Braineater Jones

by Stephen Kozeniewski

  Oh, I finally got an answer to my question. Not one of my numbered questions, unfortunately. The flophouse does have a name. It’s the Three Rivers, although you wouldn’t know it to look at the place. Only place I’ve found the name actually written down was on a signed picture of Louis Armstrong, made out to the owner of the Three Rivers. They oughta put up a sign. “Satchmo slept here.”

  Went to the cemetery. Nice part of town. Nowhere near the Welcome Mat. Miss Claudia must’ve been a rich bitch, although I could’ve told that from her disposition.

  I felt as out of place at Buffalora Cemetery as I did in my clothes. It was all fancy landscaping and $64,000 monuments. Not a wooden cross or even an inground plaque in that place. You would think a fellow in my position would feel more at home in any boneyard, but that place was just creepy. Rich and creepy.

  The gate read “RESVRRECTVRIS.” I guess Vs must be fancier than Us. Only us vulgar underlings (or “vvlgar vnderlings,” as they would spell it) use U.

  I had to climb the fence. I spent a while searching for Miss Claudia’s grave with no luck. Row upon row of tombstone after tombstone, but no Claudia Winston, nor anything close enough. I realized that grave was a dry well.

  Well, not literally. I just realized that’s a rather unapt metaphor. My grammar school teacher Mrs. Argento would’ve rapped my knuckles for that.

  Wait a minute. Where did that come from? Did I really…? Crap, the memory’s gone. If it was ever really there. Moving on.

  I decided to take a different tack. There was a little shack in the boneyard, humbler by a power of ten than the humblest mausoleum. It was nothing but twisted boards and home-smelted nails. No doubt it was the gravekeeper’s shack.

  I kicked in the door. Kicking it in didn’t seem entirely necessary, but then you never know. A poor old hunchback was sitting there, tuning a tombstone radio (appropriate, I guess). He nearly fell out of his rocking chair. It took me a second to take in the room, but only a second. Every nook and cranny was filled with little bells, like the kind you would find around the neck of a nanny goat, and each bell was marked in purple ink with a number and a letter.

  I didn’t waste much time taking in the sights because the hunchback was struggling to his feet and reaching for a gun by the radio. It turned out to be a lucky stroke that I kicked the door in after all because I managed to beat him to the bean-shooter.

  I’ll have to remember to kick all my doors in from now on.

  After he stood, I waved him to sit down. “Grab some upholstery.”

  “Who are you?” he said. “What do you want?”

  “That ain’t important.” I closed the door. “You run this place?”

  He nodded. It was a little difficult for him, what with the hump and all.

  “You try to ice all of your visitors, or just me?”

  “It’s just for protection,” he insisted.

  “From what?”

  He was silent.

  “Name,” I demanded.

  “Gnaghi,” the hunchback said.

  I could see his name perfectly fine on his nametag. I didn’t care. “All right, Noggy. I’m looking for a grave. Claudia Winston. Where is it?”

  He looked as panic-stricken as a rabbit moments before becoming hasenpfeffer. “No Claudia Winston.”

  “You got every name on every grave memorized?”

  He tried to nod.

  I leaned in real close and waved the gun for good measure. “You calling me a liar? Or just the broad who sent me?”

  “She… came back? Like you?”

  He fidgeted in his seat. He seemed unduly upset at the idea of not noticing somebody had been brought across.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You mean Claudia Baumer!” he realized. He rubbed his hands together profusely. A little too profusely, if you ask me. Like he had something to hide. I shook my head. “Maiden name. Or married name. Or something. Happens sometimes. R51. These are all graves.” He pointed at the little bells.

  I grabbed the bell for R51. A wire led out of it. I ran my fingers along the wire. “Why?” I turned and pointed the gun at him.

  He cringed. “It’s to save you. In case you come back.”

  “What do you mean ‘in case’? Can’t you tell whether someone’s going to come back?”

  He shook his head.

  “You can’t predict it? There’s no rhyme or reason to it? You have to leave a bell so the walking corpse can ring it?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s all we are, isn’t it? Walking corpses? There’s nothing special about us, nothing deserving or damning. We just…” I made a raspberry with my lips.

  He stared at me with a look of horror in his eyes as though I was about to do a lot worse than kick in his door and wave a gun in his face.

  “What causes it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think anybody knows. I’m just the gravedigger.”

  6. What am I? A dead man walking.

  “So you dug up Claudia Winston… Baumer, whatever you’re calling her. You stole her locket.”

  “No, no, I would never,” Gnaghi said. “I respect the dead too much. Anyway, I wouldn’t get away with it. My luck, the one I rob would be a corpsie like you. Miss Baumer, she was already gone. Never rang her bell. I just filled the empty grave with dirt.”

  Huh. It just occurred to me that she said she had been in a mausoleum. I wish I had asked the little twerp about that. Well, one more clue to wonder about.

  “You know who dug her up?” I asked.

  He looked like a caged rat. He knew. Getting him to spill might take some digging.

  Digging, ha! Damn, I’m hilarious.

  “Who was it?” I growled, baring my teeth.

  He shrank into his hump like a turtle into its shell, terrified of me. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in one of the bells. My gums were black, making my teeth stand out like a monster’s. That might come in handy in intimidating folks, but I’d have to look into whether I could brush my teeth without knocking them out of my head.

  “They come around sometimes. The old one is Ed, and the young one is Joey.”

  “They got last names?”

  “I don’t know. I only hear them talking to each other.”

  I growled, hoping my lips were rippling like a dog’s. That was sure to give him a fright.

  “Okay, okay!” he said. “The only other thing I know is that the young one has a mark on his neck.”

  “A brand? A birthmark?”

  Gnaghi shook his head. “A tattoo. Bright pink, and it glows in the dark like a neon sign.”

  Something barely registered in my subconscious. I had seen something like that before.

  “A snake,” he clarified, “eating its own tail.”

  I knelt down and tried to be less threatening since I knew what I wanted to know. My smile, though, was only making it worse. I clamped my jaws shut. “You don’t get out of here much, do you?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m too busy taking care of your kind.”

  Two Christian names wasn’t a lot to go on, but a tattoo like that had to stand out. I figured the best place to start was by canvassing all the inkaterias around the city. If I couldn’t find the artist who did it, maybe someone could at least tell me where it had been done.

  I went to a drugstore to flip through the phone book, but I didn’t buy a slug, which pissed off the drugstore owner. Three inkslingers in the city actually hung up shingles and didn’t just work out of some guy’s basement. I was hoping one of them would be a winner because going from door to door looking for a faker might take me the rest of my unlife.

  Two were on the docks, and one was in the seediest part of the Welcome Mat. Figuring I could use some fresh, salty air, I went to Sailor Jimmy’s. The place was packed to the gills with Navy pukes who all looked like they wanted to give me a pop in the eye. While Sailor Jimmy’s attention was torn between his cigarette and a coxswain’s neck, I snuck in the ba
ck room of his store.

  The cockroaches scattered when I turned on the lights. He kept his inks in little mixing barrels on a shelf. I peeked through them, but none were glowing. I crossed his joint off the list, but maybe I’d stop by again when it was less swimming in seamen. Then it was on to Henk’s.

  Henk’s at least was empty. It was tough to tell how he could see well enough in the dim, flickering lights to mark up anybody’s skin. He didn’t seem to care though. He was happy to have his shop empty so he could light his opium pipe and fiddle with the calibration of his electric tattooing needle. He didn’t even get up when I came in. I guessed, by his name, that Henk was a Dutchman, or maybe a Swede.

  On second thought, the guy I met may not have actually been Henk. You know how restaurants and hotels sometimes trade hands and keep the old name? Or for that matter, if the original Henk still owned it, that guy might’ve been a hired artist. Anyway, I’ll call him Henk. And he was Danish or something.

  “Looking to get a piece,” I said. “Thing is, I know which needle monkey I want to do it, I just don’t know where to find him. Think you can help?”

  After a long pause, Henk (or whoever) said, “Name?”

  “Mine or his?” I asked.

  Nothing.

  “I don’t know his name,” I said finally. “I saw a feller—younger feller—with a piece exactly like the one I want. Bright pink, if you can believe it. I might change the color, of course. A dragon eating its own tail or something. Any chance you did it?”

  “No. Get out.”

  I may not know much, but I know people. He knew something. “Tell me who did the tat.”

  He pointed his tattoo gun at me, one of those shiny titanium electric machines. He made it buzz like a streetlamp, and the needles went haywire. If I wasn’t already dead, it would’ve been threatening. I didn’t much want a brand-new pirate flag or pinup girl done at punch-throwing speed, so I stepped back. But either way, I had the advantage. I felt no pain, and I had a real gun. I decided to flash Gnaghi’s piece.

  “Why don’t you talk, you dumb Swede? I’m all out of bribe money, but I’ve still got a few bullets left.”

  “You the dumb one,” Henk said. “You don’t know who you messing with. Get out before you get hurt.”

  Who stares down a gun and doesn’t get scared? I didn’t even know if it was loaded. If it was, what would I do, shoot him in the leg? And how much metal could I squirt if he had friends?

  A half-dozen longshoremen were loitering outside, and if more sailors and salt dogs weren’t hanging all up and down the street, I’d eat Ernst Rothering’s girdle. What if somebody heard the shot and called the coppers? We weren’t in the Mat. They’d come, and I wouldn’t make it real far. I didn’t intend to find out how much damage I could take before I got double dead, either.

  I got mad. Real mad. “I will jump over there and rip your throat out of your neck.” I showed my teeth, and old Henky baby took real notice.

  His pipe clattered to the floor as he jumped up. He tried to keep me at bay with the buzzing tattoo gun. I chomped the air a couple times like a dog.

  “I’ll rip you to shreds,” I growled. “You know what I am?”

  “Yeah!” he said. “I know what you are. I know how to put you down, too.”

  That gave me pause. Everyone I’d met so far had told me to make sure I drank enough booze or I’d regret it. No one had mentioned other ways to put down our kind.

  He waved that fancy ink-throwing machine at me again. The needle shredded the air like an electric carpenter’s drill. False bravado. I actually lunged and knocked it out of his hand. It skittered to a stop in the corner, still chattering away like one of those windup sets of fake choppers in a dentist’s office.

  “Tell me what I’m looking for,” I said. “You don’t got to die tonight.”

  “All right!” he said, holding up his arms to ward me off. “It’s a gang sign. The Infected or the Infested, something like that. I don’t do them. They do them themselves. I don’t know how they get the ink to glow either.”

  “Where do I find these gangsters?”

  “The Mat,” Henk said. “Between 68th and Russo.”

  I spent the night walking the Infected’s turf like a cheap whore. Only about every third street lamp was lit on those few blocks, and the jabby sidewalks were covered with a thin layer of broken glass. It didn’t take me long to spot the biting serpent logo on a few walls. The same guy who did the long graffito motto I spotted my first day in the Mat must’ve did those, too. They glowed the same way.

  That reminds me, I still have to figure out what all that gibberish on the archway meant. Something’s going on in the Mat that gives me a queasy feeling. I know it’s not my stomach because that doesn’t work anymore.

  I took a pull from my flask—the last of the Crow that Lazar had bequeathed to me. I glanced around, suddenly worried. I knew I probably had no reason to be. Everyone near enough to be looking at me wasn’t, and not one of them looked less like a stewbum than me. Besides, the fuzz refused to come to the Mat. A woman’s shouts in a not-too-far-off alley gave me the first proof that axiom wasn’t just hearsay.

  By the time I got there, she and her assailant were gone. I hoped it had been a mugging and not something more sinister. I spotted a couple of eggs who could have been trouble boys with the Infected, but they bolted as soon as I walked toward them.

  Couldn’t find Ed or Joey. With no place to stay and no money, I hunkered down in an alley. Way off in the nice part of Ganesh, where you could afford to pretend the dead didn’t walk, a siren played me a lullaby. I slept in a box last night with only my flask to keep me company. Right where I wanted to be.

  November 4, 1934

  Success!

  A wide-ranging orchestra of derelicts banging trash can lids and cats in heat screeching woke me up this morning. I had to take a few swigs of Crow to even roll out of the newspapers. I wish I’d had a shock stick, but there’s no juice in the alley. All out of Crow now. I had to get back to Hallowed Grounds later that day, but I didn’t have to go back empty-handed.

  I knocked on a few doors, and eventually some scared folks pointed me in the right direction. Couldn’t tell whether they were scareder of me or the gangsters. Some of them must’ve hoped I would clean up the block. Sorry, folks. Narrower mission for me.

  Turned out Ed and Joey loved the whores. Everyone on the block who had seen ’em had seen ’em walking in or out of one particularly delightful joint. A cathouse, to hear the neighborhood Romeos and Roxettes tell it, but one that breathers didn’t usually go to unless they were looking for a weird old time. And don’t get me wrong, sometimes you meet some fat old bastards who like to dress up like mama and ask baby to suckle their man-tits. Whoa. That was an unpleasant flash of memory.

  The hookers were supposed to be our kind, and the johns were either our kind or the weirdo breathers who love our kind.

  The joint was all plush and purple, layers of velvet and silk. Expensive, if any of it was real. Could’ve been felt and cotton for all I knew. They were going for some exotic harem from faraway Araby or a Manchurian opium den notched up to 106%. I wasn’t surprised, honestly, to see a few johns sprawled out here and there, hitting the pipe. It was that kind of place. The scent of dope smoke mingled with the slight smell of decay.

  “Hey, man,” one of the johns said, choking on his puff of mootah then laughing like a goober on parade. “You work here?”

  “Nah,” I said.

  “Hey, wait, chum. I’m almost out.” He reached out with no real energy. “You tell the management I’m sucking on ashes here?”

  I’d like to think my response was reasonable and well measured. I grabbed the little pipe-head by the short and hairies of his lapel and flung him against the wall. The other johns either buried their heads in their blats or laughed between puffs.

  “Yeah, the management, sure,” I said. “I’ll let ’em know to come around and fluff up your pillow. Mayb
e comp you a handy while they’re at it.”

  “Hey, ease off, man,” the pipe-head said, sputtering. “I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”

  “Sure,” I said, “and the iceberg didn’t mean nothing by crossing the path of the Titanic either.”

  “What do you want, man?” The pipe-head held up a fistful of cash. “I ain’t got much. Just enough for a… you know.” He gave a couple of hip thrusts that made me want to beat him even more.

  I grabbed the cash and stuffed it back into his jacket pocket. “I don’t want your cash, jackass. You know Eddie and Joey?”

  He shook his head. “Never heard of ’em, man.”

  I believed him. Too high or too stupid to lie. Leastways to lie properly.

  “All right,” I said, letting him go. “So where’s this management you’re always on about?”

  He slid down the wall and came to a rest, butt-first, on the floor. He looked up at me, smiling perversely, no doubt the effects of the tea. “You mean Mighty?”

  That was just about confusing enough to rile me up again. I stopped a hair shy of decking the kid and figured, hey, what the hell, you catch more flies with honey than with cheese. “Sure. Why not?”

  “He’s over there, man.” He pointed at a cotton-candy-colored counter straight out of a malt shop, with a lift-up leaf and everything. All it lacked was a soda jerk with a paper hat polishing the top and a list of prices in white letters on a black chalkboard.

  Come to think of it, a price list might’ve done wonders for that place.

  I turned my attention from the little twerp with the pipe and stepped toward the counter.

  “Hey, man,” Pipesy McGee said, pressing his luck. “While you’re over there—”

  “Watch it, you,” I growled.

  Actually, there was one nice touch once I got over there: a little bell like they have at fancy hotels and auto garages to ring the attendant. I rang. A colored fellow decked out in a bespoke purple suit strutted out of the back room. He seemed to slide across the floor and did a little twirl when he reached the counter.

  “Hey, my man,” he said. “Give me some skin.” He held out his palm.