The Madness of Cthulhu Volume 2

by Joshi, S. T

  I told Mom the next day that I was going to die on Iliamna when I got old. Mom laughed her nervous laugh and said not to be silly. Wasn’t until much later that we were hanging around after Dad’s funeral and she got plastered on Scotch and confessed to having the same recurring nightmare during her own youth.

  “You dreamed you were going to drown in Lake Iliamna?” I said, also pretty goddamned drunk.

  “No, I dreamed my son would.” She slugged another double and collapsed in the bathroom. We had to take the door off its hinges to get her out of there.

  She returned to Plum Tree, Tennessee, made famous by Robert Service, to be with her mother and sisters in the shade of the most baroquely majestic magnolia you ever did see.

  O! Dark days followed with nary a ray of sun to shine on this dog’s ass. I lived with one uncle or another until state law cut my traces and then it was cheap apartments and boarding houses, the bunk in a fishing boat or a tent on some godforsaken remote surveying site. I slept under my share of pool tables and overpasses when times were lean. Slept under the cold, pitiless stars enough to have the sentimentality for God and nature and the great unknown seared from me. I think a little gangrene seeped in, though.

  It’s been thirty years and change and I still hum “Killing an Arab” as I shuffle along the beach with a gun in my hand. When wrath moves me I hum Poe’s “Angry Johnny” too, although the life-sustaining rage is gone, drained into the swamp whence it first came bubbling. I stare at the stars, the flat obsidian back of the ocean rolling away toward the moon. The moon gets closer every night.

  I died this evening. A hard, bad death. Not the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.

  * * *

  Look, back in the day I was crazy too. Quite literally mad in the technical sense—undiagnosed Bipolar One disorder. That’s from Mom’s side of the tree. Mood swings like a motherfucker. High as a kite one minute, crashed on the rocks and sinking fast the next. Nobody understood what was going on, least of all me, hick kid from north of the Arctic Circle; holes in my Sorrel boots and chip on my shoulder and not an ounce of introspection to spare. Hate in all its black splendor was my gift. I put that slow-burning rage down to the natural order of things; my people were Scots-Irish with a bit of Comanche in the old pile somewhere. Poverty, stiff-neckedness, and wrath coursed in the blood. Champion grudge holders and enthusiastic brawlers; hard drinkers and hard luck cases, God bless us every one. Never occurred to me it might be something more purely chemical, or something invasive, cancerous. In any event, my youth was one long self-obliterating rampage.

  At the nadir of this meteoric descent, the girl of my dreams swooped in for the kill. I was twenty-two, just like the caliber.

  First time I met Erica was a few minutes before my participation in an illicit bare-knuckle boxing match in a deserted gravel lot behind the plant where we worked as seasonal labor packing frozen salmon into boxes and shipping them to Japan. The whole seething lot of us was drunk. Those of us who were residents had to be to get through the eighteen-hour workday, the 365 days a year soul-killing sojourn in Alaska. The hangers-on were drunk because it was the only way we could all speak the same language.

  She watched me from the edge of the crowd of migrant workers and hobos and boggle-eyed college kids who’d flown up from the continental US to pay their tuition freight and get a bit of seasoning before scuttling back to their daddies’ companies and beach houses. A chum rubbed my shoulders while I sat on a bucket and traded devil dog glares with my opponent across the way. Meanwhile, the dayshift foreman took wagers on the back of an envelope and occasionally conferred with his accomplice, the company QA, via walkie talkie. The accomplice lurked down the street of that industrial arena, on the lookout for airport police strayed from their normal cruising territory.

  “Great anger I sense in this one,” Erica said, sounding like our man Yoda on a bender, but I didn’t care. She wore sweats and a tattered Blue Öyster Cult tee a size too large, yet snug nonetheless. Her tits mesmerized me, an anesthetizing image for the beating I was soon to receive. As a friend of mine commented later, her boobs were like two puppies fighting under a blanket. Thank God, Satan, the great Earth Mother, or whoever imbues certain nubile young women with gravity-defying double Dees and moral retardation. She chugged from a forty bottle of Steel Reserve and her eyes burned like the witchiest-bitchiest of Dracula’s brides appraising the latest dinner guest.

  Well.

  Guy named Red from the loading dock had agreed to be my opponent. Nothing personal, the guy had a heart of gold; like everybody else, he just needed the scratch. Red was a tough kid on loan from Miami; a survivor of gang turf wars. The scars on his barrel chest and pylon legs were thick as horse brands gone wrong. He slung two-hundred-and-fifty-pound boxes of fish into shipping containers for his daily bread. A behemoth with fists the circumference and density of cinderblocks. Me, I was underweight, though wiry as a feral dog. The usual mismatch. I fought monsters in the pits. The brutes who were as mean as me, but bigger and better fed. There just weren’t any other takers. Nobody in his right mind willingly fights a man who’s in it for the pain. The taste of blood in my mouth was an old friend.

  On the other hand, Money talks, yes it does, and to look at me was to underestimate the power of rage and primitive impulse. So Red and I went at it hammer and tongs there in the middle of the lot on a hundred-degree afternoon in July, our supporters shouting nonsensical encouragement while everybody else hooted and jeered and tried not to get splashed by blood and spit—most of the blood was mine. If not for the ring of truck grills I would’ve rolled out of there, a cartoon character shot from a cannon. Instead, Red settled for smashing me into the ground.

  Luckily, the airport police received a tip about a street fight and a gathering mob and sent a patrol car to investigate. The QA lookout radioed the foreman and warned everybody to scram. Red stopped slamming my head against the bumper of a rusted Ford and took to his heels. Who would think a dude so girthy could flee with the agility of a deer? Our happy crew scattered, the match called on account of the fuzz. Final tally on my ledger was a missing tooth, rearranged nose, and a concussion that lingered for nearly two weeks. Also minus the seventy-five bucks I’d put down on myself. Yeah, I was a little closer every day to remaking myself into Pop’s image. All I had left to do was to make sure I died young.

  Erica took me to her apartment and licked my wounds. I guess that put me in the black.

  * * *

  She strapped on the goggles, tipped the sake, and went kamikaze from day zero of our relationship.

  Vodka, the cheaper the better.

  Black Beauties and Microdot.

  Ouija boards.

  Tantric sex in a big way.

  More vodka.

  Choking games. The hard end of the belt.

  Violence, yeah. Lots of violence. Feral or not, I was a pussycat by comparison to my new girlfriend. For her, drop of a hat and it was go time.

  One cold September evening we packed a bottle of Stoli and a blanket that belonged to her late great dog Achilles and cruised to a bonfire/windsurfing party at Settler’s Bay where she wound up beating the tar out of some poor surfer chick over territorial pissing. When the chick’s boyfriend stepped in, Erica socked him too. Her fistful of death’s head and gemstone rings made a sweet little knuckleduster that tore the guy’s face wide open. I had to drag her back to the truck before the mob of surfer dudes and dudettes stomped us.

  She slid aside her panties and fucked me on the drive home. No mean feat considering how cramped the cab of that half-ton pickup was. I almost flew my rig off the twisty road between Knik and Wasilla more than once. Girl was totally insane. Honky-tonk blues blasting on the radio, her nipple in my mouth, her face pressed into the roof of the cab, hands in my hair, both of my own hands clamped on her ass instead of the wheel, a hundred miles an hour in the dark.

  I was young enough not to understand, arrogant enough not to care.

  She dyed he
r hair so often I didn’t figure out she was blonde for the first six months. Taller than me and curvy, but sort of muscular. She’d played soccer and rugby at college. Wouldn’t tell me her major. I’m not going to say what school because it doesn’t matter. College was over for her by a couple of years and I’d never gone. Her nose was a tiny bit crooked from getting broken during a scrum. Sexy, though, unlike my own near disfigurement.

  Her family roots were Welsh and she had something of the moors about her; an aura of mystery. Pale as winter sand, she bruised easily. She favored rugby sweaters and track pants or old ripped jeans with bloodstains ground in most of the time; autumn colors. Funky glittery eye-shadow but no lip gloss, no perfume. I got to know her scent the way dogs do with one another. A soap and water girl. Mine, for a while, then through my fingers like the blood from my mouth after one of life’s sucker punches.

  Good thing pain is my thing.

  * * *

  Between and during marathon bouts of sex and booze we dropped blotter and listened to The Toadies, Poe, and The Cure. A hell of a lot of The Cure, I remember that. “A Forest” was my theme in those days. Erica possessed eclectic taste in the arts. She jolted me out of my redneck roots with Bob Dylan, Procul Harum, Linda Ronstadt, The Clash. Bosch, Bacon, Dali, and Pollock at his maddest. Don Quixote was her novel of novels; The Wizard of Oz was her movie. Oz for the deleted scenes, the Hanged Man legend, the febrile luminescence of Judy Garland’s flesh, the deep space chill of her eyes like something written by Clark Ashton Smith.

  That fucking guy. Erica introduced me to Smith’s work via a ratty paperback anthology she toted in her knapsack. Told me CAS had been her mom and dad’s fave author since the Stone Age, that his baroque nihilism brought them together when they were undergrads at university. She preferred H. P. Lovecraft, although she didn’t elaborate why.

  Her little brother Isaiah died in a theme park accident. That was an off-limits topic. We talked about God, the cosmos, mankind’s minute presence in the infinite sea of flaming gas, and absolute zero, the meaning of it all, nothing really important.

  Sometimes after pounding a boilermaker or two I’d dream again, a rare occurrence since my nightmares of Iliamna. In the distance reared a city with spires of dirty-black ice surmounted by clouds of gas that boiled upward through a hole into outer space. Others were of a Ferris Wheel on fire and rolling across a dawn plain like the wheel of the Death God’s Chariot come loose. Erica loomed, tall as a skyscraper, watching the wheel go. Her skin glowed faintly, reflecting fire and flickers of distant lightning. A whip made of barbed wire and logging chain hung from her fist, gouged a furrow into the earth when she turned and strode toward me until the sun unfolded over her shoulder and struck me blind.

  She asked me once if I ever won any of my fights.

  “All of them,” I said. “Except the one against the Law. It won.”

  “Moral victories are draws at best.”

  “What can I say? Pyrrhic Victories R Us. Masada is my handbook for daily living.”

  We were on the road to see her parents at their place in Moose Pass, a tiny town a few minutes north of Seward. This was late March and bitter cold, making the journey a perilous one. Together for nine months and I still didn’t know much. Such essential cluelessness would prove a recurring life theme.

  All along Erica had been cagey regarding her family, choosing to change the subject whenever the conversation swung around to her childhood. Then, in a bolt from the heavens, after giving me an impassioned and impromptu blow job at the Wendy’s Drive-Thru, she paused to stare at herself in the rearview mirror. Her expression was strange. She declared that perhaps the time was nigh to pay homage at court. Her eyes glittered with that light I’d initially attributed to mischievousness and booze. Full on devilry, full on insanity more like.

  Thus, three days later, we were bundled into the cab of my old truck and slip-sliding along the treacherous Seward Highway while the wind buffeted and the snow whirled and The Fixx sang about how one thing leads to another. She gave me my mission briefing along the way.

  Erica called her folks Rob and Willy (short for Wilhelmina) and seemed rather conflicted about them. I had the feeling she adored and hated them in equal measure. They were retired government workers who lived in a doublewide trailer at the Emperor Penguin Court, had once owned a mansion and a spread in Southern California but moved north due to job opportunities and fear of earthquakes. Of course, the Coleridges were to be disappointed on the latter front, as Alaska got rocked by more earthquakes than any other state in the Union. Land of Ten Thousand Smokes, leading edge of the Pacific Rim’s fabled Ring of Fire.

  I wondered if she had any special advice for me—any inflammatory topics to veer away from? Any pet peeves to avoid petting by mistake? She laughed and told me to act however I wanted. Her parents didn’t give a shit. Willy and Rob inhabited their own private universe. This was just a day pass. She made me pull into a supermarket on the outskirts of Anchorage to snag steaks and salad. Her parents didn’t keep food in the house, only liquor. She wasn’t sure if they could stomach solid food, but it was worth a try.

  We arrived at the Coleridge manse in one piece and I felt right the hell at home. A dead Christmas tree lay in the front yard where Rob had chucked it to make room for company. The wreath still hung on the front door, the cheap lights still twinkled in the eaves. Thick shag rugs in every room but the kitchen and bathroom; velvet hangings of voluptuous nudes reclining among prides of lions juxtaposed a black-and-white poster of Carl Sagan behind the television and a gaudy painting of a Mayan ziggurat enveloped in purple lightning made one hell of sensory-shocking triptych on the living room wall.

  Erica wasn’t kidding about the no-food situation. Liquor bottles crammed every cabinet. Empties overflowed the wastebaskets, milk crates of them were piled in the hall. When her parents weren’t looking, Erica nodded at me and flipped open the oven. More empty bottles.

  “Holy shit,” I said, impressed.

  Rob and Willy were moles recently emerged from a subterranean habitat: pale and soft and dressed in pajamas. Their thick eyeglasses reflected the meager light. The couple spent six months of the year at a timeshare condo Rob had finagled during happier times. Both were semi-expert blackjack players and haunted the Vegas Strip, guzzling comped booze and winning and losing meager fortunes until it was time to migrate north and hibernate again.

  According to Erica, the pair usually woke around mid-afternoon and started drinking to kill the previous night’s hangover and played innumerable hands of twenty-one, each armed with a mason jar of pennies and nickels to cover their wagers. The drinking and gambling ritual wasn’t interrupted by our arrival. Erica sprawled on the couch and watched me sip tallboys and get snared into a marathon blackjack session. I took them for fourteen dollars in change. Willy scoffed when I attempted to decline the loot. She stuffed all those coins into a sock and made Erica put it in her purse. I didn’t argue. Much as it pained me to exploit a couple of pickled geezers, I needed the gas money.

  For a while nobody said much, and I got the distinct impression Erica wasn’t exactly in their good graces, nor had lugging home a ne’er-do-well such as myself done much to improve the climate. It was so frigid in the trailer we could’ve used the services of one of those icebreaker ships. A golf tournament played on TV and the clock radio was tuned to college basketball, both of which the Coleridges had money riding on. Willy dealt the cards, occasionally pausing to lean toward the commentary, swear under her breath, and scratch totals into a ratty notebook. Rob kept the booze coming and responded to Erica’s queries about the recent blizzards and frozen water pipes with grunts and shrugs. He seldom lifted his bleary gaze from the table, studying the array of cards with tremendous intensity.

  During a break in the action, while the couple exchanged monosyllabic insults over some point of contention, either regarding blackjack or the broadcasts, I wasn’t clear, Erica spirited me away to her old room. I gathered it sat untouched
since she originally left for college. Kind of dusty and cobwebby and it smelled stale, although not bad after the cigarette smoke stench that permeated the rest of the trailer. Admittedly, I was curious to learn more about my woman of mystery.

  The fossil record of a typical childhood: Lite Brite and Etch-a-Sketch and stars painted on the ceiling; stacks of Cosmopolitan and Seventeen and a poster of Mick Jagger as a sweet young thing. A trove of costume jewelry gleamed atop the vanity and at the foot of the single bed was a dog pillow, leash, and collar. The rabies vaccination tag on the collar said Achilles. She kept a picture of Achilles in a locket around her neck: a family scene in the woods—Erica ten or eleven, Rob and Willy in mackinaws and hip waders, and the dog at their feet. A brute with lots of teeth and a lolling tongue. Made me think of White Fang. No sign of brother Isaiah, oddly enough.

  “Man, when did you move out?” I said, eyeing a parti-colored DNA model and slide rule gathering dust next to a stuffed panda that appeared to be a prize from some Alaska State Fair of yore. I edged away, paranoid she might try to make a move on me there in that musty tomb. The wheels were always turning in her brain, powering a carousel of agendas. Shagging me ten feet from the kitchen while her parents swilled liquor and squabbled over point spreads was just her kind of kink, but a bridge too far for my taste.

  “After Achilles died. A long time ago.” That peculiar light inhabited her eyes again. She cocked her head in manner reminiscent of Willy’s habitual gesture, listening to her parents’ muffled argument, the faint exclamations of the announcers. “I went to college ahead of schedule. Full ride, so why not? Anything to get the hell away from here.”

  “Yeah, you and your full ride. What was it for, anyway?” I’d asked before; this time she humored me.

  “I wrote a paper. Some stuffed shirts liked it. Voilà.”

  I hefted the DNA model. “Must’ve been a hell of a paper.”