Grist 06 - The Bone Polisher (23 page)

There were twelve apartments downstairs and twelve up, and the entire enclosed area was visible from every single one of them. Their doors opened directly onto the parched geometry of the courtyard, each bordered by a single window about five feet wide. No cheerful lights called to the lonely traveler. Apartment seven was the door in the far corner of the lower level.

“Me first,” Henry whispered. He had his leather jacket open and his hand inside it, brushing the dark skin of his abdomen. His stomach muscles announced themselves like an alluvial ripple pattern washed into stone.

“That’s not polite,” I said, stepping in front of him. “
I
invited
you
.”

Henry wrapped long fingers around my arm. “He’s not looking for me. I figure I’ll go straight across, make a little noise, scuff a little gravel. You stay close to the walls, and when I go past the door you wait a minute and then kick it in.“

My confidence, already low, waned further. “Kick it in?”

He raised a booted foot. “You know. Like on TV.” His eyes went down to my feet, to my battered Reeboks. “Second thought,” he said, “we both go around the side and
I
kick it in.”

“Henry,” I said, “the window’s open.”

Henry squinted across the courtyard. “In Los Angeles?”

Great. He was nearsighted, too. “Follow me.”

He grabbed me again, harder this time, and hauled me around to face him. “I got Special Forces training,” he said. “Do you?”

I pulled my arm free. “I’m what you might call self-trained.”

“You gonna be what you might call dead, that guy still in there,” he said.

“Goddamn it, Henry, I need a backup, not a replacement.”

He brought his left hand up, fingers splayed wide, and rested it against the center of my chest, forcing me back three steps. It hadn’t taken any visible effort. His right hand had his gun in it. “Ten feet,” he said. “You stay behind me ten feet. I go through the window, you count to ten, and if you don’t hear anything, come in. If I yell for help, come in right away. Otherwise, you’re going in alone.”

I was not going in alone. “After you,” I said.

He nodded once, wheeled, and struck off straight across the courtyard, a man-shaped hole in the night. When he was ten feet in front of me I followed, feeling like one of Ferris’s Yorkies. A very paranoid Yorkie. I took out my own gun and jacked a shell into the chamber.

“Shhhhh,” Henry said.

The pagoda, or whatever it might once have been, loomed dolefully on our left and then receded behind us. I heard music, the muted thump of bass and drum, barely audible over the scuff of Henry’s motorcycle boots. It grew louder as we approached number seven, floating onto the hot still night air through the open window.

At the last moment, Henry jogged left to stand directly beside the window and gestured to bring me beside him. “Start counting,” he said, and then he stepped away from the wall, backed up two long paces, brought his elbows up, and dove headfirst through the window screen. At the count of two, I followed.

I landed on my elbows, getting a nice carpet burn, and rolled to the left, away from the door, until I hit a wall. I was pushing myself to my feet when the light went on, and Henry bloomed from the darkness with his pistol pointed straight at my middle.

“You count fast,” he said.

The room was empty except for a low wooden coffee table with a telephone on it and a six-inch stack of newspapers pulled up next to the table, like a cushion. The edge of the table was fringed with long black scars as though cigarettes had burned themselves out on it. The smell of tobacco was heavy in the air.

A small kitchen glared white across a low counter. Next to it was a corridor. “Bedroom,” Henry said, pointing to it.

Henry preceded me down the hallway, turning left to flick on the lights in the bathroom. I went on to the bedroom, found the light switch, and snapped it up.

The long white thing against the back wall was a bed of newspapers, maybe two inches thick and seven feet long, with an unopened copy of the Sunday
Times
drafted into service as a pillow. The shapeless olive thing crumpled at the foot of the newspaper bed was an army surplus blanket. The brown rectangle in the center of the room was another low wooden table, a twin to the one in the living room. The black thing in the center of the table was what was left of Max Grover’s hand.

A turquoise ring gleamed at me as I approached. Clutched between two of the three remaining fingers was the stub of a filter cigarette.

I got down on hands and knees. The music came from a cheap boom box under the table: a cassette unspooled itself through the little window. The boom box was equipped with auto-reverse. It could have been playing for hours.

Four-twenty.

“The fuck is
that
?” Henry said from the doorway.

“I think it’s Kool and the Gang,” I said. “Did you touch anything?”

“The thing on the table,” Henry said.

“Behold the hand of man,” I said, “and dreadful are its works. I asked you whether you touched anything.”

He was standing over the table looking down, his mouth screwed into a knot of muscle. “No.”

“Give me some newspaper.”

He grabbed a sheet from the bed and handed it to me, and I put it over the boom-box and picked the contraption up. Then I hauled it into the living room and opened the front door wide.

“Get ready to leave,” I said. “We’re going to move fast.”

“I never been readier,” Henry said at the door.

I cranked the boom box up full and positioned it in the center of the door. Stepping over it, I ran across the courtyard and through the gate with Henry right behind me. Kool and the Gang bounced off the walls behind us.

Henry was silent all the way back to Hanks’s house. I dropped him at the gate, shepherded Alice down the hill to Sunset, and turned right. West, toward the freeway.

Bird’s flight down the freeway, actually free for once, eight lanes of blank concrete like a long sentence punctuated by blue-white lights and green-and-white signs; here and there the dependent clause of an offramp. Left on the Ventura Freeway, premature morning traffic streaming south on the other side of the chain-link fence with its desiccated, hallucinogenic laurels, and then off on Reseda Boulevard, gliding between looming old pepper trees and dark houses and the deathly glare of all-night markets.

My eyes burned like someone had put Tabasco in my eyedrops, and there was an empty, fluttery feeling in my gut. Drive-time disk jockeys, preternaturally alert guys who couldn’t have passed for wits in a gathering of battery-powered appliances, made smutty jokes and played twenty-year-old music to ease the world into the gray disappointment of another day.

I’d driven this route only a few hours earlier, but it felt as distant as childhood.

By now some hustler or screenwriter, righteously steamed by the rhythms of Kool and the Gang, would have called the sheriffs. I hoped some alert deputy had awakened Spurrier from his dreams of shiny badges and broken jaws. Why should he get all the sleep?

The dawn was breaking pale and wet-looking, two fingers of vodka in the eastern sky, as I parked Alice around the corner and hiked the thorny lawns of Hesperia Street to Elena Aguirre’s house. The nine-millimeter pressed against my thigh like twenty dollars in change, but my feet barely seemed to brush the ground and my head was anchored to my shoulders by the thinnest of strings. The world slid by like a baggage belt in an airport, and I was hardly moving at all. I ticked off the symptoms of exhaustion with an almost medical disinterest.

A light was on in the front window: The poor get up early. I drifted past Elena’s dented car and went around to the back and sat on one of the big rocks. I was transparent, a cloud of gnats, something you could have read an eye chart through. The rock had a nice, regular, liquid motion. It was a cork, and we were afloat on an ocean of gelatin, and the ocean was thickening as the waves grew gentler and farther apart. We’d never get there at this rate. What we needed was a sail, or maybe a Mixmaster. I could hang it over the side and use it like an outboard.

I opened my eyes to a blare of light, a full brass section triple-tonguing brilliant baroque figures against my retina. The sun was a hand’s breadth above the house across the street, and Elena’s car was gone.

All the old aches punched the time clock, organized for action, as I stood up. Some of them went for my arms and others assailed my legs, but the really smart ones, the ones that had learned to use tools, picked up their Louisville Sluggers and took batting practice against my lower back. Trying to remember whether any of Joseph Campbell’s heroes had back problems, I limped to the back door and tried the knob.

No go. The window at the side of the house was closed and locked, and the front door made it a matched set. Expecting nothing, I knocked and got what I’d expected. This was a situation that called for cunning and discretion. I went around to the back, picked up one of the smaller rocks, one about the size of my head, lugged it around to the side of the house, and lobbed it, shot-put style, through the window.

It sounded like the entire morning had been shattered. The noise sliced through my fatigue, galvanized me, maybe even frightened me. Eschewing Henry’s highly personal head-first style, I found a place where I could put my hands without cutting them to ribbons and hoisted myself inside.

I had both feet on the carpet of a cramped little dining room when I realized that I was hearing a woman’s voice. She babbled on, cheerful, confident-sounding, apparently unperturbed that an asteroid had just ventilated her dining room.

Television
, I thought, and turned from the window to find myself looking down at a miniature human being, no more than twenty-four inches tall, with a large head and very small, white-clad feet. In my addled state it took me a good five seconds to summon up and discard three or four mutant possibilities and identify it as a child.

“Arounnaworld in thirty miniss,” the child said loudly. “I’m Lyn Vaughn.”

“
Shhhhh
,” I said, forgetting that I’d essentially entered the house by coming directly through the wall. “For God’s sake, be quiet.”

“Awholeday’s news—” the child began.

“Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “We’re playing a game. Look, look—” I picked up a saltshaker from the table and pointed it at the child. Salt poured out onto the floor. “This is the remote.”

“Headlinnnnnnnne SPORSSS!” the child shrilled, raising both arms in a good approximation of a distance runner breaking the tape. It seemed to be a girl, but the evidence at that age is scant, and I’m no judge.

“And when I push the remote like this,” I said frantically, salting the floor some more, “the sound goes off and you can’t talk. Okay, now,
off
.”

Both of the child’s hands went over her mouth. Her hands looked like she spent the entire day licking them and then running them over the dirtiest, stickiest surfaces that the planet Dirty Sticky could offer her. She stood there, the discreet monkey, eyes wide and snapping with impatience, shifting from foot to foot in her eagerness to spread the latest word about Michael Jackson or the intifada.

“Okay, now,” I said, lifting the saltshaker and bringing it partway down with every word. “What’s—your—name?” I pointed it at her and punched its side with my thumb.

“Boutros Boutros-Ghali,” she said. And opened her mouth wider, but I pushed my imaginary mute button and the hands went up again.

“Are you alone here, Boutros?” Push the button.

“Tee Wee,” she said. “Da da DAHT-DA—” The
Headline News
theme was cut off by the magic saltshaker. Her grubby palm smacked into her lips.

“Only the TV? Nobody else?”

She pulled the hands away.

“Ah-aah,” I said. “I didn’t push the remote.” I added salt to the rug. “Go.”

“
No entiendo
.”

Uh-oh
, I thought.
Español
. Another of the many languages I don’t speak. “Well, me, too. Mute’s on.” I gave her a couple cc’s of salt. “Stay close,” I said. “I mean,
vámanos
. And
silencio
, okay?”

“Hollywood minnit,” she said before gluing her hands in place.

The dining room barely provided space enough for me, Boutros, a small formica table, and four chrome and vinyl chairs. A rickety wicker bookcase, hip-high, housed a collection of paperbacks with Spanish titles and no fewer than three Spanish-English dictionaries. In a plain wooden frame above the bookcase a lachrymose Jesus, bleeding profusely from the head, opened his chest to reveal a remarkably red and improbably symmetrical heart.

I followed Boutros into a kitchen with an old Gaffers & Sattler gas four-burner, the kind Eleanor wanted to find, and a refrigerator that would barely have held my average week’s worth of beer. Ropes of chiles hung from the walls, pinned in place with big flat thumbtacks. Jesus was in here, too, his chest intact this time, with rays of light streaming out from his white-clad form. The floor was worn linoleum, the corners of the tiles curling up here and there, clean enough to give birth on. Beyond the kitchen was an infinitesimal laundry room. The man’s clothes Elena had been washing the previous night were neatly folded on top of the dryer. There was no dust or lint anywhere.

What in the world, I wondered, had the child gotten her hands into?

Lyn Vaughn, ensconced on the blue CNN set in Atlanta, smiled at me in a newsy, discreetly foxy fashion from the screen of the hulking television set in the living room. The television set has replaced the piano in modern homes as a surface on which to display pictures, and the space above Lyn Vaughn’s talking head was cluttered with framed snapshots, uniformly self-possessed faces that presented variations on a genetic theme: the echo of an uptilted eye here, a broad
Indio
nose there. A family. Three sober-faced boys—teenagers—decked out in stiffly starched shirts, one girl of eight or ten wearing a white communion dress, Elena herself in a puritanically simple dark dress, and a woman with a short thatch of steel-gray hair who had to be Marta. Marta, the troll-aunt, tiny and bent, with something simmering, insistent, and compressed, in her eyes.