The bokor’s niece hopped on one leg, trying to shake off the girl with the rapidity of a hummingbird. I wanted to step in and separate the two, but before I could, a brick flew through the air and smashed Francoise’s face in. Maybe I didn’t want to separate them that bad after all. The newly dead girl’s teeth littered the floor like kernels of corn under a scarecrow.
Delamort was sequestered in a closet chanting a cadence, haunting and eerie. I tried to put my shoulder into the door, but that made Alcibé yelp in pain.
“Watch it, you buffoon!” the head shrieked. “You almost staved my skull in.”
Turn the other cheek. That’s what I should have said to him. Ah, well.
Unable to come up with a pithy remark, I slapped him for cutting wise. I turned my other shoulder to the closet door, but after one or two mostly useless slams against it, I felt a massive hand descend on my headless shoulder like a dark shroud.
“Let me,” the big gorilla said.
I turned to see the whole angry crowd had stopped whaling on Francoise’s corpse and were watching my futile efforts with the door. I slid aside while gesturing to the door, like the lost Marx brother. The bartender smashed the door to splinters in one blow with the heel of his fist.
When the door burst open, we saw Delamort trying to pull on his old lady disguise while furiously jabbing needles into a hundred fetish dolls at once. I guess it’s hard for someone to split their concentration like that. The bartender palmed Delamort’s head with one hand and tossed him out into the round. I wouldn’t say I shed any crocodile tears for Delamort exactly, but it was tough watching the gang of deadheads rip him up like confetti.
As I watched the crowd satisfy its bloodlust, I realized the big gorilla was not watching them, nor was he joining in. His eyes were squarely on me. I didn’t turn to catch his gaze because I had an ominous feeling in the pit of my empty, non-stomaching stomach that if I turned away from the blood orgy and caught his gaze, he would’ve caved in my skull like it was nothing. Creepy. But finally the crowd finished its work and the moment of dread was over. The gorilla and me were just like we had been before: nothing to each other.
We had to rip apart the fetish dolls before the prisoners were free. I wish I could say there were a hundred happy reunions that day, but for the most part, nobody had ever met. They didn’t bother to thank me, and I didn’t mind. A lot of the escapees tousled Alcibé’s hair and bowed down to kiss his nonexistent feet, which I guess were my feet, being as he was mounted on me. The rest had to be carried out.
Ivan, though, remembered me. At least, he remembered I had been there before. He limped over to me on his hands, being as he had been separated from his lower appendages some days before.
“Well, it’s good to see you boys,” he said. “I think the bokor was about to liquidate his stock.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“Guess you never worked in retail,” Alcibé sighed.
I shrugged. I had no idea one way or the other.
“Let’s just say you fellows got here in the nick of time,” Ivan said.
“Well, now,” I said, “it’s not that I’m a glory hog, but you know, only one of us walked out of here and walked back in.”
“Why don’t you pull that stick out of your ass, Jones?” Alcibé said.
“I’d say whoever pulled it out of yours pulled too hard, head,” I muttered.
“Well, listen,” Ivan said, “what do I owe you two? You said before I was your client.”
“Oh, yeah, that,” I said. “Well, your unbirth sister, or whatever you call her, was going to pay.”
“What? Are you stupid, Jones?” Alcibé whispered in my ear, though I’m sure the poor legless bastard could see some kind of conversation was going on. “Let him pay twice.”
“No, I insist,” Ivan said.
“See, Jones, he insists,” Alcibé said.
“Well, I ain’t going to refuse you, Ivan,” I said. “Oh, that reminds me. I’ve got something for you. I wonder if they’ll still work?”
“What?”
“Your legs.”
November 9, 1934
I was back to my old game of tossing cards into my hat. I was finally playing with a full deck—don’t say anything—but a game of whist with the new head on my table was exhausting, so I inevitably gave up and went back to the old toss.
“You ever been to Hat Scratch Fever?” I asked after missing the jack of spades.
“I’ve heard of it,” he said.
“Did you ever think about—”
“No.”
“You don’t even know what I was about to say.”
“You were going to offer to treat,” he said, “and I don’t care. I never paid for it, and I never will. That might work for you, Jones, but where I come from, we have a little more pride.”
I looked him up and down, the full foot and a quarter of him. He wasn’t smiling.
“You’re putting me on,” I said.
He finally cracked a grin. “Yeah. Were you getting at buying me a new body?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Or I know this scaredy-baredy at the graveyard who would probably dig us up one for free.” Whoa. My aim was way off that time. I set off a rattrap and wrecked the ace of ones, all in one action. The noise warned all the rats and sent them scampering.
“I don’t know, Jones,” he said. “I’ve thought about it. But it wouldn’t be my body, you know.”
“So what, you’d rather be a useless head? Want me to find a plaque and hang you up on the wall? ‘Braineater Jones’s Hunting Lodge, no prey too small.’”
“I don’t want to be a head, but I want my body back. I don’t want some weird body that I don’t know what the previous owner did with it. What if he was a self-abuser with big hairy knuckles?”
“Who said we’re getting you a man’s body? I don’t let anybody flop with me but ginchy dames.”
“Any body?”
“Heads are okay. Where is your body, anyway?”
He shook his head so hard it looked like he was about to topple over. His neck didn’t quite stand him up perfectly. “I don’t know. Honduras, maybe.”
“Where’s that?”
“South of Mexico.”
I whistled. “Well, we’ll try to find your body right after I find my murderer.”
“Who says we have to solve your case first?”
“The one who’s not a useless neck pimple.”
“Well, we’d better get started, then. Have any of your memories come back?”
I looked up. “How do you mean?”
“Well,” he said, and I suppose if he’d been whole, he would’ve leaned back in his rocking chair and lit up a pipe or something. “When I was first turned, I was having real memories again after about a week. From what you’ve told me, it’s already been almost two.”
“Ten days,” I said. “I’m sure it’s different for everyone. Like puberty.”
Alcibé grunted. I couldn’t get any more cards in the hat after that, so I stopped tossing them.
I sighed. “Well, I get these flashes sometimes. Like a big thumping migraine. But they still kind of feel like they’re somebody else’s memories. And sometimes words and thoughts and phrases pop into my mind that don’t make sense. Like somebody else would’ve said them, but I did.”
“If we were still alive,” the head corpse said, “I’d guess you had some kind of brain injury. But as we’re dead, I know that’s not true.”
“Why not?” I said. “Lot of things cross over. Sleep, for instance. Why does a corpse need to sleep?”
“I don’t know about that,” he admitted, “but I can tell you that any real brain trauma, and you’d be put down.”
“Dead dead?” I said.
“Dead dead,” he agreed.
I grunted. Maybe so. There were a lot of things I still didn’t understand. “Does anybody ever not get their memories back, period?”
He thought for a moment. Strang
est thing I ever saw, a disembodied head thinking. Like watching a bust come to life right before your eyes. “I don’t think so,” he said. “But my experience is not all-encompassing.”
“No, I guess not,” I said.
“How do you feel about this partnership?” he asked.
I threw the whole rest of the deck up into the air. The cards tinkled down in a little flurry of spades and diamonds. “What partnership? What do you bring to the table aside from that wet spot there?”
“Experience, and I’ve got a good head on my shoulders. Well, you know what I mean.”
“I hate to break this to you, Alcibé,” I said, “but you’re about as useless as Dr. Watson. And I don’t have a soft spot for you, like Holmes did for his boy.”
We both sat silently for a moment. One by one, the cards appeared back in my hand.
“So you’ve read Doyle,” he said after a while.
“Yeah, I guess so. But everybody does, don’t they? Kids and such.”
“Perhaps,” he said, “but can you remember reading Doyle? Actually remember doing it?”
I thought for a moment. I felt a white flash before my eyes. It hurt, but yes, there it was. Yellowing, tea-stained pages of a book resting on a floor, myself supine and kicking my legs while reading it. “I can, actually.”
“That’s good. We have a tangible memory to start with. It could be a clue to your past life.”
“What, that I was a kid before I died? Let’s alert Hearst.”
He shrugged or whatever they call it when someone without shoulders tries to shrug. “Maybe it’s nothing. Or maybe you were an English professor. In any case, unless you were a kid with a lot of money, you probably went to the library more than once.”
“I didn’t say I remembered every story,” I said, “only that I knew who Dr. Watson was.”
“Fine,” he said and gave his little non-shrug again. “Never mind then.”
November 10, 1934
The next day I was back in the library. The place was looking threadbare as usual.
“You might think about getting a library card if you come in here much more often,” the librarian said.
I was the only one in the library, of course. No busy crowds to hide behind. Damn it. “Uh, yeah, sure. How much is that?”
“A nickel,” she said.
Highway robbery! I checked my pocket. Only about twenty bucks left from the Little Haiti caper. Not sure I wanted to spend it on that. “Well, ma’am, it’s tough all over. I don’t have that much right now—”
“Maybe you ought to come back when you do,” she said.
A squawk came from the covered birdcage strapped to my shoulder. “Rawk, pay the nice lady, rawk!”
I slammed the cage with my palm. Stupid corpse head.
The librarian’s eyebrow near about crawled up into her dusty ’do. “You ought to listen to your… parrot.”
Hmph. Hell of a place the Mat must be where you can take your pet any-damn-where. Well, I’m sure she must have seen stranger with the winos and wannabe gangsters wandering in and out. I tossed a nickel on the counter.
“Name?”
“Jones,” I said.
She tapped her pencil angrily against the counter. “First name?”
“Look, lady—” I started to say.
“Don’t you call me ‘lady!’”
“Rawk, don’t call her ‘lady,’” the birdcage agreed.
I slammed my palm against the cage again. If a real bird had been inside, a flurry of feathers would’ve flown out. I sighed. “No first name.”
“How about you get out?” she asked.
“How about Brian?”
Thank God that brutishness was over. With a brand new $0.05 blue library card with a metal strip in the middle, I wandered into what passed for the stacks in the Mat’s library. Once I found the mystery section, I flipped the cover back on the birdcage.
“So, what’s your plan?” Alcibé asked.
“This was your plan, chum bucket,” I said. “What do you think?”
“I guess you should grab all the Arthur Conan Doyle and see if any of the covers strike you as familiar.”
I turned to look at him angrily as best I could with him sitting on my shoulder. “How do you expect that to work?”
“That’s how memory works,” the head said. “It’s all flashes, underneath the surface of the conscious mind. After we’re done with all this, there’s a book by an Austrian guy you should read.”
I grabbed stacks and stacks of Holmes books. I was surprised and impressed by how many there were. Considering the guy had, what, two full-length novels, it’s incredible how many different combinations of short stories there were by different publishing houses and in different orders and with different covers. I took them over to one of the wobbly tables with the plastic kiddy chairs and spread them out like the pieces in a puzzle. More than one had the usual dark silhouettes in an alley. One cover featured an empty deerstalker hat and a still-smoking pipe. I ran my fingers over another with the title embossed in gold and no other decoration, but the feel of the letters didn’t stimulate anything in me. I must’ve been peering at them too long for the head’s taste.
“Anything?”
“Shut up,” I said. I looked around the room. Nobody there but a few drunks sleeping off last night. I pulled Alcibé out of his cage and laid him down on the table. There was something about the books. Something that tickled the back of my neck.
“Something’s coming back to you,” he said. “I can see it.”
“Yeah,” I said, “like when a word is on the tip of your tongue and you sit there for the rest of the day, and then it comes out a week later in the shower.”
“Ah, one of those,” he said.
I stood there scratching my head until I took off a chunk of my scalp. Muttering under my breath, I tried to stick it back on, but it was as if it was glued to my finger. I finally wiped it off under the table with all the wads of chewing gum.
If I keep falling apart like this, there won’t be much of me left to crack the case. I’d hate to think of a time when I’d envy Alcibé.
“You’ll have to do something about that,” he said.
“I’ve been thinking about getting a rug,” I said.
“Don’t you even think about it, my magnificent undead brother,” he said. “Be proud of who you are.”
“Yeah, whatever,” I said. “How do I kickstart this under-the-mind process bit?”
Alcibé stared at whatever I suppose he was pointed at, but his brow was furrowed with thought. Finally he spoke. “You ever play one of those little penny puzzles? You know, the one where you have a picture of, I don’t know, a boat, only there’s nine segments and only one hole and the boat’s all mixed up?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. Then reflecting on it, I added, “I think so.” I started moving the books around. I flipped one over. I moved them faster as if I was playing three-card monte. It occurred to me that I’d found another cover I had never seen. I flipped that one over. It became easier and easier. The books were a blur, but I could spot the ones I had never seen before. After a few minutes, I was left with three. I sat staring at them.
“Well,” the head kid said, “take a look.”
I opened the books and flipped through them. No notes in the margins. The pages were a little dog-eared. Nothing special. I looked at the cards in the backs of all three. Something struck me. He must have seen it.
“What is it?” he asked.
I actually pulled out this notebook and threw it down to the first open page. I pointed. “Look!”
“That’s your handwriting,” he said.
There was a name in all three of the books—Billy H. Must be me. Billy H.
Not sure I can handle that name right now. Of course, it’s only a jab in the right direction. How many Bills or Billys are there in the city? Millions? It’s the H that I’ve got to figure out.
The librarian was, of course, no he
lp whatsoever. She may have been a fixture there since time immemorial, but it wasn’t as though she would remember some kid from ten, fifteen, maybe twenty years ago. And no, they didn’t keep records like that, naturally. It was the Welcome Mat, after all, where people go to disappear and never return. Even the library was like a whirlpool.
I have a little more to go on today than yesterday, though. I grew up in the city, in the Mat. I knew my first name. A few more days like this, and I’ll get to where I need to be.
November 11, 1934
Armistice Day. Hard to believe. The head was up before me this morning.
He was staring out the window from his perch on my desk. I picked him up and moved him to the sill so he could get a better view, but there wasn’t much to see. The parade in the Welcome Mat was pretty sad. A few downtrodden, middle-aged men in their business suits with medals pinned on from the Great War. A couple of older geezers from Spain and the Philippines trailed them in wheelchairs.
“Does all that mean anything to you?” he said when I came into the office.
I didn’t really come anywhere, of course. The mattress was in the corner of the office, but we liked to pretend there were a variety of rooms. When he was in the foyer, for instance, I couldn’t hear him over in the billiard parlor.
“All what?” I asked.
“All this,” he said, clarifying nothing. “In Flanders Field the poppies grow, I watch them, count them, row on row, and so on so on, on we go.”
I flopped down into my chair. I had my first drink of the day. That sparked me up a bit. I checked my holes, weeded out a few maggots. It was getting to be a routine. They crunched like popcorn when I bit into their heads, and they tasted like nothing. The worst day had been the first, when they really founded a new Shanghai down there. Since then, it was only a little cleanup work daily. “You got a real lyrical mind, Alcibé. No, I guess it don’t mean anything to me.”
“It means something to me,” he said. “I’d march in it if I could walk.”
“You were in the war?”
“Yup. I was at the Somme.”
“And you can remember all that?” I said. “Like it was yesterday?”
He turned his face and pointed his eyes as best he could at me. “Like I’m there right now.”
Braineater Jones Page 9