Slob (13 page)

He could hardly breathe at the thought of it. The excitement of the kill had got him hot again as he relived it for the third, fourth time, remembering every tiny detail, running it back, playing it over again in his thoughts.

"Why would anybody get in a car with somebody like that?" he'd once heard some ignorant ass ask during an imbecilic television program that never even began to touch on the real guts of the mass-murder phenomenon. "Who would get in a stranger's car?" some nitwit had asked. Why, YOU would. ANY- BODY would, you dumb, arrogant, insipid ignoramus. If the right strings are pulled, anybody will do anything. If a more powerful mind, a masterful and dominant intelligence, decides you will do something, you will accede to the wishes of the greater being. Because you are SHEEP.

No one had ever refused him. If he wanted to convince you that the sky was orange instead of blue, he would simply first put on his orange sky coat. He could pull on a characterization, a personality, a facade, the way you pull on your clothes. It is something any good actor can do. You can see the difference between genuine acting and reacting very simply: just turn down the volume on your TV Set and watch the players. Most of them are unconvincing without the dialogue and a supportive story line to propel them. You have no sense of who or what they are. But the good ones—that's another thing. And they can even do more than react. They can act—alone—in a vacuum.

A true actor, a good one, pulls on a character and motivates that persona from an inner wellspring of some kind. And the reality of their own lives may be used in whatever the outlandish personality they are adopting for the moment. You can see the difference in the convincing sureness of the portrayal. He had the actor's skills, but learned the hard way, learned as survival tools as a baby, learned in dark, stifling, deadly places frightened out of his mind, learned so that he would please, and so that he would survive another tortured day. He is a chameleon when it suits him to change outwardly.

So you first see the same great, huge, waddling, terrifying bulk but not the same at all because this creature means you no harm,
—
au contraire,
he is a friendly, lovable, jolly fat man of great need and somehow has had the luck and taste to know that
you
of all God's critters out there in the swim this day, that
you
alone can help him in his dilemma or need. And all of this before a word is spoken. All of this in the posture, the diffident stance, the crinkled, dimpling smile, the radiant and puffy Pillsbury Doughboy cheeks all full of innocent, gigantic, Santa-caring and tenderness, or reflecting wonderment, confusion, loss, opportunity, the marketing need of that second's sales pitch.

And then the words come. A river of noise a flood of information a rushing inundation of data a damn ocean of input that you are suddenly awash in, all this raw verbiage lapping at the shores of your mind, saturating your thoughts, a tidal wave of talk assails you and the actor is never off the mark with the words. First the word. The word is always right, apt, mesmerizing, in character, convincing, captivating, so flattering to
you,
custom-designed to lull you, stimulate you, make you forget the simple reality of this frightening specter suddenly inserting itself into your life, always reasoned, impenetrable in its logic, unwavering, so certain that you will respond like so, and perhaps a gentle physical pat from this behemoth, guiding you, nudging you, HANDLING you as the stream of words hits you and you drown in the linguistic undertow of this powerful and evil intellect.

And the weirdness of the world helps. It's such a crazy place now who is to say that this huge, sloppy, grinning bear
isn't
a bizarro television producer, Cody, and hell everybody's always told you for years that you're beautiful enough for the movies and gee golly he seems to know what he's talking about and what—what's that?—you want me to go with you to the studio
now
so you can—oh, the photographer is only going to be there another half hour—oh, no, that's all right—I guess I could run by there. Where's the studio? No, I don't know where that is. Follow you? Well. Okay. Ten minutes? And he has them just that easy. Always some quick, surprising, even credible bullshit that sells them, convinces them instantly, that deep, basso-profundo smoke screen clouding minds as he lays down his con. And it just takes that one second—that moment when you drop your guard, Cody, and you get in the front seat with him for just that second just to—you know—go over one last thing before we go in there and start working with the photographer and you see the big, wicked, razor-sharp knife pointing at your belly and smile now, real nice, real friendly and you plaster a smile on and he's bent you over out of sight and a little careful tap just to keep you down on the floorboard for a couple of minutes until he can get over in the alley there and load you into the trunk—you know, Cody . . . for LATER.

And the scary thing is they all seem to have it now, baby. Even the dumbest baby raper has learned the verbal tap dance, the combative vocal retroflex, the conversational tennis match that will get in the pants of your mind, Cody doll. The satanic cat butchers, the psy-war voodoo priests, the benign seat murderers, the optical illusionists in the Pentagon, the young one-liner pickpockets from the coast, the rock stars from hell wearing pentagrams next to the skin, they all,
all,
have it down cold. You've got a whole gang of folks can get over on you just slicker 'n pee on a doorknob, Cody. But the big man-he's the great grandmaster of the bullshit ryu—the doctor of death with a Ph.D in psyche. The king daddy rabbit of the ultimate, big, fat mindfuck.

And in the cold, rattletrap car covered in printing and chalkmarked graffiti, he thinks about this magical moment that lit up a corner of his black life and the total conquest of this magical piece of serendipity with the memorable appellation Co-dee Chase, and it stirs in him again, and he wishes for something else. Dessert. A quickie. A bo would do. A bo like the young one he'd taken off just a couple weeks back. He could oh, oh yes, he could take a sweet young bo now, sixteen like the last one maybe, going back to Muncie or Middletown or someplace like that to face a parole violation and scared to death of doing some time that would leave him with "an asshole the size of a baseball."

He remembers how good it was, but so quick, and how easily he could snuff a young bo right now all filled with his desire and his scarlet fury that never seemed to quite get quenched and how it would heat up this cold and noisy car and how good it would be to have one to put under right here and right now and this is what the monster fantasizes about as he stands in the doorway of the moving boxcar as it pulls into the outskirts of Chicago.

This is a different view than the roadrunner sees from the cab of his eighteen-wheeler, and somewhat different than your perspective from the blacktop. The signposts are a bit different as seen from the rails. He just spotted the top of a barn not long ago that advertised M R L CAVE and as he thinks about the pleasures of a young fugitive hobo his subconscious is automatically analyzing the permutations, MARVEL, MARBLE, MIRACLE CAVE, CAVERN, MURIEL CAVE, MURIEL CAVEAT EMPTOR as his strange and amazing storehouse feeds his twisted terminals. But this is what he hates.

The two guys in UP Car Control are busy swapping gags about a shipper, they can't stand when the big 110-car train comes chugging into the hump, and the one is saying to the other one, finishing up a railroad gag, "So you know how to cheer up a depressed flat?"

"Yeah. Ya' articulate it," the other one says and they're laughing when the car comes by so they don't see the thing in the doorway. The car is at the tail end of a half-dozen boxcars hooked into a string of gondolas and hoppers out of Stockton, originally, and Chaingang has popped the door of this Santa Fe box and now he's tossing out his massive duffel and gritting his teeth as he tumbles out the hatch, hoping just hoping some fucking yard bull will spot him jumping and come try to stick him.

He hits all five hundred pounds on his good leg which is now about as swollen as the bad ankle and he promises himself no more trains as he smacks into the hard, stinging earth. But you don't see this if you spot the big man jumping out of the Sante Fe boxcar, because what you'll see is the sight of a huge man ever so gently—and delicately you might say—dropping from the train and tumbling like an acrobat, rolling so gracefully, jumping and going with the momentum of the train's speed and his bulk and rolling like some great clown man laughing fatso dancing bear jokester. You'd probably think to yourself, isn't he light on his feet. And you not even realizing that's five hundred pounds on the hoof, pal, dropping from a moving boxcar onto the rocks and rolling, and that's a lot of rock-and-roll.

But then when he gets up and starts limping for his duffel, which neither you nor I could even lift off the ground (the sleeping bag alone weighs twenty-two pounds), then you see that it is all he can do to get back on his sore, throbbing ankle. But his mind is already concentrating on the job at hand as he heads unerringly out of the vast railroad confluence and along a side road then crossing a busy thoroughfare until, about nine blocks from the yard, he's reached a county road sign. He looks down the road and sees one of the small utility buildings he's been looking for about two blocks from where he stands now.

He decides to leave his duffel here and go back and get what he needs, but at least he knows now where he will spend the night. He is cold and his ankle keeps sending shock waves toward his brain and he ignores the pain, as always, and continues to concentrate on the matters of priority. First, he gingerly hops over the deep road ditch and hides his duffel in a bed of weeds at the beginning of the adjacent field. He breaks a huge limb off of a nearby tree and using it as a cane begins hobbling back toward a small grocery store.

A car of young women slows as they near him and he can see them looking at him and laughing and the driver honks the horn and they speed by him. He got a look at the one on the passenger side. A chipmunk- cheeked high school girl of fifteen. He thinks how he could tape her mouth shut so she couldn't scream and the different ways he could make her pass out before he took her under like the way he'd tie her hands and then hang her up nude so he could work on her, hang her up there with those nice tan legs all spread open and those little nipples are erect and how he'd start pinching them real easy and then fingers like vise grips like steel tempered steel
pliers pinching and twisting and ripping this little cunt nipples and clitoris off tearing that pink skin bleeding ripping that shit off her front there as she twisted and fainted and tearing at the skin on the inside of her upper thighs and peeling down peeling her skin like you would peel a ripe fruit
and he smiles and almost laughs out loud at the prospect of such a thing.

He has a case of fragmentation grenades in his duffel. He starts to fantasize about some of the things he could do to the girls in that automobile—as he limps painfully toward the little store. He thinks how pleasant it would be to grade and brand that little USDA prime trim that just whizzed by him, stamp a brand on it then, a hot brand to mark the U.S. Government Inspected Prime and watch a hot iron burn its shape deep into the tortured, bleeding rawness of the jerking, squirming pink flesh, that pampered, untouchable young flesh and how he'd like to give it his special brand. Something to get their attention as they hung there like meat waiting for him to take his turn with each of them, letting his wild imagination invent new games to play with their bodies and souls and how easily and pleasing it would be then, later, to take their young, tender hearts.

He steps to the side of the building that advertises STRAWBERRY SODA and PROFFER'S BRAND MEATS, pushing on the dented metal door marked GENTS and letting it stand open behind him as he extricates his penis and for no reason begins urinating on the sink then guiding the stream of awful-smelling urine across the room and into the wastepaper can where it pounds like a hammer and only his inability to arc his stream that high prevents him from pissing on the empty towel dispenser. He walks back around to the front of the building, a combination grocery/package store/gas station, and pushes on the tin strip that says RAINBOW IS GOOD BREAD and lets the door slam behind him as he strides toward the food.

"Hah-dee," a wrinkled, middle-aged woman says from the shadows behind the counter where he can hear a vapid game-show host mouthing some vocal feces and he ignores her as he grabs the first packages he can reach out of the refrigerated tray, a large box of pasteurized American cheeze and a package of sliced ham and he rips the ham open with his teeth and tears the top off the cheese dropping the cardboard into the vegetable tray beside him and pinching the end off the foil, ripping a huge four-inch hunk of cheese off and wadding it up in the slices of ham and swallowing about half of it instantly, pulling a bag of something resembling potato chips off a nearby shelf absentmindedly and stabbing a finger into it then ripping it open and shoving a pawful of something into his mouth, just about ODing on sodium and preservative as he swallows a great mouthful of an awful chip of some kind, slamming one of the refrigerator doors open and grabbing a half gallon of milk and draining four-fifths of the half gallon in one long gurgling, ravenous chug-a-lug.

"Ah-gols-ah swear ah never have seen nobody drink thet much milk all at a time like that! Ah swear!" she says nervously as he continues to ravage and plunder the shelves, ripping open some cookies and another pair of meat-and-cheese combinations, walking toward her as he crams an entire package of sliced swiss and bologna in his maw, scarcely taking time to chew before he swallows and says: