John Shirley - Wetbones Read online

  It was hard to see from up here, but . . .

  It looked like something was forcing its way out of her mouth. Something white and shiny and wet and quivering with strength.

  The others crowded round her, holding her down into the pool, the men yellow in the firelight, looking like a cluster of wasps he'd seen once feeding in the wound of a roadkilled puppy.

  A squeak from the next room.

  A noise outside the door.

  Mitch felt himself testing the waters of catatonia.

  The San Fernando Valley

  Jeff was simmering about something. Prentice thought maybe Jeff was pissed off at him because he'd deserted him at the party, but then, as Arthwright walked away from Jeff to say goodbye to some producer with a lousy

  hair transplant who was taking his jiggly bimbo out to a white Rolls, Prentice saw the glare that Jeff sent at Arthwright's back. It was Arthwright Jeff was mad at.

  "What's up?" Prentice said, trying not to look smug about Lissa as he sat down on the lounger next to Jeff.

  Jeff looked him over irritably. "You just had a shower, looks like."

  "Number one on the list of tell tale signs. Yeah. You look bummed."

  "Arthwright's been hassling me to - Never mind, here he comes back."

  Arthwright was strolling up with his hands in his pockets humming to himself along with the George Michael's tune the DJ was playing. Father Figure.

  Arthwright stood a little too close, just between them. Prentice was still seated so Arthwright's crotch was level with Prentice's face. It made him vaguely uncomfortable.

  "Can I have a quick word with you, Tom?" Arthwright said. It would have been more honest to say, despite the smile and light tone, Get your ass over here, I want to talk to you.

  "Sure." Prentice got up, making a What the hell is this? expression at Jeff, though privately he was hoping it was about the script assignment. Prentice took his arm and led him away, toward the bar. The crowd was thinning out now. The bartenders wanted to knock off, were straining not to glare at people asking for drinks - some of the drinkers swaying, others casting deprecating glances at the drunks while asking for Calistoga.

  Arthwright said, "Tom - I'm having a little tangle with Jeff Teitelbaum. I don't know, maybe it's because I'm not using him on the Dagger script, maybe it's

  something else, but he's started this weird thing of getting at me through my friends. I think that's what he's doing. My friends, the Denvers - Sam Denver? Well, Jeff sent a lawyer up there to the Doublekey, threatening a court order for inspection of their premises or something - he's got it in his head that his little brother is up there. It's really pretty crazy stuff. I figure, hey, the Jeff's overworked, and he's got a bug up his ass because we couldn't use him, all right, I understand, we all have ego problems, we're all human. So uh . . ." They'd reached the bar. "Drink?"

  "Uhhh . . . no, no we're taking off here in a minute." He wanted one badly but he also wanted to seem relatively sober and level headed.

  "So anyway, I don't hold this against Jeff and I don't want to encourage my friends to countersue or anything, I'm telling them, hold off, we'll just talk to the guy, calm him down . . . I thought - maybe just to help Jeff out, keep him from getting his ass in a legal sling because of a paranoid trip he's on about his brother - maybe he's got some kind of guilt trip about his brother and he's projecting it on us, right? Anyway, I thought maybe you could talk to him for me. And - well, I'd feel better about you and me working together. After that. I mean, Jeff and you are friends and - I don't want to just lump you together, but . . . you know what I mean . . .?"

  Prentice had to snap his mouth shut. It had bobbed open when he'd realized just what Arthwright meant. It was as much in Arthwright's body language and tone as in the words. He meant: Get Jeff to lay off the legal attack and the snooping and I'll consider giving you that break you need right now. If you don't do it, you're fucked.

  "Uh - sure," Prentice heard himself say. Felt a thrill

  of horror as he said it. "I'll talk to him. See if I can straighten it out." His teeth felt heavy in his mouth. What a weird sensation.

  "Great. And then we'll talk, we'll have a lunch meeting, do some business - Whoa! Here's the vanishing beauty, back again!" This last as he turned to greet Lissa who pushed up beside Arthwright, reached past him to squeeze Prentice's hand.

  Arthwright stood between Prentice and Lissa as they held hands. Arthwright was smiling - laying a hand on Prentice's shoulder, and one on Lissa's. A holstered intimacy in that touch.

  As Arthwright kissed Lissa on the cheek and walked away, Prentice tried not to think about the man in the bedroom mirror, upstairs.

  6

  East L.A.

  Bugging out on the school bus wasn't hard. That was the easy part, Lonny thought. The bus that carried the work crew from Juvenile Hall to Griffith Park, where they were supposed to spend the day painting park benches, was a standard school bus with the emergency exit back-door. The emergency door wasn't locked and when the armed driver, halfway to the park, got in a shouting match with a UPS truck driver who was blocking two lanes with a sloppy double park, Lonny saw his chance and kicked open the back door and jumped down and dodged through traffic and climbed over a fence and skidded down the concrete embankment into the big culvert containing the skimpy stream that was called The Los Angeles River. He ran down the culvert a ways, then climbed up a drain pipe, went over another fence: crossing into East L.A., into a pretty fucked up barrio where he was going to find Eurydice and bring her out . . .

  He found, instead, Orpheus. And all the time he was thinking of a third person. Mitch. Goddamn that little fucker. Mitch, his baby.

  Sometimes you walk along without thinking where you're going; your body knows the way, your mind is someplace else. Lonny had glimpses of the neighbourhood drifting by after he climbed up out of the ''river" and over the fence. Lots of little houses, some of them fanatically neat, with gardens and little fences; others strewn with hulks of cars and trash; clusters of small but noisy brown children who seemed to have been strewn themselves. The barrio cholos low-riding by, checking him out, seeing it was okay, that he had the right shoelaces and scarf for this neighbourhood, making with the power salute or just a nod. All the houses - neat or trashy - were small and cheap, hot little boxes cooking in the yellow brew of the Los Angeles air; most of them marked with graffiti.

  He saw all this like a scattering of polaroids. In his mind he was seeing Mitch; was hunching with Mitch under the bedcovers with a flashlight, the two of them seven years old, giggling and talking about where babies come from and then Lonny touching Mitch's hairless groin, showing him things . . . No. That wasn't Mitch; he was misremembering. It was Gavin, the little boy under the covers, years ago; Gavin, who was a hustler now on Santa Monica Boulevard, the shit-whore giving his ass away for dope to motherfuckers with big cars and small dicks. But Lonny remembered the two of them coupled on the top of Gavin's bunkbed, Lonny thirteen and Gavin only just eleven, never thinking of it as fucking then. Instead it was "just trying some stuff out"; hard to think of it as fucking even later because, if he did, then Lonny would be a fag.

  Mitch. More than once Mitch had let Lonny hold him, when he'd been hurting and needed comforting, or when he talked about his tucked-up parents, but

  Mitch had never let him do anything else, had never let Lonny try stuff out with him, and Lonny hadn't forced him, had just that once put his hand . . .

  Eurydice's place. He was here. Seeing the crackerbox plaster house with all the busted toys in the front yard where Eurydice and Orpheus and Aphrodite lived with their Holy-Roller aunt. She was an alcoholic, plus addicted to some kind of prescription cough syrup she got for "chronic bronchitis". Still, the woozy old aunt was better for Eurydice and Orpheus than their mom. They'd been moved in here by Children's Services because their mom had tried to sell their asses to get herself some hubba. Fucking crackpoofing cunt.

  Their dad was doing twelve in the San
Q.

  Lonny walked up the concrete flagstones, paused at the bottom of the bowed wooden stairs to look at the yard. The toys in the dead grass and packed clay of the front yard were all grimy and busted, probably had been since the day after they came home from Toys-R-Us. Trucks with the wheels off; Hot Wheels cars embedded into the clay like fossils; splintered day-glo green and orange plastic squirtguns, and dried-up dogshit. And lying with a piece of yellow dried out dogshit nosing up to her head like some kind of giant killer worm, was a Barbie doll, with all its clothes gone and most of its hair ripped out and one arm missing. They were just dolls, but when he saw them like that they always made Lonny feel a little sick and sad.

  One of the kids came out onto the slanty wooden porch, Aphrodite, an eight year old black girl in dusty shorts and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt stained with barbecue sauce; she was holding a black baby's hand, the baby just old enough to toddle around. A cousin. Baby with shit-filled cloth diapers pinned onto

  her, nothing else. Lonny could smell the diapers from here, twenty or so feet away.

  "Orphy!" Aphrodite called, into the house. "That boy's here that Eury used to mess wid."

  Lonny winced in irritation. He'd never "messed wid" Eurydice. That was Mitch. It was Mitch in love with her, or told himself he was.

  Orpheus came onto the porch, a raspberry Bartles & Jaymes wine-cooler in his hand. He nudged Aphrodite and the baby back inside. He was a tall, skinny black teenager with a basketball player's muscles. Reeboks and jogging pants and a Lakers muscle shirt and a fake diamond earring in his left ear and a gold chain around his neck with the big gold-plated letters ORPHEUS in the middle.

  "Hey man, what'up," Lonny said.

  "Yo, Lonny, where's Eury?"

  "The fuck you askin' me?" Lonny said. "She's your sister . . ." Lonny felt a sinking in his gut. Eurydice was missing.

  "Mitch's you homie, that why. Lonny, you got you ass thrown in Juvie so you can chill with Mitch. You know where Mitch is, don't tell me no shit. Eury with Mitch."

  Lonny spat angrily at a wheel-less Tonka tractor. You get you ass thrown in Juvie so you can chill with Mitch. What was Orphy saying about him? "I came here lookin' for Mitch," Lonny admitted. "I thought maybe he'd be with Eury."

  "Was Mitch got Eury fucking with that old dude. Out the ranch. You know where that place is?"

  "The ranch? No. I thought maybe he went out there but then I thought, How'd he get out there? There's no bus out there. So I thought maybe he'd come here . . ."

  "You on probation?"

  "Yeah," Lonny lied.

  "Who you got for a P.O.? Bentley?"

  "No." He didn't want to talk about his Parole Officer. Because he didn't have one. "You think she's at that guy's place?"

  "Yeah. Denver. She be goin out there yesterday night. I don't know where the fuck it is . . . Mitch, he know."

  "Maybe. But he was in the hospital. Only he ain't there now, I heard. He cruised on it."

  The Ranch. Eurydice, now. And Mitch.

  Where was it? Where was the fucking place?

  West Hollywood

  Ephram had to bribe some guy fifty bucks at the door to get Constance in because she was underage but once inside it didn't seem to matter how old she was. A lot of the girls here, and most of the young gay boys, seemed like teenagers.

  She'd never been in a disco, if that's what it was. That's what Ephram called it. It was just a long white room with coloured track-lighting and four wall-video screens. Just now the screens showed Janet Jackson - no, Janet's video was just finished, now it was Taylor Dayne. There was a long, curvy, transparent-plastic bar - by some trick of the light it looked as if the people at the far end of the bar were leaning on nothing, on thin air - and there were a lot of tables crammed together, and a small dance floor at the far end. Mirrors on two sides of the dance floor made the room seem to extend onward like another car in a train. On the third side of the dance floor was one of the video screens so

  that a slightly larger-than-lifesize, two-dimensional Taylor Dayne was dancing with the half-dozen gay boys and hetero girls who rollicked on the dance floor.

  Constance was occupying herself with all the details - even the splatter of colours mixed into the black floor tiles - in order to keep from feeling the panic, the fear that came like a swarm of mosquitos, the bad feelings that Ephram punished her for. In order to keep from thinking about Daddy. In order to keep from thinking about the men they'd murdered, her and Ephram.

  Most of her mind, she knew, was locked away inside her, a mewling cat in a carrier-box. You had to ignore its muted yowling to get where you were going.

  She wanted to go to the bathroom but she was afraid - no, not afraid don't think that . . . She wanted to go to the bathroom but Ephram would mentally follow her in, and it embarrassed her.

  I have to follow you in. Otherwise you might wander off, out bathroom windows or back doors.

  Escape? She laughed and sipped her Coca-Cola.

  "We won't be taking any young men along with us, tonight, actually," Ephram remarked. "It happens that young ladies come here who work as rather expensive whores. They pick up the moneyed men at the bar here. We'll let one seem to pick us up. There are things I want to try . . . Best with a woman . . . A very young one preferably . . . Thank heaven for little girls, ha ha."

  Constance nodded. (Don't think, don't think, don't think).

  She sipped her Coca Cola. After a while, the video screen showed the band Poison, with their cockatoo hair and day-glo costumes and the cheap mystery of dry-ice clouds.

  She had a thought and instantly hid it away.

  From the Journal of Ephram Pixie "for July the 22 199":

  It's not enough, anymore. My use of proxie neural pathways to experience pleasures is not entirely protecting me from being used up myself. I have a sense that there is some aspect of the negative astrology, some variant of the hidden constellations that is hidden to me as well as to ordinary men. Something veiled. Could someone be veiling it from me, setting me up for a fall? Who? Denver? The Akishra?

  Could it be they've lured me to L.A . . . ?

  No. I am Ephram Pixie, master of my destiny as no man else is.

  Still, I am feeling enervated. Or at least rather ragged in my enjoyments, sagging in my appetites. Perhaps it is at last time to attempt Wetbones again. If I do, it will attract the Akishra. And that could be fatal.

  Or will it - in particular? This is Los Angeles. They feed so widely and so well here. It could well be that the Spirit brought me here so to give me a smokescreen, a place of concealment, where the Akishra will not notice me in the general background of suffering and decadence. So very many emissions here.

  It could be that I have lost faith, that I should be trusting the guidance of the Spirit more. It could be that the Spirit plans to exalt me, at last, in this place and that is why I have been guided here. He does seem to be guiding me back to the Engorgement Ritual. But oh! That Ritual is so

  very taxing. But oh again! How very rewarding it is, once the labour is done, ha ha.

  There could be another reason the Spirit is prompting me to Wetbones. It might well be the ideal way to stop any search for Constance in its tracks. When she was twelve her father had her fingerprints registered; there was a police drive on for it, a way to help locate children if they turn up missing, and to identify their bodies if they turn up dead . . . I saw it in her mind as a hope, back when I allowed her hope. She doesn't need all her fingers to be of use to me. Not really.

  I have made my decision.

  Wetbones.

  Downtoum Los Angeles

  Garner had known what the police would say. The verbal shrug he would get. There were literally tens of thousands of missing teenagers in Los Angeles. Most of them were homeless addicts and prostitutes, living in cars and under freeways. Giving his report was just a way to get Constance's name on the LAPD computer.

  Now he drove the van West, onto the freeway, glad he wasn't going Eas
t; traffic Southeast-bound, on the other side of the freeway divide, was thick as coagulated blood.

  He'd spent five hundred bucks on a deposit for a detective agency, a cheap gumshoe who was just another warm body to go about asking have you seen this girl have you seen this girl have you seen this girl, anyplace she'd be likely to turn up.

  Of course, he could be wrong about where Constance would likely turn up. And he could be wrong

  about it even being in this city. And even if it was in this city, the town was so fucking big.

  But he'd learned to trust his intuition; he thought that maybe - along with the patterns of incidents and coincidences that made up the flow of life - pulses of intuition were God's Morse Code.

  Or maybe he was kidding himself.

  He had to stay busy. Had to. So he started on Hollywood Boulevard, showing a display cardboard taped with several pictures of Constance to anyone who'd talk to him. He wandered tirelessly but fruitlessly through Hollywood and the Fairfax and downtown L.A. . He talked especially to prostitutes, trying to get a handle on the local trade in chickens. Who was dealing in young flesh? Where were they?

  It could be that the son of a bitch who had her would market her in those shadowy and seamy venues.

  He walked the streets for two days, sleeping at night in his van to save money for bribes, before he began to hear the recurrent note. The rumours kept cropping up: The More Man. A rich movie industry sleaze who sometimes scattered largesse on compliant teenagers.

  And then he began hearing about the murders. The kids on the street would try to sound knowledgeable about the murders. But all they really knew, apart from the condition of the corpses, was what to call them: Wetbones.

  Culver City Los Angels

  Prentice was trying not to think A universal skill, a widely applied survival technique: Sometimes you have to just close your eyes and just do what you have to do.