Sugartown (21 page)

“Your car was seen. The feds have a file on you. Too much coincidence is bad for the system. What are you after?” I cocked my elbow for the backhand.

“Not the book. An object. A silver ornament, very old. A religious item.”

The words came out faster than his lips formed them. It was like watching a movie with the sound out of synch. I could barely make out his face now, though we were as close as lovers. I was sweating from my hairline to my toes. My left side was numb and the gun was slippery in my right hand. It seemed that Rynearson was watching me closely, but out of curiosity, not fear.

“A religious item,” I echoed. The words were a long time getting out. My tongue was as thick as a tire.

“A cross,” he said. “With a blue stone at the axis, a lapis lazuli, and garnets at the points. It dates back to the reign of Sigizmund Augustus of Poland. There is an inscription on the back—”

Suddenly the voice was Martha Evancek’s. I turned from him, almost falling, did fall over the tea table, landing hard on my dead left shoulder and losing my gun. The light in the room wobbled crazily, I hoped because the globe lamp had fallen and rolled when the table went over, but I wasn’t sure enough to be relieved. I got up and stumbled towards the stairs. The way was clear and I was glad of that. Then I wasn’t. It shouldn’t have been, there should have been something on the floor between me and the stairwell. What? Think about it later. I felt good. I felt warm, cozily insulated, and deliciously drowsy, a man in flannel pajamas under a thick comforter in a room icy with winter. My foot found the first step. I dragged the other, the numb left one, over the edge of the well and set it down next to the first. It was wearing a lead boot. I grasped the rail. It squirmed in my hand like a snake but I held on. I found the second step, the third, rounded the first turn going down. My hand skidded along the rail. I let go, mopped my palm on my pants, started to tip forward, grabbed again for the rail.

The rail wasn’t there ...

“G
IVE ME YOUR LEFT ARM
, Amos. No, your left. That’s a good boy.”

I smiled. The blue-haired man smiled back and that made me feel good. He had traded his burgundy jacket for a white coat like doctors wear and he looked very professional with a hypodermic needle in his hand and I liked that. I liked everything about him. I couldn’t understand how I could have not liked him before, but I didn’t want to think about that; it made me feel ashamed. He had a nasty bruise on the left side of his head that closed his left eye a little. It looked as if some nasty person who didn’t like the blue-haired man had done it and it made me very mad at the nasty person, but not mad enough to hurt him. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I just wanted to go on lying in that comfortable bed that was like a cloud and do things the nice blue-haired man asked me to do so he would call me by my first name and tell me I was a good boy. I thought then that I must have been in heaven. I didn’t even feel the prick when the needle entered my wrist.

I dreamed. The nice blue-haired man was my father and we were at the carnival, the one that used to come to our town every summer until someone died when a rusty cable snapped on one of the rides, and then narcotics agents busted the man who ran the shooting gallery for awarding the same winning contestant his third identical panda stuffed with cellophane packets full of white powder. But this was an earlier summer, a deep blue July night with the midway lit like a Christmas tree and so many small brown moths fluttering about in the light that you had to be careful when you opened your mouth that you didn’t swallow one. Canned music clanked and wheezed from the merry-go-round and the Ferris wheel creaked as it turned and the loudspeaker over a peeling booth invited visitors to come see the Two-Headed Baby and the Giant Mummy and the Goat with Its Head Where Its Tail Should Be, the same message over and over in a tinny voice, so that it seemed as if it would go on forever just as it had been going on before we came and would continue after we left. I thought I understood infinity then. My blue-haired father kept asking me questions to find out how much I was seeing and how much I would remember of what I saw. Most of his questions had to do with a huge silver cross that towered over the midway where the main light pole usually stood, deep blue light shining from its center and less dramatic red lights glowing at the points. There was writing on the back in strange characters, but I found that I could read them quite easily.

“ ‘Glory and Eternity,’ ” I read aloud.

Father Blue Hair became excited. His smooth tan face moved very close to mine, close enough to show the hairline fissures at the corners of his eyes and the pouches at the ends of his mouth. His eyes were as devoid of color as puddles on asphalt. They were nice eyes for that, brimming with kindness.

“You know the inscription,” he said, and I felt his breath, warm and sweet as a kitten’s on my face. “Do you see the cross, Amos? Do you see it?”

“Pretty cross.” I smiled when I said it. The words tickled my lips. I said them again and giggled.

“Yes, yes. But where is it?”

“Shiny. I can see my face in it.”

“Where?”

I started to cry. Hot tears left molten tracks down my cheeks and puddled in my ears.

“There, there, Amos. Daddy’s sorry he yelled. Rest, now. We’ll talk later.” A towel made from the same cloud-stuff as the bed stroked my face gently, mopping up my tears. I slept.

More dreams. The carnival, a rowboat on a green pond where I used to fish and tangle my line in the eel-like superstructure of the calm lily pads, a stroll along a familiar rutted clay road where ancient snapping turtles used to cross like great dusty gray beetles with the moss thick on their humped backs. The silver cross showed up in those places too, soothing places with nothing worrisome crouching in the bushes or among the reeds or behind the booths where cotton candy was sold, just the kind brown face with blue-rinsed hair breaking over one neutral eye, its lips shaping gentle questions about the cross. I decided definitely that I was in heaven, but that I was undergoing some sort of catechism that I had to pass in order to stay. I cried whenever the blue-haired man’s reaction to my answers told me they were wrong. More than anything I didn’t want to have to leave.

A troll entered my paradise. I smelled him first, a foul animal stench, and then his misshapen shadow swam across the fluid of my eyes and crockery rattled and then the shadow swam back the other way, leaving its odor curling in the corners. It was the first smell I’d smelled in years; my olfactory sense had been on vacation, but it was back. I lay breathing poisonous air and looking at the stars overhead. There shouldn’t have been stars. Wherever I was, and I was becoming less sure that it was paradise, it felt like indoors. I closed my eyes tight and snapped them open. The stars remained. They were pale blue on a background of turquoise, spaced regularly, and formed no recognizable constellations. I moved my head left and right. The stars didn’t move with me. They were painted on the ceiling.

I turned my head sideways. The corner of a foam-rubber pillow in a cotton slip blocked my left eye. My right saw a wall with more stars on it. I turned my head the other way. Stars on that wall too, and before it, next to the bed, a nightstand with a stainless steel tray on it with a white cloth spread on the bottom and six disposable plastic hypodermic needles lined up neatly on this cloth. A small glass brown-tinted bottle stood on the corner of the tray. That explained the rattling I’d heard.

What I did next was very hard. I pried myself up on one elbow and peeled aside the thin yellow fuzzy blanket covering me. I slipped off my elbow the first two times and the blanket was heavier than it looked, it was made of woven iron with steel reinforcement, but I puffed and sweated and strained my eyeballs and finally lay unencumbered on the sheet, naked except for one of those thin white cotton hospital gowns that fasten in back. My head was heavy and sloshed when I moved it. I tried not to. My left arm was sore. I looked at it without trying to lift it. The underside of the wrist was dotted with blue holes. Someone had been using me for a dartboard and there was a fresh set of darts waiting for another game on the tray on the nightstand.

Light found its way into the room through green curtains drawn over an ordinary window in the right wall. The semi-opaque fabric diffused the light and I couldn’t tell if it was morning or afternoon. My watch was gone with my clothes. I didn’t know what day it was, and then I felt the cold touch of terror that comes to a man who isn’t sure what month it is either, or what year. Psychiatrists would have a name for that. The smug bastards have a name for everything. They would probably call it the Van Winkle Syndrome.

I heard footsteps muffled by a wall. They had a familiar cadence, sort of a thump-thump with a beat between the thumps, like someone walking a piece of furniture that was too heavy to lift. They grew louder.

I moved as fast as a man who has been kept drugged and locked up in a room for days or months or years can move, which is not fast. I pulled myself to the edge of the mattress and leaned on my right shoulder and reached out with both hands until I had the brown bottle between my palms, and then I pried at the plastic top. I was lucky. It wasn’t a childproof cap and I had it off in five minutes, or it seemed that long anyway.

A key rattled in a lock. I sobbed audibly, snatched at the needles, scattering them and pricking my hand, finally got hold of one and got its point inside the mouth of the bottle on the second try. I pulled back the plunger. It made a greedy slurping noise and colorless liquid filled the hollow plastic handle. I didn’t know how good a dose it was. Maybe it was fatal. Whatever it was it went well over the top measuring mark. Air stirred in the room. I smelled Paul. I fumbled the bottle back onto the tray without its top and let my left arm drop to the floor. I had the needle in my right hand pinned under my body. I hoped I wouldn’t stick myself or lose sensation in the trapped arm.

Paul’s footsteps were a long time thumping into the room. I was afraid he’d seen what I was doing. Then the cadence started. I lay with my eyes closed and felt his shadow pass over me on his way past the foot of the bed to the nightstand. Lord, he stank.

“Kicked off your covers, huh? Guess you’re ready for another helping.”

There was a two-foot space between the bed and the stand. He sidled along it and turned his back to set down a smaller tray containing a blue plastic pitcher and matching cup. My eyes were open now. His back muscles tensed. He’d seen the disarray on the nightstand.

I came up off the bed in a kind of slow-motion, but I must have been faster than I seemed because he was just turning when I got my left arm across his throat and stuck the needle into the carotid artery on the side of his perfunctory neck and rammed home the plunger.

It didn’t work. He shrugged out of my grip like a bull bursting through a ribbon of crepe, roaring and clawing at the thing that stung him. He looked at the needle in his palm for a stupid instant, then dashed it to the floor and forearmed me in the throat. But I had lost my balance and was already falling backwards across the bed, missing much of the blow’s force. I wheezed anyway. I landed on my back on the mattress and bounced and then Paul was on top of me, hot and heavy and spraying my face with spittle through his bared brown teeth and stinking like a slaughterhouse in July. He wrenched my right arm up and back and I yelled and he got the fingers of his other hand inside my mouth and tried to tear loose my jaw. I bit down hard, tasting the stink of him on my tongue. He whined keeningly through his teeth from the pain of it but he didn’t let go. I had shot my assailant through with vitamins or something equally counter to my welfare and was going to die with my mouth gaping horribly. Rynearson’s laughing-skull ashtray flashed to mind. My strength was going. I was beating the back of his head with my left fist, but it was like pounding a tire. I couldn’t get any force behind the blows. We might both have been underwater. My jaw muscles creaked.

Suddenly my right arm was free. I felt his grip slipping and threw off his hand just like that. Panicking, he tried to regain the hold, only to grasp empty air as I got my palm against his ugly face and shoved. His fingers tensed mightily on my jaw, but it was only a spasm. They slid out of my mouth, smearing my chin with blood from the knuckles my teeth had torn. He stopped resisting the pressure of my hand on his face and lay like a sack of iron on my chest.

We were like that for a while, reconstructing a depraved frame from a Fellini movie, and then I pushed and slid and finally rolled out from under him and went down on my hands and knees on a spongy green carpet, panting and dry-retching, spitting out blood and the taste of Paul. I wondered if I would ever eat again. I wondered if I would ever care. I wondered what I was doing on my hands and knees in a strange room with the breeze fanning my bare backside.

I pulled myself to my feet, using the bedframe and leaning against the star-papered wall. The headboard was six feet of dark oak, very old, and carved all over with fruit and braided vines showing the marks of the chisel. I looked down at Paul, snoring on his face on the mattress with an arm like a bent log hanging over the edge. If someone didn’t turn him over he could suffocate. Yes, he could. I moved away from the bed.

The blue plastic pitcher still stood on the nightstand. I lifted it in both hands and sniffed its contents. No smell. I tipped it up, took some of the liquid in my mouth, and sloshed it around, not swallowing. Water, with an added metallic taste that took me back to my college boxing days. Liquid protein. I swallowed the mouthful and waited five minutes with the wall holding me up. When I didn’t fall asleep or feel like running up the ceiling fixture I drank some more. I set down the pitcher and snatched the white cloth off the other tray, scattering the rest of the needles, and mopped Paul’s blood off my face. My flesh stung. I explored my features with cautious fingertips. I had a scab on my nose and my right eye was tender and a little swollen. My front teeth moved a little when my tongue touched them from behind. I was lucky. I could have been seriously hurt if I hadn’t broken my fall downstairs with my face.