Swan Song (3 page)

It was fading now, dissipating in the sultry heat. Sister Creep stood in front of that door, and though she knew that sweet Jesus was her mission and sweet Jesus would protect her, she knew also that she wouldn’t set foot inside that theater for a full bottle of Red Dagger-not even two full bottles!

She backed away from the door, bumped into somebody who cursed and shoved her aside, and then she started walking again-where, she didn’t know, nor did she care. Her cheeks burned with shame. She had been afraid, she told herself, even though sweet holy Jesus stood at her side. She had been afraid to look evil in the face, and she had sinned yet again.

Two blocks past the forbidding theater, she saw a black kid toss a beer bottle into the midst of some overflowing garbage cans set back in the doorway of a crumbling building. She pretended to be searching for something in her bag until he’d passed, and then she stepped into that doorway and started looking for the bottle, her throat parched for a sip, a drop, of liquid.

Rats squealed and scurried away over her hands, but she didn’t mind them; she saw rats every day, and much bigger ones than these. One of them perched on the edge of a can and squealed at her with furious indignation. She tossed a cast-off tennis shoe at it, and the thing fled.

The smell of the garbage was putrid, the smell of meat that had long since gone bad. She found the beer bottle, and in the murky light she rejoiced to see that a few drops remained. She quickly tilted it to her lips, her tongue struggling into the bottle for the tang of beer. Heedless of the chattering rats, she sat down with her back to the rough brick wall. As she put her hand to the ground to steady herself she touched something damp and soft. She looked to her side; but when she realized what it was, she put her hand to her mouth to stifle a scream.

It had been wrapped up in a few pages of newspaper, but the rats had chewed that away. Then they had gone to work on the flesh. Sister Creep couldn’t tell how old it was, or whether it was a boy or a girl, but its eyes were half open in the tiny face, as if the infant lay on the edge of sweet slumber. It was nude; someone had tossed it into the heap of garbage cans and bags and sweltering filth as if it were a broken toy.

“Oh,” she whispered, and she thought of a rainswept highway and a spinning blue light. She heard a man’s voice saying, “Let me have her now, lady. You’ve got to let me have her.”

Sister Creep picked up the dead infant and began to rock it in her arms. From the distance came the pounding of mindless music and the calls of the vendors on Forty-Second Street, and Sister Creep crooned in a strangled voice, “Hushabye, hushabye, little baby don’t you cry…” She couldn’t remember the rest of it.

The blue light spinning, and the man’s voice floating through time and distance: “Give her to me, lady. The ambulance is coming.”

“No,” Sister Creep whispered. Her eyes were wide and staring, and a tear trickled down her cheek. “No, I won’t… let… her go…”

She pressed the infant against her shoulder, and the tiny head lolled. The body was cold. Around Sister Creep, the rats chattered and squealed with frustration.

“Oh God,” she heard herself say. And then she lifted her head toward a slice of sky and felt her face contort, and the anger flooded out of her as she screamed, “Where are you?” Her voice echoed off along the street and was drowned by the merry commerce a couple of blocks away. Sweet Jesus is late, she thought. He’s late, late, late for a very important date, date, date! She began to giggle hysterically and cry at the same time, until what came from her throat sounded like the moaning of a wounded animal.

It was a long time before she realized that she had to move on, and she could not take the infant with her. She wrapped it carefully in the bright orange sweater from her bag, and then she lowered it into one of the garbage cans and piled as much as she could on top of it. A large gray rat came close to her, baring its teeth, and she hit it square with the empty beer bottle.

She couldn’t find the strength to stand, and she crawled out of the doorway with her head bowed and the hot tears of shame, disgust and rage coursing down her face. I can’t go on, she told herself. I can’t live in this dark world anymore! Dear sweet Jesus, come down in your flying saucer and take me with you! She leaned her forehead against the sidewalk, and she wanted to be dead and in Heaven where all the sin was blotted clean.

Something clinked to the sidewalk, ringing like notes of music. She looked up; her eyes were blurred and swollen from crying, but she saw someone walking away from her. The figure turned the corner and was gone.

Sister Creep saw that several coins lay on the pavement a few feet away-three quarters, two dunes and a nickel. Somebody had thought she was panhandling, she realized. Her arm darted out, and she scooped up the coins before anybody else could get them.

She sat up, trying to think what she should do. She felt sick and weak and tired, and she feared lying out on the street in the open. Have to find a place to hide, she decided. Find a place to dig myself a hole and hide.

Her gaze came to rest on the stairs across Forty-Second Street that descended into the subway.

She’d slept in the subway before; she knew the cops would run her out of the station or, worse, haul her off yet again to the shelter. But she knew also that the subway held a warren of maintenance tunnels and unfinished passageways that snaked off from the main routes and went deep beneath Manhattan. So deep that none of the demons in human skin could find her, and she could curl up in the darkness and forget. Her hand clenched the money; it was enough to get her through the turnstile, and then she could lose herself from the sinful world that sweet Jesus had shunned.

Sister Creep stood up, crossed Forty-Second Street and descended into the underground world.

Three - [The Point of No Return]

10:22 P.M. Central Daylight Time

Concordia, Kansas

“Kill him, Johnny!”

“Tear him to pieces!”

“Pull off his arm and beat him to death with it!”

The rafters of the hot, smoky Concordia High School gymnasium rang with the combined yelling of over four hundred people, and at the gym’s center two men-one black, one white-battled in a wrestling ring. At the moment, the white wrestler-a local boy named Johnny Lee Richwine-had the monster known as Black Frankenstein against the ropes and was battering him with judo chops as the crowd shouted for blood. But Black Frankenstein, who stood six feet four, weighed over three hundred pounds and wore an ebony mask covered with red leather “scars” and rubber “bolts,” stuck out his mountainous chest; he gave a thunderous roar and grabbed Johnny Lee Richwine’s hand in midair, then twisted the trapped hand until the young man was forced to his knees. Black Frankenstein growled and kicked him with a size thirteen boot in the side of the head, knocking him sprawling across the canvas.

The referee was scrambling around ineffectually, and as he stuck a warning finger in Black Frankenstein’s face the monster shoved him aside as easily as flicking a grasshopper; Black Frankenstein stood over the fallen boy and thumped his chest, his head going around and around like a maniac’s as the crowd screamed with rage. Crumpled Coke cups and popcorn bags began to rain into the ring. “You dumb geeks!” Black Frankenstein shouted, in a bass boom that carried over the noise of the crowd. “Watch what I do to your hometown boy!”

The monster gleefully stomped on Johnny Lee Richwine’s ribs. The young man contorted, his face showing deepest agony, while the referee tried to pull Black Frankenstein away. With one shove, the monster threw the referee into the turnbuckle, where he sagged to his knees. Now the crowd was on its feet, paper cups and ice flying, and the local policemen who’d signed on for wrestling arena duty stood nervously around the ring. “Wanna see some Kansas farmboy blood?” Black Frankenstein bellowed as he lifted his boot to crush his opponent’s skull.

But Johnny snapped to life; he grabbed the monster’s ankle and threw him off balance, then kicked his other leg out from under him. His thick arms windmilling, Black Frankenstein hit the mat with a force that made the floor shake, and the crowd’s noise almost ripped the roof off.

Black Frankenstein cowered on his knees, his hands up and pleading for mercy as the young man advanced on him. Then Johnny turned to help the injured referee, and as the crowd shrieked Black Frankenstein bounded up and rushed Johnny from behind, his huge hands clasped together to deliver a hammerblow.

The frenzied screaming of the fans made Johnny Lee Richwine whirl around at the last instant, and he kicked the monster in the roll of fat around his midsection. The noise of air expelled from Black Frankenstein’s lungs sounded like a steamboat whistle; he staggered around the ring with drunken, mincing steps, trying to escape his fate.

Johnny Lee Richwine caught him, bent and lifted Black Frankenstein’s body on his shoulders for an airplane spin. The fans hushed for a second as all that weight left the mat, then began to shout again when Johnny started twirling the monster in the air. Black Frankenstein bawled like a baby being spanked.

There was a noise like a pistol shot. Johnny Lee Richwine cried out and began to topple to the mat. Leg’s busted, the man who was called Black Frankenstein had time to register before he flung himself off the young man’s shoulders. He knew very well the sound of popping bones; he’d been against the boy’s trying an airplane spin, but Johnny had wanted to impress the home folks. Black Frankenstein slammed into the mat on his side, and when he sat up he saw the young hometown wrestler lying a few feet away, grasping at his knee and moaning, this time in genuine pain.

The referee was on his feet, not knowing what to do. Black Frankenstein was supposed to be stretched out, and Johnny Lee Richwine was supposed to win this main event; that’s how the script went, and everything had gone just fine in the run-through.

Black Frankenstein got up. He knew the boy was hurting bad, but he had to stay in character. Lifting his arms over his head, he strutted across the ring in a torrent of cups and popcorn bags, and as he neared the stunned referee he said in a quiet voice very much different from his villainous ranting, “Disqualify me and get that kid to a doctor!”

“Huh?”

“Do it now!”

The referee, a local man who ran a hardware store in nearby Belleville, finally made a crisscrossed waving motion that meant disqualification for Black Frankenstein. The huge wrestler made a show of jumping up and down with rage for a minute as the audience hooted and cursed at him, and then he stepped quickly out of the ring to be escorted to his dressing room by a phalanx of policemen. On that long walk, he suffered popcorn in his face, a pelting of ice and spitballs, and obscene gestures from children and senior citizens alike. He had a special fear of grandmotherly old ladies, because one had attacked him with a hat pin a year before in Waycross, Georgia, and tried to boot him in the genitals for good measure.

In his “dressing room,” which was a bench and locker in the football squad room, he stretched as many of the kinks out of his muscles as he could. Some of the aches and pains were permanent, and his shoulders felt as tight as chunks of petrified wood. He unlaced his leather mask and looked at himself in the little cracked mirror that hung inside his locker.

He could hardly be called handsome. His hair was shaven right to the skull to allow the mask a good fit, his face marked by the scars of many ring accidents. He remembered exactly where each of those scars had come from-a miscalculated turnbuckle blow in Birmingham, a chair swung too convincingly in Winston-Salem, an impact with the edge of the ring in Sioux Falls, a meeting with a concrete floor in San Antonio. Mistakes in timing caused real injuries in professional wrestling. Johnny Lee Richwine hadn’t been balanced well enough to support the weight, and his leg had paid for it. He felt bad about it, but there was nothing he could do. The show must go on.

He was thirty-five years old, and the last ten years of his life had been spent on the wrestling circuit, following the highways and county roads between city auditoriums, high school gyms and country fairs. He was known in Kentucky as Lightningbolt Jones, in Illinois as Brickhouse Perkins, and in a dozen states by similar fearsome aliases. His real name was Joshua Hutchins, and tonight he was a long way from his home in Mobile, Alabama.

His broad, flat nose had been broken three times and looked it; the last time, he hadn’t even bothered to get it set. Under thick black brows, his eyes were deeply set and the pale gray of woodsmoke. Another small scar looped around the point of his chin like an upside-down question mark, and the hard lines and angles of his face made him resemble a war-weary African king. He was large to the point of being freakish, a curiosity that people stared at when he walked the streets. Ridges of muscle bulged in his arms, shoulders and legs, but his stomach was dissolving to flab-the result of too many boxes of glazed doughnuts consumed in lonely motel rooms-but even carrying a spare truck tire of fat around his midsection, Josh Hutchins moved with grace and power, giving the impression of a tightly coiled spring about to burst free. It was what remained of the explosive force he’d commanded when he was a linebacker for the New Orleans Saints, many years and a world ago.

Josh showered and soaped the sweat off. Tomorrow night he was due to wrestle in Garden City, Kansas, which would be a long, dusty trek across the state. And a hot trip, too, because the air conditioner in his car had broken down a few days earlier, and he couldn’t afford to get it fixed. His next paycheck would come at the end of the week, in Kansas City, where he was to participate in a seven-man free-for-all. He got out of the shower, dried off and dressed. As he was putting his gear away the match’s promoter came in to tell him that Johnny Lee Richwine had been taken to the hospital and that he’d be okay, but that Josh should be careful leaving the gym because the hometown folks could get a little rough. Josh thanked the man in his quiet voice, zipped up his traveling bag and said goodnight.

His beat-up, six-year-old gray Pontiac was parked in the lot of a twenty-four-hour Food Giant supermarket. He knew from the experience of many slashed tires not to park any nearer the wrestling arena. While he was so close to the market, Josh went inside and emerged a few minutes later with a package of glazed doughnuts, some Oreo cookies and a jug of milk. He drove away, heading south on Highway 81 to the Rest Well Motel.

His room faced the highway, and the rumble of passing trucks sounded like beasts prowling the darkness. He turned on the “Tonight” show, then took off his shirt and smeared Ben Gay on his aching shoulders. It had been a long time since he’d worked out in a gym, though he kept telling himself he was going to start jogging again. His gut was as soft as marshmallow; he knew he could really get hurt there if his opponents didn’t pull the kicks and punches. But he decided to worry about that tomorrow-there was always tomorrow-and he put on his bright red pajamas and lay back in bed to consume his snack and watch the tube.

He was halfway through the doughnuts when an NBC News bulletin interrupted the celebrity chatter. A grim-looking newsman came on, with the White House in the background, and he began talking about a “high-priority meeting” the president had just had with the secretary of defense, the Armed Forces chief of staff, the vice-president and other advisors, and that sources confirmed the meeting involved both SAC and NORAD. American air bases, the reporter said with urgency in his voice, might be going to a higher level of readiness. More bulletins would break in as the news was available.

“Don’t blow up the world till Sunday,” Josh said through a mouthful of doughnut. “I’ve got to collect my paycheck first.”

Every night the newscasts were filled with the facts or rumor of war. Josh watched the broadcasts and read the newspapers whenever he could, and he understood that nations were jealous and paranoid and downright crazy, but he couldn’t fathom why sane leaders didn’t just pick up their telephones and talk to each other. What was so tough about talking?

Josh was beginning to believe the whole thing was like professional wrestling: the superpowers put on their masks and stomped around, roaring threats and swinging wildly at each other, but it was a game of macho, strutting bluff. He couldn’t imagine what the world would be like after the nuclear bombs fell, but he knew it’d be pretty damned hard to find a box of glazed doughnuts in the ashes, and he surely would miss them.

He had started on the Oreos when he looked at the telephone next to the bed and thought of Rose and the boys. His wife had divorced him after he’d left pro football and become a wrestler, and she had custody of their two sons. She still lived in Mobile; Josh visited them whenever the circuit took him down that way. Rose had a good job as a legal secretary, and the last time Josh had seen her, she’d told him she was engaged to be married to a black attorney at the end of August. Josh missed his sons very much, and sometimes in the arena crowds he glimpsed the faces of boys who reminded him of them, but the faces were always yelling and jeering at him. It didn’t pay, he knew, to think too much about people you loved; there was no point in driving the hurt too deep. He wished Rose well; sometimes he longed to call her, but he feared a man would answer.

Well, he thought as he opened another cookie to get at the creamy stuff, I wasn’t cut out to be a family man, anyhow. No, sir! I like my freedom too much, and by God, that’s just what I’ve got!

He was tired. His body ached, and tomorrow would be a long day. Maybe he’d call the hospital before he left, find out about Johnny Lee Richwine. The boy would be smarter for what he’d learned tonight.

Josh left the set on because he liked the sound of human voices, and he slowly fell asleep with the package of Oreos balanced on the mound of his stomach. Big day tomorrow, he thought as he drifted off. Gotta be mean and strong again. Then he slept, snoring softly, his dreams filled with the noise of a crowd shouting for his head.

The devotional came on. A minister talked about beating swords into plowshares. Then the “Star Spangled Banner” played over scenes of majestic snow-capped mountains, wide, waving fields of wheat and corn, running streams, verdant forests and mighty cities; it ended with an image of the American flag, stretched out and immobile on a pole sunk into the surface of the moon.

The picture froze, lingered for a few seconds, and then static filled the screen as the local station signed off.