Kornwolf (26 page)

The moment he spotted the stranger, the color drained out of his face, by all accounts.

From there on, eyewitness testimony clashed.

Freida Baylor, who would own up to having been no fan of Dollup or Gibbons for years, would insist that Ms. Dollup had only made matters worse by “batting eyes with the stranger.”

Other patrons agreed to a point, but insisted Ms. Dollup could never have known or suspected the trouble she was getting into. Even while flashing “alluring glances” across the bar, as one man claimed, she had seemed more intent on punishing Gibbons than soliciting shows of real affection.

Whatever the case, the regulars tried to wave her off, with no success. Baylor motioned an urgent warning. Which only egged Ms. Dollup on.

Swaying, she met the stranger's gaze. Her addled focus eventually sharpened. She stared intently into his eyes. Her coquettish grin began to dissolve, giving way to a look of vague discomfort.

Gibbons started to lose his cool. The regular patrons braced for disaster as the stranger, fueled by evident lust and intoxication, grew more excited.

He called on Baylor, demanding gruffly: “
Who's the trollop?
”

Baylor shrugged.

Again, the intruder spoke in “Dutch.” It sounded like some kind of horror movie. He motioned to buy Ms. Dollup a drink.

Aggravated, Baylor was slow to respond.

The stranger pushed some money toward her, slamming the counter. “
Do as you're told!
”

Startled, she took a step back. Behind her, Ms. Dollup, as though coming out of a reverie, laughed out loud. “Give me a whiskey.”

Gibbons intruded. “Don't give her a whiskey.”

The stranger snapped at him, “
Quiet, vermin!
” He looked to Baylor. “
You heard the lady
.”

Silence hung over the room momentarily, thick as a pending hostage crisis. Ms. Baylor frowned. “You're crazy, Valerie.”

Dollup retorted, sneering nastily. “Fetch me a whiskey.” She giggled. “
Freida
.”

Livid, Baylor proceeded to mix a whiskey and water, shaking her head.

The stranger threw back his head and let out a “horrifying” laugh.

In a flash, he got up and carried his bottle around the counter toward Valerie Dollup. A wave of panic swept the room.

Dollup sat up on her seat, looking startled.

In an instant, the stranger took Gibbons by the back of his neck and ripped him off of the stool. Gibbons hit the wall and dropped
to the floor with a yelp. A gasp went up, but no one stepped forward to intervene. The stranger slid onto the stool beside Dollup, grinning obscenely. “
Greetings, fräulein
.”

As Gibbons struggled to get to his feet, the front door opened and the first of The Heathens appeared—at last, a half hour late. Taylor Blake, Ms. Baylor's boyfriend, was just in time to see Gibbons, whom he “couldn't stand,” pull a cue stick down from the wall and smash it over the stranger's head.

The Heathens might have been spurred to action—i.e., beating Gibbons to a pulp—had the stranger not tended to matters himself. Uninjured, apparently, he whirled on Gibbons with a backhand, dropping him straight to the floor. He reached for the broken cue stick and bore down repeatedly. Squealing with every blow, Gibbons attempted to crawl for the door. Despite Ms. Baylor's appeals for help, The Heathens stood laughing. It caught them off guard. Parting ranks, they allowed the “worm,” as Gibbons had always been known to them, to be “horsewhipped brutally” out the door. They even slammed it behind him, still laughing.

This was an unexpected, and welcome, surprise for them—a good start to the evening.

Even though Freida Baylor insisted the stranger had been causing trouble all night, and even though he looked “kinda freaky” and “stunk like shit,” The Heathens liked what they saw.

“What are you drinking?” Taylor offered.

Again, the stranger responded in “Dutch.” Nobody understood, but his overall bearing was less than deferential. He seemed un-impressed by their leather-clad brawn. He was fearless, this one: “a credit to bad-ass-dom.”

Baring his teeth, he whirled back into the tavern and stalked toward a hedging Ms. Dollup. After another disgustingly long pull of bourbon, he let out a piercing laugh, then took her by the arm and pulled her down the length of the counter to the ladies' room …

For the next few minutes, a frenzy of banging and screaming let out from behind the door. While it was happening, Freida
Baylor cursed not only her boyfriend, Taylor, but the rest of his chapter for not stepping in. They dismissed her, insisting that Dollup was getting not only what she asked for, but what she deserved—and enjoying herself in the bargain, at that.

Which may or may not have been true, by report, given the cries of what sounded like “pleasure.”

Either way, Ms. Baylor was fed up. She blasted her boyfriend's chapter for cowards. When one of them started to chop out a line of methamphetamine there on the counter (which all of The Heathens would later deny), she gave up and placed a call to the police.

Booing, The Heathens called her a “buzzkill.”

In fact, the police had already been summoned—first by a pummeled Dwayne Gibbons, then by the first two patrons who were able to flee the bar while the coast was clear. The calls had been placed, one after another, from a pay phone, outside in the parking lot. Officers Kreider and a newly-returned-to-duty Beaumont were now en route.

Back inside, the thrashing and wailing from the ladies' room peaked to a sudden crescendo. A silence followed, interrupted by the roar of a boxer being knocked out on the TV.

Soon, the door swung open abruptly. The stranger reemerged—disheveled, deranged and “smelling worse than ever.”

What's more, his complexion appeared to have “darkened.” His posture was slumped. His eyes were “scarlet.”

He didn't respond when The Heathens beckoned him over to blast “his share” from the counter. He didn't appear to understand—neither their speech, nor their intentions.

Finally, according to subsequent testimony, someone (Taylor Blake) produced a rolled dollar bill to demonstrate.

“It ain't the best,” he was said to have claimed. “But it's good enough for a weekend in Blue Ball.”

That caught the stranger's attention, at last. Accepting the outstretched dollar bill, he followed Blake's example, honking not only the line of crystalline powder intended for him, but three
others beside it. He pressed his entire face to the counter. He snorted and slobbered in wild abandon.

Which didn't appear to bother The Heathens, even in light of the mess he made.

He came up with powder all over his face, blinking and twitching in breathless spasms.

The Heathens laughed as a few more disgusted regulars made for the exit with haste …

Then Ms. Dollup appeared from the ladies' room. Everyone looked at her—standing in the doorway, ravaged, despondent, her clothing in tatters. The stranger ignored her—along with the angry cries of Ms. Baylor to “
Get her a jacket!
”—pitting his face, instead, to the counter to slobber and snort at the powder some more. He stiffened in place, almost seeming to choke. He gripped the counter and craned his neck with a heaving, then
snapping
esophageal roar. A scream went up from the pit of his diaphragm.

Whether by cause of cardiac overload, the tavern's notoriously greasy cuisine, the two-fifths of whiskey downed in an hour, the three tabs of Valium ingested unknowingly—or, of course, the muscle relaxant the quadruple dose of crank had been cut with—a blast of flatulence ripped the air, followed by the pungent stench of feces.

Groaning, Ms. Baylor implored Jesus. The Heathens backed off in sudden alarm. Only Valerie Dollup's thousand-yard stare remained unchanged throughout.

Appearing “subhuman” by now—as one patron would claim, he had changed in an hour's time (“
He came in as a man and left as an animal
”)—the stranger / intruder snapped from his spot at the counter and shot down the aisle, scampering—past the jukebox, over the welcome mat, out the exit and into the night.

…
startled cries from behind, diminishing. Open air. Wind from the north, through fields of aster and sumac and nitrogen—underfoot asphalt, slapping—trash on the road, moving over it, into a ditch—clogged with oil and sewage and rainwater … up the embankment, craggy with limestone and quartz toward power lines humming above—a blinding glare, more voices behind, more tires on asphalt, approaching directly—urgent calls to the driver—continuing up and then over the rim of the bank and then tumbling downward, downward, down—to a plateau of aster and jimsonweed, old rusty wire on appendages, puncturing flesh—then release—a pounding inside, as of moving again … through bull-thistle, knapweed and dogbane to aorta / ventricle, hammer and anvil. Surging. Thirst and palpitations. Overload, onward—till heavens above yawning wide in the darkness: trains in the distance, motorized traffic delayed at a crossing—of burning downwind, of exhaust and of cellophane—carbon monoxide, fiberglass, vinyl—wafting through fields of Queen Anne's lace, over islands of oak and hickory trees—bull thistle tearing the shredded finery, hanging in strips from the briars behind—until, fully divested, and running as brought into searing existence, alone, at birth: naked and bloodied and wailing and here without limit, though thirsty, terribly thirsty—down on all fours at the edge of a stream—the moon's reflection in ripples, a furnace of streamlined combustion, gulping, burning, fueling, steadily waxing to term … Up again. Blackness. A gap in movement—more briars, more sow-thistle, gouging and
tearing—a break in the tangle, a crumbling fence post—and over—a clearing of gentler grass—clover and goldenrods, sweet even now in the brittle of autumn, soothing of hazel welts—pressing at length to an island of white oaks and hickories—milkweed exploding on impact—over a gritty forest floor, covered with bitter green walnuts and pine cones and kudzu—a canopy overhead, white oak and maple crowns, gently obscured by the layers of dogwood and sassafras—opening up to the sky … Croppings of granite, spotted with red-green lichen and moss—slick on the incline—slipping, tumbling down until—BANG—to the cankered remains of a chestnut stump—coming to in the splash of a darkened corridor—getting up, pressing north
…

Blackness
…

Bounding through fields of squash in the moonlight, and pumpkins, and cattle manure underfoot—pavement again, of passing below: of honking and screeching and swerving and SLAM—to a pole—and, still racing, with thunder behind—to a pain in the flank and of stabbing, unbearable—onward, continuing, moving, flight
…

The aroma of hay and confinement: of stables and holding pens, rank with the heat of manure—lumbering bodies, tense with fear and ripe for the tearing of flesh and crimson … of thunder and booming—and voices now, furious—squalling in starts—and then bounding again
…

More blackness
…

…
weeds overlooking a lot full of half-completed modern dwellings. An engine cutting across the sky. Automobiles in the clearing below. Men inside. Patrolling the property. Grounds defiled. Moving again
…

The clatter and rattle of falling beams. A door being torn from its hinges, on end
.

Floodlights, shouting, more thunder, more booming … pellets of lead hissing by, off target
…

…
into a field of nettles and ivy. Moving through tangled thickets to clearings of nightshade, Saint John's wort and charlock … beyond to a blackened line of evergreens: cypress and hemlock and larches and spruce—a carpet of needles and cones underfoot, the sweet aroma of hardened pine sap
…

An increased roar of motors ahead
…

Evading them easily, back up an untraveled road to a field of pungent nitrogen … churning downwind from the ugly man's home, now approaching, his absence abundantly clear—in spirit, in purity—nobody home: down with the gutter trims, out with the windows, off with the pump handle, up with the waterwheel—spraying the porch from one end to the other, then off again, moving away
…

Blackness
.

…
cockleburs, goldenrod, milkweed—continuing north over water, through ditches and granite—to darkness in terrible thirst and beyond: for the ugly man's fortification of sorrow—the place of captivity, home of the killing
…

Syd had been able to stitch up the cut over Roddy's eye in the dressing room, downstairs. But due to the number of blows he'd sustained to the head, he would still need an MRI. Syd had to work at the clinic early, and couldn't spend the rest of his night in Philth Town.

On leaving, he wrapped his arms around Roddy and told him, in no uncertain terms, how honored he'd been to serve in his corner, how well he had done by himself and the gym and how all of Stepford was sure to be proud of him too. He had nothing at all to feel bad about.

“Go to the hospital,” Syd finished up. “And then go home. This town eats its young.”

Jack drove Roddy and Owen to the Jefferson General's emergency room on 8th Street. There, they would sit in a packed lobby, surrounded by every battery victim and drug overdose for miles around—during which time they might have returned to Stepford, been treated and gone home to bed. Roddy was finally admitted at three, at which point the trouble with billing had begun.

While Roddy—who, black-and-blue and oozing, was able to keep his cool throughout—was rolled away in a wheelchair and left to sit in another hall for an hour, Jack and Owen attempted to deal with the desk receptionists, who were maintaining, despite what anyone else may have promised, that neither Travers's
productions, The Network, the Blue Palomino nor anyone involved had insured their fighter with medical coverage. And seeing how the records reflected that Roddy, through a prior, boxing-related admission, already owed the hospital in excess of two thousand dollars, there was definitely a problem.