by A. R. Moxon
“Can I help who’s next?” Daniel asks, looking ostentatiously around as if seeing his snitch in a sweat during office hours is perfectly normal. Obsessed with seeming cooler than anyone else—the idiot. Before turning back to his desk, he glances at her. She knows him enough to read it: Jesus, now we’ve got loonies to deal with. She lets the side of her mouth turn ever-so-slightly up, allows her glance to play ever-so-subtly in the direction of the departing moustache. Loonies are no better or worse than these gangsters, though.
Then they’re back into their roles, but she’s seen the amusement tell in his eyes. And just like that, he’s done it: He’s not just an idiot, but her idiot. Her genius. A donkeyface, sure. Not classically handsome by any means. He’d even been a homely kid. But whenever trouble inevitably comes, when he should—when anyone else would—cower, stammer, beg mercy, retreat, debase themselves for the hope of continued safety…at these times Donk smiles, and the spark in his eyes lends him surplus beauty. This beautiful ugly idiot genius, who smiles when he should weep, who twinkles when he should run. Who takes his advantage by breaking the game, by doing it wrong, purposefully, doing it in a way nobody else would, for nothing but the sake of doing it differently, for the frisson of the unexpected, the joy of imbalance, to splinter logic, trusting to his ability to reconstruct the pieces faster than his opponents can. Even the little things, he does different, seemingly out of a preference for difference. For example, the way he wears a suit, even when bagging groceries. A suit—not the peacock strut and flash of an Island gangster’s almost cinematic shinythread pinstripe attire, but a bespoke three-piece in a conservative palette. It should look wrong, but somehow it conveys what he needs conveyed: He’s about business, he’s above their fray, and he’s more gangster than any of them, because he’s got every button buttoned and every pocket sewn shut.
Their relationship they’ve kept secret. It’s safer for her this way, Donk reminds her, whenever she acts a little too familiar in public, for nobody to know they can hurt him through her. For Ralph not to know especially. Remember, Donk would admonish, you never can tell who else might be talking to Ralph. Or have you forgotten the greenhouse? Have you forgotten what Ralph did to Yale? No Daniel, she wants to reply. I haven’t forgotten. Yale may have been your brother, but he was something to me, too.
Donk leans against his desk and regards them both. “So?”
“Boyd’s got a story to tell.” Bailey says.
“I love stories.”
Boyd starts to talk, but he’s not more than a couple sentences in when Donk holds up a hand. “Let’s do this in the Fridge,” he says. “This doesn’t sound like open-air talk.”
The Fridge is another of Daniel’s secret spots, though it’s one he inherited from Ralph, who instructed the architect to build it to serve as his office refuge and panic room. Ralph never visits these days; he’s all but willed it to his protégé. Few besides the three of them know about it. It’s a hell of a perk. These inner rooms are appointed with the sort of tastefulness achievable only by one who is new to the concept of taste and is striving to attain it. Tiffany globes hang low from tasteful mirrored ceilings. Tasteful shag carpeting hugs the floor. Warm, muted light dances from a gas-powered fireplace, before which a tasteful bearskin rug lies in a somnolent posture, above which a taxidermied and mounted swordfish swims tastefully over the mantle. Sinfully comfortable leather-lined recliners and immense overstuffed sofas hug the walls. Three walls in each room are fitted with varnished wainscoting and decorated with oil paintings, but the entirety of the fourth wall is lined with hand-crafted oak bookshelves, between which are gaps; in those gaps, one-way mirrors have been installed, from which one can spy back out onto the grocery floor. You can see the checkout lanes from here. Bailey remembers—how could she forget?—how Ralph used to stand at the panels, smoking a stogie and watching her at work. You never shake the sensation of hidden eyeballs on your neck. It makes you diligent.
Now it’s their “break room,” though in truth they live there. From the door in the antechamber you step into the game room: billiard table, pool table done in violet felt, poker table, reading table, chess board upon which slumber crystal and ebonite pieces transfixed in the game Ralph was playing with himself when he retired. Next is the sitting room, which has the fireplace. After it comes the smoker, fumigated and converted to a bedroom, then the kitchen, then the pantry. At Daniel’s insistence, they keep other abodes, to throw enemies off the trail, but it’s to the Fridge they return after work, and it’s here they pass most nights. The entrance is in the stockroom, where there are mirrored panels between the refrigerated cases. At the base of one mirror is a small foot-pedal, which, if pressed in the correct sequence, causes another mirror to unhook slightly. When you are certain there are no onlookers, you reach in and unhook the latch, open the swinging panel, and step in. As you swing the door shut, a keypad beside a second door activates. Once you’re safely ensconced in the antechamber you enter the code, and the door to the break rooms swings open.
They follow Daniel to the library, where he sits and picks up the book he’s left there. It’s a secret habit, so he indulges himself only in the Fridge. He’s got a copy of Plato’s Republic, managing to read it with the same pageflapping speed as anything else. Lately he’s gone for the heavy stuff. Like most who came up in Loony Island, Donk’s education is wonky; he’s got the random and omnivorous habits of the autodidact—though in their quiet moments he dares hope the next generation might have something a bit more formalized. Donk peruses the book absently as he listens to Boyd’s story. Bailey, hearing it for the first time along with Donk, moves from interest to shock to something almost like skepticism, if it were possible to be skeptical of Boyd’s reports. Tunnels running under the whole island? A whole flock of redbirds attacking Wales inmates at the bowling alley? With…syringes?
“Remind me again,” Daniel says, once Boyd’s finished. “Father Julius is mixed up in this how?”
“I don’t think he is. I think he just happened to be there. But he was spooked. He saw something there in the Wales.”
“Something—what something?”
Boyd ruminates. “He said…a man. A flickering man.”
“Flickering.”
“That’s what he said, yes. He gave me this newspaper.” Boyd fishes it out of his pocket and Bailey recognizes it; he’d been holding it in his hand while he was being chased. Donk uncrumples it and studies it. It’s the morning edition. It’s got a green rectangle colored on it with crayon, but other than that it’s unremarkable. Donk shakes his head and sets it down. “Well, Julius saw something at the Wales. I’d like to know what. We’d better have Boyd go get the big old dummy to come over here and tell us.”
“I can go,” Bailey says. “In case there really is trouble out there.”
“Boyd’ll do fine,” Donk murmurs absently, eyes scanning his book. “I want you close. That whoever-it-was you let go after your fight will be reporting to his boss about where Boyd went pretty soon. I think we should expect some trouble today.”
“Then neither of us should go, probably,” Bailey says, trying not to sound annoyed as she feels at his growing propensity for dismissing her. My concerns have kept us alive more than once, she thinks. Have you forgotten that, too? She doesn’t say it, though, hoping to avoid an old and unproductive fight. She looks to Boyd for support, but Boyd has already noticed the tension and retreated to one of the Fridge’s other rooms.
“True enough. We’ll send him this evening,” Donk replies, and Bailey’s annoyance only grows—Well, hey, don’t listen to me, buddy…“Anyway, we’ve got to make some moves here. If we have trouble coming, we need to shut down the store early.”
“I still have work, even if you don’t.”
“Manager work.”
“The manager work matters to me, Daniel,” she says, unable to keep the asperity from her voice—Looks we’re going to have
that fight again, after all. After all this time, and still he doesn’t understand that what you mean when you say “pride of ownership” isn’t just about a scrapper’s rep, it’s everything you do. It’s understanding possibility in everything, and choosing the right possibility, the better possibility, every time. What nobody understands about me is nearly everything, but even you, Daniel? Even you?
Daniel’s noticed her mood. He sets down his book, comes to her and puts his forehead to her forehead, hands to her ears. “I’m sorry,” he says, “my fault”—and just like that, they know each other again, better than any other in the world. She reaches up and puts her hands to his ears and holds them. What a strange thing we do, she thinks, resting in this posture, but it’s us. Do any other two do such a strange thing? No; it’s us, and it’s only us.
Later, as Donk snoozes, Bailey keeps awake, watching through the windows for any signs of trouble, counting her fights.
Until this morning, one hundred fifty-one was the most recent. A collection gone wrong. A small-timer who’d gotten strung out and stopped making payments—an entire month’s juice. Claimed he’d paid already, then, he’d tried pulling a gun but was too wasted to do it well; you had his arm broken before he’d negotiated his pocket. Tossing the place revealed only a small safe, which you took. On the way out, you saw a filthy kid of indeterminate gender peeking from behind a curtain. Later, when Boyd had cracked the safe, you found nothing in it but a few toys from fast-food kiddie meals, and the thought rose up in you: We have got to get out of this place we have to get out of here soon…
CHAPEL
Father Julius’s purported “miracle,” on the other hand…that’s one reason some people believed he was a holy man, or maybe even a real priest, despite his deviations from expected norms. It happened—if indeed it did happen—the night the old abandoned cathedral burned. Nobody found out what got the fire started—and, it being in the Island, nobody inspected—but whatever the cause, it burned from the inside and up, its wooden innards consumed, its stone heated to a kiln, its interior converted to a deadly smoker choking those trapped within. By the time anybody noticed it, it was too late; the flames were already licking the shingles. For there to have been so few fatalities required a miracle. To a perverse mind, it might almost seem fatalities had been intended. The diocese had shuttered the place up the year previous, but they didn’t like how many indigent types wound up squatting in there, and the doors had been chained up from the outside not long before the blaze, almost as if…well. Now I’m engaging in conjecture not much better than conspiracy theory, and anyway there’s no conspiracy needed to know that a fire starting in Loony Island is going to be a horror. No volunteers have the resources to fight a blaze like that, and Island folks have learned to expect a practiced lack of urgency from municipal services like fire departments. It was a terrible blaze, and might even have taken all Checkertown down with it, too, if it hadn’t been for this odd fellow in jogging attire, kneeling in classic aspect of prayer—and wouldn’t you know it, within moments there came a rain so hard and so fierce it drowned the fire. Nearly drowned those nearby, too. I say nearby, and I mean near—even though the gutters ran two inches deep up in Checkertown, the factories down at the Island’s southern tip stayed dry as a cracker. It was a downpour as targeted as it was torrential.
Five minutes later—ten at most—the deluge stops. The fire’s out. And here’s this fellow in jogging gear, still kneeling. Up he gets, and who are you, they ask him, and I’m Father Julius, he says, I’m the new priest.
They thought he’d be on his way, but they were wrong about that. He stayed. They never saw the jogging gear again, though. The next day he was around, wearing the denim vestments that would soon be familiar to the gangs and goons and loons and lads and ladies; familiar as the story that enshrined him, the tale of the cleric who appeared on Loony Island in its hour most desperate, the priest who had a direct line to the Big Guy, the holy man who prayed the rain down. And what did he do once he’d arrived? He built the damn Neon Chapel himself, by hand. Julius even worked the cranes to set the beams. At first it was just him, living in a tent, then a lean-to, then the small section he had made weatherproof. Soon enough, people started helping out, hauling the materials that came from trucks. While he supervised, others began laying bricks. By the time it was done, he had a small team. They stayed; they became, in a sense, his disciples. the first brothers and sisters of the Neon Order—though others would join after. They did every bit except haul the materials—those came from trucks conspicuously fresh-painted over, as if designed to hide corporate logo and affiliation.
You ask me, Finch my dear, that’s the real miracle. A man starting a structure that size by himself, then getting others to want to join such an insane operation? Miracle. But he did it. It got people talking; almost afraid to approach him, too. And what did they talk about? They talked about the rain. Maybe because they really did see a miracle. Maybe because watching someone perform a miracle so tactile as construction in a place so abandoned leant itself to presuming something more mysterious. How many people might have seen this alleged miracle? Dozens, certainly. Maybe fifty? A hundred? As many as were awake in the wee hours and interested enough in a fire to see the fuss. How many people now say they were there? Every resident of Loony Island now makes that claim.
One person I know was there. One person I know for sure, because the night of the fire also just so happens to be the night that one person, doomed within days to be snatched up and thrown into the nearby booby hatch, first arrived at Loony Island. In fact, though I never have admitted it, the fire happened because that person arrived.
That person was me.
* * *
—
Jogging away, Julius thinks: You should have asked him his name. Do it soon—next time you visit. Tomorrow morning. Maybe tonight?
The priest’s finally left the Wales after long hours sitting in the common room, waiting without luck for another glimpse. Even that disturbance—Boyd chased by one of those red-clad ninja types—hadn’t shaken him from the obsession. It’s starting to feel more like addiction than compulsion, more like greed than desire. And with it, of course, comes the shame. People who count on him have gone without assistance, and gone without knowing why, to boot.
He’s deep in Checkertown now, almost to the track that forms the unofficial northern border of Loony Island. The trees stand sharp against the sky in the unearthly brightness of a day on the cusp of ripening to sunset but still minutes away from the transformation, the strange glow a low-hanging summer sun provides. The air brings him the enticing smells of cooking meat, and Julius picks up his pace. He rounds a corner, and there it is, peeking over the lower buildings: his home, his refuge, his nest, the Neon Chapel. A gray brick building spaghettied with glass tubing that blaze with noble gases; pink as hot as the cheeks of an Alabama sheriff, blue as bright as a dream of the Tahiti sea, purple groovier than a magistrate’s silk undies, green as a seasick turtle, yellow as jealousy, orange as Ernie. Here, he hopes, he’ll be able to find some clarity. He knows he’ll be able to find a plate. The barrel grills are out and the crowd is already forming. He just needs a moment to rest.
It’s not a small building, the Neon, but nothing so big as the cathedral it replaced, and there’s grass planted now all around in the footprint of the old structure. Julius shucks off his sneakers in rote practice at this threshold, ties the laces together, hangs them around his neck like a holy stole. He briefly kneels to pray before stepping onto the grass, then heads inside to the narthex for a quick drink from the water fountain just inside the door. It’s a large open space; you can see almost all of it from any other part. The Neon mimics the cruciform shape of the cathedral it vacated, though not the grandeur. The emptiness of the interior lends it a sense of size it doesn’t possess—an effect diminished somewhat by the décor, which he’s heard described as “chain-restaurant chic.” Every inch of wal
l and ceiling space had presented Julius an opportunity to display some gaudiness or other—stuffed moose head, kitsch painting, mirrored advertisement for watery lager—interlaced between with more neon noodlework. Hanging from the ceiling, a mobile made from hubcaps and galvanized lock washers. Hutched in the narthex, a sofa upholstered in velvet; by the door, a hat rack, its arms inlaid with silver finials, its wooden base carved to resemble large wooden clown shoes; a triad of eight-foot bookshelves crammed with old paperbacks and magazines. The pews are rows of easy chairs. The altar rail is a fine burnished lacquered beauty, but the padded kneelers have a violet underglow better suited to a low-rider automobile.
The nave is trimmed on either side, not by a cathedral’s aisles, but by rooms, the open-faced “cells” within which the Neon Brothers and Sisters reside. There are twelve cells in all; six to a side, with two rows of three stacked one above the other, identically and generously sized. Each cell has a wall missing, exposing it to the nave’s central room, though there are accommodations for privacy; each comes equipped with the sort of roll-down heavy-duty steel shutters used to secure mall stores and downtown pawn shops. The fellowship utilizes the three unoccupied upper cells on one side for storage, and these are shuttered and locked, but the brothers and sisters rarely use the forbidding shutters to obscure their own abodes. For everyday privacy they’ve festooned their entrances with decorative curtains, each customized to their own taste. Sister Nettles wove her own marvelous curtain. Up close, it appears to be a lone shade of midnight blue flecked with lint, but as you withdraw, you see the intricate patterns of black woven throughout the blue, and the farther away you stand, the more specific the face described by the “lint”—each fleck of which is a delicate single-thread loop of white—becomes. Nettles also wove Julius’s drapery, a birthday present to replace the sad plastic shower curtains he’d strung up in early days. It’s more a tapestry than a curtain; woven intricately with many colors, with shades of brown figuring most prominently, and with particolored bits of glass, blue and white and gold and crimson, threaded expertly into the fabric.