The Holy Terror (20 page)

“Over on Madison? I’ve been there, that’s where I met Mike, in fact.”

“Ever see that crazy lady in the bonnet?”

“Yea, she’s a trip.”

“I bought Mike a book from there once,” Reve said. “Trumpets of Beaten Metal. Said how the title reminded him of wheelchairs. That’s how I recognize the receipt.” She brushed her hair back.

Tremulis wished his family could be half as proud of his disease, even if it didn’t have a pretty label, as Mike Surfer was of his. The man made him think that the Givers of Pain and Rapture had given him, Tremulis, the opportunity to be in chronic pain for most of his adult life. Maybe all of it; he truly couldn’t remember when it had ever been any better.

He looked at Reve, then at the book.

“What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”

* * *

They walked south through the alley behind the Title and Trust building, old newspapers and McDonald’s cartons flattened to the ground in original patterns by dried vomit and urine from nights past. Tremulis showed Reve the breezeway on the west side of the church where all the motorcycles were parked, and was pleasantly surprised that she had never noticed. It was an oddity, conjuring images of all these Franciscan monks on their choppers, cassocks flying in the wind.

He had asked a suit on the corner, once the guy had a helmet slung over the shoulder of his three-piece, what the deal was. The suit answered that he’d been parking his bike there for three years. Saying it like it made him something more than a nine-to-fiver behind a desk.

The chain-smoking woman was gone from her perch at the doorstep of St. Sixtus. It was the first time both he and Reve had not seen her roosted there, slapping cigarettes—Reve thought that they were Lucky Strikes—into her mouth and judgments out of said mouth; blowing out smoke and indecipherable phrases at passerby. The cold weather had never kept her away before. Both were thinking that maybe the Painkiller was branching out in his quest for victims.

The gift shop of the church stood just to the left of the holy water receptacle in the lobby—a fountain where parishioners could fill up their plastic bottles—and one of the first things Tremulis noted was that Reve didn’t stop to dab holy water on herself as they entered. He dipped his hand into the dish by rote, but did not touch his forehead. Rather, he touched his first two fingers to his neck, as a woman might her perfume, because that was where Tremulis’s muscles were tightest, where his spasms were unrelenting.

Just before the gift shop, a beige statue of St. Sixtus faced the two of them, sagely flashing a peace sign. A young Mexican boy stood behind the waist high glass counter. He was reading a copy of Catholic Monthly, and was wearing a black turtleneck sweater. A silver medal depicting S. Lazaro, patràn de lospobres, dangled just below his collarbone.

Reve walked up to him and pulled the psalm book from the back pocket of her Gitano jeans as smooth as a dealer putting up front money. Book in one hand, receipt in the other, Reve kept it simple: ”Hi. These from here?”

The Mexican boy didn’t know what to make of it, maybe the pastor was sending someone by to see if he knew his stuff on the job. And he did, all right.

“Heck, yes, lady,” he said in that humble way most Mexicans or Ricans in Chicago have when speaking English. “If you’d like, I’d be happy to point out several other such books off you might find of interest.” He beamed as only young boys or girls on their first jobs did.

“No, that’s all right,” Reve said. Tremulis was fingering a scapula blessed by Pope John Paul II on display, then turned away. They both thanked him.

“Hello, Reve.”

Both turned, startled at the voice. It belonged to a priest standing near the stairwell leading down to the boy’s club affiliate.

“Hello, Father.” Reve turned to Vic. “This is Father Dennis, Father, Vic Tremble.” Tremulis felt embarrassed that he had ever told him that that was his name.

The priest extended a hand. Tremulis was surprised to feel calluses on the man’s palm. Both nodded hellos.

“Are you new to the parish, son?” he said. Father Dennis was in his early forties, had graying blond hair, and, Tremulis would see, as they walked through the lobby, he had pronounced limp. Reve would tell him that the priest had arthritis.

“No, sir,” he replied. “I’ve been here before.”

“Oh, I’m not placing you. New to the area, Dearborn Park, perhaps?” He smiled. “I like guessing at neighborhoods the way others guess at Zodiac signs.”

”No, sir—uh, Father.” Tremulis’s voice cracked. “My family lives in Wicker Park. On Honore.”

”Such a small world it is. I taught catechism at St. Fidelus years back, up on Washtenaw.”

“Father, Vic is a friend of Mike Surfer’s,” Reve said softly.

The priest shared the intrigue and uniqueness of the names some, of his parishioners gave themselves. Not like the businessmen on the rise. If God’s son was reborn today, Father Dennis sometimes wondered if his business card would read:

 
“Met him here, in fact,” Tremulis looked around, like a new guest at a party. “I honestly feel at ease here. Even—” He let his voice trail.

“Yes?” the priest questioned.

Reve took it up, seeing Tremulis’s uneasy look.

“We found this”—she held up the psalm book—” actually, that preacher on the street who looks a little like Eddie Murphy found it and left it at the Mardinn. He found it where Grandma, Wilma Jerrick—” and that, too, trailed off, like a pallbearer’s breath after he lets go of the coffin and there is nothing left of the deceased ever to touch again.

“The police are doing all they can,” Father Dennis said. “One of the officers confessed to me after they found the first body. I suspect there will be more.”

He pointed at the book still in Reve’s hand. “Those are as common as hotel Gideon’s. We’ve sold them for years.”

He didn’t ask why they hadn’t offered the book to the police.

* * *

Later, when they were walking past the Bank of America building on LaSalle, Reve grabbed his hand and held it tightly as she led him across the street ahead of a car speeding through a yellow light. They went to a McDonald’s on Randolph and Wells.

They ate hamburgers and fries with large Cokes and they talked of other things for a time.

The American Dream slammed the pay phone down, more from a nervous tremor than of anger. That detective, Daves, was still unavailable and it was next to impossible to talk to anybody else at either the Chicago District or James Riordan Police Headquarters. At this particular moment on the early evening of Christmas Eve, he was standing in full battle regalia at the third pay phone from the right in a group of seven, near the northeast corner of State and Division. He was standing between a restaurant named Monday’s and a bar inconspicuously called Hotsie Totsie.

The wind chill was now ten below. What few decorations anybody in Chicago put up anymore were dulled by the gunmetal sky. The bars were all lit up sure. A happy customer was one who drank and sang carols and spent money and left to wreck his BMW on the Drive somewhere. God rest ye, merry gentlemen. The American Dream was not concerned with the insides of the bars, or with Christmas tinsel.

The hero’s heating pad was curled at the bottom, the weight of the insulated pad keeping it from flapping in the wind with a more dramatic flair. A blackboard near the curb read FILL YOUR BELLY AT OUR DELI. Across the street, through the skeleton of a construction site, he could see a huge bottle of Michelob Dry splashed across the wall of a Rush Street bistro and apartment building.

Second time that early evening he had struck out: he’d called from this particular spot because he’d just come from the building at 30 East Division, where Skinny Minny lived with an ancient-looking Nam vet. Skinny’s actual name was Andy Krejca, and his life was a series of scams, the current one to be wearing a fake scar over a fake cut. What he’d do, is become an innocent bystander who was whacked in the face by some harried secretary with a head-level umbrella on her lunch hour. You had to be Walter Payton to walk the Loop streets during the rainy season, the rainy season being whenever it fucking feels like raining. Often enough, a yard would cover the secretary not having to deal with his medical bills, nonexistent as they would be.

The Skin Man wasn’t around, though. The Vet didn’t know where he might be. The American Dream thought he’d have encountered the Painkiller, in that they were both figures engaging in crimes. The Dream felt that all criminals knew one another and maybe got together over drinks at Binyon’s or The Standard Club after every job.

There would be other contacts. He knew an ex-Elvis impersonator who was heavy into selling things that had been touched by The King. And he had plans to take Vic Tremble up to see the girl all the high rollers called Lullaby and Goodnight on account of her deformity.

He fought the cold, squirreling his arms into the deep pockets of his jacket. It was a lime-green deal purchased at an Isola Street thrift shop.

“Hey, Mister.” An elderly woman’s voice came from just around the corner, and the Dream knew something was going down. Just like that, his instincts kicking in. What he saw was a spindly man with crooked gold and black teeth running past a newspaper kiosk, a white purse dangling from his tallowed hand.

The woman, blue rinsed and withered, cursed violently in Lithuanian as the American Dream took chase. Only out-of-towners screamed anymore, he thought.

The guy was wearing those new high top sneakers with the pump. Felony flyers, Officer Rizzi called them. The two men ran past Elliot’s Nest on Bellevue, then they were on Rush, and, then the pain kicked into overdrive for the Dream. Future streets and intersections blurred together. He assumed that the man was running for the Cabrini- Green projects.

The felon, twenty-three years old and nine hours into his heroin heebie-jeebies, never looked back at the man chasing him. The sky had darkened to look like soiled BVDs. The man never saw the van driven by Tyrone Fuka that clipped him and sent him spinning onto the cement. The junkie puked up a milky vomit.

Catching up with him, breathing heavily, The American Dream gave a shit if the junkie heaved up his intestine through his nose. The fucker brought on his own pain; he wasn’t born with it. The purse lay open on the sidewalk, a tube of Polident like a fat worm poking out. The two men were in front of a bar called Hat Dance, at 325 West Huron.

Faces behind curtains became bodies in doorways. The legend on the sign above him read:

SHE LIFTED THE FORK TO

HER VOLUPTUOUSLY SULLEN LIPS,

ALLOWING THE ADVENTURE TO LOLL

IN HER MOUTH FOR A MOMENT

AND THEN --

…the junkie grabbed his ankle.

The American Dream looked down at him, caressing his weathered shoe as if he was rehearsing to kiss the Pope’s feet.

They both, the two of them, lived day to day.

* * *

Tremulis was sitting in the lobby of the Lawson YMCA, waiting for Evan Shustak. They had planned to meet in the building at Chicago and Dearborn to discuss future plans. It was nearly eight PM now, and Shustak was late. Tremulis warmed his hands over the coffee he had bought at the Burger King next door and was thinking about Reve, that first time he had seen her. Her face, devoid of makeup scars yet not vampiric, as so many of those forced to live out the Rust Belt winters were.

It should be noted that Tremulis’s eyes, with their hundred-yard stare, very much mirrored the eyes of the junkie back at the Hat Dance.

Both men were lost and in need of something badly.

And now it was eight-fifteen and he was thinking about marrying Reve and taking the last train to the coast

(out there in havin’ fun, in that warm California sun)

But only because Evan was late.

Tremulis had always fixated on a certain kind of woman. Someone who didn’t keep her face in a jar by the door, or in separate jars and tubes and five-day pads. He liked a woman who had a fleck of graveyard dirt under a fingernail and didn’t bother to clean it out.

The coffee was cold and still he drank it. A man sitting down the way was reading the city’s gay newspaper,
The Windy City Times
. Reve Towne made him think of an actress on one of the current networks shows set in Vietnam. On the television drama, the woman didn’t wear more than base makeup, wasn’t afraid to drink or cry until snot dripped out of her nose and off the roof of her mouth.