“What you got for me?” the head of Hat Scratch asked when we were finally all settled.
I got nothing.
“A proposal,” Alcibé said before I got myself into too much trouble with my silence.
The old pimp burst into laughter. Not the false kind of laughter he seemed to bust out at every turn, either. He seemed to genuinely find the situation funny. “What’s that, head? You want a spot in my hat rack? Ain’t got no body. Ain’t got no legs. Well, we ain’t got much demand for homo-heads either.”
“There’s no need to be crude, Mr. Dull,” Alcibé said with more dignity than I would have imagined a dismembered meat skull to be capable of mustering.
Even Mighty seemed impressed. He leaned his chair back on two legs. “All right, so lay it on me.”
“We are partners in a very lucrative detective agency,” Alcibé said.
“Private dicks?” Mighty interrupted with a cackle.
“Sometimes they call us that,” the head admitted.
“Sorry,” Mighty Dull said, waving his hand. “Only use I got for private dicks is ten dollars a pop for certain customers. And I don’t get those customers all that often. So you two ain’t staying here.”
“We’re not offering our services as… what’s the word?”
“Gigolos,” Mighty supplied.
“Gentlemen cowboys,” Alcibé supplied. I assume he made up a euphemism he preferred right on the spot. “Not at all. What I’m saying is, suppose we put up our shingle here.”
Mighty looked from the head in my crotch up to my face and back again. He leaned back and lit up a cigarette. “Get out.”
“Come on, Mighty,” I said.
“Now, I remember you, first of all. Mr. Braineater Jones, except what the hell is wrong with a deadhead that calls hisself that, hmm? You strolled up in here, steal some time with one of my hos—”
“You offered that to me,” I said.
“Whatever you want to call it, big shot,” Mighty said. “The idea is the first hit is free, and then you pay afterward. You never followed up with the second part.”
“Maybe the product wasn’t to my liking. No offense to Brigid,” I said. “That’s kind of how the whole pusher thing is supposed to work, Mighty.”
Mighty had a face like he had just sucked a lemon whole out of its skin. He spat a little tobacco that had gotten loose from his fag on the ground. “Let’s make a donut hole in the conversation.” Mighty made a circle with his pointer finger. “Supposing I hook you up with a room for your usage and you start working out of my whorehouse. What possible value is that to me?”
“Well, for one thing, you’d have your own personal detectives on staff,” I said.
“Bodyguards,” Alcibé said. “Bouncers. You name it.”
“A head with no fists and a guy with no brains is going to be my bouncers?” Mighty said, “What is you, five foot nothing? You ain’t even as scary as half my hookers, let alone my clientele.”
“Well,” I said, “do you ever have dine and dash problems, if you know what I mean? Pump runners?”
“Now and then,” Mighty admitted. “Mostly with Ed and Joey. And you scared them two off. Now that I think about it, you two idiots have cost me customers. And the truth is, you may think I’m an idiot because of the color of my skin and the way I talk and the way I treat the ladies, but I’m not. I know who you is. I know who Lazar is, and I don’t get all my booze from him, but he comes around still. He’s like a damn patron saint to you and me and ours. So you might be all right with trying to piss him off and run to me, but I ain’t. Now get out for real, or I’ll break your kneecaps and keep you on the floor ’til Lazar can get here. You dig?”
I did not, in fact, dig, but I left anyway.
Boy. Dayzha voo for him and me and you. How does one find oneself repeating old patterns, going back to old places?
A bridge. The first bridge I ever saw in my unlife. And wouldn’t you believe it, the same word-salad spouting underboss was waiting for me. He had replaced my little newspaper hat with a bit of tin foil, the edges twisted into Viking horns.
“Get ready,” I whispered to Alcibé.
“For what?” he asked suspiciously.
“Oh holy night,” the lunatic cried out. “The beef is coldly sputtering. O-yay! O-yay!”
I didn’t wait for him to continue. “Long bomb!” I flung Alcibé at him, not so hard that if he hit the ground, he would splatter or even really be affected. The head bared his teeth in midair or something, because he really latched on to the stewbum’s shoulder as soon as he hit.
The loon squirmed and jumped and batted at Alcibé. “Out, out, damn Fido! I don’t want your death glove cancer fire brain mojo!”
I could see Alcibé growling and sputtering like a dog. There was something a bit absurd about it. It made me laugh. It was enjoyable watching that son of a bitch get his comeuppance. I didn’t think our condition was transmissible. At least according to Gnaghi, it was pretty well randomized. Still, I wouldn’t have minded one bit if the captain of the SS Cuckoocloudlander had ended up like me.
He finally managed to scrabble Alcibé off his shoulder and then punted him, but bad. Oh, shit. The derelict went running off in one direction, and my best friend went flying in the other. My fault.
I sprinted toward the falling head. Deadheads didn’t historically move much faster than “shamble” but needs must as the devil drives. I wasn’t going to make it. That was clear. I dove. Maybe that would do it. Nope.
He bounced once, twice, then came to stop. I crawled toward him.
“Alcibé?” I said. “Alcibé, are you all right?”
Silence.
“Damn it!” I yelled at the sky, “If I ever thought You were up there, I don’t now! Damn You!”
Then there was a croak. “Jones.”
I rolled over to stare at him. His head was partially flattened, but I guess the brain hadn’t been destroyed.
“Yes?” I said.
“I’m starting to regret following you into exile.”
November 24, 1934
I went into the five and dime like nothing was wrong. I even got as far as putting my fingers on a glass bottle of delicious, amber-colored Listerine before I heard the shotgun cock. I cleared my throat—there was a roach in it. “Just got a little halitosis, mac.” I tried my best to disguise my voice.
“Whyn’t you just vamoose, Jones?”
“Damn it,” I muttered. I sighed, watching the sweet bottle of mouth rinse—which had been so close to being mine—slip away, back into the shelf that housed it. I turned and looked at the storekeeper. He had real thin wireframe glasses and a white shirt like he was a druggist, but he wasn’t one. I couldn’t read anything in his eyes. He wasn’t shaking, but he was one of our kind, and I don’t know that we do shake when we’re nervous. It was my only hope anyway.
“Come on, Joe,” I said, not knowing his name—although maybe I should’ve. “You could give me a break.”
“Mr. Bethany gave you a break, didn’t he? And how’d you repay him? No, you’d better just mosey along.”
So that was it. No one was breaking ranks with Lazar, not for a no-account bum like me. In the Altstadt and the rest of the city, I got the bum’s rush just for being a deadhead. In the Mat, where I was supposed to be welcome, it was the cold shoulder.
“Please, Joe,” I said, putting my hands on the counter, although that was close enough that he could put the barrel of the shottie directly to my forehead. “Just a taste. Just a zozzle. I’m dyin’ here.”
“Well, then go die out there. Don’t die in my store. I don’t want a braineater in here, and I don’t want to become one myself because I crossed the bootleggers.”
The five and dime wasn’t the only place to give me the boot, but it was the one I was most hoping wouldn’t. I trudged back to the bridge feeling about as low-down as a catfish in a sewer.
The head was jammed, inverted, into the hole of a cinder block for s
afe keeping. “Any luck?”
“Yeah, I got champagne and Bacardi, whatever you want. Jeeves is bringing it around in the limo.”
“What do you say to a bite to eat, then?”
“Won’t make me feel any better.”
“Maybe it’ll take your mind off it.”
I sighed and sprawled back against a pile of bricks. “Nah, I don’t think so, head.”
“Come on,” he said. “Thanksgiving’s next week. Let’s have a bite to eat like we’re regular old breathers.”
“We can go on Thursday, then,” I said.
“Nah, you don’t want to go to the soup kitchen on Thursday. Bet there isn’t even a line today.”
I looked over at him. Alcohol-starved, miserable prisoners hiding under a bridge, fighting off other derelicts to maintain our tenuous control of said bridge. He was just trying to make me feel better, I guess.
“Okay,” I said and wrenched him out of the concrete.
We stood in line at the men’s mission. I looked around. How many of these were our kind? Were any of them?
It seemed ridiculous, in a way, to take food out of the mouths of living, breathing human beings who needed it. We were just doing it for tradition. But I guess that’s important, too. We needed a sense that our universe was grounded in some kind of objective reality.
Wait. What? Was I an astronomy professor or what?
We could’ve done with a few shots of booze and been on our way, but Alcibé was pretty insistent. I had him in a parrot cage again. Not the nice one we had left behind but one I had jury-rigged out of some mesh and covered with a discarded window curtain. Still, I wasn’t the most goofy-looking guy there. One fellow had a shopping cart full of Coca-Cola bottles. Another brought his mangy, flea-ridden mutt in with him. They served us all just the same.
I wandered out into the alley once I had my tray. Had to. Had to if I wanted to involve the head without treating him like a parrot. I made sure to get a little extra of everything.
“No bedpan?” he said.
“Couldn’t find one,” I said. “We’re in an alley. Just eat and let it go wherever.”
We sat there for a while chowing down. Turkey, a little bit of filling, some poorly mashed potatoes, and some miserable succotash. Strange as it was to be sitting in an alley next to a dismembered head and eating food stolen from the poor, it felt somehow normal.
“You think they get swamped with donations this time of year?” I asked.
“I don’t know about swamped. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re eating gobble-gobble morning, noon, and night for a few weeks.”
“What I wouldn’t give for a taste of Crow—”
“Don’t start that! We came here to get our minds off it, remember?”
“I remember,” I said. “I just can’t. It’s so damn hard.”
“You think this is hard? This is nothing. You should’ve seen the Somme. Bodies stacked like cordwood. Not even a ditch to yourself unless the Hun got your trenchmate. And then you couldn’t even appreciate the privacy because you were lonely. This isn’t hard. That was hard.”
“Were you ever scared?” I asked.
He was munching on some strained carrots or something. He squeezed it through his gullet into some cardboard boxes he was sitting on.
“Huh?”
“Over there,” I clarified.
“Oh.”
It was a while before he said anything. I stared at a sad little chunk of gobble-gobble on the edge of my fork. I turned it to and fro.
“Yeah, once or twice,” he said, “but not as often as you’d think. There comes a point where all you can do is rely on your training to get you through.”
I munched darkly on some white meat. “And if you don’t have any training?”
“Then you rely on your friends,” he answered, without missing a beat.
November 25, 1934
Woke up this morning. The head was gone. I looked around. Had he rolled off? Not likely. Had one of the vagrants come by and snatched him up? I was a heavy sleeper, but I knew damn well I would’ve heard that. Alcibé would’ve made sure to yell loud enough to wake me.
If my stomach had still been bubbling and bursting with vital juices, I knew how it would have felt. It would’ve felt as if a big chunk of ice had plunked down in it. I felt absent not having that feeling. Does that make any sense? Like life was slipping away from me a little more every day. We could pretend when we were part of the community. At least then there were other play-actors acting like everything was the same as it had been before unlife.
I stood up. I knew it wasn’t vagrants, not even that King Visigoth Fisher guy. All my bottles were in the brown paper bag, unmolested except for what I had already drunk. Why would they take the head and leave the booze? Why would they take the head, anyway?
No, it was deliberate. Spiteful. To be sure, I checked all around. Nope. Nowhere to be seen.
There was only one place he could be. I waited until noon, when the sun was bright and our kind were not out in the street. We were nocturnal creatures. Not by any biological or societal necessity, but because we hated to be seen. Hated to be noticed. We avoided showing our faces in public. Darkness shrouded everything.
I knew I had to be careful. Homer was blind, but he wasn’t stupid. There was a creak in one floorboard, I knew that well. His cat stared at me, waiting. I could’ve said something, could’ve put my finger over my lips or something equally asinine. I didn’t. What was the point? Cats didn’t understand such things. We were all fundamentally prisoners of our own languages, or lack thereof.
Man, am I ever waxing grandiloquent today. Even that word was pretty fancy.
I don’t know how I snuck past the fence. Once I was past him, he turned. Heard something, or smelled something, more likely. I inserted my key into the door of the cage as slowly as humanly possible and held the door stiff as I unlocked it. It creaked ever so slightly as I opened it just enough to slip through.
“Jones?”
I stood stock-still. Waited. I would’ve held my breath if I was still alive. Would’ve willed my pounding heart to stop beating if it wasn’t a shriveled black old husk. I waited for him to turn away, then one-two one-two and through and through went up the steps, snicker-snack.
When I got up the steps, the office door was hanging wide. That was a first. Even when I had visitors, they usually had the common decency to close the door. Something made me pull my piece out of my pocket.
I stepped inside and peered around. Nothing seemed amiss. Alcibé was nowhere to be seen. There was, though, a pink cakebox on my desk. I took a few steps forward and checked out the window. “Head?”
No answer.
“Alcibé,” I said, slightly louder.
Shit. I took a look at the box. A note squatted beside it, crumpled into a ball so it wouldn’t blow away. I flattened out the note, which was written on a familiar sheet of paper that took me just a second to place.
HOW DOES IT FEEL?
I reached into the depths of my trench coat and pulled out this journal. A page had indeed been torn out. They had been there. Had their filthy hands all over me.
I opened the box. I looked at my hand, the one I had put to the cardboard. I could feel it quaking, but I saw it wasn’t moving at all. The memory of a muscle. A feeling. Something like a compulsion. I expected the fingers to quiver, but they lay there, limp, like a squid baked to death by the sun.
The head had been lovingly secreted in the box at a careful angle so that the lid could close. A red pocketknife, like a Boy Scout’s or something, jutted out of the soft spot that in the head of a baby grew harder over time but never diminished completely. His jaw hung open like he had one last word to tell me, but probably he had died screaming. And dead he was, or double dead, or put down as our kind so inelegantly put it. Dead as a doornail. Son of a bitch. I closed the box and put it aside.
I buried my face in my hands to think. What do you do with something like t
hat? Chuck it in a dumpster? Try to give him a fancy burial? Maybe cremate it? I didn’t know.
There was no reason to be sad, I told myself. The head had never done any good for anybody, least of all me. He had been a nuisance, really. I was well rid of him. Still, loneliness was an unpleasant travelling companion. Just to hear him joke and jibe and tell me everything was jake was a great relief sometimes. He had known more about the community than I did, always had, had proven himself an asset in that arena.
It wasn’t like I cared about him. How do you care about a head? Nobody could care about a head. Still, maybe he shouldn’t die unmourned. I justified it to myself that way. Nobody deserved to die alone, unmourned. I sat there for a while, rocking back and forth, trying to summon tears. How had Lazar done it? Maybe he wasn’t really…
I stood up. It had to be Lazar. I had taken someone important from him, so he had taken someone important from me. He couldn’t be satisfied with banning me from what little I had left in my life.
I drew the pocketknife out of my friend’s skull, closed it, and tucked what little of his remains remained under my shoulder.
November 26, 1934
I went to the docks. There was a garbage barge taking off that I managed to jump on. As it weighed anchor, I spotted a familiar all-black figure standing by the water’s edge watching me. The Grim Reaper raised his hand to his cap and walked off wordlessly. I suppose matters were settled between us.
As I lay amongst the piled eggshells and banana peels, I remembered thinking that I wouldn’t have been able to stand the smell if I was still alive. I could still smell it—after a fashion—but it didn’t bother me.
I had one last Lucky Strike. Not sure quite what I had been holding onto it for, but I pulled it out. I also pulled out the head and held it aloft. “Alas, poor Yorick.” I grinned as I set the head down in a little pile of garbage, on top of a plush red pillow I think was once a dog bed. “See? I knew the right lines.”
Braineater Jones Page 17