The Holy Terror (2 page)

I’ve been wrestling for a while with how much to mention here. There’s a factor that shouldn’t be ignored, or hurriedly glossed over, but neither should it take central spotlight:

When it comes to handicaps and crippling conditions, Wayne Allen Sallee knows what he’s talking about, all too well. His brain hemorrhaged when he was born and left him with the lifetime souvenir of cerebral palsy. Not long after I first got to know him, roughly twenty years ago, he was struck by a car and catapulted into the side of a Chicago Transit Authority bus. He’s been through more operations and procedures and endured more pain than any random handful of other people I know. From both near and far I’ve seen him contend with it all with gallows humor, stubborn willpower, and a tenacious refusal to let self-pity and anger take control; instead, he transmutes and channels them into more constructive outlets. His work varies, like that of all writers who keep at it for the right reasons—sometimes a scream, sometimes a flipped middle finger, sometimes a dissection—but it’s typically characterized by an empathy unusual in its depth, especially for fiction falling under the horror rubric.

In The Holy Terror, then, you will find a novel that was written straight from the heart, as many novels are, but as few can be. Its characters, many of them street people, and most in wheelchairs or otherwise in bodies that don’t work properly—“a prisoner of war to one’s own body,” in the novel’s words—are not exalted as noble role (or roll) models, dealing with whatever ails them with saintly stoicism. Neither are they the caricatures that might have resulted from a writer who didn’t understand what the world looks like through their eyes.

Instead, they’re just likeable, fallible, brave, and sometimes even ludicrous human beings, making their way with humor and bitterness and determination and sorrow and an occasional touch of grace, and always looking out for each other. Because they’re the ones best equipped to do it.

And they surely need to, now more than ever.

Because preying on Chicago’s population of disabled street people is the Painkiller, a serial murderer the likes of which you haven’t seen before. His methods are unique, and so is what compels him. He believes it to be God, and without a doubt he’s been touched by something, but there’s room enough here to make up your own mind. Just as valid an explanation is the alternative pantheon, the Givers of Pain and Rapture, imagined by the novel’s main conscience, Vic Tremble.

When I first read The Holy Terror, in 1992, I’d never heard of Amma, Mata Amritanandamayi, known as “the hugging saint,” and who has by now embraced roughly 30 million people around the world. I’ve been brought to tears by stories of some of the people she’s welcomed into her arms, people whom you can imagine haven’t been touched by another human being in years.

But I thought of her while rereading the novel the other day. It struck me that Amma’s simple mission of love and unconditional acceptance and truly seeing whoever approaches her is one of the purest affirmations of life I’ve ever heard of…

And that the mission of the Painkiller is its inverse, with death coming not from animosity, but from a grotesquely mutated form of compassion.

* * *

The same day I began rereading The Holy Terror, I saw an article on ABC News’ web site about Huang Chuancai, a 32-year-old man in China undergoing treatment for neurofibromatosis, a rare genetic condition that caused him to develop 50 pounds of facial tumors. Several photos supplemented the article, and drove home the severity of Huang’s condition as newsroom prose couldn’t. Imagine a large, heavy, sandbag made of skin draped over a skull and loosely molded with human features.

His hands, though, were exquisite, the hands of a pianist, or the hands of Yo-Yo Ma, photographed in repose against his cello. Even here, in a man whose disfigurement is believed to be the worst of its kind in the world, there was beauty, if you could see it.

Some did. In the Comments section, most people were kind. A few tiny minds couldn’t resist making jokes. But most were deeply kind, offering words of compassion and wishes for the success of his treatments that Huang Chuancai will probably never see, although I like to think that something gets through to him.

One comment stuck with me, although perhaps not for the obvious reasons: I believe people like this man are a test for the rest of us, to see if we are cruel or kind in our hearts.

It stuck with me, unnervingly so, because a test implies someone who gives it.

Someone who grades.

Those who pass and those who fail.

Most of all, it implies that someone else has been picked to be that test, whether by accident or design, through physics or biology, or even by Givers of Pain and Rapture.

And if you’re brave enough, or compassionate enough, or cruel enough to wonder what that must be like, keep reading. You’re about to walk in those shoes, with someone who knows the way.

Brian Hodge Boulder, CO January 2008

Chicago's Near North Side:
Friday 1 December, 1958

They had been snickering in the back row of the classroom, prematurely dismissing Sister Kara Veronica’s readings of the class’s Good Samaritan compositions in favor of discussing whether or not you’d be able to pick your nose if your hand didn’t have any bones in it, when the fire that killed ninety-five children and three nuns broke out. It was 2:37 in the afternoon.

The sixth grade’s homework assignment the night before had been to write three hundred words on a Good Samaritan story of their own; the three boys in the last row had listened to the first story only because one of the three, Frankie Haid, had been the author. The black-haired boy who had a face still rounded by baby fat and squinty blue eyes set into sockets like horizontal thumbprints would always have a way with words.

Especially when it came to bastardizing Bible stories.

His composition, meticulously printed onto pale tan foolscap paper, the loops of his small e’s and a’s properly touching the forest green dotted-line that ran halfway between the solid lines, was the usual classic. The parochial school had discontinued purchasing that type of foolscap a year earlier, but several of St. Vitus’ nuns would not think of ordering new supplies until the old were depleted.

Jim McCoppin and Freddy Gorshin had never doubted their friend’s ability. They both had gassed it up as the penguin read Haid’s little gem. What it was, this Samaritan helps this kid, a real holy terror in the neighborhood, who cracks up on his Schwinn, but only after some greaser makes book with the prone kid’s record box filled with 45s of labeled-by-the-penguin JD’s like Eddie Cochran, Elvis Presley, and Chuck Berry.

The good nun had commented that, while Haid’s story was filled with “modern-day jingoisms,” he once again showed his talent for “presenting a cohesive bonding between religious cornerstones and present-day situations.”

“In other words,” McCoppin snickered to his friend when the sister was through yakking, “the same old happy horseshit!” That would be the last commentary on life he would make before dying in the burn ward of Lutheran Deaconess Hospital three days later.

“Aww,” Freddy Gorshin mugged. “Widdle Fwancis is the penguin’s pet! I’d bet you’d make a great altar boy, Frankie, because you’d do anything to please Sister Sagging Titties!” The blond boy, who had been putting his father’s Wildroot in his hair ever since Charles Starkweather’s picture ran in the Daily News back in February, flashed a limp wrist.

Haid then commented on how it looked like Freddy didn’t have any bones in his hand, and that was how the three boys came to their scientific discussion in the minutes before all hell broke loose.

Veronica had started reading a paper by Billy “Pencil Neck” Dulcette, and Haid, bored, was looking without interest at the alphabet flashcards above the blackboard. Freddy, following on Frankie’s idea, was pushing his finger loosely into the side of his nose. Aa is for Apple, Bb is for book...

When the fire alarm suddenly went off, most everybody held their cheer behind silent masks; with any luck, the drill would take them through the three-thirty bell and that would be all she wrote. Three dozen chairs pushed away from their desks, each scraping across unwaxed red and tan checkerboard tiles.

Haid lost track of his compatriots almost immediately. Veronica wagged a liver-spotted finger to separate the class into proper order. Frankie took great joy in hearing the penguin babble about proper Catholic grade school discipline, and how her little cherubs would never behave like the public school hooligans at Wells or Peabody. “On the beam, chop-chop,” she droned on. “We’ll show those whipsnappers, all righty.”

Haid was staring wistfully out the window at the deserted basketball courts across California Avenue, in Humboldt Park, and watched an old newspaper flip across the concrete three times before the penguin finally opened the door to Room 217. The hallway was a buzzing hive given direction by the sharp adult commands of Sisters Vesna and Benatrix. The squeak of patent leather shoes echoed down the halls, making Haid think of mice in a sewer.

“Single file, as we practiced.” Veronica’s face twitched. “Billy, you and Phillip Morrow hold the double doors open for your fellow classmates. P.D.Q., boys!”

Haid thought that the two brown noses looked hilarious, moving in a kind of duckwalk to the far end of the corridor. They opened the doors as if they were ushers at the Blackstone. Haid saw wisps of smoke like winter breaths coming up from beneath the second set of doors.

“Okay, cherubs, on the beam!” Veronica barked as the screams suddenly erupted from below. Haid’s eyes darted around, the alarm box above his head resembled a giant red tarantula. But the siren he was now hearing was coming from somewhere outside—the fire trucks from LeMoyne Street!—made him realize that this wasn’t a drill.

Everybody lost all rationality at this point. Haid watched the cords in the nun’s neck become more defined as she, he was sure, struggled to hold back her panic.A moment later, he could no longer see Veronica, as the second set of doors were opened and greyish brown smoke engulfed one-third of the students. He thought he heard someone whispering The Lord’s Prayer and he hoped that it wasn’t himself.

A crowd in panic: all logic gone from every living, breathing individual. They rush and press against doors meant to open inward. In 1904, half a thousand lives were lost in the fire at the Iroquois Theater on Randolph Street, the exit doors remaining closed due to the pressing weight of the crowd. The city fire laws hadn’t changed in the fifty-four years since.

Haid saw things like in that commercial on TV, with the pearl falling ever so slowly down the bottle of Prell shampoo.

A boy next to him started keening like a dog. He watched a kid named Mahl shit in his pants right in front of him, twin streams of lumpy liquid streaming from the legs of his regulation, navy blue slacks. Veronica looked like The Bride of Frankenstein, transfixed as her little charges stumbled around her, arms outstretched for impending crucifixions or forming X shields in front of their round faces. They banged into lockers, water fountains, and themselves as the smoke and confusion grew thicker by the second.

Oddly, Haid thought of a passage Veronica had read aloud just the week before, on how, in the 1300s, French townspeople celebrated the festival of Saint John the Baptist by dancing in near delirium, until they fell to the ground, their limbs flailing uncontrollably. This spectacle came to be known as Chorea Sancti Viti, or St. Vitus Dance.

That’s what it looked like everybody was doing. Only it was much more refined: the rigors of Catholicism did not mean that the children would conform to the actions of the French peasants. Janet Mandeen puked onto the lockers to her right, the lunch hour meal of fish sticks and green Jell-O not yet digested. The vomit stuck thickly to the tan and silver doors. Others beside her were crying, snot coming out of their noses like opaque soap bubbles.

He was crying now, too. And he hated crying, because it reminded him of being a baby and how his mother would pull the bars on his crib higher and tie the pillowcase loosely around his face so that he wouldn’t cry out when she let the mailman in.

Thinking about Doreen Madsen Haid—his mother, the slut—made him forget the panic that was rising up within him, so he stayed with it. The hate he felt for his dead mother was that strong. His mother would bed down with the mailman or the kid who delivered sandwiches for Ricky’s or just about anybody while his dad was out driving an armored car for Thillens.

Dad had cleared out after he eventually figured things out, and he and Mom had moved into his Uncle Vince’s two--flat on Potomac Street, just a few blocks away from the school here on Crystal Street. Haid had despised her so much that he could have cared less when she drove her Chevrolet Biscayne into a Division Street trolley. Now, even though Uncle Vince Janssen made Frankie do some things that he really didn’t like doing, he still called him Father.

He tried thinking of his new Father, of the way he smiled when he gave Frankie his bath, lathering him up good, and then the first set of doors were beside him. Their rubber wedges were still in place. Haid kicked one of them and the door loosened. A crayon-scrawled snow scene adorned a tattered sheet of white construction paper in one corner of the beveled glass. Frosty the Snowman kicking his heels up, real jazzy like on the cartoon Frazier Thomas shows on Garfield Goose and Friends. The kid who drew the scene had used orange crayon on the trees in the background, as if Frosty was running from the sunlight. One vertical edge of the paper drawing had begun to curl up the way his mother’s L & M’s had. She had never bothered to take the cigarette out while scolding him.