Chaingang (6 page)

R
oyce Hawthorne was shaking. It was cold in the tiny hillside cabin, but he didn't feel like building a fire. He was sure it would be warmer outside. The brightness of the day shone through the grimy windows. He threw some clothes on—the same old shirt and greasy pair of jeans—pulled on his scuffed cowboy boots, splashed icy water on his face, grabbed sunglasses, and lurched out the cabin door.

Outside it was summertime! The sun was blazing hot on his face. The sky was as blue as it ever gets, at least over North America, and it was a day for the fast movers: the jet jockeys from Scott AFB, and the T-38 pilots out of Eaker all overflew Waterton regularly. This morning there was a big tick-tack-toe game overhead; a crosshatching of contrails covered the blue. The fresh lines were as bright as white paint, as white as pharmaceutical cocaine. Where they began to dissipate, they had the look of downy cotton pulled out in a long strand.

Hawthorne stood eyeballing the perfectly crossed vectors, their straight-arrow pathways intersecting and then softening, dying, vanishing back into nothing.

He took off his shades and rubbed sleep or whatever it was that was gumming up the corners of his eyes. Still a little groggy and hung over, he needed to brush his teeth. Drink a brewski. His mouth was foul from too many tequila shooters and ghetto gang-bangers.

Royce could scarcely believe his deal had gone south on him. That was supposed to be later. But this business with Drexel was too off the wall for words. He felt that old Rockhouse anxiety attack that he'd experienced at the blackjack layout trying to resurface. He had trouble grasping what had happened. Drexel! Of all people to fuck him over, it's Mr. Straight. That preppie hippy dippy yuppy wimpy pimpy prince. Folding on him. Then with the melons not to take his calls.

He'd phoned maybe a dozen times, each time getting the two rings and that suck-face recorded message that he was “unable to come to the phone right now, but if you'll leave your name and number when you hear the tone—” It had tested all his willpower not to leave a screaming threat on his machine, but fortunately he wasn't quite that stupid or that high.

He tried to analyze what it meant. He couldn't. The guy had been golden.
Golden.
Where did this leave him? It left him between the hardscrabble and a rock crusher was where it left him: high and dry and broke and owing and holding serious weight. A whole mothering load of that Peruvian flake. Happy was right. He was an ounce-pouncer, señor. He should have stuck to twenty-one. He'd stepped into the deep end of the pool, this tadpole.

What in hell was he going to do? Call the cops?
Sue
Drexel? He couldn't move that kind of weight for that kind of dough. And giving it back to Happy was out. There had to be a way to save the deal. He blinked his glazed eyes, massaged his aching temples, ran his fingers through his long, stringy hair, and put his shades back on.

The edge of Waterton Cemetery was visible from where he stood. Just the extreme northeast fringe, where they buried the paupers. Unlike its manicured, golf-course green sister burial ground to the southwest, this edge was over-grown with weeds, and covered in a carpeting of dead grass and rotting mulch. There was a thick tree line to the right.

Looking down at the pauper's field, he was suddenly conscious of his aloneness. The empty mud of the hillside baking in the hot sun, the desolate fields below—flat from tree line to horizon—the look of the forgotten burial place, all hit him. He thought of his family's grave concerns, pun intended, their unanswered prayers, the countless families like his own whose forgotten histories were etched in dated stone.

Just as he put his sunglasses back on, he saw the movement. It had taken a couple of heartbeats to register. He caught a fleeting glimpse of something—a man in motion coming through the tree line? Brown clothing, so he wasn't a hunter. Not a game hunter, anyway. Although, Royce told his paranoia, some of these idiots around here were dumb enough to go out in the woods in their macho camouflage gear. “He didn't have no orange on, Your Honor” was a manslaughter defense around these parts.

Royce's sinuses hurt. He felt like he might be coming down with a cold. Well, that could be fixed. Coke paranoia pulled his mind back off the lines and he concentrated on the tree line. He saw him clearly. He was conscious of the fact that his firearms were all in the pawn shop.

He'd taken to wearing a little Legionnaire Boot Knife in a sheath tucked down in his boot. It was inside, naturally. He went in and got it and rolled his left sleeve up and quickly duct-taped a small black leather sheath to the inside of his left arm. He taped it very tight, but a hard pull and seven inches of razor-sharp 440-Stainless, Made in Japan, would be in his hand. He rolled the left sleeve back down, left it loose, and eased back into the doorway. He'd lost the man.

He stood and watched, feeling like Lionel Hampton was pounding out “Flyin’ Home” on his face, and just about dirtied his britches when the man came out of the wisteria fifty yards down the hill from him.

“Howdy,” he called to him.

“Hi.” It was a kid. Maybe twenty, nineteen—empty-handed. But he reached inside his jacket when he was twenty feet away. Mentally, Royce was planning the dive to the deck, figuring how he'd time the throw. The kid pulled a square of paper out. “Mr. Hawthorne?"

“Yeah?"

“Um—Mrs. Perkins is tryin’ to reach you on the telephone. She called Daddy when she couldn't find your number. He told me to give you the message.” He took the smudged paper. A country hand had printed, “Mary Perkins. Reel important,” and the number. “Daddy said bring it up here.” He shrugged and turned, moving away.

“Oh, hey. Thanks. Uh—don't I know you? Aren't you Beaudelle Hicks's boy?"

“Yes, sir."

“Well, would you please tell Beaudelle I really appreciate it?"

“Okay."

“Thanks for making the climb."

The kid nodded and disappeared in the wisteria vines. The kid could walk. Beaudelle lived on King's Road, in the field next to the cemetery. Hawthorne didn't have a listed number because, in fact, he didn't have a phone.

Mary Perkins. “Reel” important. He went inside to get his keys, wondering if somebody they'd gone to school with had died.

"THE HOLE"/CELL TEN

MARION, ILLINOIS

I
n a hard pool of saffron light, locked within the bowels of the “Max,” bound, chained, shackled, tethered, and restrained, the beast sits. Waiting.

Deep inside D Seg, Disciplinary Segregation Solitary Confinement—called “the hole"—America's only level seven inmate sits in heavy chains; silent and unmoving.

Huge. Beyond anything you can imagine. Arms and legs like steel tree trunks. Butt, belly, and upper torso heavy and ugly with great rubbery tires of hard fat over the body muscle. Scarred, dimpled face partially covered with a mouth restraint, a “biter,” the head appears to sit directly on the torso. The gigantic boulder of a neck is not visible. That part of the face that shows is not unlike a mound of wrinkled dough, but for the eyes—which are tiny, hard, black, and unblinking. There is no life in the eyes of the beast. They are unmistakably a killer's eyes. But these eyes see nothing.

He is far away, inside the nightmare of his strange and amazing mind. Deep within his head he is lost, as free and unbound as a wild dog running through the hills. Several levels of the beast-man's complex brain are at work.

His first books were encountered while he was in a foster home. He learned something that gave him an edge, and the book, which happened to be an adult instruction manual and not meant for the eyes of children, discussed in clinical detail certain vulnerabilities of the human body. He seized on this scrap of information as if it were the Rosetta Stone, using it to decode one of the mysteries about death. He saw that books and other printed matter, when applied to actual experimentation, could further enhance one's ability to destroy an enemy. He began reading for self-defense.

Where are books kept? In public libraries. Logically then, that was the next step: to penetrate the libraries and obtain all the relevant information he could lay hands on. Already adept at swiping toys, comics, candy bars—kid stuff—he graduated to library books. He preferred stealing them to checking them out, on principle, and so Daniel began his lifelong affair with the library system.

Reform schools and adult jails did not offer the wealth of literature one could find in Kansas City's public libraries, but there one could attend impromptu classes taught by street professors of B & E, armed robbery, escape and evasion, identity change, disguise, unarmed combat (from street-fighting to sophisticated martial skills), demolition, and a thousand other nasty subjects from con stings to murder modes.

He would use this information to get better data, since he was aware that these were failed exponents of their respective spheres of expertise, but in many cases their experiences could point the way for him. He soaked up information like an immense sponge, always seeking more.

By the time he'd done his second bit in prison, he had probably ingested (sometimes literally!) twenty-five thousand stolen library books. He once computed his total of overdue fines, and it was in seven figures. He'd swiped everything—from elegant, rare, quarto-size volumes of arcane subject matter to massive coffee-table books which he smuggled out under voluminous shirts and overcoats. He left many a little old lady gasping at the sudden downdraft of noxious sewer stench as he clomped loudly through dusty reference rooms in his gigantic 15EEEEE combat boots.

What did he do with the books? Think of a huge, wrinkled desert that stretches across the mindscape of the imagination. This is the monster's brain. For thirty years or so he's used this desert as his private dumping ground for information.

Every wrinkle is deep, like a chasm; a dangerous, deadly repository filed with stolen library books. He reads the books, sometimes eats pages that he particularly likes—one of his weird and inexplicable habits—chewing the corners, sucking the foulness out of them, devouring special passages that somehow imprint themselves on his remarkable memory.

His memory banks are not the same as yours and mine. At the heart of his brain there is something akin to a mental computer, and it is this oddly efficacious organ that retains data for him.

His is no “photographic memory,” which he knows to be a misnomer, but is a freak of nature known as eidetic recall. Perhaps a part of the gift of physical precognition is the essence of this ability: to retrieve those shreds of seemingly forgotten knowledge that become input relevant to specific situational confluences.

At the moment he is reading from the pages of a scientific quarterly he once scanned for pleasure: “Massim Matrilineal Reincorporation and Kula Ring Rituals.” He is reading, mentally, about his favorite subject. Rereading and savoring the bizarre anthropological studies of Massim mortuary practices. Considering, with the greatest pleasure and fascination, the cultural implications of eating the dead.

But his mind does not work the way an ordinary man's does. As he mentally screens the retained word groups, graphs, sometimes entire pages at a time, he brings to the reading greater focus, concentration, and specificity. When most of us read, it is a passive act, but in the beast's labyrinthian brain recesses, his computer searches for stored data. Searching his spectacular knowledge of the clinical disciplines and general sciences, he probes for hidden gold: some piece of information that, when retrieved and applied to the subject matter at hand, will give him—once again—that sharp and lovely edge.

A remembered and reread phrase has triggered a flow of images, and he scans them, letting them flow through his subconscious as he reads the now familiar word blocks: he senses blood pouring from extremities, secondary anatomical targets, superior vena cava, pathology of death fetishes, inferior vena cava, theoretical fluid mechanics and applications of Cartesian and general tensors, right auricle, hydrastatic wave-effect stress in surface flow, right ventricle, molecular symmetry in abiogenetics, pulmonary artery, aliphatic open-chain structures.

And as the subconscious triggers
open-chain structures,
yet another level of his brain considers the chain—his “flexible killing club"—and the chains that bind. Considers tension, specificity of heavy-metal laws, kinematics of motion, vector algebra, angular momentum theory, quasi-conformal variationals in isometrics, self-mastery practiced as a physical or engineering science, elliptical intuition, aura-manipulation and wish-fulfillment application to the loosening of bindings, essentials of quantitative prediction and advanced muscular control. These assert themselves. Test the bonds. File automatic situation reports.

The beast is aware of these intrusive thought associations only in the most subliminal way as he senses severing of pulmonary artery, raw umbles, mucoprotein absorption, human and animal spoor, application of nonmetric affine geometry to the healing arts, pulmonary veins, geodesist survival vaults, left auricle, fundamentals of vertebrate rhythmic contraction of life-support pumps, sevenfold man in phylogenetic transition, left ventricle, involuntary organ donations, oracles and auricles, dimensional space and karmic mythologizing of physical nonspace, the human aorta, images that flow by as he scans and senses related possibilities.

Good enough,
the beast thinks, mentally reading those words, the closest he comes to telling himself a joke, letting his thoughts run free in lost wordplay through the mortal ritualistic eating of the dead on an island that bears the name. A pun—for someone else. For him it is a fantasy trigger, and he thinks of a heart he took, fantasizing, as he has ten thousand times before, about the boundless pleasures he recalls from the consumption of his enemy's life force.

The beast makes an involuntary noise under the facial restraint, coughing loudly into the biter. A harsh and frightening sound like the attempted ignition of a cold engine. The sound of an outboard motor's initial cough as the starter lanyard is pulled. The barking, metallic noise of a recalcitrant lawn mower. It is the sound of “occupant” laughing.