The bathtub had likewise been illustrated. Painted with a naked man, arms and legs seeming to dangle over the edges, long penis at the crotch lying like a flat snake on the cool porcelian, its tip dribbling what looked nasty down the drain.
This two dimensional model was covered in blood, much of it appearing to flow from a deep gash at the throat and where the eye sockets bespoke of gouging. Where his hands and feet hung over the sides, directly beneath on the linoleum floor had been painted red pools. He’d dripped, get it? Like, this was a statement, right? The tiled walls around the tub were also splashed red as if the figment jugular had sprayed in delicate yet evocative arcs.
So, it looked as if someone had bled out in the tub, and then somebody else had puked into the john after either killing this guy or finding his body.
“Quite an avowal about the violence in society,” Unc explained to Pearly. “Like, a revelation of Daddio Reaper. Dig?”
“Uhh, do I actually have to put my ass on that?” the eight-year-old had asked his father’s brother, now his guardian.
Why did this guy have to move to Los Angeles, approximately in time to take in the li’l orphan?
“Yeah,” Unc Dan replied, a little hurt. “And every time you do, it’ll make you consider the politics intended.”
Pearly arched a wispy eyebrow. “And when I sit in that tub, do I do it on the dead guy’s face? Or would you rather I sit nearer the drain, on his…”
Dan quickly put his hand over his nephew’s mouth. “Jesus, where did you learn that crap?”
Pearly chuckled. “I learned it considering the politics intended.”
“I should’ve been a conscientious objector,” Dan muttered. Pearly didn’t know if his Unc was still talking to him or not. “I would rather have spent my time in prison than tripping over guts on the beaches. And I was part of the force they sent into Hiroshima after we dropped the -A-. You see there in the tub, where the guy’s got no eyeballs?”
“Yep.”
“Well, I’ll bet you thought somebody cut them out. But really they melted out of his head during the flash.”
“So why’s his throat cut?”
“He got hit with flying glass. It’s why there’s blood all over him. Somebody slashed his throat to put him out of his misery. Maybe he did it to himself rather than wait to develop the latent burns and the keloids. Besides, he was going to be blind.”
Dan shivered and shook, which sometimes reminded Pearly of his mother’s convulsions. But he knew these originated from a different place. Dan hadn’t been wounded in the war, not in the traditional sense. But he did benefit from May 21, 1956. This was when Milltown put out a white tablet trank, one of a new line of things known as a ‘peace pill’. There were others: Equanil, Thorazine, Serpasil, Frenquel, Patacal. They were ataractics, from the greek word ataraxia. Meant freedom from confusion and worry. Supposedly, the joke went, you still had worries—who didn’t?—but you didn’t worry about your worries.
(Couldn’t tell Pearly this guy wasn’t confused.)
Might have worked better if Dan hadn’t also been a junkie.
Pearly remembered what he’d seen about a week after he’d come to live with Dan—also in The Vagabonds, not three blocks from where the boy had stayed with Katrin Soloway. (There were no coincidences. Fate had done this deliberately. What a bitch.)
Anyway, this week-after was four months past when his mother had gone out the window. Pearly had been first in a juvie hall, then at a foster family’s where he’d found out that just because they were being paid by the state to take care of you didn’t mean they liked you. There were ten other kids there and he had to sleep in a closet, with his knees to his chin and his arms wrapped around his legs. Smelling mothballs every night until his nose ran all the time. They only ever fed him peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And it was always a cruddy, cheap strawberry jam which reminded him of his mother’s fall.
Anyway… This week-after he’d come to live with Dan (April, ’57), Pearly had climbed off the couch which had been made up for him to sleep on—it was a fold-out, at least, so he no longer had to sleep curled into the fetal position. He’d found Uncle Dan in that colorful hell of a bathroom, tying a piece of rubber tubing around his arm and sticking a needle into a vein pumped up for the occasion. Then he watched Dan get dressed as he shook his ass to Nelson Riddle on the record player, ‘Lisbon Antigua’. Dan did himself all in black, it being all he owned. Because he fancied himself a beatnik. All Dan’s friends did this, dressing up somber and bleak as if they’d just made up their minds en masse. “Hey, lets see what we have in our closets that’ll make us look like tombstones.”
Those people hung around Dan’s place. Well, Pearly’s mother had always dressed in black but somehow that had been okay for her. Yet it bothered the boy to see this affectation on them. They sat up all night (on the same couch where Pearly was supposed to sleep) and smoked reefers and stuck needles in their arms and expounded on the state of the goddam world from the perspective of a morbid elite seeking the shelter of some gothically drab socialism.
Some of them would stand up—in ways supposed to look spontaneous but which were really obviously rehearsed—and recite poetry while the others snapped their fingers and approved with cool, man!, groovy, man!, just hit the core of space dead-on, man!
Had to feel the beat, they claimed. The beat beat beat. An emotional intellectual perceptive pulse that coursed through those truly alive.
Pearly knew this was a genuine entity for he sensed it himself—perhaps more than even normal children did. But he never got the impression that most of those visiting Unc really knew what it was. They pretended they did. They snapped their fingers as if their narcotically-enhanced yet ingenuine pantomime, like, somehow represented this force. An empty gesture, devoid of both terran and empyreal nucleus.
One of the poets was named Salem. Dan and he were very close. Dan and he would slip into Dan’s room in the morning after everyone else had finally gone home.
Pearly remembered one of Salem’s poems.
Went something like this…
“Iconoclastic zombie:
seduce the maggot
and give birth
to constellations of death.
Them kind of stars,
them kind of stars lie in ambush
for the space ships of our dreams,
then jap the crews
until that poor dead asshole’s
just old news.”
Early on, Pearly learned not to hang around. Couldn’t sleep anyway if they happened to be on his couch. Didn’t like the smell of the weed they smoked because it made him light-headed. Didn’t want to just try to sleep during the day—even if he wasn’t bothering to go to school anyway—because he could hear that sickening uhhn uhhn uuuuhhhhnnnnnnn! coming from Unc’s bedroom, slapping noises, pounding the wall noises, flesh coming together like wet sheets.
He’d been placed in school but it was a year later now and Pearly didn’t bother to go because it bored the ever-lovin’ out of him. The snail’s pace the teachers maintained for the kids put him to sleep and that got him into trouble. Or he’d daydream fantastic adventures—and this would get him into trouble, too. Jingles of A-B-C’s. Hey we done this already. Time to move on for fuck’s sake. Challenge him, stick an I-wanna-live needle in his heart. Pearly felt as if he’d been slipped some of that calming stuff that Uncle Dan took, nap-candy which sssssslllllloooooowwwwwweeeeeedddddddUnnnnnncccccc wwwwwaaaaayyyyydddddooooowwwwwnnnnn!
Hey, it’d be the ’60s soon. The space program was off and running. By ’68 he figured there would be Americans with hot dog stands on Mars. Hell, last year already the Russians had put up Iskustvennyi Sputnik Zemli, or “Artificial Traveler Around The Earth”. Five miles per second. Then America launched the first Jupiter-C rocket from Cape Canaveral. Two weeks before Sputnik, the U.S. sent up the Thor rocket. On January 31 of this year, 1958, the U.S. of A. launched its first Earth satellite, dubbed Explorer 1.
It went out on another Jupiter-C rocket. It weighed 31 pounds, just about half of what Pearly weighed.
Pearly occasionally looked up at night, wondering if he could get a glimpse of a satellite. He couldn’t help thinking that in twenty years people would be killing each other en masse on the real angry bloody red planet: earth. If, that is, they didn’t all die from the radioactivity in the stratosphere. So, hot dog stands on Mars by ’68, then a few stray, blind mutants living underground by ’78. He would be twenty-nine and his brain would be the last repository for mankind’s wasted knowledge.
To hell with school and the multiplication tables he’d memorized in about two seconds. He spent time on the sidewalks watching the younger kids play. Looked young enough himself that people thought he might only be five and not in school yet.
Frail, underfed, petite. Sure. Nobody asked.
He also discovered the public library, the amazing Central one on 5th Street, reachable by bus. And in the year since he’d moved in with Unc—April to April—he’d taught himself to read way beyond the third grade level.
He knew he was smart. He didn’t spend his days at Central. He knew about truancy laws and didn’t want to get busted. Sure he hated living with Dan—mostly because of who Dan hung out with. But he didn’t want to go back to some foster home, some cramped nine square feet of closet, and sandwiches made with peanut butter and blood and brains.
He went to the library after he knew regular schools had let out. There he stayed until the place closed. He made sure he always took whatever books he wanted to peruse into a room where an adult—any adult—sat reading. It made it appear to the librarian on duty that he wasn’t there by himself.
It was right after Easter weekend.
Last Friday, Cheryl Crane—the teenage daughter of actress Lana Turner—had stabbed Lana’s boyfriend to death, as he threatened her mother. Pearly passed tables and went from room to room, hearing hushed gossip about the dead guy, a gangster named Johnny Stompanato.
He thought briefly about stabbing men who’d threatened his mother. And then he remembered the angel with her wings painted a gaudy red. He wondered what had happened to that, since he never got it. Was it still wrapped and sitting on the top shelf of the closet in the apartment Katrin and he’d shared?
Pearly shook his head and whispered, “Probably gone. Bet it flew away.”
««—»»
Aster Risk hated her name. Her father had been an English professor and wasn’t he clever, making a pun of his little daughter’s monniker? She’d always hoped she’d marry and be able to change the last part. How could she date when she always worked the evening shift? (How could she date, if nobody ever asked her?) So here she was, just a cliché for the spinster librarian, with a name which was little more than a definition for a footnote.
She’d seen the pale-haired boy many times now. Always sitting behind a stack of books so that, unless she came around to the side or behind, she couldn’t see him there at all. Some of the books were as big as he was. He went through whole volumes—sets!—of encyclopedias. He was so young, she guessed he was really only looking at the pictures.
Yes, that must be it. Dragged to the library by his folks and told to sit and be quiet while one parent or another did research. Probably a professor like her father with the imperative to publish or perish. Aster recalled many times as a little girl being hauled off to the college library and having to sit there (and be quiet!) while Professor Risk buried himself in dusty tomes and flaking ink up to the patched leather elbows on his corduroy jacket.
So why was she a librarian? Because, with nothing to do (couldn’t squirm and didn’t dare play), she’d started reading the books herself. Grew to enjoy them, finding worlds to escape into.
Precisely what the boy must be up to. Making the best of his situation.
She was surprised at his ragged clothes. Would a professor’s son be dressed thus?
One night after the place closed up, she went to put away the child’s stack. She looked over the titles he’d been devouring. One was INFANTERIE GREIFT AN, by Erwin Rommel. Another was THE PRINCE by Nicolò Machiavelli. There were several textbooks on medicine, ranging from internal to emergency treatment to anatomy. Also a copy of the 1895 collection of formulas, LEE’S PRICELESS RECIPES, compiled by Dr. N.T. Oliver. She opened this last and saw where he had marked with a tiny check of pencil (shame on him for defacing a book, even with such a small mark!):
Fulminating Powder.—1. Mix together in a warm mortar 3 parts of pulverized nitre, 2 parts of dry carbonate of potash, 1 part of sulphur; a small quantity heated on an iron shovel or ladle until it fuses will explode with great violence. 2. Sulphur 1 part, chlorate of potash 3 parts.
Well, she told herself, he’s simply curious about how to make fireworks. Of course he’d also marked:
Nitro-Glycerine.—This is prepared by the action of strong nitric and sulphuric acids on glycerine at a low temperature. Sulphuric
acid 4 3/4 pounds, nitric acid 2 1/3 pounds, glycerine 1 pound; nitro-glycerine collects at the bottom of the vessel and is freed from the acids by carefully washing in a copious supply of water; the explosion is caused by the rapid transformation from the liquid to the gaseous state.
Hmmm. She noted that there were slips of paper inserted to mark other places of interest. Curiosity got the better of her.
Pencil check.
Chloroform Tincture.—Mix 2 fluid ounces of chloroform with 8 fluid ounces of alcohol and 10 fluid ounces of compound tincture of cardamons. Dose 10 to 20 minims.
Beg your pardon? Why would a kid need—or even want—to know how to make knock-out drops? Then she looked at the opposite page and saw there he’d checked the following.
Digitalis Tincture.—Digitalis, recently dried and in fine powder, 4 ounces, diluted alcohol a sufficient quantity; moisten the powder with 2 fluid ounces of the alcohol, pack it firmly in a conical percolator and gradually pour diluted alcohol over it until 2 parts of tincture are obtained. It is stimulant, but afterwards sedative, diuretic and narcotic. In overdoses it occasions vomiting, purging, vertigo, delirium and death. Used in inflammatory diseases, phthisis, dropsies, palpitation of the heart, etc.; in mania, epilepsy and asthma. Dose. 10 to 20 drops.
He looked to be maybe six or seven. If he was even that, considering how small he was. These books must have been what his parent was investigating, then setting them there when finished. Heedless disregard. Perhaps even criminal inattention.
Aster put the books away, on their respective shelves according to Dewey’s Decimal System. Went home and fed her cat a saucer of milk and a couple of the sardines from the can she used to make a meal for herself. Took a bath in a tub so white and clean it was almost a shame to cover it up with bubbles. Put on her nightgown and pinned up her hair so she’d have a few curls in the morning, then went to bed. Dreaming about a tiny, pale boy standing above her with a cloth full of chloroform. Smelled like the pastries in Indian restaurants.
As he brought the cloth down over her mouth and nose, he smiled such a pretty smile. He looked, in fact, exactly like an angel—the cherubic sort—from an Easter pageant. He put one forefinger against his lips. “Sh. Shshshshsh…”
The next night he was back (in the library, not her dreams). Sitting behind a stack of books. Aster thought he sure seemed to be reading them. She decided to approach him. Make sure he wasn’t delving into subjects too old for him. That could cause a ruckus if people knew that children were getting into books they hadn’t ought to be into. Knowledge was a good thing but there was a time for certain aspects of it.
She noticed a few of the books on the desk. Same LEE’S PRICELESS RECIPES. Same THE PRINCE and the infantry book by Rommel. There was also a copy of ONLY A VIOLET I PLUCKED FROM MY MOTHER’S GRAVE by Noom Chambers. A limited edition printed by Lapsus Calami Press, 1940, and not supposed to be out of the rare books cage. A ghastly tome written about Jack The Ripper.
She shuddered, then took hold of herself emotionally
. Smoothed her skirt with her hands. Kids these days were something else, weren’t they? Maybe she was glad after all not to be married, not to be a mother.
“Hello,” Aster murmured, ever conscious of the silence the library mandated. “Are you here with that man?”
She indicated the only other person in this particular reading area.
The child glanced over. (He didn’t want her asking that man to take charge of a son who wasn’t his.)
“Why, no, Ma’m. My mother is here but she’s in the part where—you know—they have the silly romance stuff.”
He curled his pert nose to show what he thought of that.
Aster persisted. “What are you reading there, if you don’t mind my asking?”
He looked up, big blue eyes in the glacially white face. He shrugged self-consciously and replied, “It’s called PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS. It was written by a Dr. von Krafft-Ebing.”
“Oh, honey. That’s full of such big words,” she managed to say. How had he gotten his hands on this? It was another book always locked up. One which must be requested and signed out specially—by adults only. Some careless grown-up had left it on the desk. She was mortified but determined not to scare him. After all, she doubted he was capable of understanding what the book was about. Or of even comprehending those big words.
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