Eric blinked, shook himself, and faced the girl. “What are you—? How did—?”
She opened her prostheses, picked up the Polaroid camera, and snapped his picture, the sudden bright flash of the bulb momentarily blinding him. Instinctively, Eric’s hands came up to shield his eyes two seconds too late and he dropped the photos, which scattered at his feet.
It took a second for him to realize that he couldn’t move; not a finger, not a foot; he couldn’t even move his eyes from where they were looking once the bright flash from the camera began to fade from his sight.
At the pictures around his feet.
One displayed the hallway wall next to the bathroom, covered in blood; another showed the wall beside the stairway, where a bloodied handprint started near the top and began a ragged smear as it traveled downward, as is whomever had made it was trying to remain standing as they stumbled downstairs; yet another showed the chalk outline of a very small body, only where its head should have been was a deep dark stain in the living room carpet; here was the outline of a woman’s body, wide splashes of gore all but obscuring the chalk—or was it tape?—that showed the position in which she’d been discovered; here was the banister at the top of the stairs, dripping with viscera and speckled with things that looked like pieces of bone; and here was a picture of the living room—not the living room that was down there now, no, but the living room, nonetheless—where the outline of a man’s body was drawn partly on the floor and partly on the wall next to the fireplace, a massive splatter of blood and brains covering the wall, the outline of a shotgun lying less than a foot away from that of his hand.
“He used a meat clever on me,” said the girl from the realtor’s office. “I was studying piano, had been accepted at Julliard, so my hands were the first things to go, but I got out before he could do any more damage. Mom and Billy were already dead by then. I remember screaming when he bashed Billy’s head against the banister. I froze, I was so scared. And all because he had to fuck his whore, and she got off on taping it, and Mom found it. He should have never stuck around if he didn’t want kids, a family, responsibility. But that’s always the way, isn’t it? You do things because you feel obligated, then wake up one day to find that all of these things—your life, your family, your responsibilities—hang around your neck like chains instead of pearls. He always had a problem with his temper, but never did anything to help it.”
Eric tried to speak, tried to force some kind of sound from his throat, but he couldn’t even pull in a breath.
He saw her shadow approach him, felt her slip the new photograph into his shirt pocket.
“The funny thing is,” she said, “that I still love him. I don’t want to—he butchered my mother and my little brother, then blew his own head off—but I still find that, when I think about him, I still feel some love. Pathetic, isn’t it?”
She dropped the camera at his feet.
Eriq Bakker, read the misspelled name punched onto the plastic blue strip attached to its underside.
“I have to go back now—or go forward, depending on how you look at it. I don’t know what of this will remain back here, but if I did this correctly, something should stay behind. At least, I hope so.”
Eric felt her lean forward and kiss his cheek. “Time will tell, I guess.”
He listened as she left the room, went down the stairs, and out the front door.
After a few moments, he could breathe again, and felt his frozen limbs begin tingling back to life.
Slowly, with only a little stiffness, he bent down and picked up the blank photographs, wondering where they’d come from, then saw his old camera by his feet.
Funny—he could remember losing this thing but not finding it.
Looking at the photographs, he realized it was a moot point because the damn thing obviously no longer worked.
He tossed everything into the waste basket beside the bed, noticed he’d left the television on—some old re-run of The Dick van Dyke Show he’d recorded a few nights ago—turned it off, and went back downstairs.
He was gathering up the detritus of this morning’s breakfast fiasco—he still needed to wash away the blood—when he heard the front door open and Val come inside.
“Eric,” she said, sounding unusually chipper. “Hey, baby, you down here?”
He picked up the chopping knife and saw the deep splashes of red that still clung to the blade, but whether it was still his blood or from the tomato he couldn’t tell and didn’t really care. All he wanted was to spend his two off from the restaurant in peace and not have to deal with anything.
“I’m in here,” he called to her, scratching at a spot on his chest. Feeling something in his shirt pocket (when had he gotten dressed?), he reached in and pulled out the photograph.
Funny, he didn’t remember taking this one, either.
Not that it mattered, because it was already fading.
Was it just him, or for a moment there, before the image finally gave up trying to develop itself and faded to that dull off-white that was always the bane of the Instamatic owner’s life…was it his imagination, or had he seen a flash of family, of two parents and two children, smiling for the birdie?
He blinked, and the image faded, its memory and any meaning it might hold for him becoming mist, a ghost, just out of reach, as so many things seemed to be these days.
Jesus, he needed rest. He needed peace and quiet, a break from the daily pressures.
“Eric,” said Val and she started toward the kitchen, “I saw my doctor today, and I’ve got…God, I still can’t believe it…I’ve got some wonderful news!”
He lay the empty photograph on the cutting board amidst the guts of the tomato and impaled in place with the chopping knife, held his breath, and then turned to face his wife whose radiant expression bespoke the joy she was about to bring into their lives.
El Poso Del Mundo
Introduction by Tim Waggoner
One of the many things I admire about Gary’s fiction is the unblinking—and all-too-often heartbreaking—honesty that lies at its core, and “El Poso Del Mundo” is no exception. Its primary theme deals with violence—not the stylized hyper-exaggerated ballet of brutality that we see in far too many of our entertainments, but the real deal. Violence which has consequences, affecting people not only physically, but emotionally. Gary’s story asks a profound and much-needed question: “Who’s the true victim of violence?” His answer: “Everyone.”
It’s because of this question—and even more so, its answer—that I assigned this story as a reading in a Horror Literature class I taught at my college one year. I wanted the students, many of whom had only taken the class because of their love for blood-splattered gorefests like the Friday the 13th film series, that true horror—horror that matters—isn’t about machete-wielding maniacs, but rather the pain that eats like cold acid at the center of the human heart.
El Poso Del Mundo
“The souls of the Mexican people are heavy for the wings of love, they have swallowed the stone of despair.”
—D.H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent
An old piece of ranchera music blared from the rusted radio at the edge of the bar:
I dreamed of money in the bank
And of driving a Cadillac
I married a blond, hoping to become
A respected U.S. citizen
But she turned out to be a wetback too
Now I’m back home, driving my burro
Humberto Farais shook his head and quietly laughed at the song, hoping that the ghosts of his family would not think he was showing disrespect. Good Christ! How many times had he heard his own father sing that very tune as he sat with other workers around trash-barrel fires in the migrant camps? Sad, silly, drunken men, all of them, with thick calluses on their hands that smelled of tobacco and dirt and cheap tequila and lemons, clutching at their shabby clothes and even shabbier hopes, crooning into the uncaring night toward some God they believed in but had never seen
any proof of, praying he would hear their pleas and grant them safe passage to the plentiful streets of el norte.
Well, father, he thought as his eyes searched the doorway for some sign of his target, it was that desire to reach el norte that killed you. More’s the pity, for I wish you were alive to see me now, and how I am making them all pay for your death.
He was sitting in the bar of a transient hotel in downtown Monterrey, waiting to run down one of his most profitable con numbers, one that he fondly called La Caza De Grillos—The Fool’s Errand. All part of putting la mordida—the bite—on the wealthy Americans.
He didn’t have to wait long.
A man dressed in a three-piece white suit already caked with dust and grime walked in, quickly spotted Humberto, and came over to his table. Sweating, red-faced, and wide-eyed, he might as well have had a sign hanging around his neck with the words I AM HERE TO LAUNDER SOME DIRTY MONEY written on it in capital letters. The man shimmered with panic, and with panic came impatience and carelessness, the two most useful tools.
You’re about as inconspicuous as an Israeli at a PLO picnic, thought Humberto, slamming back a shot of tequila to keep himself from chuckling.
The man took a seat at the table. Humberto turned on his Lizard Grin and said, “Hey, m’man, loo-keeng good today.” The accent was nice and thick and just slightly overdone, something that Humberto had worked years to finesse; he’d found the more he acted the role of Sleazy Mexican Crook, the more his targets took him at face value. He even went so far as to wear the kind of stereotypical uniform that the americanos expected of their Mexican hooligans: a polyester leisure suit circa 1977, with an open collar, a few gold chains, rings aplenty, slicked-back hair and a three-day growth of beard. He could’ve been an extra in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.
“C-could we just get on with this?” said the target. “I have to catch a plane at eight.” Humberto draped one of his arms around the man’s shoulders. “Hey, no problemo, man. This don’t take long. You have, I think, something to show me, yes?”
“Maybe. If you have something to show me.”
Humberto reached inside his jacket and produced a thick envelope that he dropped in the target’s lap. The man jerked his head to the side to see if anyone had noticed, then opened the envelope and flipped through the bills.
“Authentic Banco de Mexico notes,” whispered Humberto. “No bills larger than a fifty, just as you said. Serial numbers out of sequence.” He smiled. “Some of those notes are older than we are, señor. A nice touch, no?”
“Where were they printed?”
“Some here, some in the States. All very clean.”
The target lifted one of the bills up to the light and examined it carefully. “You got a name?”
“Jarraro. And you, señor?”
“The people I represent call me ‘Petey.’” He put the bill back in the envelope. “How much?”
“How much you got, m’man?”
“Seventy-five thousand.”
Humberto whistled, long and low. “Very impressive amount. But that would be the hospital’s money, no? Do not look at me that way, I only repeat what your ... associates tell me over the phone last week. How much of your own money did you bring?”
“Another fifty thousand.”
Humberto let fly with his corniest sleazebag laugh and clapped the target on the back as if he were an old friend. “This is very good. Here is what I will do for you, señor; I will give you an exchange rate of sixty-seven cents on the dollar.”
“Bullshit. The agreement was eighty.”
“That was before your chubby president passed his wonderful trade act so your American companies could use my country for an industrial toilet. I’ll give you sixty-nine cents and we’ll call it a compromise in the name of international harmony.”
The target chewed on his lower lip. “You people are all the same, lazy, shiftless .... Seventy-five cents.”
“Seventy.”
“Fuck you,” said the target, holding up the envelope. “Seventy-three.”
Humberto reached over and turned the target’s head toward the window. Outside in the street, a short red-haired man with a 35mm camera snapped a quick series of pictures.
“W-who’s that?”
“One of my amigos. He can have that film developed in thirty minutes and the pictures in the hands of your American authorities before you even get to the airport. I am very popular with your American authorities, señor. They find me curious. They would want to ask you many questions about me, and about the envelope you are holding in the picture. They maybe would want to check on your background. That is, I think, something that would not please you.”
“I’ve got a gun.”
Humberto knew he was lying. “I do not think so.” He flipped open a switchblade and pressed the business end against the man’s crotch under the table. “But if I am wrong you may shoot me now and I will die a fool.”
The target swallowed and shook his head. Humberto pulled the knife away and gestured for the man with camera to leave.
“Seventy-two?” whispered the target.
“Senor, we have a deal.”
Surprise registered on the man’s face, and he shook Humberto’s hand. Back in the States tomorrow this man would gloat to his partners how he stood his ground and made the oily little wetback squirm for every penny. Another great triumph for American capitalism.
“You will please give me ten thousand dollars in cash right now,” said Humberto.
The man took an envelope from inside his jacket and exchanged it for the one Humberto had given to him, which contained the exact same amount.
“Go back to your hotel room and wait,” whispered Humberto. “In one hour an amigo of mine will visit you. He will have something in a box. You will understand. If you are still agreeable to the terms, tell him and he will bring the message to me. I will meet you back here at five and we will conclude our business.”
“I understand.” The target stared, his suspicion obvious.
Time to lay it on thick and play the part to the hilt.
“Hey, señor, how rude of me! You maybe want somebody to pass the time with? They call me proveedor, you know? You want eet, I get eet for you. You want maybe some coke for the nose, some lovely wee-men for your bed, no? Get you first-rate poo-see, real clean, yes?”
“I don’t think you have anything that would interest me,” said the man, rising. “My room, one hour.”
“Do not worry yourself, señor. I am Miguel Jarraro and I always come through.”
The target left. Humberto slammed back another shot of tequila and winced as it hit his stomach.
This guy was a wimp. In a hurry and harmless as a fly.
And then Humberto Farais—alias Miguel Jarraro, José Baranda, Gonzales Vargas, and a dozen other names—remembered something that made his smile weaken, his eyes grow weary, and his chest so very heavy; something that always took him down a few notches when he was feeling cocky and too goddamned for a mere mortal; he remembered the face of his father and the way it had looked the last time Humberto had seen him alive.
And for a moment he didn’t feel quite so self-satisfied and indestructible. His face lost its confident expression and became that of a man whose life had become little more than a low-budget two-reeler serial shown in place of the cartoon at a Saturday movie matinee; it was the face of a man who’d cheapened himself and knew it, a man whose skill and intelligence were rapidly deteriorating under the compiling weight of shame, anger, and loneliness; the face of a man whose only untainted pleasure was studying the stars at night while the ghost of his father looked over his shoulder, whispering, Behold the light from God’s eyes, my son. See how brightly it shines. Always the stars will be watching over you, even when I am with you no longer.
It was a face filled, for the moment, with a bitter self-disgust that defied boundaries.
But a second later it was gone, replaced by thoughts of la mordida.
&nbs
p; There was business to attend to.
Always there was business.
* * *
“You’re telling me there was no film in the camera?”
“You said it was just to scare him. I figured the whole thing was just for show. Besides, I’m getting low and film’s expensive down here.”
“My God,” said Humberto. “We’ve turned into a Donald Westlake novel.” He smiled at the red-haired man. “You know, Patch, for someone who did two tours in Vietnam and managed to come out with only a few scratches, you sometimes make me wonder how.”
“Part of my well-honed mystique. Just sit back and be awed, I can take it.”
There were three of them in the van: Humberto, Michael Joseph “Patch” McCarthy, and a little boy know to them only as Ruben. Humberto had found the boy in a labor camp outside of Mexico City a few months before. Humberto had given the boy some money, bought him something to eat, and discovered that he had no family at the camp. Before he knew what had hit him, the boy had simply and quietly insinuated himself into Humberto’s life with all the subtlety of a stray dog that followed whoever happened to throw it some scraps. At first Humberto chose to keep the kid around because he was useful in running down con numbers; he had that innocent, Bambi-eyed look no one could distrust. The fact that he could not—or would not—speak made Ruben all the more disarming. Today would be the first time the boy had ever been used in something this major.
Yes, Ruben was quite useful.
But now there was much more to it than that. The boy had insinuated himself not only into Humberto’s life but deep into the core of his heart, as well. Humberto could not have cared more for him had Ruben been his own son.
“What happens next?” asked Patch.
“We wait forty-five minutes and then send Ruben up with a box of the pencils.”
Patch lit a cigarette and opened a window so the smoke didn’t kill them. “You wanna explain this little ditty to me once more?”
Halfway Down the Stairs Page 36