Little Doors (41 page)

A few seconds later, my ex-wife and her new lover walked in.

Clutching her purse demurely, Sparky looked more desirable than ever, with her tumbling Titian curls framing her adorable face. Recalling Ellen’s catty gossip, I thought I saw a slight swelling of her tummy, heralding the bastard child, substitute for the offspring we had never managed to conceive. I felt myself falling in love with her all over again—until I recalled with a shock the murderously contorted lines of this same visage as she swung the axe at my back.

Her companion—the same thuggish man I had seen her with while still a tree—I paid little attention to, deeming him beneath my mature consideration. Besides, it was hard to consider myself his vigorous rival while wearing the semblance of a pipe.

Reefer hailed us as if meeting buddies at an amusement park. “Howdy, Mayor, Commissioner! Hope we ain’t kept you up past your bedtimes. But the deal we got in mind needs a little privacy, heh-heh, if you get my drift.”

Sparky kicked Reefer’s ankle and took over the pitch, her dulcet voice achingly familiar.

“What my partner means is that we intend tonight to put an end to all delays. Twelve months of red tape have left us feeling very antsy. If there’s any way we can, um, grease the wheels of progress, we are quite willing to—”

“Just spit it out, baby. We’re ready to put down some serious mazuma to get this project under way. Whatta we talkin’? Ten thousand? Fifteen thousand?”

I quivered menacingly between Nolan’s choppers. If only Sparky and Reefer had been able to read the language of my jiggling, they would have turned tail and run. But they were blind to Nolan’s rage.

“Let’s see the color of your money, Reefer.”

The mobster reached into his suitcoat’s inner pocket and hauled out a sheaf of bills weighty as one of my prize cabbages. All eyes except mine were magnetized by the bundle of large-denomination bills. Thus only I witnessed the Shade sneak cat-footedly up behind Reefer and tap him on the shoulder.

“Jig’s up, Reefer. Will you come quietly, or do I have to use force?”

Everyone had forgotten Sparky. Until they heard in the stunned silence the click of the hammer on her .45, loud as my former oaken body crashing to the ground.

Sparky’s eyes were hard as her stage name, her face taut with rage. “Jules ain’t going nowhere. It’s you three that are gonna take a little trip.”

Even Reefer seemed stunned by his paramour’s steely determination. “Put the rod away, baby. We can beat a little bribery rap. It’s just their word against ours.”

Sparky swung her gun toward the Shade, but addressed Reefer. “Sometimes I swear you’ve got less spine than that mousy dirtgrubber I married! Win a case against the Shade? Are you crazy? He’s got this town sewed up!”

“It’s simply a matter of being on the correct side of the law, Miss Flint. Now if you’ll just do as your boyfriend advises—”

“Shut up, you! Now, head for the staircase!”

The trio of captives shuffled out—under two guns now—while I was still fuming over the insult Sparky had paid my memory. Once in the stairwell we climbed steadily upward, emerging onto the roof. The summer sky hosted an infinity of stars, as likely to offer us useful help as anyone else in the city.

“Go over near the edge,” Sparky commanded. “There’s gonna be a little accident here tonight. Three clumsy stargazers are gonna take a little dive. Maybe the papers will even figure the Shade was somehow responsible. When our crew takes over City Hall, we won’t have a care in the world.”

We now stood at the low parapet protecting us from five stories of oblivion. I could see the Shade tensing his muscles for a lunge. But Sparky anticipated just such an action.

“Jules, grab the girl.” Once in Reefer’s clutches, Ellen suffered the muzzle of the pistol jammed against her stomach. “Try anything funny, and your girlfriend gets gutshot. It’s not as easy a death as a broken neck, believe me.”

With surprisingly acrobatic ease, the lumpy Nolan jumped atop the parapet. “Don’t shoot her, Flint. I’m going first.”

And with that he jumped, taking me with him, of course.

Nolan’s blunt fingers gripped the ledge and interrupted our fall. I deduced his plan: to lure Sparky and Reefer over for a look, then make a surprising grab at them with one hand, thus breaking the stalemate. But even in the dim light Sparky must have seen his efforts.

“Reefer, he’s holding on! Turn the girl loose and go whack the old coot’s fingers.”

I witnessed Reefer above us hefting his own gun, reversed. He smashed the butt down.

Nolan grunted, fell a foot with uselessly waving arms—

—and that was when the protruding spike intercepted my bowl.

Nolan’s teeth bit into my stem like a crocodile’s.

Reefer called out, “He’s hanging on by his damn pipe!”

“Shoot the pipe out of his mouth then!”

Reefer took careful aim—

* * *

And just then the gunshot rings out, simultaneously with the sound of a scuffle on the rooftop, the thud of fists on flesh, of muffled grunts and screams.

The bullet pierces my stem, severing it completely. The pain of my mortal wound wracks me with titanic agonies. I try to hold onto consciousness, but feel it ebbing swiftly. In my last seconds of full awareness, even as my two halves tumble into the void, I thankfully witness the Shade lunge three-quarters over the edge of the parapet to grab Nolan by his wrist.

Then a familiar mortal darkness descends.

Curiously, unexpectedly, my soul is not completely extinguished. Although split in two, my human essence remains connected by a dormant thread of ectoplasm. Patiently, able to do nothing else, I await the reinvigorating reunion of my halves, a repair I am somehow confident will arrive in due time.

At last the blessed event comes. Jagged lower stem intersects with upper fragment and bowl, firmly secured with a spot of Elmer’s glue. Although certainly unfit to be smoked, I can still exercise thought and perception.

I find myself stapled to a plaque, hanging on a wall beneath an odd circular skylight. Weirdly, the view through the cross-barred aperture reveals not mere sky, but an eerie nighttime landscape of canted tombstones.

I am underground! And where else but in the Shade’s fabled but never pinpointed sanctum, its location now disclosed to me alone as the haunted corner of Idlewhile Cemetery!

The Shade himself steps back from hanging me up on his trophy wall. Beside him stands the short, lumpish, wide-eyed figure of Busta, that faithful son of Ham who assists the Shade and drives him about Central City in his yellow cab.

“Well, Busta,” confides the Shade, “yet another relic of a case well-solved. Not only did we jail Sparky Flint and Jules Reefer for bribery and multiple attempts at homicide, but, thanks to her confession, we cleared up the old murder of her husband, poor chap.” The Shade patted me affectionately. “Unfortunately, Dottle had no lucky talisman such as this pipe to save him, in the manner it saved Nolan.”

The Shade turns to a set of blueprints spread out on a table. “But enough of past glories, Busta. Let’s direct our attention to this diagram of Fort Knox. I expect the Gasworks Gang will strike next month, during the annual ingot dusting—”

Safe, protected from the elements, privileged to share a vicarious life of crimefighting, I settle cozily down on the wall to listen to the Shade’s brave scheming.

There are worse fates for a broken pipe. And for a man as well.

SLUMBERLAND

The Candy Kid

“Wake up! C’mon, Gramps, rise and shine! It’s a new century now, don’t wanna miss any of it. And today’s special, real special. I got word from your floor nurse that you hit one hundred today. Ain’t everyday one of Slumberland’s residents notches up the big one-double-oh.”

The irreverent, irrepressibly careless young voice ended the old man’s uneasy slumber. Accompanied by a waft of peppermint breath, this morning call for attention boomed annoyingly close to his hairy, flaccid-lobed, aged ear, shattering his shallow anxious dreamless sleep.

He opened his rheumy brown eyes to a placid nebula of sunlight, to the smell of bacon grease and the rattle of dishes on a wheeled trolley. He strained to focus on the blurry pink male face pulling back from his.

“Glasses. Get me my glasses, please.”

The kitchen aide declined. “Naw, I ain’t messing with no glasses. Let the nurse’s aide handle that. You don’t need no glasses anyhow just to drink your kinda breakfast. Nice can of vanilla Enfamil. Mmmmmm! Look, I’ll power up the top half of the bed so you don’t choke, then I’ll put the straw right ’tween your lips. Here you go—”

The hospital bed motors whined, and the elderly occupant of Room 1905 of the Slumberland Extended Care Facility felt his withered torso being levered creakingly upward.

“Enough, enough.”

“Okay, don’t blow a fuse, centennial dude. Here, sip.”

The man weakly sucked some of the over-sweet nutritious slurry up through the plastic tube, while the kitchen aide watched approvingly, all the while clicking around an omnipresent breath mint between his upper and lower teeth, as if to accent the old man’s own toothless condition.

“Everything cool now? ’Cuz I got lots more breakfastses to deliver.”

The old man feebly spat out the tip of the straw. “Fine, fine.”

The kitchen aide turned to leave, but the old man stopped him with a question.

“Is it really a new century?”

“Yeah, sure, why would I say so if it wasn’t?”

“And it’s my birthday today?”

“That’s what your babysitter in uniform tells me.”

“Then I am a hundred now.”

“Cool. Well, save me some birthday cake, Pops.”

The aide left, whistling what sounded improbably like some old Broadway show tune from the man’s youth.

The old man lifted a trembling hand toward the fuzzy image of his breakfast tray, which was positioned over him on the extensible arm of a wheeled bedside platform, then he altered the course of his motions to smooth the few wisps of white hair trailing across his bald, spotted skull. Sinking down deeper into his pillows, lowering his eyelids, spurning his insulting breakfast, the old man thought:

One hundred years since I was born.

Ninety-five since the dreams began.

Nearly ninety years since they ended.

And just that long have I been searching for a way back into them.

Impie

Every Sunday the dreams had come like clockwork, beginning when he turned five years old and continuing for the next six years.

Like nothing else in his life before or since, the dreams had come to lend his whole juvenile existence deep meaning, rich excitement. More vivid than reality, they had cast his mundane life under a shadow, rendering the mortal world’s diurnal colors less bright, its successes less joyful—but also, in partial compensation, its failures less painful. All his waking experiences had paled against the memories of his Sabbath dreams. And only when his weekly excursion into that magical otherworld arrived did he feel truly alive.

At first, the dreaming had come hard. For several sequential weeks he had known the worst sort of frustration. Each week’s dream started and ended on repetitious notes, unvarying in their clunky monotony. (Although what occurred between the entrance and exit points shifted fantastically, a constantly changing canvas of wonders.)

He entered his dream each time by appearing to awaken in his own bedroom (a false virtual renouncement of sleep that paradoxically betokened a deeper immersion into those very waters of the unconscious). He would bolt up in bed at some disturbance, whether noise or motion or visitor. Sitting up curiously in that dream analogue of his familiar bulky bed, he would confront the miraculous: clowns, sprites, animals, fairies, once the smiling visage of the moon, all come to summon him to the realm of dreams, where further wonders—and the companionship of a certain princess—were promised to await him as his natural reward, his secret birthright as it were.

He would leave his bedroom behind then with whatever guide had manifested that week, ready and eager to cross the changeable fantastical terrain separating him from the veritable kingdom of dreams. But disaster of one sort or another always intervened. Landscapes collapsed or fragmented around him, due either to his clumsiness or incapacity, or to some uncontrollable natural calamity. Often his own dream death aborted his quest. Then he would be plunged out of the bizarre geography of his pilgrimage, back into his cold sheets, usually to tumble awkwardly upon the hard floor, his flesh-and-blood postures mimicking the contortions of his astral form.

His parents would rush in then to see what all the commotion was about. His mother, robustly beautiful as a Gibson Girl; his father, all mustachioed Ben Turpin bluffness. Or perhaps some relative spending the night would be delegated to check on the restless boy, doting aunt or dotty uncle.