Joe's Black T-Shirt (17 page)

Gloria enjoyed shopping, buying anything she or the baby needed. I liked watching the kid learn to walk and giving my wife a fistful of cash every week. I gambled with Louie and the Russo brothers every Tuesday night. At the theater my wife and I sat in the most expensive seats possible. I bought opulent gifts for Gloria’s mother while I drank top shelf liquor and smoked twenty-dollar stogies. All the simple pleasures of suburban domesticity that money could buy.

One day, I walked into the Russo’s shop, to get my pitiful check and my cash allowance, but nobody was around. My first thought was a robbery. The brothers had been kidnapped and were bleeding to death in the trunk of some rival gang’s Cadillac. Then I heard the coughing. Following the hacks, I discovered the brothers huddled over a desk, each with a trimmed down fast-food straw in their noses like a walrus missing a tusk. A pile of coke as big as my fist sat in a mound between their bowed heads.

Without a word, I sat down at the table with them. I intended to wait them out, but the younger Russo cut me a line, and handed me a straw. What the hell I figured, sticking the straw that still smelled of Pepsi into my nostril. The drug’s potency hit my brain like an orgasm times a million.

Through a cocaine driven haze, my son began to grow up and I hardly noticed. The little I did come home, Gloria usually met me at the door, furious, wanting to know where I had been, why had I even bothered to come home, and most of all, where was the all goddamn money going?

Little by little, our home disappeared. First to go was the TV and the surround sound system, then the dining room set and Gloria’s great-grandmother’s china. Not so bad, things that could be replaced if I could cut back, but I couldn’t. Next went the living room furniture and our bedroom set. When Gloria came home and found the copper plumbing gone, she took the kid and left. It was a week before I realized it.

When I went to her mother’s, she wouldn’t open the door. I could see my boy through the curtains, crying to see me, and still, she wouldn’t open the door. By the time the cops arrived, I had smashed out the window.

Two days later, as I collected my personal belongings from the sergeant’s desk, I was served an emergency order of protection. Given Ex Parte, while I puked my guts out in the city’s metal toilet, her attorney had been hard at work. She shouldn’t have bothered. I had already made up my mind I wasn’t ever going to see her or my son again.

The one thing I still had was my car. I needed cash. I needed coke. I went to the one place that seemed to have a never-ending supply. A mile from the Russo brother’s shop, I ran out of gas.

I walked the rest of the way, but wasn’t worried. I would go in, get a bump, grab a little do-re-mi, and hit the streets. I knew enough hustlers to find somebody who needed something, and a guy like me who could connect the dots.

The surprise that I got when I saw those chains on the gate was like holding a firecracker too long. You can’t believe it happened. But it did.

The IRS had shut it down. An armed guard in a blue windbreaker stood staring at me. He came toward the gate and I ran. I didn’t stop until my lungs had shriveled to the size of raisins in my chest. I hid behind a dumpster, trying not to breath. To my surprise, no one had been following me. No hound dogs bayed out my position or cracks of rifle fire flew toward me. Nevertheless, I was scared out of my mind.

I asked myself, ‘How the hell could this have happened?’ We had been careful, in spite of the drugs. Our books were flawless. Everybody filed their taxes on time and religiously rendered unto Caesar on April fifteenth.

Then it occurred to me. Gloria wasn’t a wide-eyed girl anymore. Whether she wanted protection, from me or maybe the Russos, it was hard to tell. If it were her alone, I don’t think Gloria would have said shit if she had a mouth full. Her mother and my boy, though, were innocent bystanders. They were the ones who needed protection. The kind the Federal witness relocation program offered like candy from a stranger in a dark sedan. Once you took it nobody ever saw you again.

I went underground with friends for as long as they would suffer me. When they found their kids piggy banks mysteriously empty, checks and credit card statements with huge cash advances they certainly would have remembered, I would leave. Sometimes peacefully, under the cover of night. Sometimes, with a black eye and a bloody lip.

One night, smoking crack in an abandoned downtown loft, I heard about the Russo brothers. How their name came into the conversation as we passed the glass dick in a circle, I can’t remember. I do recall losing my buzz immediately when I was told that they were doing twenty to fifty for tax evasion and armed assault on a federal officer. Nobody died but several gold badges found out if their bulletproof vests worked that afternoon.

My son, is a man now, good looking like his mother. I’ve bumped into him a couple of times at the downtown library. It’s a block away from the homeless shelter where I take most of my meals.

The first time I saw him, it paralyzed me. Ten minutes after he left I was still standing in the same spot. I came out of it when the jackoff security guard pushed me out the door. I knew better than to fight him. He was just doing his job, probably no more happy about it than I was.

Now, when I see my son, I cautiously follow him as he regularly reviews the books on how-to-write. I hope that he is a writer, aspiring or otherwise, doing something noble with his life, not looking for the easy way like I did.

“You lose something in there?”

I had been so lost in my dreams of legitimacy that I hadn’t seen the cop standing right next to me.

“No officer,” I said meekly, careful not to make eye contact.

“Move along,” he said, motioning me in the side with his nightstick.

I took his advice. Behind the building in my cardboard squat, I got comfortable. I had missed supper, and my stomach let me know it.

Tomorrow, maybe, I would see my son. That would be nice.

###

Blackwater Opera

The LED detonator reached quadruple zero. Karen had expected, anticipated excruciating pain, but the moment was the equivalent to a pin’s prick. Then she felt nothing. No more pain or joy, no more shame or condensation or fear, no more body or faithfulness to it, and no more servitude to this world. It was not nirvana or heaven or anything she had been promised. A lone sense of floating in weightlessness was all that remained. She could see the explosion billowing in orange and black clouds below her. A wave of sheer energy rippled out turning over cars with the resistance of leaves in the fall and leveling the surrounding buildings without regard for brick or glass.

To Karen’s surprise, she heard the faint cry of an infant, then its quieted greedy suckle. Amy was no longer pregnant. Her child, a girl she presumed by the pink swaddling, and she was like Karen, floating above the mass destruction. She noticed the doctor, the nurse, and the security guard. They were holding hands and singing, but she couldn’t hear them.

Karen could not feel her body, yet still felt alive. The others around were the same as she had remembered them in the clinic with the exception of Amy, yet even she appeared relatively similar to her pre-natal self. Their clothes were not stained, they were not drenched in blood nor were they screaming in pain.

Without realizing it how it came to pass, she was next to Amy. Karen laid her hand upon the infant’s round head, gently stroking the whisper of fine hairs that covered its scalp. The child was beautiful. Karen could feel the baby’s warmth and smell its newborn scent. There was no doubt to her that these people, including herself, were dead. An amazing fact she didn’t question.

The doctor was first. With the grandiose vigor akin to a bottle rocket, he shot straight up, his only remnant a silver tail briefly visible, then gone. The nurse and security guard did likewise.

“What is her name?” Karen asked sensing Amy’s departure next.

“Hope.”

“A beautiful name.”

Amy’s ascension was no less different than the clinic employees, but with her going Karen felt two things: remorse and a sense of falling.

The flames billowed and raged and she fell through them without resistance. Through the roof, the I-beams, the floor, and the concrete she fell and did not stop. What she perceived to be her flesh was pulled from her body with an immeasurable agony. Her exposed red muscles wrapped in blue veins fell away in chunks as the descending acceleration increased. Then those sections ripped away and exposed the white bone that lay beneath. The skeletal features reminded her of the anatomy class figure from her tenth grade science class. She had wondered then about the accuracy of such things. Her bony white fingers connected by cartilage to the forearm confirmed that indeed the model had been correct.

It began with her feet. Unlike a skydiver falling face-first, she was descending with the efficiency of a missile. Karen no longer felt the previous intense pain, but a pins-and-needles sensation that moved up her body. The bone was evaporating, turning to sparkling dust. It reminded her of the special effects used in movies to simulate the whizzing by of stars at incredible speeds.

In a brief flash, she saw her life with the perspective of a narrator telling her life story from the push to exit her mother’s womb to the bomb’s detonation. Her whole life revealed to her with the secret, omniscient knowledge of what consequences each choice brought and how things could have been different. It was the most wonderful, heartbreaking thing she had ever experienced.

“My God, what have I done?”

The blackness was complete and perfect. No sound or flicker of light to disturb the pure tranquility that it was and Karen without, permission or forgiveness, became the black, then became nothingness itself.

***

Karen walked with her arms folded around herself despite the sunshine that warmed Carondelet Park. It would be easy to mistake her body language as a woman chilled than a person under enormous stress.

She had thought she had come to terms with what had to be done. It wasn’t like this happened last night. Her appointment, for which she had volunteered, had come months ago. Karen was proud then to have been selected for “Operation Blackwater,” to have been singled out from the group as special, unique in the fact that she could help carry the message to the world.

Karen had found
God’s Chosen People
on the Internet by Googling religion plus mysticism. She had skimmed sites that revolved around the Kyballah, the Koran, and several that claimed transcendental meditation through statuary, their human (still living) founders, or the ingestion of drugs. Her interest was peeked though by the GCP’s website’s fundamental biblical ideology.

They were staunchly independent, stating that all organized religions had been corrupted in the pursuit of money. Salvation, which each claimed alone they could offer, were nothing more than plots to collect wealth, land, and slaves in order to supplement their leaders opulent lifestyles. Karen couldn’t have agreed more.

The GCP believed by extracting themselves from the world, from its system of commerce, and the illusion of personal property, could one indeed know true freedom. The true church, the one spoken of in the Book of Revelation, would be uncontrolled by such encumbrances. That through group consciousness, reliant on mass meditation toward its goals they would not only be prepared for the end times, but be crucial in bringing it about.

The end of the world did not concern Karen. Murder, genocide, starvation, droughts, floods, rape, global warming, drug wars, child exploitation were reported so blasé within the allotted ten minutes before sports and weather, she did not have to be convinced that the human race was already damned.

The GCP’s website was not an advertisement or incitement for the wayward seeker as much as a declaration of intentions, a notice to the world at large that they had no reservations in regard to fulfilling the ‘end times’ predictions.

Karen liked this kind of straightforwardness sans the charming commercialized come-ons for peace and tranquillity. It was exactly the kind of thing she wanted. She had thoroughly searched the website for an hour and could not find one crucial element. There was no address or phone number. There was however a tab labeled ‘Contact Us.’

The contact page was standard in that it asked for name, address, telephone, and e-mail address. All the regular and expected stipulations of the modern times to which Karen conceded.

After that, it became more like an entrance exam. They wanted to know the odd, intimate details such as age, weight, hair color, eye color, and annual yearly income. All relatively simple to answer with drop-down menus or click and fill dots nostalgic of a SAT answer sheet. Then there were the essay questions.

“Who, in your opinion, is the most relevant figure of the Bible and why?”

“Do you believe in the relevance of fasting to understand God’s will?”

“Have you ever sensed or audibly heard God speaking to you?”

Karen answered each in less than a hundred words. She had written three books (all flops) and found it child’s play to respond. Blithely she wrote meaningless, politically correct statements that gave away none of her personal character. The last question, however, stopped her stream of consciousness cold.

The question appalled her, yet Karen wanted to answer it. It had come to define her life as before and after. Her fingers trembled on the home-row keys, wondering if she could answer.

“Have you ever had an abortion? If yes, explain.”

***

“I’m pregnant,” Karen said.

Bobby asked, “How? We were careful.”

Silently, she agreed. Karen may have been fifteen but was well enough informed in the use of contraception. It was the nineteen eighties for Christ sake. She had got the pill thanks to the free clinic and had enough rubbers for Bobby to last until Christmas. Between the two items, they should have been bulletproof.