The Holy Terror (12 page)

“Ma’am? Are you there, ma’am?”

The woman seemed to recognize the voice, Haid thought. They were just opposite the double doors, smells of syrup and grease around the garbage cans. Teal posters for a bar called Nolan Void were stapled to the door frame.

He pushed the chair with ease, propelling it backwards as he chanced a look over his shoulder. The action made him accidentally tip the chair backwards on two wheels.

Father, it’s going badly!

The woman in the chair seemed to be an elf or some other comedic creature, bouncing this way and that, already feeling the rapture.

FATHER!

If the rock that the wheelchair had caught on was a sign from above/within him, then it was certainly a badly conceived one. Perhaps it was a test. One he might fail.

Fifty feet behind them, Brother Preacher Man came into view. He could hardly see the silhouette of the chair and the huddled form around it.

Haid bit down hard on the inside of his right cheek. Father was reprimanding him, it wasn’t right yet to have someone bearing witness to the miracle and the rapture and the glory to you, o’ Jesus CHRIST! the wheelchair’s left wheel caught on the rock. He fell forward, and, forgetting where his hands were positioned, put pressure in all the wrong places.

He squeezed the old woman’s shoulders and Wilma Jerrickson’s clavicle broke in two places. Her right scapula splintered under his grip. The Painkiller’s grip. Unable to release his hold, his fingers slid through her skin, silently tearing through the ligaments. The bursa—a small sac that cushions the tendons from the bone—broke and he felt the warmness of the fluid caressing his fingertips.

There was no blood yet. His body tilted forward, and a dozen or more strands of the woman’s hair fizzled into his chest at nipple level.

* * *

The reverend Latimore heard the metallic sounds of the chair in the shadows. He had read the papers, even the Defender was now talking about how the killer was using a fast-action acid on his victims, and when he smelled the burning flesh, he began to run even faster.

* * *

Haid looked down at the woman, appalled at the angles her shoulders and forearms now took. But that wasn’t all. Her head had turned to the right when her collarbones were crushed. And now it was halfway inside of his chest. He’d have to watch her face as he pulled her in further and he never had to do that before.

The woman’s left cheek slapped against Haid’s chest like a smooth rock on pond water. He could hear the rapid breaths of the person behind him drawing closer. With the woman’s face dissolving into him, Haid did one last turn and fit the chair snugly between two garbage bins. What was left of the face had contorted into a joker’s visage. His thighs were now touching the padded arms of the wheelchair. The woman’s arms lay limply at her sides. Her hair sparked and flickered into him, quick blue flashes that made him see her receding face that much clearer.

Her right eye was gone, and Haid hoped that what she now saw inside him would soothe her, that her body would cease its dreadful shaking.

But it didn’t happen. He forced himself to continue staring down. One mistake and he would be discovered by someone who might not understand what was happening. The bones in the woman’s nose and remaining cheekbone crackled and snapped with the gentle sound of breaking bread.

“It will be all right.” Haid could think of nothing else to say. Things were moving slowly for him. She didn’t reply. How could she? Three-quarters of her mouth was inside him now. Maybe she was already speaking with Father. Then the rest of her mouth was gone, the flabby left corner of her lips trailing like a deflated weather balloon.

Her left eye had broken free of its socket: Haid’s chest engulfed the area around the socket as if it were a volcanic island submerging in the Pacific, an atomized atoll like Eniwitok or Bimini. Like a weighted child’s toy—what was that ditty from the early seventies? “Weebols Wobble But They Don’t Fall Down”—the orb rolled up his chest. It nearly touched the cavity in his collarbone, then went back down, arcing around his right nipple, finally melting in on itself as if all it had been was a cheap Woolworth’s novelty candle all along.

“Grandma Wilma?” The preacher’s voice came clear and Haid realized he was just beyond sight.

Latimore stopped by the first garbage bin, placing a calloused palm on the lid for balance. He was not at all concerned about the probability that he was stepping into unknown territory. But he’d be double-damned if he rushed around the corner with his lungs on fire. In that instant of the preacher’s hesitation, Francis Haid did a sort of impromptu belly flop onto Wilma Jerrickson’s torso. Her trunk collapsed into him as if she had been an inflatable doll and he was making the air rush out. He then spun around on the chair. He had to hurry, bending down, he—“Now, doan go tryin’ nothin’, man! Gramma lady, you okay?” The preacher came into view, ready to fight the good fight if he had to.

Haid looked up from the wheelchair. “I been called many things in my life, mister man, but Gramma sure ain’t one of them!” He hoped he sounded deluded enough.

Latimore looked down at the pale-haired man, his scalp grey in the light of the street lamp, sitting in the chair. Newspapers were bundled up around his waist and legs. Haid stared dumbly at him.

“I’m very … very sorry, uh, please. My ‘pologies.” The preacher was flustered. “It’s just that … there’s this woman... I, uh, thought—“

Haid stared at the man’s yellowed teeth. “Yes, there’s always a woman,” he said. “But just me here tonight.” Events had slowed down sufficiently that Haid heard the El trains as they rumbled over Wabash Avenue behind him.

“Yes, well.” The weird remark Haid had made had confused him. “Again, I am sorry for disturbing you.”

“Forget it.” Haid dismissed it with a shrug.

“My name is Reverend Charles Latimore, maybe you’ve heard my sermons in front of the Oriental Building? Sometimes, I preach up by Pathway Financial. “When the police finally get him moving, was what he didn’t say.

“Yes,” Haid was getting very uncomfortable in the chair. It really was too small for him, something he hoped the preacher wouldn’t notice. “Well...”

The preacher stepped back once. “It’s goan be might cold out tonight, don’t you think you might be wanting religion at the Pacific Garden Mission, Mr… ?”

“Call me Vince.” Damn, why had he said that?

“Vince, then.”

“No, I’m fine here, really.” Haid shifted his weight. The papers rustled, a headline about air bases in downstate Illinois closing flapped against his right thigh. “I might stop by. Thank you for your concern.”

Reverend Latimore knew that if a street person declined to find shelter, whether it be out of guilt or anxiety, no one, not a man of religion, or even a beat cop with a nightstick instead of a psalm, could get that person to change his or her mind. But he had sworn that it was the old woman from the Marclinn he had watched wheel back here.

“Well, God Bless You,” he said softly.

“Oh, he already has, thanks.”

The preacher shrugged his shoulders at the man’s apparent cynicism towards the Lord. After he walked away, Haid counted to twenty and let out a sigh. The news pages fell away, revealing Haid sitting on what little remained of Wilma Jerrickson. “

The left leg to the knee. Almost as much of her right leg. The right shoe had fallen away from the stockinged foot. It balanced against the footrest. Haid felt exhausted, but still strained to hear if the man had truly gone. There were pinpricks in his fingertips, and looking down, he was astonished at how tightly his hands gripped the padded arms of the chair.

Another train rumbled by, a Ravenswood moving counterclockwise on The Loop, and Haid turned his head to watch the fragments of life displayed on the faces in the ovoid windows.

When the train had passed, and it was again truly silent in the night, he began to nudge the footless shoe back and forth, making a game of it.

“Fool!” The preacher had Mr. T mentally curse him out. Then, in his own thought-voice: Eyes be playin’ tricks w’you, old man. Charles Latimore had known the television star when he was still Lawrence Tero, bouncer at Mr. Ricky’s Disco on Garfield Boulevard. A place the preacher knew well, before he found the Lord, if you anticipate the thrust.

He shook his head. The preacher had never seen this Vince before, maybe he was one of the ‘plegics that hanged by the river. He’d ask Mike Surfer about it, the guy was always playing detective. And the Lord Himself knew what Tee was spewing to the crowd. Damn, it was cold...

Taking longer strides, the preacher had just taken his first step onto the street proper when he planted one of his size nine Florshiems on something small and square. A small black book. Bigger and thicker than an address book, he thought, wiping the cover with the thumb of his Christian Dior glove.

The cover was slick; the writing weathered and cracked. He walked closer to the neon display past the theater. Squinting, an involuntary tick starting in his right eye, the preacher read the faded script. My Daily Psalm Book. He heard a squad’s cherry, hoped it wasn’t the Tee caught scamming with his mike. Last time that happened, well, it wasn’t going to happen again or you can stick a fork in the man, because he be done.

He thought about going back to Vince, see if he dropped the book. But getting back to Tee was more important.

* * *

Haid shifted his weight. His Joe Cellulite butt cheeks were going numb from sitting on the bits of the old woman’s legs. He wanted to scratch himself down there, but was afraid of what he might touch. Maybe the woman’s privates were visible from where her slacks had burned away. He thanked Father that the wind had kept the reverend from noticing the woman’s smoldering soul.

He felt sleepy, sated. An image floated through his clouding mind, in frames that receded with each heartbeat. The image was that of a bloated rat floating down one of the city’s sewers, complacent in its impending doom as the waters rose higher and the tunnel more claustrophobic.

Could a rat conceive of himself as, a martyr? He didn’t have an answer. His head bobbed like the rat in the sewer, once, twice. A half-hearted third attempt at sitting upright.

Finally, his chin settled into the folds of his jacket, so warm. The rat stopped struggling. The Painkiller slept and dreamt.

* * *

Two bits.

Father, in the dream, lay the quarter down on the small tray next to his empties of Drewry’s beer and men’s magazines. The magazines, their covers damp and curled, had titles like
Torso
and
Gentlemen’s Gentlemen
.

The two bits was easy and oh how he loved to please Father. Silver quarter, jet black hair, grooves radiating backwards from Vince Janssen’s comb strokes. Smelling of Glover’s tonic, honey mixed with some other awful medicinal odor. Red label on the beer cans; he was allowed to drink one once, many years before. Foam had come out of his nose, young Haid the rogue. He had smoked in school, but couldn’t handle beer for a long time. Magazines with black covers and blue skies and bronze bodies. Male bodies.

He must have been younger in this dream; he had to reach up to caress Father’s head. One of the Norman Lear comedies was on the old RCA Victor, one of the few things that had not accompanied them to the basement apartment on Tooker Place. They were in the Tooker Place apartment, though. Where there were no neighbors who gave a shit about anything.

Haid put his right fingers into the elder man’s hair up to his first knuckles. Vince Janssen went
aaaaahhhhhhhh
. Someone on the television was looking for someone else named Stretch Cunningham. It might have been Archie Bunker. Father could have been called Stretch in his heyday, until the booze infected his legs, and—Haid took it upon himself to look down at his own body.

He was (in his dream) in his teens because there was a lot of curly hair around his dick and nuts. And he was wearing his brown and gold Jesus Christ Superstar t-shirt, the one from late 1970. The shirt smelled faintly of marijuana. He smelled many things in his dreams; in waking life, a certain scent on the street or in the bedroom might give him a déjà vu feeling.

Gently, he then let his left hand reach into the hair on Vince Janssen’s beautiful head and began massaging the scalp. How he would perform aerobics by reaching around the chair to touch his Son...! Having to walk around the house half-naked was bad enough. But it was what he wanted.

A passing El train sang to his subconsciousness while the preacher was still wiping the cover of the psalm book. The ch-chack ch-tack ch-chack of the cars sang out:

This is my body, given up for you...

Rub it in, rub it in.
AAAAAaaaaaahhhhhhh, sonny boy
. Scritch scritch on his big old head, staring past his strong legs, pants hiked up above the sock line. Brown slacks, white socks. Scritch scritch.
aaaaaahhhhhh sonny do it
. Holes in the toes of the socks. Yellowed toenails that were curled from being too long. Beyond the socks and toenails that reminded Haid of Frito-Lay corn chips, the bigots on television.

Haid hated bigots, unless Father said it was okay to heckle someone. Father had often called him a dee-pee just like his mother was. That meant dumb polack. Jane the fat waitress at The Triangle Grill used to call everybody who didn’t leave her a big tip a dee-pee. But she meant it in a bad way, as if all Polish people were shiftless and cheap.