Seeing Red, page 9
The hallway was unheated, and cold. The building knocked and shifted as though she was moving through the belly of a zeppelin-sized dinosaur settling down to die. Her ear picked out the faraway babbling of a television set, and for a fleeting second her ingrained self took hold and forced her to call out, "Is anyone awake . . . ?" Strong echoes were the only response. No one down here was aware of what had taken place upstairs. They would all hide in their cubicles, trembling, and rightfully so.
Let them, she thought.
The stairway to the third floor was an architect's nightmare, far too narrow and crammed into a corner of the hallway to service—just barely—the subdivided arrangement of rooms. Four steps up, a hard left turn, four more steps, another turn, and four more. Heat rose. Here the air was lukewarm, heavy, and unpleasant—the stink of senile old buildings past their dying time. The risers groaned as Leona stepped cautiously upward.
She drifted past a permanently sealed door suffocated in nails and cheap paint. One less way out, she thought. The brass numerals affixed to the next door were obscured by the same clotted, cream-colored paint that deadened every portal in the building to the same scuffed shoe-sole appearance. This was 307; Leona's was 207. Faint, smoky light seeped from the crack below.
Thinking of opportunities, she knocked. There was no response, immediate or otherwise, as she found when she waited a few beats and knocked again.
The knob was slack and loose. It was blackened by years of dirty hands and rattled when Leona knocked; it ground out a soft-clockwork noise when she twisted it. The front door was unlocked, unbolted, and this was not a revelation. As the knob reached full crank, Leona fancied she heard a papery, rasping sound from within, almost like a dry laugh.
If it was normal, that is, some dreadful bathroom accident, she thought, she could do no worse than possibly distinguish her life with an act of bravery. Yes, officer, I ripped my gown into bandages and bestowed the kiss of life and I didn't even care if they had bad breath or syphilis. Let that smug Mr. Michael Donnelley match that bit of courage for his kid!
Warmer air huffed out against her face as the door swung back. A table lamp glowed near the ragged hide-a-bed sofa in the main room. There were cinderblock and milk-crate shelves loaded not with books, but stray papers and worn-looking knickknacks and dirty gray bar ashtrays. The miasma of recently burned hamburger hung offensively in the air. The ceiling seemed far away and unhealthily browned, as though it filtered all the upward-bound air in the building.
A child's phonograph collected dust in one corner, surrounded by a scatter of overplayed record albums. A champagne bottle that had held a fistful of pitiful, shrunken flowers was distributed around the floor in broken green chunks.
The curtains were wide open to the night. Leona shook her head. Of course.
She knew the path; this bloc was laid out identically to her own rooms. She had to round a corner formed by the conjunction of the capsule kitchen and the hollow where the undersized closet would be. Inside the bathroom, past the half-shut door, she heard the copper slurp of a lethargically feeding bathtub drain. The natter of the TV set, a thousand miles away, might have been an aural hallucination.
Nothing waited to grab her behind the bathroom door. Her heart hammered away nonetheless until the doorknob bonked hollowly against the bathroom wall.
The boy hung half-out of the tub, tubes and viscera and things never meant to dry in the air strung across the floor. One hand was outstretched, like the clutching claw Leona had imagined behind her earlier, and clamped bloodily onto the toilet seat. His eyes were gone. His tongue was gone. His flesh had been rearranged to suit a temperamental and impatient carver. The tiled floor was awash in a half-inch depth of stinking blood. Like the boy, his wife's corpse was naked, gaffed and cleaned out like a trout. She was wedged ass-up, face down, into the narrow space between the tub and the toilet. Her skin—her pelt—covered the floor in slices.
"You're the scoffers," Leona said in a gentle, knowing voice. "You weren't careful. You didn't look out." Didn't kids learn anything anymore? Their lives had trickled down the same pipes into which Leona had spit her disease.
When she heard the door to 307 click shut—it was unmistakably the door through which she had just entered—she closed her eyes, anticipating the consummation of a courtship that had lasted for decades. There would be no bovine grunting and thrusting; she would not have to assume an embarrassingly submissive position. The deliciously itchy fireball down deep in her was nothing like what she felt when dealing with Michael Donnelley. And when she heard the rasping little laugh again, and smelled the dry cinnamon odor of flesh to which rot was but an ancient memory, she smiled, because the thing that had wanted to get her ever since that scary night in the dining room was getting her tonight.
But it had never wanted to hurt her.
Once again, Leona found herself in a messy, reeking bathroom. This time, however, her parents did not need to drag her out and tuck her in. This time she left under her own power. Love could do that to a person; it gave one unsuspected strength.
Her slippers were soon abraded to dirty rags from her night-walk. The shroudlike tatters of her robe were stiff with baked blood. She found a unique joy in no longer fearing people or things. The flies that lit on her to feed were only an annoyance.
After a time she found her way to a street called Willow Avenue, and the house Michael Donnelley had described so proudly. In a small bedroom tucked into the rear of the house, Donnelley's son Chad would be toying with an HO train rig . . . awake far too late for any seven-year-old.
No one had ever warned him what to watch out for, not in this day and age of enlightenment.
Leona tittered softly to herself, brushing hair from her face. The laugh was moist and croaking; the white wisps of hair brittle and dead, now revealing her functioning eye. Her insides rumbled with a sickly, hungering commotion as the blind, pink grubs within her squirmed and tried to feed. A daddy longlegs picked its way downward, mountaineering from the dark socket and withered lids of Leona's absent eye to the light membrane of cobweb beneath her chin. Where her throat had been. Where it would begin a nest.
As Leona had begun hers.
Here was her niche in the world. She was part of a family now, and it was time to grow.
She took her place at Chad's window. When he turned his child's eyes toward her and began screaming, a maternal joy filled her as the emotion she had so long been denied came rushing home at last.
LONESOME COYOTE BLUES
Jake's black Trans Am gobbled up Highway 15 at eighty-eight per.
"How about 'Digger Man,'" Jake shouted from the pilot side, over the din of the radio. The car's Kickers were pumping out "All Down the Line" by the Stones, real cruising music. With the moonroof open, the tune was barely more than bass notes thanks to the slipstream of hot desert air blasting through the car and deadening our ears. Our imaginations filled in the unheard guitar riffs; memory did the same for the lyrics.
"Wrong!" I yelled back. It was a good idea to stick to monosyllables, for comprehension's sake. "Sounds too much like Nigger Man; it'd make people hostile if they heard it on the radio." I watched the green LEDs of the stereo's power booster jump in the dark. "'Cruise Blues,'" I offered, snatching inspiration from what writers called Real Life.
"Nah!" Jake always denied suggestions with Luddite swiftness; it gave him more time to scare up a rational reason for the denial. "That sounds too much like a navy drinking song; you know—crew's blues. And it's too wimpy. Keep thinking."
"'Untitled Soulful Surefire Hit Single Blues.'"
"Don't be an asshole, Lester."
"Okay, okay . . . let me masticate this mentally for a moment, bwana." I was beginning to think Jake was soliciting my suggestions for the sole purpose of shooting them down, so I let him stew a bit. Not maliciously, understand—this was just one of those lull periods you hit during a long haul on the road with nothing to do.
"Live with Me" commenced; some deejay back in Los Angeles was on a Stones binge tonight. Jake submerged his consciousness into the chugging beat, and the Trans Am's needle made a tentative introduction to the century mark. The sleek gas hog was one of the few extravagances I'd known Jake to permit himself. Macho phallic fun. It had actually been a gift from Jake's father—the only such perk ever accepted, given on the occasion of Jake's premature leavetaking from the University of Nebraska. That's right, a present for quitting school. Jake's father was Señor Self-Made, and preferred his only son to whittle out his own niche on the club circuit instead of passively purchasing a dull career via the college route.
The sun had set on L.A. a while back, and somewhere in front of us was the sky-glow of Las Vegas, golden and artificial. I reached back for the beer cooler and racked my knuckles on the steel edging of Jake's guitar case for the fifth or sixth time that evening. I held my fingers against the chilled can for a second before popping the top and sucking away foam. We'd been pounding the trail long enough for the over-cranked stereo to start giving me a headache, but I could stand it for five more minutes. I told myself that every four minutes or so.
The jetwash of warm air blitzing through our open car was stingingly fresh, filtered to purity by the sand and scrub surrounding us. There is no sensation quite so exhilarating as bulleting through the desert night like some low-flying X-15, with all vents cocked open, a cold beer tucked into your crotch, and Uncle Mick and Company thumping time while the landscape scoots by. Our payload was band ordnance; somewhere beneath Jake's Gibson six-string was my own Rickenbacker bass, stereo-wired. We had mobilized with flight-scramble speed and were cutting impressive time. It would be tight: we had to be set up and playing for a weekend Vegas lounge crowd in another two hours, but for now we were entitled to be smug.
Rudy's phone call had set our plans just over three hours ago: "Jake, get your buns up here by the witching hour and you've got a gig." Rudy's style didn't admit to social niceties like hello.
Jake had just crawled from his hide-a-bed, and his characteristic answer was fuzzy with sleep. "No shit?"
"Alfie got clobbered. Some kinda virus. He drinks anything but water and it comes flying out of one end or the other in Olympic time. We need a sub who can crank out our repertoire and do heavy-metal chops, and solo fills that go beyond fingers raping a fretboard or eight-bar sustains . . ."
"Yeah, I got the program," said Jake. "But why me? I mean, there must be fifty or sixty dudes in Vegas who can—"
"Hey, I thought I'd toss you a favor, ace. I don't have time to screw around. Yes or no?"
"How much?" Jake could always do business in his sleep.
"Your cut is two hundred."
"Hell, Rudy, the gas for the trip'll run over forty!"
"You want it or don't you?"
Abruptly, Jake stared at me. I was slouched over the breakfast bar of our apartment, choking down recycled coffee. In two minutes I'd find a dead roach in the dregs and make a fresh pot. Right then I was trying to guess Rudy's end of the argument. Jake quibbling over money? We were stony.
"Cut Lester in for a quarter," Jake said calmly, "and we'll be there in time for the sound check."
I overheard what Rudy yelled next just fine; Jake held the receiver away from his ear: "We already gota bass player!"
"Correction. You already have a novice bass player. Leroy listens to too goddamn much Journey and you know it. Your stage act suffers because he only plays one string. Give him the night off to pick up women."
"But that's another two hundred—"
"Yes or no, Rudy? Lester needs the cash worse than Leroy ever will." Leroy's dad was into computer keyboard manufacture, and had a well-developed sense of family responsibility. Jake and I, yesterday, had been matching quarters to see which of us would have to take up mugging Social Security recipients just to meet Mr. Elkin's outrageous monthly rent.
I didn't have to hear any more, because Jake smiled and nodded to himself. He and Rudy went all the way back to a cheezoid garage band called Abduction; Rudy's gesture was something more than a personal debt kickback and something less than charity. I figured it was the muse Euterpe, looking out for Jake the way she always had. Or maybe Polyhymnia. Either way, Jake never found a leap of faith in the face of impending catastrophe as difficult as I still did. He knew food would turn up as needed, and that our rent would always come from somewhere at the last minute. I wished I could learn the trick that made him so confident.
So there we were, with the old two-lane BT all to our lonesomes, with one more precarious month of life accounted for, a full tank and a full ice chest and no problems except one: Jake could not think of a catchy title for his newest goddamn song, a sweet, slow blues lick he had composed the day after his twenty-eighth birthday and had been refining for two months until it was like mead for the ears.
"How about 'Sweet and Slow'?" I said, turning reverie into reality.
"Sounds like a fucking song?" The set of his jaw said he'd know the right title when he heard it.
L.A. was dwindling out of reception range behind us; the rambling patter of the deejay was phasing in and out in two minute cycles. Then the intro to a Styx tune blared forth, and Jake screamed in mock agony, "Aaaaghh! Automatic dial turner!" He instantly twiddled the knob. We both laughed.
Jake had developed this ground rule in order to keep radio listening sane. The two L.A. stations he favored were close together on the FM band—KPLA was a millimeter past true 96.2, and the more rigidly play-listed KORC (originally a pure pop station as in "pop goes the KORC") sat next door at 97.4. Whenever a deejay got tiresome or the hot-rod-shop-and-dragway ads came on, Jake would flip to the neighboring station. There were a select elite of rock groups dubbed Automatic Dial Turners who got the same treatment—Styx, Boston, Kansas, and any other band named after a place, including Art in America; Rush; Molly Hatchet; and most of the head bangers of the 'Gasm or AC/DC ilk. Flip! The radio hooked to the Kickers was too advanced to have pushbuttons, but Jake's fingers knew the precise tuning distance between frequencies the way they knew how not to get lost amid the frets during a chaotically fast improvisational solo. The only subtlety of which those fingers were incapable was making standard blues stroking dull—and god, was I ever thankful for that blessing.
As for the stuff on the radio, I usually tap my foot but prefer the mid-Fifties to mid-Sixties discography. That's where you pick up those essential twelve-bar blues phrases, the flat thirds and sevenths for the melody lines, and the groundwork laid by the acoustic bass for my trusty Rickenbacker. But I enjoy the rock 'n' roll end, too—I'm the only Marketts fan I know of
With awesome reaction time, Jake flipped backward from KORC to KPLA, which was spinning a Doors oldie, "Five to One." Something strafed quickly past between the two stations—I didn't hear enough to identify a tune. "Hey, you just passed something else," I said unnecessarily.
"Nothing," said Jake, eyes front. The road streaked beneath us. "Maybe a rural station—a lot of these burgs off the highway have low-wattage after-sunset country stations. Or maybe we're picking up Vegas." The idea of getting within reception range of our target pleased him.
"Turn it back. Let's see what it was."
"Aw, don't interrupt Jim Morrison, man," he said with an annoyed grimace.
Suddenly the Trans Am slewed wide into the opposite lane with the frightening drag of a high-speed course change. I caught a flash of Jake cranking the wheel hard, mouth open, and of a darting brown shape whose eyes threw back our headlights during that one second we both stopped breathing.
"Jesus! What the hell was—"
"Coyote, man?" Jake was shaken and panting. We soared out of the looping path we'd taken, and both got facefuls of whirling grit from a dust devil we didn't have time to avoid. For an instant we were in the eye of the vortex, and Jake yelled "Shit!" as sand covered everything and drifted down our collars. His attention was locked to the oncoming road in anticipation of a third surprise. Our speed dipped below seventy for the first time that night. KPLA crackled with static.
I rubbed sand out of my eyes with a groan and felt it sprinkle down from my hair.
"Fucking coyote," Jake said, his tone neutralized by shock. "Geez." I was about to ask him if he wanted to pull over for a minute when he seemed to exhale heavily and come back to normal. He tasted his beer, and getting a mud-pie flavor, chucked the can out the windows "Damn it. Crack us some fresh, huh, Lester?" Stability was restored.
"Did we hit him?" I said, still not sure what had happened. I fished two iced cans from the cooler.
"No." He blew off a squirt of adrenaline like an exhausted jogger. "Whooo, god!" Our road speed began to climb again. "See if you can bring the radio back."
I'd never seen one of those miniature tornadoes at night before, and told Jake so while I tuned. I remembered the faint mystery station between KORC and KPLA, and hunted for it.
"Desert's full of dust devils and coyotes," said Jake. "And tumbleweeds. And ugly birds. Hey, get KPLA back."
"Keep your pants on a second," I said. The frequency was so skinny I had to zero in on it pendulum-style, but I finally pegged it. Fuzzy, and growing stronger; some sort of primal rockabilly performer who wanted wanderin' Wanda to wander back home to me in a Presley drawl. From what I could hear, the guy's backups were pretty fair clones of the Jordanaires. The song died with a flourish and was followed by a girl group (Me, sexist? That's what they're still called in the industry—girl groups. Kiss of death.) belting out something called "Glory Oscy," about a girl named Glory and a guy . . . well, I knew this one by heart even though I'd never heard it before.
"Come on, Lester, you got your fix," Jake said, turning to KPLA. In an eighth of a second he identified the bridge from "Spank Your Thang" and flipped to KORC, where he ran head-on into Van Halen's crappy cover version of the Roy Orbison classic "Pretty Woman." He gnashed his teeth. "Damn! A double dial turner! See what you did, Lester, you jinxed the goddamn thing!"
