The Holy Terror (9 page)

Actually, those almost like her. For, the reason she had self-exiled herself into confinement in this wheelchair since 1974 was frightening in its simplicity; a clinical reason, though one not having anything to do with disease.

By staying in the wheelchair, bundled up in her bright red and orange afghan, it became that much harder to string up a noose and hang herself from whatever light fixture was handy. Balance the photo albums under her feet, kick them away, and follow them into the dervish oblivion.

She was out of it, back to the present. It was that quick with her. Mood swings a manic-depressive would kill for.

“I’m serious, Michael. I know I couldn’t get my poor hands to wheel me away from the flame!” Would she really try? She held her hand to her breast, as if she had just been offered sex. .

Surfer had run the aspirator tube through the slit in his throat a dozen times, like the ultimate in flossing. He popped the shunt back into place, keeping his finger over it like it was the trigger on a squirt gun or something equally non-threatening.

“Sad world.” His mouth a minimalist charcoal sketch. The words less garbled after the aspirator cleaning. “I want to be with you when you go sunnin’, this be keepin’ up.”

Wilma dismissed it with a wave. “Don’t be silly, Michael, the farthest I go is in front of the Theater, you know that.” She was referring to the recently renovated Chicago Theater. At the northeast corner of State and Lake, it was within sight of the Marclinn.

“But still.” Michael tried to sound desperate about it.

“Michael, I sit out there, you can see me around more people going by after work than I could ever meet in my life!” She said she never had to go all the way to the beach, because the waters of Lake Michigan had the same smell as came from out of tile subway grates along Washington Street. Dank, but yet somehow fresh, the year round. She had told this to Karl, an aging biker who had ALS. His reply was the same he gave most anything: Fuckin’ A. That is, right on the money.

“Michael, you are a gentleman and a scholar.” She drank the last of her morning constitutional. You could read now how Payton had run 16,726 yards in his career. 9.5 miles.

“Now it’s time for this old gal to get her butt into gear. I told Colin I’d watch the Lotto machine this morning, and I promised Cat that I would help her go through the Sears catalog this afternoon.”

“I read that cop book you gave me,” he said, to keep her near him just a few heartbeats longer. “The one by that Ed McBain guy.” He pronounced the last name Mac Bain.

“Oh, which one was it now? I forget, there are so many...”

“
Tricks
it was. With them little people on Hall’ween dressed as boogens an’ haints, robbin’ groceries.”

Wilma had started to wheel away, but her face brightened and she placed a hand on Surfer’s knee. “You know, my nephew Henry is going to give me a copy of the new one for Christmas.
Lullaby
, I think it’s called.”

“That’s a nice title,” Surfer said. “Like that old song, ‘Lullaby and Good night.’ Just be careful, Gramma! I want to read that one, too.” He had tried saying that last part without fingering his shunt. “I said on how I just wants you to be careful!”

“Hell, Michael. If you aren’t watching over me, then Evan is when he’s all dressed up as that American Dream character!” Wilma slapped him on the hand one last time.

As an afterthought, she reached over, one hand clutching the afghan to her throat, and kissed Surfer on his stubbly cheek. His complexion being dark chocolate, she couldn’t tell if he was blushing as she wheeled away.

A few feet away from Surfer stood a pool table, and in the short silence following Wilma Jerrickson’s departure, someone broke and a new game of Stripes and Solids was begun. On the television above the pool table, an advertisement for a new aspirin product played out its pitch. Yuppies worked hard and held their temples briefly to the jingle, “I haven’t got time for the pain... “.

* * *

Frank Haid read the article in the Tribune about the murder. His interest waned before the third paragraph. He was never big on reading, or watching the news, for that matter.

In the candlelit bedroom, the shadows of crucifixes like beckoning fingers across the wall above his Father’s corpse, still in the wheelchair, Haid went to bed after twice reading Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoon, unable to understand it.

Victor Tremulis’ first visit to a church downtown came on a day which typified Chicago weather of any given season.

Thursday had started out looking damn fine for being so close to the holidays. Later, Victor would think that he was not the only one gulled by the bitch-goddess weather. Morning broke at seven-twenty, a blue the color and as crisp as a rookie policeman’s shirt. A blue so pale that it was almost, well, Victor wrote in his journal on the way to the Loop that it was as if the clouds were stretched out so thin that the blue couldn’t help but wash through. If the city natives weren’t too cautious, there would be dancing in the streets, he wrote.

By eleven, the most anyone grumbled underneath a featureless grey sky was, “at least it ain’t snowin’ anna wind ain’t comin’ off the lake.” Tremulis heard that, or variations of such, by three people on the same street. And not one single meteorological source would saddle the blame; by noon, when the first loveless flake fell without fanfare into the gutter beneath the Lake Street elevated tracks, every radio and television station was predicting every scenario a disaster movie mogul could dream up. Temperatures ranging from ten below in the outlying ‘burbs to forty and warming were to be expected, depending on which dial you might be flipping through.

When Victor Tremulis by chance walked past St. Sixtus, on Madison between LaSalle and Clark, it was thirty degrees and he was wearing his autumn windbreaker. The last time he had gone to a mass of any kind was for the Feast of Our Lady of Czestechowa, a Polish remembrance, in August. He attended mass occasionally at St. Boniface or St. John Cantius with his mother, because he truly loved her, deep down in his heart where the shit stink of the city couldn’t touch him.

And so it was, purely by chance, that he ended up in front of the Franciscan church, with its monolithic Christ on the cross looking down over cabbies and bike messengers giving each other and everybody in general the finger. He had come above ground from the Milwaukee/Douglas subway line in front of W. Bell on Dearborn. His stomach was acidic because of the pain doing the Bristol Stomp on his back. Seeing the turn the weather had taken since the train had gone underground back at Ashland didn’t help worth a cat’s shit.

The cramps hit him as he crossed the First National Plaza, recalling an argument with his mother over ten dollars. Why did she have to piss and moan so? “Why does everyone think I’m so violent?” He muttered loud enough for those closest to glance his way.

Just because I’m angry, he thought.

He rushed into the Wendy’s across from the plaza, hating how his bowels controlled his life. Afterwards, a fine sheen of sweat on his forehead, Tremulis walked past the Loop synagogue, turned down Madison and was mesmerized by the huge stone savior. The church had four separate entrances; a woman in a blue bonnet talked to herself in front of the westernmost set of stairs, a cigarette dangling from her mouth.

Tremulis stood there, watching.

“What a babe, huh?” Tremulis turned to see a man with shoulder-length brown hair. He was wearing a casual sport jacket and carried a maroon portfolio. Victor started to open his mouth.

“Just like you, you fucking freak,” the man interrupted him. “Can’t even walk a straight line. I been tryin’ to pass you, you fucking dork. Jesus Christ.”

So surprised by the man’s outburst that he couldn’t even react, Tremulis could only stare as the man passed near the breezeway between the church and the Brevoort Building. Suddenly, a black man in a wheelchair came out of the alleyway, his front tires seemingly skimming the air, and blocked the man’s path.

“Shoo, son. You got a mouth!” Tremulis saw the crippled man place a finger over a plastic thing on his throat, just visible underneath a grey and white scarf.

The punk in the sport jacket stared at the man who faced his chest head-on as if he were an apparition from a nicotine fit. Maybe he thought twice about it, but he then jabbed a middle finger up and almost touched the black man’s blue parka. Then he pushed past him, as well, shaking his head at the audacity of the public display.

The crippled man extended a calloused hand to Tremulis, again touching his throat as he spoke. “Name’s Mike. Mike Surfer.” Later, he would explain the nickname he had given himself.

“Hey, don’t go lettin’ that clown go jammin’ you up. Not the way, man.”

Tremulis looked down at the smiling face, the teeth a white rind in the stink of the lunch hour gutter.

Behind them, the bonnet woman lit another cigarette and cleared her throat to continue speaking nonsense.

* * *

They went into the church together, Tremulis feeling warm inside. The lobby had the smell all churches had, one he could almost, but not quite, place. Like parchment and spices, but that wasn’t it, exactly.

Alleluia, from beyond the next set of doors, up the marble steps. Alle-lu-ia-ia. A -le-e-lu-u-ia. Mike whispered to him how he had knocked over a votive candle once and set his sleeve on fire. Tremulis dipped his hand into the pool of holy water, and Surfer did the same. The black man reaching upward looked to Tremulis, like a child placing money on a counter top to buy licorice from the corner grocer.

Come and save us, Lord our God.

Let us see your face.

Let us see your face, and we shall be saved.

There was an elevator opposite the gift shop, and Tremulis was fascinated by this. When the doors opened and he saw a gilded cross several inches over the glass frame of the doors to the nave, he worried himself with the thought of his palsied hands banging the cross into the glass at the exact moment the congregation bowed their collective heads in prayer.

Lord, let us see your kindness.

And grant us your salvation.

The Lord will judge us by His law,

He is our King and Savior.

He was like that at home, afraid to make a move to disrupt anybody from their outline of normalcy. A mouse hiding from the talons of conformity wielded by his parents...

Raise your voice and tell the Good News.

The Lord our God comes in strength.

Let the clouds rain down the Just One,

And the earth bring forth a Savior.

An elderly woman clutching a red pill box was saying a prayer before each station of the cross, down the farthest aisle to the right of the two men. Her lips crumpled like old newspaper as she mouthed her blessings.

* * *

“...and the earth bring forth a Savior,” Haid finished the December First reading from the St. Joseph’s Weekday Missal. He had a captive audience of one, and the man was terrified. They were in an alleyway off Van Buren and Plymouth Court. The only lights outside of the alley street lamp came from the top floor library of the John Marshall Law School a half block north.

The man in the wheelchair, black and legless, had been drinking to fend off the cold. Moonlight, benign and deceitful, glinted briefly off an emptied bottle of Night Train Express in the man’s lap. The man himself was sobered by fear.

The day’s temperatures had dropped drastically. Loop workers, again displaying a hive intelligence, fled the winds barreling down the concrete canyons by way of the Metra and CTA commuter lines. The last of them had disappeared into the catacombs of Union Station by seven PM. When the weather in this city is displaying its fickleness in the middle of a work week, even the taverns are empty.

The wind had come in off of Lake Michigan in late afterndon, a Canadian wind, while Mike Surfer was introducing his new friend Vic to Gramma and Cat Townsend at the Marclinn. This type of wind usually overtook Illinois out in what Chicago weathermen call “the sticks.” The wind in the Loop that night hugged the elevated tracks, turned malicious circles amongst the lofts of Printer’s Row and the terraces of Dearborn Park, and eventually found its way to the alley where the Painkiller was embarking on the rapture.

The wind chill factor was minus eleven. The wind itself filled the hood of the Haid’s jacket and whipped it to either side of his head. Haid was not cold. The man in the chair, who had identified himself as Hutch an eternity of seconds ago, sat as far back in the chair as his numb butt would allow.

His gold teeth were chattering up a storm, but the weather was secondary to his condition. There just wasn’t anybody else out on the street to hear him scream. Hutchie knew that.

No one to smell the burning flesh, when that part of it happened, either.

Officers Rizzi and Morisette responded to a “See the man” at a corner deli called The Dill Pickle, on Van Buren and Dearborn. They were beat patrolmen from the First District, and Morisette radioed in at six-forty AM that they were on their way. The wind had lulled but the elder cop still felt numbness in his fingers simply from fiddling with his walkie-talkie. Even with the woolen gloves on.

“The man” turned out to be a security guard working graveyard at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a stone wedge of a prison on Congress Parkway. He was walking to State Street to catch his bus back to Hyde Park when he saw the empty wheelchair in the alley. And then saw the body parts lying amidst the frozen refuge. “I read the papers, you know,” the guard said as if no one would believe it from the looks of him. And here it was Rizzi had worked up an appetite and was looking forward to grabbing a bite at the deli.