Seeing Red, page 22
Tillyard's left hand never lost contact with the haft of his bone knife. She rushed ahead of him, apparently unaware or unconcerned about the traps that might be before them, and Tillyard grudgingly allowed a bit of trust—she had, after all, neatly dispatched the Shuffler that had intended to lunch on him. His paranoia eased back a notch; just then the tunnel dead-ended out. She stopped.
Not quite; he registered a narrow cleft in the rock but she did not continue through it. Rather, she came to him and tugged his arm, indicating that he should precede her now. So this is the game, his mind nagged.
He jerked the knife free and with no hesitation whatsoever stepped through the split in the rock wall. She hung by it, not following. Waiting, it seemed.
There was no life inside. Instead, there was a gentle upward slope scattered with shale chips that had cascaded down from above. Tillyard worked his way up the incline for a while, sniffing for trouble. His leg muscles, recently pressed hack into service, stung in protest, and his back was soon lubricated with sweat. What he caught was no threat, but it stopped him short in surprise.
The air had changed, subtly. There was a greasy sheen to its odor, a tinge of metal, of solvents and moisture. He took a few more steps upward. Various carbons and a sweeter tang he did not immediately recognize. He cocked his head; there was an open space not too far up and the weighty moisture of the cave air seemed to dwindle behind him.
Tillyard's heart began to thump heavily and an icy sweat broke out over his entire body. He began trembling lightly and blew his breath out quicker to compensate. She had shown him the way out of the labyrinth; what was in front of him was topside.
But she was not behind him.
He could smell the air; air moved by breezes and carrying with it the forgotten smells of the outside world. It was like perfume, seductive, holding Tillyard in unmoving awe. He turned and picked his way with infinite care back down the slope, slipping on the shale chips and finally reaching the bottom in a noisy, ass-sliding scatter of loose rock. His scabbed legs did not seem to mind.
Beyond the cleft, she waited.
"It's the way out," he said in his hoarse, nearly useless voice. "Come with me; it's the way out!"
She moved, but not toward the cleft. Her hand traced lightly down his cheek in a caress that seemed to web his lungs in electricity; it became difficult now to breathe. She pulled him toward her.
"It is you," he said.
Touch me. Love me. I've been so alone.
His arms went around her and he found that one of her own was missing at the elbow. Like his severed fingers. You lost pieces of yourself in the labyrinth, and if you survived its denizens, it would consume you, absorbing your soul and being into the rock walls. It might rob you of your voice, even as it had spent endless, painstaking time robbing Tillyard of his, though he still retained that selfish remnant of speaking ability. It might rob you of other things.
"Althea." He said it only once. It was a whisper, sucked quickly into the stone walls without an echo. She held him tighter, her face now buried in the hollow of his neck. He could feel her tears running down his chest. She made no sound.
Take me. Love me.
He forced it out, tears now welling up in his own eyes: "I love you." He said it quietly, his teeth clenched together as though he was in great agony.
His eyes were squeezed tightly shut as he buried the bone knife in her back up to the hilt. She stiffened in his embrace and he could feel her blood pumping out, slicking his fist. With a guttural rasp of air that sounded vaguely like a sigh, she slumped and he supported her. She was dead in an instant. Tillyard knew how to time the swing; how to place the blow to kill instantly and properly. He was a machine.
He laid her corpse gently down at the mouth of the cleft and spent some time squatting near her, touching her face with his callused fingers. She had scars and battlemarks to match his own. It was her right arm that was gone. Their eyes were still good, he thought crazily. They still made tears.
He had spoken her name once in three hundred and six kills, now three hundred and seven. He could whisper that, and the other things, to himself as he climbed, the evaporating tears streaking backward in the dust coating his face, but he did not. Smelling the air, he decided he had no further use for speaking.
The wind was very cold, and the redly setting sun reflected off Tillyard's dead eyes as he crawled, at last, out of the earth to resume his work.
The turd had really hit the turbine, thought Eye Man, with Jocko's small theft from the pumpkin truck. Rude had devised a theory about Jocko. He'd told it to Strongheart and Nobby. Nobby, scared enough to piss bleach, had repeated it to Eye Man, not giving an airborne fuck whether he was believed. Rude was history, too, and Nobby had watched him die.
The theory was that the ghost of Jocko had come back to haunt them until everybody was dead, dead, dead.
This was no trank fantasy. This was real. Growing up could be such a scream, except sometimes you saw how simple it would be to keep screaming until state-funded medication erased all pain from your life. Which still didn't sound too shabby to Eye Man.
None of them had ever thought they might actually grow up, or grow old, or grow dead.
Jocko had always made the other Boulevard punks antsy. The standing joke was to guess what brand of carb cleaner he was snorting this week. He stood a wiry five-five, the kind of sawed-off blood with muscle bumps in his jawbones and a full basket of twitches and tics. His coffee-colored skin had become mottled in a chemical mishap to which he frequently alluded, yet never detailed. Eye Man thought that Jocko had been the victim of a spill in the birthmark department, and had fabricated the notion of a calamity in his misty past to make himself more mysterious, so Chaka or Lindabelle would do the bone dance with him. Otherwise, it was so solly, fuck Gash or don't fuck. But Jocko was weird enough without fictional embellishment. He'd boasted the tallest orange spikes on the street until he'd gotten clipped by the wing mirror of an RTD bus. Beat cops had hustled him off the curb, and he was muttering about Officer Piggy and the right to sit wherever he fucking well pleased, when—whang! The buttcrumbs staffing the emergency ward shaved Jocko's head regardless of whether it was medically necessary. Ho, ho, the name of the game is Shear the Punk. Keep Hollywood straight-edged. Big fucking deal.
After that, Eye Man swore he could see death riding in Jocko's eyes; their sclera had run to a sick ochre that reminded him of pus.
Bad trouble simmered in Jocko's glare. They'd be loitering against the brick wall facing the Orange Drive crosswalk, hustling turistas for coin or sneaking into the Hamburger Hamlet to foul the john, and Jocko would unleash a scream guaranteed to hamper traffic and make pedestrians cut them a wider DMZ. Jocko's wires were beaucoup frayed. Eye Man heard some out-of-towner farting through his face about how Los Angeles rated third in the nation for the number of homeless mental defectives roaming the streets. Right. At least Jocko never shit himself in public without warning.
The upside of Jocko's alien weirdness was power—power that could make them ten, fifteen strong on weekend nights. They sauntered down the Walk of Stars cleaving citizens to either side. At the Seven Seas Lounge they whiffed and drank and shot up and pissed and fucked until they blacked out. Usually somebody's deathmobile could he hijacked to wherever the Scorpion Club had relocated that week, and they could skank and slam and thrash until somebody's momma called Officer Piggy about the ruckus.
Once, Jocko had bitten the ear off some dude in a fight. He always talked about wishing he'd kept it, so it could be worn on a thong like a wartime memento. The only mortal who had ever backed Jocko down, to Eye Man's knowledge, was Rude. Jocko had been pulling his raving 'n' drooling bit, getting hazardous. Rude knew animal tranquilizer when he saw it, and put the flat of his hand to the center of Jocko's forehead. There was a loud, wet beefsteak smack and Jocko's eyes rolled yellowly toward the moon. He hit the deck and did not stir until sunrise. Nobody slept near him because he had filled his pants. He woke up with a nosebleed and no memory of having been such a sphinctroid.
That had happened back when Eye Man and his fellows maintained a nest of sleeping bags and crates and candles inside the shell of the Mecca. During the thirties the Mecca Hotel had been pure swank, a trysting oasis for the celebrated, a stone's hurl from Grauman's Chinese. By the mid-sixties, transients had blessed it with a permanent urinary stench, and the week Jim Morrison died in 197I the iron security bars sprouted across the door and windows. The next decade saw it shut down, then condemned, then gutted. When Eye Man's crew assumed residence, it was on dirt floors interrupted by the basement's ancient and crumbling support pillars.
Then the Mecca had been invaded by key lights and camera track. Eye Man and Jocko and the rest had been evicted by, of all things, a Death Wish sequel using the hotel's husk for local color. In the movie, it was a hideout for dope-dealing rapist punks.
The Seven Seas vanished next. It had gotten refurbished into a yupster disco serving nonalcoholic drinkies. Eye Man didn't know what it was called now, and didn't care a rat fuck. On weekends, the lines outside the place were choked with Iranians in Miami Vice drag, pawing underaged giggle-boxes sporting spike heels, fat arms, and faint mustaches.
Punks were losing the battle for the Boulevard; fewer and fewer manifested on Fridays, after dark. The Boulevard seemed to be evolving into something different. For different people. For eaters of frozen yogurt.
One night, they tried to raise the ghost of the Seven Seas—Jocko and Strongheart and Gash and Lindabelle and Chaka and Nobby and Eye Man and other worthies all got tanked in the Hollywood High School bleachers and wound up in the alley behind the Paramount Theater after the parking attendants had fled for the evening. The old Seven Seas cul-de-sac still bore the back-door entrance sign. Punks had always been required to enter through the rear door, and it was a status they treasured. Eye Man felt that just a wee bit more beer and powder would crank them enough to kick in the now-barred access and introduce a lot of boogie feehs to some genuine hardcore mayhem. Anyone who didn't care for fighting could wrestle with Gash, who was dusted enough not to care who stuck what where or how.
Fucking Gash's sliding-door cunt never failed to make Eye Man think of stirring a vat of chili with a toothpick, or tossing a hot dog into a swimming pool. Fat chicks were always gushers. Staying hard was no strain; feeling any friction at all was the challenge. Had Gash been born with that trench, or had she dug it herself? Either option made Eye Man's dick prefer television nights to getting slimed one more time.
Out came the spraycans and silver markers. PUNK DEATH SQUADS NOW! FUCK INGFUCKINGFUCKING! ELTAS WATCHES YOU AS YOU SLEEP!
Elias had died a long time ago.
The county had turned Jocko into a skinhead just as the news chancres unfurled their gambit to censor punk on the basis that the skinhead faction had been artificially linked to white supremacists. The witch-hunt kicked off, ignoring such plain truth as embodied in "Nazi Punks Fuck Off"—a song in which the Dead Kennedys showed the out door to punks who stirred up shit.
They were under siege from all fronts.
Pissed, Jocko decided he wanted the rusted Seven Seas sign to adorn their hovel at the Mecca. By standing on Rude's shoulders, be was able to wrench it free with an opera's worth of grunting and a few drops of sacrificial blood. Rude reanointed Jocko with Budweiser and got a beer shampoo. Rude's head was mown into a tic-tac-toe crosshatch, with a virulent streak of bright green. His eyes, generic, as colorless as distilled water, turned to the square dead space formerly covered by the sign.
Everyone saw the gang tag—part nickname, part hieroglyphic, all incomprehensible. Anyone who lives near a city has seen it: Cholos and low-riders bickering over turf; Vietnamese clubs leaving memos of their passage; solos marking their layovers and announcing their existence to an uncaring public like dogs lubricating hubcaps. This, however, was not NIKKO-BASLJRA-EL MERO MERO #I or CATHI SUX +DTK or 1411I ST CRIPS RULE. This tag was unreadable in any tongue.
Jocko let fly one of his lunatic assault screams and obliterated the insignia with red spray paint, looping and curling and blotting out from the land of the living all trace of its faded declaration. It drowned beneath his crazed design, strangled by artful, sure strokes.
Somehow the plan to raze the disco and put the boot to wimp buttocks aplenty got buried, too. Dust and budget 'ludes can do the old cups-and-balls trick with one's attention span, that way.
Gash woke up with a quart of jism dripping out of her, and Jocko came to curled around his pilfered sign. Eye Man arose still tangled in Lindahelle. He had slept four hours, and through that time her sleeping hand had enclosed his detumescent cock as though protecting it. Linda-belle was brown on brown, curly-haired and freckled, with big breasts on an otherwise shapeless body. She would never he instant boner bait—like Chaka—but neither was she brain dead, like Gash. Eye Man enjoyed her smile, her smart eyes, her habit of not loudly belaboring the obvious. She provided calm to balance the stormy or extreme personalities of the rest. He did not mind waking up with her, now. When she saw his eyes open, she held a finger to her lips—slihh, our secret— and smiled that smile, pumping him in the dark until he curved up painfully stiff, then rolling on top to work him like modeling clay until he shot off with enough force to bang her head against the Mecca's low basement ceiling.
Rude glided in bearing that morning's booty from the Donut Stop dumpster, off car-packed Highland Avenue, across the street from the Holiday Inn. "Fuckin' old winos," he muttered to whoever cared. "They found out about the dumpster. I got there early and there was still one of them fuckers, ass-up. I was in no fuckin' mood. I kicked the shit outta him and told him to stay the fuck away." He hoisted a pair of battered cartons—his cull of the Donut Stop's throwaways. "Breaky is served."
Getting stale donuts free meant that change could be spent on hot coffee. Yeah, they were sure giving the free enterprise system a run for its bucks.
That afternoon they worked the Chinese, hanging near the forecourt and hustling Japanese tourists for coin. Any normal human could pose for a homey holiday snap with a real live urban punk—for a buck. It bought the beer. Jocko thought posing was pussy, but swilled his share nonetheless. No one ever tried to slap a brew from his hand.
Lindabelle and Chaka had lit off to pump the walking traffic for smokes. One round on the boulevard generally netted plenty, especially after the layer-coifed, hormone-crazed ax heros strutting out of the Guitar Institute of Technology got a hind-brain-full of Chaka. She exploited a sharp Aryan physiognomy and a jailbait contour, a bleached military crop above frank Arctic eyes above an elegant, chewable neck. Between those last two, almost as if in ambush, waited a pouty mouth destined for one specialty, maybe two if you were imaginative. Linda-belle caught Chaka's bounceback, and cigarettes were a smoother gimme than plain cold coin.
Again, Jocko wasn't motivated. He rolled his own from gutter butts. Eye Man guessed Jocko preferred the handmades for their potency—more tar! more nicotine! more rust brown active ingredient! When he smoked, Jocko pulled hard, as if he was inhaling distillate of life essence, selfishly hoarding every wisp of thick gray smoke. Eye Man wondered what leftover lives Jocko was willfully packing into the dead storage of his lungs, what other psyches or failures, what ugly ends. Was he respirating the tobacco-cured breath of people now dead? Famous? Or just stuff too rank for the other Boulevard ciphers?
What load was Jocko taking on, by his own hand?
Eye Man gave it up. Too much like trying to figure out who the hell Beniamino Gigli had been. A bronze LP was mounted on the guy's sidewalk star, but that said zero.
Jocko his own bad self loitered against the wall, casting about for sport and mustering a sullen sneer, until he spotted the pumpkin truck from Half Moon Bay. It slowed, gears gnashing, for the Orange Drive light just as Strongheart polished off a pair of hamhocks from Atlanta. Wifey first, then her baseball-capped breadwinner. Strongheart's kinked 'hawk made him a foot and a half taller than either of them. He then photographed mister and missus beneath the main marquee. Texas Chainsaw Massacre III was afoot. The hick's eyes darted wetly about, as though he feared this monster would eat his Instamatic, but he pressed a humid dollar bill into Strongheart's hand with a shitload of full-bore rural howdy-do. Strongheart grinned back, just as fatuously. The couple's chicken-fried accents were so dense he could not comprehend a syllable.
Jocko's jaundiced eyes caught nothing but the truck, and its load of plump orange pumpkins—the color his hair had been, before. His jaw worked and his eyes reflected back orange glints. His brain was afloat with some proposed violence, naturally involving pumpkins.
"Tricker treat," he mumbled, a truly deranged smile carving its zigzag way across his mottled face. His teeth were as yellow as his eyeballs.
As the light changed, he highstepped out into traffic and snatched a pumpkin from the unstable pyramid weighing down the truck's rear deck. The driver should have missed seeing, but did not. He tapped his brakes, nearly causing a rented LeBaron full of townies from some Texas hog wallow to rear-end him, scissoring Jocko. But Jocko leaped deftly from the pinch line, bristling, just itching for a confrontation if this clodhopping retard was stupid enough to leave his truck and start shoving. Nobby, casing tourists near one of the poster shops, caught wind and laughed, high and shrilly. Imagine an Orthodox Jewish punk and you've got Nobby.
Jocko stood ground in the street, grinning like a sniper, pumpkin cradled, waiting for retaliation. Backed-up cars honked uselessly. The truck driver had left his spine in Half Moon Bay. He spat Hispanic invective and laid his pedal down. The wheezy Ford lurched through the crosswalk at a palsied thirty, its load of pumpkins teetering, its bald retreads feeling every crack in the slurry sealing. A workshirted arm jammed the unilateral peace symbol back in Jocko's direction. Pussy.
"I got me a punkin!" Jocko hooted.
