The Sleepless (37 page)

‘You asked for this, friend,’ said the other man, hunkering down beside him, so that Joe could see his face. White, so white, with a spotty, blotchy complexion, the wings of his nose crowded with massive blackheads and his eyes filled with blood. 

‘I have a family,’ Joe croaked, and then spat fragments of leaves out of his mouth. 

‘You have a family? That’s even better. People who have families always get much more frightened. And – of course – the more frightened you are – the better we like it.’ 

‘You think you’re – scaring me? I served in Nam.’ 

The white-faced man crouched right down amongst the leaves and kissed Joe’s lips, and then licked the sweat from Joe’s forehead with his tongue. 

‘You’re
alive,
though, aren’t you?’ 

‘You disgusting son-of-a-bitch,’ Joe retorted. 

The white-faced man laughed, a kind of high-pitched whinny, and then he stood up, and paced around. ‘You know something, friend, I’m glad you ran into the woods. It’s so much more private here, don’t you think? Listen! You can’t hear anything. Not even an airplane. Not even a bird. A dead place, this, like a mausoleum. Kind of spooky, aint it?’ 

He circled around Joe’s prostrate body, kicking leaves. He began to hum; a high, quavery hum, and after a while, with his face pressed hard against the loam, Joe recognized the song he was humming. He had learned it in grade school – everybody had learned it in grade school. 

What is your five-o?
 

Green grow the rushes-o!
 

Five for the symbols at your door
 

And four for the gospel-makers.
 

Three, three, the rivals ...
 

Two, two, the lily white boys
 

Dressed all in green, ho-ho
 

One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so.
 

Joe listened and closed his eyes and tried to believe that he wasn’t here at all – that he was back in grade school, with the morning sun shining through the upper windows, and children’s voices lifted all around him in song. 

For a split second he believed that he could escape from his nightmare just by the power of his imagination alone. 

But then the man who was sitting astride him yanked up the back of his coat, and his shirt, too, his uncut fingernails scratching Joe’s skin. 

‘Bastard! Get off me!’ Joe raged at him. But the other man knelt down beside him again and helped his friend to tug Joe’s coat right up over his shoulders. Joe shouted, ‘Bastard!’ again, and without hesitation the man scooped up a handful of dirt and leaf-mould and pine-needles and crammed it into Joe’s open mouth. 

‘No need to be rude, my friend,’ he admonished him. Joe coughed and spat out dirt, and struggled to get up. But now the two men began to assault him with terrible strength and animal-like earnestness. One of them hit him with his knuckles three or four times on the side of his head, while the other one kicked him in the thighs and the ribs. Joe screamed and breathed in leaf-mould and almost suffocated. 

‘Think he’s scared?’ whooped the man who was sitting astride his back. ‘Think he’s good and scared?’ 

‘I’ll make him good and scared,’ said the other man. He seized Joe’s belt and dragged his trousers down over his buttocks. The belt scraped painfully against Joe’s hips and thighs, and he shouted out ‘Help! Don’t! Listen – whatever you want!’ but the men took no notice of him. They dragged his trousers right off him and threw them into the bushes. 

Half-naked, stunned, Joe made one last effort to get to his feet. But one of the white-faced men walked around him and kicked him right in the bridge of his nose. The kick was so unexpected that he didn’t even realize what had happened at first; but then he felt blood flooding down the back of his throat, blood mixed with pine-needles and leaf-mould – blood that tasted fresh and metallic, like death. 

It suddenly occurred to him that they were going to kill him. It suddenly occurred to him that today was the day he was going to die. 

Oh God, forgive me,
he thought.
Oh God, don’t do this to me, please. Not here, not now. Not at the hands of these terrible white-faced men.
 

The man who had been sitting astride Joe’s back now dropped on his knees onto Joe’s shoulders, pinning him down to the ground. At the same time, the other man groped his hand between Joe’s legs, and took hold of his testicles. He gave them an agonizingly hard squeeze, and Joe yelled,
‘No.!’
and tried to twist himself around. 

‘It’s your choice, my friend,’ said the man who was kneeling on his shoulders. ‘Life ... death, it’s all up to you.’ 

‘I have a wife,’ Joe told him, with nose-blood running out of the side of his mouth. ‘I have a family.’ 

‘Should this make a difference?’ the man asked him. 

‘I’m asking for a little compassion, that’s all.’ 

‘Compassion! That’s rich! You would have gladly seen us fry!’ 

‘For God’s sake,’ Joe choked. 

‘I don’t think so,’ the man replied. 

At that moment, the man who had been squeezing Joe’s testicles ferociously burrowed his head between Joe’s thighs, dragged his penis backward and downward, and gripped it in his mouth. Joe grunted in terror, and humped his back, but the man clung on, his teeth clinging tenaciously to the rim of his glans. 

Joe was shaking with shock and disgust. ‘What the hell do you want?’ he kept repeating. ‘What the hell do you want?’ 

‘You want it bitten off?’ the man asked him, in a suggestive, oily tone. ‘My friend just adores to bite them off.’ 

To make his point, the white-faced man sank his teeth into the sensitive skin of Joe’s penis just a little deeper, and lasciviously licked around the end of it. Joe’s stomach knotted up with fear and revulsion and the taste of blood. 

He could hardly think. His mind was like a television screen filled with static, turned to top volume. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t hear. Every one of his senses seemed to be blotted out by an endless crashing roar. 

He had been frightened for his life before: once in an automobile crash, and once on a flight to Niagara Falls, when his plane had been struck by lightning. But nothing like this. This was misery and terror and utter humiliation, all mixed up together. He found himself praying that his family would never find out what had happened to him. Better to be lost forever, in a shallow grave in the forest, than for Marcia to discover what these white-faced men had put him through. 

He was still praying when the man who was sitting astride his shoulders slid two long metal tubes out of his inside pocket. Without a word, without any hesitation at all, he positioned one of the tubes above the middle of Joe’s bare back. It made an indentation in his white, plump flesh. 

‘You know what it says in the Bible,’ the man told Joe, conversationally. ‘Man cannot live by bread alone.’ 

‘Wha–?’ said Joe; and it was then that the man pushed the tube so hard that it penetrated Joe’s skin, and Joe felt it run cold and sharp right into his body. It touched him somewhere right inside him, and he felt tissues snag and nerves thrill with unexpected agony. He tried to fight, but teeth crunched into his penis, so deep that he felt as if they would bite it in half. In spite of the agony that the needle was inflicting on him, in spite of the sheer exquisite pain of having that thin tube sliding into his body, pricking and digging at his kidneys, he gripped the soil with both hands and squeezed his eyes tight shut and tried to think of anything else but pain. 

Which was impossible, of course – because the next thing he knew, a second tube had been pushed into the other side of his back, deep through skin and muscle and fatty tissue. He screamed, although he couldn’t hear himself screaming, and then his sinuses exploded in a hideous sneeze – blood and earth and twigs and vomit. 

He thought he heard somebody laughing – a high, shrill, maniacal laugh. He thought he heard thunder, but it was only the blood roaring through his brain. 

He felt a sweet, intense agony in his kidneys, an agony that convinced him that he was dying. He didn’t know whether to join in the laughter or to sob with pain. 

He dived deep into unconsciousness, and as he lay unconscious, the two white-faced men bent over him, sipping with intense concentration at the thin metal tubes that protruded from his bare back. All that disturbed their sipping was an occasional twittering from a bird in the trees above, and the distant droning of an airplane. 

Joe could feel their sipping, but he remained comatose. He thought that he was walking along a beach somewhere, with the breeze blowing steadily into his eyes, and gulls circling all around him. He was aware that somebody was following him, very close behind his right shoulder, so close that he felt he couldn’t turn around and confront him. 

‘You could join us, you know,’ a voice whispered, a voice half blown away by the breeze. 

He stopped, and whoever was following him stopped too. 

He heard somebody say, ‘Mr Hillary? Mr Hillary?’ 

He turned around. He found himself face-to-face with a tall, angular man in a soft grey coat, a man with bone-white hair which whipped and curled across his face. 

The man’s eyes were filled with red, like two glass inkwells brimming with blood. 

‘Mr Hillary,’ he heard somebody say; and that somebody was him. 

The man nodded, and slowly raised his right hand, so that his sleeve fell away from his arm. His wrists were thin and his skin was unhealthily white. ‘You could join us, you know,’ the man smiled, although he spoke like a stage ventriloquist, without moving his lips. ‘All the world is our dominion. The sins of the fathers, and of the sons, they all belong to us.’ 

Joe was cold with absolute terror. His heart was bumping slower and slower. Nobody had ever frightened him so much in his entire life. 

‘Mr Hillary’ kept on smiling, and held his arm closer. It appeared that his skin was wriggling. Joe didn’t want to look, didn’t want to find out why, but he couldn’t help it. The man terrified him so much that he didn’t dare to look away. 

‘Do I alarm you?’ the man asked. ‘Is there something about me which makes you feel uneasy?’ 

Joe stared at the man’s arm and realized that the wriggling movement was right inside his veins. In fact, on the inner side of his wrist, where his skin was thin and almost transparent, he could actually see what was causing it. Through the man’s veins, in a constant and sickening stream, grave-worms were crawling. They oozed and waggled down the inside of his arm, and around his elbow, and bulged through the veins on the back of his hand. 

Joe slowly raised his eyes, toward ‘Mr Hillary’s’ face, and saw that the worms were even squeezing their way through the arteries in the side of his neck. 

‘Mr Hillary’ grinned. ‘Do I frighten you, Joe?’ he asked him. 

Joe took a sharp, cataclysmic breath. He breathed in blood and earth and ragged shreds of sinus. He tried to breathe again, but he couldn’t. His lungs were clogged. His trachea was blocked with leaves and fibre. And he was far too frightened. 

His heart clenched, like a man clenching his fist, clenching it tight, and refusing to open it. 

Oh God. Oh God. 

But his heart refused to beat. And his lungs refused to breathe. 

Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. 

And then death came rushing in. Like black wings beating. Like a cellar door opening. And then there was nothing at all. 

Eleven 

Ralph pulled his car into the kerb at the end of Seaver Street, followed nose-to-tail by the metallic-purple ‘82 Eldorado which had escorted him all the way southward through the Combat Zone. He climbed out and locked the door, even though he realized how absurd it was, to lock the door of a three-year-old Volkswagen parked on Seaver Street. Absurd because (a) nobody on Seaver Street would want to steal it; and (b) even if they did, police department statistics showed that even models with factory-fitted alarms were broken into and moving within 1 minute 58 seconds, usually quicker. 

Somehow, however, he felt that his car wouldn’t be stolen today. Patrice Latomba was waiting for him on the sidewalk, flanked by six or seven of his lieutenants, including Bertrand, dreadlocked and black-spectacled and jumpy and wild, and a totally handsome young black man with a bald-shaved head and silver hoop earrings and a sleeveless leather jerkin, and an ex-boxer with puffy eyes and a squashed nose whom Ralph (with some sadness) recognized as Henry ‘The Hammer’ Rivers, one of his heroes from the days of black-and-white television with rounded corners. The Cassius Clay days: the Kennedy days. 

He walked around his car and onto the sidewalk and Patrice was waiting for him, stony-eyed. 

Ralph said, ‘I’m sorry. I want you to know that, before we say anything else at all. It was an accident, no more than that. But, your son’s dead, and I shot him, and I’m sorry.’