by Rex Miller
“Memorize your part?” he asked, smiling in the window with the right profile toward her.
“Yeah. You want to hear it?” She was ready for the applause. If this was all there was to acting...
“Okay. Let's really try it out. I got an idea,” he said with sudden animation, and in a burst of energy he chugged around and got in behind the wheel, perhaps for the last time. “Here. I want you to try your luck. Go across the street there and—” He pulled out the big roll and started counting big bills off to her. She almost fainted. Welcome to the big time, she thought, not really believing it but not NOT believing either.
“This is five thousand,” she said to him somewhere in between the inflection of an interrogatory and an exclamation. Five grand could do a lot to make disbelief go up in a puff of lime-colored smoke. Five thousand in real money. She'd never dreamed something like this could happen. She'd hit the bull's-eye that people talked about. This was it.
“You really want me to BUY a car?” She couldn't quite let it register.
“Yep. I want to see if you can do. Uh, that is, I want to let you have this acting experience. Think of it as a lesson you can draw on later.” That magic word again.
“And really GET a car. BUY a CAR?"
“That black Caprice, right there. He pointed, letting his hand graze her leg and she sat there calmly.
“You gonna be there."
“No. Talk just like we rehearsed. If I'm there you won't be alone ON STAGE. This way you're the lead actor. You get experience in a starring role. Get it?"
She nodded, the money feeling good in that big stack that dried her throat just at the exciting thought of it all. “Yeah."
“Can you pull it off?"
“SURE."
“Okay."
“But don't we trade THIS car in?"
“No.” He had forgotten she had a functioning human brain. It was by far her most intelligent question or statement, and he had to take a beat to frame an answer.
“See, the deal is, most people TRADE and they lose so much in blue book. What your best deal is—you SELL your own car to a private individual, then amortize your collateral or if you have a mortgage or submortgage your equity, you see—then take the difference and put it into your refinancing."
“Oh,” she said, satisfied at the double-talk. “Okay. Do I have to do anything else?"
“No. Just the way we rehearsed it. Then get the temporary tags, and after you pay tax and title and all, you be sure you have the motor vehicle registration, the pink slip we talked about. That's it. You drive ‘er back over here."
“Okay,” she said with a luminous smile. She looked pretty to him and he patted her leg and the smile didn't change. And Chaingang realized how horny he must be.
“Okay,” he rumbled. “Outstanding."
“Now?"
“You're ON,” he told her, his huge, dimpled grin straining at the battle dressing. “Break a leg."
He watched her get out of the car, pushing her dopy sunglasses that were held by a cord around her neck back up on her nose and starting across the street with the money in stolen bills clutched in her small, bony hand.
“SISSY,” he called to her, his bark startling her, and she spun around, hurried back, and stuck her head in the car window.
“Probably be better,” he said, smile fixed in place, “if you didn't have the money in your hand like that. Ya know? Why don't you put it in your purse now? Then you can hand it to the man when you get the thing all signed, eh?"
“Yeah, okay.” She opened her purse and stuffed the money in. “Good idea,” she told him.
He thought how he'd like to pull her right in this second. Grab that hair and just yank her in, slapping her hard enough to break her puny neck and then masturbate into her open mouth while she died. How easy it would be to waste her. He watched her walk across the street, her thin legs outlined through the cheap dress.
BUCKHEAD
Agent Pfeltmann was reading the chronological sequence report in a loud, slightly adenoidal, singsong voice,
“...constitutes the relevant and known sequence of events in the investigation of the bank robbery and shooting death of Mr. Floyd Raymond Coleman, of 2802 Brook Valley, Buckhead, which occurred on the morning of 3 July as per attached 52-11.
“Time: 0610. Occurrence: Two armed male Caucasian subjects gained entrance to the Fields residence at 34822 Cypress Road, North Buckhead, by means of prying the front door loose. All power lines to the home had been cut but the alarm system line, which was buried under the home, was not severed and—"
“Too bad they didn't cut that too, we wouldn't have to screw with this.” The alarm system in the Fields home was triggered so that a cut in the line for longer than three minutes signaled the local police. They had complained of many recent inconveniences caused by interruptions in the power by the local utility company.
“Yeah. Anyway, it goes on about the wife and child being out of the house. Mrs. Fields substantiating and corroborating the husband's story. Blah, blah. Two armed subjects ordered Fields to accompany them to the premises of Buckhead Mercantile Bank and Trust, 1705 East Broadway, where he is employed as a manager. Goes on about the surveillance video.” He read ahead silently. “And the fingerprints from the home and the crime scene, and goes on about the vault. Let's see, he described the vehicle as a late-model dark colored Crown Victoria, either dark blue or midnight blue. What the hellsa difference between dark blue and midnight blue. Okay, goes on about the guard. Coleman blah blah, fifty-two years old, blah blah, coroner's report, ballistics, the forensic analysis, spent projectile report, again referencing the surveillance video,” his voice going up and down in a bored little song, “okay, now we get to the nitty."
“Silent alarm 07:01:30. Dispatched uniformed officers Eleven-Yankee-One. Backup car Eleven-Yankee-Six. Robbery in progress. Okay, here BOI gets the robbery-with-shooting call. Man down. Buckhead homicide rolls on it. We roll on it. SAC, you, me, Delgado. Two uniforms inside when we arrive on the crime scene: Ramírez, Jones. Five clothes: Brown, Lee, Tuny, Peletier, Ecklemeyer. You got the janitor, Jefferson. You got Fields. You got the broad. What's her name? Kelly Pierce.
“Fifteen people besides the two perpetrators who had fled. Now our good friend Mr. Monroe is telling us they got sixteen thousand dollars and change. That Mr. De Witt did, rather. We got Mr. Phillips telling us they got twenty-eight thousand and change. What is it? $28,145 I think it says on the 52-11. Okay. So what are our options? What are we lookin’ at?” He took a piece of white chalk and started making marks. He printed on the blackboard the same way he talked, in screeching little singsong, bored strokes.
“ERROR you got. Somebody didn't count right. Whatever. THEFT BY BANK. Cover embezzlement. That kinda thing. Phillips, or a teller, or the one with the tits. Sees it as an opportunity to cover a mistake. Phillips looks good if you're gonna hypothecate. He could pick up twelve kay and who'd know? He might bet we're not gonna get the perps. So we look at his life a little closer. But from a cursory glance he don't NEED twelve thousand. The janitor picks up some money. When? You got the surveillance tape against that. One of us. We didn't get there soon enough.
“PERPETRATOR you got. John Monroe decides he'll burn his partner and walk away from a Murder One. Shit. Homicide committed during an armed robbery of a bank? He'll burn for it. So he squirrels away twelve grand and calls us with his story. He looks sorta good for that until you spend five minutes with him.” There was laughter in the room.
“So this leaves THEFT BY INVESTIGATING POLICE.” He wrote DIRTY COP on the blackboard, and the chalk scream as if tortured.
ROSEMONT
They stayed the night in a motel in Rosemont. Chaingang began weaving a tale that was calculated to cover their next move—a move that would surprise her.
“You have all the tools,” he told her in his concept-producer voice, “all the gifts.” A big, dimpled, lopsided smile. “And you're beautiful. But remember where we're going A
LL the girls have all the tools and all the gifts and they're all beautiful. I want you to learn the whole thing. I want to give you EVERYTHING so that when we get to California we'll blow the town apart, right?"
“Right."
“But, Sissy, this won't be easy."
“Yeah. Well, that's okay."
“So you are willing to work?"
“Sure."
“You really want this?"
“Yeah."
“Well"—the huge head tilted—"what this means is lots of hours of practice, coaching, meditation, thinking, soul-searching, and GUIDANCE. More LESSONS. Understand?” She nodded yes. She had no idea, but whatever. She was game for it. “Here's what I think we need to do. I think we should PREPARE for a few weeks; you'd be on full pay of course the entire time, but spend a few weeks in preparation before we light up the town with your big entrance."
“What do you mean? I mean, what do you want me to do?"
“This is just a spur-of-the-moment idea, but I know this man who owns some property out in the country not far from here. I was thinking an arrangement might be made where we could stay there and polish your new career until we were ready, and then...” And the words poured out, clouding her mind in a billowing smoke-dream of heady possibilities, and she nods yes. And he is pleased and makes sure she is fed, watered, settled cozily in front of the television set, tucked in, and his game locked down tight. Then he excused himself to “take care of some business."
His homeliness was not the issue. When he was moving from the black Caprice, his first legal wheels, to the motel room, a pair of punks had pulled out of the parking lot beside them in a red pickup and Chaingang had seen the driver's face laughing at him and then looking over at the passenger beside him as they both roared in derision. But this is not what had distressed Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski. Something else, the crooked smile, the set of the upper body behind the wheel, something stabbed at him.
Daniel was a man to whom taunts and ridicule had no effect. He was oblivious to the scorn of the monkees. To a man whose life had been a saga of abuse, torment, torture, anguish, unbearable pain, distress was a catalyst—a hair trigger in a gun loaded with suffering, confusion, misery, bewilderment, and the paralysis of dread and fear. It had kept a child immobile, willing his heart not to beat, willing his tiny penis not to leak or drip, not to pee, willing his bladder not to burst, slowing his respiratory system to death's threshold, taking his mind all the way to its limits and beyond into the darkness of consciousness's edge, willing himself not to scream in his childhood's hellish, unending nightmare rending the mind and heart and soul and rendering the victim a frozen, cowering thing riveted with terror and abject fright.
To this man, whose horror is more jolting than any electric shock, whose fear and hatred is more hallucinogenic than any combination from add to lithium to peyote to paregoric, those hideous, violent, psychodynamic origins and psychogenetic developments cause Daniel Bunkowski to see hear smell feel taste touch and perceive—to say the least—a distorted reality.
And so the set of the punk's shoulders or the bared teeth of the punk's smile is enough to trigger it. And it comes in a hot, brutal tidal wave washing his senses in the mad desire to kill and in just that moment of derisive laughter from a passing pair of punks, in just that hot heartbeat of memory-jarring reality, Daniel's kill lust was kindled. So he said his piece to Sissy Selkirk and was in the black Caprice and the flickering telephone poles whipping by were a hypnotic thing ticking at the edge of his vision as he drove into the darkening night, driving over newly painted yellow line, aimlessly yet with singular purpose, driving toward the heartbeat of an unknown victim.
He would not remember what triggered it, later, or how he knew to sit for so long in the parked car. The infinite patience and mysterious self-confidence always his trademarks. Nor would he remember why he zeroed in on Harmon Schmitz when he saw him. It was a thing of balance. The inner clock. The gyro. The thing that was his automatic pilot and regulator.
Harmon Schmitz was a faggot. A simpering, mincing, limp-wristed, queenish, full-blown, cruising-for-a-lip-bruising sperm-sucking fag. He was as gay as a fucking fruitcake. He had good points. He was smart. He was a good worker. He loved his mother. But he had this problem. The idea of putting a stiff male erectile member into his bodily orifices got him crazy. He was smart enough to know if he wanted to keep his gig out at Cat's Paw he would have to act butch during the day. And he liked the bucks and so during the day Harmon Schmitz was a regular guy. No sly looks. No hand on the hip. All he needed was a palomino named Fury and he was Straight Arrow.
But with the coming of nighttime Harmon Schmitz underwent a wild and gay metamorphosis and Lon Chaney, Jr., became the wolfman under the lunar luminosity, but instead of getting hairy he got horny and instead of wanting to sink his fangs into somebody's neck he wanted to sink his lips onto somebody's beaver-cleaver. A total, God-help-me-Mary-I'm-coming, Hi-there-sailor, screaming, swishing, knees-to-the-men's-room-floor queer.
And he was in mortal fear day and night, not of being found out, he wasn't worried about coming out, he was worried about shagging a nice, virulent, unstoppable case of killer AIDS. Scared out of his wits. Frightened half to death. Not to the point where he'd stop cruising, you understand, but very seriously afraid. He already had three friends who were in some stage of the devilish disease. And it was all he thought about when he wasn't horny.
I mean, when you think about it, what's so wonderful, what's so exciting, what's so thrilling about the rubbery, cock-sweaty, tasteless taste of a penis? What was the big attraction about gobbling a few cee-cees of nasty, warm cum? Why couldn't he give it up? He didn't know. Harmon Schmitz just plain loved to suck the boys’ things and that was all there was to it.
He liked the humiliation, he supposed, of subjugating himself to another man. The way they'd look at him when he let his eyes travel down to a guy's bulging crotch and back up to look him in the eye and let him know. The way one of them was always dominant and one was always the more passive. He loved the passive role but he'd play it either way to get laid.
He liked it in the mouth in the butt in the hand, he would take it in his armpit if that's what got some stud off, but the important thing was the cruise. He liked finding it. The tingling and decadent erection that would threaten to rip through the front of his pants the moment he saw a guy. He liked all the numbers out there and it was then that his thoughts would be far from AIDS and the other dangers of the mean streets.
Harmon loved “dating,” which is the name he gave it in his mind. And when the number wasn't too rough sometimes they would date and it would be an even greater ecstasy in anticipation of the climax of the evening. But he liked the toughest trade too. Liked, hell he craved it. Craved the suicidal impulses and self-destructive urges that led a fellow down that path.
He loved the language of the game. The illicit kick of the stalk and the final moves. He loved the positioning of the belt buckle and the hip pocket handkerchief and all the lore and the secret mating signs and the self-advertising clothing and mannerisms of the gay brotherhood. He adored the rites of homosexuality. He got off on the ritual, like an inveterate pipe smoker reaming away at the dottle and dreaming about the sweetness of what he was going to be sucking. He could write a book about sucking.
In fact, that is exactly what Harmon Schmitz was thinking about when this hulking behemoth stepped out of the shadows and rumbled something at him and he turned and it was like a rowboat looking up at the looming Queen Mary but sometimes you take what you can get and with his caution switch on overdrive he turned and said something clever and the voice rumbled again, some nonsense about how to get somewhere and he was both relieved and mildly disappointed that this big thing wasn't a number just someone asking bothersome directions and he replied he didn't know and started off and the voice rumbled again, “Hey!” And he turned back, frightened, but then it spoke to him again and it wasn't menacing the guy just wanted to get directio
ns and so he made himself stop and think for a minute and the man said, “Isn't that Scranson Something going east?” He didn't catch the name but when the huge Goliath pointed and said, “There!” so insistently, he turned his head to look to make sure, Oh that, he thought, that's only Kings Highway but he never got the thought enunciated because as he was turning back to speak a building fell on him and he died.
Nothing fell on him really, but when Chaingang turned back to his left, moving his right arm, that powerful killing arm, to his left to point in front of the victim, pointing out toward the street, his arm going right in front of the man's face where he'd have to turn and look, and as the man's scrawny, pencil neck turns Chaingang smashes that battering ram of an elbow back into the side of the man's temple, and as he fell to the ground he killed him then and went over to the waiting vehicle and packed him away and Harmon Schmitz died as he lived.
He died a heartless death. He died as a piece of meat is butchered. And one cannot overlook the perverseness of the irony that had Harmon Schmitz known that he would be killed so that a madman could eat one of his organs, he'd never in a million years been able to guess which one it would end up being.
Life is funny.
BUCKHEAD SPRINGS
She'd first told him about it that night coming back from Peggy and Jimmie's when they'd gone over for dinner and cards afterward. Lee not seeming as downbeat as he'd been and the evening a pleasant one, with no talk of the Job or any other subjects that might bum anybody out, and they were both in a cuddly mood when they drove home that night.
He loved the look of metropolitan Buckhead after dark. It always seemed to him to look like the best of both worlds, the familiarity and predictability of a small hometown environment coupled with the pizzazz and dazzle of a big city at night. Invariably Jack would recharge a bit at the look of the lights of the city skyline and the surprisingly big-town feel of a vast cosmopolis when he drove through South Buckhead and down Main toward Buckhead Springs, and saw that string of bright lights and all the glittering nightlife in the distance.