TWO FISTED NASTY
Steve Vernon
Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
© 2011 / Steve Vernon
Copy-edited by: David Dodd
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Table of Contents
LEFTOVERS
A Novella
CHAPTER 1
* a purple jesus acid wash *
Don't let this collar fool you.
I'm not one of the good guys.
A good guy wouldn't be caught dead standing outside of a man's office at this time of night.
A good guy couldn't conceive of the kind of nightmare I've schemed up.
It was raining. I didn't mind. If you ignored the rain for long enough it usually went away. Everyone but Noah said that.
The man I was waiting for stepped outside. His name was Lucius Cartland Maugham. He was a portly man, with a slight side-to-side swagger. He wore a sport coat that had been carefully tailored to hide the milk fat, and a pair of equally tailored acid washed jeans.
Acid washed jeans. I never did understand that concept. Paying extra up front to make sure your new pants looked old. It is amazing what people will pay money for.
I stood in the shadow of a dead oak, dressed in a tattered pea coat and black denim jeans. He didn't see me at all. That was the beauty of living in homelessness. People learned to ignore you or curse you just like the rain.
I stepped out and grabbed my chest, falling toward him. I couldn't remember which arm was supposed to hurt while experiencing a heart attack. Left? Right? Fuck it.
He didn't catch me like he was concerned. He caught me sort of gingerly, like he was afraid I would dirty his hands. I grabbed his arm as he reached out to catch me. I let myself sag a little, feeling him take my weight. I swung up fast, getting a lot of hip into it, driving two hard hooks deep into the soft of his belly. He lashed out once, tagging me on the right eye. He didn't do too badly for a fat man.
I sank a third hook. It was his turn to bend over. I felt his belly heave up like a jellyfish that hadn't been stomped quite hard enough. I prayed he didn't puke on me. I guess there was a lot of fastidiousness going around tonight.
When I was sure he wasn't going to regurgitate his last box of Krispy Kremes, I caught his head by the ears and brought my knee straight up. I nailed him right on the chin. His teeth came together with a satisfying click.
Then I dragged him back into his office.
Lucius Cartland Maugham's face turned the tight purple-blue of a frozen violet, until I loosened the double width duct tape gag that covered his nose and mouth. The video camera hummed contentedly.
"If you try to scream," I said. "I will replace the duct tape and you will asphyxiate. You may have heard that asphyxiation is a painless way to die. It can be a bad mistake to believe everything you hear."
He tried to scream. I resealed the duct tape. Then I waited a moment for that tight, panicked shade of blue to re-emerge.
Perfect.
I loosened the gag and repeated my warning. He was a slow learner. I repeated the process twice before he was conditioned. I didn't think any less of him for being so obtuse. Panic is not conducive to the reasoning process.
"You have to try and remain calm," I warned him.
I inserted the transfusion needle into his arm. It went in smoothly. I didn't want to hurt him. I didn't want him to squirm and cause me to miss the vein. This whole job was carefully planned out. I didn't want him to spoil it.
"Remain calm."
Repetition is soothing to horses and dogs and small children. An asphyxiating man is far less easy to calm.
"Listen. I'm poking an open needle into your arm. If you squirm too much I might accidentally force an air bubble into your veins. Do you know an air bubble in your bloodstream will kill you quicker than any bullet? Please don't make me kill you too quickly."
His eyes opened wide. He calmed visibly, staring up at me from behind his duct tape gag.
"Are you ready to cooperate?"
He nodded.
I didn't believe him. I retightened the gag. Then I brought out the transfusion gear.
"Exsanguination is a simple operation," I assured him. "The Red Cross and ten billion mosquitoes perform it every day. You need to hold still while I drain your blood. Remember that air bubble? Killing you accidentally is the last thing on my mind."
It was the truth. I try to never tell a lie. It makes things easier for me when I have to. Besides, if never-tell-a-lie was a good enough motto for George Washington, it was good enough for me.
Lucius ceased his struggling and began to breathe in short breaths. Then, as the transfusion proceeded, his movements weakened.
"Steady, steady." I chanted. Patience is a wonderful magic. With a bit of patience and a lot of Vaseline, a full grown man could successfully sodomize a horsefly.
I felt him relax. It was time for my sermon.
"Shall I tell you what you did to deserve this treatment?"
He stared up at me, apparently too weak to nod.
"You know what you did, don't you?"
I think his eyes nodded. Or maybe they just rolled back into his skull.
I kept on talking. "Michael Leyburg. Do you remember the name? You should, you know. You ruined his life. You didn't think his blood was pure enough, did you? You didn't want your daughter marrying a Jew, did you?" I shook my head impatiently. How could such a prejudice exist in the twenty-first century? We hadn't learned all that much since the Inquisition, had we?
Any answer I had was laying on the ping pong table before me, half dead from blood loss. I wondered why you would need a ping pong table in your office. Was it for stress release? Was it for weight loss? Did he stage impromptu tournaments? Or was he maybe a closet Forrest Gump fanatic?
"Don't die. I'm not through with you yet. Just wait a minute while I begin the transfusion."
I had pulled the transfusion gear from out of the car trunk and I had it mounted on a hospital IV stand, ready to go. It took me three days of volunteer work at the Red Cross to get the technique down. I was proud of my effort. You wouldn't believe that I flunked my high school science fair.
"You ruined his life. You paid to have him raped. You wanted to punish him. To hurt him. To break his spirit. Did you know that one of the bastards you hired was HIV positive? I bet you did, didn't you?"
Lucius tried to shake his head. He made a small strangled noise beneath the gag. He might have wept, but there wasn't enough moisture left in his body.
"You gave him HIV. You stole his pride. You ruined his life."
I tried to keep my voice even. I wanted to shout at him. That wouldn't do. Shouting would only spoil the soundtrack.
"Did he tell you about his brother? Did you even try to get to know him? You ought to get to know someone before you destroy them, don't you think?"
I noticed the picture on the wall of Lucius and a woman, presumably his wife, standing in front of the ping-pong table wielding a pair of ping-pong paddles. So Lucius was presumably a happily married man. Too bad for him. There was a young girl standing in front of them, looking as if the two of them were about to offer her to the gods of ping pong.
Too bad for her.
I knew everything I needed to know about Lucius. I knew he was a fat and greedy man who needed to learn a lesson.
"He had a brother, you know. A brother who loved him nearly as much as Michael loved your daughter. A brother who'd done quite well in the commodity market. I suppose that part doesn't surprise you, does it? Jews are good at that sort of thing, aren't they?"
I held my anger like a knife and used it, working it into him one inch at a time.
"That's the problem with perceptions. You look at someone and see one thing, and then you make up the rest."
He started to glaze out. I slapped him hard enough to regain his attention.
"Michael's brother did quite well. He made quite a bit of money. Enough to hire me."
His eyes rolled up like bubbles of sea foam, waiting to be popped.
"He hired me to punish you. To hurt you. Don't let the collar fool you. I don't give a damn about your spirit. If you have any soul left I'm going to burn it out of you."
I watched as the blood in the second bottle drained into his veins. I kept talking to him. The sermon wasn't over yet.
"Blood in, blood out. Isn't that what they say? A total blood transfusion. I've emptied out every bit of your blood and I'm replacing it with a brand new supply. There are athletes who pay money for this sort of treatment. They claim it invigorates them. That it gives them fresh new strength." I smiled. "It's amazing what people will pay money for."
More blood flowed out. It was calming, like watching the seas recede.
"Are you invigorated yet, Lucius?"
More blood flowed. My calm deepened.
"Of course it all depends on where you get the blood from, now doesn't it? It doesn't do to pump low grade gasoline into a brand new Ferrari, now does it?"
He made a little sound around the duct tape gag. I waited for the fear and sense of consequence to set in. It didn't take long. I think he was weeping. I thought about his daughter. I wondered if she would weep, too.
"Shall I tell you where I got this blood from? Have you ever heard the term Purple Jesus? It's a college thing. You go to a frat party, and there's a big vat of grape Kool-Aid in the center of the room. I don't know why it has to be grape. Maybe it's a pagan thing, like Bacchus."
More blood flowed. Blood was like sea water that way. Mostly water and salt. I wondered if the moon really moved as some folks believed.
"Then everyone brings a bottle of some cheap rotgut and dumps it into the vat. It's a frat house thing. At the end of it you see God, and he's purple."
Lucius gave me a wet, pleading-eyed stare, like a sheep begging for slaughter. He was almost gone. I wouldn't let it end that fast. Not yet.
"Do you know how I've spent my last two weeks?"
He stared blankly.
"I've spent them on the street. I've spent them in every soup kitchen and alley in the city. Spent them in every whorehouse and flop joint. I've spent a lot of Michael's brother's good money in the process."
I smiled. I was enjoying myself.
"I spent it on blood. I've been gathering blood from every wino and whore who was desperate enough to sell it. Do you have any idea how far down the road a whore has to go before she gets that desperate? How many men she might have had inside her body?"
He's glazing out. Settling. It could be shock, his body rejecting all those mixed blood cells, but I didn't think so.
"And not all of those whores were women, Lucius."
He felt that. He showed it to me, deep inside his eyes. I've seen it before. That look that the dying get when they feel the pit bull of despair gnawing at what's left of their guts.
"So there you have it. A Purple Jesus party, just for you. You ought to be honored. My soup making is renowned. I've pumped you full of a soup d'jour teeming with every sexually transmitted microscopic bacteria and disease ever imagined. All of those impurities swimming inside your veins."
He started to kick. He made angry sounds beneath his gag.
"Of course, it wasn't all tainted blood. That would be inhuman. I made certain to include a couple of pints of good clean blood to cut the contamination. I got it from a rabbi on the Lower East side. I told him I needed it to save a Catholic child, whose parents couldn't afford the hospital bill."
He squirmed. I smiled. I was enjoying this. I wasn't feeling the least bit guilty.
"Do you know what he said when I asked him if the child's faith mattered to him, Lucius? He said that blood knows no faith, no border, no discrimination. Isn't that a pretty thought, Lucius?"
I finished the transfusion. I watched him get his strength back. I watched his anger and rage build. He was pissed with me on principle. He'd spend the rest of his life hating his own blood. The whole story was a lie, of course. I'd just pumped his own blood back into him, but he didn't need to know that.
I loosened the gag. He spat at me. I resealed the gag.
"We're not through yet."
I hooked up the last transfusion bottle. It was a heavy, clear thing of solid glass.
"You don't like what I've done for you, do you Lucius? You don't like your new blood? You don't think that it's clean enough for you, do you?"
I hooked the last bottle up. I carefully held the poke needle poised over the largest vein I could find.
"Let me cleanse it for you, Lucius," I smiled in what I hoped was an appropriate beatific manner. Then I jammed the needle in, careful not to spill any on my fingers. It wouldn't do to spatter sulfuric acid on my hands.
"This'll clean you out, good and proper."
It took him five minutes to scream the duct tape gag loose. Another ten to stop screaming. I read him his final unction as fast as I could, keeping the camera running through the whole thing.
The screams stopped at 9:28. Punctuality was a virtue.
I think he felt the whole thing, the whole time.
At least I prayed he did.
Jacob Leyberg was a tall man with sad eyes that glinted hopefully as I handed him the tape.
"He's paid for his crimes?"
"He's paid for his sins," I corrected.
Jacob's eyes shone. He honestly thought this would make things better. I knew it wouldn't help at all. Closure sounded easy, like closing a door, but grief was the uninvited party guest that didn't know when to leave. Sometimes you had to throw it out. Sometimes you had to nail the door shut. And sometimes, nothing worked.
"I've edited the whole thing into the middle of a Japanese horror movie. There's no danger of embarrassing questions being asked if the wrong person sees the tape."
"You had no trouble with continuity?" He smiled when he asked that. He was cracking a joke. I took that as a good sign.
"It's Japanese horror," I explained. "Low budget and a bright red imagination. Plot is secondary to gut wrenching imagery. Hideo Nakata would definitely approve."
He took the video tape from my hands, clutching it as if it were a sacred relic. Vengeance and retribution were all that he had left in his life. As idols went there wasn't much hope, but you worked with whatever you were given in this life. I knew he hoped that watching this tape would somehow erase the image of his brother's corpse swinging from his kitchen ceiling fan with the pre-timed pot of breakfast coffee, perked and merrily waiting.
We shook hands.
"Thank you, Father Simon."
I didn't correct him. He had enough mistakes to bear, his brother's and his own. Besides, he was sort of right. I checked myself in the mirror. The eye had moused over blue-black from where Maugham tagged me. I still looked like a priest, though. I still wore the collar.
Behind the mirror glass, soft like a half whispered prayer, I saw the acid-burned face of Lucius Cartland Maugham staring out at me.
This kind of work has its price.
Fuck it. It was time to make the soup.
CHAPTER 2
* the making of soup *
Soup is where leftovers go to die.
That was my job in The Shambles kitchen. I made the soup. I made it from whatever was left over from our food bank donation. I made it from last night's supper, and sometimes dinner and breakfast. I made it so you could count on feeding a small army of hungry men. They called me the soup-man, and sometimes Superman but mostly they called me Father Simon.
It was good soup tonight. Jacob Leyburg's money bought an awful lot of fresh supplies, and I souped up some of it while Montezuma fried a legion of pork chops. For vegetables we had several huge pots of mashed potatoes, and crisp green beans. We smothered the entire mess in a thick mushroom sauce, to fill the leftover cracks and crannies. Hot coffee and fresh bread perfumed the dank kitchen air. The Shambles smelled like a hand-me-down heaven.
I didn't build The Shambles. It was here when I arrived. No one was sure when The Shambles began. I think it kind of grew here, like mold or weeds. I think some unknown bum spent the night here, sleeping under a hangman's oak, and The Shambles grew out from beneath him like a filthy, contagious shadow.
The Shambles was a kind of accidental monument. Everybody knew about it or had heard about it, but nobody talked about it. I stumbled in here about six years past with blood on my hands. Nobody cared. The Shambles opened its dirty, cankered arms and took me in.
A lot can happen in six years. Like World War II, for instance. A baby can advance from a single ambitious egg into kindergarten. The human body can damn near forget its past sins and remake itself, cell by cell.
At least in theory.
The Shambles was low and flat and as undeniably real a structure as could be imagined. There was a sense of hardness to it, as if the building were solid clear through. Poured concrete and brick laid with an inarguably specific geometry. If the universe ever collapsed, I was certain it would swallow itself down until nothing remained but The Shambles.
This is where we lived, the homeless and the lonely. You saw us in the street and you learned to look away and we grew a kind of invisibility. You ignored us and we put up with you. We leaned against death, calling it shade as we lit our last cigarettes and said "Fuck you all!" to the rest of the world.
It was a living, of sorts.
The walls of The Shambles stank of piss and regret, and I'm not sure which smelled the worse.
There was a lot of blood in The Shambles. There used to be a sausage factory here. The walls reeked of forgotten slaughter. I worked in the kitchen, serving up soup and slabs of fresh-baked bread. We got a discount on floor sweepings from the local flour mill.
"Been fighting, soup man?" Amos Briarchild asked, noticing the soft, blue-gray mouse that Maugham left me with.
Briarchild was a quiet fellow who understood bruises. He'd been beaten regularly as a child with a wooden coat hanger and there were places on his face that didn't quite fit together. He baked the bread. Tonight, he lumped out mashed potatoes. He was versatile.
Somebody once told me Briarchild spent six years in a sanitarium not saying a thing. That sounded about right to me. Briarchild was a quiet, comfortless quilt of a man. He kept silent as death listening to the world turning slowly around him. Words from Amos Briarchild were a cherished gift. Yet when the man picked up a harmonica you would have sworn he'd sold his soul to the Devil to gain such musical talent.
As a young man, Briarchild had blown through backwoods Kansas like a bitter killing wind. Twelve people were found dead in their bed without a mark on them. He'd burked them, pinching their nose and mouths closed and holding them down until they'd breathed the last bit of air left trapped in their lungs. They'd die in silence, struggling beneath his firm, gentle death grip. At the end of it, he'd seal their extinction with a tight goodbye kiss.
"I was just trying to catch their last breath," Briarchild told me one night over a long bottle of bourbon. "There's a magic in that kind of closure. If you catch enough last breaths you can live forever."
He said it with all certainty, and maybe he was right. God doesn't tell us all of the rules.
They never caught Briarchild because the Kansas authorities hadn't wanted to admit they had a serial killer on their hands. Death by misadventure, they called it. Folks just died in their sleep. In the backwoods of Kansas you got away with living behind lies like that.
"You should have seen the other guy," I said.
For an instant I saw the face of Lucius Maugham floating in the broth, melting from the inside out like a rustle of old snow slipping down a steam grate. Real or not, I stirred it back into the soup.
Briarchild nodded. He'd said his sentence for the day. It was almost mystical, like he was saving his breath for some greater cause. I might go a week before I would hear him utter another sentence. It was enough.
Montezuma laughed out loud at my wisecrack. Montezuma was the cook, and would have been at home in a five star restaurant if he could have learned to keep his mouth shut -- and if it were not for his unfortunate predilection for forbidden white meat.
"I just like the taste," he explained to me. "The same way some people drool over cheeseburgers."
That was all there was for Montezuma. He liked the taste of human meat and he made no excuses for it.
"A reporter asked me if I ate human flesh for a spiritual reason," Montezuma told me once. "He had this theory that I gained the strength and courage of anyone I ate. Theories are damned dull dry things, but they taste right nice with a bit of hunter's gravy and some fresh green peas. So did he."
Montezuma was named by his father following an ill-fated Mexican vacation, in which Montezuma's father returned with a case of the flying axe handles, an unexpected groinal infestation, and a pregnant wife whose womb had been quickened by some other man's seed. Montezuma's father never found out who the other man was, but a door-to-door Jehovah's Witness had handed out cigars for a week following Montezuma's birth.
Montezuma's father wasn't happy about any of these south-of-the-border repercussions, and decided they were some kind of a revenge of fate. He'd hated his son, and made no attempt to hide his feelings.
"I'm going to go back and get that bastard someday," Montezuma said. "My dad, I mean. Once I get big enough to take him."
I looked at Montezuma, big enough to give a large-sized Sasquatch a run for his money. How big did he figure he needed to grow? I guess every child has got to have his own kind of dream.
That was the kind of people The Shambles attracted. People with a touch of darkness in their soul. We served them all indiscriminately. The Shambles was a purgatory of lost souls who weren't particularly interested in finding themselves. None of us looked for a cure. I was a mass murdering vigilante. Briarchild, a quiet man with a taste for breath. Montezuma, a follower of the darkest of fad diets. There were many others.
"No kidding? Did you nail somebody?" Montezuma asked, pantomiming an ass kicking, his four hundred pounds of muscle and meat as supple as a fish-fed sumo wrestler. "Don't fuck with the soup man."
"From the mouth of the cannibal to the ears of God," I said.
It was an old joke.
We laughed, just the same.
Old or not, giggles trumped angst, every time.
Except tonight. Tonight, I was too busy staring down into the eyes of a thirteen year old boy, who stood there staring up at me from the front of the soup line. Briarchild saw the boy and stared just as hard. Montezuma looked too. The three of us stood there -– the cannibal, the suffocant and the avenger -- staring like a trio of deaf and dumb wise men at this thirteen year old boy who looked like he knew way too many answers.
I sat with the boy over a bowl of soup. He ate slowly and seriously, like he meant every spoonful of it. He ate with the purposefulness of a famine victim. He had something to tell me, but not just yet. I sat and waited him out. The edge of his spoon scraped a soft song against the side of his stainless steel soup bowl.
"It's good soup," he said as he finished.
"Try the bread," I said. "Briarchild is proud of it. He bakes it fresh every morning. He claims it's as light as an angel's breath."
The boy didn't need to be coaxed. I refilled his bowl, stepping in front of the others, while he worked on his bread. I figured he'd been out of doors for a few days, judging by his appetite. I figured this was his first meal in a while.
He thanked me when I returned.
"Do you have a name?" I asked, handing him the second bowl of soup.
"Robert Bruce, sir." Then he looked startled. I'd caught him off guard with the second bowl of soup. He hadn't meant to tell me his name.
"Now that's a name to conjure with," I said. "Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland in the early 13th century. His body was buried in Dunfermline Abbey while his heart was kept in Melrose Abbey. Eventually his heart was taken to the Crusades. I guess they couldn't find themselves a good luck rabbit's foot."