Profane Men

by Rex Miller

  “Are the white folks still in power?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” he said.

  “Well, then the country’s safe, motherfucker!” And he laughed like a hyena.

  In a second of clarity he feels the blood rush to his face. Awww, fuck me, he thinks, with some embarrassment. I’m not in jail anymore. I’m in fucking Veet’nam. Shit!

  He remembers the snake in the grass, the one he didn’t really see, the one slithering an S through the tall weeds, that was a Vietnamese snake. The bloods are United States Marine Corps splibs named Vernon Brown, a radio telephone op from Memphis, and LeRoi Washington, a weapons-and-demo brother from the Windy, and he is far away from the Cook County Jail and crime and slime and dope without hope.

  He hasn’t dealt any bad crank in a long time. Hasn’t slung a mama over his sissy bars or worn his colors in a damn coon’s age. He hasn’t even thought about the little boy in a long time.

  Motherfucker! he thinks, why can’t I pull myself off it, for God’s sake. It is driving me batshit. It ain’t nothin’ now, anyway. He wipes his face with the back of his hand and looks at the sunburned arm and the hairy, thick-fingered hand with its swollen knuckles. Fuck it. He lets himself think about the little boy again. Poor little son of a bitch. Oh, God, he thinks, why would you let something like this happen?

  God moves in mysterious ways, somebody once told him when he was a kid. God’s ways are not for man to understand. Oh, yes, that is right as rain, Big Merlin thinks. He never could understand any of it. Not for a fucking second.

  Why is it whenever he thinks about the little yellow pus-sack of baby snakes spilling out of that big water moc, he automatically triggers a flash on the boy there in the dark place down under the Doc’s place? OhJesusohGod no. Ohnoohno. Please don’tpleasedon’tletme . . .

  He remembers as he always does, in a gushing flood of soul-tearing insight and memory and pain. He can see it as vividly as if he had painted a big color picture of it on the inside of his eyelids. He carries the picture with him everywhere, like some men carry a picture of their girl or their family. He carries this.

  First, as he goes through the wall, he sees the big room with the two snot vampires and the little girl they are working on. He can see it with crystal clarity, the corrugated tin, the rusty nails bleeding brown stains down the metal, the Skelly Oil and Coca-Cola signs and crap nailed to rotting timbers and planks, the pictures thumbtacked all around, the little girl all dirty and screaming as he takes off the snot vampires, hoping to only hurt them so that he can go back and take his time with them and show them some payback, but he loses control and just totally fucks them over right then and there.

  He saved the little girls, all three of them, the one they had in the wig and the two back in the other part, but not the boy. He didn’t even find the boy at first, and part of the shock was when he did find him. He didn’t even know what he had found at first.

  He stops thinking about it for a moment and forces himself to take big, deep breaths. Sometimes it gets so bad he can’t breathe and he makes himself calm down and then in spite of himself it slides back in there and he lets it take him down.

  It was in the last of the tin-partitioned areas where he found him. He was huddled in a ball on a bloodstained, filthy mattress, and the boy was not chained as the little girls were. Big Merlin was so scared and sick at first he thought he was going to just pass out or die right then and there. He backed off from the boy, and went back in and looked around in the first room for a while, and when he allowed his mind to finally grasp what the man and woman had been using the little child for, he went back and took his knife to their bodies, he just went nuts and cut them in a damn bloodbath and he shouldn’t have because the little girl was screaming and it finally got through to him and he stopped. Shit, they were dead anyway.

  For a time after that, he stood around in the room, just trying to figure out what he should do next. Nothing in his experience, sordid as it was, had begun to prepare him for this. He just stood there. His mind wouldn’t touch it. He just couldn’t deal with it. He didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. He was still there when the ambulances and the taw finally showed.

  Claudia and the Doctor, as they were called to their faces on the street, lived most of the time in a secret sub-basement of a long-deserted sharecropper shack out on the edge of an overgrown field about an hour’s drive north of O’Hare’s flight path. The Doc had found the basement out nosing around and spent the best part of a year constructing the rooms from a cache of old metal signs and billboards and pieces of roofing he’d been squirreling away.

  They also maintained a straight residence in a nearby, rundown suburb, but except for one or two occasions they’d been staying down in the secret place here this past year. Ever since they’d had the three girls and the little thing, which is what they called the boy, they had used the house only for infrequent shows and the odd kitchen convenience, preferring the dank sub-cellar of their “school.”

  Claudia was Myrtle Pratt, fifty-six, and the Doctor was Joseph Forbis Ely, fifty-one. They were the twisted proprietors of the School for the Blind Ten-Year-Olds, as they called it, a quartet of tin-walled cubicles, three of which contained a stained mattress and slop can and a manacled, sightless, captive child cowering in darkness and abject terror. The main area where Claudia and the Doctor ate and slept and watched soaps and sit-coms on their battery-powered TV also held a blinded child, whomever might be the luckless focus of their current energies.

  They liked the secret place now because they could make all the noise they wanted to, and sometimes their students would scream like little wounded animals during their instruction. It was better there near their charges.

  They had found and kidnapped three of the kids themselves, Ely then blinding each child in the makeshift operating room of their home, in a surgical procedure he had paid five hundred dollars and a Yuban jar full of dope to learn. Because both Myrtle and Joseph were grotesquely ugly, their mangled egos required that their victims be very young, beautiful children who could not see.

  It was not enough of a turn on, unfortunately, to just blindfold the children. And the Doctor was more than willing to see that each of his charges was immediately forced to suffer.

  Considering the degradation of the ordeal each victim would undergo, this may have been a dark blessing of sorts. The Doctor had performed the operation unsuccessfully only three times. The four others, one of whom he’d traded a CB and a trunkload of stolen audio cassettes for, had lived to provide their nucleus.

  Myrtle hated her name and had seized on Claudia while enthralled in the plastic plot of some long-forgotten soap opera. She was simply a very ugly, lonely, sad, embittered, lazy, violent-tempered, amoral, insensitive old slut with a scarred sex drive and a wide mean streak. Left to her own devices she would have probably fogged her brain and body chemistry into a junkie stupor and remained fairly harmless.

  But the combination of the Doctor and Claudia produced a synergy that was something else again. His vile appetites and dark, evil nature evoked a viciousness and twisted mindset so perverse it sometimes shocked even Claudia.

  Joseph Ely was what is called in the jargon of the street gang a “doc,” meaning that he is an expert in the applications of brutal team sex. In the confines of an all-male environment, he’d be the one to find out the greatest area of vulnerability of the new fish. If Tommy was nauseated and repelled by the touch or sight of feces, the Doc would carefully investigate. In that sense he was a collector. He collected information, technique, concepts.

  He’d learn somehow that when Tommy was a little kid he had tried to clean himself and had plunged his fingers through the thin toilet tissue and into an anus covered in filth, and gone screaming in to his mother, who had forced him to wipe himself as he cried, gagging in disgust. What was a distasteful, intimate anecdote to be forgotten as soon as possible would be pure gold
to a doc. It would be trivia to be filed away and mined later. Later when he can operate on Tommy with five or six of his cronies for backup, the Doc will bring Phyllis, the black faggot, to pay a call on Tommy.

  They will begin by forcing the new fish to eat the peanuts out of Phyllis’s freshly shat bowel movement, and on and on through a series of perversions too disgusting to catalog until Tommy is left a quivering, limp sack of flesh-covered organs and bones, covered in filth of every description, every orifice raped and bleeding, and terrorized to the brink of sanity’s sawtoothed edge.

  That, in the sick substrata of the counterculture’s underworld, is the function of a doc in gang sex: to so destroy and humiliate and injure the victim that as the gang gets off, a bit of the victim dies. It is a form of group sex crime that transcends the physiological and for which no penalty can begin to compensate. A doc who is allowed to continue will only sink lower into the abyss of depravity, becoming more jaded, requiring greater challenges, filthier gross-outs, a higher terror threshold, a deeper and more relentless violence.

  As Doc and Claudia wallowed in the tortured favors of their blinded child victims, their perversions led to the downhill slide of unspeakable appetites. Because of their notorious tastes that seemed gross even to the sickest minds of the street trash, a name had stuck to them like iron glue. No one called them this to their face, where they were always the Doc and Claudia, but otherwise they were referred to with the generic reference that had become the official street handle for this pair of subhuman specimens. Every two-bit hooker, doper, thief, torch, junkie, pimp, fence, runner, shark, cowboy, dip, wino, snitch, and hit man from Downer’s Grove to Oldtown knew them by one name. They were the Snot Vampires.

  Merlin Hedgepath, whom they called Merlin the Magician, Magic Man, and simply Magic, was among their prime dope suppliers. His big number was meth or crank, as it was always called on the street. Dealing from a biker bar and from his dilapidated mobile home on the fringes of Wooddale, Illinois, Big Merlin was the Oldtown connection to a Chicago-land gang that specialized in serving what they liked to think of as the disenfranchised. Merlin’s clientele were the dregs of society in an area where society isn’t necessarily that toney to begin with: flamboyant drag queens and tee vees (transvestites), necrophiliacs, and coprophiliacs, Haitian gunmen and wetback skag mules, and every other brand of beat, bent, busted-up, sorry-ass street scum cast off by their “betters.”

  Big Merlin looked like he belonged in the cab of a Freuhauf Long Ranger, ratchet jawing with the Kenilworths and Jimmies as they roared down the interstate higher than Godzilla and telling their old, stale eighteen-wheeler gags (“I know where you can get a new Peterbilt . . .”), getting truck-stop blow jobs, killer hemorrhoids, and youthful coronaries. But he just looked the part. He was more at home on a Harley chopper with a rearview dental mirror. Because he looked so fucking bad, he was able to carry off all kinds of heavy-duty numbers. He scared straights and freaks alike.

  He’d angled for a way to duke himself into their secret place ever since the stories had come back to him about what they did to those kids. It snapped something inside him. He started supplying them with his best crank, carrying them on the arm, sweettalking them, flattering, consoling, cajoling. When he saw his chance, he ran a big con on them about a shipment of hot meth so street sweet and clean and priced so right they couldn’t say no. The price for a whole shitload — a little girl, condition unimportant, age ten or so if possible.

  He busted his butt to sell it to them, and convincing the Doc was no easy matter, but he was dedicated and he didn’t let up. Finally they agreed to a swap; they would bring a girl to him. He watched them for days, blending into the shadows. Tailing them with full concentration and will power. Willing himself to stay awake, willing them not to spot him. Waiting. Watching.

  Dog-tired and heartsick, he was still awake on the third morning when they headed for the boonies about nine. He followed at a discreet distance, so excited he forgot to be pissed that they hadn’t opted for last night. He hid motionlessly in high weeds until at last he’d seen them as they closed the trapdoor down on the sub-basement of the sharecropper’s place. It was so well hidden he had a hell of a time finding it again by the time he had crawled up through the weeds and grass and broken glass and garbage.

  He didn’t wait for them to bring the little child out, as he had first planned. He crashed through the wall as if it wasn’t there, sending an eight-foot length of rust-encrusted tin sheeting and two-penny nails and rotten boards crashing down into the room below. He burst in with his piece at his hip, finger on the trigger and itching to pull it as he gasped at the stench and the sight of the filth and decadence and horror.

  Seeing the little girl in the blond wig and smeared lipstick, the woman doing things to her while the man called Doc burnt her with his cigarette — this was frozen in his mind forever, a tableau of unforgettable evil. He took a deep breath of foul air, and as the man started to get up off the bed, he triggered a 2 3/4-inch 12-gauge shot shell of a dozen Magnum buck pellets packed by the Federal Cartridge Corporation of Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A., into the man’s chest.

  Jacking the next shell into the chamber and making sure the little girl was out of the way as much as he could, he angled around to make sure the spread didn’t catch her too, hearing her animal scream and the scream of the woman Claudia and his own voice screaming as he pulled the trigger of the shotgun with its shortened barrel up against the woman and feeling the big shotgun jump and hearing the shell explode like TNT in the subterranean enclosure, feeling the pieces of bloody gut and flesh and filth and bone splatter him as he fired, the screams echoing and echoing in his memory again and again and again.

  “Gone off the deep end.” That was the phrase he’d heard one of the cops say to somebody. That seemed right. It had always stayed in his mind. Jail. More time in jail and a judge. Time. He found himself facing a long term of straight-up jail. A dime or more anyway. Cold storage.

  But somehow a profile had emerged in a computer and it had ended up as printout, binded into a file in the in tray of a plans executive. A phone call had given birth to many more phone calls, and suddenly Big Merle was the new best friend of some very heavy-duty Sawyers who had come to pull him out of cold storage. The offer was simple and there was only one possible answer. Sure, why the hell not.

  Almost overnight, Merlin Hedgepath found himself in a training camp, and then in a stockade, then on a big government contract flight to Vietnam, complete with deep cover number about a court-martial which had never made a lick of sense to him. He had never fully come alive again, but sometimes on the ambushes he’d go out all cold and bloodless, and come back later looking like Count Dracula, all red-faced and rosy-cheeked, somehow staying alive on it. And once in a great while, when the moon was right, it would light his fire a bit, and you’d have yourself a wild-eyed, haired-off lunatic out lusting for a hot, gushing blood spill.

  Chapter 21

  “. . . this night thy soul shall be required of thee.”

  — Luke 12:20

  As a child I liked to swim in a chill, muddy- bottomed lake, swimming for hours, often underwater, pretending to be a fish, a mighty swimmer like Tarzan or Jungle Jim, a UDT frogman, a Japanese one-man submarine preserved since World War II in some subaqueous nest of gnarled undersea roots, live torpedo intact, defying all physics, chronology and logic as my imagination ran rampant. At nose level, my proboscis the warhead, a restored Jap minisub snaked through the underwater weeds on its mission of vengeance.

  For hours I’d slither through the lily pads, dislodging schools of bluegill carp, and drum, swimming over the remnants of fishermen’s lunch buckets, teen parties and family picnics which had floated to the bottom forming a kind of rusting junk landscape. I’d dive under (“Down periscope!”) with an inane honk of my imaginary warning Klaxon (“Baaahhh!”) in a reckless scavenger hunt through the shards and jagged-edged lit
ter.

  Diving down through the weeds and small fish, I brought up surprise treasures of Kist and Country Club, empty Vienna sausage tin and broken beer bottles, the odd tennis shoe. I swam for hours, tirelessly, fascinated by my secret world that existed in the dark cool shadows of the lily pads.

  One of my favorite fantasies was a recurrent, soul-shuddering daydream that came only when the clouds and sun were just so, and you could look around at the impenetrable inkiness of the lake’s depths, changing, dappling, even as you squinted into the blue-green blackness, the sunlight reflecting off the surface of the water like a pocketful of shiny coins scattered across the lake. And then sinister circles of growing shadow would seem to materialize there in the water exactly as it might look if something was coming to the surface. The bigger the circles, the more deliciously frightening the fantasy.

  The penultimate moment of the imagining would be the second you saw what appeared to be an enormous circle widen out to the full breadth of the nine-mile-long lake, and in that breathtaking instant before oblivion, you realized you were about to be eaten by a monster as big as the lake itself, rushing up from the mud-covered bottom to inhale another tiny morsel of humanity. A kid’s underwater fantasy twenty years before Jaws.

  That’s the way I felt when I found out I’d been kicked out of the Training Program. It was as if my life had been swimming up here on one level, carefree and happy, and something as big as a nine-mile lake had come shooting up from the bottom in a tidal wave of feeding frenzy to gobble me up in a millisecond of uncaring destruction. The agency had that sort of ingestive capability and a similar kind of insatiable appetite for small human flotsam.

  “This can’t be a big surprise” was a line of remembered dialogue, most of which I’d managed to mercifully block out in the ensuing torrent of frantic embarrassment. No. No surprise whatsoever. My heart always stops beating for a few seconds every Friday afternoon about this time. I was young enough to still worry about things like severance. All very major league, very poli-sci, post-grad, predigested, spoon-fed, bland, homogenized, antiseptic sort of swift, parting fuck you.