Count Geiger's Blues (18 page)
34
A Garage Party in Philippi
For over two months,
the stolen go-truck that Elrod Juitt had bought from a pair of junglebunny gangbangers out of Satan’s Cellar had stewed in his garage at the Auto Parts Reservation outside of Philippi. Juitt had neither painted the truck nor torn down for scrap the Therac 4-J in its loadbed. Every three or four days, Juitt would have Larry Glenn Wilkins throw back the tarp covering the truck and start up its engine—just to exercise it. Mostly, though, Juitt ignored the vehicle and the Therac 4-J.
One afternoon in early March, Larry Glenn roared up from town on a beat-up Harley—he’d totaled his Camaro—and found Juitt cradling the telephone receiver in his tobacco-scented office. Larry Glenn waited for Juitt to hang up.
“They’s a couple of Salonika cops, plainclothes guys, at the Philippi Inn, Elrod. Jim Percy”—the inn’s owner—”says they’re here to investigate a stolen security-cop truck. They’ve spent the whole day axing about you, pumping folks.”
Juitt blinked. “You think they plan to come see me today?”
“Who knows, Elrod?”
“We better get humping.” Juitt led the way back and through an auto-parts aisle toward the garage. “Fisher,” he yelled at an employee, “keep an eye on things here! Me and Larry Glenn got work to do.”
In the garage, they unveiled the truck and set to work, sanding off security-firm logos and filing off the identity numbers on the engine block and chassis. They filled and sanded. Wearing goggles, plastic caps, and stained coveralls, they spray-painted the truck candy-apple red—every part of it, but the loadbed and the Therac 4-J.
“What you gonna do wi’ that whatzit?” Larry Glenn nodded at the Therac 4-J.
“It’s no bigger a worry than the truck. We got to finish up and get ’em both out.”
The garage stank like a turpentine factory so badly that Larry Glenn couldn’t even drink a beer for the reek. Finally, the truck was like new. Larry Glenn wished that it was his. He could take his Harley to dirt-track races in it, haul pine straw or new potatoes or horse manure, and make him some extra money.
“Here.” Juitt tossed him the keys. “Hide the sucker behind the smokehouse on yore place. When we sell ’er, I’ll give you a third of the take.”
“Jeez, Elrod. Thanks.” A wish come true.
Larry Glenn drove the go-truck down a narrow country road to the half acre he’d inherited from Daddy Wilkins last October. He had family there, his wife Missy and their daughter Callie-Lisbeth, a four-year-old going on forty, but they probably wouldn’t be waiting up for him at six A.M. He would not’ve wanted them to either.
It was just soothing, somehow, to stand out behind the collapsing smokehouse, sixty feet from the used doublewide where Daddy Wilkins had had his stroke—soothing to be gazing on the candy-apple-red truck that might one day be his. Eventually, he covered it with canvas, cut some evergreen branches, and laid them atop the canvas as camouflage.
Inside the trailer, he lay down on Daddy Wilkins’s bed, so as not to disturb either Missy or Callie-Lisbeth, and slept until almost noon.
35
Big Mister Sinister
Tim Bowman had been incognito ever since his firing.
Like a villain in a
Decimator
comic, he had gone underground. There actually were mephitic-smelling, interconnected sewers, dank and intricately bricked, under the crowded alleys of Satan’s Cellar. On the day after his firing, Bowman prised up a manhole cover not far from P. S. Annie’s, lowered himself into the opening, pulled the manhole cover clankingly back into place, and worked his way rung by rung into the dripping caverns of the undercity.
The sewer was surprisingly like the sewers Bowman had drawn as a comics-infatuated kid: echoey, wet, claustrophobia inducing, rat haunted. With a flashlight beam, he carved a path along a concrete ledge on the main tunnel’s inner wall. Ahead of him lay catacombs, grottoes, tributary tunnels, slopes, niche-in-the-bricks hideouts: safe places for drug smugglers, pokeweed addicts, and gangsters of the notorious Nick City crime syndicate. You could also probably find madmen, losers, and failed suicides down here. Bowman, psychically aseethe, had come below to think about his meteoric descent into a category encompassing all three types.
First, he had no family now that F. Deane Finesse had cut him loose. A foster child through his thirteenth year, he had fled a poultry farm near Tuscaloosa to make his way to Salonika, where, for three years, he had survived squeegeeing, for extorted pay, the windshields of cars stalled in traffic. He’d also sold hubcaps, boosted office supplies, and slept in the pews of unlocked churches from Sinatro Heights to Chattahoochee Park. While a vagrant, Bowman had taught himself to draw, copying the figures in shoplifted comics, on humorous billboards, even from the photos and funny papers of wind-tumbled
Salonika Urbanite
pages. Without a tutor, he’d served the apprenticeship that one day brought him to the notice of F. Deane Finesse, who, at Bowman’s urging, incorporated and funded the home-grown enterprise known as Uncommon Comics.
Now, hiking a sewer pipe or wading in the slop crawling like blackstrap molasses about his ankles, Bowman was on his own again. He knew how to cope, he’d learned as a kid. But the image of what he’d achieved, and the full-color grandeur of what he’d lost, rode him like stones. He thought seriously of submerging himself in the underground sludge and fatally inhaling it. Why not? He was the world’s—well, at least this city’s—redheaded stepchild, and he saw no future for himself apart from the wonder and security of UC’s Unique Continuum.
Hours, maybe days, passed as Bowman vacillated on the crucial issue of self-extinguishment. Pondering, he threw a broken brick at a water rat the size of a Pekinese. At the intersection of two tunnels, he stole the soggy French fries of a snockered bum asleep there. He scarfed the dregs of a bottle of Strawberry Street Wine that he’d found in a rusty grocery cart capsized in a tunnel under Satan Cellar’s trolley terminus. He kept his eyes open for victims to roll, rodents to stone, and organized human predators to dodge. He brooded on his options.
Don’t off
yourself
, a voice advised him. Get the creep who did this to you.
F. Deane Finesse?
Hell no. He lifted you out of poverty. If you’ve fallen back into it, it’s because circumstances beyond your, and old F. Deane’s control, worked to pull you down.
What circumstances? Who?
Think. Tuck your carroty hair up under your thinking cap and . . . think! He did, and it came to him—the exact Who responsible for his descent into the smelly depths. His memory of the event that had sabotaged him, that had made everything go blooie, set him moving again, slogging through Satan Cellar’s syrupy muck toward a ladder up and a manhole out.
*
Bowman emerged in an alley. A stray dog fled,
ki-yi-yi
-ing as if he’d kicked it. A whore, in laddered black hose and a skirt not much larger than a dish towel, gasped and ducked into a doorway. Bowman trudged past, shedding oily ropes of toilet paper and braided waste matter, a living replica of the Mulch Creature from issues 47-54 of
Mantisman
. He met other people in the midnight alleys, but none tried to mess with him. They all used the avoidance strategies of the yelping stray or the startled hooker.
There was an all-night gun shop in a cul-de-sac just off West Bush Street. Bowman schlepped down this alley and caromed into the shop like a mud-plastered tackling dummy. The faces of the wizened owner and his three patrons, one in full Klan gear, revolved toward him with looks ranging from doubt to full admiration. Bowman approached the owner, whose crease-lined mouth reminded him of a ventriloquist’s dummy’s, and declared, “I need a pistol.”
“How many?” the owner said hopefully.
“One. A small one I can hide on my person.”
“I’ve got a two-for-one special tonight. Or buy three makes of different caliber and get twenty percent off a twelve-piece Syrian assault rifle.”
“A pistol. One pistol.”
The owner showed Bowman stub-barreled, silver-plated, pearl-handled, double-hammered, and half-cocked pistols. Bowman chose the smallest, and cheapest, Saturday-night lethal. He also bought a box of bullets and loaded his pistol on the premises.
“Twenty-seven ninety-eight,” said the owner. “Plus tax.”
“Shit,” Bowman said, spinning the dented handgun’s chambers.
“Well, you look like a decent sort. I’ll knock off five. And you can forget the tax.”
Bowman pulled out his wallet. Sleezer and his friends recoiled from this strange object, but the limp bills in Bowman’s hand soon calmed them.
*
Next stop: SatyrFernalia.
Griff Sienko and his pet gerbil were on duty in the upper-story costume bay, Griff watching the Pornucopia Channel on a wrist-corsage-sized TV, the gerbil sitting paws-up on the checkerboard on which Griff had arranged sunflower seeds, some Hartz Munchy O’s, and a tiny playground of toilet-paper tubes and empty match-books.
“That any good?” Bowman asked, nodding at the tiny TV.
“Hard to say,” Griff said. “It’s like watching finger puppets across a football field. What can I do you for, Mr. Bowman? You look a little grimy.”
Behind the costume bay, in a bathhouse with polished wooden slats crisscrossing its floor, Bowman stood a long time under a spray that started lukewarm and finished as cold as a Phosphor Fog waterfall. But as he laved away the past, preparing for a collision with the lout who’d destroyed his career, the water sprinkling from the showerhead did not match the deafening seethe of the storm inside him.
Later, Griff brought him the zoot suit that Howie Littleton had designed from Bowman’s drawings of Big Mister Sinister, a crime overlord from the
Decimator
series: wide, striped, pleated trousers bulging at the hips and tapering toward the ankles. A jacket that hung so far below Bowman’s butt it was almost a dressing gown. A hat that Zorro would have loved (except, maybe, for the lavender band).
“Costume party?” Griff apparently had no idea that Finesse had let him go.
“Sure.” Bowman found his freshly scrubbed wallet, tipped Griff, slid his pistol into a jacket pocket, and sat down on a shower-room bench to think. According to Griff, it was almost dawn. Soon the city—not just Satan’s Cellar, but Salonika proper—would be alive again, and Bowman would have work to do.
*
At nine o’clock, he presented himself to the receptionist in the lobby of the Ralph McGill Building. A security guard appraised him as if he’d fallen off a wardrobe truck from the touring company of a
Guys and Dolls
revival.
“With whom do you have an appointment?” asked the receptionist.
“Somebody. Anybody. Lee Stamz, probably.”
“Your name?”
“Big Mister Sinister.”
“Sir?”
“Tell them—tell Lee Stamz—that Tim Bowman is here dressed like a character from a
Decimator
film.” Bowman nodded at the switchboard, the front brim of his hat an insistent edge.
The receptionist relayed his message to Lee Stamz, who said, audibly even to Bowman, “Well, get some ID and send the joker up.” Of course. At the height of the shakeup at Uncommon Comics, Bowman had refused Stamz’s every request for an interview. This change of heart was gratifying.
On the newsroom floor, Stamz did a comic boggle, mostly intentional, at the sight of him, then took Bowman into the dayroom, where nearly everyone gave him a gander. He was hard to miss. Did they know his character from the first two
Decimator
movies? Or was he just a diversion to gawk at on an otherwise humdrum morning?
“Come into my cubicle.” Stamz
leaned
Bowman in that direction.
“Not yet.”
“What, then? You got an agenda? I’ll show you around if that’s your druthers.”
Bowman tilted his Zorro brim, and Stamz led him among the thocking keyboards and half-walled offices of the dayroom, introducing him to every drudge—faces blank, suspicious, or fascinated—as “Big Mister Sinister, heh heh heh,” as if the three-note tag of his giggle were a college degree.
“And here’s a colleague of mine in entertainment,” Stamz said. “Xavier Th—”
“Thaxton,” Bowman said. “I know.” He pulled his pistol and fired three quick shots into Xavier’s gut:
Bang! bang! bang!
Heh-heh-heh.
36
“Adios, Superman”
Xavier heard the reports as widely spaced notes
in a symphony of three movements, each movement a year in length. The impact of each bullet was a one-note crescendo. Why was a man outfitted like a 1940s barrio hipster trying to kill him? With the exception of Ricardo’s Mexican Restaurant’s radio ads, he loved all things Mexican. He found the talents of Orozco, Paz, and Valenzuela
muy simpatico
. Some days, he could even tolerate mariachi music. So why had a son of that noble culture just shot him? Thrice?
“Eat
this
, you s.o.b.!” the man cried. “And
this!
And
this!
” Or had cried. Time was out of joint for Xavier. Events no longer had reliable sequence, and he was lying on the floor. Everything happening above him happened in blurred slow motion. This wasn’t just a murder, but an assassination. He was being removed for murky ideological reasons. His views, as expressed in “Thus Saith Xavier Thaxton,” had led this assassin, who sure looked like Big Mister Sinister in a
Decimator
movie, to walk in and shoot him.
“You don’t know comics!” the man shouted. “You don’t like them! You bring no objectivity to their criticism!”
Comics? thought Xavier, mouthing the word.
Lee Stamz karate-chopped the pistol from Big Mister Sinister’s hand, grabbed him, flung him down. “Call nine-one-one!” Stamz shouted at the dayroom.
On the floor, his face less than six feet from Xavier’s, Big Mister Sinister raged: “Go back to reviewing high-tone books whose artsy-fartsy last sentence always wraps around to their first one!”
Pardon, Xavier mouthed, hurt more by this verbal attack than by the shooting.
“Go back to wetting your pants every time Screen Dreams shows
Citizen Kane!
”
Xavier gaped sidelong at Big Mister Sinister.
“If you survive, hie yourself to Joyce’s grave and sit on it till your ass freezes!”
Stamz sat on Bowman to keep him from rising, urged Nakai, who’d just entered, to kick the smoking pistol farther out of Big Mister Sinister’s reach. She did, as if playing a desperate sort of shuffleboard.
“
Agenbite of inwit!
” Big Mister Sinister shouted red-faced at Xavier. “May it drive you bonkers!”
“Shut up!” Stamz shouted back. “Shut your fucking mouth!”
“Only if he dies. Then we’ll never have to pull on hip boots to wade through his holier-than-thou drivel again.”
“Who is that?” Xavier managed. By now, he should have passed out from shock, blood loss, his first wonky intimations of death. Why hadn’t he?
“It’s Bowman,” Stamz said. “The bastard who wouldn’t give me an interview when Finesse fired his ass.”
“He wrote the letter,” Xavier said. “Bowman . . . wrote it.”
“What letter?” Stamz said.
Urbanite
employees had surrounded Xavier’s desk. They milled around like spectators at a car wreck. Someone had called 911. Someone—Donel Lassiter, bless his heart—struggled to loosen Xavier’s tie.
“Give Mr. Thaxton some air,” Donel said. “Stand back, you all, give him room.”
It was a relief to know—although he couldn’t say just why—The Mick had not written that letter. (If The Mick had written it, he might have been able to raise his grade in English.) A hostile letter to the editor was more public, and thus more shameful to its recipient, than a mugging. Whoa. What skewed logic. Good thing he hadn’t voiced that argument out loud. Sticks and stones and all that . . .
Xavier looked over at Bowman. “I like your costume,” he said. “Rakish . . . getup.”
A portion of Bowman’s hat’s brim was caught under his neck, but it was still recognizably a hat. Bowman was nonplussed. He stared bemusedly at Xavier.
“But it’s too much like the DeeJay’s,” Xavier said. “The Zoot Suit Look. The DeeJay’s a . . . stalwart. Big Mister Sinister’s a . . . cr-crime lord. That confuses . . . the k-kids.”
“Save your breath, Mr. Thaxton.” Donel’s smile was kindly.
“I prefer Count Geiger’s costume,” Xavier said. “It’s a . . . um, true classic.”
Bowman seemed confused. Was Xavier an enemy of the comic-book business, or an astute critic of its shortcomings and excesses and thus a variety of friend? Had Bowman walked into the Ralph McGill Building and unwittingly shot an ally?
At that moment, the police arrived. Stamz got off the gunman, and a cop much smaller than Stamz yanked Bowman up and handcuffed him. A female cop disinterestedly Mirandized him.
“If he just took three bullets,” the male cop said, pointing at Xavier, “why ain’t he dead?”
Xavier lifted his head off the floor. “Bulletproof vest,” he said. Donel was trying to unbutton his top shirt button. Xavier brushed Donel’s hand away. He didn’t want everyone to know that he was wearing tinfoil skivvies. Had his Count Geiger gear kept him from dying? So it seemed.
“Bulletproof vest?” the cop said. “That standard issue around here? Y’all that afraid of your readers?”
“He is,” Stamz said.
“An elementary precaution,” Xavier said, getting to his feet with no help from Donel and only a little from the edge of his desk. Two paramedics came rushing into the dayroom with bandages, drugs, resuscitation equipment, a canvas litter.
“Shit,” Bowman said, looking at Xavier. “You didn’t die.”
“Sorry,” Xavier said. (Actually, he wasn’t.)
The female cop led Bowman, hangdog and surly, away.
*
The paramedics wanted to examine Xavier. According to both Stamz’s testimony and the confession of Big Mister Sinister, he’d absorbed three bullets at close range. Smart people didn’t try to walk around with three slugs in their guts, a paramedic said. They asked to have the bullets removed and their wounds treated.
“Don’t touch me,” Xavier warned. “I don’t want you to remove the bullets. I don’t want you fiddling with me.”
He could see tomorrow’s headlines:
FINE ARTS COLUMNIST XAVIER THAXTON SHOT BY VICTIM OF UC PURGE
/
Undergarments reveal Thaxton as secret admirer of his assailant’s work
.
No way.
“What the hell’s the matter wi’ you?” Stamz said. “You
want
to get gangrene? You
want
to die?”
“I’ll be okay. Donel, help me to the restroom, please.”
Donel helped him to the restroom. Xavier refused to let Donel come inside with him, arguing that he wanted to put some cold water on his face, examine his wounds himself, and try to get emotionally centered.
“Mr. Thaxton—Xavier—you need medical attention. You’ve been shot.”
“All in a day’s work,” Xavier said. Knees wobbly, brow sweat-beaded, he went into the restroom, locked the door behind him, and draped his jacket on a hook in the central toilet stall. Off came every single conventional wardrobe item that he’d worn to the Ralph McGill Building that morning.
In front of the room’s long mirror, he observed that his Count Geiger costume had
not
deflected the slugs from Bowman’s pistol. Three craters pocked the foil, in a lopsided constellation across his abdomen. Ouch.
Standing there, he began to concentrate on the highest of the three slugs, the one under his left ribs. Using the hypochondriac muscles in that region (their scientific name, as he knew from the medical books he’d purchased soon after his first P.S. attacks), he managed to expel the slug. It emerged, dented and bloody, through the mesh of the Suit, dropping with a plink and a rattle into the washbasin. The mesh instantly sealed itself, as if he hadn’t been shot at all. Then Xavier worked on the other two bullets, rippling the muscles around his navel and in the epigastric region. These slugs soon popped out, too, as if flipped by a strong and accurate, if ghostly, index finger.
Plink, rattle. Plink, rattle.
The mesh around each miniature crater drew together. The torso of his Count Geiger costume was whole again. Well, that was his Suit. What about the wounds in his gut? Were they healing as fast as the rents in the Suit?
Xavier fingered his three wounds. With no external evidence to go by and no tender places under the unbroken mesh to offer a clue, he couldn’t even find the bullet holes.
This doesn’t have much to do with the Suit, Xavier thought. A little, only a little. How, then, had he found the power to pop out pistol slugs and effect a psychosomatic cure of his wounds? It scared him, the comic-book inspecificity of his trip to instant health. But why gripe? If he had to choose between being disabled by bullets and improving by means of a tacky supernaturalism, the choice was a no-brainer.
Hallelujah, I’m alive. Hallelujah, I’m not dead.
He put his everyday garb back on, even his bloody dress shirt, and deposited the slugs in a paper cup on the mirror ledge and returned to the dayroom with it.
“Go home, Xavier,” Walt Grantham said. “Get some rest. You’re entitled.”
The male cop, still questioning staffers, accepted the cup from Xavier and bagged the slugs for forensic analysis. “How’d you salvage these?”
“They got hung betwixt my bulletproof vest and my shirt. A snap, finding them.”
The cop asked Xavier if he were okay (“Fine,” Xavier said) and if he had any idea why Bowman had tried to kill him (“He thinks I hate the comics”). Then Xavier told Grantham that he still had work to do and felt just fine, thank you.
“Damn it,” Grantham growled. “I said, Go home!” Oddly, the boss had allies. Lee Stamz, Donel, Ivie, the cop—everyone in the dayroom—urged Xavier to beat it.
“I appreciate your concern, but you all’re blowing this incident out of proportion.”
“Look,” Grantham said. “I don’t make wounded employees punch a time clock.”
“If you like, I’ll sign a statement saying I stayed out of sheer muleheadedness.”
Everyone around Xavier’s desk looked incredulously at everybody else.
“He thinks he’s Superman,” said the cop with the slug-filled cup, heading for the elevator. “Thanks for cooperating, folks. Adios, Superman.”