Reinstated behind the wheel, that undue sensation of being a stalked animal is gone. You're back in willful domain. If you wanted, you could whisk Maddie all the way to Capital Hill and never have to see any of these people or their Twilight or their Barney Fifes ever again. The Astro's V6 greets you like an old friend. Maddie takes care to buckle her seatbelt. You reduce the radio's blare to a muddled drone and shift into drive, veering away from the curb, coasting through a stop sign, and squealing the tires under a sharp left turn (quite pleased with yourself, as it's no meager feat to squeal an Astro's tires less than 15 seconds after take-off).
"Where are we going?" She inevitably asks.
"Someplace hidden."
You admit you enjoy teasing her, even while she tries so hard to dispel the apprehension not just from her voice but from her thoughts and to actually trust you. The windshield is freckled with so much gull s**t you sometimes have to tilt your head to see between globs. After letting her stew a while longer, you explain, "Me and Lefty found it before, a random little parking lot tucked away behind some s****y old buildings. There was only one car there, and the place didn't look like it got much traffic."
Maddie is quiet a moment. "I think I know where you mean." She sits there and studies the van, runs her hand over the armrest but doesn't open it, keeps politely contained until something on the floor catches her eye. She bends down and picks up a book, the cover of which you can't make out. "Which one of you's the Buddhist?"
"Guess."
"Well," she reasons, "you're clearly the calmer one. At the same time, it's nothing like a serene calm. Lefty seems more serene than you, in his own way."
You're stumped how to reply.
"He's a funny guy, isn't he?"
"I hope you mean Punditte, who yes, is tolerable for his breed."
"No," she corrects. "Lefty."
Bemused. "Funny how?"
"Funny how? More like funny how not? He acts funny, he talks funny, he looks funny."
"Well, he is a quarter Hungarian."
"Is he . . ? Huh. I can see that now that you mention it. My stepdad's grandparents were refugees from communist Romania. Those two are neighbors, you know."
"Jack?"
"Huh? Oh yeah, Jack." She grins mischievously. Accessory to larceny, underage intoxication, lying to an officer: nothing to sniff at for a Wednesday night.
"Lefty's Hungarian on the same side he's Jewish." You resent your cohort's ability to hog the limelight even in his absence, but as far as topics go, discriminated old hens are a relatively safe one, and in this case, anomalously captivating. "His grandma survived Auschwitz, if you can believe it."
"That's interesting." Maddie pages through the book.
"He told me he grew up staring at her hands. Always asking for an explanation but never getting one until he was around 12 years-old."
She pauses. "Her hands?"
"Yeah, the Nazis switched them. Like they reversed them so that, palms down, both thumbs are sticking out, you know what I mean?"
To your surprise, a grim laugh escapes the back of her throat. "Stubs, you are so f*****g with me right now."
"There was a picture of them--just her hands, no name was given I don't think--in an issue of Modern Science a few years back. I can't say for sure it was Modern Science, that's what Lefty says . . . I guess I can't say for sure any of this is true, but if I had to guess, well, Lefty's a pretty terrible liar."
"You should try and find it online. The picture."
"Uh-huh. It wasn't even an article about the Holocaust. Not exclusively anyway. Its theme was advancements in microsurgery. Kind of funny, right?"
"Microsurgery." She repeats the word with deadpan disgust like how people sometimes say "you're kidding".
"You'd be surprised how much we know about what the human body can endure, how much it can survive or tolerate, is owed to the Nazis and the data they took running their little wackjob experiments. It was all confiscated during the liberations and now it's being widely referenced for more humanitarian medical purposes."
"Talk about irony," she shudders. "That makes my skin crawl."
"Sure. It seems sick in one light, but what's done is done. If some good can come out of it . . . Like think. Because of victims like Lefty's grandmother, doctors now have clearer blueprints for a hand transplant, say, if somebody gets theirs crushed in a machine, which must happen all the time. So because of the Nazis, how many chimps get to keep their hands?"
"Chimps at the expense of human beings."
You restrain a number of Darwinist witticisms before going on, "I'm only kidding of course. They don't use chimps for that sort of thing, but the county morgues tend to be generous in such respects."
Maddie's voice is thick with revolt. "Let’s not have this conversation anymore."
"Fine."
She returns the book to the floor, backtracking only a little. "What's her name?"
"Who, Lefty's grandmother? I have no idea."
"Is she still alive?"
"Yes." You almost add '"as far as he knows" but catch yourself, as that would just tempt an inquest on why he hasn't seen his living grandmother for so long.
"Jack's grandma," she says, "my great grandma, her name was Ecaterina. Isn't that beautiful?"
When you take too long to answer, more focused on nailing all the correct turns and keeping a weather eye out for one-way streets, she tacks on something truly cunning. The most shameless pretext for a compliment you've ever heard.
"Things can be beautiful, you know."
All you say is, "Of course." She might be let down if you didn't attach a certain improvised look that makes her break away and blush, like a child who's backed out of her own dare. In later months, you try replicating that look in the mirror to no avail.
Enclosed like this, sealed tight from the town's definitive reek of spume and fish guts, you're captive to her perfume as never before. Whether it's really perfume or not is debatable. It's so familiar, so equally integral as her mouth or her nose, you're sure you noticed it earlier than now on some level, probably the moment Max showcased her outside Food Mart, but were too diverted by the light of her eyes and every other like nuance that incidentally stripped poor Lefty of his eloquence. He's always been more prone to subjective sensitivities, and yet, not quite sensitive enough himself to attune on the subtle profundity of this scent that clings to her like dew droplets. Pink, you can see them now, glistening up close like pearlescent n*****s on a long, flat palm.
The Astro inters no shortage of smells, that's for damn sure. It's actually quite embarrassing, but she hasn't commented yet. When she runs a hand through her hair, fanning out the long band of strands as if playing a harp, it exudes that whiff of dampness you catch before a storm. Nothing, not even Lefty's dirty socks, can subjugate it, and this vessel which has taken on the official role as your home, your hamper, your bed, and your bank, is transmuted into little more than a child's wicker basket piled with fresh-cut lilacs. It's all you can do not to veer the subject off of her real cousin Jesse ("--so when Punditte asks my mom about it, she'll probably doubt her memory before she doubts my honesty.") and onto that stale topic of the way she smells. Not to say she smells stale, but what else could it come across as besides a lazy pass up her skirt, while you've got her here, alone? And what, at its core, would it be besides just that? Be honest with yourself. Be f*****g rational; aren't you always deeming yourself the rational one? If you want her so bad, just take her. These rhapsodic applications are natural for someone who's been deprived so long and so thoroughly as you have. A is A, after all. What is Maddie's 'A' but a broken faun, and what is yours but a literate wolf? What risk is there in hard feelings when you'll never see each other again? Chimps at the expense of human beings.
She quits talking and smoothes her skirt. The parking lot's entrance is just ahead.
It's narrower than you remember, almost foreboding you might lose one or both sideview mirrors on the way in. You nose up onto the sidewalk, reverse, and straighten out before attempting to thread the needle. Maybe it's just an attempt to feign competence, but you're not sure why you choose then to ask the question you do, not until Maddie explains so herself. "Do you like your stepdad?" Steering intently, you have an excuse not to look her in the eyes or process their feeling.
"Yeah. He's an alright guy. He takes good care of my mom and me."
And that's as far as she gets without laughing, which is nothing in itself but what bothers you is the sarcastic ilk of the laugh--you'd never have guessed her to have a sarcastic bone in her body. She's sort of slouched into the crook where her seat meets the door, one eyebrow raised and her slur playfully returning as she says, "Why, do you want me to hate him?"
"Why would I--"
"Watch it there!"
"I got it, I got it. Why would I, um, want that?"
The van lurches over a seam of flush sidewalk and rugged asphalt. The high walls of an alley plunge everything outside your lowbeams' range into watery darkness, like at any moment a luminous eel could go slithering past the windshield, and a misplaced dumpster comes harrowingly close to scraping off your side's paintjob.
"No, I don't think you would," Maddie retracts. "Want is the wrong word. But I do think you expected it. I mean, little emo girls are supposed to hate their stepdaddies, right?"
"Are you asking me?"
"Don't play dumb," she jokes. "You were probably waiting the whole time for me to start telling you what crazy pills I'm on and how much I like to kiss other girls."
It's so dark now she doesn't see you arch your eyebrows. Only the central, most protrusive parts of your faces are visible brassy apparitions. The ugly Buick Lefty tried to boost is gone. What you face is now a ghoulish, sequestered void. Everything--the ground, the weeds, the brick canyon walls--are awash in your headlights' sepia tint like worn documentary footage from the 1920s. Something on Maddie's person emits a digital chirp. "That's probably Max." She extracts a cellphone from her purse while you swing the van left and graze along the southern wall, hunting with your eyes. "He says 'Wutz Takin' with like 30 question marks. But he can't be that worried about me or else he'd call, wouldn't he?" She tsk-tsk's as her fingers fly across the slideout keyboard. The fog is so condensed inside this man-made gulch that you can't distinguish shadows from actual crevices even five feet away. Forced to make a fair estimate, you shift the van in park, letting the engine idle while swiveling your forehead searchingly against the cool window glass.
"Well, should we head back?" Her phone snaps shut.
"When Lefty and I were here before, some kids caught us--well, caught him--trying to steal their car, so we had to book it through one of these alleys." You point at random out the window, knowing she's as blind as you are. "That one there, I think, should take us pretty close to the bar, right? Or at least in the right direction."
There's a definite revisement in her breathing, which you ignore as you twist out the key.
"I'm not sure," she replies, waiting to go on until you can bring yourself to look at her. "I wasn't really paying attention." Now she cranes her head too, but odd as it seems, there is no easy way to get one's bearings in here besides standing on the roof and trying to squint up at the moon or a navigational star; the low air has thickened into such a soupy Mesozoic paste you're almost afraid to breathe. When you open your door and swing both legs out, she jumps at the noise and the overhead bulb that snaps on. Sitting there, her eyes have grown wider and skin waxier, but it must be an illusion. You hop out and slam the door so hard it peal slike a gunshot. The darkness switches on. There is silence. Even the Strait sounds muffled, more like placing your ear to a conch shell. Presently, a little blue light ignites inside the van; her phone. You're curious who she thinks she's calling and put your hand back on the handle to ask, when suddenly the passenger door clicks open and she uses the light to guide her way over.
You censor your breathing, crouch low, and lunge the second she steps past the hood.
"Cut that out!" She bats you blindly across the ear rather hard.
You laugh in good fun and take her hand. "Come on. Point that thing over there so we can find the way out."
She does as she's told. "It's so spooky back here."
"You just have to remember what a dumpy old lot it is when the sun's up."
"Yeah, but the sun's not up."
"No s**t."
As you approach, a mosaic of bricks etches itself into the milky gloom cast from her LED and you tell her to shine the beam back and forth. The alley lies a couple feet to your left. "It's not a very deep one," you promise, whereafter you swear she gives your hand a small squeeze but don't waste much time overanalyzing.
Stepping past the vanguard of the intimate structures into the alley is like entering a vacuum. Maddie packs away her phone because it's uselessly insufficient to even permeate the air before your face, and the only way you know you're still attached to planet Earth is by the disturbance of gravel underfoot and the damp stony smell of the bricks. You switch the hand holding Maddie's from your left to your right and use your left to feel along the wall. She doesn't question this adjustment. You're waiting for that abrupt transition from textured coarseness to smooth metal. The mist clings like scarves at your throat. ". . . It's funny how your mind messes with you, isn't it?" Her voice sounds, at first, indecently loud, and you notice how she drops it a few decibels, not quite to a whisper. "Just now, while we were being so quiet, I had an image of the entrance behind us growing this sort of living, reddish membrane with veins and arteries and everything, actually living, that got real hard and became brick. And then the same thing happened at the other end. The membrane spread and continued to grow over our heads, covering up the sky, hardening into solid brick so we were trapped down here, shuffling back and forth, side to side, forever. That should be in a sci-fi movie, huh? We'd starve standing up. Starve or suffocate or--" She screams as the door makes a perverted sucking noise and light vomits forth from the stairwell.
Recalling how heavy it was, you'd exerted enough force to throw the slab wide open and kept pushing until it became wedged between its hinges and the adjacent wall. Without a word, you hurdle the three-foot ledge inside, surprised to hear a polyrhythmic crunch beneath your feet. There is still glass strewn all over the landing and no commotion overhead. Neither detail bodes well for the baby. Turning around, you adjust your eyes back on Maddie down in the dark trench. She's agape at the spontaneous new ledge. She could have married Max, settled down, and died in this town without ever guessing that ledge existed, if not for you. Her chest heaves like a tectonic plate under her coat.
"Come on," you say because it's all you can think to say, and then you laugh--but laugh at what? Not at yourself, not at Maddie, possibly at fate.
"Where did this--?" She gasps, fighting for words. "What the hell are you doing?"
You try to put yourself in her place and behave more reverent, but somehow you're at a loss how to explain and can only produce such lame generalities as, "There's something you should see."
"What are you talking about? What is this place?" She leans in and her eyes fall on the Costume Shop sign, rendering her only more confused. "Does somebody live here, Stubs? Is this somebody's home?"
"I'll explain everything." But you don't. And anyway, she's deafened by her own hysterics.
"Get down from there! You said we were going back!" She retreats in the direction of the van, since the way south is aptly barricaded unless she opts to drag her hands and knees over sharp gravel.
"Just trust me. This is something you'll want to see. Actually, it may be a matter of life and death."
"I'm leaving." She sounds scared, like maybe she mistook you.
"Maddie, wait, there's a kid."
"I don't give a f**k!"
She's not even listening, that's what stings the most. And so, as she turns to go, you elect to lunge out and grab the first thing you can reach: her hood. "Let go of me!" She's shrieking so insanely that soon, you're afraid, she'll start crying rape. But before that happens, another wail succeeds in drowning her out. It shudders down the stairwell and finds you both there--Maddie in bewilderment, you somewhat relieved. An infant's desperate, starving squawk.
Her limp hand quits trying to pry at yours but doesn't fully let go. "Oh god," she moans at last. "This is somebody's f*****g home. Stubs, are you trying to get me arrested?"
"No one's been here to tend that baby for a very long time," you explain hastily. "I know because of all this glass. You see? Lefty did this, at least four hours ago. The thing can't even walk yet and you should see the place, Maddie, it's a shithole. I wouldn't be surprised if it's been abandoned. Would you ever have known?"
Of course not. You can read it in the tear-brimmed flecks of light mottling her scared, disconsolate eyes. Visibly torn. The baby, meanwhile, keeps up its part, sensing the dependency of its own existence on each tenuous wail.
"We should tell the police," she gasps.
"Tell them what?"
"I don't know. Don't be selfish at a time like this! We can tell them that-that we were passing by and heard the baby crying for a long time and peeked in and--"
"Peeked in?"
"Well what did you bring me here for?" She snarls so bestially you could slap her just to change that awful expression.
"We should take the baby with us."
"Gee. You mean kidnapping? And take it where?"
"Any-f*****g-where. A church, a hospital, your precious Punditte's f*****g doorstep. But it can't survive here, nothing could. Come up and you'll see what I mean."
"Why don't you go up? What do you need me for?" Her eyes narrow in a long-repressed augury of suspicion.
You waste a few moments trying to wrangle those eyes back into your confidence, then finally give up and say, "Fine. Okay. I will." You swing around and start clomping up the stairs, alone . . . Clomping, not because you're pissed, but because you'd rather give any sleeping residents fair warning to rebel rather than step on them and get stabbed in a moment of impetuous panic. You also call out loudly over your shoulder, "I'll grab the little s**t, bring him back down, and show it to you." Her dumbfounded gaze is palpable on your back as you put one scarred linoleum stair behind you at a time. Some of the missing chunks are so big they look like shattered windows, with great dirty triangles of wood showing through, cracks coursing outward and up the wall, and that damn dome light oscillating like a Hollywood rave between life and death. Halfway into your ascent, you can't help but smile.
"Wait," she grunts, hoisting herself carefully onto the landing. You wait there on the same middle step until she catches up and retakes your right hand with a sense of greedy entitlement. You exchange brief looks--hers is some hybrid of reproval and apology--then continue on in silence.
The space beyond the upper doorway is so immune to the flickering bulb it appears curtained with black velvet. A foul odor of mildew already wafts out on the same vibrations as those hauntingly deprived sobs. At the top landing, Maddie pushes past with a billow of determination and walks out into the middle of the living room, getting snagged by all the unseen jetsam on the floor. You stay beneath the lamp and swap glances with the cartoon tenants scribbled on the lower wall. They grin back like old friends. When you look up, Maddie is gone, already having pressed into the kitchen. The temperature inside the hovel is remarkably colder than that of the outside world. Your thoughts are that the kid will definitely need some medical attention; at best, for bronchitis. Already you can hear the suction and snap of that garbage bag nailed up in the window, and with every step comes the real or illusory tickle of cobwebs blanketing your face. The kitchen is faintly pregnant with a greenish tinge and you remember the phone charging on the countertop.
Maddie asks, "What's that?" but doesn't sound too curious. While she checks on the baby, you walk over and unplug the phone. Bleep. You flip it open to a blank silver background and find the Contacts folder. There are no contacts. There are also no missed calls, dialed calls, received calls, and likewise with texts.
"Sshhh," Maddie soothes, hunched over the playpen with one arm presumably stroking the baby. Its bawls relax into mere stifled sniffs.
The phone's home screen says it has "73.66 minutes remaining", such an unwieldy number that indicates to you calls must have been made or taken on the phone at some point and erased later. Feeling anticlimactic, and for lack a better idea, you figure out how to dial voicemail.
Maddie is meanwhile living a fantasy where free, effortless babies cry out in the night for lonely mothers. "It's okay, princess, it's okay." She finally succumbs to the basic whim of raising the child out of the pen and securing it close to her chest along with its blanket. Cooing all the while, she rocks the loaf to some serene tempo, serene being a trait Maddie esteems.
As the call connects, you ask, "How do you know it's a girl?"
"Huh?" She'd clearly forgotten you were in the room, and this insult adds a triteness to your tone.
"The baby. You called it princess. Maybe it's a prince."
"Oh, did I?" She shrugs, you can hear her smiling. "I guess--"
"You have two unheard messages."
"Sshhh!" Your shush is not meant to soothe anyone. Turning away towards the counter as if to recede into a private office, you're overcome by an olfactory assault of scattered, fungal poignancy enough to make you gag and spin back around.
"First message received on November 3 2008. 12:09 PM. From 1-866-293 . . ."
Maddie nuzzles the baby's head and starts humming at it. The b***h on the recording finally finishes her spiel and a moment of static ensues before another voice picks up: "Hey this is Dan here at Best Buy just getting the word out about our holiday season sale where you can come on down and get a 50" hi-def Samsung plasma screen for only--" You instinctively jam the number 7, which was the correct key on your old phone, but the recording now alerts (somewhat tauntingly, if you're not mistaken): "All messages deleted."
You swear aloud, knowing no way to regain the second message.
"What's the matter?" Maddie asks. Her voice is dripping with bittersweet sentimentality. From anyone else it would evoke malice, but you just take a deep breath and say, "Nothing. It doesn't matter anyway I guess. How's the kid?"
"Seems alright. It's freezing in here though!"
You walk over to the refrigerator and shed some light on the room. Inside, there's nothing but three opened, half-empty jars of assorted mustard and horseradish taking up one shelf and a wilted brown head of Iceberg lettuce taking up another. Keeping that door open so to exploit its light, you check the freezer, which is dark and cloudy and a great swirling puff of fog burps out.
"What are you doing?" Maddie whines. "You're just going to make it colder." Sticking your hand into the icy gloom, you feel something hard like a brick and draw it out. Held up to the fridge light, it's a frozen bundle of newspaper. There are blood stains on the paper. You peer over your shoulder at Maddie, who has toted the baby into a far corner, away from the cold, and throw your discovery back inside, closing both doors.
"Find anything?"
"Just some old mustard and lettuce." You walk over. "No bread so I can't make you a sandwich."
"Oh darn." She says, obviously in a better mood.
Once you've sidled up from behind, the only thing that keeps you from placing your hands on Maddie's shoulders is that it would feel way too much like a family portrait. Instead, you loiter near enough to flex your nostrils, though at the moment, her aroma mixes disparagingly with the kitchen's and the baby's. Dim yellow fog basks outside the windows. A quiet sniffling noise you had all the while attributed to "princess", or maybe even low, scurrying rats, is all of a sudden disclosed as the agent behind her trembling shoulders . . . "Maddie, are you--crying? What's wrong?"
"Nothing." Her voice is tight and shrill with the temperance of emotions.
"We've got it now," you remind her. "We're not too late. You saved it."
"We saved it. Her."
"Right."
She sobs a little more openly now that she's been caught in the act. "It's not that--" She strives to explain further but her convulsions get the best of her until finally she has to pass the baby off to you, which you immediately discard back in its playpen.
"Why'd you do that?" She asks sharply.
"I'm nervous. I feel like I might drop it, there's so much s**t to trip over in here."
"She's beautiful."
You can't really see the thing worth a damn, but of course, you agree anyway.
"She stopped crying, didn't she? As soon as I picked her up."
"She sure did."
"I--I would've been an alright mother, I think." It's partly inflected as a question. Now, with the baby out of the picture, you do take ahold of her shoulders, ever so gently.
"A more than alright mother, and you still will be some day. Stop talking like you're fifty, Jesus Christ, Maddie! First you have to go and find yourself a deserving, dependable daddy though."
She dabs at her eyes. One long spiderleg of mascara splits her left cheek. "I was wrong about you, Stubs."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, of course it's cruel to judge people, but you have to admit, you do act more selfish sometimes than you really are."
"Do I?" And some bangs have come loose from her barrette. You sweep them aside.
"You know you do . . . Some people think they're too good to feel anything. They're scared of emotions, probably because they can't interpret their own, or . . . or they can but they don't like who they are and don't think change is possible. I thought you might be one of them. But there is something sensitive about you, and now I think I knew it all along. When I first looked at you, I knew, this person can see inside me. And to be straight with you Stubs, I've never felt that before with anyone."
"Is that a good thing? It sounds a little, I don't know, maybe disconcerting."
"It is," she admits, taking a deep breath. "It really is. But I feel like I can see inside you too." Your finger traces the line of mascara back up to her eyelid and she never blinks. "--Lefty wouldn't have come back for the baby, am I right? Or is that another unfair judgment?"
There's one name you could do without hearing at a time like this; but after pretending to give her query a moment's deliberation, you confirm, "No. You're right, he wouldn't have. But he's not all bad either."
"Nobody's all bad. I don't believe anybody can be all bad. Do you . . ?"
To bide time, you draw up her hands and press her knuckles to your lips without actually kissing them. They are wet from wiping tears while your back was turned. A lie would seem uncouth now, even by your standards, as her body stands bated between breaths and her eyes latch onto yours, awaiting your verdict like a doctor's prognosis of how much longer she'll live on. Or want to.
An answer finally spills out of you. "Only for each other."
Whoever truly kisses who first is irrelevant, the action and reaction are close enough to count as one. Her hair envelops your face, and, drawing from its scent, each lip feels like a lilac pedal on the bough, breezing across your tongue like new silk. You clasp her by the shoulder blades and draw your chests together. She squeaks a little but never stops kissing you. All the same, you must ease off . . . To keep your volatile fingers busy you caress her scalp and this she condones very much. Her own hands are clasped behind your neck. One of your legs is forked between hers, so tight you can feel the nylons' lace embroidery through your pants and crave more than anything to shred them off with your pickled teeth. Licking that vernal nectar off every cliff, knoll, and plain.
To divert these impossible impulses, you must fantasize tenfold. . . two entwined bodies on the sunshiny face of a mountain . . . lilacs everywhere . . . the chaotic, crosshatch pattern of grassblades stamped all across your backs . . . and that citrus torrent trickling like a clear brook . . . between . . . her . . .
At first you attach the ensuing screams to your fantasy; but it's far too depraved, not enraptured, and inhuman, not Maddie's.
She tears her face away, wearing an expression of paralyzed shock that bucks you back into the manacles of space and time. Another volley of screams decimates the stagnating silence of this all-too-real kitchen--Actual screaming, how odd, like a man lying severed by shrapnel on a battlefield. Her first instinct is to run and collect the baby, but vetos this idea and darts out of the kitchen altogether. By the time you process all this fast movement in your residually drunken state (and wade through the hurt of just how bluntly, how goddamn insolently, you've been forsaken!) Maddie has added her own screams from the hovel's nether regions. They don't market unimaginable pain, like the others, but total and unadulterated fear.
You sprint out calling her name. Her shadow can be seen dancing on the stairwell's slim section of upper wall. A few more steps and she is entirely visible: stammering arbitrarily, signaling at something down below. While running toward her, a loose article ensnares your foot and vaults you forward, though you manage last-second to catch yourself on the door jamb, concurrently peering back at the smiling emptiness in vain and suffering her hysterical tugs at your lapel until you come and can see for yourself the repugnant, red, unctuous mess groping its way up the staircase . . . A becomes X . . . The bum from Beecher Blvd. is trailing a bevy of blood and yodeling his head off about it.
"Help him!" Maddie begs. "Help him!" She's two stairs down, trying to tow you along. You don't want her going near that creature so you shove her aside with more force than necessary and go on alone. However, you're at a strategic loss how to proceed from there.
The hobo won't hear of you taking his arms and keeps flailing them in all sorts of angry contortions. Shrieking. His great purple maw never closes or quits vomiting gravylike strands of saliva. Each row of teeth in itself is a bilateral aggregate of minced yellow sharkfangs and gingivitis. His eyelids are the transplanted slack from some old scrotum and when they snap open-wide at last to fix you with an ornery glare, you find two milkyblue cataracts which account for how anyone could hop onto a plain of broken glass without exercising more caution. His hands are bloody too, from where he must have reflexively clutched at his feet, thus when you finally get a hold of them they're slippery with the risk of HIV and other such ungodly transactions.
For a homeless man, he's one heavy f****r, and you don't flag Maddie off this time when she tramples down to assist you in sliding him bellyside-down up the stairs. Still, his obstinate seizures don't exactly facilitate the task. His screams alone threaten to put your brain out of commission, crossed somewhere between a silverback gorilla and the sound a live martian would make on the CIA's operating slab. You get fed up enough after two steps' progression at the rate of 30 seconds each to clench a fistful of beard and steer him by that. It feels like gnarled fishing net. He only yowls louder, of course, and Maddie pleads with you to stop, but there's no point in that, not now that the bum has finally started kicking off with his own mangled feet, propelling all of you to the summit in no time and onto the next stage of rendering him intelligible.
"Shut-up you old fool! Where are those nice hightops Lefty gave you?"
"Stubs, Stubs! What are you saying?"
There's no use trying to communicate over the ignominious wails. With Maddie's help, you roll him on his back, then order her to straddle his arms while you slide a little ways down--dodging legs as they swing wildly at your head--and manage to secure his left foot beneath your armpit. His conjunct toes, soles, and instep illustrate the repercussions of strapping some rare albino lizard to a glass grenade. Callouses an inch think, swirled like intricate frosting over a bloody sponge cake! Six or seven good-sized shards are wedged just in this foot alone, with countless smaller glistening cuts that will require extraction by a tweezers. Infection is inevitable. For the meantime, you shape your thumb and index finger into a makeshift forceps and plunge them around the largest shard, lodged centrally in his arch, and squirm deep as you can until you reach solid bone so the glass won't simply snap off inside. Up top, Maddie can't view your elected surgery and gets overwhelmed by the man's response. He buckles from the leg up, though you've still got his ankle firmly clenched, and judging how the light seems to flicker even more loosely in its socket over his protests, the entire city must know his pain.
"Hold him still!" you shout, never tearing your eyes away from the task at hand but consciously aware of a trembling note of ecstasy in your voice.
You're just about to attempt swift catheterization, when the foot, alas, flies free and knocks you in the brow hard enough to bowl you over. You manage to grope the broken banister for support, avoiding similar injuries as your patient. For a moment, you hang there enjoying the reprieve like a pathetic orangutan. All the light, noise and motion has begun to make you queasy. You're wiping two bloody fingers off on your pantsleg when the bum's baleful lament switches to piglike horny grunts. Maddie screams your name repeatedly, the last chorus muffled.
All you can see from this low angle is his body rolled on top of hers and two ballet shoes cloistered against the wall, unable to kick or move at all. Something like jet fuel spearheads up your spine. In the next second, you're looming over his back, fingertips dug into the ridges of his larynx and clenching harder, ever harder. Two bright blue eyes appear over the attacker's massive tendrils of ratty hair, begging without volume, since she can't open her mouth without ingesting him. The man looks to be nuzzling salaciously below her cheek, unresponsive to your abuse except by how he ramps up the fury of his nuzzling. One of his great brown hands masks Maddie's face and forces her back under so that she no longer exists under his hulking jerky form. In another desperate tactic, you cup each of his ears and rip them backwards as if steering a horse by the reins. That does it.
He rears upright. Maddie reappears and the first thing you glimpse are three crimson strands snapping like power cables from her throat up to his mandible. The man turns and grabs your bicep, looking about ready to bite that too, except you've balled your free hand into a fist and punch him across his red sticky lips so hard he twists from the force. You jump on him again, again going straight for the throat, decanting all your bodyweight into the goal of plowing his head against the wall--once, twice--on the same invisible bullseye as a spiderweb of cracks grows larger, splintering the cartoons' lurid carnival beneath his face until, at last, it smashes straight through. He vanishes inside and strikes something solid with such brutal immediacy that his whole body jerks erect, before falling limp.
A fine plastery snow settles over the chaos.
Maddie wriggles free from the corner, refusing your aid. She can hardly stand and stumbles in a daze about six or seven stairs down before toppling on her a*s. A pleasant breeze whistles through the open door. Sweeping some sweat-matted hair out of your eyes, you focus on the beast at your toes; his current prostrate behavior is open to interpretation. He could be dead, but you doubt it. A fat vein twitches at the base of his neck, and his back falls and rises with a respiration so faint it could very well be a trick of the bad lighting. One thing you've never experienced before, nor honestly thought existed, is a 'state of shock'. But looking back and forth from Maddie's backside to the hobo's, you might be on the verge of something like that now.
She has one hand clasped over her fresh, raw hicky. When you walk down and ask to see it, she stares into the black portal of night without replying or complying. You expect her to resist when you lean over, take her purse, and stand her on her feet, but she doesn't. She doesn't give in either, and you literally have to cross over to her good side, the left, and throw that arm over your shoulder. She's light as a newborn. Making her take the first step, you hobble together down the glassmired, bloodslathered stairs like two Bunker Hill brothers-in-arms.
Getting her off the ledge and into the alley proves impossible without her cooperation, so you pretend to drop her until she jars awake and anchors herself against the neighboring wall. Then you hop down and help her do the same. She has to stand on her own while you free the door and see that it seals shut, so imbued in her private Hell she never even mentions the baby. But you can't expect that luck to last forever. If the old lecher up top is dead, then the longer he rots there undiscovered the better. The baby, too, would rot by due process, granting there was any chance Maddie had been stricken with post-traumatic amnesia like what happens in TV shows. The moment she regains her wits, you're going to have to put up a fight and say something prudent. What though? What's the plan of attack? Think now while she's incapacitated.
The verdict may taste bitter, but this is one of those rare situations which begs official police intervention. It's too risky to go back herself, with or without Max's worthless protection. S**t, you realize, the easy part is over. Once the four of you have regrouped atop Red Ryder's, you're going to have to try peddling some sense to this distraught little girl and her shitfaced emo boyfriend. Maybe something along the lines of: "Listen. There is a method of attack here most favorable for all parties. Give Lefty and I an hour to distance ourselves from town, got it? Then call and report everything to the authorities."
Everything? They'll say.
"If you can, try to leave me and Lefty out entirely, if only for your own convenience. It will draw a lot of bad heat later on that nobody deserves. Trust me . . ."
That's banking on the bum's survival of course. If the squad goes up and find a corpse with its head bashed in, somebody will have to answer. Maddie just might be stupid enough to try and take the blame, but who would believe her? All suspicion would fall on Max, and he is obviously not going to jail for anyone, though the idea doesn't exactly make you blanch.
You slide past Maddie to take the lead and, in doing so, are happy to find the bum's odor hasn't clung to or subverted hers in any way, not that there aren't more pressing matters at hand. The comparatively warm air suspends an ironic police siren somewhere inside city limits; probably trusty old Punditte spotted a Wednesday barfly swerving in the 25 zone on his way home. The walls of the alley drop off and that's really the only way you can differentiate being in the parking lot. Everything is still choked with fog. You almost go into Maddie's purse for her phone but the van is parked close enough you shouldn't need it. Suddenly, you feel something soft brush against your cheek and it's Maddie's hair. Doing it purposely, of course, out of helpless adulation. You let yourself enjoy some solace in knowing maybe the kiss you shared wasn't totally lost or forgotten by its interposed mayhem.
"Stubs," she purrs in your ear. "Please, I feel dizzy. Where's the van?"
"Don't worry," you lie. "Right here."
Sad as it seems, you haven't found the van yet. You're having an absurdly difficult time locating it amid the turgid murk, even to the point where a bud of panic starts sprouting in your solar plexus, especially as that siren outside the walls waxes louder. How long since you last saw Punditte? you wonder. Or more pertinent yet, how long since you left the bar . . ?
Lefty can only be expected to sit still for so long.
prev chapter
![[send message]](https://www.writerscafe.org/images/mail.png){kind=small}
![[befriend]](https://www.writerscafe.org/images/friend.png){kind=small}
Share This
Email
Facebook
Twitter
Read Request
My Library
Flag Writing
