The Revenant Road (7 page)

11

“I Heard Somebody Say

 Burn, Baby, Burn”

In the dream, it’s my ninth birthday and I’m furious
.
Lenore has just given me the bad news.

“Daddy’s not going to make it to the party, Obadiah. He’s been… unavoidably delayed in
Las Vegas
.”

I don’t cry. I actually smile. Then I go for the gasoline.

Inside our house, Lenore is trying to salvage the party by baking my favorite cake: double chocolate with pecans. As we don’t have many friends, the only people in attendance at my “birthday party” are Mrs. Brooks, the hearing-impaired woman who lives across the street, and my cousin Walter. Walter has rickets and walks with a limp.

I’m standing in our old garage with a gasoline can in one hand and a box of matches in the other.

I upend the gas can into an empty steel trashcan that I’ve stolen from the abandoned lot across the alley. Squinting through eyes suddenly gone blurry from the fumes, I strike a match and stare at the tiny fire blossom that trembles between my thumb and forefinger.

At my feet, Doctor Necropolis lies, safely entombed within an old cardboard shoebox. The shoebox has been double-wrapped with masking tape to prevent the bastard from getting out.

“
This doesn’t solve anything, O-dog.”

“Shut up,” I say through clenched teeth, and somewhere, as I lie dreaming back in what I am laughingly coming to think of as “The Real World,” the pain in my jaw
feels
real.

I drop the match into the trashcan and flames erupt, reaching nearly to the ceiling in a rush of red brilliance. I step back, my eyebrows crisping from the intense heat. I bend down and pick up the shoebox.

“No matter what you do to me, daddy is never coming home, O-dog.”

“Sit on it, douchebag.”

I toss the shoebox into the trashcan. Necropolis screams. For a moment, I consider dousing the flames, retrieving the shoebox: Doctor Necropolis was a Christmas gift from Marcus.

If I lose him…

I don’t let myself complete the thought.

Curious, I step forward—the flames have begun to recede enough for me to look over the edge of the trashcan—and something, a screaming shadow, leaps up from the flames, grabs me with burning hands and pulls me into the fire.

I scream.

And I burn.

12

An Affair to Dismember:

Part 3

     Three days after my father’s funeral, I was lying on the sofa in my apartment, surrounded by the emptied contents of my liquor cabinet and wishing I’d majored in brain surgery: There were several choice moments from the previous seventy-two hours that I would have happily cauterized.               

I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten solid food since the morning of the funeral. I sat up. The pain in my head immediately called me an idiot and punished me accordingly. At first I thought the blinking red light in the corner of my eye was a burst blood vessel. Then I realized that it was my answering machine.

I pushed the “play” button and my mother’s voice filled my living room.

“Obadiah, I haven’t heard from you. We need to talk. Call me.”  

Beep.

“Obadiah, hi, it’s Mark Bloom. Remember me? The publicist you’re underpaying to make you internationally fabulous? Listen, I booked you on
Juno
for the day after tomorrow...”

Beep.

“Obadiah. Neville Kowalski calling.”

I rubbed the crust out of my eyes.

“I don’t know exactly what your mother told you, but I can guess. I’d like to meet with you today, maybe over lunch at the White Fedora, say,
one thirty
?”

I reached over and turned up the volume.

“I know this seems odd,” Kowalski’s voice continued. “But there’s a few matters need clarifying before we can proceed.”

Before we can proceed?

“There’s a whole lot you don’t know about your old man. I’d like to tell you the real story. I’d like for you to understand what Marcus was all about. I hope you’ll come.”

The machine asked me if I wanted to erase my messages.

I looked at my watch: Twenty minutes to get to the White Fedora. I got up, got dressed, ran past my kitchenette and into the street to chase down a cab.

I could eat after lunch.

* * * *

Thirty-two minutes later, I stepped out of a taxi at the corner of Broadway and
47
^th
Street
. A healthy lunch crowd swirled around me. As I stepped up onto the curb I was jostled by a group of fat Midwestern tourists. One of them, the obvious leader of the pack, grabbed me by the shoulders.

“Sorry, my brother,” he brayed. “Say, you and me aren’t gonna have a
praablem
here, are we, Roscoe?”

The rest of the pack yipped and chattered like overfed hyenas. The red-faced pack leader pounded my shoulder and roared with what I might have taken to be corn-fed good humor if I hadn’t been nearly asphyxiated by the vodka fumes eddying out of his enormous pores.

Without waiting for my reply, the fleshy adventurers moved on up the sidewalk, filling the air with harsh Midwestern
r’s
, smashing every vowel flatter than the flattest flapjack as they pursued the ephemeral pleasures of
Times Square
, Restaurant Row and the
Great White Way
.

The shrieking lunatic was almost a welcome relief.

I turned, expecting to see some perfectly ordinary crack-addled urban wildman, caught up, perhaps, in the throes of a brick-wielding frenzy. Instead, I was stunned to see a portly man wearing a smart cardigan and khakis and waving a butcher knife crossing 47th
^th
Street at a dead run.

“Diiiiieeeee!”

He was talking to me.

As people around me scattered like roaches I had one second to realize that I knew the wild-eyed lunatic.

That’s Copernicus Geller.

Geller dodged a speeding bike messenger and came on, his eyes wild as he screamed.

“Dieeeeeeee!”

Then the cross-town bus smashed into him. Geller flew West, thirty feet through the air, and landed on Broadway, dead center of the southbound lane.

It was
1:42 PM
: The height of the midtown lunch rush.  

Geller sprang to his feet. He’d managed to hold onto the knife, but his left arm jutted at an angle that would have confounded the nation’s greatest contortionists. Undeterred, Geller turned, spotted me in the gawking crowd, lifted the knife—

“Diiieeeee!”

—and was struck by a taxi.

The taxi driver screamed in some Middle-Eastern dialect as Geller bounced off of the roof, slid down the back windshield, rolled off of the trunk and hit the concrete.

Again, Geller managed to stagger to his feet. Or rather his
foot
: Most of his right leg was rounding the corner of
48
^th
street
, dragged beneath the wheels of the fleeing taxi.

Disoriented, Geller hopped backward into the
northbound
lane just as a speeding UPS truck thundered into the intersection and blasted him through the window of the nearest
Starbucks
.

As tourists and New Yorkers of every stripe ran toward the scene of the accident, I turned and made my way back up the street. Copernicus Geller was the book critic for the
New York Sentinel
. He hosted a weekly national cable show called
Lit-Beat,
during which he’d once burned a copy of
Death and the Sorcerer
while singing
God Bless America
.

One nutjob down,
I thought with warm satisfaction. My step grew lighter as I made my way back up
47
^th
Street
.

I even whistled.

* * * *

“Sorry I’m late. Traffic.”

Kowalski had already ordered lunch: chicken salad on a bed of fresh spinach. He waved away my excuse and grunted around a mouthful of croutons: “Traffic in this town sucks donkey balls.”

He waved the waiter over to our table.

“Get you something from the bar?” he said, indicating the chilled empty glass in front of me. “How ‘bout a nice cream soda?”

I sat down across from him.

“Just coffee,” I said. “You drinking anything?”       

“Everything,” he said. “Which is why I stick with cream soda.”

Kowalski leaned in, lowered his voice. “Obadiah, I’m seven years sober today. Christ, I’m tickled pink about that.”

“Congrats,” I said.

Again the wave: “Who gives a shit?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Obadiah, I shared that information with you because I believe that you and I are going to become friends.”

“That’s probably overstating things,” I said.

“Oh, not today,” Kowalski continued. “Hell, probably not even next year. But what I’m going to tell you about your father... Well let’s just say that he and I came from different worlds. Circumstances brought us together, changed both our lives. We were partners for nearly thirty years.”

By now I was profoundly uncomfortable. I turned, hoping to find a waiter—or a runaway bus to throw myself under.

“Your mom told you part of a story that began before you were born,” Kowalski said.

I nodded. “That you and my father were some sort of spook detectives.”

Kowalski winced. “Monster killers, son. Marcus Grudge and I were monster killers.”

“Listen, Mr. Kowalski,” I said. “I don’t know what kind of sick stunt you’re trying to pull over on my mother, but I came here today to tell you: It’s over.”

Kowalski looked up from his salad as if he hadn’t heard me. “How’s that?”

“I don’t know what kind of twisted though perfectly acceptable sexual relationship you and my father had and frankly, I don’t care,” I said. “I want you to stay away from my mother.”

“Sexual relationship?” Kowalski growled. “
Sexual relationship?
”

Kowalski laughed.

I clenched my jaw to control the flow of outrage that seeped around my teeth. Something about Kowalski set my nerves on edge. 

“You’ve filled her head with a lot of fairy tales and somehow, perhaps because of closet alcoholism or some undiagnosed mental disorder, she’s come to believe them. But whatever the reason: It’s officially done.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out my checkbook.

“I’m going to write you a check for more money than you’ve ever seen back at whatever trailer park you came from. I’m going to give you this check, and then you are going to disappear, just like Count Dracula or the Invisible Man or whoever
else
you’d like to invite to your indictment, which I will
personally
guarantee if you come within fifty yards of me, my mother, or anyone in the tri-state area who bears a passing family resemblance. Capische?”

Kowalski stared at the check.

“I’ll take that as a “yes,”” I said.

I stood, feeling like a righteous defender of the mentally defective. I reached into my wallet and threw a five dollar bill onto the table.

“Thanks for the coffee.”

I spun on my heel and walked away from the table.

“Why do you think your books are so successful, Mr. Grudge?” Kowalski said.

I stopped. “Oh, I don’t know, Mister Kowalski,” I said. “What say you just chalk it up to dumb luck and fuck off.”

“You believe her.”

I turned back.

“What did you say?”

“You believe every word of what Lenore said and it scares the pistachios outta you,” Kowalski said, tapping the side of his blue-veined nose. “I can smell the fear comin’ off you in
waves
. Hell, you’re scared shitless; because you
believe
and you don’t even know why.”

He grinned. “Why didn’t you look in the black box?”

“How did you…?”

Kowalski smirked. “Look at you,” he said. “You’re one cocky son of a bitch. You dance across the bestseller lists and tell yourself that it’s because of raw talent and hard work when the truth is you’re a hack. “What’s worse? You
know
you’re a hack.”

“You arrogant bastard,” I said. “Who do you think...?”      

“Save the wounded artiste routine for someone who gives a rat’s ass,” Kowalski snarled. “The truth is you don’t have the slightest inkling why so many people buy your books.”

“That’s not true,” I said.

“Oh?” he shot back. “Your ideas are good but your dialogue stinks. Your plotting is inconsistent at best. Your prose is decent enough: you paint pretty pictures. But your protagonists are cold, overly intellectual. Every one of em’s got a dictionary crammed so far up his ass they shit crossword puzzles. Your work lacks guts.”