by Lee Lamothe
Graduating from police academy, proudly smiling in his blue uniform.
Told to grow his hair and beard and go street.
Taught to ride a bike, to work his way into the drug trade of a downstate chapter of the Stateliners. Then their initiations and months of fun and frolic. Having the club crest and rocker tattooed onto his back. Dedication to his duty.
And then scenes of depravity and excess and his bosses refusing to pull him out when he broke down in a weeping, drooling mess, leaving him out there to make one more buy, climb one more rung.
He knew then that he was simply meat to them, something to be tossed into the pit for the animals to hopefully fuck up upon, to end in charges and prison.
The club was a brotherhood that accepted him, nourished him, was loyal to him, more than the police force ever did. So he went under and stayed under and never came back.
But it wasn’t enough, even that. The Stateliners saw his true nature emerge, and they didn’t like it much. Anarchy had no place in any infrastructure.
Stabbed in the nuts by a broken beer bottle, his goodbye from the club. He lost his balls. Then the cheese grater, not as amusing a story as he’d made up for old Marko.
And then north to the city. He saw himself arriving with his fingertips already burned off by acid. No longer a cop, no longer a crook. An anarchist of no name, the most heroic of characters.
In his mind he saw Marko Markowitz’s smile of appreciation when Jerry showed up with his bodyguard’s shotgun for a dope deal.
Don’t ask, man. I’m here, he isn’t. I got your back.
And because an anarchist has no loyalty, it was Marko’s turn for attention. And Julia Gurr’s. And Bobby Preston’s. Everyone, everyone.
Ah, Marko, I loved you, I loved killing you for no reason. You were my reason to be, man. You came through for me. Goodbye.
He stared past Chyna Lily at the blue sky of his last moment.
Naked, Chyna Lily gathered all the forces and powers she felt nature owed her for its betrayals. Owed for the arbitrary tricks that had allowed her only brief years as a striking young woman with a heart that beat for all in the most beautiful time imaginable, that had evolved her into … this. This gross thing.
The strength of it filled her. She was bursting with it and would have broken into beautiful song but for the butchered, mumbling face of Jerry Kelly at her feet. Nature had never listened to her, never nourished or succored her. But Jerry Kelly, with the wide toothy gash where his twisted lips had been, where broken teeth resided and showed themselves through a mouth that had been extended all the way to his ears, Jerry Kelly would listen.
“Beast,” she screamed at the still-stirring, moaning face as she brought the axe down and opened his chest cavity. She rested.
“Ape.” The axe rose and fell above his collarbone, digging at a deep angle into his neck. There was a satisfactory spray there, then. She rested.
“Destroyer.” She was barely able to raise the axe head much above her shoulder, but she leaned her weight into it as it landed in the centre of his stomach.
Panting heavily, she wrestled the axe out of him, gathering the debt owed from the twisted fucking of nature with its arbitrary distribution of love and hate, beauty and beastliness, poetry and avarice.
She screamed: “Wrecker.”
And nature delivered to her the requisite strength to cleave the blade exactly through the centre of Jerry Kelly’s forehead.
Zoe Preston was yoked with a piece of thick rope, short enough to keep her within stabbing range of the butcher knife Chyna Lily had taken from the house.
Chyna Lily had her carry Aurora’s body to the end of a long line of plants. There was a shovel. Zoe dug and scraped until she had a grave. Naked Chyna Lily urged her to be gentle. Zoe dragged and rolled Aurora’s body into the ground and tucked a muumuu around her. Naked Chyna Lily sang to her as she worked. Her voice was stunning in its aria. When Aurora was embedded, Chyna told Zoe to leave the shovel, and took her by the yoke down the hill to where Jerry Kelly’s body was already being feasted by flies. The axe stood in his head
“We’ll have to chop him up here. It’ll be easier. Would you be a dear and do it? I’m very tired.”
The axe head wouldn’t come out of Jerry Kelly’s skull. Zoe yanked and twisted. It didn’t move. Zoe could smell the blood off his body, could smell the rancid sweat emanating from Chyna Lily’s fat. She could hear the thick buzzing of the disturbed flies. The rope rubbed her throat raw. She feared the butcher knife.
Chyna Lily took the axe and told her to drag the corpse to the edge of the hill to dismember it. She wouldn’t have him in her garden, polluting.
Zoe grabbed Jerry Kelly’s pants cuffs and pulled. The leather jacket slid up the corpse as she dragged it a few inches at a time. She pulled harder and his pants became loose, revealing scars on his groin. When she reached the edge of the hill she turned the body over, unable to look at his face. The jacket and sweater were gathered under Jerry Kelly’s armpits. His back was a mass of small round burn marks the size of the tip of a cigarette. There were wide blurs of scarred flesh.
There was, caught in the belt at the small of Jerry Kelly’s back, the handle of a small automatic pistol.
Chyna Lily didn’t see Zoe’s hand take the pistol, but she saw Jerry Kelly’s vast field of destroyed tissue, blurred flesh, and cigarette burns. She sobbed, “Ohhhhh,” and dropped the axe. She pushed Zoe out of the way and dropped on her thick knees beside the pale Jerry Kelly.
One hand was wrapped with the yoking rope and the other gently stroked the carnage of Jerry Kelly’s back. She wept. “My God, oh God, you too, you too.”
Under the beautiful glowing canopy of a thousand trees, Zoe Preston straightened up, the yoke rope taut, the gun held in both hands.
Don’t ever hesitate, her Uncle Marko always said when he taught her to shoot in the basement.
Shut off everything and just do it.
Don’t analyze it, don’t get the what-ifs.
She thought about her loving uncle, thought about her loving dad and loving mom, wherever they were, whatever might have come to them.
In the finality of things, she thought, I hope I’m more my Uncle Marko than my dad.
She turned and saw Chyna Lily had leaned forward to blow softly on the scars that revealed Jerry Kelly. Her eyes were closed as if remembering another time, as if hearing a faraway music. She whispered, “Oh, a boy …”
She turned her head, her reverie disturbed by Zoe’s lack of motion or sound. Her face was sweet and the twists of her hatred and fear had melted away, revealing the vestiges of a girl strummer who had to love a tortured boy and bring him to peace through music and love and forgiveness, because her heart never stopped being what it once was.
The first shot entered her open mouth and came out her cheek.
The second went into the elephantine folds of her stomach, to no visible effect.
The third and fourth went in higher, between the sagging breasts.
The fifth and sixth went into the ripples at the throat, and the seventh went into Chyna Lily’s left eye. The ungainly body was complicated and it fell in parts and seemed to take a long time.
Zoe Preston sat on the ground, still jerking the trigger to no effect.
A man’s high-pitched voice came from deep in the trees: “Mur-der … Oh, mur-der …”
A choir of other voices joined in, a deep hum of dirge that grew deeper but no louder.
Zoe Preston held the empty pistol.
Around her she saw in the forest flitters of life.
A hollow man holding a baby peeked out from behind a tree.
Two old, grey-haired ladies with their hands covering their toothless mouths, staring from a clutch of trees.
A slim young woman darted naked from one tree to another.
Zoe Preston backed away up the road, away from the forest’s chorus.
Looking back she saw a crowd had emerged from the trees and a man was
already stabbing a shovel into the ground beside Chyna Lily’s body.
She turned away and went looking for her family.
Epilogue
Ray Tate and Djuna Brown were returning the fleet Ford 500 to headquarters when Abner Hussey pulled up beside them in his boss Cadillac at the traffic light leading to the span bridge.
Hussey, staring straight ahead, looked like a middle-aged man enjoying his cigar while patiently waiting for the light to change.
“Old Abbo.” Ray Tate said. “Our old pal that started all this.”
“Huh.” Djuna Brown had been morose since the discovery of Sharon Sherriff in the little house in Tin Town. Simply saving Sharon Sherriff would have made it all worthwhile.
She regretted the dogs she’d killed. She thought about them a lot, how her training had come to her and she rocked with the scattergun, racking fast as she’d been taught.
Boom boom, almost a single sound.
Shotgunning the pits had been grim business and it provided no relief.
Bobby Preston and Julia Gurr, who she’d never met, dead. And Marko Markowitz. And Sharon Sheriff. And the anonymous Vietnamese fisherman. All gone up, all dead. She had little hope that Zoe Preston’s body would ever turn up.
Only Jerry Kelly and Gary Dorset had got away. Two, Djuna Brown believed, who deserved the shotgun blasts more than the dogs. In her heart she knew that the angry, fearful, violent elements of her self that had run wild in the riots the year before had never gone away. She was capable of things, capable and willing and maybe even eager. Dogs were the least of it.
She’d loved Ray Tate when he looked in the shattered window and gave her the thumbs up. “They’re lipstick.” But he took his gun from his ankle and, two-handed, aimed and fired twice through the window. “Good doggies.”
Vaguely she mourned Marko Markowitz and his broken-hearted lost-boy moves when he was trying to hook her up at Gratelli’s. Bobby Preston, too, received a portion of her sympathy, for his human grief about his daughter and his sadness and shame for the migrants.
She could live with them all, the people and the dogs, and knew that with time she’d put them into perspective. She’d just have to wait for it. But the death of Sharon Sherriff, the one innocent she thought she could rescue, twisted in her.
“A lot of dead people, Ray, for a simple money grab.” She glanced at Abner Hussey rolling forward over the white line. “What if he’d kept his mouth shut when we pinched him? You think they’d all be alive?”
“Nope.” He was definite. “Jerry Fucking Kelly had a game on. All those people were walking dead whether we were around or not.”
“All those people dead, and Jerry Fucking Kelly gets away clean. For nothing.”
“But we got the money. And that means two weeks in Paris, right?”
She didn’t answer. She was thinking of the Sharon Sherriffs still up in Indian Country.
“Djun’? Paris? Cassoulet? The Pompidou?”
The light changed.
“You want to take old Abner, don’t you, Ray?”
“Well, we are cops and he is a crook.” He tried to cheer her up. “Maybe he’s rolling dirty.”
She touched a light hand to his shoulder. “Go get him, Bongo.”
The night before their flight to Chicago to catch the flight to Paris, they were sipping gin-and-taps on the bed in their faux atelier.
No matter what he said, he couldn’t move her off her mood.
“We didn’t make any difference, did we, Ray?” she said for the fiftieth time, as if at some point he’d correct her, show she was wrong. “Bobby Preston, Marko, Zoe, Julia Gurr, Sharon Sherriff, all dead. Kelly gets away. No difference.”
“We can’t always, Djun’. We do what we do with what we know. We’re just cops. Stuff happens off-stage, you don’t know about. You can’t say, after, ‘Fuck I should’ve seen that.’ You can’t.”
“You said yourself. Sharon was walking dead. And what did we do? We went for the money. We let her die, Ray. We should have stopped everything, saved her, let the money walk. In the end, what good are we to anybody?”
“Day after tomorrow, we’ll be in Paris. Get some perspective.”
“I’m not going. I’m taking Sharon home to Buck.”
“Will you meet me, over there?”
She looked very sad.
At the Café de Paris the waiter asked Ray Tate if he wanted le eynzcatsoup. It was a joke. When they’d been on the run with the State card earlier in the year, the café became their go-to place where they’d meet up if they separated for the day, each off to their own artistic discoveries of Paris. When they’d been given a mayonnaise concoction for their frites, he’d asked for Heinz ketchup.
The waiter recognized him, but with wisdom about important things didn’t ask about Djuna Brown.
Ray Tate watched the intersection at rue Buci, expecting her to come through the evening crowds, around the corner with her camera around her neck and spiky hair and worn-out ankle boots and cool scarf, to discover him, waiting, knowing he would wait as long as it took.
Copyright © Lee Lamothe, 2014
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