I thought of Shirley saying We killed a thinking being and George saying that was bullshit.
Except it wasn’t bullshit. The bat and the fish hadn’t come equipped with things that looked like transistor radios because they had been animals. Today’s visitor — which we’d hacked to pieces with tools we’d taken from the pegboard — had been something quite different.
However loathsome it had seemed to us, no matter how instinctively we’d — what was that word? — we’d repudiated it, Shirley was right: it had been a thinking being. We’d killed it nevertheless, hacked it to pieces even as it lay on the concrete, holding out the severed stump of its trunk in surrender and screaming for the mercy it must have known we’d never give it.
Couldn’t give it. And that didn’t horrify me. What did was a vision of the shoe on the other foot. Of Ennis Rafferty falling into the midst of other creatures like this, things with yellow knobs for heads under tangled masses of pink ropes that might have been hair. I saw him dying beneath their flailing, acid-lined trunks and hooking talons, trying to scream for mercy and choking on air he could barely breathe, and when he lay dead before them, dead and already beginning to rot, had one of them worked his weapon out of its holster? Had they stood there looking at it under an alien sky of some unimaginable color? As puzzled by the gun as I had been by the ‘radio’? Had one of them said We just killed a thinking being to which another had responded That’s bullshit? And as I thought these things, I also thought I ought to get out of there right away. Unless I wanted to investigate such questions in person, that was. So what did I do? What did I do next? I’ve never told anyone that, but I might as well tell now; seems foolish to come this far and then hold back.
I decided to get in the trunk.
I could see myself doing it. There would be plenty of space; you know how big the trunks of those old cars were. When I was a kid we used to joke that Buicks and Cadillacs and Chryslers were mob cars because there was room enough for either two polacks or three guineas in the trunk. Plenty of space. Old Huddie Royer would get in, and lie on his side, and
reach up, and pull the trunk closed. Softly. So it made just the faintest click. Then he’d lie there in the dark, breathing stale air from the Puff-Pak and holding the ‘radio’ to his chest.
There wouldn’t be much air left in the little tank, but there’d be enough. Old Huddie would just curl up and lie there and keep smilin and then . . . pretty soon . . .
Something interesting would happen.
I haven’t thought of this in years, unless it was in the kind of dreams you can’t remember when you wake up, the ones you just know were bad because your heart is pounding and your mouth is dry and your tongue tastes like a burnt fuse. The last time I thought consciously about standing there in front of the Buick Roadmaster’s trunk was when I heard George Morgan had taken his own life. I thought of him out there in his garage, sitting down on the floor, maybe listening to the kids playing baseball under the lights over on McClurg Field around the other side of the block and then with his can of beer finished taking up the gun and looking at it. We might have switched over to the Beretta by then, but George kept his Ruger. Said it just felt right in his hand. I thought of him turning it this way and that, looking into its eye. Every gun has an eye. Anyone who’s ever looked into one knows that. I thought of him putting the barrel between his teeth and feeling the hard little bump of the gunsight against the roof of his mouth. Tasting the oil. Maybe even poking into the muzzle with the tip of his tongue, the way you might tongue the mouthpiece of a trumpet -when you’re getting ready to blow. Sitting there in the corner of the garage, still tasting that last can of beer, also tasting the gun-oil and the steel, licking the hole in the muzzle, the eye the slug comes out of at twice the speed of sound, riding a pad of hot expanding gases. Sitting there smelling the grass caked under the Lawnboy and a little spilled gasoline. Hearing kids cheer across the block. Thinking of how it felt to hit a woman with two tons of Ford police cruiser, the thud and slew of it, seeing drops of blood appear on the windshield like the debut of a Biblical curse and hearing the dry gourdlike rattle of something caught in one of the wheelwells, what turned out to be one of her sneakers. I thought of all that and I think it was how it was for him because I know it’s how it was for me. I knew it was going to be horrible but I didn’t care because it would be kind of funny, too. That’s why I was smiling. I didn’t want to get away. I don’t think George did, either. In the end, when you really decide to do it, it’s like falling in love. It’s like your wedding night. And I had decided to do it.
Saved by the bell, that’s the saying, but I was saved by a scream: Shirley’s. At first it was just a high shriek, and then there were words. ‘Help! Please! Help me! Please, please help me!’
It was like being slapped out of a trance. I took two big steps away from the Buick’s trunk, wavering like a drunk, hardly able to believe what I’d been on the verge of. Then Shirley screamed again and I heard Eddie yell: ‘ What’s wrong with him, George? What’s happening to him?’
I turned and ran out the shed door.
Yeah, saved by the scream. That’s me.
THEN:
Eddie
It was better outside, so much better I almost felt, as I hurried along after George, that the whole thing in Shed B had been a dream. Surely there were no monsters with pink strings growing out of their heads and trunks with eyes in them and talons with hair growing out of them. Reality was our subject in the back seat of Unit 6, that debonair, girlfriend-punching puke, let’s give him a great big hand, ladies and gentlemen, Brian Lippy. I was still afraid of the Buick — afraid as I’d never been before or have been since — and I was sure there was a perfectly good reason to feel that way, but I could no longer remember what it was. Which was a relief.
I trotted to catch up with George. ‘Hey, man, I might have gotten a little carried away in there. If I did — ‘
‘Shit,’ he said in a flat, disgusted voice, stopping so quick I almost ran into his back. He was standing at the edge of the parking lot with his hands curled into fists that were planted on his hips. ‘Look at that.’ Then he called, ‘Shirley! You all right?’
‘Fine,’ she called back. ‘But Mister D . . . aw sugar, there goes the radio. I have to get that.’
‘Doesn’t this bite,’ George said in a low voice.
I stepped up beside him and saw why he was upset. 6’s right rear window had been broken clean out to the doorframe, undoubtedly by a pair of cowboy boots with stacked heels. Two or three kicks wouldn’t have done that, maybe not even a dozen, but we’d given my old school chum Brian plenty of time to go to town. Rowdy-dow and a hot-cha-cha, as my old mother used to say. The sun was reflecting fire off a thousand crumbles of glass lying heaped on the hottop. Of Monsieur Brian Lippy himself, there was no sign. ‘FUCK! I shouted, and actually shook my fists at Unit 6.
We had a burning chemical tanker over in Pogus County, we had a dead monster rotting in our back shed, and now we also had one escaped neo-Nazi asshole. Plus a broken cruiser window. You might think that’s not much compared to the rest, kid, but that’s because you’ve never had to fill out the forms, beginning with 24-A-24, Damaged Property, PSP and ending with Complete Incident Report, Fill Out All Appropriate Fields. One thing I’d like to know is why you never have a series of good days in which one thing goes wrong. Because it’s not
that way, at least not in my experience. In my experience the bad shit gets saved up until you have a day when everything comes due at once. That was one of those days. The granddaddy of them all, maybe.