To think: If it hadn’t been for the teenybopper incident during the fire at the Bixby, Lenny might never have dreamed up the scam he pulled on Flip. Yes . . . strange how one thing leads to another.
But Flip’s overdose. Maybe that was really Lenny’s fault. Maybe the five hundred he had left the Flipper last week—guilt money?—had been too much cash at once. Maybe it had let him go out and get some really pure stuff. A lot of it. And maybe that was why he was dead—because of the money Lenny had left him.
The Lulus faded out, followed without commercial interruption or dj comment by the Pendrakes’ “I’m So Crazy for You.”
Another of Lenny’s groups from the fifties.
He felt a tingle crawl up from the base of his spine. What was going on here? Coincidence was one thing, but this made seven songs in a row he was connected with. Seven!
Lenny strode back to the tuner and spun the knob. Stations screeched by until the indicator came to rest in the nineties. Flip Goodloe once again shouted the chorus of “Little Rocker” from the speakers. Lenny gasped and gave the knob a vicious turn. Another screech and then the Boktones—another group on one of Lenny’s short-lived labels—were singing “Hey-Hey Momma!”
Sweat broke out along Lenny’s upper lip. This was crazy. It was Lenny Winter night all over the dial!
One more chance. Steadying his hand, he guided the indicator to the all-news station. The only tunes you ever heard there were commercial jingles. He found the number—
—and reeled away from the machine as the familiar opening riffs of “Mary-Liz” rammed against him.
With a quaking index finger stretched out before him, he forced himself forward and hit the power button. Silence. Blessed silence.
He realized he was trembling. Why? It was all just a coincidence, nothing more. The Flipper’s death had put the stations into a retrospective mood. They were playing old Goodloe tunes and other stuff from his era. And the all-news station . . . probably doing a feature on Goodloe, and Lenny had tuned in just as they were airing a sample of his work.
Sure. That was it.
So why not turn the radio back on? Why not indeed?
Because he had to go out now. Yes. Out. For some air. Lenny fled the trophy room and went to the front hall. It was spring but still cool out here along the Long Island Sound, and he’d need a coat. He pulled the closet door open and stopped. At first glance he thought the closet was empty. Then he saw the coats and jackets on the floor. They’d all fallen off their hangers.
And those hangers . . . they didn’t look like hangers anymore.
They hung on the closet pole in a neat row, but they’d been twisted into an odd shape that was becoming too familiar . . . something like a cross between a G-clef and a dollar sign. They hung there, swaying gently, the light from the hall gleaming dully along the contorted lengths of wire.
Lenny stared at them dumbly, feeling terror expand with the memory of where he had first seen that shape: Goodloe’s apartment.
Flip had been squatting under a hanger shaped just like these when Lenny had last seen him. He’d called it the great god Doolang or some such nonsense. Just a junkie fever dream—but what had happened to these?
Someone was in the house! That was the only explanation.
Some buddy of Flip’s had come here to twist these things into knots and scare him. Well, it was working. Lenny was terrified. Not of any supernatural mumbo-jumbo, but of the very idea of one of Flip’s junkie friends in his house. Probably upstairs right now, waiting. He had to get out.
He snatched a coat from the floor and stumbled toward the front door. He’d be safer outside. He could run around to the garage and take the car. Then he’d phone the police and have them go through the house. That was the best way, the safest way.
As the door slammed behind him, he waited for a blast of cool air. It never came. Instead, it was warm out here. The air was stale, heavy with the smell and humidity of packed bodies. And it was dark . . . darker than it should be. Where were the lights of downtown Monroe?
Pain shot through Lenny’s abdomen as his intestines twisted in fear. This wasn’t his front yard. This was someplace else. He turned back to his front door. It was gone, replaced by a pair of wide, flat, swinging panels, each with a small glass rectangle at eye level. Through the glass he could see what appeared to be a lighted theatre lobby with Art Deco designs on the walls, popcorn machine and all. But deserted. He pounded on the doors, but it was like pounding against the base of a skyscraper; they didn’t even rattle.
He turned. A light was growing out where the apron of his driveway should have been. Something was moved in the glow. As his eyes adjusted he could see rows of theatre seats stretching away on either side, and a filthy carpet leading down to a stage where the light continued to grow.
Noise filtered in like someone turning up the volume of an amplifier. Music: the driving rhythm of “Mary-Liz” and Flip Goodloe himself shouting the lyrics.
With his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth, Lenny took a faltering step or two toward the stage. It couldn’t be.
But it was. No mistaking those gyrations, or the voice, or the riffs: the Flipper.
He heard crowd noises—cheers, hoots, shouts, hands clapping—and tore his gaze from the stage. The seats around him were filled with kids jumping up and down and gyrating wildly to the music. But there was no excitement in their slack faces, or in their cold eyes. Lenny knew this place. And he recognized those kids.
The Bixby in Astoria. But that was impossible—the Bixby was gone—burned out back in ‘59 during his first rock show and torn down a few months later.
Lenny ran back to the swinging doors and slammed against them. They still wouldn’t budge. He pounded on the glass but there was no one in the outer lobby to hear. Had to find another way out, another exit. He was halfway down the aisle when he smelled it.
Smoke.
A cough. Another. Then someone shouted “Fire!” and the panic began. The crowd leaped out of its seats and surged into the aisle, enveloping Lenny like a hungry amoeba. As he went down under the press of panicked bodies, he caught a glimpse of the stage. Flip Goodloe was still up there, hurling his wild riffs into the smoky air, oblivious to the flames that ringed him. Flip smiled fiercely his way, and then Lenny was down, his back slamming against the filthy carpet.
Pain. Shoes kicked at him, heels high and low dug into his face and abdomen in frantic efforts to get by. Bodies fell on him. The weight atop him grew until he heard his ribs crack and shatter; but the lancinating pain from the bone splinters was overwhelmed by his hunger for air. He couldn’t breathe! Stale air clogged in his lungs. The odor of old popcorn and dried chewing gum from the carpet was becalmed in his nasal passages.
Vision dimmed, tunneling down to a narrow circle of hazy light filtering through the chaos that swirled around him. And there on the ceiling of the theatre he saw a chandelier. But not the tassled punch-bowl affair that had hung in the old Bixby. This was a huge fluorescent tube, glowing redly, twisted into that same shape . . . the Doolang shape . . .
DAT-TAY-VAO
1
Patsy cupped his hands gently over his belly to keep his intestines where they belonged. Weak, wet, and helpless, he lay on his back in the alley and looked up at the stars in the crystal sky, unable to move, afraid to call out. The one time he’d yelled loud enough to be heard all the way to the street, loops of bowel had squirmed against his hands, feeling like a pile of Mom’s slippery-slick homemade sausage all gray from boiling and coated with her tomato sauce. Visions of his insides surging from the slit in his abdomen like spring snakes from a novelty can of nuts had kept him from yelling again.
No one had come.
He knew he was dying. Good as dead, in fact. He could feel the blood oozing out of the vertical gash in his belly, seeping around his fingers and trailing down his forearms to the ground. Wet from neck to knees. Probably lying in a pool of blood . . . his very own homemade marinara sauce.
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Help was maybe fifty feet away and he couldn’t call for it. Even if he could stand the sight of his guts jumping out of him, he no longer had the strength to yell. Yet help was out there . . . the nightsounds of Quang Ngai streetlife . . . so near . . .
Nothing ever goes right for me. Nothing. Ever.
It had been such a sweet deal. Six keys of Cambodian brown. He could’ve got that home to Flatbush no sweat and then he’d have been set up real good. Uncle Tony would’ve known what to do with the stuff and Patsy would’ve been made. And he’d never be called Fatman again. Only the grunts over here called him Fatman. He’d be Pasquale to the old boys, and Pat to the younger guys.
And Uncle Tony would’ve called him Kid, like he always did.
Yeah. Would have. If Uncle Tony could see him now, he’d call him Shit-for-Brains. He could hear him now:
Six keys for ten G’s? Whatsamatta witchoo? Din’t I always tell you if it seems too good to be true, it usually is? Ay! Gabidose! Din’t you smell no rat?
Nope. No rat smell. Because I didn’t want to smell a rat. Too eager for the deal. Too anxious for the quick score. Too damn stupid as usual to see how that sleazeball Hung was playing me like a hooked fish.
No Cambodian brown.
No deal.
Just a long, sharp K-bar.
The stars above went fuzzy and swam around, then came into focus again.
The pain had been awful at first, but that was gone now. Except for the cold, it was almost like getting smashed and crashed on scotch and grass and just drifting off. Almost pleasant. Except for the cold. And the fear.
Footsteps . . . coming from the left. He managed to turn his head a few degrees. A lone figure approached, silhouetted against the light from the street. A slow, unsteady, almost staggering walk. Whoever it was didn’t seem to be in any hurry. Hung? Come to finish him off?
But no. This guy was too skinny to be Hung.
The figure came up and squatted flatfooted on his haunches next to Patsy. In the dim glow of starlight and streetlight he saw a wrinkled face and a silvery goatee. The gook babbled something in Vietnamese.
God, it was Ho Chi Minh himself come to rob him.
Too late. The money’s gone. All gone.
No. Wasn’t Ho. Couldn’t be. Just an old papa-san in the usual black pajamas. They all looked the same, especially the old ones. The only thing different about this one was the big scar across his right eye. Looked as if the lids had been fused closed over the socket.
The old man reached down to where Patsy guarded his intestines and pushed his hands away. Patsy tried to scream in protest but heard only a sigh, tried to put his hands back up on his belly but they’d weakened to limp rubber and wouldn’t move.
The old man smiled as he singsonged in gooktalk and pressed his hands against the open wound in Patsy’s belly. Patsy screamed then, a hoarse, breathy sound torn from him by the searing pain that shot in all directions from where the old gook’s hands lay. The stars really swam around this time, fading as they moved, but they didn’t go out.
By the time his vision cleared, the old gook was up and turned around and weaving back toward the street. The pain, too, was sidling away.
Patsy tried again to lift his hands up to his belly, and this time they moved. They seemed stronger. He wiggled his fingers through the wetness of his blood, feeling for the edges of the wound, afraid of finding loops of bowel waiting for him.
He missed the slit on the first pass. And missed it on the second. How could that happen? It had been at least a foot long and had gaped open a good three or four inches, right there to the left of his belly button. He tried again, carefully this time . . .
. . . and found a thin little ridge of flesh.
But no opening.
He raised his head—he hadn’t been able to do that before—and looked down at his belly. His shirt and pants were a bloody mess, but he couldn’t see any guts sticking out. And he couldn’t see any wound, either. Just a dark wet mound of flesh.
If he wasn’t so goddamn fat he could see down there! He rolled onto his side—God, he was stronger!—and pushed himself up to his knees to where he could slump his butt onto his heels, all the time keeping at least one hand tight over his belly. But nothing came out, or even pushed against his hand. He pulled his shirt open.
The wound was closed, replaced by a thin, purplish vertical line.
Patsy felt woozy again. What’s going on here?
He was in a coma—that had to be it. He was dreaming this.
But everything was so real—the rough ground beneath his knees, the congealing red wetness of the blood on his shirt, the sounds from the street, even the smell of the garbage around him. All so real . . .
Bracing himself against the wall, he inched his way up to his feet. His knees were wobbly and for a moment he thought they’d give out on him. But they held and now he was standing.
He was afraid to look down, afraid he’d see himself still on the ground. Finally, he took a quick glance. Nothing there but two clotted puddles of blood, one on each side of where he’d been lying.
He tore off the rest of the ruined shirt and began walking—very carefully at first—toward the street. Any moment now he would wake up or die, and this craziness would stop. No doubt bout that. But until then he was going to play out this little fantasy to the end.
2
By the time he made it to his bunk—after giving the barracks guards and a few wandering night owls a story about an attempted robbery and a fight—Patsy had begun to believe that he was really awake and walking around.
It was so easy to say it had all been a dream, or maybe hallucinations brought on by acid slipped into his after-dinner coffee by some wise-ass. He managed to convince himself of that scenario a good half dozen times. And then he would look down at the scar on his belly, and at the blood on his pants . . .
Patsy sat on his rack in a daze.
It really happened! He just touched me and closed me up!
A hushed voice in the dark snapped him out of it.
“Hey! Fatman! Got any weed?”
It sounded like Donner from two bunks over, a steady customer.
“Not tonight, Hank,”
“What? Fatman’s never out of stock!”
“He is tonight”
“You shittin’ me?”
“Good night, Hank.”
Actually, he had a bunch of bags stashed in his mattress, but Patsy didn’t feel like dealing tonight. His mind was too numb to make change. He couldn’t even mourn the loss of all his cash—every red cent he’d saved up from almost a year’s worth of chickenshit deals with guys like Donner. All he could think about, all he could see, was that old one-eyed gook leaning over him, smiling, babbling, and touching him.
He’d talk to Tram tomorrow. Tram knew everything that went on in this goddamn country. Maybe he’d heard something about the old gook. Maybe he could be persuaded to look for him.
One way or another, Patsy was going to find that old gook. He had plans for him. Big plans.
3
Somehow he managed to make it through breakfast without perking the powdered eggs and scrambling the coffee.
It hadn’t been easy. He’d been late getting to the mess hall kitchen. He’d got up on time but had stood in the shower staring at that purple line up and down his belly for he didn’t know how long, remembering the cut of Hung’s knife, the feel of his intestines in his hands.
Did it really happen?
He knew it had. Accepting it and living with it was going to be the problem.
Finally he’d pulled on his fatigues and hustled over to the kitchen. Rising long before sunup was the only bad thing about being an army cook. The guys up front might call him a pogue but it sure beat hell out of being a stupid grunt in the field. Anything was better than getting shot at. Look what happened in Hue last month, and the whispers about My Lai. Only gavones got sent into the field. Smart guys got mess assignments in nice safe towns like Quang Ng
ai.
At least smart guys with an Uncle Tony did.
Patsy smiled as he scraped hardened scrambled egg off the griddle. He’d always liked to cook. Good thing too. Because in a way, the cooking he’d done for Christmas last year had kept him out of the fight this year.
As always, Uncle Tony had come for Christmas dinner. At the table Pop edged around to the big question: What to do about Patsy and the draft. To everyone’s surprise, he’d passed his induction physical . . .
. . . another example of how nothing ever went right for him. Patsy had learned that a weight of 225 pounds would keep a guy his height out on medical deferment. Since he wasn’t too many pounds short of that, he gorged on everything in sight for weeks. It would’ve been fun if he hadn’t been so desperate. But he made the weight: On the morning of his induction physical the bathroom scale read 229.
But the scale they used downtown at the Federal Building read 224.
He was in and set to go to boot camp after the first of the year.
Pop finally came to the point: Could Uncle Tony maybe . . .?
Patsy could still hear the disdain in Uncle Tony’s voice as he spoke around a mouthful of bread.
“You some kinda peacenik or somethin’?”
No, no, Pop had said, and went on to explain how he was afraid that Patsy, being so fat and so clumsy and all, would get killed in boot camp or step on a mine his first day in the field. You know how he is.
Uncle Tony knew. Everybody knew Patsy’s fugazi reputation. Uncle Tony had said nothing as he poured the thick red gravy over his lasagna, gravy Patsy had spent all morning cooking. He took a bite and pointed his fork at Patsy.
“Y’gotta do your duty, kid. I fought in the big one. You gotta fight in this here little one.” He swallowed. “Say, you made this gravy, dincha? It’s good. It’s real good. And it gives me an idea of how we can keep you alive so you can go on making this stuff every Christmas.”
A Soft Barren Aftershock Page 28