John Shirley - Wetbones Read online

  Garner found them, all of them, in the parking lot of a corner E-Z Check Cashing place, its windows cluttered with signs. Any check cashed! Bus Passes; Money Orders; Food Stamp Pick-up; Western Union.

  On the opposite corner, across from the little parking lot, was Bubba's Discount Liquors. The crowd that hung out in the parking lot filtered back and forth between the check cashing business and the liquor store. They stood around laughing and arguing and hustling one another and ignoring one another and gossiping, their restless eyes watching the street. Now and then one of the girls, the toss-ups, would take a ride with one of the men who cruised by, looking for easy pussy. There were about forty of them in the Set, when they were all there; sometimes there were as few as ten, depending on what the Mix had given them. Garner had sat in his van and watched them for a while, sipping from his bottle until one of the girls approached him. A black girl - her skin the colour of coffee with a single spoonful of cream. She was short but quite pretty, despite being nearly emaciated. Big eyes, pointy tits in a t-shirt shortened to

  show her flat, muscular belly, brown jeans. It was the sort of t-shirt with a cat's face on it, traced out in gold and silver paint; its eyes were plastic fake emeralds glued on at the factory.

  "How are you today?" she asked, putting it like that because he was a white guy.

  He shrugged and said, 'What's your name?"

  "Gretchen."

  "I'm . . ." He thought back. When he was using, the time before, they'd called him Slim, on the streets. "I'm Slim."

  "So. Slim - what's happening with you today?"

  She was careful not to solicit him, and she was consciously speaking in mostly white English. She probably had an educated background. A fair number of addicts did. He'd met hardcore crack whores who had two degrees. They were usually black, though, even the educated ones. Going back to visit the old neighbourhood could be dangerous, if your life was going sour.

  "What's happening?" Garner snorted. "My daughter's dead. She was murdered. I want to get fucked up. Really geeked-out fucked up on rock. And then I want some pussy."

  She stared at him. Then laughed. "Well, you come right to the point anyway, don't you?"

  They were in a dingy box that Gretchen's cousin, Hardwick, called "my crib". It was a studio apartment with the bathroom down the hall. It had nothing in it except a mattress where Garner and Gretchen and Hardwick sat with legs sprawled onto the floor; an aluminium chair missing the back; a pile of clothing in

  one corner. Even the fridge and the stove had been hauled out and sold somewhere, probably for less than fifty bucks each.

  Garner knew it was stupid and dangerous to be here. He heard voices in the hall. From time to time people pounded on the door and asked, ''What up?" Hardwick sent them away without opening the door but Garner knew that eventually they'd be back, and some of them would get in. And he knew that the more he was out-numbered, the more dangerous it was. Hardwick himself was a slender, muscular black man. Some weeks ago, after getting his back G.A. checks, he'd had his hair cut and shaped. There was a flat layer on top of his head, and his girlfriend's name, TASHA, was cut into the sides of his hair with calligraphic exactitude; but it had partly grown over as money went to crack instead of haircut maintenance. Hardwick wore a sleeveless, well-aged Lakers shirt, black work-out shorts and plastic sandals. Right now his yellowing eyes were focused on the crack pipe tilted off-centre and clamped between his lips.

  Garner and Gretchen were staring at the pipe too. Waiting for their hits.

  Garner had, of course, gotten off on the first two hits he'd taken, coached by Gretchen on how to melt the crack in the pipe with the lighter, how to draw the hit. Now, his hands shook where they clutched his knees as he struggled to keep from snatching the pipe from Hardwick.

  That, he knew, would be very dangerous indeed. He hadn't seen any weapons on Hardwick but he'd seen the faded prison tattoo on the underside of his forearm, and he'd seen the old, black trackmarks on his veins from an earlier period of preferring the needle over the pipe, and, most important, he knew not a goddamn thing about

  Hardwick. Nothing, except that he was Gretchen's cousin. And he knew scarcely anything about Gretchen. Except that she was a cocaine whore who had been a licensed RN who used to make 40K a year supervising a ward for a Chicago hospital before coming home on a vacation and getting hooked and subsequently forgetting her job, staying here for the next three years . . .

  For all Garner knew, Hardwick was a murderer. For all Garner knew, so was Gretchen. Maybe they got white guys with money in here and got them fucked up and then rolled them. Or killed them.

  Maybe not. Maybe she'd just wait till he was too loaded to think, and then steal his money and split. Maybe she had AIDS and syphilis which would be just too bad for him since, now that he was loaded, he had every intention of fucking her and that was understood to be part of the deal. He might be dead of AIDS in two years if he weren't beaten to death first.

  All of it was possible and Garner was enjoying that possibility immensely.

  With luck, he might get killed.

  The pipe came around to Garner, at last. Fingers vibrating like tuning forks, he took his hit. He felt the rush; saw the room's colours drain and swirl around him; heard a humming in his ears. Then it was over.

  He stared at the pipe in surprise as Gretchen pulled it from his hands. "Not mucha hit," he muttered.

  "You gotta good hit," Hardwick said, absently picking at fuzz on the mattress, inspecting it between his yellowed fingers to see if it were a fleck of cocaine. Tweaking.

  "No . . . I . . ." Garner shook his head. The rush had been brief and superficial. The next one, he knew, would be even less powerful. He'd never smoked crack before

  tonight, but in the old days he'd shot heroin and cocaine, slammed it into his mainline, and he knew what to expect from coke. A high, then a down, then a smaller high, then a deeper down, then a smaller high yet, then an even deeper down . . .

  He wasn't feeling great, now, but still, he was stoned. Stoned and numb, which was right where he wanted to be. Constance seemed like a strange dream. An aberration in his life. Constance and the years of ministry. He had taken up the past seamlessly; he was back where he belonged, on the streets, burning himself up like a smoldering cigarette butt.

  He waited impatiently for the next hit. It finally came but it wasn't much and he said so.

  "What it is, we don't have the good shit," Hardwick said. "I can git it though. You front me two hunnerd, I bring you somethin' like a quarter ozzie."

  Gretchen was shaking her head at Garner, but he fingered two hundred dollars out of a shirt pocket - he had the rest of his money tucked into his shoe - and passed it tremblingly to Hardwick. "Just do it fast."

  "Need to borrow your van, bro," Hardwick said, shooting Gretchen a warning look.

  Garner stared at Hardwick. The room swam around him. "My van? I don't know, man . . ."

  "Hey - I leave you my I. D., and you in my place here, this is where I live, man, so you know for sure I'm comin' back."

  "Oh yeah." That seemed to make sense. Sure. Yeah. He passed over his car keys and Hardwick was up and out the door.

  "Motherfucker," Gretchen said. "I hope that wasn't all your money."

  Santa Monica

  It came to Constance suddenly, on a balmy early evening, with the sunlight turning the smog into a sluggish light-show at the horizon.

  She could run away from Ephram. All she had to do was suffer enough. And what would that mean? Misery. He'd shoot her full of hurt.

  So what? She looked at her maimed hand; the bandages over the stump of her missing finger. He'd cut off her finger and she hardly felt it. She was disfigured, and she didn't care. She could take it. Anyway, what could be worse than this seesawing between ecstasy and the steel rods?

  She was sitting on the back stoop of the place he'd rented, looking at the wasps making dabbing motions with their bodies at the rotting lemons in the corner of the backyard.
They didn't seem to want the lemons but couldn't quite leave them alone.

  Maybe they get sweeter when they're rotten. She looked at the fence. The gate in it.

  Ephram was in the shower. He'd be distracted, though she knew he was monitoring her somehow. But he couldn't be following her too closely. He hadn't punished her for these thoughts . . .

  "Go on," she said. "Let him."

  She stood up and started toward the gate. It was just across the yard but it seemed to take a long time to get there. Then she'd reached it, fumbled at the latch, pulled it open, stepped into the alley -

  It came like black lightning. Negative lightning from the negative constellations, from the hidden cracks in the sky, searing through a thousand light years to seek out the mote that was Constance, smashing into her head,

  scorching down her spine, exploding in her gut. She felt as if her intestines had exploded and blasted shit throughout her.

  She screamed and staggered but kept going.

  Constance!

  She was in a gravel alley. The mouth of the alley and the street were about forty yards to the left. She staggered that way - and then her legs stopped working. She fell, paralyzed.

  He'd reached into the motor-controls of her brain. He'd stopped her cold. She was lying on her face, with the lower half of her body turned into a granite statue, shivering with sickness and pain.

  Then it lifted. It was as if the wing of an angel had come between her and the pain. It was gone. The feeling in her legs returned. She felt no hurt but for the sting of a scrape where the gravel had dug her knee.

  All right, Constance. You dirty little whore. Go. You don't love me anyway. You never loved me. Go. Run away. Enjoy . . .

  The words echoed in her head - and then faded. She got to her feet. Was he really going to let her go? She jogged off down the alley. She got to the corner. She had no money - wait, she had a dollar in change, in her jeans.

  A dollar was enough for the city bus that came trundling along the boulevard toward her, as if eager for a long-anticipated rendezvous.

  Hollywood

  She knew this was the Sunset Strip, in Hollywood, and that the crowd standing in line outside the rock club was there to hear some headbangers. She could hear some band inside thundering away. It was about eleven p.m.

  and getting dark, and she was hungry and tired. That's about all she knew. She'd called her dad's house, using his credit card number, and some boy answered, "Garner residence." And she'd asked, "Who're you?" He said his name was James and he was house-sitting for Mr. Garner and she told him, "This is Constance. I just wanted to tell dad I'm okay and uh, I'm . . . Uh . . ."

  Then she'd hung up. She wasn't sure why. Why didn't she tell him where to find her? Why didn't she want her dad to find her?

  She thought about the cops, again. But she was a murderer. Even though Ephram had forced her, she had murdered people, she had cut them up and tortured them to death, and if she turned Ephram in the cops would get her too. They'd never believe she had been forced to do all those things. They'd never believe her about how Ephram had done it. And how could she prove it? She couldn't.

  Of course, she should at least turn Ephram in anonymously. Stop the killing. They'd be looking for any lead at all on the Wetbones killings. They'd check out the call.

  Why couldn't she do that? She could make the report for free, by calling 911. What was stopping her?

  She churned inside. Her emotions in such turmoil she couldn't move, couldn't turn this way or that. But one feeling came up, more stridently than any other. It took her a while to recognize it.

  "No," she said aloud. "No, forget it, no."

  She shook herself out of the stuck feeling, and walked up the line of headbangers. Not sure what she was looking for.

  She found it, though: she picked them out easily. Three boys, who'd clearly come here without girlfriends.

  Boys with fantastic, feathery, multicoloured haircuts and leather jackets; badges pinned between the spikes on the black lapels, military insignia, anything official-looking enough to be both glittery and out of place. "Hi you guys," she said, stopping near them as if she'd been about to walk by but had only just noticed them. "Didn't I meet you, like, somewhere in the Valley at that girl's party? What was her name?" She kept her maimed hand in her jacket pocket.

  "Oh - Olivia?" one of the boys said. He wore dark glasses and fingerless black leather gauntlets. Spiked belt, like the others, and spiked straps slung around his snakeskin cowboy boots.

  "Yeah," Constance said. "I think her name was something like that. Olivia. I was kind of drunk."

  "Oh wow," the taller, blond one with the big adam's apple said. Buying the lie completely. "I think I remember you. Are you, like, the chick that fell into the pool?"

  "Yeah. That was me."

  "Oh dudette," said the smallest and, judging from his slack mouth and dull eyes, the stupidest one of the three. He had black hair and zits and eyebrows that grew together. "You don't rully get stoned unless you like fall over, you know?" He said stoned so it sounded like stooned and know so it came out knoo. "An' why fuckin bother to get stooned if you don't rully get stooned you know?"

  "I know," she said, making herself smile. The line shuffled toward the door; she went with the three boys, peering anxiously at the burly doorman. "I'm not 21 - do you think I could get in this place?"

  "Oh yeah dudette," the small, stupid one said. "They got it fixed so if you don't order no drinks at the bar, you

  can be under 21 and still get in the club, you know? You just chill in the main room. Hey, you wanna smoke a number?"

  The small, stupid one paid her way in and snuck drinks to her, hovered close, touching her arm from time to time, checking out her tits, thinking he was getting over and he was finally going to get laid. The other two tried to bird-dog her too, when they could, but she stuck close to the stupidest one. She could handle him.

  The place was dark but fragmented with coloured light, pierced by the small spotlights striking at the stage in perfectly straight-edged shafts of whirling cigarette smoke; the walls reverberated with the roar of the Marshall stacks behind four air-humping rockers on a beer-sticky stage. Once she saw a handful of sweat from the capering lead singer fall onto the footlight next to the monitor speakers and sizzle back up in oily steam. The bass player was kind of cute.

  Huge waves of metallic sound rolled out of the Marshalls and over the crowd, so that most of the time Constance didn't have to make conversation, since it couldn't be heard anyway. The club was only a four-hundred-seater and the noise of the band would have filled an auditorium.

  She felt strange. Confused, hungry but not hungry, tired but wired, teetering on the crumbling edge of a cliff unseen in the darkness of her inner world. She had been stuffing her feelings into the cat-carrier for so long, guarding her thoughts so endlessly, she couldn't quite make sense of freedom from Ephram's super-vision. Every so often, she asked herself, again: Why don't I call

  the cops? Why don't I try harder to find dad? Why don't I try to get home to Alameda?

  She felt no guilt, not really, but a dull ache of disgust at having participated in the killings. It was like stepping in dogshit. She really hadn't had any choice. She'd tried refusing, three times, letting Ephram punish her - he could leave her lying on the floor paralyzed for hours, or move her limbs around like a puppet. Could make her part of it whether it was voluntary or not. And when he pushed her pleasure buttons, she responded automatically to do whatever was necessary to keep it going. There was no choice about that, not at those levels of pleasure. It was . . . programmed. Something she knew about from her dad.

  Oh God. Now there was some guilt: Thinking about her dad. How could she go on like this without getting in touch with him? He must think she was dead or something . . .

  Dead. What difference did it make who was dead, and who was briefly alive? Everyone, Ephram had pointed out, was dying: they were in a waiting room called life. When they were done wait
ing, their number was called and they were hustled through the door into death. Into nothingness. She'd seen so much death. It seemed so near and so easy. What did it matter if her father thought she was dead? She was near enough to it.

  She hugged herself, wincing as the guitar player went into another sonic tirade. She could make out the music in the wall of sound, but it was some kind of speed-metal thing, and she didn't relate. She liked Bon Jovi and Whitesnake because those guys had something sweet about them, even if they did act like hard-rock types sometimes.

  No matter what she thought about, that one feeling

  wouldn't go away. It was this painful pulling sensation in her gut. Like there was a crab in there, pulling on her innards with its serrated pincers, trying to get her to go somewhere. The discomfort was getting worse and worse.

  She felt something else, now, and sharply. A hollow aching. A big black hole of depression. The drinks and the pot hardly helped at all. It ached deeply in her, from her stomach down into her uterus. She thought she might collapse inward on herself . . .

  She imagined Ephram, smiling at her in an avuncular kind of way. His semi-erect little pee-pee radiating solace and waves of Reward . . .

  Now the stupid one with the single long eyebrow was yelling something in her ear. Something about did she want to go get loaded, somewhere. He was making his move.

  She had to get away from him, hanging around him just made her want to give in to that aching hunger . . .

  Made her want to kill him. It would feel good. It would be such a relief to kill him.

  She shouted in his ear: "Do you have any condoms?"

  His eyes lit up, hearing that. He shook his head. "No! But -"

  "They have some in the girl's bathroom here, I think. There's a condom machine. They cost a couple of dollars. Could you give me the money?"

  He nodded, trying not to grin, and gave her a small wad of cash. She squeezed his arm, smiled at him, and headed for the girl's bathroom. Once camouflaged by the crowd, she broke for the exit door.

  Ephram wasn't surprised to see her come back. He had known, and that was the only reason he had let her go. The inevitability of her return was almost tiresome.