Concrete Calling

31Jan10

You knew this would happen. You saw it coming a mile away.

You still can’t get your leg out of the cement.

It started so routine. Okay, fine. You are lying to yourself. There is no such thing. It just doesn’t work that way. You can pretend, but in the end you were making it up as you went, hoping that none of the men in the suits with the bulges from guns, with the guns in plain sight, with guns smoking from the recently spent cacophony of hollow point shells that shredded a group of workers on strike would notice that you were scared and stupid.

And you told everyone where the workers would be gathering, when, why. You were a rat and a scab and you wet yourself in shame as your fellow workers became red stains across the wall.

Which would have been one thing in the early portion of the century with the unions and the union busters. But this is 1967 and you are a sex worker in the Pearl District of The City and the people dead just a few feet away from you are all buxom, hung, naked for other reasons. And all very dead.

And the men with the guns also have badges. All very official. All given a kiss from Uncle Sam and walking around with that same “In God We Trust” mentality that was killing people in South-east Asia. They walk forward and admire their handiwork. Exclaim about who shot who, what torn appendage they had taken time to make sure came all the way off, regrets expressed for ears still attached, eyes not popped.

One of them approaches you and chuckles to see you in your weekend state. “Don’t feel bad, kid. You did a good thing today. Your country is proud of you,” he says in a tone that twists every word into a dagger in your bladder. You are leaking fluid and you run then, anything to get away from the smell and the memories.

And you end up out back of the warehouse pointed towards the rail line that once coursed through this area and brought jobs and commerce of a less seedy kind. And you fall to your knees and cry and continue to wet yourself. An alarming amount of liquid is flowing down your leg and by the time you pull yourself together long enough to take a look at it you find that you have been shot in the upper thigh.

And you didn’t even notice.

And you have been kneeling in fresh cement and the liquid has coagulated and that sinking feeling you felt as you had your head in your hands and your eyes pointed to the sky wasn’t imaginary.

The good news is that your leg sunk in far enough to cover the wound and stop the bleeding. The bad news is that you have been sitting here for almost twenty hours now and nobody has found you.

But you never were memorable.


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Grinning Eyes

29Jan10

“To breathe is to acknowledge that one is alive, and to be alive is to acknowledge that there is something feral, bestial, primitive inside of us that seeks to breathe again and again,” he said.

Tabitha Burroughs, sweet  and innocent, her breast heaving in a rapture born of simple curiosity mixed with a primal instinct of its own, absorbed every word from the lecture as if it were cast upon stone by peels of lightning.

Alice hummed and rolled her eyes and sighed. She had rarely chanced to be so bored by anything in her life. The winter-haired gentleman with the preposterous mustache kept talking, pontificating, really. He wore the fatigues of a man that had spent time on safari but he had the hands and skin of someone that had sat inside a building, not a tent, which would at least give cause for insects and sweat and malaria, no this man had been in a plantation house while different beasts were killed and brought forward to him by tribal natives and well paid and highly experienced men who understood something of the speech he was claiming as personal experience.

Alice watched as these same men, hopefully paid extra to keep their mouths shut, shuffled and sat uneasily on the podium behind the blow-hard.

Tabitha continued to palpitate audibly. Her skin was all bumps, hills and valleys of expectation and anticipation. Alice sighed again and caressed Tabitha in a gesture of acquittal, acceptance, but held fast to reminder her what was at stake and how they would proceed on this, the least affable and worthy of targets.

Tabitha made the introductions as the lecture ended in a wholly unearned smattering of applause that crescendo into a headache that Alice would have to log as one more thing wrong with attending the Anthropology Foundation’s annual gala. Certainly Tabitha’s mother had built the thing and it was important for Tabitha to keep these old ties to the past open, but it was a beleaguering tax on Alice and being uncomfortable was something almost completely foreign to the young woman.

Professor Lawry Boon III was a man of spastic body language when not behind a podium. His hands shook like leaves and his joules flapped in an audible way that gave him a sort of reverse lisp. Everything without a th sound ended in a soft flup that could in no way be mistaken for charming. He moved in a cock-eyed way as well, one of his legs was either shorter than the other or he had a foot injury he was trying to pretend didn’t exist. He wore a pith helmet, despite being indoors, and his mustache, great and gray and wavy made him snuffle like a dog.

Tabitha greeted the man with that subtle mixture of high breeding and broken moral compass that grabbed and held the attention of men in an instant. She wore a fine gown that slooped and opened in just the right places that when she was exuberant and over eager would open and reveal the better part of her assets. Boon didn’t need much coaxing, didn’t need much flattery of his words and position, did not need more than the first few syllables of an invitation to speak in private before he promised to meet them after the rounds of the gathering. He had a room there, in the museum held by the Foundation for times when he was not abroad.

Tabitha and Alice were given a time and busied themselves with their own rounds of flattery and idle chatter before quitting the festivities for their promised meeting.

They arrived precisely on time, as was always Alice’s prerogative and found that Boon, a laughable excuse for the alpha male he pretended to be, was already inside and gestured them in with an offering of fine brandy wearing a smoking jacket made of Persian silk and a garland of Indonesian flowers that produced a heady aroma that sent Tabitha into tithers and bothered Alice instantly and profoundly.

Boon was a very different man here, in his private chambers. The wounded gait was gone, the hands were steady, and the grin within his eyes changed from a greedy glimmer of career advancement to the steely grin of a predator that had already won, but wanted to keep the game alive.

Tabitha downed the brandy and laughed that childish trill of constants and vowels that blurted from her mouth and fell in a clatter to the carpet. Tabitha’s laugh was all bells and starlings, a bright and piercing cacophony of unadulterated bliss. Boon smiled under his mustache, darker here in the dim light, coated with something both reddish and brown. He had stopped snuffling.

Alice frowned at the setting, the fire set in the back wall, the enormous and numerous displays of wild beasts in the form of rugs and heads and full reliefs that jutted and wound their way around the entrance hall, the sitting room, the parlor, but not the master bedroom. Boon wasted no time in sweeping the young women from room to room, with only a scant comment about a particular animal or display, one full stop to refill the brandies, then on to the bedroom.

Tabitha was pie-eyed taking it all in. The scent of the flower garland that Boon wore had her spinning and nearly tripping to the bed where she fell flat and turned over and giggled and giggled. Boon shut the door and locked it with a heavy brass key, chained it, barred it. Smiled as he turned. A ghastly look, the look of a man washed ashore to find food after a week on a raft. Hunger and greed did nothing to describe it. Desire blushed in the face of it. Want and need were left behind miles ago. This was a look of divine certainty.

He moved from the door to the bed in an instant and produced a small pair of scissors from the pocket of his smoking jacket as he moved. He tore into Tabitha’s dress and removed the garment in one deft upswing. Not a single bump of her lilac and cream skin was disturbed, so precise was the motion. Alice brightened slightly, Tabitha’s instincts were not so far gone at all.

Boon raised the barely conscious and giggling Tabitha up and spread her arms and legs gently to the corners of the bed. He caressed her face and traced his hands down and up her body. “You have such lovely, perfect skin,” he said.

“As do you,” said Alice. “Just the right amount of age and wisdom and sadism. I wonder what your heart will taste like.”

Boon’s smile dropped for the first time since Tabitha had laid eyes upon him at the outset of the evening. Alice perked up and began smiling for the first time since they had left the penthouse that afternoon.

Boon’s hungry eyes and easy smile worked their way out into a look of horror, though to his credit he did not cry as Alice smacked him in the neck with one of Tabitha’s rings and they released the nerve toxin of some little known spider into the anthropologist and taxidermist. He did not flinch as the girls cut and peeled the skin from his arms and legs and showed it to him. He did not scream as they disjointed and dismembered him.

He was, after all a professional, and a professional could always admire quality work when he saw it.


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Not All Endings

29Jan10

His names was Masingal. It was foreign, but country unknown. He had an accent, thick like coffee left out at night, but it wasn’t distinct, lacking all the usual markers of country, race, place. He had set a ransom of fifty thousand for the Parkers. And he had sent both of her pinkies in as proof. They had been knocked off with a hammer. Those marks were distinct. Crushing and bruising before finally the skin had enough give that the bones tore through and the separation was complete.

Masingal may not have a specific origin, may not have an ethnicity, but he had a signature.

The name is Andrew Smith, I go by Hound, as a nickname, attached and stuck to by the missus, Alice. She didn’t like the work, but she didn’t see the work. They always called in Hound Smith when they needed someone found, and people went missing in these parts frequently. You would think a place as big as Oklahoma City would be see its share of this kind of crap, but it saw two, maybe three times as much as places even bigger. Human trafficking was supposed to be a game for the port cities. Easy access, quick delivery. But three is something to be said about centralized locations. And Oklahoma City is geographically the center of the whole country. It may not have produced any of the trends of 1958, it may not have started any fads or popular movements, but it had seen them all come and go from New York to Los Angeles, shipped the people from Detroit back down to Houston, taken the losers from Las Vegas and sent them back to Chicago.

It took extra care to process those poor souls caged and delivered via Miami to the likes of The City and the dry, dead flats of Hooper and Carligan, but it had its pride, and it tried to keep its head above the smell.

But times were tough and the ports were getting wary. Demand was up and production was down. So the people being bought and sold and traded up were no longer women from Russia, Japan, China, Easter Europe, Africa, Brazil, no; now it was time to take the women from the heartland, daughters of farmers and coal workers the local salt-of-the-earth, and ship them around. But American’s were an gamblers and dreamers so they offered odds. You had choices here. You didn’t have to lose your daughters, sisters, would-be brides, not if you could outmatch the open market price for her.

And so I was sitting outside of the saddest road house in the south eastern chunk of Oklahoma waiting at a pay phone with a bag of money, a half-loaded gun, and a less than a little hope waiting for a call and instructions to make the drop.

It would prove to be an ugly affair.

I had been waiting for about three hours, nursing a combination of beer and coffee, trying to keep my nerves quiet and my head sharp when the barkeep, a guy named Gill, engaged me in conversation.

“You been here a while, you waitin’ for someone?” he said.

“Maybe, maybe they got held up,” I said.

“Helluva place to meet someone, should have just had them meet you in Tulsa,” he said.

“Maybe, but they were going to call first,” I said.

Gill chuckles, wipes a hand across his stubbly mustache and clean shaven face and nods at the pay phone I’ve drilled holes in with a steady gaze of hours. “Not here I would hope. Damn thing hasn’t rang in months, not since the line was cut by a tree last September.”

My gaze tracked up along the building and to the severed line that should have connected to the power pole that connected the broken wooden building with the rest of the world.

“Shit,” I said. The Parkers got their daughter back. Worse for wear. Down both pinkies, took a chunk out of her face and broke both legs. I heard they had to amputate. She may have started a debutante and worth her weight in cash, but by the time Masingal got done proving what he would do he had worked himself straight out of a payday. The Parkers weren’t done with me, though.

They sicced Masingal on my office. They took Alice, they burned down our home and my office. They took it all away.

And the whole time I was sitting with a bag full of money and a half-loaded gun more drunk than sober near a broken damn phone.


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Suburban Shadows

24Jan10

McKinley Hargraves took a cautious look around the neighborhood. His eyes were coal beads in a leather sack. His hair was cropped short and split by a scar across the left edge of his scalp. His jaw held onto a toothpick like a drowning man to a raft. His chest was sunken, nearly concave from three missing ribs. He had to walk slow and stooped forward to keep breathing. He was a ghastly sight, too tall, too thin, too hard, too mangled for the suburb, too kind for The City. His watchful, unblinking eyes saw nothing important, nothing amiss, nothing notable, so he entered his house at the corner of Bleeker and Robison and called it a day.

Across the street a second set of eyes blinked rapidly, nervous and innocent, the gaze of someone that was receiving information but not processing it, not inspecting it, not judging it, the gaze of a child. The kid, Billy by name –they were all named Billy– watched Hargraves enter his house and then ran inside, spooked and curious and a mixture of questions suspended in a web of limbs. “Mom! Mom! Mom?”

The owner of this familial moniker did not appear. Billy ran from the entry to the sitting room, to the living room, to the kitchen. A figure sat in the darkness of the kitchen there in the dim evening light, staring out the window with a gaze as steady and clear as a castle sentry, a lighthouse worker, an assassin tracking a mark. “Calm down, kid. Your mom and pop are out shopping for dinner. Be home in an hour. Sit down.”

Billy brightened at the shadowy figure and rushed forward to wrap his arms around the man who sat in the dark looking out a window and tapping a scarred hand on his grey trousers. “Uncle Rory!” cried Billy with the exuberance and enthusiasm of a fly in goo.

Rory scooped up Billy and placed him on a knee facing out the window. “You want to hear a story to pass the time, Billy?” Billy scrunched up his face and turned his head and nodded with force and vigor. “Okay okay. Calm down and listen close. I’m going to tell you a little story about your neighbor there.”

“Years ago your mother knew Mr. Hargraves there. He was in his second year at university, she was just getting started on her own here in The City. She left your pop back in Kansas and was looking to find a place for herself in the world…

It didn’t go well for Janet Boone. A tough broad, sure, but not in the right places, like a prize fighter with a glass jaw and a gut. She could hold her own as long as she was on the offensive, but she couldn’t take a blow. She left the mundane life in Kansas to find something of her own. Privileged to be the daughter of a learned woman and a professional father. She was a librarian, he was a dentist. They lived like royalty out there in the country.

But it wasn’t all roses and lollipops. Janet had some issues, got hooked up with a young lad that turned out to be the distant bastard son of the Smith family. No real power, but enough influence that he didn’t get punished for his mistakes, other people did. And Janet was young and headstrong. Long story short, she had to flee as much as she left.

Hargraves was just another man. A person trying to build a life using the tools he was given, a sharp mind, a quick whit, the ability to read people. He didn’t want much out of life, just to learn, get a job passing that knowledge along. Then he met Janet.

They complimented each other, at first. He was defensive, tough as steel and iron in his blood. She couldn’t hold her own but fought like a hellcat. Together they got into a lot of trouble in this town.

A romance bloomed, as it often does in these situations. She needed stability, safety, a wall between her and the past. He needed someone that could crack the shell and climb in and keep him company, remind him that there was a world out there. They come back to Kansas together. They are into each other in that way that the rest of the world just drops down and bleeds out. They live in their own space and everyone else is an extra in a road movie about them.

But then it goes awry. She sees your pop, remembers what she has. Gets scared during a confrontation with the Smith boy and Hargraves. Bad memories well up in her, she’s got no defenses, no way of weathering the storm and lives from day to day by hiding behind anyone that will stand in front of her. She lashes out and Hargraves is wounded. He let her too far in and he can’t stop her. He cracks under the assault but still has to go out and confront the Smith boy to save her.

And it gets worse. Hargraves is distraught, cracked, but he doesn’t know how to stop, doesn’t know when to lay down and let them count him out. And your mom is all instinct, she sends your pop out too. Hargraves confronts the Smith boy. Has it out with him, has to protect the woman he loves even though she just destroyed him. He comes out of that barn with the broken ribs and a chest wound. Two shots to the chest have shattered his chest cavity and he’s going to bleed out if he doesn’t get help and soon. Which is when your pop shows up with a shovel and nearly takes his head off.”

Billy is pie-eyed, his lip quivers. Rory smiles. “Hargraves survived the event. Took him years to get back on his feet, but he does. He comes back to The City and goes back to his life. He finishes school. He teaches. Your mom and dad move from place to place around The City as work an opportunity demand. But Hargraves is always there. Always watching the house, always around.”

Billy sops at his nose and eyes with a grass-stained hand. “But why Uncle Rory?”

Rory Smith smiled, “Because some people just never learn.”


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