The Holy Terror (18 page)

“Or, how about—” Lynch was fresh with ideas.

“I anticipate your thrust again, Lynch, and you know how the police feel about me as well”

“Yea,” Lynch said, leaving it at that.

“Do you think it’s that guy what everyone’s calling The Painkiller?” He said before The American Dream was out of earshot. “Do you think?”

* * *

11AM am angry and hurt that the police did nor report the subway incedent to me.

Unless UNLESS it has NOTHING to do with the pain killer himself. Sick people in the world today.

1220PM Am sitting in Mariano Park hoping for news. Rush Street deserted. One man walking buy. Singing.

Got me a newborn son.

Gonna buy my newborn son a gun.

Gonna buy my newborn son a gun.

1230PM Who put me on this world, in this city?

Who put this world in me...

Ten hours before, down the State Street subway line. Somewhere between Monroe and Roosevelt:

Strutting down the stairwell on Dearborn like Elvis in his prime, proud as a boy saying the word cunt into the mirror for the first time. Father had told him that it was time to cruise the trains. Let’s forget this shit about walking the streets in twenty below or what the fuck ever.

Haid hated the subways, except maybe those around the airport, where Jane Byrne dedicated each of the O’Hare extension stops in honor of James Doyle, William Fahey, and Richard O’Brian: three cops murdered in February of 1982, the latter two shot dead after attending the funeral of the first.

The long tunnel connecting the Jefferson Park-O’Hare line with the 95th Howard line was empty. It might have been because of the Christ-Moses freezer box up top, or more likely just one of those odd moments, a break in the midnight clockwork.

The fare lady paid him no mind as he flashed his Special Users pass against the window like it was a badge or something. It had taken four letters from his Uncle Vince’s neurologist to the CTA to get him the pass four years back. In this city, you weren’t physically or mentally handicapped, you were a Special User. Go figure.

How it was, there were a ton of pedways—connecting tunnels—between buildings and the transit lines. In addition the west-northwest route connected to the north-south route by a similar tunnel which ran the length of the alley between Dearborn and State. During the day, the tunnel was brimming with commuters from the North side avoiding just one block of walking above ground to their banks and offices in the West Loop. During the night, the bums and the musicians came out to play their dirges to that part of the population that took to the streets when the sun went down, the clubbers and the flashers. Haid had often seen men in wheelchairs in this tunnel.

But tonight it was empty.

So now what? Walk, just walk. Warm up a bit. He came out of the tunnel around Monroe Street, boarded up maintenance rooms behind the escalators leading upwards. Piss stains on the cement stairs. There were a few people sitting on a wooden bench next to a Hindu-run newsstand. All they sold were smokes and stroke magazines. A TV screen above the newsstand flashed useless information about bus schedules and ads for cigarettes.

There was plenty of desolation between the shacks and the pillars alongside the tracks and the people who didn’t care as long as it wasn’t them. Across the tracks leading north, Haid saw ads for the Penthouse Pet of the Year and the Bill Murray film Scrooged!

To his left, he saw, blocks north, the lights of the Washington Street platform. And a man he would know as Lex Bastoni.

* * *

Haid first saw him as a white guy with curly black hair and blue jeans with shiny knees. The guy was sitting in the shadows of a maintenance shack, near an overhead read and white sign that read

HOWARD

trains ahead
(typesetting note: smaller size)

and which had several squirts of ancient tobacco on its underside. Haid had been thinking that all the white cripples must hide themselves out in the suburbs, like Hinsdale and Buffalo Grove. Well, if they were in the city, they certainly weren’t on the streets. When the man introduced himself as Lex, Lex Bastoni and extended a hand with long polished fingernails, Haid was thinking on what the man wanted to confess to him.

Haid pulled his hand out of his suede jacket and shook Bastoni’s. A firm handshake, but half-hearted on Haid’s part.

“Name’s Frank.” An errant page of a discarded magazine slid off of the platform on the El tracks. It was an ad for that chick on TV who says “Don’t hate me for my hair.” The chick’s face flipped over and kissed the rail. Haid watched this, then continued. “Out late, huh?”

Like the guy had a home. Jee-sus, the epitome of small talk. Bastoni’s hands were dry and chapped. Didn’t have a cup in sight, either.

“Nowhere to go,” Bastoni replied in a gravelly voice, making a small attempt at a small smile.

“Same here,” from Haid. “Got a story? Makes you different from everybody else, you got a story to tell.”

“Everybody got the same goddamn story to tell,” Bastoni said, shrugging. “The lawyers and the bums, ‘n people like you and me,” he itemized.

“Shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” Haid said, moving so that he was stepping in front of the wheelchair. The chair hooked fairly new, and was colored a powder blue. The wheels also seemed to have just come down from a display. A couple of dozen feet down, a small group of post-teenagers made their way down the broken escalator. They walked toward the platform nearest Haid and Bastoni, but not where they would be in direct sight.

“Don’t go preachin’ at me now,” Bastoni said wearily.

“Preaching is something I don’t do.” Haid replied honestly.

The man shrugged with apparent understanding. One of the young adults that entered the subway turned on a cassette player. The radio was tuned to one of the Chicago stations that played “yuppie oldies,” songs from the early seventies.

“Me, I’m just walkin’ around,” Haid said. “Stayin’ out of the cold, doin’ my best to, at least.”

Bastoni glanced at the kids with the radio, and Haid caught it then and spoke up.

“Oh, hey.” He held his hands palms up, the swirls in the first three fingers on each hand a faint blue from the liniment. “I’m not going to roll you, really.”

Bastoni looked at him, neither curious or leery. Same kind of look Dolezal had given him back at the Cass Hotel. Tired of it all.

“Find myself thinking too much when I’m up on the street,” Haid gave it conviction. What the hell, he was always thinking about what Father wanted.

“Now I hear you,” Bastoni said, and they were talking like old friends then. Trains went by to the north and south, but the kids with the radio hung around the Monroe Street terminal. Haid doubted they were finding shelter from the streets because they thought too much. The only thing they were thinking on, most likely, was rolling Bastoni as soon as he left. God help them.

Bastoni told him that he was forty, come to town from Detroit a few months back. And how it was a bitch-kitty getting a wheelchair onto a Greyhound. Haid told him about his own life, how empty it had been since Uncle Vince had died. But he had left him money to live on.

The faces of the late night commuters changed. The night shifters, even the happily drunk clubbers, were wearing elongated faces as dawn neared, as if the very rumor of daylight called back the skeletal, shit eating grins that dominated the daytime Loop. For the chubbers had to pay the same price as those who worked the graveyard shift. In this city, everybody sang for their last supper.

The radio played an ad for Jay Leno on Cool Ranch Doritos. Then it was “Sweet Emotion,” by Aerosmith. A yuppie oldie. Bastoni surprised Haid by pulling out a pint of C.C. And, as it had been since time out of mind, it was the drink that made the sinner confess.

Haid rationalized it later that Bastoni had wanted to be saved, or why would he have told him what he had?

Bastoni had leaned close, got a scrunched up mean look like the wrasslers on the TV, and told Haid how he was in a chair because he had been shot by a lady cop named Koja in Royal Oak, Michigan, fchrissake, all because he had gone and cut up a few people, you know how it is when you’ve had a few.

To which Haid replied, no, he didn’t. But he had had a few confessors. Bastoni said what? And Haid couldn’t answer, his head was suddenly hurting so bad.

The man was evil, yes. But he had paid his price. Yet he’s gloating over this, his glory days story. Haid weaved back and forth, not knowing which voice in his head was his.

“Hey, you okay?” Bastoni reached forward, grabbing for Haid’s jacket with his hand. He misjudged his sudden lurch, and both men were surprised when Bastoni’s hand went into Haid’s torso up to the wrist.

The hand was just as quickly expelled. Haid was rock steady now, he knew that it was because Bastoni was evil, that was why his soul was being rejected. At first, Bastoni himself had thought it to be a trick of the shadows.

Until the pain started in his hand, delayed and intense as if it had been submerged in scalding water.

He opened his mouth as if to scream. Haid clamped his own hand over Bastoni’s lower jaw and his fingers melted into his cheekbone.

He took his hand away to grab the empty bottle of Canadian Chub, which was ready to shatter on the floor. Bastoni’s face was as white as his eyes.

Down the platform, Danny O’Keefe was telling the commuters that Good Time Charlie had the blues:

“Everybody’s gone away, said they’re movin’ to L.A. There’s not a soul I know around. Everybody’s leavin’ town.”

Someone belched like the song was telling a tale that needed to be repeated.

Thirty seconds into the healing and no one saw anything. Maybe it was the song, maybe just plain old common sense. A Chicago State of Mind, patent pending.

“Nyk.” Bastoni said, before a piece of his tongue, like dried clay, fell from his mouth onto his lap.

Then he blinked and his hands started moving to undo the brakes on his chair. The left one functioned, the right one, the one he had grabbed with, flopped like a fish off Foster Avenue when the water pollution was just right.

Haid latched on to both his shoulders and pushed Bastoni back in his chair, back against the wall. He saw his radial tendons, sticking out, his knuckles white knots.

Bastoni’s body was shaking silently, blurring Haid’s vision. The crippled man made a gargling noise as his eyes swelled up and the whites turned into a snot-green jelly. His face was completely dry and there Haid was, sweating up a storm in his Australian suede jacket.

The skin under Bastoni’s lids cracked, the thin veins turning a light blue. Smoke came out of his mouth.

“In the name of the Father,” Haid said, and then someone turned up the music.

* * *

The first bass patterns of the song curled around the two men like the misty mother fog of a forgotten poet reverberating against the pissy tiles and the dank walkways, echoing off into infinity. Or at least the Clark/Lake Transfer platform.

Then the matching drumbeat, like a spoon spaded underneath an eyeball. Digging, digging...

“When I die and they lay me to rest...”

Haid felt the advantage of Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit In The Sky,” and worked with it, like the chicks did at the Lehmenn Court club where Vice Janssen used to watch their storefront aerobics. The slits doing their little pussy thrusts to Springsteen’s “Pink Cadillac.”

“Gonna go to the place that’s the best...”

Bastoni had to be dead. But he could still pray for his soul. “Who art in Heaven,” he continued.

“When I lay me down to die, goin’ up to that spirit in the sky...”

Jagged lines of cracked flesh erupted across Bastoni’s face.

“Please Father,” Haid whispered.

A disagreement ensued between two men getting off the northbound ‘A’ train. “Mahfuh piss mah cuff allays say, he say smoke my dick right here, man.” An elderly voice standing up for his rights, good for him.

And Bastoni wasn’t going into him. But he couldn’t let go. The dead man’s rib cage broke. The rest of Bastoni’s face dried up like Play-Doh left out in the sun, the departing train drowned out the song, the gashes got deeper and redder then blacker, and Lex Bastoni exploded.

Organs bursting within the corpse, grue welled out and slopped onto the wall, little bits of hair like nosehairs in a juicy looger you’d been working at getting all week. Heads turned then and saw Bastoni’s form collapse in on itself, saw bit of Lex on Haid’s chin, saw the Painkiller simply freak.

The “explosion” had hurt his head worse than before. He wasn’t the only one spooked by the destruction. People screamed and scratched their heads. First the guy is cutting up cripples and maybe blowtorching them in their chairs, now he’s blowing them up. Well, it’s a good thing the fucker got a taste of his own medicine.

A yell bellowing out of him, to shock himself into motion as much as those around him, he flung the chair with Bastoni’s remains in front of the oncoming southbound train. The conductor shielded his eyes as if a different type of crime was being committed.