From the Heart of Darkness (28 page)

Big Tom Mullens riffed through the photographs. “Jesus Christ, you
did
get Betty Jane Lawrence! Jesus Christ! She goes to school with my son, he's
dated
her!”

“Still think Prince Rupert wears padding?” Angelo asked.

“That's—God, I want to puke,” Big Tom groaned, handing the stills back to his smiling lieutenant. “His cock, it looks like it's
rotting.
”

“Well, LGV
is
an incurable disease, you know,” Smokie Joe agreed. “Not so very bad for a while, if you have the personality Prince Rupert does. And if you have an employer who gives you some fringe benefits.

“Want to see more?” he asked, waving at the scores of file folders. When Big Tom shook his head sickly, Joe slammed the drawer and continued, “Between payoffs and this kind of pressure, Angelo here isn't in any danger. Nick's operation is a little different, though, since the heat on him is mostly state and we don't have the same kind of locks on that.”

“What's the matter?” Big Tom asked, turning toward the outside door as if it were the gate of his prison. “Couldn't you get a picture of the whole Drug Enforcement Division having a circle jerk?”

“Oh, anything is possible,” Smokie Joe said agreeably, following the big racketeer down the hall. “We'll have better luck if we give the state boys something to go after besides us, though. Shall Nick arrange a little diversion for them, Big Tom?”

“Arrange whatever you want,” Mullens said. “I'm not sure I give a god damn about anything. Except that I don't want to see you any more today, and I don't want to see Angelo
ever.
”

He slammed the door behind him, within inches of Smokie Joe's smile. From the front of the house came a scream, then another and another in rhythmic pulses. The smile grew broader.

*   *   *

Big Tom Mullens slapped folded newspaper down in front of Smokie Joe who waited for him with a stack of account books. “I'm getting goddam sick and tired of people playing goddam games with me,” he snarled. “I get a call from Shiloh Academy saying Danny hasn't showed up for classes in a month and a half. I get here and Nick hands me this paper, asking how I like the job he did for me.
What
job?”

Joe calmly unfolded the paper. “It's not unusual for boys your son's age to drop out of school, you know,” he said.

“I'm not spending eight fucking grand a year for that kid to drop out!” Big Tom said. “He's getting chances I never had to really make it by going straight, mixing with all the kids whose folks had money without having to scramble for it. If Danny thinks he's going to throw that away, I'll blow his fucking head off!”

“The money doesn't matter, Big Tom,” said Smokie Joe. “You've got more money now than you could have dreamed of a year ago.” He smoothed the front page and rotated it back to Mullens. “Nick probably means the headline,” he said.

Big Tom mimed the words with his lips, then read aloud, “‘LSD Poisons Bloomington Reservoir; Hippie Terror-Plot Slays Scores; City Paralyzed.' What the Hell?”

“It's the diversion you told us to make,” Smokie Joe explained with a smile. “Acid goes through the treatment plant without being filtered out. We backed it up with a letter to the
Daily News
saying that unless marijuana were legalized and the army was disbanded in three days, we'd do the same to every other city in the country. So now the drug boys—and just about everybody else—are not only in Bloomington and out of our hair, they've just about dropped hard drugs statewide to hassle hippies about pot. Slick, isn't it?”

Big Tom's mouth was open but no sounds were coming from it. His palms were flat on the table to support his weight, but his forearms were trembling.

The door opened. Big Tom spun around. “Danny!” he cried. Then, “Hey, what in Hell happened to you?”

The boy wore a greasy sport coat and a pair of coordinated slacks from which most of the right cuff had been torn. While his father had gone to flesh in the past year, Danny was now almost as cadaverous as Angelo. He looked down at himself in mild surprise. “Hadn't paid much attention to how I look,” he said. “Not since I went to the doctor.” His hand clenched a sheet of slick paper which he thrust at his father. “Does this mean anything to you?” he demanded.

Big Tom scowled at the sheet, a page torn from a medical text. “I can't even read this crap,” he said. “No, it don't mean anything.”

“Then maybe this does.” The tone would have snapped Big Tom's head around even if the movement of Danny's hand from beneath his coat had not. Smokie Joe was watching the boy with an expression of bored resignation. That remained unchanged at the sight of a .45 automatic wavering in the thin fist.

“The men have business to take care of, boy,” Smokie Joe drawled. His fingers drummed absently among the account books. “Why don't you take your little playtoy out and close the door behind you?”

“You
bastard,
” the boy said, swinging the pistol full on the slim, seated figure. “You're the real cause, aren't you? I ought to use this on you.”

“Sure, kid,” Smokie Joe agreed, tilting his chair back a little, “but you don't have the guts. You probably don't even have the guts to use it on yourself.”

“Don't I?” Danny asked. He looked at the baffled rage in his father's eyes, then back to Smokie Joe's cold scorn. The pistol seemed to socket itself in his right ear of its own volition.

“Wait, Danny!” Big Tom cried. He threw his hands out as the gun blasted. The windows shuddered. Danny's eyeballs bulged and the ruin of his head squished sideways with the shot before his body slumped to the floor.

Big Tom more stumbled than knelt beside his son. Smokie Joe scooped up the torn page from where it had fallen. “Sure,” he said, “he probably tried curing it himself with what his room-mate had left over from a dose of clap last year. When the doctor told him what he had and what his chances were of getting rid of it now, Danny wouldn't want to believe him—who would?—and picked up a book to check it out. ‘
Lymphogranuloma venereum
is a disease of viral origin, usually transmitted by sexual intercourse.' Well, the only important thing about LGV is that it's like freckles—it won't kill you, but you'll carry it till you die.”

Mullens was squeezing his son's flaccid hands. “Normally just blacks get it,” Smokie Joe went on. He squatted beside the wax-faced racketeer. “That isn't … shall we say, a law of God? Give her a chance and a white girl can catch it. And given a chance, she can pass it on to.…” Joe's hand reached past Mullens to unhook Danny's belt. “Funny thing—you wouldn't have expected Betty Jane to have been interested in a man for a
long
time after Prince Rupert was done with her. Maybe she was too stoned to care, or maybe Danny-boy used a pretty—direct—approach. There's no real harm done by screwing a girl, is there?” He jerked down Danny's slacks.

The boy wore no underpants. His penis was distorted by three knotted sores slimed with yellow pus.

Big Tom choked and staggered upright. His right hand had wrapped itself around the butt of the automatic. Smokie Joe raised an eyebrow at it. “That's a mistake, Big Tom. Don't you hear that siren? When the police arrive, they're going to think you shot your own son. Better let me take care of it—just tell me to and I'll fix it so you won't be bothered. You don't care
how
I take care of it, do you?” He stretched out his hand toward the pistol.

“I'll see you in Hell first!” Big Tom grated.

“Sure, Big Tom,” said Smokie Joe. “If that's how you want it.”

Big Tom crashed out the six shots still in the pistol's magazine. Amid the muzzle blasts rolled the peals of Smokie Joe's Satanic laughter.

CHILDREN OF THE FOREST

When Teller came in from the field, gnarled as his hoe-handle and looking twice his forty years, his wife said, “The cow has gone dry, man.”

Teller scowled. She had slapped out her words like bolts from a crossbow. He understood them, understood also why she was whetting the black iron blade of their only knife. From his wife, warped and time-blackened by the same years that had destroyed him, Teller turned to his daughter Lena.

And Lena was a dazzle of sunlight in the darkened hut.

She was six, though neither of her parents could have told a stranger that without an interval of mumbling and dabbing fingers to cracked lips. But there were no strangers. In the dozen years since the Black Death had swept southern Germany, the track that once led to the high road and thence to Stuttgart had merged back into the Forest. The hut was all of civilization, a beehive with two openings in its thatch. Teller now stooped in the doorway; above him was the roof hole that served as chimney for the open fire in the center of the room. By that fire sat Lena, easing another baulk of wood under the porridge pot before looking at her father. Her smile was timid, but the joy underlying it was as real as the blond of her sooty hair. She dared not show Teller the welts beneath her shift, but she knew that her mother would not beat her in his presence.

“I said, the cow has gone dry,” the woman repeated. The rasp of iron on stone echoed her words. “You know we can't go on until the harvest with three mouths and no milk.”

“Woman, I'll butcher—”

“You will not.” She slid to the floor and faced him, bandy-legged and shorter on her own legs than when sitting on the stool. “The meat will rot in a month, we have no salt. Three mouths will not last the summer on the cow's meat, man.

“Three mouths will not last the summer.”

She was an iron woman, black-faced and black-hearted. She did not look at Lena, who cowered as her mother stepped forward and held out the wood-hafted knife to Teller. He took it, his eyes as blank as the pit of his mouth opening and closing in his beard. “Perhaps … I can hunt more…?”

“Hoo, coward!” mocked the woman. “You're afraid to leave the clearing now for the woods devils, afraid to go out the door to piss in the night!” The reek of the wall across from the pine-straw bedding proved her statement. “You'll not go hunting, man.”

“But—”

“Kill her.
Kill her!
” she shrieked, and Lena's clear voice wailed hopelessly as a background to the raucous cries. Teller stared at the weapon as though it were a viper which had crawled into his hand in the night. He flung it from him in a fury of despair, not hearing it clack against the whetstone or the
ping!
of the blade as it parted.

The woman's brief silence was as complete as if the knife had pierced her heart instead of shattering. She picked up the longest shard, a hand's breadth of iron whose edge still oozed light, and cradled it in her palms. Her voice crooned without meaning, while Teller watched and Lena burrowed her face into the pine needles.

“We can't all three eat and live to the harvest, man,” the woman said calmly. And Teller knew that she was right.

“Lena,” he said, not looking at the girl but instead at his cloak crumpled on the earthen floor. It was steerhide, worn patchily hairless during the years since he had bartered eggs for it from a passing peddler. That one had been the last of the peddlers, nor were there chickens any more since the woods demons had become bolder.

“Child,” he said again, a little louder but with only kindness in his voice. He lifted the cloak with his left hand, stroked his daughter between the shoulder blades with his right. “Come, we must go for a little journey, you and I.”

The woman backed against the hut wall again. Her eyes and the knife edge had the same hard glitter.

Lena raised her face to her father's knee; his arm, strong for all its stringiness, lifted her against his chest. The cloak enveloped her and she thrashed her head free. “I'm hot, Papa.”

“No, we'll play a game,” Teller said. He hawked and spat cracklingly on the fire before he could continue. “You won't look at the way we go, you'll hide your head. All right, little one?”

“Yes, Papa.” Her curls, smooth as gold smeared with river mud, bobbled as she obediently faced his chest and let him draw the leather about her again.

“The bow, woman,” Teller said. Silently she turned and handed it to him: a short, springy product of his own craftsmanship. With it were the three remaining arrows, straight-shafted with iron heads, but with only tufts remaining of the fletching. His jaw muscles began to work in fury. He thrust the bow back to her, knots of anger dimpling the surface of his bare left arm. “String it! String it, you bitch, or—”

She stepped away from his rage and quickly obeyed him, tensing the cord without difficulty. The wood was too supple to make a good bow, but a stiffer bowshaft would have snapped the bark string. Teller strode from the hut, not deigning to speak again to his wife.

There was no guide but the sun, and that was a poor, feeble twinkling through the ranked pines and spruces. It was old growth, save in slashes where age or lightning had brought down a giant and given opportunity to lesser growth. Man had not made serious inroads on this portion of the Forest even before the Plague had stripped away a third of the continent's population. Fear had driven Teller and his wife to flee with their first child, leaving their village for a lonely clearing free from contamination. But there were other fears than that of the Black Death, things only hinted at in a bustling hamlet. In the Forest they became a deeper blackness in the shadows and a heavy padding on moonless nights.

They were near him now.

Teller lengthened his stride, refusing to look to the sides or behind him. He was not an intelligent man, but he knew instinctively that if he acknowledged what he felt, he would be lost. He would be unable to move at all, would remain hunched against a tree trunk until either starvation or the demons came for him.