He touched her mouth with the shotgun barrel. “Open,” he said warmly. The barrel tapped her tooth. “Open,” he said again, gentler still.
Tears ran down her nose and flowed onto the metal. She opened and he seated the blued hole in her mouth. “It’s not like the movies,” he said. He was careful. He didn’t want to hurt her teeth with the little red-tipped sighting bead. Her lips closed involuntarily on the steel and she gulped, trying to breathe, swallowing deep in her throat like a cheap trick.
“Aw, the heck with her, anyway,” Alex thought and said it aloud. “It’s just something I want to see.” He was awfully close to begging. A project, for criminy-sake.
Dad had been proud of his facility with science and numbers. “You’ll be an engineer, a rocket scientist. Something. Jeeze, Alexander, the space program’ll heat up again. There’s opportunity out there, son.” His dad had pointed to the workshop ceiling. “And I don’t mean the dining room.” They laughed together. Heck, Alexander knew that. Dad pointed to the stars. “There are worlds out there, chances no one knew in my day. If a guy’s got brains—and education, don’t forget that!” He tapped Alexander’s head with the screwdriver blade, then tapped his chest with his other hand. “And the guts to make something of himself, that’s the ticket. You have the guts to take the chance?”
Before he could answer, there was Mom, on the stairs to the basement, smiling at her two boys. “Dinner’s ready, you pioneers!”
Aprons and smiles was Mom. How he always remembered her, anyway. So what for all those worlds? he’d thought. Who’d want to leave here?
Then Dad swept his arm around Alexander’s shoulder and the two of them climbed the steps to Mom’s fragrant kitchen.
Alexander bent his knees so the gun pointed toward the back of the girl’s upper palate. “This is physics,” he thought and said it aloud. “Like school.” He smiled. But the girl was so gosh darned short he had to crouch, get darn-near on his knees to get it angled just so, so the wave front of expanding gases, the shot and unburned powder grains would pass at exactly the right place through her head. He never could get a decent lab partner, how the heck was he expected to...? He dipped deeper, bent to sight along the barrel, extended an imaginary line through her shaking, nodding, bobbing, gulping head. Her whole body quivered as he knelt in front of her. Kneeling, he had to say it, it felt... weird. Felt like church, like genuflecting. Fuck. Goddamn it, goddamn fuck it. For a moment, there was Father O’Donnell. For a moment, he flashed on Sister Marie George, smelled the chalk dust of her, the old spit and bad dentures. Why had the folks made him go to parochial school? God Darn, he really wanted to be in public school with his friends from up and down the street. Darn. He leaned into the kick as he squeezed both triggers at once.
As always, a shotgun blast in a small place was too loud to hear. He felt the concussion over his whole body. The tiles went red, black, and white. But he saw—YES—her eye sockets. They went empty! Empty in that fraction of a second before her head shoved, yes, forward onto the barrel, then jerked back and it was over.
That was the moment for this one. The moment. The moment her eye sockets went red, black, and empty, her eyeballs yanked out by the optic nerves, the whole package sucked out by the speed of shot passing, by the vacuum left as the brain vacated the open skull at supersonic, wow, speed drawing both visual—God!—stems out of her so fan-A-OK-tastically fast, spreading them with the pink gray brain against the—oh fuck-fuck-outstanding-fuck—back wall of the ladies’ room. Then, doggone, he lost her in the moment. Then the moment was over and he had to get going. Back on the road, Rat Time in recess.
That had been where? The high desert west—no, east—of Denver. He’d ditched the Greyhound, waited at the stop for two days before getting a lift and by then the rats were swarming, a pot boiling over. They calmed, crouching, as soon as he got a lift. Pretty little girl. He took the person and her Ford when she stopped for gas and a pee. Great experiment! Thanks, partner.
He traded that Ford for another in Nebraska. North Dakota. Somewhere. He traded plates outside Minneapolis. Same year, same model, same color. Ha. Where’d he learn that? Reform school? That long ago? The Toyota? Along I-90 in North Nowhere, Indiana, near the College Football Hall of Fame. Christ. He swapped the Toyota for a Volvo. Cleveland. Near the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He swapped rides and rocked someone who’d roll no more. Ha! Boomtown Rat Time again.
He traded down to another Ford, a family wagon, in Cooperstown, New York at Baseball’s Hall of Fame. A family, Christ, bad luck for them. If he hadn’t been born in jail while his mother was waiting to take the gas for razoring his father to nothing, he might have let one of them live. Better dead than orphans. Didn’t he know that. A favor. Fuck ’em. He had no feeling, one way or other, for any capital-F-Family. Shit, he’d let the friggin’ dog live. Anyway, that family was not the poster-posers for Family-With-A-Smile! Bastards couldn’t stand one another. Kids, dad, mom, none of them. He could tell. No wonder they offered him, a stranger, a lift to a filling station. Not a second thought. Figured Alex, maybe, would be one friendly face for a couple miles. Bad call, Dad! And Alex. Yo! On one fine roll. Bing. Bing. Bing. Bing. The whole one, two, three, four nuclear-warring family, one after one, one wonderfully squishy time. Cleaning out the gene pool. Wop-da-bop! Just outside Cooperstown, Crack! The Crowd Goes New York Nuts! Maybe he’d catch a ballgame sometime, somewhere. A bar, maybe. Wow!
He ditched the family boat a couple miles along. This was the good old crammed-together east. One jurisdiction shoved against another, one town across the street from the last.
He stopped at Canastota, still in New York, because he saw the sign for the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Amusing, this spate of museums, halls of fame.
He let an elderly lady pick him up. A Chrysler. He let her live. He hadn’t liked her that much but she’d sussed-out his story from the start. One sharp old lady. A bad boy, was she right? Like her last husband, yes? Ivy League, if she didn’t mistake the look of him. Yes?
She was good. So few people realized that Penn was even part of the League. Huh! She dropped him two blocks from her home. He waited, then strolled over, hotwired the Chrysler and slid. She was a snob but he appreciated class. Like he did. Yes.
He laughed at the sign for the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. He traded tags there—he liked that Chrysler—and tossed a goodbye wave to that Hall.
Then he was pumping gas and, oh God, it was wonderful being him. Free and on the open road, touching every museum along this highway of Halls. Didn’t cost much and he’d met so many nice people. Last couple hundred miles, he felt he didn’t even need a gun. The baseball bat he’d gotten... Where? Yes, in Cooperstown. The souvenir ballbat from Cooperstown was wholly adequate.
The pump nozzle was cold in his hand. The three young people in the booth looked warm, focused, slack mouthed, and tube-glued. By gosh he was glad Mom resisted getting a set. He’d complained, of course he complained. A kid’s job. All his friends laughed over last night’s shows the next day. Something to talk about. TV stuck them all together. Left him out. But Mom. She got him to read instead, encouraged him to pick up a couple musical instruments, learn a language or two. Made him, God bless her, made him want to take part in life, real life, “be part of the world!” she’d always said. To this day—and he hadn’t played in years—he’d bet he could pick out a tune or two on the piano. Trombone? Probably not. That was how long ago? He chuckled. Young people today? He looked at the two boys and the girl in the cashier’s booth. They know reality shows, soaps, sit-coms. Faux life, toy music. Trillions of images flicking across the night. All TV did was pile up heaps of people in rooms across America, the world, people alone or in twos and threes, but gathered by the ton. Gazillions of eyes, mouths, and armpits gathered and delivered, sold…
The pump clicked off. Tank full. Time? Could he go farther without Rat Time biting his butt? Should he bring it on? Now? Right here? Those wasted empty faces?
God, give him the strength of character to know…
He hung up the hose, screwed on the cap. Over the trunk of the car, he saw the three faces in the booth, dead-eyed, licked by flicking TV color. They laughed.
“Huh,” said Alex. His eyelids flickered.
Five miles down the road, he saw the first sign for the Hall of Pain.
Rain. Rhode Island, he was certain, but the states flowed together so. Every town, a black cocoon of brick and wood spun around a shut-down mill. Jesus. Dead buildings by nameless rivers. Everybody sat down to die when the factory closed. Fuck yeah, he knew what that was all about. He remembered Uncle Ben. Ben, who’d cared for him after Dad and Mum were killed on vacation. Little Al, what, maybe five? Life would have been…
Fuck it.
It was still raining when he stopped. The name of the town wouldn’t stay in his head. Something-Tucket. Tucket was dark wet streets and left-over light. Tucket’s streets were narrow canyons of brick warehouses, meandering coaster rides between houses that sagged this or that way, slate or brick sidewalks. Tucket was roads, cobbled or shattered, frost-heaved concrete, veins of tar sticking it all together. That was Tucket.
For the last hour he’d followed signs for The Hall of Pain. He cruised curved streets that slimmed to alleys, alleys that shriveled to paths and paths that died at brick walls or fenced lots. At every ending or turning, a sign: “See The Hall of Pain” or “Don’t Miss The Hall of Pain,” then an arrow and a decreasing number of miles then fractions of miles.
“This must be the place,” he said aloud. The rain stepped up as he crawled from one island of yellow light to the next along the sad dark dead-ends.
This one ended at a river. Ahead was a black iron pedestrian bridge. By the bridge, a sign and an arrow: “H LL F P N.” Below: “Y r The e! His headlights kicked back from the white wall of rain and mist. He switched off. Across the bridge a black silhouette stood against the sky. His vision was grainy. Static sparks snapped in his blood; his body sang with exhaustion. Coffee nerves or Rat Time? He’d run too long. 3,000 miles at speed on I-buzzing-90, I-friggin’-80. Whatever fucking “I” he’d had to run, he’d run it.
“Stay or hit the road?” he wondered.
The museum was a square block of company houses, the lousy dumps factories rented to their workers month-by-month for damn-near each month’s pay. The crummy dumps he and Uncle Ben lived in when he was… Through the rain-run window, the museum flickered. Uncle? No Uncle. Ben or otherwise! What the hell was that? Nerves, yeah.
He stretched, twisted. His spine popped all the way down.
“Hall of Pain,” he said to the empty Chrysler. “Perfect. This is America.”
A dim light glowed to life in an upper window of the building. With it, his blood rushed, flushed his vision clear. The chatter in his arms and belly steadied. “Ah,” he said to the light, “a fellow human. Well.” He remembered to lock the car as he walked away. Rain misted him like the body-hot sweat of bad work. No matter how tightly he clutched his jacket, the rain soaked his neck. The iron bridge was painted with shadows. Drooping weeds, junk trees, sumacs, ginkgos, grew, dripping, from the riverbanks, below. To his right, a smooth coil of water rolled over a spillway. The cataract pounded the stone bridge supports and transmitted the rumble to his feet. A suck of cold air washed him as the flood thrumbed downstream, down the dark.
“Great day for a field trip, Miss Kerkauff!” he shouted, his voice lost in the roar of waters.
The museum entrance was a stoop and a wooden door, one of a dozen, either way along the building. Above the door, a single bulb glowed yellow against mossy brick. The lamp was clear glass, like the streetlights he’d potted with his BB gun when he was a kid. He smiled. Then the thought, “What the fuck?” BB gun? Jesus, no. “Put your eye out, Allie,” Aunt Florence said. Then another gut-punch: Who in Christ was Aunt Florence?
He tried the knob and What the fuck? It opened. He never expected it to, but it did and that pissed him off. Why the hell? Even this shit-house should be locked, at—he squinted at his watch—4:28 in morning. He was ready to kick, to smash a face… And, Jesus, there was nothing and nobody and Jesus Fucking Christ it was not going to be a good day for somebody. Maybe a few somebodies would have a day of bad hurt and long forevers. Wait till he found the Manager.
Above the rain and rushing river, he heard a cry from inside, a sob. He listened, tuned.
Another.
“It is the Hall of Pain.” His voice came back from the darkness. “Scare me, will you?” He stepped inside. And it felt so good to not be rained on. When he shut the door, the roar of falling waters was lost. A lamp came on overhead, then farther along. They made a trail of light. They didn’t brighten the place, but he could see the path. Ahead, to the sides, a half-dozen paths maybe, maybe more, he didn’t count. Hard to tell, but the ceiling didn’t look right, too high, too high. But the floor—he bounced on the balls of his feet—good carpet. He liked that. Deep, solid underneath.
Above one corridor was a sign: “Those Who Suffer,” it said, “Have Hope!”
Alex smiled. Above the smile came the sound, again the cry, a whimper from beyond the words. By God, he knew something of suffering, he did. He followed, alive now, tingling. The wonder of Rat Time: it posed no questions, it led and was reason alone, logic itself. Bless those who cry. Alex moved quickly from pool of light to pool of light. The whimperer ahead was one who knew the score, had no illusions left of life or of when death would come. The cry was the sob before the trigger. “Thank you,” it said. “Please do it right, do it quick.”
Alex was come to serve.
Passages intersected. He didn’t care, didn’t count. He followed his stomach. Rooms slipped by. Exhibits. Lives in mannequins, worlds in props and furniture. He glimpsed an amputation, a shattered limb hacked in flickering electric candle. The patient howled in silence, straining, frozen, from the blood-wet table, the saw poised for another bite of flesh, nerve, and marrow.
He’d seen better in life. Still, he almost tasted the loose-bowel stink in the air. An effect? Bad plumbing?
In other rooms, tortures, ancient and modern, the usual tools: flame, pincers, tongs, flesh-flecked rope and gore-beaded spikes, batteries and clamps. Accidents, industrial and domestic. Rooms of flickering solutions, many solutions, all failed, attempts that yearned for the perfection of finality. Photo montages tacked on cracked walls: holdups, murders caught on camera, dismemberments. Parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and the damned of love. Or scenes of famed mayhem acted in silent film: local talent, Lizzie Borden, that swinging doll, her own Rat Time Two-Step blessing her. Crippen, Gein, Manson, Jones, and Dahmer, the wonders of Kosovo, Saddam and Sons…
And all lousy. None of it satisfied.
He wanted that voice, the still-wet meat-throat that led, the yellow-brick whimper down the halls of Pain. Where are you? Where are you? Through a window, dark: a man in gloom, a dummy man, slope-shouldered, by a bed. On soaked sheets, the newly dead—another dummy—legs spread, gown rolled, her whatchacallit place between her legs; she was a red crater, belly to knees. The guy? He held something. Something nice and red. Newborn, the thing, a baby. Ah! Alex had thought he’d done her with a knife, an ax, his hands, his teeth. But, no, no she had died of birth. Like his mother. Nice. The doctor, head hanging, hands blooded, held the life that had killed its mother. Frustration? Exhaustion? Disgust? Annoyance? Did he want to smash the little wet doll he’d saved?
“Fuck up, Doc?” Alex wished the doc were alive so he could kill him now, kill him to pieces.
The sob was near. A splash of light washed from an open door across the hallway. The sob was there. In there. Rats stirred deep, behind Alex’s eyes, in his balls, at his jaws.
“Ahhh...” Alex walked into the light.
The room was a bright cube of no one. The sobs drained away.
“Ahhh...” His throat rumbled. He put a clamp on Rats about to tumble. It had been here.
In the co
rner was a toilet. He used it. There was a sink. He splashed his face. There was a comfortable-looking chair, a refrigerator. The fridge was filled. He had a bite and it was good. There was a television. The bed invited. Every wall had windows, each window had curtains. He opened them one at a time. Nothing. Dark glass. One-way glass, he’d bet.
This was an exhibit. An exhibit in-process, in the making. Me. He sat on the bed and it felt good. It was still. So comfortable to sit on a thing didn’t do 85-90 miles-per-hour. The ceiling was a transparent blue like summer. If he imagined, there were clouds. If he wanted, there was a breeze from across the, yes, meadow. Damn. This was a big room and his, no one else’s. His room.
His door closed.
For the first hour, he smashed himself against the glass, the door. He shouted until he couldn’t. Nothing gave, no one came, and he was bloody with effort. He dumped furniture, smashed it, looked for weapons. He could make knives, bludgeons, garrotes. Wonderful tools, but nothing to use them on.
He sat to think.
He thought nothing. He ate. He collapsed on the bed and pretended to nap. He’d catch whomever, prickbastard, cocksucker soon-to-be-dead-as-a-doornail motherfucking son-of-a-someone, sneaking.
No one came. Soon he slept for real.
When he woke the light had dimmed. Without glare, the room was almost pleasant. Personal rats swarmed his spine and loins, of course. They burrowed, rammed the inside of his skull. There he was. In memory the projector chattered behind him. Hinnershitz’s wool pants prickled his leg. He ate deeply of Hazel Gensler’s grape breath. Alone in his room, food, water, plenty of everything and he was going…
Going a little ratty. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Rat Time tunes and not a partner in the hall.
He whimpered and monkey punched a knot in the muscle above his right knee. Good! He clenched and hit himself again. He screamed. Again. Harder. Harder. He screamed. Sobbed. The sob. He recognized the sob. He’d known it before he knew it now. He was the expert on sobs, the tear without illusion, the cry that knew the score, the gasp before the trigger. Yes. He. Alex, Alex, Alex. Winkler. Winkler. Winkler. He reminded himself as he struck. All but his name slipped away. He buried knuckle in flesh, through nerve, struck bone. He called, “God! I’m a friggin’ professional!” He bit his cheek to shut himself the fuck up. He shut, finally, the fuck up when he tasted meaty cheek, oozing salty, a morsel on his tongue. Then it wasn’t bad. Wasn’t too bad if he sat unmoving, so still no one knew he was nibbling inside. Just a knotting of the jaw, a quiver in the eye. But small. So small. Rat Time condensed.
Drink for the Thirst to Come Page 22