Dark Advent (10 page)

Creepy Carl…

Did you see that?

He damn near kicked Scott’s head offa his shoulders!

Carl began to cry, without knowing why, just that they weren’t sad tears.

He wept, and endlessly fondled the ten-dollar bill, now moist from the sweat of his palms.

* *

They were less than five minutes into the match, and already the thing was turning into a fiasco. For all his muscles and glitz, Jack Armstrong was outclassed by the fury of Pit Bull Pearson. It wasn’t supposed to be Pit Bull’s night, not this time. The outcomes had been scripted in advance because, hell, it was all just a show anyway. Nothing rehearsed, no lines memorized, no steps choreographed to the split-second, but it was a show just the same. And to the players, the ending was already known.

Or, at least the way the ending was supposed to go.

It was the good guys versus the bad guys in these matches, where the good guys usually won. When the bad guys won, it was only to set them up for a worse toppling sooner or later. This was understood. Good versus evil, and the crowds thrived on it, these sweaty little morality plays where the sword and shield were replaced with leg-locks and armbars.

This crowd, tonight, was clearly growing agitated. And nervous. Their fair-haired boy, Strong Jack Armstrong, was getting the shit kicked out of him.

Pit Bull was slowly demolishing him with body slams and dropkicks, with clotheslines and backbreakers, with leg-scissors and Texas compactors and repeated head-slamming trips into the corner turnbuckles. He was Pit Bull, the one, the only, and no matter what Al had told him, this
was
his night, and he’d make Al proud after all. Because he was headed straight for the top, maybe even after the crown of Hulk Hogan himself.

Steiner was screaming at him from the corner, waving the leash in the air. He called out words of encouragement that were really coded phrases ordering Pit Bull to back down, dammit, back down and ease off and let Jack Armstrong gain control of the match.

I
hear you Al, I hear you, and I’m gonna take us both to the top, you and me, you and me.

Steiner groaned when he saw that Pit Bull hadn’t heard or wouldn’t obey. He felt sweat breaking out from his scalp down to the soles of his feet. There’d be hell to pay after tonight, all right. Just what the hell had gotten
into
Carl? He’d always listened to Steiner before, trusted him as a child trusts a parent. And in a way, hadn’t Steiner been exactly that to him? Hadn’t it been Steiner who’d found him engaging in the bloody bare knuckles matches in St. Louis’s seedier areas? Hadn’t it been Steiner who had crafted Carl’s ring persona? Hadn’t he known that Missouri was one of the leading spots for dogfighting in the country, and likened Carl’s aggression to that of a pit bulldog, one of which he kept as a pet? Carl loved that dog, jokingly referring to it as his brother. And hadn’t it been Steiner who’d shelled out the bucks to get Carl his outfit and pay for the electrolysis so he’d never have to remember to shave his head again? Hadn’t Steiner trained him from scratch?

And now his creation, his Pit Bull, was raging out of control and stomping on Steiner’s very livelihood. He fell silent and watched aghast as Pit Bull tore into Strong Jack Armstrong with an ever-increasing fervor.

A sea of faces surged out there in the smoky haze, beyond the reach of the lights burning down on Pit Bull and his prey, and the bald wrestler took a moment to look out at them. An overwhelming majority were booing him, hurling obscenities as he locked Armstrong beneath him, twisting him into a three-second pin, pressing the man’s shoulders to the canvas.

Even the ref couldn’t deny it now. The night was Pit Bull’s.

Sweat glistened on his skull as Pit Bull gazed out on the audience, heard the hateful things they were saying.
Creepy Carl, Creepy Carl…

Some things just never, ever change.

He cocked his head, listening intently, Armstrong still trapped uselessly beneath him, struggling like a squashed bug. There was somebody out there who didn’t hate him. Somebody was cheering for him, somebody liked him. Maybe even Marty Betts himself. And over there, another. And over there. Sure. They’d been calling for blood the whole time. And as long as they hadn’t given up on him, he couldn’t let them down. He owed them, because they gave him his strength, his will, his drive.

His fury.

If you want blood, you’ve got it.

Creepy Carl, Creepy Carl
…

“I’m Pit Bullll!” he roared at them, those bastards out there who hated him, who’d always hated him, who’d tormented him all his life, whose voices drowned out the cheers of his friends. He bared his teeth and snarled at them…

…and dove against Jack Armstrong’s shoulder with the force of a pile driver. He bit through flesh, muscle, feeling the blood rush warm and salty into his mouth, biting deeper until he hit tendon. He flexed his back and neck muscles, jerking backward and ripping away a large, dripping chunk of Jack Armstrong’s shoulder. Strong Jack thrashed beneath him, bellowing out one long, last cry before going limp.

Pit Bull, the one, the only, leaned forward and spat the grisly prize out of the ring, over the top rope and into somebody’s lap in the front row. Blood dribbled from the corners of his mouth, ran down his chin, dripped onto his chest.

The referee hit him then, leaping onto his back from behind, a flea trying to bring down a dog. Fresh hysteria had broken out through the crowd, because they hadn’t expected this, not
this,
because you pays your money and you gets your show,
but not this.

Pit Bull reached back and grabbed the ref’s skinny arm, flipping him over his shoulder to land flat on his back. The ref hit the canvas so hard it drove the wind out of him, and he could feel his legs draped over the prone form of Strong Jack Armstrong, whose face had gone a cheesy white.

Pit Bull, now on his knees, gazed down at the ref, whose legs stretched away from him. The man’s head was directly before his knees, and how silly the man looked lying there, gasping for breath in his pale blue shirt and dark little bowtie. To think that this puny fucker had actually tried bringing down the one, the only…

…Pit Bull.

You don’t tangle with Pit Bulls, ’cause Pit Bulls bite.

He raised his big fist high into the air, hesitating an instant, just so he could see the ref’s eyes widen in fear and sudden knowledge of what was about to happen. And the moment was golden, because he could still hear his nameless friends out there, isolated but never silent, and surely somewhere behind him Steiner was urging him on.

He brought a colossal hammerfist down onto the ref’s nose. Blood spurted onto the sweat-stained blue shirt, and the bridge cracked beneath his fist as easily as a toothpick. Splinters of bone shot backward into the man’s brain.

Pit Bull gazed out at the crowd, nearly misty-eyed.
I
did it for you. Don’t you see? All for you.

But the moment of glory and honor was short-lived. The ring was suddenly overrun with wrestlers whose matches were already over and done, and those who’d yet to fight. Tall, squat, black, white, they streamed in to take down this one of their own who had blown his last fuse, subdue him before anyone else got hurt. The way the crowd was reacting, he may very well hurdle the ropes and start in on them next.

Pit Bull screamed and strained, his muscles quivering with the tension, and he felt himself being dragged away from his moment, his night. Overhead, the lights whirled through a drifting haze of smoke. There were too many of them, and it wasn’t fair, they were ganging up on him again, just like it had always been…because some things just never, ever change.

“AL!” he shrieked. “HELP ME, AL, THEY’RE TAKING ME AWAY AGAIN, AL! DON’T LET ’EM TAKE ME AWAY! AAAAL!”

And as he was half dragged, half carried from the ring, he rolled his head toward Steiner and saw his manager still in the corner of the ring, looking older than Pit Bull could ever remember. Al turned his head away. Al was crying.

A moment later Pit Bull did likewise.

Because he knew that he was suddenly alone again in the world.

12

The day was wrong from the beginning.

Jason slipped through the glass doors of Kelly’s just before nine that morning and noticed that Marvin Pawley was acting the part of lord and master near the register. Marvin was Kelly’s manager, and Jason worked with him only on rare occasions, since Marvin generally ran the place at night and on weekends. The arrangement suited Jason fine, as Marvin was one of the slimier characters he’d ever encountered. Not that he did a bad job for Kelly—it was simply the way the man looked. Vitalis in his hair, Calvin Klein bronzer coating his wrinkled cheeks, gaudy rings adorning more than half of his plump, sluglike fingers. Jason felt sure if he hadn’t been hired by Kelly, he’d be off in the dusty back lot of a place called Screw-U Used Cars, plastic pennants flapping overhead.

“Where’s Kelly?” he asked Marvin, giving his tie one last tug into place.

Marvin’s bronzed cheeks puffed out in a distraught sigh. He looked genuinely shaken. “His wife took him to the hospital last night.”

Jason’s heart skipped a beat, then tried to compensate. “The hospital?
What’s wrong?” He remembered Kelly hadn’t been feeling the greatest yesterday, and hadn’t improved as the day wore on. He had a fever, a cough was developing, his groin and underarms had been painful and tender, and Kelly said he thought they might be swollen. He’d dismissed it as a case of summer flu, which wasn’t going to drive him out of
his
store.

“She didn’t really know,” Marvin said with a helpless gesture. “You were around him yesterday, you know about as much as I do. She said he just got worse and worse, weaker and weaker.” He twisted at his collection of rings.

Jason leaned heavily against the counter, tapped his fingertips against his thigh. Kelly, in the hospital? That had always seemed so remote. If anybody in town was destined to steer clear of the hospital, it was Kelly. He was like a playful bear, an overgrown cub, too feisty and mean to come down sick.

Jason swore and trudged toward the back office for a cup of Mr. Coffee’s offering for the day.

Thursdays didn’t start out much more rotten than this.

* *

He’d never thought much one way or another about hospitals until his parents had died. After that he hoped he’d never have to set foot in one again. He knew this made no sense—they hadn’t lingered in twin beds, putrefying into limp bags of bones. They’d gone quickly. But now he realized that hospitals were places of death, and he wanted no part of it
.
People went there to heal, yes. But they also went there to die, human elephants heading for that final burial ground. Except the hospital charged you to get the job done.

Jason grimaced and tugged at his tie as he neared the main desk in the hospital’s lobby. Sweat broke out, and he hooked a finger into his collar.

“John Kelly’s room, please,” he told the duty clerk. His stomach then made one of those embarrassingly loud noises that sound like a cross between a newly released spring and mutated human speech. He cleared his throat in case it spoke up again. He was spending his lunch break here, and knew he wouldn’t feel like eating again until this evening. If then, even.

The clerk found Kelly’s card, pursed her lips while scanning it. She looked up at Jason. “Are you a member of the immediate family?”

“Not exactly.”

“I’m sorry, but he’s not allowed any visitors outside his immediate family.”

Jason felt his stomach drop away with such rapidity it was dizzying. “What’s wrong
with him?”

She shook her head, a practiced gesture she looked almost bored with. “I’m terribly sorry, but I can’t tell you any more than that.”

He sighed heavily, tapping the counter for a moment. “Okay, how about this: He’s been like a father to me the past year, and I’ve been the closest thing to a son he’s had for even longer.” He smiled hopefully.

It didn’t wash. She was terribly sorry, but…

And his smile wilted away. He left in defeat and, in the back of his mind, thought how busy the hospital lobby seemed. Was it always this crowded? Or did it pick up during the noon hour? Or was business just booming in general these days?

* *

Jason watched as the shadows gradually lengthened across the lawns, the sidewalks, the street. It was evening, pleasant for mid-July, and as he sat on a lawn chair on his balcony sipping a Coors, he knew he should be feeling well at ease with the world. The just rewards of a long day and a hard run. Instead he felt about like he had in the week or so after Lora had left him last spring.

Kelly in the hospital. He’d tried calling his wife at home, got no answer. His calls to the hospital were terminated at the switchboard. He wondered if they were this inconsiderate of everybody these days, or if there was something special about Kelly’s case.

It had been two weeks since Kelly had sent him to St. Louis to pick up that shipment, a trip that had seen him fall prey to his first mugger. It had left him feeling agitated at the time—
how about a warning the next time you send me into a combat zone.
Of course it hadn’t been Kelly’s fault, but nobody likes to lose a wallet, forty-six dollars, a driver’s license, an American Express card, pride, dignity, and blood, all in one fell swoop.

Right now, though, Jason believed he’d gladly crawl through as much broken glass as it would take to get Kelly discharged with a clean bill of health.

Jason remembered the mugging, not bitter anymore, and he remembered the little mutt that had come trotting along to pick up his spirits. He wondered where the dog had come from, who she’d belonged to, why she’d been forced out on her own. He remembered her with a fond little smile on his lips.

Jason would’ve regarded her with something close to awe if he’d known that, above all, the dog had saved his life.

* *

The call from Kelly’s wife came the next afternoon, while he was still at the store. Marvin, powdered and perfumed and bronzed and wrapped in one of his many three-piece pinstriped suits, took over Jason’s task of fitting a fellow in a tux for an August wedding.

His mouth went dry when Maude Kelly introduced herself. There was no hesitation in him when she told him that Kelly wanted to see him…now. At their home.

During the first half of the drive, Jason’s spirits lifted. He must be doing better now, right? Out of the hospital and all, back in his own bed, watching his own TV. Then his spirits took a nosedive. If Kelly was really doing better, why wouldn’t he have made the call himself?

Maude answered the door a minute after Jason rapped the brass knocker. Before she did, though, he had a flash of Ebenezer Scrooge and the knocker on his own door, transforming into the face of Jacob Marley.
My partner, seven years dead this very night.
It felt like a bad omen.

Maude’s eyes were listless, glassy orbs in pools of darkened skin. Her makeup was old and smeary, and her hair, usually so carefully coiffed, looked more like a fright wig. If she’d gotten two hours’ sleep out of the last forty-eight, Jason would’ve been surprised.

“Thank you so much for coming,” she said, clutching him by the arm. “He started asking for you late this morning.”

Jason felt a rush of undeserved guilt. “I tried to visit him at the hospital, but they wouldn’t let me go up. They wouldn’t even send a phone call through.”

She nodded wearily.

“What’s wrong with him?” Jason asked. “Please tell me.”

“I only wish I knew, dear,” she said, looking him straight on, strong and dignified despite the smudges of mascara around her eyes. “Nobody knows what to call it.”

“How come he got sent home, then?”

She shook her head. “They didn’t discharge him. I sneaked him out to the car overnight and drove him back here myself. That’s what he wanted. And I bet if you’d been a patient up there in that hospital, that’s the way you’d’ve wanted it too.”

Jason’s brow creased and he was about to ask her to explain when she pointed toward the rear of the house. “You know the way.”

With as much trepidation as he could ever recall feeling, Jason slowly walked that gauntlet toward the bedroom. He first noticed the smell, getting stronger with each step, the thick phlegmy odor of a warehoused human being that they try so hard to mask in nursing homes. The smell of illness, and beneath it, death on the wing. In the bedroom, the shades had been drawn, plunging the room into a perpetual dusk. Kelly lay on the bed, seeming little more than a lump beneath the covers. The brittle rasp of Kelly’s breath filled the air.

Movement…was the figure on the bed nodding? “Come here. I want to see you.”

Jason moved from the doorway over to the bed, looked down at him, fearing what he might see. But the dim light was merciful. It made it easier to pretend that the purple-black lesions on Kelly’s face were shadows.

Jason felt a tear creep into the corner of one eye and hang suspended. “We need you at the store, you know. We, uh…” His voice wavered, threatened to crack. “You’re one indispensable guy.”

“Get used to it.” His voice wasn’t
that
bad, was it? Weak, yes, but speaking didn’t seem to take much effort. Surely he’d get better.

“Come on. In a week this’ll all be a memory.”

In the dim light, Kelly grinned, the grin of a man at the brink of a secret, who knows more than he should. “Know what? I bet in a month this whole
town
will be a memory.”

He’s losing it,
Jason thought. And a tiny dark part within him hoped that’s what prompted such a revelation.

“Maudie tell you she sprung me from the hospital last night?”

Jason nodded, feeling that single tear fall because more were coming behind it.

“She did me right on that count. Did she ever show some nerve on that. Jason, put that wet washcloth on my forehead. Lord in Heaven, I’m burning up.”

Jason lifted the cloth from a pan on a table overrun with bottles of aspirin, sleeping pills, boxes of Kleenex, water glasses…and a small pan that looked as if it were filled with raspberry syrup. A moment later Jason realized with horror that Kelly had been spitting into it. He averted his eyes and draped the cloth across Kelly’s forehead.

“Ohhh, better,” Kelly whispered. “Not much, but…better.” He sniffed, then heaved a retching cough and spat into the pan. Jason felt his stomach turn inside out.

“John,” he said, and now the tears were starting down slow but steady, for he already knew the answer to the question he was about to ask.
But please let me be wrong, please.
“John, why did you want me here to…to see this?”

Kelly sighed. From within his chest came the papery rattling of reeds whispering in the wind. “I wanted to say goodbye, Jay. I think you know that.”

Jason bit his lower lip so hard he feared he might draw blood.

“I’m not gonna last the night, I know that.” Kelly trembled as he fought back another coughing spasm. “I’ve seen so many others go, I know what my chances are. And at least I got my wits about me. More’n I can say about a lot of them. Guess I’m luckier than most. At least I get to make some goodbyes.”

“What are you talking about? Back at the hospital?”

Kelly nodded. “That place is full to bursting, Jay. Most all of us had this. No such thing as private rooms anymore. They’re all wards. And they got security a lot tighter on that place now. It’s a wonder Maudie got me out at all. She had to bribe a night nurse five hundred dollars. You believe that? But I want to die at home.” He coughed again, spat. “Feels like my frigging lungs’ve torn loose.”

Jason began to feel soft creeping fingers of fear tickling at his insides. “Why haven’t we heard anything about this? There’s nothing in the paper, nothing on the news.”

“I expect it will be before too long. It’ll get too big to hush up. But haven’t you noticed anything around town?”

Jason shook his head.

“’Course not, you’re such a loner and all.” He grunted a laugh. “But I did. Maybe a week ago, maybe more…maybe less. I dunno. Business started dropping off. Just a little. More each day. Sidewalks got less crowded. Less traffic. Not so’s just anyone’d notice. But someone observant, who
takes
notice. Like me.” A sluggish hand reached up to wipe his face with the washcloth. “And in the hospital I tried hard to keep my ears open, pick up what I could. You hear lots of things at night, when it’s quieter. A lot of things.”

“Like what?”

“Like how bad St. Louis is getting. They think it started around there, I forget the name of the town. Some little pissant burg. And I heard tell of these special doctors from Atlanta running all over trying to figure out what this is.”

“Nobody
knows?”

“Not that I heard. Ah, hell, they come around and jab us in the ass and in the arms, and give us pills, and none of it helps.” He grunted another laugh. “All I got to show for their trouble is a sore ass.” He rumbled more laughter, and it threw him into another violent bout of coughing. “I say hell with ’em. These Atlanta doctors, they’re from someplace everybody was calling the CDC.”

“Centers for Disease Control,” Jason said. He’d once watched a documentary about their involvement in the Legionnaire’s Disease case.

“I figure if they can’t puzzle it out in time, just let me die in peace. Let me go out with a little dignity, without some nurse young enough to be my daughter trying to stick another thermometer up my ass.”

Jason grinned a little, through the tears. Because a part of the old Kelly had resurfaced for a moment. Then loomed a question so obvious he was surprised he hadn’t thought of it before. “John, if this is so bad, why did you call me here and expose me to it?”

Kelly smiled grimly. “If you’re gonna catch it, son, you’re gonna do it sooner or later.”

That makes sense. It really does.
The question of his own mortality still didn’t seem real yet, that it was now as chancy as the toss of a coin. But if such was his fate, to fall before this onslaught that was laying a secret siege to the town, he couldn’t think of anyone he’d rather catch it from than Kelly.

“But maybe you won’t,” Kelly said, a note of hope creeping into his voice. “And if you haven’t by now, then you never will.”