly mama's boys with a few screws loose who only got their rocks off by chopping women to pieces on paper.

  She met the husband during auditions for a movie he produced but didn't direct. She thought he was a real artist, showing up on set like that to keep an eye on everything. A control freak but not heavy-handed about it. “I was the worst kind of stupid,” she said. “Because I thought I'd been through more than everybody else.”

  Dane thought, yeah, that was kind of stupid. No matter how slick you thought you were, there was always somebody else on the corner who had you figured out.

  The husband still had no name, even while she told his story. Glory leaned forward, funneling her words right into Dane's ear. How they'd dated for a few weeks but it was nothing too serious. He did some coke but not a lot, and she never guessed he was involved with distributing the product. Then he asked her to move in and it still didn't seem very serious. He'd already started preproduction on Under Heaven's Canopy when—

  Dane cut in. “Listen, I want to ask you—”

  “What the title means, right? It drives everybody crazy. There's all these weird theories running around on the Internet, geeks who find all kinds of bizarre symbolism and make these freaky connections to the Bible.”

  He nodded. “I watched it twice the other night and it still makes no sense to me.”

  “The original title was The Mouth of Hell. Think about that one for a minute, see if it makes any more sense to you.”

  He remembered that the caves deep in the mountains where the terrorists hid the missiles were called that. “Okay, see, now that's a cool action title. And it ties in with the story.”