Blue World (18 page)

“Trick-or-treat!”

Dan struck into the Carl-thing’s stomach with the butt of the shotgun. From its mouth sprayed a mess of yellow canary feathers, pieces of a kitten, and what might have been a piglet. Dan hit it again, and the entire body collapsed like an exploding gasbag. Then Dan grabbed Karen’s hand in a frantic blur of motion and was pulling her with him out the door. She held on to Jaime, and they ran down the porch steps and across the grass, along the driveway and the road and toward the main highway with the Halloween wind clutching around them.

Dan looked back, saw nothing but darkness. Jaime shrieked in tune with the wind. The distant lights of other Essex houses glinted in the hills like cold stars.

They reached the highway. Dan shouldered Jaime, and still they ran into the night, along the roadside where the high weeds caught at their ankles.

“Look!” Karen cried. “Somebody’s coming, Dan! Look!”

He did. Headlights were approaching. Dan stood in the middle of the road, frantically waving. The vehicle--a gray Volkswagen van--began to slow down. At the wheel was a woman in a witch costume, and two children dressed like ghosts peered out the window. People from Barrimore Crossing! Dan realized. Thank God! “Help us!” he begged. “Please! We’ve got to get out of here!”

“You in trouble?” the woman asked. “You have an accident or something?”

“Yes! An accident! Please, get us to the police station in Barrimore Crossing! I’ll pay you! Just please get us there!”

The woman looked at them uncertainly, glanced over at her own costumed kids, and then motioned toward the back. “Okay, get in.”

They gratefully scrambled into the back seat, and the woman accelerated. Karen cradled her sobbing child, and Dan’s voice shook as he said, “We’re all right now. We’re all right.” The two ghost-children stared curiously at them over the seat.

“You have a car accident?” the woman asked, and looked in the rearview mirror as Dan nodded. “Where’s your car?” One of the children giggled softly.

And then something wet and sticky hit Dan’s cheek and drooled down his face. He touched the liquid and looked at his fingers. Spit, he thought. That looks like--

Another drop hit his forehead.

He looked up, at the roof of the van.

The van had teeth. Long, jagged fangs were protruding from the wet gray roof of the van, and now they were rising from the floorboard too, drooling saliva.

Dan heard his wife scream, and then he started to laugh--a terrible, uncontrollable laughter that sent him spinning off the edge of sanity.

“Trick-or-treat, Dan,” the thing behind the wheel said.

And Dan’s last coherent thought was that the Devil sure could come up with one hell of a Halloween costume.

The fanged jaws slammed together and began to grind back and forth.

And then the van, now looking more like a huge cockroach, crawled off the road and began to scurry across a field toward the dark hills where the Halloween wind shrieked in triumph.

Chico

“Everythin‘,” Marcus Salomon said as he took another swig of wisdom, “is shit.” He finished his beer and thunked the bottle down on the beat-up little table beside his chair. The noise spooked a roach from its hiding place under the lip of an overflowing ashtray, and it fled for a safer haven. “Jesus!” Salomon shouted, because the roach--a shiny black one perhaps two inches long--had leapt to the arm of his chair and was skittering madly along it. Salomon whacked at it with his beer bottle, missed, the roach ran down the chair and got to the floor and shot toward one of many cracks along the baseboard. Salomon had a bulging beer belly and a number of jiggling chins, but he was still fast; at least, faster than the roach had anticipated. Salomon slid out of the chair, stomped across the room, and smashed his foot down on the roach before it could squeeze into the crack.

“Little bastard!” he seethed. “Little bastard!” He settled his weight down, and there was a satisfying crunch that changed his sneer to a grin. “Got your ass, didn’t I?” He ground his shoe down, as if grinding a cigarette butt, and then he lifted his foot to look at the carnage. The roach had been torn almost in half, its abdomen crushed into the floorboards. A single leg feebly twitched. “That’s what you get, you little bastard!” Salomon said--and it was no sooner spoken than another black roach shot out of a baseboard crack and ran past its dead mate in the opposite direction.

Salomon bellowed with rage--a shout that shook the flimsy walls and the dirty glass in the open fire-escape window-- and stomped after it. This one was faster and more cunning, trying to get under the threadbare brown rug between the apartment’s front room and the narrow hallway leading to the rear. But Salomon was an experienced killer; though he missed twice, his third stomp stunned the roach and made it lose its course. The fourth stomp mashed it, and the fifth one burst it open. Salomon settled his two hundred and thirty-seven pounds on the roach, grinding it into the boards. Someone hammered on the floor from below, probably with the end of a broom, and a voice shouted, “Stop that noise up there! You’re breakin‘ the damn place down!”

“I’ll break your ass, monkey lips!” Salomon hollered back at old Mrs. Cardinza in the apartment below.

And then came the frail, almost frantic voice of Mr. Cardinza: “You don’t talk to my wife like that! I’ll call the police on you, you bastard!”

“Yeah, call the cops!” Salomon shouted, and stomped the floor again. “Maybe they’ll want to talk to that nephew of yours about who’s sellin‘ all the drugs in this building! Go on and call ’em!” That quieted the Cardinzas, and Salomon stomped on the floor above their heads with both feet, his weight making the boards shriek and moan. And now Bridger, the drunk next door, started up: “Shut your mouths over there! Let a man sleep, damn you to hell!”

Salomon stalked to the wall and pounded on it. The apartment was thick with the steamy heat of mid-August, and sweat glistened on Salomon’s face and wet through his T-shirt. “You go to Hell! Who you tellin‘ to go to Hell? I’ll come over there and kick your skinny ass, you--” A motion caught his attention: a roach zooming over the floor like a haughty black limousine. “Sonofabitch!” Salomon shrieked, and he took two strides after the insect and brought his shoe down on it like Judgment Day. He pressed hard, his teeth gritted and sweat dripping from his chins: a crunch, and Salomon smeared the roach’s insides across the floor.

Another movement caught the corner of his eye. He turned, a wall of belly, and looked at what he considered a roach of a different kind. “What the hell do you want?”

Chico, of course, didn’t answer. He had crawled into the room on his hands and knees and now he sat on his haunches, his oversize head cocked slightly to one side.

“Hey!” Salomon said. “Want to see somethin‘ pretty?” He grinned, showing bad teeth.

Chico grinned too. In his fleshy brown face one eye was deep-set and dark, and the other was pure white--a dead, blind stone.

“Real pretty! Want to see it?” Salomon nodded, still grinning, and Chico grinned and nodded in emulation. “Come on over here, then. Right here.” He pointed to the glistening yellow insides of the crushed roach that lay on the floor.

Chico crawled, eager and unaware, toward Salomon. The man stepped back. “Right there,” Salomon said, and touched the glinting mess with his shoe. “It tastes like candy! Yum-yum! Go on and lick it!”

Chico was over the yellow smear. He looked at it, looked quizzically up at Salomon with his single dark eye.

“Yum-yum!” Salomon said, and rubbed his belly.

Chico lowered his head and stuck out his tongue.

“Chico!”

The woman’s voice, shrill and nervous, stopped him before he reached the smear. Chico lifted his head and sat up, looking at his mother. The weight of his head began to instantly strain his neck and make his skull tilt to one side.

“Don’t do that,” she told him, and shook her head.

“No.”

Chico’s eye blinked. His lips pursed; he mouthed no and crawled away from the dead roach.

Sophia trembled. She glared at Salomon, her thin arms dangling at her sides and her hands gripped into fists. “How could you do such a thing?”

He shrugged; his grin had gotten a little meaner, as if his mouth was a wound made by a very sharp knife. “I’m just kiddin‘ with him, that’s all. I wasn’t goin’ to let him do it.”

“Come here, Chico,” Sophia said, and the twelve-year-old boy crawled quickly to his mother. He rested his head against her leg, like a dog might, and she touched his curly black hair.

“You take everythin‘ too serious,” Salomon told her, and he kicked the crushed roach into a corner. He enjoyed killing them; picking up the dead ones was Sophia’s job. “Shut up!” he bellowed through the wall at Bridger, who was still shouting about a man never being able to get any sleep in this festering hellhole. Bridger fell silent, knowing when not to push his luck. In the apartment below, the Cardinzas were quiet too, lest the ceiling cave in on their heads. But other noises swarmed into the apartment, both from the open window and from the guts of the tenement itself: the relentless, maddening roar of traffic on East River Drive; a man and woman shouting curses at each other in the garbage-strewn square of concrete that the city called a “park”; a boom box blasting, turned up to its highest notch; the choked chugging of overloaded pipes; and the chatter of fans that were utterly useless in the sweltering heat. Salomon sat down in his favorite chair, the one that had a caved-in seat and springs hanging out the bottom. “Bring me a beer,” he said.

“Get it yourself.”

“I said… bring me a beer.” His head turned, and he stared at Sophia with eyes that threatened destruction.

Sophia held his gaze. She was a small dark-haired woman with a lifeless face, but her mouth tightened and she didn’t move; she looked like a tough reed, arching itself against an oncoming storm.

Salomon worked his big knuckles. “If I have to get out of this chair,” he said quietly, “you’re goin‘ to be real sorry.”

She’d been sorry before; once he’d slapped her across the face so hard her ears had rung like Santa Maria’s bells for three days. Another time, he’d thrown her against a wall and he might have broken her ribs had Bridger not threatened to go for the police. The worst time, though, was when he’d kicked Chico and left a bruise on the boy’s shoulder for a week. She had gotten them into this mess, not Chico, and anytime Chico was hurt, it carved her heart to pieces.

Salomon placed his hands on the armrests, in preparation to hoist his body out of the chair.

Sophia turned and walked the four steps into what served as a kitchen. She opened the stuttering refrigerator, which held a mixture of leftovers, things in sacks, and bottles of the cheapest beer Salomon could find. Salomon settled himself back in his chair, paying no attention to Chico crawling mindlessly back and forth across the floor. A big, useless roach, Salomon thought. Somebody ought to squash the little bastard. Put him out of his misery. Hell, wouldn’t that be better than bein‘ deaf, dumb, and half-blind? Anyway, Salomon reasoned, the kid was empty in the head. Couldn’t even walk. Just crawled around, a moron on hands and knees. Now, if he could get out and hustle some money somewhere, it might be different, but as far as Salomon could see, all Chico did was take up room, shit, and eat. “You ain’t nothin’,” he said, and looked at the boy. Chico had found his customary corner, and was crouched there, grinning.

“How come you think everything so damned funny?” Salomon sneered. “You go to work on those loadin‘ docks like I do every night and you won’t grin so damn much!”

Sophia brought him his beer, and he jerked it out of her hand, unscrewed the cap, and spun it away. He swigged beer down his throat. “Tell him to stop it,” he told her.

“Stop what?”

“That grinnin‘. Tell him to stop it, and to stop lookin’ at me.”

“Chico’s not hurtin‘ you.”

“It hurts me to look at his damn ugly face!” Salomon shouted. He saw a dark flash: a roach running past Chico’s foot along the cracked baseboard. A drop of sweat dripped down Salomon’s nose, and he wiped it off before it reached the tip. “Burnin‘ up,” he said. “I can’t take this heat. Makes my head ache.” Lately his head had been aching a lot. It was this place, he thought. It was these dirty walls and fire escape window. It was Sophia’s long black hair, streaked with gray at age thirty-two, and Chico’s remote grin. He needed a change, something different to keep him from going crazy. Why the hell had he ever taken in this woman and her idiot child anyway? The answer was clear enough: to fetch him his beer, wash his clothes, and spread her legs when he wanted them spread. Nobody else would have her, and the welfare people were about a signature away from putting Chico in a home with other idiots like him. Salomon ran the chilly bottle over his forehead. When he glanced at Chico in the corner, he saw the boy still grinning. Chico could sit like that for hours. That grin; there was something about it that grated Salomon’s nerves. A big black roach suddenly ran up the wall behind Chico, and like a fuse it set off Salomon’s charge. “Damn it to Hell!” he shouted, and he flung the half-full bottle of beer.

Sophia screamed. The bottle hit just below the roach, and about six or seven inches over Chico’s swollen skull. It didn’t break, but splattered beer everywhere. The bottle fell and rolled, and the roach darted up the wall and winnowed into a crack. Chico sat perfectly still, grinning.

“You’re crazy!” Sophia shouted. “You’re crazy!” She knelt down, putting her arms around her son, and Chico’s skinny brown arms embraced her.

“Make him stop lookin‘ at me!” Salomon was on his feet, his belly and chins trembling with rage--toward Chico, toward the black, shiny roaches that it seemed he had to kill over and over again, toward the crack-crazed walls and the roar of noise on East River Drive. “I’ll bash his face in, I swear it!”

Sophia grasped Chico’s chin. His head was heavy, resisting her. But then she got his face turned away from Salomon, and Chico rested his head against her shoulder and gave a soft, strengthless sigh.

“I’m goin‘ to take a leak,” Salomon announced. He was ashamed; not of throwing the bottle at Chico, but of wasting beer. He left the room, went out the door and toward the community bathroom at the end of the hall.