A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  “That’s my dummy pistol, Gus. Actually, a genuine government-issue Mark IV, but the bullets are dummy—just like the guy I let get hold of it.”

  Jack brought it along when he wanted to see what somebody was really made of. It rarely failed to draw the worst to the surface.

  He bent and picked up the ejected rounds. He held one up for Gus to see.

  “The slug is real,” Jack said, “but there’s no powder in the shell. It’s an old rule: Never let an asshole near a loaded gun.”

  Gus charged, swinging the .45 at Jack’s head. Jack caught his wrist and twisted the weapon free of his grasp. Then he slammed it hard against the side of Gus’s face, opening a gash. Gus tried to turn and run but Jack still had his arm. He hit him again, on the back of the head this time. Gus sagged to his knees and Jack put a lot of upper body behind the pistol as he brought it down once more on the top of his head. Gus stiffened, then toppled face first onto the floor.

  Only seconds had passed. Jack spun to check on Ceil’s whereabouts. She wasn’t going to catch him twice. But no worry. She was right where he’d left her, standing in the corner, eyes closed, tears leaking out between the lids. Poor woman.

  Nothing Jack wanted more than to be out of this crazy house. He’d been here too long already, but he had to finish this job now, get it done and over with.

  He took Ceil’s arm and gently led her from the living room.

  “Nothing personal, lady, but I’ve got to put you in a safe place, okay? Someplace where you can’t get near a fire poker. Understand?”

  “He didn’t love me,” she said to no one in particular. “He stayed with me because of his job. He was lying all those times he said he loved me.”

  “I guess he was.”

  “Lying . . .”

  He guided her to a closet in the hall and stood her inside among the winter coats.

  “I’m just going to leave you here for a few minutes, okay?”

  She was staring straight ahead. “All those years . . . lying . . .”

  Jack closed her in the closet and wedged a ladderback chair between the door and the wall on the other side of the hall. No way she could get out until he removed the chair. Back in the living room, Gus was still out cold. Jack turned him over and tied his wrists to opposite ends of the coffee table. He took two four-by-four wooden blocks from his duffel and placed them under Gus’s left lower leg, one just below the knee and the other just above the ankle. Then he removed a short-handled five-pound iron maul from the duffel. He hesitated as he lifted the hammer, the recalled Ceil’s eyes as Gus methodically battered her kidneys—the pain, the resignation, the despair. Jack broke Gus’s left shin with one sharp blow. Gus groaned and writhed on the floor, but didn’t regain consciousness. Jack repeated the process on the right leg. Then he packed up all his gear and returned to the hall.

  He pulled the chair from where it was wedged against the closet door. He opened the door a crack.

  “I’m leaving now, lady. When I’m gone you can go across the street and call the police. Better call an ambulance too.”

  A single sob answered him.

  Jack left by the back door. It felt good to get the stocking off his head.

  When Jack dialed his answering machine the next morning there was only one message. It was from Oscar Schaffer. He sounded out of breath. And upset.

  “You bastard! You sick, perverted bastard! I’m dropping the rest of your money off at that bar this morning and then I don’t want to see or hear or even think of you again!”

  Jack was on his second coffee in Julio’s when he spotted Schaffer through the front window. He was moving fast, no doubt as close to a run as his portly frame would allow, clutching a white envelope in his hand. Perspiration gleamed on his pale forehead. His expression was strained. He looked like one frightened man.

  Jack had told Julio he was coming so Julio intercepted him at the door as he did all Jack’s customers. But instead of leading him back to the Jack’s table, Julio returned alone. Jack spotted Schaffer hurrying back the way he had come.

  Julio smiled as he handed Jack the envelope.

  “What you do to spook him like that?”

  Jack grabbed the envelope and hurried after Schaffer. He caught the developer as he was opening the door to a dark green Jaguar XJ-12.

  “What’s going on?” Jack said.

  Schaffer jumped at the sound of Jack’s voice. His already white face went two shades paler.

  “Get away from me!”

  He jumped into the car but Jack caught the door before he could slam it. He pulled the keys from Schaffer’s trembling fingers.

  “I think we’d better talk. Unlock the doors.”

  Jack went around to the other side and slipped into the passenger seat. He tossed the keys back to Schaffer.

  “All right. What’s going on? The job’s done. The guy’s fixed. You didn’t need an alibi because it was done by a prowler. What’s the problem?”

  Schaffer stared straight ahead through the windshield.

  “How could you? I was so impressed with you the other day. The rogue with a code: ‘Sometimes I make a mistake. If that happens, I like to be able to go back and fix it.’

  I really thought you were something else. I actually envied you. I never dreamed you could do what you did. Gus was a rotten son of a bitch, but you didn’t have to . . .” His voice trailed off.

  Jack was baffled.

  “You were the one who wanted him killed. I only broke his legs.”

  Schaffer turned to him, the fear in his eyes giving way to fury.

  “Don’t give me that shit! Who do you think you’re dealing with? I practically built that town! I’ve got connections!” He pulled a sheaf of papers from his pocket and threw it at Jack. “I’ve read the medical examiner’s report!”

  “Medical examiner? He’s dead?” Shit! Jack had heard of people with broken legs throwing a clot to the heart. “How?”

  “Aw, don’t play cute! Gus was a scumbag and yes I wanted him dead, but I didn’t want him tortured! I didn’t want him . . . mutilated!”

  It was time for Jack’s fingers to do a little trembling as he scanned the report. It described a man who’d been pistol-whipped, bound by the hands, and had both tibias broken; then he’d been castrated with a Ginsu knife from his own kitchen and gagged with his testicles in his mouth. After that he’d undergone at least two hours of torture before he died of shock due to blood loss from a severed artery in his neck.

  “It’ll be in all the afternoon papers,” Schaffer was saying. “You can add the clippings to your collection. I’m sure you’ve got a big one”

  “Where was Ceil supposed to be during all this?”

  “Locked in the hall closet. She got out after you left. And she had to find Gus like that. No one should have to see something like that. If I could make you pay—”

  “When did she phone the cops?”

  “Right before calling me—around three a.m.”

  Jack shook his head. “Wow. Three hours . . . she spent three hours on him.”

  “ ‘She’? Who?”

  “Ceil.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Gus was trussed up and out cold with two broken legs but very much alive on the living room floor when I left. I opened the door to the closet where I’d put your sister, and took off. That was around midnight.”

  “No. You’re lying. You’re saying Ceil—” He swallowed. “She wouldn’t. She couldn’t. Besides, she called me at three, from a neighbor’s house, she’d only gotten free—”

  “Three hours. Three hours between the time I opened the closet door and the time she called you.”

  “No! Not Ceil! She . . .” Schaffer stared at Jack, and Jack met his gaze evenly. Slowly, like a dark stain seeping through heavy fabric, the truth took hold in his eyes. “Oh . . . my . . . God!”

  He leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. He looked like he was going to be sick. Jack gave him a
few minutes. “The other day you said she needed help. Now she really needs it.”

  “Poor Ceil!”

  “Yeah. I don’t pretend to understand it, but I guess she was willing to put up with anything from a man who said he loved her. But when she found out he didn’t—and believe me, he let her know in no uncertain terms before he pulled the trigger on her.”

  “Trigger? What–?”

  “A long story. Ceil can tell you about it. But I guess when she found out how much he hated her, how he’d wanted her dead all these years, when she saw him ready to murder her, something must have snapped inside. When she came out of the closet and found him helpless on the living room floor, she must have gone a little crazy.”

  “A little crazy? You call what she did a little crazy?”

  Jack shrugged. He handed back the ME’s report and opened the car door.

  “Your sister crammed ten years of pay-back into three hours. She’s going to need a lot of help to recover from those ten years. And those three hours.”

  Schaffer pounded his mahogany steering wheel.

  “Shit! It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this!” Then he sighed and turned to Jack. “But I guess things don’t always go according to plan in your business.”

  “Hardly ever.”

  Jack got out of the car, closed the door, and listened to the Jag roar to life. As it screeched away, he headed back to Julio’s. A new customer was due at noon.

  MEMOIRS OF THE EFFSTER

  First Day of Spring ‘61

  So we’re sitting around this table near the back door at Gerde’s Folk City in the Village, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and the Effster, all recovering from last night’s party at LeRoi Jones’s apartment, Allen still loaded on psilocybin and Jack already stoked with his own drug of choice (Ripple red), and the two of them engaged in another episode of one of their interminable arguments while I’m scratching out a couple of chapters of the new novel on a yellow legal pad. A warm day for the first of spring, so we’ve got the door open and the sun’s pouring in. Gerde never lets too much sun into Folk City. Easy to see why. Not too many places more depressing than a night spot at lunch hour.

  The Effster’s not the only one writing there that afternoon. Some baby-faced kid in blue work shirt and denims with curly light brown hair twisted this way and that like it hasn’t been combed since New Year’s eve is sitting on the edge of the stage hitting a few chords on his guitar then stopping to write some lyrics, then hitting the chords again. Allen called him Bobby when we came in, said the kid’s been in town only a couple of months and already he’s making waves in the folk scene around the Village.

  The Effster’s not real crazy about folk music.

  “I gotta get out of New York,” Allen says, scratching his beard. “It’s stifling me.”

  The Effster knows just what he means. I’ve been here almost a year now and can sense a gradual waning of my literary production. I mean, here it is almost April already and I’m only half a dozen chapters into my third novel of the year (Stranger in a Strange Land under my Robert A. Heinlein pseudonym). I’ve already finished Ship of Fools and A Shade of Difference (the sequel to my 1960 blockbuster Advise and Consent under my Allen Drury pen name), but still have Failsafe and Seven Days in May to do before June.

  By this time last year I’d already finished The Agony and the Ecstasy, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Three Hearts and Three Lions, Franny and Zooey, and Tropic of Cancer; and the year before that I’d already done Starship Troopers (another Heinlein title) and a real fat one called Hawaii under the Michener pseud.

  Got to get cracking.

  “Thank Krishna that Peter and I are heading back to Paris the end of the month,” Allen sighs.

  “What for?” Jack says with one of his demonic grins. “To meet up with Burroughs? You won’t get much out of him these days. All he’s doing is that cutting and pasting jive. That’s not writing.”

  The Effster knows Willy B. pretty well. In fact, last time I was in Paris I convinced him to change the title of his novel to The Naked Lunch (he wanted to call it Word Horde), and finished it for him when he got sick from too much majoun.

  “Gonna meet Corso there too,” Allen says. “Paris in the spring. It’s inspiring.”

  “Greg’s the one who could use some inspiration,” Jack says. “Hasn’t had much since The Happy Birthday of Death.”

  I agree but keep my comments to myself.

  The Effster does not put down other writers. That’s reserved for critics and reviewers.

  But I’ve been thinking Allen might be losing his touch as well since he began hanging out with Tim Leary and dipping into mushrooms and meth. He read me his latest poem, “Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber,” and I thought it missed the point. But again I kept my opinions to myself.

  The Effster is nothing if not sensitive to other writers’ feelings.

  “Greg’s Happy Birthday is truly a fine work,” Allen says heatedly. He and Gregory Corso are old friends. “And ‘The Bomb’ is one of the greatest poems ever written about the nuclear age.”

  “Nowhere near as good as his ‘Marriage’,” Kerouac counters, “but who would’ve noticed ‘Bomb’ if the old Effster here hadn’t suggested Greg have it typeset in the shape of a mushroom cloud?”

  “Greg owes the Effster for that one,” Allen says. “We all owe the Effster one way or another. You, Jack—what would’ve happened to On the Road if old F. here hadn’t convinced Millstein to give it that rave review in the Times? You wouldn’t be King of the Beats now.”

  Jack nods. “No argument there. And where’d you be if the Effster hadn’t made a few phone calls and got Ferlinghetti arrested for selling ‘Howl’ in Frisco?”

  “Yeah,” Allen says somberly. “No obscenity trial, no notoriety.” Then grins through his beard. “And no extra printings. You’re the greatest, F.”

  I merely shrug. The Effster has never seen any sense in belaboring the obvious.

  Just then the folk singer wanders by, frowning.

  “Hey, Bobby,” Allen calls. “Why so glum?”

  “Lyric troubles,” Bobby says, running his fingers through his bed-head hair. “Got a song full of questions but no answers.”

  “Then you’ve come to the right place,” Allen says, gesturing dramatically. “Myself and my two friends here, Jack and the Effster, are the world’s greatest answer men. Aren’t we, F.?”

  I say, “Sometimes the answers are so obvious you can’t hear them. Sometimes they’re just blowing in the wind.”

  Bobby’s eyes widen. He snatches paper and pencil from the breast pocket of his work shirt and begins scribbling. “I’m gonna use that, if you don’t mind.”

  I shrug. The Effster is nothing if not generous with his bon mots.

  “This is for a folk song, I presume.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Need some original material for my gigs. Want a real mix. Some standards, some new, some serious, some funny, and some just strange. Don’t know how the original stuff’ll go over, though.”

  “Anything original these days is good,” I say. “The times they are a-changing.”

  Bobby jerks like he’s been kicked and starts scribbling some more. “Can I use that too?” he says.

  I shrug once again. “Why not? It’s merely a statement of fact.”

  “Thanks a lot, F. Thanks a million.”

  I wave off his thanks. “Don’t think twice, it’s all right.”

  He scribbles again. “And that? Can I use that?”

  I nod and refrain from saying another word. The Effster fears this Bobby character will copy down his order for another beer.

  “Thanks again, F,” he says, heading for the door.

  I look at the sky outside and see the gathering thunderheads and figure it should be safe to mention the weather.

  “Better hurry,” I say. “Looks like a hard rain’s gonna fall.”

  He starts scribbling again as he goes out the back door.


  I wish him well.

  The Effster is nothing if not generous with his well-wishes for fellow writers, even if they’re folk singers. And I have a feeling that with proper guidance from the Effster, this Bobby What’s-His-Name might do all right.

  Back to work.

  Summer ‘73

  So here’s the Effster, sitting around the gat-shaped pool (a concrete .45 automatic with steps at the clip end of the grip) at my Left Coast hideaway playing chess with Stevie Spielberg between knocking out chapters of my new horror novel in progress,

  “So F,” Stevie says, sliding a pawn toward my knight, “what do we do with all those subplots?”

  He’s talking about Jaws, the novel the Effster recently finished under his Peter Benchley pseudonym. Stevie just read it in manuscript and wants to direct it.

  “Dump them,” I tell him. “They’re ballast. I just put them in there to fill out the page count. This is a movie, Stevie. You’ve got to learn that what works in a book doesn’t necessarily work on the screen. Dump the subplots and keep that shark on the screen; and while you’re at it, work some sort of basso obligato into the score whenever the shark’s around. You’ll have yourself a winner. The Effster guarantees it.”

  I glance at the board and take his queen with my king’s bishop. “Hey, thanks, F.”

  “For what? Taking your bishop?”

  “No—for the advice.”

  I smile. The Effster is nothing if not generous with his advice.

  Just then Georgie Lucas climbs out of the pool and hangs over the chess board as he dries off.

  “I tell you, F,” he says, “that computerized camera idea of yours is really working out on the special-effects tests. It’s going to take years to do but I think you’re going to love the final product.”

  “I hope so,” I tell him as I type another chapter on the new novel. “l mean, you know how ‘Star Wars’ is the Effster’s favorite of all the scripts he’s written this year. Didn’t want to give it to you if you couldn’t make it look right.”

  “Speaking of writing,” Stevie says, obviously trying to distract me as he slides his rook down the right hand side of the board, “you’re really taking your time with that new book there.”