The Boss

The old Packard convertible chugs through the gate into the lot. This yard, rusty autos and machine parts stacked against the walls, tough guys and grease monkeys lurking in the gaslight shadows, is the boss’ territory. It’s his fortress, and you don’t come here unless he summons you, or you have big business to discuss. Or you’re very stupid.

Sy drives. He’s the mouth and the negotiator; he’ll talk to the boss and ask for our due. I might chime in to correct a number or defuse a comment that might spark somebody too hot, but I’m mostly moral support. Sy talks. Tommy sits in back. He’s got a rusty old nine iron on the seat next to him, from the time when they used to let guys like us play the course before the members teed off. Don’t bring that, Tommy, I said. Just in case, he said. Just in case.

We park the Packard and cut the engine. The boss, standing with a few of his heaviest heavies, motions us over. We’re partners of his, employees, is how he might look at it, and though we ain’t been invited we got the right to talk to him.

Tommy waits in the car. Sy brings out the big book. It’s filled with little posters of the pictures we did for the boss. My nephew out on the coast makes ‘em, and we copyright ‘em and ship ‘em out and funnel the ticket money in to the boss’ businesses. Sy flips through the pages, pointing out each one – lurid, colored illustrations of beefy men and submissive, scantily clad women. The titles are all chosen by the boss, and they’re like a picture of his heart, a window into him. Brute. Force. Hammer. Crusher. Brute Force.

We’re owed, Sy says. We been doing a lot of work for you, and we ain’t got our due. We ain’t got what we agreed on.

The boss, swarthiest of an army of swarthy types, that big mole on his face and the scar that just misses it, always with a look on him like he’s tasted a lemon, nods as Sy flips through the book and points at the posters. Sy presses him, and the boss, after a long silent stare, which Sy returns steadily, though I know he’s quaking inside, takes a pen and begins signing the book. Page by page, signing grudgingly on the amount due for each picture.

He signs, and he hands the pen back to Sy. Get them eight hundred, he says, and one of his guys scurries off to wherever the safe or the cash box might be, not that I need to know, or want to. Sy makes a face, and opens his mouth to pop off about how eight hundred is like zilch, and the boss just signed on thirty grand, but I cut him short with a shake of my head and a look in my eye. Sy knows my looks, and this one says, it’s enough for now, and we keep our skins.

We trudge back to the Packard, the bills folded in my overcoat pocket, and Tommy says, how much? Sy waits til he starts the engine and is rolling toward the gates before he says, eight hundred, but it’s still too soon. Tommy turns red, throws his hat on he floor of the car. I try to shoot him the look, but it misses him by a mile. He stands up in his seat and starts yelling at the boss and his guys. Calling them things you can’t forget, things guys like these won’t be able to forget, and things about their mothers that no mother should hear.

I tell Tommy to sit down and shut the hell up, and tell Sy to move it, but it’s too late. Some of the boss’ guys are already surrounding the car and closing the gates. This may be it for us, I tell Sy. Yeah, he says. The guys are all around the car, but they ignore us and go at Tommy. Grab him by the coat, standing on the side rails of the car, ripping the nine iron from his hands. I stand up and reach over the seat. Trying to keep their hands from hitting him too much. I take a few punches, but I’ve had worse. One of the guys has a baseball bat. A big oak Louisville, stained with grease and dirt and God knows what. Watch out, Tommy, I yell, but he never sees it coming. There’s a whack like a bomb went off, and Tommy’s eyes roll up and I see his skull move in a way it ain’t supposed to move. He falls down in the back seat. The boss’s guys back off, slipping away from the car back into their pools of shadow. I jump over my seat and grab Tommy’s head in my hands. It feels all wrong, and he’s moaning and trying to look at me but he can’t even do that. I hold his head and cry, No Tommy, Tommy, no, Tommy no, but it’s over. He’s slipping away right in front of me.

Gun it, I tell Sy. Hit the gates.

…

We don’t have to say a thing after that. Like we always knew this time might come, and never wanted it to, but we would be ready to do our duty if it came. The last time the world needed good men to fight, we were already too old. But this is our fight and we can’t refuse it.

The accountant’s office is dark, like the flower shop it stands on top of. This little office of wood and paper, and smoke lingering under lampshades. Sy and I started it right out of school, and Tommy joined us not too long after. It may be the last time we see it. But it’s no time for sentiment. We have eleven hundred in the shop (I see it like a sign in the window, just like I’ve always seen numbers), and the eight hundred from the boss. It should be enough to get the guns we’ll need.

We go the back way, and we walk. Along the narrow numbered streets, the bushes give us cover, and the trees stretch above us. We march down the street in bright sunlight, like furious angels coming down from heaven through a long hallway of green. The Latins, no friends of the boss, nod as they see us pass. They sense it, what’s coming. They see us from their gardens and their alleyways, and they see the hardware under our coats. They let us go by with the faintest of smiles. The bushes rustle like a standing choir, and the falling flowers sing a soft, fragrant hymn of battle.

The Recruiter

[Location Sense: In the UK, though no one speaks with an accent.]

Time is of the essence. I glance around the room trying to decide if there’s anything important enough to pack or whether I should just get the fuck outta here. I hear him tromping up the stairs, and then, quicker than it should be possible, he’s at the door. I try to slam it shut but he’s pushing from the other side. I can see his grimacing death-mask of a grin, the prickly hair on his fat bald head, and hear him grunting as he tries to force his way in. When I fled here to avoid the draft, I never thought he’d follow me this far. They call him the recruiter.

Desperation breeds strength. I manage to close the door and lock it. He starts pounding away – it won’t take a guy his size long to break it down. This room is a dead end, and the only way out is through the window.

[Location sense: once I’m out the window, the local architecture and landscape are the area near my grandmother’s house, a neighborhood I spent a lot of time in as a kid.] The room is on the second floor of the boarding house. I shimmy down the trellis and drop into the dirt of the garden below. I’ve probably only gained a few seconds on him, so I take off running down the street.

A couple of houses down, I take leave of my senses and decide that hiding is better than continuing to run. I dive under a car in the driveway, not the best cover but I’ll have to make it work.

That stocky bull-necked fuck must have gone another way, but three of his seekers are coming down the street. Local teenagers, paid off by the recruiter. I could probably take any one of them, but three together might be tough, and they’d raise an alarm pretty quick.

Under the car, I find I’m not alone. There’s a friendly bulldog lying under here, probably dozing in the shade, but now awake and excited to find a friend. He wiggles around and barks, trying to get me to play with him.

“Sssshhhhh!” I hiss. “Get out of here! Go away!” But he carries on making noise and hopping around, and when he finally trots over to greet the three seekers, they know where I am.

The jig is up, and I have to try something. I find a wire, stiff like an unbent coat hanger, and a blue racquetball lying under the car tire. I puncture the ball with the wire and make a flimsy little makeshift weapon to swing around. It may be the sorriest little makeshift weapon ever, but it’s something. Maybe.

Out on the street, the seekers surround me. They try to reason with me, but I know the recruiter will be on us soon, so it’s go time. I whack one of them with the racquetball a couple of times – it can’t hurt too much but he flinches and hollers, open mouthed. Then, a stroke of luck! The ball flies off, but I jam the wire into the kid’s gaping mouth and twist it around his tongue, ready to rip it out by the root.

The Smear

(Location Sense: the second-floor apartment where I lived with my college girlfriend, though it’s bigger inside and there’s a bedroom where there should only be a closet.)

We tromp up the stairs, our radios and nightsticks clanking on the railings. I glance down at myself, eyes flicking over the sidearm, the crisp black buttons, the little brass nameplate on my chest reading “Kim”. My partner, imposing as I am lithe, towering as I am small, reaches the door first and pounds it with his fist. “Police! Open up!”

I take a breath, Domestic disturbance calls are always a crap shoot – might be the kids playing too loud, or a 300-pound drunk with a shotgun, or anything in between.

The little girl answers the door and lets us in. She seems healthy and unbruised, but she is silent and sullen. She backs up against a wall and looks at the floor. Her face – it’s blank, no emotion at all. Like the thousand yard stare of broken men, who’ve seen it all and never quite got back from wherever they found it.

Walking in the room we can feel that something WRONG. Lights are on but it’s dim in here, oppressive and dank, like after a fire. It’s an unnatural feeling, like there are too many shadows, like something is creeping behind you, approaching just out of your field of vision. It chills me.

From the bedroom off to the right, we can hear the mother. She’s ranting and raving and screaming like a woman possessed. Is it English? Or something else? Could be anything. Can’t tell if she’s gonna need handcuffs, or a straightjacket, or a long rest to get whatever she’s on out of her system.

[Persona shift]. Kim stays in the front room to try to talk to the girl. I give her a smile and she just stares back with those dark, dead eyes. I head over to the bedroom where the growling and shrieking are coming from. I feel a chill run down my spine as I reach for the knob. There ain’t much that can slow me down, but this place is creepy.

She’s hunched over, hair a tangled bird’s nest, clothes filthy and torn. Mumbling and clawing at herself, and the walls. This is bad. It ain’t right. There’s too many shadows in here. Something is off….and there it is.

A smudge, a stain on the wall. A dark little smear, like a slug or a piece of food. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s the problem. It’s the what in “what the hell is going on here?” But it isn’t catchable. When I walk over to it, it isn’t there anymore. It’s moved to another wall, or it’s just a little gouge in the paint and the smear has moved to another place. Every time I get near it, or reach out my hand to touch it, it’s gone.

The Secret Message

I’m hanging out with Eddie and a couple other guys on the old man’s back porch. We slouch in our deck chairs, leaning back with our feet up on the railing, laughing, eating lunch slowly, doing nothing at all. The omniscient geographical sense of position that you sometimes have in dreams tells me that we are across the street (and down a few plots) from my High School House, but this house, this porch, never existed.

The porch overlooks a vast open pit, a backyard that has been excavated, all life and character removed. It’s forty feet deep and hundreds of feet on each side. Way too big for this residential neighborhood.

The property owner is a senile old man who drifts in and out of the house, sometimes rambling on about nothing and everything, not quite participating in our conversations. We listen to see if his muttering ever makes sense, but it doesn’t really flow. He sometimes comments on passing vehicles or nearby sounds, but that’s the extent of his connection with reality.

(A bird sings). “Meadowlark, red-breasted, mates for life. Like Sarah and me, we met at the World’s Fair nineteen thirty six, she had a red gardenia in her hair. Hockey tournament in the park this weekend. The railing is wobbly. Bunch of crooks in the government, crooks.”

(A car passes). “1957 Plymouth Belvedere. Canvas top, shark fins, Great Barrier Reef. Too many sharks. Two three four five...”

Eddie has a concealed tape recorder, and he’s surreptitiously recording the old man’s stream-of-consciousness. Later... we’re back at home, at someone’s house, in a dim basement den lit in blue. We’re hunched over the tape recorder, listening and reliving, fading the volume up and down, slowing down and speeding up the playback, causing feedback, playing with the sound waves like strings in a cat’s cradle. But suddenly, buried deep in the static, recorded so quickly that the other sounds stretch slow like thick taffy behind it, there’s another voice on the tape. We zero in on it, muddying the sound of the old man’s voice to clarify this new speaker. It is not a human voice.

“We are the Vikra. Hearken to our message, carried through time and ether, our urgent plea. Help us. Help us. Only you can save us...”

Strange Fruit

[Geographical Shift - 1500 miles east]

The killer has just been here. The girls hang from the doorway, swinging gently in the dry breeze. Kath is struggling, grunting and grasping for air and clawing at the rope. The other girl looks like she's already dead.

I remember the day I realized I hated Kath. Squeaky voice, soulless eyes, squat body, legs like tree trunks. It was an unconscious, visceral reaction, a revulsion to everything about another human being. A discovery - "So this is what it's like to truly hate someone." And I consider myself a pretty rational, non-judgemental person, willing to give everyone a chance. Except Kath. Something about her. I knew I despised her, even if I didn't know why.

Gary, normally so passive, so collected, is freaking out. He's scrambling around, almost running in different directions like a cartoon. He's the one with the giant duffel bag full of mysterious equipment, and he's asking me if I might have a rifle with a sighting scope nearby. A rifle with a scope? Oh, yeah, sure, Gary, I've got one right here, let me shoot the fucking rope right now, why didn't I think of that?

Rifle or no, we get them down somehow. Kath is going to be all right, and I try to hide my disappointment.

Nomads of Sunrise and Eyes Like Stars

We barrel out into the morning light. Spilling out of the little club's doors. Splitting off in different directions. Nomads scattering at dawn.

"That was a bitchin' place to live", Emily drawls. Already the maze-like interior, low-ceilinged and mysterious, is fading from our memories.

We head up the street, in search of breakfast or housing or the next party, just drifting toward the next adventure. It's just Emily and me right now, but we know the rest of them will find us, or we'll find them, or we'll all arrive at the same place pretty soon. It's like we are magnetically attracted to parties. There's no planning, no timetable. It's just "I'll see you there", wherever there may turn out to be. Saturday is every day.

My pocket practically vibrates - it's holding a hundred bucks and it's my turn to buy the drugs. There are eight of us, but Jenna and Flora probably won't want any. But I still might need to find a good deal to stock up for 6 on a hundred dollars.

We head up the street. It's early, but people are up. The night birds are stumbling into the light, heading homeward for some sleep or sniffing out the next happening. The responsibles are making breakfast or doing chores or whatever it is they do.

We walk next to the haunted mansion. It's not really haunted, but if you call it that, everyone knows what house you mean. It's an incredible three-story Gothic house, like it was ripped from antebellum New Orleans. It looks like a movie set or a carnival ride, and it's the most desirable place in town to live.

Today, it seems there's an open space in the mansion. There are hundreds of people lined up outside, inside, on its balconies and staircases, holding rental applications and lining up to impress whoever owns the place. 300 people applying for one room in the best party house there is. The current occupants of the house, hungover and sleepy, mill about, walking up and down the line of new possible roommates.

Emily points up at the second floor and says "Isn't that that girl Holly?", and I go into a daze. "That girl Holly" is my long lost one... my past love faded away... my "what ever happened to?" I've been looking, but not really looking, for her for a long time. Wondering.

And it is her, swaying and weaving blearily through the crowd. Last night must have been a good party here too. She's dressed like a 1950's Playboy magazine housewife, with a white robe and a cigarette and something tied up in her hair. I call out her name, but there's a din from the huge crowd, and she can't hear.

I move closer, my eyes on her, yelling "Holly! Holly!", but she still doesn't hear. I don't know what I want. Reconciliation? Anger? Just acknowledgement that we knew each other once, that we meant something to each other? I don't know what I'll get, but it doesn't matter. Something in me just yearns for contact.

Finally I'm standing on the street right below the balcony Holly's on. She stands woozily, looking out over the scene. Something catches her eye, and she stoops down to pick up a piece of trash, or throw it down to a lower level so it's not near her anymore. And she catches my eye. She stops. Her head physically wobbles, and her star-blue eyes lock into mine, spinning like pinwheels. The world fades away and all we can do is look at each other.

Monash the Miniature Elephant

There's an elephant in the flower bed. Or, at least, there is according to my sister Flora. I can't tell - the flowerbed is pretty overgrown with grass and piled with rocks and twigs, but it kind of looks like something is moving in there.

"His name is Monash", Flora says. She wants me to capture him. What do we do then? Put him in an aquarium? I shake the bushes to move him out into the open. He's probably scared. There's his call, a high-pitched, twee trumpeting from the tulip forest. And there he is, no bigger than a mouse. A two-inch African elephant.

I feel kind of mean, pushing dirt and rocks with my hand like a bulldozer, to scare him in the corner. But it works - Monash is cornered and I scoop him up in my hands. He sits clamly in my cupped palms, lifting blades of grass to his mouth.

Wall

I step out my back door into the yard. It’s different today. Colleen, my cranky, wrinkled, busybody of a landlady and neighbor, is ordering around a laborer, as she is wont to do.

Colleen owns everything in her view and is the unquestioned master of her realm. She giveth and she taketh away. She benevolently grants small gifts and decorations for you to use while you abide in her presence, but they can be taken back, changed, whenever the mood strikes her or if your use of them somehow displeases her. The table I moved outdoors to put plants on disappeared one day without a word. Perhaps I did not care for it properly. The broom, a gift as well as a “sweep your porch” reminder, similarly vanished when she discovered I already had my own.

The sun beats into my eyes, brighter than before. My yard is naked and exposed and unfriendly.

Colleen and her hired man are rearranging the entire landscape. An unfinished wall is replacing a simple fence. Plants and earth are gone, replaced with stone. The tree I worried would fall on me with every rainstorm is gone. The yard, green and private and friendly before, a sanctuary, is a cell now. Rough slate and concrete on all sides, holding me in, trapping me with the heat of the day.

Crash

Carly is driving, and she never drives. She’s too timid – can’t make a left if there’s another car within 200 yards. I am in the front passenger seat, though I never turn my head to look at her. I see everything through the windshield.

We’re driving at freeway speeds, too fast for this one-way single-lane alley. A grey brick wall on the left blurs by, just feet from Carly’s window. Ahead, a white sports car with a patchy paint job doesn’t see the brake lights. He slams into the little blue hatchback that’s in front of him, and instead of stopping, he seems angered by the collision - he stomps on the gas and keeps pushing the other car. They swerve off to the left and smash into the wall. Somehow Carly avoids the accident, and we continue on our way.

But the mood turns dark. The carnage seems to follow us psychically. We drive on, but we’re tense, scared, cringing. Like someone is going to jump out to stop the car, or the police are going to pull us over and blame us for the crash.

It seems relatively normal when figures start appearing in front of the car – policemen with their badges out – hands up gesturing for us to stop. But they’re not real cops, they’re TV cops. Pembleton. Columbo. Goren. I grip the steering wheel with my left hand and talk Carly calmly through the storm of authority figures streaking past the car. Nothing to worry about, keep going, don’t stop, it’s not real. You always see ghostly, projected images of TV detectives passing through your car when you drive down dark alleyways.

We take a right down an even smaller alley, to try to escape the gloom and the ghosts. I’m still holding the wheel, talking her down, driving with my voice. The alley gets smaller, the walls closing in, until it’s not even an alleyway, but a passage leading to somebody’s back yard, and we have to stop and put the car in reverse before we drive into their den through the sliding glass door.