by Steve Vernon
He tried to scream. I resealed the duct tape. Then I waited a moment for that tight panicked shade of blue to re-emerge.
Perfect.
I loosened the gag and repeated my warning. He was a slow learner. I had to repeat the process twice before he was suitably conditioned. I didn’t think any less of him for being so obtuse. Panic is not particularly conducive to the reasoning process.
“You have to try and remain calm,” I warned him.
I inserted the transfusion needle into his arm. The needle went in smoothly. I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t want him to squirm and cause me to miss the vein. This whole job was carefully planned out. I didn’t want him to go and spoil it.
“Remain calm,” I repeated.
Repetition is soothing to horses and dogs and small children. Unfortunately, an asphyxiating man is far less easy to calm.
“Listen. I’m poking an open needle into your arm. If you squirm too much I might accidentally force an air bubble into your veins. Do you know that an air bubble in your bloodstream will kill you quicker than any bullet? Please don’t make me kill you too quickly.”
His eyes got big. He calmed visibly, staring up at me from behind his duct tape gag.
“Are you ready to cooperate?”
He nodded. I didn’t believe him. I retightened the gag. Then I brought out the transfusion gear.
“Exsanguination is a simple operation,” I assured him. “The Red Cross and ten billion mosquitoes perform it every day. You need to hold still while I drain your blood. Remember that air bubble? Killing you accidentally is the last thing on my mind.”
It was the truth. I try to never tell a lie. If it was a good enough motto for George Washington, it was good enough for me. Lucius ceased his struggling and began to breathe with short and quiet breaths. Then, as the transfusion proceeded his movements weakened. His breathing shallowed.
“Steady, steady.” I chanted. Patience is a wonderful magic. With a bit of patience and a whole lot of Vaseline a full grown man can successfully sodomise a horsefly.I felt him relax. It was time for my sermon.
“Shall I tell you what you did to deserve this treatment?”
He stared up at me, too weak to nod.
“You know what you did, don’t you?”
I think his eyes nodded. Or maybe they just rolled back into his skull.
I kept on talking.
“Michael Leyburg. Do you remember the name? You should, you know. You ruined his life. You didn’t think his blood was pure enough, did you? You didn’t want your daughter marrying a Jew, did you?”
I shook my head impatiently. How could such a prejudice exist in the twenty first century? Hadn’t we learned anything since the Inquisition? Any answer to that question was lying on the ping pong table before me, half dead from blood loss. I wondered why you would need a ping pong table in your office. Was it for stress release? Did he stage impromptu tournaments? Or was he a closet Forrest Gump fanatic?
“Don’t die. I’m not through with you yet. Just wait a minute while I begin the transfusion.”
I had the transfusion gear out of the car trunk and mounted on a hospital IV stand, ready to go. It took me three days of volunteer work at the Red Cross to get the technique down. I was proud of my effort. You wouldn’t believe that I flunked my high school science fair and needed to read the instructions twice before programming my DVD player.
“You ruined his life. You paid to have him raped. You wanted to punish him. To hurt him. To break his spirit. Did you know that one of the bastards you hired was HIV positive? I bet you did, didn’t you?”
Lucius tried to shake his head. He made a small strangled noise beneath the gag. The truth was I didn’t care if he knew or not. He was a job, nothing more but I didn’t tell him that. He might have wept, but there wasn’t enough moisture left in his body.
“You gave him HIV. You stole his pride. You ruined his life.”
I tried to keep my voice even although I wanted to shout at him. That wouldn’t do. Shouting would only spoil the soundtrack.
“Did he tell you about his brother? Did you even try to get to know him before you ruined him? You ought to get to know someone before you destroy them, don’t you think?”
I knew everything I needed to know about Lucius. I knew he was a fat and greedy man who needed to learn a lesson. I was going to teach it to him tonight.
“He had a brother, you know. A brother who loved Michael nearly as much as Michael loved your daughter. A brother who’d done quite well in the commodity market. I suppose that part doesn’t surprise you, does it? Jews are good at that sort of thing, aren’t they?”
I held my anger like a knife, working it into him one inch at a time. I kept trying to convince myself that none of this was personal. It was just a job.
“That’s the problem with perceptions. You look at someone and see one thing and then you make up the rest. You fill in the blanks with your bullshit and then you have the gall to believe your own brand of crap.”
He started to glaze out. I slapped him hard enough to regain his attention.
“Michael’s brother did quite well. He made quite a bit of money. Enough to hire me.”
His eyes rolled up like bubbles of sea foam waiting to be popped.
“He hired me to punish you. To hurt you. Don’t let the collar fool you. I don’t give a damn about your spirit. If you have any soul left I’m going to burn it out of you.”
I watched as the blood in the second bottle drained into his veins. I kept talking to him. The sermon wasn’t over yet.
“Blood in, blood out. Isn’t that what they say? I’m giving you a total blood transfusion. I’ve emptied out every bit of your blood and I’m replacing it with a brand new supply. There are athletes who pay money for this sort of treatment. They claim it invigorates them. That it gives them fresh new strength.”
I smiled. “It’s amazing what people will pay money for.”
More blood flowed out. It was calming, like watching the tide come in.
“Are you invigorated yet, Lucius?”
More blood flowed. My calm deepened.
“Of course it all depends on where you get the blood from, now doesn’t it? It doesn’t do to pump low grade gasoline into a brand new Ferrari, now does it?”
He made a little sound around the duct tape gag. I think he was weeping. I thought about his daughter. I wondered if she would weep too.
“Shall I tell you where I got this blood from? Have you ever heard the term Purple Jesus? It’s a college thing. You go to a frat party, and there’s a big vat of grape Koolaid in the center of the room. I don’t know why it has to be grape. Maybe it’s a pagan thing, like Bacchus.”
More blood flowed. Blood was like sea water that way. Its basic components were mostly water and salt. God always kept the important things simple.
“Then everyone brings a bottle of some cheap rotgut and dumps it into the vat. It’s a frat house thing. At the end of it you see God and he’s purple.”
Lucius made wet pleading eyes, like a sheep begging for slaughter. He was almost gone. I wouldn’t let it end that fast. Not yet.
“Do you know how I’ve spent my last two weeks?”
He stared blankly.
“I’ve spent them on the street. I’ve spent them in every soup kitchen and alley in the city. I’ve spent them in every whorehouse and flop joint. I spent a lot of Michael’s brother’s good money in the process.”
I smiled. I was enjoying myself.
“I spent it on blood. I’ve been gathering blood from every wino and whore who was desperate enough to sell it. Do you have any idea how far down the road a whore has to go before she gets that desperate? How many men she might have let inside her body?”
He began glazing out. He was settling into unconsciousness. It could be shock, his body rejecting all those mixed blood cells but I knew better than that.
“And not all of those whores were women, Lucius.”
He felt tha
t. He showed that look to me, deep inside his eyes. I’ve seen that look before. That look that the dying get when they feel the pit bull of despair gnawing at what was left of their guts.
“So there you have it. A Purple Jesus party, just for you. You ought to be honored. My soup making is renowned. I’ve pumped you full of a soup d’jour teeming with every sexually transmitted microscopic bacteria and disease ever imagined. All of those impurities swimming inside your veins.”
He started to kick. He made angry sounds beneath his gag.
“Of course it wasn’t all tainted blood. That would be inhuman. I made certain to include a couple of pints of good clean blood to cut the contamination. I got it from a rabbi on the Lower East side. I told him I needed it to save a Catholic child, whose parents couldn’t afford the hospital bill.”
He squirmed. I smiled. I was enjoying this. I wasn’t feeling the least bit guilty. “Do you know what he said when I asked him if the child’s faith mattered to him, Lucius? He said that blood knows no faith, no border, no discrimination. Isn’t that a pretty thought, Lucius?”
I finished the transfusion. I watched him get his strength back. I watched his anger and rage build. He was pissed with me on principal. He’d spend the rest of his life hating his own blood. The whole story was a lie, of course. I’d just pumped his own blood back into him, but he didn’t need to know that.
I loosened the gag. He spat at me. I resealed the gag.
“We’re not through yet.”
I hooked up the last transfusion bottle. It was a heavy clear thing of solid glass. “You don’t like what I’ve done for you, do you Lucius? You don’t like your new blood? You don’t think that it’s clean enough for you, do you?”
I hooked the last bottle up. I carefully held the poke needle poised over the largest vein I could find.
“Let me cleanse it for you, Lucius,” I smiled in what I hoped was an appropriate beatific manner. Then I jammed the needle in, careful not to spill any on my fingers. It wouldn’t do to spatter sulfuric acid on my hands.
“This’ll clean you out, good and proper.”
It took him five minutes to scream the duct tape gag loose. Another ten to stop screaming. I read him his final unction as fast as I could, keeping the camera running through the whole thing.
The screams stopped at 9:28. Punctuality was a virtue.
I think he felt the whole thing, the whole time.
At least I prayed he did.
* * *
Jacob Leyberg was a tall man with sad eyes that glinted hopefully as I handed him the tape.
“He’s paid for his crimes?”
“He’s paid for his sins,” I corrected.
Jacob’s eyes shone. He honestly thought this would make things better. I knew it wouldn’t help at all. Closure sounded easy, like closing a door but grief was the uninvited party guest that didn’t know when to leave. Sometimes you had to throw its ass out into the street. Sometimes you had to nail the door shut. And sometimes, nothing worked.
“I’ve edited the whole thing into the middle of a Japanese horror movie. There’s no danger of embarrassing questions being asked if the wrong person sees the tape.”
“You had no trouble with continuity?” He smiled when he asked that. He was cracking a joke. I took that as a good sign.
“It’s Japanese horror,” I explained. “Low budget and a bright red imagination. Plot is secondary to gut wrenching imagery. Takashi Miike would definitely approve.”
He took the video tape from my hands, clutching it as if it were a sacred relic. I knew he hoped that watching this tape would erase the image of his brother’s corpse swinging from his kitchen ceiling with the pre-timed breakfast coffee pot, perked and waiting.
We shook hands.
“Thank you, Father Simon.”
I didn’t correct him. He had enough mistakes to bear, his brother’s and his own. I checked myself in the hall mirror on my way out. The eye had moused over blue-black from where Maugham tagged me. My collar was still straight. Behind the mirror glass, soft like a half whispered prayer I saw the acid burned face of Lucius Cartland Maugham staring out at me.
This kind of work has its price.
I stepped out into the street and headed downhill. If I hurried I could get to the kitchen before the flock started to show up.
I made it to the kitchen with an hour to spare.
“Good morning Father Simon,” The dishwasher said.
I stared at him standing there by the sink, already elbow deep in soap suds.
I looked at my own hands.
Leyburg’s money would buy an awful lot of soup.
“Don’t let the collar fool you,” I said to him. “I’m just here to make the soup.”
Rolling Stock
If you put your ear to a railroad track you can hear the sound of train wheels thundering hundreds of miles away.
I rolled on into the Big Apple inside the gut of a boxcar that stank of straw and old cardboard and an all-pervasive unidentifiable funk you’d swear had been moldering since Satan took his first teenaged swan-dive of rebellion from out of God’s celestial hay loft. I felt the unmistakable reverberation of something coming and yet I was as helpless to avoid it as a deer in a pair of oncoming headlights.
Traveling by boxcar is out of style these days. Nowadays people travel by cellular phone and megabytes and blinks of existence flashing by on some unknown deity’s computer screen but I don’t care for any of that. I’m a bit of an archaism, I suppose. A man who likes to do things in his own way and whenever I travel I like to take the train.
You want a picture of me? Color me lean and dark, streaks of lightning where the eyes should be, a few too many scars, a few too many unanswerable questions etched in the furrow of my brow. Lines around the eyes where the crows tap danced a little too closely, making me older than you ever should guess. I wear a sailor’s pea coat, given to me by an old Dutchman tired of wandering. I’ve crowned myself with a black watch cap to keep the cold off my ears and the rain off my head. There’s a stout pair of army boots, nearly worn out from a thousand miles of wandering, for the battles I had to fight.
We’ll get to one of these battles, by and by.
*
Like I said, I’d rolled into New York City just around midnight. I jumped from the boxcar. I felt the comforting crush of good old terra firma slamming up through the soles of my feet and accordionating my knees. I made a perfect three and one half point landing - two feet, one hand, and the left cheek of my buttocks. What the hell. Anyone you walk away from is all right by me.
I stood up, looking wary for the railroad police. I dusted myself off and looked around again, double wary. I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched by a pair or two of eyes. I turned around and that’s when I saw him. He stood in the shadows of a switch house, staring at me like I was a midnight snack he’d been waiting for all night.
The piggyback man. The one who never rides alone.
Oh I didn’t know him right off but I knew straight away there was something unnatural about this man. Something in the way he seemed to move, even when he was standing still. Something in the way he looked like he was a tallow candle wicking itself down into a pool of nasty fat. Out Arkansas way I’d seen a man standing in the belly of a burning barn, wearing a skin full of fire like it was some kind of kingly cape. He had looked like one of those X-ray pictures your doctor will show you, like his skin was a lamp shade, and you could see the bones shining blackly through. He’d looked that way for a heartbeat or so until he knelt over the body of the woman he’d run into the barn to try and rescue and the two of them went up together like thirteen-year-old pitch pine.
That was the way it was with this fellow, like he was sizzling away, like he was vanishing, like a mouthful of spit spat onto a pancake griddle.
Now living on the road like I do, I’d seen a lot of hungry men. Bull up or wire out, that’s the way it goes when your living hand to mouth. Some fellows get thicker the e
mptier they get like bears in hibernation; while other men wire out like they were getting set to hitch a ride on the next south-bound breeze.
Usually when I see a fellow looking this hungry I try and find him something to eat but I didn’t think I could spare what this fellow was hungering for. He looked lean but not the kind of hunger a weekend at McDonald’s would cure. Not a half a thousand Texas prime rib steaks were going to heal this fellow’s hunger. There was something in the way he eyeballed me that made me feel like a virgin at a satyr’s ball. Like he was getting ready to kick my tires and take me out for a test spin.
He walked on over.
I thought about running away but I’ve got this curious streak running about a mile wide right down the center of my soul. I was three parts alley cat, my granddad once told me, after pulling me out of an old Indian cave where I’d spent two nights speaking with something that hadn’t had a tongue in a hellish long time.
Grandad said “Easter, God put a question mark in men’s souls so they’d know how to wonder why but you don’t always have to find an answer, now do you?”
I don’t know about that, Grandad. I always thought wonder sounded like wander, and sooner or later if there was something that moved beyond knowledge I had to go on over and have a look.
So I walked on over to say hello to the piggyback man.
“Fine morning if the sun don’t shine too hard,” I said, even though it was round about midnight.
He narrowed his eyes and blinked. There was something about that, something in the way he blinked. Twice in the space of what should have been a single blink, like his eyelids were trying to echo themselves. So I winked back, once, and kept on talking
“It’s a fine night for a walk,” I said.
He blinked again and a chunk of his left ear fell off.
I bent down and picked it up. That probably wasn’t the wisest thing I’d ever done but I just couldn’t help it. What the hell. It probably wouldn’t hurt. The flesh was cold and hot, both together at the same time, like a snowflake when it’s melting in your hand.