The Holy Terror (14 page)

Back to the present: he stood in the open doorway, the wind whipping his hair around his face.

“SHADDADOOR YA LIVINA FUCKIN BARN!” Haidturned towards where the shoes protruded from beneath the stall.

“SHADDADOOR AN LET A GUY SHIT WITHOUT FUCKIN FREEZIN THANK YOU VERY MUCH MOTHERFUCK!”

Haid thought about looking through the stall door crack. He said nothing.

“WHATTAYA WAITIN FOR? YOU SOME KINDA FUCKIN FAG?”

Haid clenched and unclenched his hands. Father had told him how to treat these people, guy was probably a jig from Maxwell Street. “Mister, you don’t know shit from Shinola,” Haid said proudly. He took the steps to street level three at a time. Streets and Sanitation found the remains of Wilma Jerrickson at 6:45 the next morning.

* * *

Just a block further north, The American Dream examined himself in the checkerboard tiles of the Nolan Void bathroom. The mask he wore over his face was a shapeless thing, a ski mask with badly stitched eyeholes. Over several layers of long underwear and sweatshirts, he wore a shoulder immobilizer, though keeping his arm free of the thing. Dirty grey now, an American flag was stitched onto the back the previous month by Reve Towne.

On the front of the grey sweatshirt that was his outermost clothing, he had written in blood red letters:

Hell’s Kitchen N.Y.C.

He also wears wrist braces and, at times, finger splints. The garments and devices are all part of his armor. Not costume. That is for heroes in make believe gothams and metropolises. In this city, all too real, this city whose pulse of despair riding the veins of lost hope was as suddenly palpable and as painful as the onset of rigor mortis in a family member’s corpse, one wore armor to survive. Not a costume, never a costume.

Without the safety of the braces, whether real or imagined, one might just as soon gape like a hooked fish off Twelfth Street as they bobbed on the bus or the train or even the sidewalk. D.O.A: Dead of Afterbirth. Bored In The U.S.A.

He glanced over at the urinal to his left. The drain clogged by bits of vomit, he stared down at two black, curled pubic hairs, mesmerized. As if he were inverted and gazing up at two high flying vultures, relentlessly circling him ever so high. In a serene Ty-D-Bol sky.

He then walked out into the bar, ignoring the stares. Sometimes, hell, most of the time, to truly see the show, you had to be the show.

The inside of this place is a fuckin’ Frank Lloyd Wright wet dream, Victor Tremulis thought, taking in everything, moving his head in a semicircular arc, hands in the pockets of his jeans. Waiting for Mike Surfer. Taking it all in.

He had expected to see the average rooming house as catalogued by the human interest stories the papers ran on Chicago’s holiday homeless. Rick Soll had done several articles on the soup kitchens along Madison and Halsted that about blew him away. Wasn’t often that a newspaper reporter was allowed to have his own voice. He didn’t write the same old lunch bucket “there but for the grace, etc.” shit.

There were no Bible quotes scarring the windows in harsh, red neon. No dangling crosses over the sidewalk, no sandwich board SERVICEMEN WELCOME print. The Pacific Garden Mission on South State bore a huge cross that read CHRIST DIED FOR YOUR SINS. The DeRamus dive on Poe Street had quotes from the New Testament plastered daily on an old theater marquee.

Tremulis understood. NO one here needed saving. No one had a desire to be born again. Every single tenant here was crippled; being born handicapped, they knew they had to get their lives straight the first time. Nobody succumbed to alcohol here, he would bet. Being a prisoner of war to one’s own body was difficult enough, he well knew, that one didn’t need a golden arm or a withered kidney, thank you very kindly.

In addition to the plaques he had seen earlier, up at the front desk when he was talking to Nutman, Tremulis was mesmerized by three figures at the far wall, by the elevators. The Greek Fates. Incredible. He walked closer to examine the detail. Okay, let’s see now. Clotho was the spinner of man’s individual fate and Lachesis was the dispenser of lots. Both had delicate claws’and almost loving visages. The third one, Atropos, The Inexorable One, had a mouth open in a wide shriek. Trermulis wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that the residents used the mouth as an ashtray.

He realized he had committed himself to the center of the main walkway. The room was occupied by a half dozen men. A tray next to the couches held an aluminum bowl of ice and Pepsi bottles. A man with shoulder-length auburn hair sat at the end of the couch in what Tremulis first thought was a lotus position. He then realized that the man’s pant legs were empty and pooled around his lap.

A man with black plastic glasses and blond hair sat next to him. He had no arms and was wearing a bow tie over a white shirt. Tremulis wondered if it was a clip on. An older man was seated in a straight-back chair, listening intently.

To the left of that group, two men were shooting pool at a red felt table. From one of the conversations he’d had with Mike, Tremulis knew the red-haired one to be Karl and the man with the walker was Etchison. Spider plants dipped low over bookshelves behind them. Before taking a shot, Karl cracked his knuckles and it sounded like wax paper being torn from the jagged edge of a deli box.

The front door to the Marclinn slid open and Tremulis saw a familiar face from the street.

“Brother Preacher!” Karl bellowed. “Frippin-A!”

Etch slammed his walker gently down onto his companion’s leg in deference to his language.

“Etch, I oughtta—” Karl said before breaking into a smile of yellowed teeth and receding gums. Then: “Three ball in the side pocket.”

Tremulis kept his eye on the game at hand.

* * *

Nutman looked up from his Lansdale novel as the preacher’s shadow covered the pages. And, besides, he smelled the Aqua Velva. He placed the book spine down over an ashtray from For Cry-Eye, a bar on the north side of the river. Brother Preacher looked down at the novel.
The Nightrunners
. The things people wrote about, he thought with a slight grimace that Nutman construed to be gas.

“Cold night, ennit?”

“Yes, Colin. It is.” The preacher reached into the inside breast pocket of his trench coat. “I find this up by the theater. Think it might be the woman what stays here.”

“I’ll see she gets it,” Nutman placed it atop a stack of newspapers. The top one, Dziennik Chicagoski, was Gizanmas.

“Tell Michael I said hello.”

“Will do, preacher,” Nutman said as the reverend moved towards the door. He reached the weight sensor and the doors shooped open.

Tremuhis had wandered back over to the men on the couch, avoiding Nutman because of the preacher being there. Where was Mike? This was crazy. The men were talking about the recent Painkiller murders.

“Zif we didn’ have ‘nough to wor’ bout,” the old man was saying. The blond man with no arms said “The cops will catch him. A guy does crazy shit like he did to the guy up at the Cass, he’s gonna fuck up.”

His right shoulder stump jabbed forward with conviction.

“Oh, there will be other murders, to be sure.”

“S’funny, O’Neil.” The legless man addressed Blondie. “You’d think that it would mean more that a victim be in the wrong place at the wrong time than the killer—”

“—but we all know that’s not how the killer gets caught, Szasz.” O’Neil pronounced it Sage but Tremulis knew his Polish spellings. That’s what they needed in spelling bees these days.

Everyone looked past the elevators just then, and Tremulis saw Mike Surfer wheeling down past the pop machine. “Mike, grab me a sodee,” the oldest of the men said. He pulled out a pint of C.C. and noticed Tremulis for maybe the first time.

Staring him up and down, not seeing leg braces or other supports, he spoke a little too loudly. “Y’ass me, some stand-up whitey gotsda nerve. Big man to go after cripple man inna chair.” He looked directly at Tremuhis, still sizing him up.

“Haveta be a strong whitebread to hold that blowtorch so steady.”

The old man reminded him of his mother; both had eyes that didn’t care who or what they impaled. So this was it, then? Another group who couldn’t see his handicap, therefore he couldn’t be considered their equal. He walked away from them, from Mike, with the voices behind him all blending together.

“I really think a blowtorch is farfetched, Chuso.”

“Was that your friend Victor, Mike?”

“Blood. Where was his blood, man?”

“Mike?”

“You’re so fucked up sometimes, Chuso, I tell you.”

“So have a conniption fit.”

“Oh, quit your pissing and moaning.”

Tremulis continued on towards the front door, who was he kidding, thinking he would fit in here? Oh, man, was he the fool...

He was so nervous he had to piss: Hoping, hell, not really fucking caring if they saw him, he went into the door marked MEN beyond one of the pool tables. He didn’t even acknowledge Etchison or Karl.

And so he didn’t see The American Dream and Reve Towne enter through the front doors.

Francis Madsen lay at home, listening to a Buddy Holly cassette. Talking to Father, alone in the bedroom. Always smiling now that the pain was over. His personal pain.

Always smiling because his head was gone from his lower lip on up, dissolved into his Son. This is my body, given up for you.

“It was close, all righty, Father,” Haid confessed with reverence. “I had to M-O-V-E, move. Move it or lose it. Shit or get off the pot, like you used to tell me when you taught me strip poker, remember?”

He laughed, thinking about the first cleansing, followed by the voiding. Shit or get off the pot. Giggling now, giddy from fatigue here in the bedroom with the man he loved. That first one had come spilling up out of him like…like black gold, Texas tea. Well, the first thing you know, old Jed’s a millionaire.

Laughing was okay; the newspapers had told him that he had not been able to consume the first two because they were thieves. Well, it was actually Father who had told him this: Haid often got his facts mixed up.

The newspapers were saying how some maniac was chopping up handicapped people all over the place. He made mistakes, but he was learning. Even Jesus made mistakes.

The truth was that Father wanted only the good part of the thieves in Heaven. The part of their souls that could be redeemed.

“Oh, but this time I had to dance, Father.” Haid smiled at the crucifixes on the wall, ornate silver symbols of a son’s love for his father. Crosses that were once shadowed by the top of Father’s greasy head.

“Yea, dance. The first and last St. Vitus Dance. Now that was a good one...”

He drifted away back to Massie’s Bar at the corner of Damen and Augusta Boulevard, the 20th of January 1981. For everyone else in the city, the country, it was the day Iran released the American hostages. For Haid, it was the day that Jeffrey DiMusi confessed to setting the fire that killed so many of his peers.

Thinking back, he could almost forget the stench of the fire. But the rancid smell of what remained of his Uncle Vince, of Father, still stung his nostrils. He wondered when, or even if, what few neighbors he had on Tooker Place would complain of the smell.

“Yea, that was a good one,” he repeated softly.

Vince Janssen would have winked his approval. If he still had his eyes.

* * *

Later, Haid tried taking another shit, his stomach upset. Maalox Plus, drank straight from the bottle from Walgreens, was caked dry on his lips and chin.

The old woman had led a good life: he didn’t have to shit one bit of her up.

He tried just the same, to ease his cramps. Grunted. Pressed down with his generous ass cheeks hard enough to crack a screw in the yellowed toilet lid. For a moment, there was a rumor of a turd, however tiny.

Haid drooped his head, the crucifix he wore around his neck coming free from his shirt. It, too, was caked with Maalox Plus when he was through.

He slept with his pants around his ankles, Father guiding his hands to a place that was familiar to both of them.

Tremulis didn’t know what to make of the guy who followed him into the bathroom of the Marchinn. The first thing he said was, “Watch you don’t drink from that faucet directly.”

He turned to look at the guy with the ridiculous looking ski mask on, thinking, “Here we fucking go.”

“Safety from possible disease is as equally important as protection against the street scum and junkies who would gladly dismember their grandmothers for a shot at getting through life in some warped semblance of unconsciousness for more than one day.” He had said that all in one breath, so Tremulis assumed he didn’t smoke.

“Uh, right.” Tremulis edged toward the door, but not out of paranoia. Was this the guy they wrote about in the papers sometimes? The swinging bulb over the sink made his shadow dance across two walls narcotically. The papers had never mentioned this guys’ speeches being like a bad Adam “Batman” West monologue.

He recalled, though, a Loop cop saying in one story how the guy was born with cerebral palsy, and his upper frame was atrophied. The man had a noticeable limp; it made Tremulis think of the DC Super-Hero action figures from a few years back. Each character had its own “power.” A “Nuclear Power Punch” or a “Computerized Power Kick.” He pictured the man replete in a shrink wrap, the legend alongside his packaged figure-reading in three-dimensional red and black: Squeeze the American Dream’s shoulder blades together and watch him walk with a NOTICEABLE LIMP!