He sat at his bare desk, his cindery eyes glaring at nothing, then he stumbled out of the cell of an office. The sounds and the heat of the shop seemed to rush at him and recede in waves on which the faces of Annette and Jackie and the customers were floating. He felt isolated, singled out—felt as he had throughout the trial.
Yet if he couldn’t be certain that he had been singled out then, why should he let himself feel that way now without trying to prove himself wrong? “I think I will go early after all,” he told Jackie and Annette.
Some of the shops were already closing. The streets were almost blocked with people who seemed simultaneously distant from him and too close, their insect eyes and neon faces shining. When at last he reached the alley between two office buildings near the courts, he thought he was too late. But though the shop was locked, he was just in time to catch the hairdresser. As she emerged from a back room, adjusting the strap of a shoulder-bag stuffed with presents, he tapped on the glass of the door.
She shook her head and pointed to the sign which hung against the glass. Didn’t she recognize him? His reflection seemed clear enough to him, like a photograph of himself holding the sign at his chest, even if the placard looked more real than he did. “Foulsham,” he shouted, his voice echoing from the close walls. “I was behind you on the jury. Can I have a word?”
“What about?”
He grimaced and mimed glancing both ways along the alley, and she stepped forward, halting as far from the door as the door was tall. “Well?”
“I don’t want to shout.”
She hesitated and then came to the door. He felt unexpectedly powerful, the winner of a game they had been playing. “I remember you now,” she said as she unbolted the door. “You’re the one who claimed to be sharing the thoughts of that monster.”
She stepped back as an icy wind cut through the alley, and he felt as though the weather was on his side, almost an extension of himself. “Well, spit it out,” she said as he closed the door behind him.
She was ranging about the shop, checking that the electric helmets which made him think of some outdated mental treatment were switched off, opening and closing cabinets in which blades glinted, peering beneath the chairs which put him in mind of a death cell. “Can you remember exactly when you heard what happened?” he said.
She picked up a tuft of bluish hair and dropped it in a pedal bin. “What did?”
“He killed himself.”
“Oh, that? I thought you meant something important.” The bin snapped shut like a trap. “I heard about it on the news. I really can’t say when.”
“Heard about it, though, not read it.”
“That’s what I said. Why should it matter to you?”
He couldn’t miss her emphasis on the last word, and he felt that both her contempt and the question had wakened something in him. He’d thought he wanted to reassure himself that he hadn’t been alone in sensing Fishwick’s death, but suddenly he felt altogether more purposeful. “Because it’s part of us,” he said.
“It’s no part of me, I assure you. And I don’t think I was the only member of the jury who thought you were too concerned with that fiend for your own good.”
An unfamiliar expression took hold of Foulsham’s face. “Who else did?”
“If I were you, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is, I’d seek help, and quick. You’ll have to excuse me. I’m not about to let that monster spoil my Christmas.” She pursed her lips and said “I’m off to meet some normal people.”
Either she thought she’d said too much or his expression and his stillness were unnerving her. “Please leave,” she said more shrilly. “Leave now or I’ll call the police.”
She might have been heading for the door so as to open it for him. He only wanted to stay until he’d grasped why he was there. The sight of her striding to the door reminded him that speed was the one advantage she had over him. Pure instinct came to his aid, and all at once he seemed capable of anything. He saw himself opening the nearest cabinet, he felt his finger and thumb slip through the chilly rings of the handles of the scissors, and lunging at her was the completion of these movements. Even then he thought he meant only to drive her away from the door, but he was reckoning without his limp. As he floundered toward her, he lost his balance, and the points of the scissors entered her right leg behind the knee.
She gave an outraged scream and tried to hobble to the door, the scissors wagging in the patch of flesh and blood revealed by the growing hole in the leg of her patterned tights. The next moment she let out a wail so despairing that he almost felt sorry for her, and fell to her knees, well out of reach of the door. As she craned her head over her shoulder to see how badly she was injured, her eyes were the eyes of an animal caught in a trap. She extended one shaky hand to pull out the scissors, but he was too quick for her. “Let me,” he said, taking hold of her thin wrist.
He thought he was going to withdraw the scissors, but as soon as his finger and thumb were through the rings he experienced an overwhelming surge of power which reminded him of how he’d felt as the verdict of the jury was announced. He leaned on the scissors and exerted all the strength he could, and after a while the blades closed with a sound which, though muffled, seemed intensely satisfying.
Either the shock or her struggles and shrieks appeared to have exhausted her. He had time to lower the blinds over the door and windows and to put on one of the plastic aprons which she and her staff must wear. When she saw him returning with the scissors, however, she tried to fight him off while shoving herself with her uninjured leg toward the door. Since he didn’t like her watching him—it was his turn to watch—he stopped her doing so, and screaming. She continued moving for some time after he would have expected her to be incapable of movement, though she obviously didn’t realize that she was retreating from the door. By the time she finally subsided, he had to admit that the game had grown messy and even a little dull.
He washed his hands until they were clean as a baby’s, then he parceled up the apron and the scissors in the wrapping which had contained his present. He let himself out of the shop and limped towards the bus stop, the book under one arm, the tools of his secret under the other. It wasn’t until passersby smiled in response to him that he realised what his expression was, though it didn’t feel like his own smile, any more than he felt personally involved in the incident at the hairdresser’s. Even the memory of all the jurors’ names didn’t feel like his. At least, he thought, he wouldn’t be alone over Christmas, and in future he would try to be less hasty. After all, he and whoever he visited next would have more to discuss.
SHOTS DOWNED, OFFICER FIRED by Wayne Allen Sallee
Wayne Allen Sallee has been in the previous nine volumes of The Year’s Best Horror Stories and has chosen this year to inform me that he was born on September 9, 1959, not September 19 as consistently reported here. He claims to have been born in Chicago and to live there still. Fans of his work might well wonder in which planetary system this Chicago might be.
Sallee is another of the small press demons, with hundreds of poems published nearly everywhere in addition to his short fiction. Since I discovered him under a flat rock, Sallee has been placing stories in major anthologies, publishing novels (The Holy Terror), thin volumes of verse (Pain Grin)—both of which are in European translation, and will soon have a chapbook from Tal Publications, Untold Stories of the Scarlet Sponge. His second novel, The Girl With the Concrete Hands, is making the rounds, and he is now at work on another, The Skull Carpenters. Not the singing group.
I, Epileptic Lines
I remember my father staring up at the ceiling. A young man back then, for I was in my single-digit years, he was lean and admirable in his policeman’s uniform. The shirt was almost the exact color as the blueberry Ice Pops we’d get at Buhler’s on the way back from the clinic. The ceiling was as white as the buttons on the shirt, buttoned with a strength I still do not have. The image comes back to me often, as sad a memory as words
better left unsaid to a past lover, particularly when I see the weariness in his sixty-year-old eyes. Next March, he will be a police officer for thirty years. The longest job I have held, besides my writing, has been five years. The city-issued shirts for the department are still the same shade of young hope and blueberry Ice Pops.
I had assumed that I would one day visit the clinic, that I returned on an October Saturday two years ago was purely spur-of-the-moment. Like when I recalled my father staring at the ceiling simply because I was feeling guilty about having a good day with no stress.
There were black-and-white television shows on back then. We would sit in the waiting room and watch a man chasing another man with one arm. My mother often said that it was the saddest show on television. Outside the glass door, boys and girls were wheeled to the burn ward or the place where, to my young mind, blind people were kept. I had never seen a blind person on Crystal or on Washtenaw, the only world I was aware of outside of my father’s Chevrolet Biscayne and the trips to the Cook County Clinics.
The black-and-white television screen would be reflected in the glass window, the sad man with black hair like my father’s running toward the boys and girls in wheelchairs, intangible, looking back over his shoulder at me.
This is where I spent much of my first thirteen years. Illinois Research is how I recall its name. Division of Services for Crippled Children. Polk and Wood Streets. A building of rust-colored walls and epileptic lines on the floors directing visitors and patients where to go to look for hope. Thirteen years. I shut my eyes to avoid thinking about how many years it must have seemed for my father.
The lines I am referring to were as easy to recall as the lines marking the elevated tracks on a Chicago Transit Authority map. Yellow, red, blue, black. Running along the black margin of floor next to the right wall of each corridor. An ongoing YOU ARE HERE type of thing, I suppose it gave parents a sense of reassurance. Some paths were discernible, after all. I am certain my father had no idea whatsoever how I would turn out, what paths I might be pushed down or wander along of my own volition, and I have never asked him
It was a warm Saturday, comfortable enough that I was willing to take the elevated train to the Loop. This far west, the Douglas line is in Vice Lords territory, and if it were any colder, I would have felt completely disadvantaged in the face of a confrontation. I knew an elderly man, once he was attacked on the way home from the Jewel store on Lawrence and Avers. He swung his bag of potatoes and scared the thugs off. If he had had nothing in his arms, he felt certain that they would have killed him.
So on this particular day in mid-October, I found myself again mesmerized by the elevated tracks passing within a baby’s breath of broken homes and failing businesses. As the train slowed before each station, there was time to make out the faded patterns on hanging laundry on the three-flats back porches. It was faded clothing, still considered usable after years of wear, that made me think of the Cook County Clinics. The place I used to call Illinois Research.
I vacated the train at 18th and Paulina, the Sears Tower visible in the distance like a birthmark on the sky. To my dismay, the building housing the clinics was closed on weekends. I was not content simply seeing the rusty walls and chrome doors. It was like watching a potential subplot dissolve in a film. There’s just not a hell of a lot you can do about it.
A security guard came to the glass door and let me enter. My backpack probably made me look like a grad student. We exchanged talk about the weather and my eyes found the lines on the floor. I had an idea of where I was going. The yellow line shot off to the right at the Diagnostic Center in a way that reminded me of the Voyager craft arcing out of the solar system after passing Saturn.
The red line dead-ended at the Pharmacy and another doorway that led to some mysterious place. It was a toss up between the royal blue and the black. I realized that the lines only seemed to jump around if you stared at them without blinking. When I saw the lines as a boy of seven, I was still having neck spasms and could not hold my head straight up like an alert puppet. Sometimes, my father would carry me as if out of a burning building. Released from detailed pain, I would stare intently at the lines from past my father’s beat-patrolman stride.
I was wearing gym shoes, again, my concerns of a confrontation with gang members, and so I did not even have the clocking of heels to mark my passage through the halls.
The room I wanted was numbered 18. Black numerals on an orange door. Fitting Halloween colors. Wooden frame chairs with blue cushions faced the doorway. Overhead lights were arranged in odd molecular patterns. It was the blue line that led to the doorway numbered 18. My father would sit just inside that doorway as the therapist led me further down another hallway.
I peered through the door’s window as if it were a peephole. A new generation of crippled children’s drawings covered a bulletin board, tacked up with white pins. Current role models from television and music. I recall drawing a scene of Martian tripods standing guard over a city in flames.
I have always been secretive of the things I had to do for those thirteen years. I vaguely refer to picking up maroon colored pills that were flat on one side and putting them into a tiny-necked bottle. Doing “airplanes,” that is, balancing my arms and legs in the air while my torso lay on the floor mat. Climbing steps. Descending the steps I had climbed.
I thought again of my father staring at the ceiling. He would invariable be doing this when the therapist brought me back out, and we would surprise him because I was never as loud as some of the other children. My father stared at the ceiling because he was praying. My father stared at the ceiling because he did not care to watch the show about the fugitive pursuing a one-armed man.
A one-armed man seen fleeing the scene of the crime. My father had his pursuits. I had the scene of the crime in front of me. The crime was never knowing what to say.
I did not look at my watch. I saw track lighting and knew that no one could stare at the ceiling for long anymore.
I had a full day ahead of me and went back to the remaining black line, assuming it would take me to a place that I could actually exit from.
II. Shots Downed, Officer Fired
The call came in the middle of his second hour of delirium, on his first night of furlough.
Cruising down the Federal Street corridor in complete silence; no partner, no drug-sniffing canines, no cop show theme song with a frenetic beat.
The squad ran beautifully, a new ’92 Chevy Caprice. Not one gang banger, not a single hustling meth jimmie to eyeball him. When the Lake-Dan Ryan elevated coasted two blocks down and three stories into the night sky, it was like a new-fangled fancy painting, squares of hospital glare; white against the lakefront’s summer turquoise.
Not one soul on board the four cars of the “B” train. Again, he was alone.
The city: his.
He pulled the squad over. Climbed out, stretched in the night air. He heard distant shots fired, felt them like pulses in his forehead when the nights were more humid, also feeling as if the gunfire did not concern him. Moved away from the car in a sliding motion.
Embarrassed; his starched shirttail flapping in the wind like ghetto laundry, his bony knees pale in the summer moonlight. The wind stank of whiskey. His police-issued black socks were soaked when he walked through a puddle near the corner of Thirty-Ninth.
His size-ten feet left wet, sloppy prints in the shag carpeting.
Fumbled with the buttons, trying to put the shirttails back into his blue and white striped jockey shorts. Flaccid head of his dick bent and caught to the right side of the flap. He would not be reprimanded for this apparent lapse in the dress code.
This was Chicago, and he was a twenty-seven-year veteran. When they know you’ve seen enough—the ’72 Midway crash, the ’68 Democratic Convention, the body bags in the crawlspace on Summerdale—then the others cover for you. Police take care of their own, he thought. Weaving proudly. Thinking of a face melted into the springs of the airline s
eat in front of him, the plane missing the airport by fourteen city blocks. Back then, he drank Drewrey’s.
Again, shots. He did not hear them as they were being fired, but he heard the breaking of glass. Sounding like a bulb that had been dropped, rather than exploded.
The street slid open next to him. His hand gripped the nozzle in his holster. The gun weighed more than he had thought and he could not pull it free.
The streetlights flickered. Briefly, he saw his own reflection. Then he was face-to-face with his son. He must have come down here to buy his own drugs. Not enough to tough it out like The Old Man. Always talking like he had a candy asshole.
“Dad, c’mon.” Maybe a bit of a slur in the son’s voice, as well. “Let’s lay back down, okay?” What the hell was he talking about? He was out here in the streets every damn night while his son stayed home and wrote stories and slept until noon.
“C’mon, Dad. You can vacuum in the morning.” The closed door slid wider and he saw the rest of the bedroom. He tried to balance himself, standing on a pile of his wife’s old shoes and forgotten clothing, garments that had fallen from the hangers.
“Let go of the vacuum.”
Stern voice with The Old Man. Takes enough shit from Division. Don’t need it from the candy-ass.
He put up resistance, the way the academy taught him a stripped-away lifetime ago. The department drove Mercurys back then, it had been three years before he had to answer a call for Shots fired, officer down, all units in the vicinity respond. Knocked his son back, the candy-ass falling flat on his bony butt in the middle of the beige street.
“Damn you,” his only son said. “Back into bed, before Mom gets home. You stink worse than those damn black socks.” The younger man stood up and brushed dog hairs from his jeans.
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