Profane Men (16 page)

As Doc and Claudia wallowed in the tortured favors of their blinded child victims, their perversions led to the downhill slide of unspeakable appetites. Because of their notorious tastes that seemed gross even to the sickest minds of the street trash, a name had stuck to them like iron glue. No one called them this to their face, where they were always the Doc and Claudia, but otherwise they were referred to with the generic reference that had become the official street handle for this pair of subhuman specimens. Every two-bit hooker, doper, thief, torch, junkie, pimp, fence, runner, shark, cowboy, dip, wino, snitch, and hit man from Downer's Grove to Oldtown knew them by one name. They were the Snot Vampires.

Merlin Hedgepath, whom they called Merlin the Magician, Magic Man, and simply Magic, was among their prime dope suppliers. His big number was meth or crank, as it was always called on the street. Dealing from a biker bar and from his dilapidated mobile home on the fringes of Wooddale, Illinois, Big Merlin was the Oldtown connection to a Chicago-land gang that specialized in serving what they liked to think of as the disenfranchised. Merlin's clientele were the dregs of society in an area where society isn't necessarily that toney to begin with: flamboyant drag queens and tee vees (transvestites), necrophiliacs, and coprophiliacs, Haitian gunmen and wetback skag mules, and every other brand of beat, bent, busted-up, sorry-ass street scum cast off by their “betters.”

Big Merlin looked like he belonged in the cab of a Freuhauf Long Ranger, ratchet jawing with the Kenilworths and Jimmies as they roared down the interstate higher than Godzilla and telling their old, stale eighteen-wheeler gags (“I know where you can get a new Peterbilt . . .”), getting truck-stop blow jobs, killer hemorrhoids, and youthful coronaries. But he just looked the part. He was more at home on a Harley chopper with a rearview dental mirror. Because he looked so fucking
bad,
he was able to carry off all kinds of heavy-duty numbers. He scared straights and freaks alike.

He'd angled for a way to duke himself into their secret place ever since the stories had come back to him about what they did to those kids. It snapped something inside him. He started supplying them with his best crank, carrying them on the arm, sweettalking them, flattering, consoling, cajoling. When he saw his chance, he ran a big con on them about a shipment of hot meth so street sweet and clean and priced so right they couldn't say no. The price for a whole shitload — a little girl, condition unimportant, age ten or so if possible.

He busted his butt to sell it to them, and convincing the Doc was no easy matter, but he was dedicated and he didn't let up. Finally they agreed to a swap; they would bring a girl to him. He watched them for days, blending into the shadows. Tailing them with full concentration and will power. Willing himself to stay awake, willing them not to spot him. Waiting. Watching.

Dog-tired and heartsick, he was still awake on the third morning when they headed for the boonies about nine. He followed at a discreet distance, so excited he forgot to be pissed that they hadn't opted for last night. He hid motionlessly in high weeds until at last he'd seen them as they closed the trapdoor down on the sub-basement of the sharecropper's place. It was so well hidden he had a hell of a time finding it again by the time he had crawled up through the weeds and grass and broken glass and garbage.

He didn't wait for them to bring the little child out, as he had first planned. He crashed through the wall as if it wasn't there, sending an eight-foot length of rust-encrusted tin sheeting and two-penny nails and rotten boards crashing down into the room below. He burst in with his piece at his hip, finger on the trigger and itching to pull it as he gasped at the stench and the sight of the filth and decadence and horror.

Seeing the little girl in the blond wig and smeared lipstick, the woman doing things to her while the man called Doc burnt her with his cigarette — this was frozen in his mind forever, a tableau of unforgettable evil. He took a deep breath of foul air, and as the man started to get up off the bed, he triggered a 2 3/4-inch 12-gauge shot shell of a dozen Magnum buck pellets packed by the Federal Cartridge Corporation of Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A., into the man's chest.

Jacking the next shell into the chamber and making sure the little girl was out of the way as much as he could, he angled around to make sure the spread didn't catch her too, hearing her animal scream and the scream of the woman Claudia and his own voice screaming as he pulled the trigger of the shotgun with its shortened barrel up against the woman and feeling the big shotgun jump and hearing the shell explode like TNT in the subterranean enclosure, feeling the pieces of bloody gut and flesh and filth and bone splatter him as he fired, the screams echoing and echoing in his memory again and again and again.

“Gone off the deep end.” That was the phrase he'd heard one of the cops say to somebody. That seemed right. It had always stayed in his mind. Jail. More time in jail and a judge. Time. He found himself facing a long term of straight-up jail. A dime or more anyway. Cold storage.

But somehow a profile had emerged in a computer and it had ended up as printout, binded into a file in the in tray of a plans executive. A phone call had given birth to many more phone calls, and suddenly Big Merle was the new best friend of some very heavy-duty Sawyers who had come to pull him out of cold storage. The offer was simple and there was only one possible answer. Sure, why the hell not.

Almost overnight, Merlin Hedgepath found himself in a training camp, and then in a stockade, then on a big government contract flight to Vietnam, complete with deep cover number about a court-martial which had never made a lick of sense to him. He had never fully come alive again, but sometimes on the ambushes he'd go out all cold and bloodless, and come back later looking like Count Dracula, all red-faced and rosy-cheeked, somehow staying alive on it. And once in a great while, when the moon was right, it would light his fire a bit, and you'd have yourself a wild-eyed, haired-off lunatic out lusting for a hot, gushing blood spill.

“. . . this night thy soul shall be required of thee.”

— Luke 12:20

As a child I liked to swim in a chill, muddy- bottomed lake, swimming for hours, often underwater, pretending to be a fish, a mighty swimmer like Tarzan or Jungle Jim, a UDT frogman, a Japanese one-man submarine preserved since World War II in some subaqueous nest of gnarled undersea roots, live torpedo intact, defying all physics, chronology and logic as my imagination ran rampant. At nose level, my proboscis the warhead, a restored Jap minisub snaked through the underwater weeds on its mission of vengeance.

For hours I'd slither through the lily pads, dislodging schools of bluegill carp, and drum, swimming over the remnants of fishermen's lunch buckets, teen parties and family picnics which had floated to the bottom forming a kind of rusting junk landscape. I'd dive under (“Down periscope!”) with an inane honk of my imaginary warning Klaxon (“Baaahhh!”) in a reckless scavenger hunt through the shards and jagged-edged litter.

Diving down through the weeds and small fish, I brought up surprise treasures of Kist and Country Club, empty Vienna sausage tin and broken beer bottles, the odd tennis shoe. I swam for hours, tirelessly, fascinated by my secret world that existed in the dark cool shadows of the lily pads.

One of my favorite fantasies was a recurrent, soul-shuddering daydream that came only when the clouds and sun were just so, and you could look around at the impenetrable inkiness of the lake's depths, changing, dappling, even as you squinted into the blue-green blackness, the sunlight reflecting off the surface of the water like a pocketful of shiny coins scattered across the lake. And then sinister circles of growing shadow would seem to materialize there in the water exactly as it might look if something was coming to the surface. The bigger the circles, the more deliciously frightening the fantasy.

The penultimate moment of the imagining would be the second you saw what appeared to be an enormous circle widen out to the full breadth of the nine-mile-long lake, and in that breathtaking instant before oblivion, you realized you were about to be eaten by a monster as big as the lake itself, rushing up from the mud-covered bottom to inhale another tiny morsel of humanity. A kid's underwater fantasy twenty years before
Jaws.

That's the way I felt when I found out I'd been kicked out of the Training Program. It was as if my life had been swimming up here on one level, carefree and happy, and something as big as a nine-mile lake had come shooting up from the bottom in a tidal wave of feeding frenzy to gobble me up in a millisecond of uncaring destruction. The agency had that sort of ingestive capability and a similar kind of insatiable appetite for small human flotsam.

“This can't be a big surprise” was a line of remembered dialogue, most of which I'd managed to mercifully block out in the ensuing torrent of frantic embarrassment. No. No surprise whatsoever. My heart always stops beating for a few seconds every Friday afternoon about this time. I was young enough to still worry about things like severance. All very major league, very poli-sci, post-grad, predigested, spoon-fed, bland, homogenized, antiseptic sort of swift, parting fuck you.

And the big black shadow suddenly materialized from far below me, rushing up with its jaws open taking in lake water, drum, lily pads, broken glass, Keds, weeds, cattails, frogs, turtles, catfish, and one-man Japanese submarines. Crunch. Gulp. And I was gone inside the black monster as big as a nine-mile lake.

The next morning I stumbled out the front door of a strange Holiday Inn on the outskirts of big, dirty D.C., shaking from the sense of loss as much as from the booze I'd taken in the night before, stumbling out blindly into the bright sunshine to see if it was a dream. Awakened by the most pleasant sound in the world, a combination of ringing telephones, vehicle horns, and maids screaming at each other from half a city block away, Minnie Pearl–style, I jerked to life hearing,
“Hhhhhhhoooooooooooo­wwwwwwwwwwwwwww­dddddddd­eeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

Is there any landscape, extraterrestrial or otherwise, as barren of any aesthetics as the Great American Mercantile Vista? You can wake up with a savage hangover, foggy-brained, pummeled by a cacophony of lunatic maids and flushing toilets and slamming doors and screamed greetings, and the one comfort is that wherever you are, it will look exactly the same. The Great American Mercantile Vista has become one vast horizon of Fried Chicken buckets and golden Big Mac archways. Assuring you that if you fall asleep tonight, drunk as a lord in Schenectady, and you are kidnapped in the night by a gang of Arizona outlaw bikers, when you escape the next afternoon, trembling in Scottsdale, it will look exactly the same. Kulture — so $ucce$$ful, Kommershul, plastic, fast-n-EZ, and regimented as to be staggeringly harsh — assaults the senses.

Of course, this is news to no one. But if you are suddenly thrown out of work, divorced, lose a loved one, or otherwise see your life flipped upside down by the fates and powers that be, this environment takes on a wholly new ugliness. Excluding perhaps the Gulag Archipelago, the poisonous rings of one or two distant planets, and certain parts of Cincinnati, no vista is so crushing in its irritating uniformity.

Nobody ever said it was going to be a walk in the park, you tell yourself, and if you have a lick of sense you then go out and find a pretty girl and take a walk in the park. For weeks I did nothing but just that, walking in parks and assorted grassy places, humping the endless reaches of the boundless Smithsonian, seeing every show in town, rubbernecking at every famous monument, the great institutions of government, doing D.C.

I was dating a fabulous-looking semi-android who worked as a part-time receptionist for a big record company, and I took her everywhere from the great art museums to the awe-inspiring, gilt-encrusted cathedrals of the nation's capital. We walked for miles and miles. Each of us with the other out of habit more than desire. Both of us were in love with other people, she with a married steamfitter, and me with all trim. Not the perfect couple.

When her company began to wear and my budget started giving glimpses of its underwear, I tired of the expensive French eateries and the aimlessness of my life. There were about six or eight weeks in a rooming house. I remember this time only vaguely, as if it was seen through gauze, a time of great lassitudes, of long, aching boredom spent watching the tube and reading and picking my dry cleaning up; small drudgeries performed somnambulistically. I was alone by then, my friend having found a lively surrogate for her steamfitter.

The last few days before they made contact were very strange, melancholy mornings of rememberings. Mostly the mistakes and the incongruities and the disappointments and the endless humiliations of “the farm,” which was not a farm at all but a concentration camp for junior drones and good little Nazis willing to do anything in the name of “chust followink orderz.” The specialties of the house were subversion in ninety-seven flavors, and a particularly vicious Masters in Blackmail Administration. Cryptonym: “ISOLATION.” Right.

Afternoons found me wandering around out at the airport, one of the world's busiest confluences of the international air travel streams, pretending I was going somewhere (I was, it turned out) as I watched the passengers embark for Addis Ababa, Athens, or Atlanta, with a wretchedly purposeful demeanor as I sat or stood, slouched with lethargic indecision. I had arrived at a point where I was insanely contemplating squandering my last dollars on a one-way flight to — where? I could catch the red-eye to Baltimore and spend the rest of my savings in a week of decadence on “the block,” shacked with a pneumatic hooker go-go girl named Lynn. Then what?

One memory is retained from those last days. I saw the most beautiful creature I have ever seen in my life there in the D.C. airport. And I've seen the young Liz Taylor running across a beach. But this woman was just heart-attack, full-mill beautiful. Men were dropping their luggage, women were running into things, it was that sort of a beauty. She had on a liberal coating of makeup, just this side of theatricality, and I ran up to her with the fatuous line, “On your way back to Vegas?” I gambled, smiling for all I was worth, which was about $238 and change.

“L.A.,” she sneered breathily, with the same bored tone she always used on the six hundred guys a day who hit on her with dopey lines. On your way back to Vegas? Pitiful. On
your
way to the shit drawer, chump, and don't come to play in the majors when you ain't even got a bat. She was so beautiful that even as she turned around to ignore the semihuman vermin that had accosted her, bathing the airport in musk, and standing there on legs that seemed to go all the way up to her neck, I kept waiting for more, all blown out of my shoes, panting, looking at her gorgeous back. That's how far down the well I'd fallen. Beggars can't be choosers, isn't that the line?

Finally I just dove down into it. Down into the blackness, down in the murky depths below the lily pads, in the cool, muddy slime where time has no meaning, down below the bluegill and the perch, and I came to rest there on the bottom, in the Land of the Lost, amid the Campbell's cans rusting away with the broken Griesedieck bottles. I was lying there on the bottom, waiting for the monster as big as a nine-mile lake to come and get me, when they made their approach.

“Code name Rescue” blasting out of a PRC snaps me back to reality. I am a few thousand mites from Langley and McLean, deep in the green, green grass of USMACV, far from the madding crowds of Camp Peary and Quarters Eye and Foggy Bottom, and farther still from home.

“ — is a three-man team offering short-term services worldwide to travel barriers and no taboos. We are a can-do unit, with complete flexibility and deep background in sea-air-land penetrations, removals, and other services. Reasonable fees and absolutely ironclad discretion is assured. Protect yourself when inquiring and keep a nice clean paper trail. We do the same. Rescue. Box 1001H, Agana, Guam 96909. And this is KILL Outlaw Radio on the air!

“Want privacy assured for your special announcement on KILL or elsewhere? Send twenty dollars U.S. funds for one month's forwarding to Seeker 2, Center Street 10, Auckland, New Zealand. Complete privacy, no questions asked, cash or money orders only please. And KILL has a new number following this brief message.”

I lay there thinking about Chi. Wondering who and what. Thinking those thoughts you told me not to think, Rona, as I lay there on the muddy bottom of the lake there in the land of the lost souls. I felt the ground shudder in a great, heaving, sphincter-shrinking earth tremor, and in that split second of wondering whether it was an arc light or the thing as big as a nine-mile lake coming up from the core to swallow us, I saw something fine and white and irreplaceable disengage itself from me and leave.

Wisdom: never swim alone in the Land of the Lost.