Slice (3 page)

We all know of cases in which individuals have survived the most bizarre wounds and the most extreme and apparently fatal traumas. A man recently survived for weeks without food or water. A child recovered from a long immersion in freezing water and nobody could explain it. A woman fell from forty stories, suffered two broken ankles, but lived. Every day the headlines carry a tale of someone who would not die. And these are ordinary persons, not Chaingang Bunkowski.

Bunkowski floated off in the rising tide of water that flooded into the submain. The water made his huge bulk buoyant and carried it off into the black recesses of the subworld. And that was it. Hours became days. There was brief, flickering consciousness, then only more cold, gathering darkness. But Daniel's body was like no other. A massive storehouse of inexplicable tolerances and virtually inhuman powers. A uniquely self-sustaining death machine. And slowly the great bulk began to heal.

His first memory was of trying to see. He opened up his one eye as much as he could and saw only Vaseline. It was like the time he was a kid and had been in the reform school and caught “pink eye.” He remembered his eyelids seemed stuck together. One eye was like that now. It refused to admit light. The other one saw only a smear, as if someone had taped one eye tightly shut and smeared a couple of pounds of petroleum jelly over the other. And it was such an effort to try to see up into the jellied covering that he let the deep sleep take him again.

The next memory included sound. He had come awake shivering. Stone icy cold to the bone. Frozen to the marrow. Freezing to death, he thought, and he struggled to move and could not. And struggled to open his eyes again and saw only the jelly. And, freezing, he shivered and made a kind of whimpering noise. And he heard his mother say, “Now, now. You just lay right there like a good boy."

“Nnnnnnnn,” he tried to tell her, and reassured by the sounds of his beloved mommy, he fell back into the arms of Morpheus.

Finally, he came to for longer than a couple of seconds. He was awake for perhaps two minutes this time. Once he had tried to instinctively open his eyes and went through the Vaseline routine again, but he stopped struggling and just trembled. Not from fear so much as from the cold.

“There, there, Baby Boy."

“Nnnnnn,” he said to his mommy

“Good boy."

“Mmmmmmmm.” Beloved Mommy.

“Big Boy. Good boy."

“Nnn."

“Rockabye, Big Boy, in the treetop,” the woman sang tunelessly.

“Ooooooh.” The huge man made a shuddering sound as he trembled from the cold chill that had penetrated to his core.

“Lah dee dah dah, the cradle will rock."

“Nnnnnn."

“Now, now. Good boy."

“Mommy.

“Big Boy, Momma's big boy."

“
OOOOHHH.
” Another massive shudder racked his body.

“Oh! You scared me. Such a big boy,” she crooned to him. She was holding his wounded head in her lap.

“Ooooh.” So cold. He would never get warm again.

“You go back to sleep now, my big boy.” She loved to care for things. Doctor things back to health: small animals, cats hurt in fights, dogs run over by cars, derelicts, junkies. She'd never cared for anything as big as this one, though.

“Mmmmmm.” He made another moaning noise and snuggled against her and passed out. She wondered if it would live. Well, it won't get done with me sitting here, she thought as she got up, letting Daniel Bunkowski's bloodied head splash down unceremoniously in the filth.

And he was close to death for a time. The dark angel who he knew so well from hundreds of previous encounters, the ominous angel of death hovered over his body, freezing him as it blew the icy breath of mortal coil's cessation across him. And Daniel slept. And in the sleep of death he dreamed of his own murder. Of a policeman who threatened him with the symbols of his tortured childhood and then came and hunted him down in the sewers and shot bullets into him, blasting him apart in a screaming hot blinding deafening explosion of fiery pain. Then he opened his eyes and saw the black angel settling on him and he died in his nightmare—this beast who had caused so many nightmares he renewed his acquaintance with the ultimate bad dream.

He is cold. Inert. Unmoving. He does not seem to breathe. Although his great bulk is covered in a mound of rags and newspaper placed there by the old lady to allow the dying one to retain its body heat, he feels like he has been entombed and packed in ice. His tactile senses have finally ceased to exist. Hearing, deafened by the up-close blasts of Eichord's service revolver, shuts off, leaving a ten-decibel electric hum like the buzzing of a faraway bee. Sight, blinded by the gunshots into his face at point-blank range, winks out. He sees nothing. Even in his imagination he cannot conjure up the image of the blues and brilliant reds and yellows that one sees when you “see stars.” His sense of smell long since vanished from the assault of his environs beneath the Chicago streets. His taste is dead. In fact, he wonders idly if his jaw has been shot away. And in this altered state the huge man realizes that, by definition, he no longer exists. So this is what it is like, he thinks, to be dead.

And that is when he sleeps the longest sleep of all, the one that takes him to the brink and beyond, and then he escapes the sharp talons and the chill and the black, and one of his eyes tries to open but it cannot but at least he knows he is not dead, and he is drenched in his own foulness and bathed in poisonous sweat and the flood of perspiration beneath the mound of impromptu covers unglues his eye and he sees his mother there—MY GOD HE SEES HIS MOMMY—and he tries to speak her name and the old woman hears the dead thing go “Nnnnn.” And she whirls around, nearly jumping out of her skin in fear.

“Big Boy is alive,” she says to him. Mommy says to her baby boy. “Whaaaaa. You gave me such a start, I thought you was dead.” She comes down near him and be sees the outline of Mommy's face and imagines the warm smells of her as she takes him and coos and comforts him and holds him and rocks back and forth talking gibberish to herself and she tells him her name.

“
My
name is Pippy. What's your name, my big boy?"

Chaingang just lies there and lets his mommy hold him.

“I'll bet you've never heard that name before. Isn't that a pretty name? Old Pipper is taking care of you now. Making you big and strong again. Pippy found you all dirty and bleeding. You was in baaaaad shape. But you're a fine sight now, oh sonny boy yes indeedy you're a fine sight now,” the old woman tells him as he shakes with pain and sickness, his body racked by infection and fever.

“You best get your rest now. Go back to sleep. Get your forty winks. And then pretty Pippa will make you a nice hot bowl of soup. But right now, Big Boy, just have to go night-night and live off the fat of the land.” She pokes him gently in the center of the huge mound to emphasize her point and cackles like a cartoon witch. And, grateful for his mother's comforting nearness, his head in the folds of her skirts, Chaingang Bunkowski lets himself drift off again, racked with pain, sweating like a pig, on the lap of his long-dead mommy.

He is starving to death when he wakens the next time and he feels a tide of relief wash across him as he pops his eye open and sees the woman looking down on him.

“Wake up now, Big Boy. Pippin must get some soup into your jib. Ready for your nice soup?"

Feed me, he thinks.

“Okay,” she says as if she was reading his mind, “here we go.” And she splashes something liquid across his face.

“Now, now, boy. Now, now. Big Boy is a bad boy. Big Boy mustn't bleed for Pepper. We'll have to fix that, won't we?” And she goes and gets something and then Mommy does an unspeakable thing to her trusting baby boy as Chaingang's eye opens wide in horror at the sight of his mother coming to him and plunging something sharp some awful stabbing sharp silver thing into his face. Oh don't, Mommy, I'll be good I swear I promise I won't ohhhhhhhhh nooooooooooooo, and the woman hears the thing grunt “NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN” as she takes the huge needle and begins sewing the side of the man's wounded face together with sailcloth thread she retrieved from a garbage dump.

He begins to wonder if he has hallucinated the injury to himself as he once dreamed that he might have hallucinated the rape and murder of an exquisitely beautiful woman. He was not given to many hallucinations. But trauma, pain, illness, some powerful disease, had shaken his iron resolve. Was he alive? Yes. Was he dead? No. Was he a dying man? Perhaps. He ran it through his malfunctioning computer. He smelled—no, that isn't the right word—tasted a foulness that permeated every waking breath he took. At first his computer told him it must be coming up from diseased lungs. He thought he had lung cancer. He wondered how long he would live and what he should do next.

“Waaaaaaahhhhhhh.” He coughed and spit the foul taste out in a hawking effort that racked him with a convulsive pain spasm and a woman's, voice said, “Bad Big Boy.” Which made no sense to him whatsoever. He knew he was alone. He tried to open his eye wider but the light was so bright and he shuddered with chill and yet he was soaked in sweat, and the side of his face felt pinched shut.

“Bad, bad doggie,” the old witch cackled, but Chaingang Bunkowski did not hear the voice and he was taken down again into trauma and unconsciousness. He did not hear her say “Bad, naughty puppy dog. Bad boy spit and make him face bleed for pretty Pip. BAD boy.” The crazy old bag lady watching him as he passed out again.

Much later he awoke and it was all black and he thought the cancer had killed him and he assumed he was dead, but the thought was but a fleeting awareness as he was sucked back down into sleep and then the bright light and the noise, and he made an effort to open his eyes but one seemed swollen shut and something was wrong with his face and it was the old woman saying something: “You was never gonna get up, boy. Are we hungry?"

He tried to nod his huge head and the massive effort almost took him down. He tasted feces, coal oil, death, stale fish, an awful stench beyond the worst halitosis from acute gingivitis becoming the worst peritonitis and then the ultimate case of death breath on record. He tried to spit and could not, and then tried to swallow and the voice said, “Here, open wide for Mommy."

“Mmm.” It was his mommy? He tried to assimilate the information.

“Eat."

“Nnnnnn.” He agreed to eat. He was ravenously hungry.

“There.” It tasted like hot water but he was able to swallow the liquid and for the second it took to swallow it the awful taste in his mouth was gone.

“MORE,” he rumbled, and the old woman dropped her spoon, then laughed.

“Baby boy can TALK. Boy's first word to Mommy: MORE. All righty, we've got plenty of good, nourishing soup here. Yes indeed, pretty puppy, Pipkin has plenty of good soup.” And she fed him another spoonful of hot water.

“More,” he said.

“Yes. You'll get more now. You can talk. What is Big Boy's name?” He said nothing and she got another spoonful down him. “My name is Pippa. Do you think Mommy is pretty?"

“More."

She obliged him. “Feeling our old selves now, are we?” He blinked. “Is Peppy's big doggie going to be up and wagging his tail soon, eh?” She cackled madly.

“Mmmm.” He tried to make her give him more again but it was just too much work to get the word out. Fortunately she understood and nodded and dipped the soup spoon back in to the can.

“MMM-ummm, good,” she sang tunelessly, and he managed another swallow. And the small nourishment was sufficient to pull him back off the edge. He turned his head and felt the pull at his face. What had happened? He remembered the blinding gunshot. He wondered if he was blind in that one eye—perhaps from the point-blank explosion? No. He knew on some mysterious level that he was all right. He was going to be all right.

“More,” he rumbled.

“At's a fine, Big Boy. We'll have you up an’ at ‘em in no time now.” And he saw her dip the spoon, which was silver and marked Palmer House, into the can that said Campbell's Minestrone Soup, and his brain told his arm and his hand to move and he reached out and took the can and tilted it up and swallowed the soup.

“HA!” She was pleased. Another stray being nursed back to health. “Big Boy ate allll his soup."

He smelled it now and knew that he was wrapped in foul rags, and he realized for the first time that he was lying in his own filth. Why hadn't he been cleaned? What sort of a nurse was she? This wasn't his mommy. This was ... what? He saw where he was then. He was down in the sewers. And this creature who had given him soup had done something to him. He remembered her plunging something sharp into his face and hurting him, and Chaingang looked at the old lady and thought how easily he could snuff her out like a dirty candle but the thought washed over him like a dark and heavy cloud and he could only swallow, a major effort, and he let his upper torso and head fall back down into his nest of rags and he slept again, feeling himself pulled down into the black sleep whirlpool as the woman's voice sounded far away, “Rockabye, Big Boy, in the treetop” and something about something breaking, and he was gone again.

“That's my good big boy. Sleep good now for Mommy. And when we wake up we'll have a FEAST. We'll slay the fatted calf,” she said with a delighted screech at her rapier wit.

But Chaingang was far away, dreaming of the face of the cop and the things he would do to that face, the ways he would change that arrogant appearance, and the thought of it stretched part of his own face in the rictus of a bloody smile, and then the big man dreamt of the song of the killer whales and slept.

“
L
isten to
this
,” he said, reading in a loud voice anyway so he could be heard in the next room but screaming the words he wanted to emphasize. “Designer Bob Mackie attaches a
muff
to this classic evening fur. All right. Check it
out
.” He was getting louder by the second. “I'll go muff-diving in
that
! HEY, you listening?” There was no comment from the dining room, where the long-suffering woman sat at the table with a pile of bills. The wife of Eichord's old pal Chink.