Drink for the Thirst to Come

by Lawrence Santoro

  And you know what? Welly/Dave never realized how Leslie had connected the two of them. Even if the Demi- had mentioned the specifics, the coincidence of their link was on such a vast, such a, well, cosmic scale, neither would have believed it. And that very incredulity would have led to misunderstandings. Misunderstandings certainly would have…

  No, the Demi-Doll said nothing about Earth, saying only that her last Creation was a pretty silly thing and just as well it had been disassembled. The rest was silence. But a great leave! Of course some things are inevitable, and following that…

  Well, don’t ask. It’s best you don’t know too much.

  RAT TIME IN THE HALL OF PAIN

  Outside, Kagen’s Fine Jewelry was an island of gentle light in the soft California evening.

  Inside, Alexander Winkler made a red mess of Kagen’s manager’s sharp wet face.

  “Ah, ah, former manager,” Alex thought aloud.

  Kagen’s was quality. Couldn’t miss the fumed oak, spotless glass, the warm flow of indirect light across their surfaces. You felt the carpet’s hush. “Real wool,” Alex noted, probably aloud, deep wool that made you sink, sink so you wanted to come to rest and rest forever there.

  “That’s Mister Hillegas,” the former manager said, frowning down his nose at Alex, who dropped him with a sharp shot from a three-foot handful of two-inch pipe.

  Arrogant authority. Alex hated it. Rudeness of any stamp, anathema. Mother taught that. Her nature. She, a gentle woman, alone. If father hadn’t gone off with the “other one”—the “her” of tearful evenings—when Alex was (what was I?) seven (no, six), things would have been so, so different for him and so many other Mister Hillegases. He knew that. Poor mother. What had she been thinking? Well, misters like Hillegas seem. They always seem.

  Behind the counter, Alex straddled the still-twitching remnant of “Mister Hillegas.” Thoughtfully, almost gently, Alex shattered another square inch of flesh and muscle with. The. Pipe! Wai. Ting. For. Rat. Time. To. Come. ’Round. At. Last. For a moment the former manager’s left eye dangled by the optic nerve from its splintered socket. The next blow crushed that pale wet thread and the eyeball flowed, winter honey, down Mister Hillegas’s neck and settled, staring up at Alex from Kagen’s good wool carpet.

  Won’t need that, Alex figured.

  While Alex worked, Fat Marty held his cut-down boomgun on the clerks, a man and the woman. Marty’s barrel quivered. The woman was a beauty. Alex wanted to look too. He venerated beauty but appreciated it at leisure and this… This was business. The woman was older than he, probably older than Hillegas, but by God, she was art! Probably deserved Hillegas’s job. Oh yes, Alex knew she did. She was class. Hillegas? Greed, need, and attitude.

  The other clerk was a kid in a daddy-suit, all wooly wrinkles, hair K-Y wet. The kid didn’t belong. Not in Kagen’s Fine. He smelled of sweat, gel, and loosened bowels.

  Alex never broke rhythm. No, no, Rat Time, bless it, was almost, almost there. Another minute. Less. Come on, comeon, comeoncomeoncomeoncomeon!

  Alex figured the kid in the too-big too-wooly suit knew he wouldn’t make tomorrow. He’ll take it quietly, he thought, use all his guts to not beg. He’ll be a Man, a sweaty man, a blind scared, piss-down-his-wooly-leg man but a Capital-M Man absolutely, a quiet good-bye good guy, yes sir, amazing that pretty woman to the end. Alex snorted. Yes. A co-worker, who should have been his boss. He kept his eye on the woman. What a beauty she was, but Beauty had thrown up twice. She was all-over fear. Dread rippled on her like static. If there was a current to her terror, Alex realized, it was no doubt concern: concern for Mister Hillegas, the Hillegas family, something. Imagine. Or about the prick she worked with.

  “Damn,” Alex thought aloud, looking, “you should have been manager.” Not Hillegas, he thought. “He doesn’t deserve you!” he said, and brought the pipe hard across the jagged stew of Mister’s face. Rude prick. Oh yeah! Here it was, coming now: A Hillegas dance in Rat Time.Rude prick probably GOT the fucking job because he was fuckin’ connected. Right? Fucking somebody’s daughter, Right? Fucking somebody’s son. Yes? Maybe fucking SOMEbody somebody’s-fucking-self. YES.

  Each stroke thrilled Alex’s arm and he kept it, stepped it up. Hillegas, Hillegas has something on that fucking Kagen-somebody. Alex had a fucking feeling, a Goddamn motherfucking feeling, about that fucking guy and all the fuckin’ somebodies it took to put together all the lousy deals that made a place like Kagen’s Fine Fuckin’ Jewelry spin like a well-fucked top.

  In it now, Rat Time slithered up his arm, wrapped his shoulder. His jaw torqued shut, Rat Time tingling his head. His vision danced in Rat Fucking Time. Cracked a molar, once, he had, clenched down in Rat Time.

  Mister Hille-fucking-gas did abso-fucking-lutely not deserve the fucking manager gig and Alex was always fucking right, always-on-the-fucking-A-track about those feelings. Well, this fucking paid him fucking back! Using both hands, his full weight swept down. The pipe end drove into the open hole where the exquisite woman’s boss’s supercilious nose had Mistered for the last time just a few minutes before.

  And now, as it always did, it ended with Alex dragged from the birth canal, dripping, clean, covered in new air and sucking freshness. His head rolled back. Relax, he thought. He relaxed. Caught the woman’s eye. Wanted her to know, I’m with you. He understood, knew what she’d put up with from that. Hillegas. All those years. He shook his head, tired, smiling. He hoped the woman (oh she was Beauty) would appreciate this, what he’d done for her, before they married. Before he killed her. Whatever.

  And, aw jeeze, Rat Time was over. Too bad. The unconscionable bastard, Hillegas, had taken the edge. She’d be dull now. Business. A .22 to the base of the skull. Kid wooly wrinkles? The same. His partner, Fat Marty? Later, later, tomorrow, day after, sometime when the sweaty porker was jerking off, thinking of the Woman. Fat Marty, sent to hell, sins squirting. He shouldn’t breathe in the same world as she, Fat Marty shouldn’t. Soon he won’t. She wouldn’t be in the world by then, either, of course.

  Rat Time over, Alex considered the future. The rest was business. For show, all for show. Jewelry, metal, money. Tokens in the game, how the game was scored.

  Alex pushed himself up with the pipe. The pipe stuck out of whatshisname’s face. “Time for the game.”

  He may have said that aloud because for the third time, Beauty puked.

  Alex kept his foot to the floor. Highway white lines shot under; the roadway paint hissed as it passed. Speed chattered, amped him up to a place between sleep and terror, kept him sometimes more, sometimes less awake through grainy night.

  The moon split the clouds and lit the layered haze that had settled in the valley into which he plunged. The rearview was black. He almost jumped, seeing his own eye lit by dashboard green in the corner of the mirror. Behind him and ahead were mountains, dark forests, deep glens. In these pale moments of moonlight and fog the old rock and forest whispered. They’re nearly dead, he thought. The east is a ghost, he thought of the coast toward which he ran. Where the hell was he now? New York, P-A? Western Mass? Damn, he loved the east. Moody son-of-a-bitch, this dead country. The store out west had clinched it. (Where? California? Yes.) He’d had it with the west.

  After Fat Whatsit, his partner barely remembered now, Alex hopped a Greyhound out of Berdoo, one breathing body among fifty-two. They rode a taut desert highway toward the mountains. He was surrounded by Mexicans, Indians, old ladies and drunks, pimpled soldiers and pregnant women riding alone. The bodies comforted, at first, brought warmth and scent. He leaned back in air-conditioned blue-glass comfort, lounged through miles of sun-soaked empty, breathing in the folk. He eased asleep, surrounded, supported.

  When he woke, night hummed. He thought he was awake. In a while he knew he was. Greasemouth Marty, Fat Marty, that was his name, Marty Mouth, was garbage, a couple, three hundred miles back. The store? The jewelry job, yes. The name of the place? Who were the dead? Forget it. It was dollars. Not many. E
nough.

  Marty. Marty wasn’t even an emptiness beside him. Marty was a negligible asset that had become a palpable liability. Partner? Partners made Alex nervous. They pinned you down. Partners were greedy, too scared, or, stupidly, not scared enough. Partners were whims with hands and anxious feet. Partners were mouths that hit and ran and never stayed shut. No, this was a business and the economic mantra of the day was Downsize. Reduce the eyes, shut the mouths.

  Heck yeah, he thought, after work a partner was just a witness.

  There always were witnesses. Someone somewhere always knew something and you couldn’t kill them all. Much as you’d like to, you couldn’t murder everyone.

  Awake now, yes, in his Greyhound run to the east, surrounded in the dark glass night, the bodies breathed, each with its bouquet. Alex tasted the lives around him. He listened. They whispered. Damn. Goddamn. Their chatter climbed his spine. A murmur now, in a bit it would be Rat nibbles. Third Grade again. Miss Kerkauff again. On the way to Wednesday movies again, again marching down the hall between Robby Ringler and Brenda Hebhardt. In lockstep and under eye. And Rat Time would twitch ’round. Marty had barely done it for him.

  “Oh, ohh,” Alex moaned and wondered again if he really was awake. Another moan. He was.

  “Y’okay, Mis-ter?” The voice drawled from an angular thing next to him. The quick light of a highway marker slashed across the voice’s face. Bone thin and pimple-flamed, a greasy crew cut and snaggled-teeth. Sixteen, maybe. Country doofus, just like Alex. Good ol’ Al.

  “Y’okay?”

  “Abso-tutely,” old Al drawled back. Aw Lord Jesus, yes. Rat Time drawing nigh. And here he for sure was, in the desert, wrapped in Greyhound, padded with Greasers. “Indubitably, ol’ buddy.” He nodded thanks to Miss Kerkauff, who’d made him study his vocabulary. Words. They gathered the world so easy-like. He looked out above his own grin. Saw the uniform. Made like he just noticed. “Oh, hey, pardon, Sarge,” Alex said. He considered: Do I Rat Tango with Pimples here?

  Options flickered.

  “’Cause I got some aspirins here, you’re feelin’ poor.” Kid said. “I know how’s I hate travelin’ with the headache or the tooth. So, you need somethin’, you lemme know, y’hear?”

  The boy was real. Probably real. In a few hours, he’d be someone? His mother? His mother’d be talking or moaning make-believe, like she did.

  “I surely will,” Alex said. Even now, the kid in wrinkled khakis was becoming less kid, more Mom. He’d watched her, Mom, through iron curlicues at the foot of the bed. Seemed to Alex he’d stood all his childhood down there, watched a dozen daddies every night, the perfumed men who’d lined up for stinky-time with Mom. He’d watched through the bucking bedstead as her ass swayed, her smiling mouth gulped wet with —those daddies, square johns, rig pushers. Soldiers, like Pimples here, they all squinted at him while she slurped. They wanted to put out his light. Each one.

  Mom never daddied no Mex. “Sure as shit ain’t gonna trick with them, can’t bother to learn English,” she’d say, making hard eyes with potential daddies passing along the stroll. “Come here and ain’t got the courtesy to learn our fucking language, expect we’ll talk theirs. I don’t wanna ever hear you speaking nothing but American, y’hear?”

  No ma’am.

  “Indian, either.”

  If he could see in the dark of the bus—better, if he could cut the lids off the eyes of the sleeping wetbacks and Indians around him, if he could shine a light and look—their eyes’d be the same as the white- and nigger-eyes that had stared him dead through those painted iron curlicues. All the same, Injun or Mex, they’d drain his light too if they could.

  Considering the kid next to him: The next stop? Talk him off, do him hard and wet, get back on, ride away? Or do him quiet by the john? Travel a distance with the sleeping dead, one among fifty-one? Then get off, casual?

  He considered. Soon the rats would crawl. He’d attend them when. Until? He’d keep them in check. It was dangerous to be not in control, hungry in the dark, surrounded by so much meat. The time would come and beyond that...?

  Beyond? He laughed. There was no beyond, beyond that. Beyond Rat Time? The time when he had to go a little mad, like that freak said in that movie. When Rat Time came, it came for sure and always was obeyed. Obeyed, it always ended with someone—someone small or large, but someone—always, forever after, was always very very very dead. Then after, and for a while, he was this, what he was now, this perfect gentle man: resting, hunkered down, square-one. No. There was no “beyond” beyond Rat Time forestalled. A violation of physics, a contradiction in terms, the irresistible force, the immoveable object. Two factors that cannot exist in the same universe: Rat Time and No Rat Time.

  For now, he thought, let’s see how far we take it.

  “No thank you, Sarge,” Alex said to the thin darkness beside him. “I’m fine. Just a dream.”

  And like that, the boy was saved.

  A buzzer shouted. Felt it in his spine. The fuel light on the car’s dashboard blinked. Thank the Lord. He’d have to stop. Too early for dawn, but he was riding near empty, and he’d have to pause.

  A sign grew. “Food. Fuel. Rest. 17 miles.” White on green. Then gone. The road flattened along the valley of a river he didn’t know and couldn’t see for dark and trees. Soon, a hazy light arose ahead. A nudge of the wheel eased him onto the gentle up-curve of the off-ramp. Eighty-five bled to zero as he rolled the last hundred yards into the sodium vapor island at the oasis.

  Gas clicked into the tank and its good scent filled his head. He looked over the trunk and into the glass and aluminum cashier’s booth. Three people crammed in there. Two guys, one working, the other, a buddy, with the buddy, a girl. Alex balanced: a fill-up and a rest or a fill-up and a dance? Depended. Now, Alex felt polite, soft. Now. He had no idea what the world would be like when the tank was full.

  Now and then he had to go, get out. City, town, the place, wherever the place was, the walls of concrete, steel and too-bright glass, the asphalt floors or the fields of brown and green, the wide domes of blue sky, chrome sun and pointy black night, wherever it was the place would get behind Alex’s eyes and shove.

  When these days came, he’d remember Miss Kerkauff and movie Wednesdays in the dark. He’d remember the ratchet chatter of the projector, the scratchy black and white flicker. He’d recall the narrator’s voice. The wooden slats of the folding chairs pinched his scrawny ass, his feet dangled from his skinny pins and made his butt go numb. On one side, fatty Stevie Hinnershitz’s wool pants rubbed Alex’s legs. On the other, Hazel Gensler’s grape-pop bubble gum breath filled his hunger. Whenever he grew hungry forevermore, he had only to breathe and there would be Hazel and grape and he would fill. In front, Frankie Rhodes’s hard white skull and damp crew cut waited. Frankie waited for the dark of the movie to turn, a bristly silhouette with knuckles. When the dark came, Frankie monkey-punched Alex’s leg, knuckles going deep into his meat and muscle.

  “That hurt like fuck?” Frankie whispered.

  Alex said nothing. Mouth shut.

  “We’ll, s’posed to,” Frankie said. Four, five times each period. Wham. Wham. WhamWhamwham. Movie Wednesdays.

  He’d watch the wrinkled screen with the brown Rorschach water stain across the middle. He’d wait for the pain and keep his fuckin’ mouth shut when it came.

  Sometimes the movie was “Be clean, brush your teeth,” or “Say please, say thank you.” Sometimes it was “Work hard. Be good. Thank everyone.”

  He saw the rat film once. Only once. The narrator’s voice, manly, smart. “Our world today grows ever smaller.”

  Airplanes, speeding trains, liners on the sea...

  “The space between people narrows.”

  Cities. Traffic. Crowds.

  The film told with pictures: Picture a rat in a cage. The cage is big. Picture a rat couple in this cage. Picture a rat family, a happy few, this band of rats. Sleek rats. Happy rat faces, clean bodies, scurrying, groo
ming whiskers. Mother rats nursing little ratties, hairless rat pups at suck. Mommy rat, baby rat, brother rats and sisters, daddy rat off to gather food. Beautiful. Home.

  The picture dissolved; the narrator spoke numbers. The cage was fuller: a bustle of rat, a flow, and a marvel of rat efficiency. Roiling, busy rat paths crisscrossing, a Ratopolis, Rat Gotham. Rats carrying forth important rat tasks.

  Another lap-dissolve, the narrator’s voice went darker. The cage, once spacious, friendly, home and haven, now was jam-crammed. Packed rat-jowl to rat-butt, bodies clamored, claws raked bellies. Rats burrowed into corners or sat shivering, torn, dirty, crawled on, over, snapped at, shat upon and fouled. Rat faces in close up: terror, exhaustion. Breathless. Snarling. Big rats tore at small ones. Small ones ganged on old ones. Rats stole. Rats hoarded. Rats starved, shivered, thinned, failed, falling within inches of the food they’d gathered and held. Rats killed for nothing, yet nothing was wanting in the abundance of the cage. Rats murdered in fury while others waited calmly their turn to be torn, left twitching. The place was madness, this place, this lab-made hell.

  In memory, the images are of teeth, fur, bodies, blood. All Alex hears is projector chatter and the smart, warm, passionless voice. Alex doesn’t have the words, but the voice speaks of matricide, parricide, ratricide. This closing of the space between the rats has brought out the worst in ratkind, brought out the inner rat, brought forth Rat Time. There is one final image: a small rat in a corner, death around, his twitching whiskers, bloodied, his fangs dark with blood. Blood from where? Who knew? There was blood on his fur and nothing in the tiny bright eyes but patient waiting. That picture…

  …flickered, and Alex’s leg ached from Frankie’s monkey punches, and the sound, the memory, the memory always was such a comfort to Alex. And Hazel’s grape breath.