Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  A small headline on an interior Metro page caught his eye: Airline Employee at Hartsfield / Victim of Gruesome Murder. The details of this slaying would have given even the hard-boiled Ethan Dedicos pause. A check-in clerk for Southwest Airlines had been found in an elevator in the North Terminal with the top of his skull cut away and his brain primitively extracted. As bloody embellishment, the killer had chopped off the ill-fated clerk’s right hand.

  Lingenfelter mumbled, “Jesus,” as he peeled back the pages of the Diversions section to “The Squawk Box.” Then he stopped and stared at the ceiling. The bizarre particulars of the airport murder plucked at his memory. He set today’s paper aside and rummaged about for last Sunday’s. In it, he found the “Squawk of the Week,” which struck him as insupportably petulant: “Asking the brainless counter help at Hartsfield International for a hand is a waste of time. A prison inmate might as well ask a guard for a massage.” An eel of discomfiting coldness wriggled down Lingenfelter’s spine. His nape hair bristled.

  Grisly coincidence? Surely. Anyway, this squawk had no more wit or grace than a dozen others that had appeared last week. The Squawk Jock had spotlighted it only to plug a recent investigative series in the Harbinger on the breakdown of services at the airport and attendant customer frustration. Lingenfelter sighed heavily. Some of his own experiences at Hartsfield had nearly moved him to murder, although not to a murder as complex or gory as this one.

  He laid the old Sunday paper aside and returned to today’s edition. Fumblingly, he checked out “The Squawk Box,” confirming his suspicion that its editor had stiffed him again. As always, it consisted of the banal, tongue-tied, and pilfered submissions of dolts and plagiarists. Two thirds of these troglodytes, Lingenfelter smirked, had to be the Squawk Jock’s creditors. Or inbred cousins.

  Thirty minutes later, he refilled his coffee cup and slunk into his study. At his computer, he ignored the guilt-provoking icons symbolizing his stalled novel and clicked instead on his Internet connection. The Squawk Jock’s ignorance and pettiness had to have a natural limit. A fresh baker’s dozen of his canniest topical epigrams would sound that limit and result in his first published squawk. One of his efforts might even earn enthronement as “Squawk of the Week”! Gamely, Lingenfelter curled his fingers above his keyboard.

  • Confession is good for the soul, not to mention the prosecution.

  • Marriage institutionalizes love, sex, parenting, and, sometimes, one or both partners.

  • My 4-year-old niece has a toy pool table. She shoots peas into its pockets with a plastic straw. The kid really knows her peas and cues.

  • Caller ID is a fine innovation. Now we need another, Callee ID, for those of us who forget whom we’re calling.

  • Pity my estranged wife, a designer-clothes exclusivist. She was confined to our home last winter by a swollen dresser drawer.

  • If my mood depended on the regular publication of my squawks, I’d need a truckload of Zoloft just to elevate my feet.

  Lingenfelter savored these recent submissions, as if they belonged in Bartlett’s Quotations. But Sunday had come again, and the Squawk Jock had nixed them all. Despite both the day and the early hour, Lingenfelter knocked back a jolt of Wild Turkey, neat. Granted, he had stolen that barb about Nan’s fussy taste in clothes from Hoosier humorist Kin Hubbard (1868–1930), but the others had all originated with him alone. How could anybody bypass them in favor of crap like—well, like the crap the Squawk Jock preferred?

  The “Squawk of the Week,” for example, struck Lingenfelter as a whimper of no distinction at all: “The fat of our great land has rendered us into a nation of grasping fatties.” It barely warranted a place in the column, much less in a box at the feature’s top. Lingenfelter poured another shot and tossed it down. Let the dork responsible for that fatuous line relish his brief moment of glory. Alcoholism and altruism alike delude, Lingenfelter thought. A moment later, he twigged to the fact that his words had … yes, squawk potential:

  Alcoholism and altruism alike delude.

  He wobbled off to catapult this saying through the ether and to compose another batch of epigrams for his nemesis. When his phone rang in the midst of this activity, Lingenfelter ignored it on the grounds that his agent—thank God for Caller ID—would scold him rather than root him on.

  During the following week, Lingenfelter took to meeting his deliveryman, Ernie Salter, at curbside at 6:25 A.M. and seizing the Harbinger right out of his hand. Monday morning witnessed the first of these addled rendezvous.

  A heavyset African-American with muttonchop whiskers and a foul cigarillo, Salter hunched forward in his spavined pickup truck and cocked a scarred eyebrow at Lingenfelter. The two had already talked about Lingenfelter’s “Squawk Box” hang-up, and Salter obviously thought him tetched. Dashboard glow shadowed his bulldog jowls and the chest of his faded Olympics tee shirt.

  “No luck last week, eh?”

  “Maybe this morning.” Lingenfelter paged immediately to “The Squawk Box.” Several blocks away—the two men lived in Mountboro, eighty miles southwest of Atlanta—a rooster crowed. As the sky to the east pinked up prettily, Lingenfelter tilted his paper into its sheen. His brow furrowed. Then he refolded the section and thwacked it against the pickup, hard.

  “A moron chooses these things! A spiteful, dyslexic moron!”

  Ernie asked, “How much does the Harbinger pay for a squawk, Harry?”

  “Not a copper cent. You know that.”

  “Yeah, I know that. Do you get your name in the paper?”

  “Every squawk is printed anonymously. You know that, too.”

  “No wonder you’re losing Zs trying to crash this market,” Ernie said. “The big bucks. The fame.”

  “Damn it, Ernie. I can get sarcasm from my agent. Or from Nan, long-distance.”

  Ernie’s cigarillo waltzed over to his other lip corner. “Get back to your Ethan Dedicos stories, Harry. I really dig that guy.”

  “You and fourteen other people.”

  “I got to go. Stop squawking. Start writing again.” Ernie let out the clutch, and his clattery old pickup began to roll.

  Lingenfelter trotted along behind it. “I’ll see print yet!” he cried. “I’ll make that jerk sit up and take notice!”

  “Don’t write so damned highfalutin!” Ernie shouted back. “The Squawk Jock hates highfalutin!” Apparently, Ernie’s patience had just run out. Lingenfelter jogged to a bemused standstill.

  But he showed up hopefully at curbside every morning, anyway—to no purpose but the further exasperation of Ernie Salter, who on Friday exited his truck, hooked elbows with Lingenfelter, and walked him back inside. “They aint nothing in here from you, Harry. Nothing.” He shoved Lingenfelter into a kitchen chair and poured him a cup of his own godawful molasses-like coffee. “I’d lay odds. Check it out.”

  Lingenfelter checked. Ernie was right. Another strikeout. No, a whole clutch of mortifying whiffs!

  With a tenderness that reduced Lingenfelter to tears, Ernie gripped his shoulders and squeezed. The massage lasted not quite a minute. Then Ernie said, “Let the damned bug in your ball cap go, Harry,” and slowly clomped out.

  Lingenfelter picked up the Harbinger. On the front page of the Metro section, this: Bank President Found Mutilated / In Abandoned Car Dealership. The headline alone yanked him erect. The story itself shoved a flaming rod down his spine. His hands shook, and the newspaper’s pages rattled as if burning.

  A night watchman had found the bank president’s decapitated head sitting on the hood of his new Ford Exorbitant in the roofless courtyard of a car dealership that had just gone bankrupt. The dealer had sold economical imports from Eastern Europe. The watchman found the overweight victim’s body hanging in the boarded-up showroom like the carcass of a butchered hog. The air conditioning, which should not have worked at all, blasted away at its highest setting. Meanwhile, an iron kettle next to the SUV boiled merrily over a fire of scrap wood, rendering the man’s internal orga
ns into soap scum and tallow. A pair of severed hands gripped the Exorbitant’s steering wheel, like claws. The whole ghastly scene suggested that the culprit had fled only moments before the arrival of the watchman.

  Lingenfelter picked up last Sunday’s paper again. Shaking like a man with delirium tremens, he tore from it the “Squawk of the Week.” He then cut out the story about the bank bigwig’s murder/mutilation, stapled the squawk to its corner, and stuffed both items into an envelope, which he addressed to the Atlanta police department. By now, some law-enforcement official must have noticed the connection between the Harbinger’s featured squawk and the particulars of the killings at both the airport and the car dealership. How many earlier featured squawks had provided a sick human specimen the impetus for murder? How many prize squawks of the future would prod that same wacko to slay again?

  Don’t mail this in, Lingenfelter told himself. Phone it in. You can’t waste time—oh, the irony of that self-admonition—going through the U.S. Postal Service. You need to speak to somebody now! Although he didn’t really want to get involved—a cliché with a shame-engendering edge—he steeled himself to call. Even as he touched the numbers on his keypad, though, he wondered if the police would suspect him. Tipsters sometimes turned out to be perps, and even if the police congratulated him on his civic-mindedness, they would file his name and number for future reference.

  A polite female functionary took his call, promised to pass along his tip, and admitted that several other people had already telephoned with the same concern. In fact, the policewoman said, detectives had noted not only the squawk-as-murder-incitement angle but also the head-and-hands obsession of the killer or killers responsible for these latest mutilation slayings.

  “Latest?” Lingenfelter said. “Others have occurred?”

  “Thanks for doing your duty as a citizen,” the woman replied. “We’ll call if we have any further questions.” Click.

  Lingenfelter set the envelope with its provocative clippings aside and reexamined the squawks in today’s paper. His heart, whose pounding had eased a bit, began to hammer again at his ribcage. One item annoyed him intensely: “Now that ‘The Squawk Box’ has printed me, I have an agent ready to sell movie rights to my life to the highest bidder.” What an egomaniac! What a self-deluding boob!

  Oddly, Lingenfelter’s own agent, Morris Vosbury, chose that moment to call him again. He let the phone ring. Just as his answering machine prepared to kick in—provoking Morris’s departure, for he refused to talk to a machine—Lingenfelter relented and picked up.

  “Finally,” Morris said. “How goes the latest Ethan Dedicos? You gonna make your April fifteenth deadline?”

  “Tax day?” Lingenfelter moaned. “That’s less than a month off.”

  “Yeah, well, we chose it as a mnemonic aid, Harry. Remember how you forgot your own birthday as a deadline for the last Dedicos?”

  “That book drained me spiritually,” Lingenfelter said. “I had to go deep—deep into myself—for Blessed Are the Debonair.”

  Morris’s long pause suggested that he was biting his tongue. Eventually he said, “So how goes Seven Terriers from Bedlam?”

  “Not bad until you broke my concentration.” After a few closing pleasantries, Lingenfelter hung up. A pox on Morris, anyway. How, after such an intrusion, could he hope to concentrate on his fiction writing? Better to soothe his nerves with a little Wild Turkey and a new strategy for cracking “The Squawk Box.”

  • Some self-obsessed fame seekers think that enlightenment occurs at the pop of a flashbulb.

  • Cell phones have as much business in the front seat of moving motor vehicles as uncapped whiskey bottles.

  • Ever notice how the mayor’s mustache makes him look like Adolf Hitler in an elongating funhouse mirror.

  • My condolences to the person who spent two weeks in Los Angeles for brain surgery. Even without surgery, L.A. can appallingly alter the brain.

  • In the long annals of crime, Fulton County’s counterfeiter of Beanie Babies hardly qualifies as an Al Capone clone.

  • Yesterday I got a mailing from an “intellectual” magazine begging me to subscribe: “Think for yourself. Just send in our card.” I thought for myself. I ash-canned the card.

  One more, Lingenfelter thought, just one more, and I’ll get back to my novel. He tapped out: “Journalism is to literature as a stomach flutter is to all-out panic.” What did that mean, exactly? He had no clear idea. He did know that he had killed yet another afternoon, and when none of these submissions appeared in the paper that week, he knew, too, that his career was down spiraling like a missile-struck F-111.

  How did other writers maintain their focus when day-to-day living threw so many distractions at them? He checked the Activities page in the Harbinger. Conferences and book signings were rampant in Atlanta this weekend, with visits from such eminences as John Updike and A. S. Byatt, such mystery-writing stalwarts as Sue Grafton and Joe R. Lansdale, and such up-and-comers as Ace Atkins and Atlanta’s own Chick Morrow. Lingenfelter had met Chick last year at a Georgia Author of the Year program. Although he had liked Chick, he had also felt a twinge of impending competition. This Saturday the younger writer had a signing, albeit a modest one, at the Science Fiction & Mystery Bookshop on Highland Avenue.

  Chick bore down and wrote. He deserved his success. Lingenfelter could not imagine him sweating manuscript staples to place a silly one- or two-liner in an amateur forum like “The Squawk Box.” This thought sobered Lingenfelter, literally. He set aside his bourbon bottle and applied himself all morning to Seven Terriers from Bedlam, his first long stint of work on the novel in over six weeks. At noon, he felt like a hero—or, at least, a competent human being.

  On Sunday, he paged to the squawks out of habit rather than compulsion. The “Squawk of the Week” leapt out like a mocking jack-in-the-box, but he thought it amusing—and incisive—and wished that he had written it, for it gibed with his own experience:

  “Having met several authors at book signings, I can report that most writers are smarter on paper than in person.”

  Amen.

  Hold on, Lingenfelter warned himself. If the “Squawk of the Week” provides our anonymous serial killer fantasy fodder for his next murder, why couldn’t he settle on you as his next victim? Ridiculous. For one thing, the previous murders both took place in or around Atlanta, not out in the country. For another, even in the South, writers abound. If you know where to look, writers wriggle like maggots.

  Lingenfelter observed the Sabbath. He walked to Ernie Salter’s and played him several games of two-handed poker. And the next week he wrote—on his novel, not on a battery of desperate doomed-to-rejection squawks. Life seemed almost tolerable again. One night, in fact, he called Nan in Montana—hey, not a bad title for a Western—and apologized for his crazy work schedule and net surfing, which together had pitched their relationship into the crapper.

  On Thursday morning, though, he opened the Harbinger to find this headline on the front page: “Rising Atlanta Mystery Star Chick Morrow / Himself the Subject of a Mystery: / Body Found Strangled in Ponce de Leon Apartment.” An inset head read, “Police suspect that killer / uses popular Harbinger column / to target victims.” Jesus, Lingenfelter thought.

  Apparently, the murderer had surprised Chick Morrow at his desk and choked the life out of him. Then the fun began. The intruder affixed a dunce cap to Chick’s head, rolled out a sheet of butcher paper, and laid Chick on the paper. Then he sketched a red outline around Chick’s body with a grease pencil, just as the police draw a chalk outline around a murder victim for investigative purposes. This time the killer had not mutilated or dismembered his victim. But when the police moved Chick’s body, they found the paper inside his outline teeming with mathematical formulae, some so abstruse that only Steven Hawking could have deciphered them.

  According to the newspaper, one detective said, “Think last Sunday’s ‘Squawk of the Week.’ You know, ‘Smarter on paper than in pers
on.’ Get it? Pretty highbrow. Pretty sick.”

  I’d say, Lingenfelter murmured.

  Bam! Bam! The screen on the kitchen door banged open and shut.

  Lingenfelter jumped up from his computer table. Had the killer come for him, too? He kept no handgun in his house, and this morning he regretted that scruple. In a panic he looked about for a heavy object—doorstop, paperweight, or dictionary—to use for self-defense.

  Ernie Salter manifested in the doorway. “Hey, Harry, how you doin?”

  “Not so good.” Lingenfelter patted his heart. “A friend of mine up in Atlanta was strangled dead yesterday.”

  “That’s why I come over. That damned ‘Squawk Box’ thing. You hear how the paper aint gonna run a ‘Squawk of the Week’ no more?”

  “I just read it—last paragraph in the story.”

  “Oh man,” Ernie said. “Sorry bout your friend. Weird how it’s got this screwy squawk tie-in. Weird n spooky.”

  “Take me to Atlanta. I’ve got to see about Chick, help the family, something. I’ll pay if you drive me.” Nan had taken their car when she skedaddled for Montana, but Lingenfelter had not missed it until now. He got around Mountboro just fine on foot or bicycle.

  “You got it, bro. When you want to leave?”

  An hour later, Ernie drove Lingenfelter up I-85 toward Atlanta. Traffic streamed about them, and by chance they fell in behind a slow-moving Parmenter’s chicken truck. White fluff from its stacked cages blew back at them in a diffuse blizzard, along with a sickening stench.

  Ernie said, “Now those birds got something real to squawk about.”

  “You mean Chick Morrow’s murder doesn’t qualify?”

  “I mean I’m glad you gettin over your squawk hang-up. Even as I’m sorry bout poor Chick.”

  “I’m just jumpy, Ernie. Chick’s murder has really hit me. The other killings made me feel weird, but this one wrings my heart. There’s more to all this than a robotic ‘Son of Sam’ character taking random instructions from a newspaper. ‘The Squawk Box’ strikes me as—well, flat-out evil. Look at the hold the damn thing had on me. It’s like all my aborted squawks fed something bad, a monster living off ill-will.”