The Holy Terror (28 page)

His presence was still unnoticed, though. The eyes, a dull grey, were rolled back into the head, with mostly the whites showing. Even the white was more like a dirty grey. As the head nestled in the crook of the girl’s arm, a faint orange drool dripped from the gaping mouth. It was then that Tremble again heard the sensuous female moan.

From the portion of the room he could not see, a sleek, tanned form walked over to the foot of the bed. She was totally naked. Of course she was, what the hell was he thinking?

Mesmerized by her downy thatch and firm breasts, it took him a moment to realize that he recognized the body. From imagining it, imagining her, naked on the evening news. It was the newswoman who was hell-bent on pleading with the Painkiller to stop killing innocent cripples.

Tremble watched the newswoman, who brought tears to the eyes of some and rating points to her network, finish the task of masturbating. Her thumb and three of her fingers were glistening. She wore the same nail polish as on the television, and her hand moved with the practiced movement of one accustomed to shuffling pages in the public eye.

When she knelt down between the prone girl’s legs, her eyes hungry, Tremble shut his eyes. He put his hand to his forehead, felt the pulse of the curled vein above his temple on his little finger.

It was the scream that made him open his eyes again.

The newscaster’s face had been buried between the girl’s thighs. She grunted a scream in orgasm. The mutated head showed no sign of life, if it ever had.

Not even when the newswoman grabbed its neck with both hands and throttled it like it was one of those cushioned “stress dolls.”

Her beautiful, blond, weeknights at five-six-and-ten hair whipping around her, the newswoman’s head bobbed furiously in the deformed girl’s crotch, as if her spine was broken and she could not get up. Her voice was muffled. She might have been cursing an ex-spouse, she could have, been mouthing the television station president’s name in syllables muffled by sweating flesh. Whatever she was saying, her voice rose as she pressed her perfectly-sculpted fingernails under the mutated head’s jawbones. The face quickly purpled. Its drooling had stopped...

Mama Tomei’s daughter shook her own head from side to side, her eyes squeezed shut in passion or pain.

The newswoman’s fingers spidered over the lower head as if it held a message in Braille. She pulled down the side of the mouth closest to Tremble, breaking the skin, scratching a red line back to the ear. There was very little blood. What came out was more like a snotty nosebleed.

With her other hand, she pulled at the thing’s tongue and let it snap back into the mouth. Her fingers then moved across the entire face. Tremble thought again of a blind person, this time reading for emotions.

The daughter moaned louder, less guttural. The newswoman lifted her head, positioned her thumbs, and her moans became one with the girl’s as she plunged them into the head’s eyes. The tissue ran, down the pale cheeks like runny eggs. Fluid leaked down the head’s cheek and into its ear.

When the woman humped against the edge of the bed twice and then looked up and breathed a thank you to not the girl, but the mutilated head, Tremble knew that he could take no more.

* * *

Frank Haid, their suspected Painkiller, had never come for the favors of Lullaby and Goodnight. Vic Tremble understood fully why the American Dream had thought he might have come. As an act of contrition.

On the way back to the relative sanity of Armitage Avenue after midnight, the American Dream spoke quietly. “The head was stillborn. That’s why she can charge so much, and why she has to.”

Tremble stared at the storefront businesses, Natalie’s Hair Salon, a garish “Leinenkugel now on tap!” sign in front of Club Ennui, a flyer in the window bearing the legend Home of the Elviscera, a row of two-flats with either plastic palm trees, crucifixes, or promo photos of Richard

M. Daley, Jr., in the front windows. Down Wells Street there were more street hustlers and corner cafes. He recalled the newswoman’s face. How many times...?

“They can do whatever they want to the head,” he heard the American Dream say as they made it to State. “Strangle it, whatever.”

“They use the johns’ money for plastic surgery and bone reconstruction. The eyes are fake. Fiberglass. Guy named Timpone sends them from New York. Mama Tomei says that, lately, more and more of the johns are going for the eyes.”

The two men waited in silence for the downtown bus.

As Haid ascended the stairwell on the southeast side of Grand, between State and Dearborn, the wind gusts were averaging thirty miles per hour, coming off the lake. Near one of the bridges which stitched the Loop with the rest of the city, a film company was shooting a movie about a killer doll, evidently named Chucky, by the way the crowd was chanting. Haid was able to see the spotlights and heat lamps, though the entourage was blocks away.

He paid no mind to the fictional drama unfolding to the west. And he was not cold. Father’s aura warmed him. As did the long underwear and high school sweater that he wore underneath his suede jacket. The sweater had been Vince Janssen’s, the school had been Peabody, and the legend the younger man had scripted on the back in younger days read HUBBA HUBBA.

He heard a dog barking, and he wondered if it was a dog that would save everyone from the killer doll. He hadn’t heard mention of an animal in the film when they talked about it on the television. The dog sounds gave him a rush of déjà vu, something slipped out of the old cranial vault.

Thou shalt have no dog befoul me. A recurring dream-sound. It wasn’t Father’s voice. It wasn’t his own voice, either. He had started hearing that long ago voice a few months ago, when he could still talk to Father face to face.

After the incident, Haid had tossed the remaining white desipramine capsules off the Flechette Street overpass, letting Dr. Bruinooge’s precious little anti-depressants tumble down to Goose Island like teeth knocked from a young child’s mouth for doing something BAD BAD BAD. And the long ago voice came ba—

And just like that, he understood. He clapped his hands together like a patient man.

The fireman from 1958 had whispered to him in intimacy: THOU SHALT HAVE NO GODS BEFORE ME.

The knowledge was exquisite.

He stopped for a hot dog and can of Just Whistle cola—to which Father a-okayed his pouring a generous amount of Seagram’s V.0., for added warmth, of course—at the Mr. Grand’s Park-N-Eat. Continuing south, he chewed and gulped, watching a sliver of elevated train pass between the buildings on Franklin Street. He passed two Mexicans arguing about a labor dispute.

He crossed the river at Dearborn; Verbeerst had lived behind him, the woman just down the block. Now they both lived in the glorious everlasting heaven. Let us celebrate the mysteries of life...

A Star-Spangled cabbie blew the yellow light and gave Haid the finger because he almost got himself run down.

He passed the Merchandise Mart, and was in the shadows of a Skid Row that was being regentrifiedwith yuppie loft apartments. The Michael Todd theater at the corner of Lake and Dearborn, which had shown such wondrous movies as Fantasex Island and On Golden Blond at five bucks a crack, pun intended, was now the cutesy-named Dearborn Station, where those upwardly mobile couples who didn’t want to deal with Facets Multimedia or the Fine Arts could brave the fringes of the Loop battleground and plop down their twelve bucks a head, no pun possible, and nod those heads thoughtfully to the world according to Woody Allen and go to their stupid jobs the following Monday in their power ties and buttons and bows and talk like they actually knew one fucking thing about the reality of day to day, hand to shit to mouth, life in Chicago.

You could erase the ghetto or the slum from the equation, change the denominator from a black man in a Rowls Invacare wheelchair who had forgotten his social security number when Nixon was still president with a shitgrin-shined face who wears his color-coordinated scarf outside of his overcoat and drinks diet wine coolers like someone in a J.

D. Salinger novel gone wrong, but the answers to the problems wouldn’t really change at all.

Sometimes, he didn’t know what the hell he was trying to think about. But he did know this: he cherished life as well as afterlife. He had been shown the afterlife for several minutes thirty-one years ago. In the holy fire where he had been reborn as the only son. And Jesus had wept for Francis Haid not to go back.

But the crucified man had allowed young Haid to finish his life by bringing others before him. From the world where men died senselessly every day. He’d give their passing meaning.

It wouldn’t happen today, he was just walking the route. No one in a chair out tonight. Father would be lonely were it not for Haid talking to him.

He continued on towards Daley Plaza, where there were more theaters showing the current conquests of Rambo and Jason Vorhees. Fuck and die, the choice of a new generation. Too bad Pepsi-Cola had dibs on that slogan.

Haid had his own slogan.

This is my body.

* * *

The wheelchairs were beautiful. But that would change. Murdy had to have pulled a few strings to get the chairs. Neither Shustak or Tremulis would ever know that the small man had paid eight hundred dollars cash for them.

Everest & Jennings, Shustak’s jet-black, Tremulis’s Doevin Blue. That’s what it said in the owner’s manual. Powder blue like on an air freshener can.

Tremulis felt guilty: Mike Surfer had never had anything this good. Padded naugahyde 24" molded rear wheels with plastic metal spokes, 8" molded caster wheels “for a sporty look” and detachable footrest and butterfly strap. “Move away from the clinical look of the past,” it said in the brochure.

He plopped himself into the chair and ran his hands over the tires. Damn comfortable chair. Give him one of those vibrating pillows for his back and he’d be set.

“They look too new,” Shustak said.

That was obvious, Tremulis thought, but did not say.

“We’ll take them through the alley, let them sit in the weather for a day or so. Scrape them up a bit and cover them with blankets. We’ll fool that bastard Haid.”

Tremulis hoped so. He wondered what kind of scars they would be left with.

* * *

PALESTINE: MURDERS OF COMMIES AND FAGS!

let the uprising of stones pave the way for PEOPLE’S WAR!!!

KHOMEINI POPE FALL WELL NORTH

SI DIOS ES TAN GRANDE CUCARACHAS

Y CHI-CHIS

WHAT? WHAT?

Tremulis looked at the small courtyard, at the squalor just beyond the confines of the Marclinn. It seemed to have been swept regularly, most likely by Nutman or maybe even Reve. But the graffiti was incredible. Much of it faded by months and years had the artists’ and writers’ ideals changed since then? He read on, looking closer at torn white flyers.

WHEN YOU SMOKE YOUR BABY DOES AS WELL. WHEN YOU DO DRUGS

WHEN YOU ARE PREGNANT, YOUR BABY CAN GET AIDS, TOO.

COYOTE GOSPEL RING MY THING PAP MY PLIP

IN MY SHIVERING CHAIR

GANGSTER CITY

L’IL SKULLY LIMBO ME, MINE LIMBO

ALLLUSTREISBLAK AUNQUE

EL REMEDO PARA

SIDA ESTA

MUYAJENO

PREVENCION

ESTA ALREDOR

DE LA ESQUINA.

RIDE THE CTA FREE ON NEW YEAR’S EVE 8PM-6AM courtesy of BUDWEISER.

“They’ll be safe here,” Shustak said. The courtyard was bounded by Callan’s Flowers, the Treasure Chest arcade, and an abandoned building in disrepair.

“Are you ready for this, Vic?” Shustak looked at him.

“Yes,” he replied. The image of the deformed hooker was still in his mind, fresh as a scattershot wound. He had long ago stopped wondering about the Givers of Pain and Rapture’s mysteries. He simply accepted their idiosyncrasies.

“This is my world,” Shustak said. “Where I am is what I am.”

Tremulis had never believed otherwise.

* * *

Reve Towne sat on her Murphy bed, grimacing over what she had to endure earlier that day. She had gone to the Chicago Avenue station to get a list of witnesses and potentials, they were called, from Dean Conover. The guy had practically undressed her with his eyes.

She planned on talking with some of the people while Evan and Vic were doing the wheelchair stakeouts. Christ, how she hoped they weren’t doing the wrong thing, or going about it the wrong way.

But she knew they were too far into it now.

She massaged her toes as she rocked back and forth, scanning the pages. Conover had kept running his hand over his gun holster, like it was supposed to turn her on. That was right up there with the boys of summer cruising down the street and turning up their car radios at the stoplights, right, like hearing REO Speedwagon bleating “157 Riverside Avenue” was supposed to give women the screaming thigh sweats.

And she about gagged when Conover told her how he didn’t need to wear a Kevlar vest because his skin was tough enough to stop bullets.

Reve could not understand why the killings had gone on so long and there was so little to piece together. It was like Ed Gein killing everybody up in Plainfield, Wisconsin; a town whose population could live on the first seven floors of any building downtown. No one knew that Gein was robbing graves and making belts out of nipples because no one in town cared what the hell happened to anyone. It was the same thing here, only updated to the late eighties.