Curtains (12 page)

Could he put
his right hand on that burner again? Hutson didn’t think he could,
in his muddied, agony-spiked brain. He was sweating and cold at the
same time, and the air swam around him. His body shook and
trembled. If he were familiar with the symptoms, Hutson might have
known he was going into shock. But he wasn’t a doctor, and he
couldn’t think straight anyway, and the pain, oh Jesus, the awful
pain, and he remembered being five years old and afraid of dogs,
and his grandfather had a dog and made him pet it, and he was
scared, so scared that it would bite, and his grandfather grabbed
his hand and put it toward the dog’s head...

Hutson put his
hand back on the burner.

“One...............two...............”

Hutson screamed
again, searing pain bringing him out of shock. His hand reflexively
grabbed the burner, pushing down harder, muscles squeezing, the old
burns set aflame again, blistering, popping...

“...............three...............”

Take it off!
Take it off! Screaming, eyes squeezed tight, shaking his head like
a hound with a fox in his teeth, sounds of cracking skin and
sizzling meat...

“...............four...............five...............”

Black smoke,
rising, a burning smell, that’s me cooking, muscle melting and
searing away, nerves exposed, screaming even louder, pull it away!,
using the other hand to hold it down...

“...............six...............seven...............”

Agony so
exquisite, so absolute, unending, entire arm shaking, falling to
knees, keeping hand on burner, opening eyes and seeing it sear at
eye level, turning grey like a well-done steak, meat
charring...

“Smells pretty
good,” says one of the thugs.

“Like a
hamburger.”

“A
hand-burger.”

Laughter.

“...............eight...............nine...............”

No flesh left,
orange burner searing bone, scorching, blood pumping onto heating
coils, beading and evaporating like fat on a griddle, veins and
arteries searing...

“........ten!”

Take it off!
Take it off!

It’s stuck.

“Look boss,
he’s stuck!”

Air whistled
out of Hutson’s lungs like a horse whimpering. His hand continued
to fry away. He pulled feebly, pain at a peak, all nerves
exposed–pull dammit! –blacking out, everything fading...

Hutson awoke on
the floor, shaking, with more water in his face.

“Nice job Mr.
Hutson.” Little Louie stared down at him. “You followed the
agreement. To the letter. You’re off the hook.”

Hutson squinted
up at the mobster. The little man seemed very far away.

“Since you’ve
been such a sport, I’ve even called an ambulance for you. They’re
on their way. Unfortunately, the boys and I won’t be here when it
arrives.”

Hutson tried to
say something. His mouth wouldn’t form words.

“I hope we can
gamble again soon, Mr. Hutson. Maybe we could play a hand or two.
Get it? A hand?”

The thugs
tittered. Little Louie bent down, close enough for Hutson to smell
his cigar breath.

“Oh, there’s
one more thing, Mr. Hutson. Looking back on our agreement, I said
you had to hold your right hand on the burner for ten seconds. I
said you had to follow that request to the letter. But, you know
what? I just realized something pretty funny. I never said you had
to turn the burner on.”

Little Louie
left, followed by his body guards, and Bernard Hutson screamed and
screamed and just couldn’t stop.

"—KILL YOUR DARLINGS—"

I was wiping down the counter with an old
shirt rag when he came in. The man in the yellow slicker. I saw him
without looking up, drank him in the way my customers downed their
Scotch and water. Years of bartending had made me a quick study.
Call it survival instinct.

Big guy, woolly Groucho Marx eyebrows, but
his nose was small and sharp, more like a hawk's bill than an
eagle's beak. He was an easy 6'  2" if he was an inch, and he
was at least an inch. He was slouching down into the collar of his
slicker, trying to make himself invisible. Fat chance.

He shook off the afternoon rain that had
collected on his broad shoulders. Even in the dim light of neon
beer signs, I could see his black smoldering eyes roaming over the
joint. He wasn't here for the atmosphere, though we had plenty of
that. A television in the corner, tuned to a 24-hour sports
station, the sound turned down. A row of ragged barstools, their
cotton stuffing oozing out from under the vinyl seats. A jukebox by
the restrooms, broken down and so old that it featured "The Brand
New Hit from Hank Williams!" A couple of regulars slouched in a
booth, deep in their cups despite the early hour, whiling away the
day until it was time to get down to some serious drinking. And all
of that was doubled back in the long, foggy mirror that covered the
wall behind the bar, the mirror that had a perfect round hole from
a passionate gunshot maybe twenty years ago. He wasn't here for the
scenery.

And he wasn't here for the smell. Stale urine
laced with crusted vomit that never completely dried, just sort of
congealed half-heartedly. The musty smell of the soggy carpet, worn
down to the threads or, in places, all the way through to the rough
pine planks underneath. The odor of old cigarettes which had seeped
so deeply into the walls that you could kill a nicotine craving by
chewing on a piece of the peeling wallpaper. And, of course, the
grainy smell of every kind of imbibement known to man, at least the
stuff that was under twenty bucks a bottle.

No, despite all this decadent splendor, he
was here for something besides a blind date with a watered-down
slug of rotgut. He was looking for someone. He walked across the
floor to the chipped bar and sat down in front of me.

"What's your pleasure?" I asked, still not
looking up, rubbing on a cigarette burn I had been working over for
a few weeks.

"Business is my pleasure," he said, his voice
husky and raw, his throat a clearinghouse for phlegm and
bitterness—

"Honey, time to go to work," my wife called
from the kitchen. She put up with my writing, humored my foolish
ambitions, and served as a whimsical sounding board for my evolving
plots. She even let me use our apartment's overgrown pantry as a
study. At least my new hobby kept me at home, unlike my earlier
flings with surfboarding and collecting Civil war relics. My
writing was fine with her, as long as the bills were paid.

I gulped down the gritty dregs of my coffee
and looked at my wristwatch. "Coming, dear."

I left Marco in the middle of his story,
along with the guy with the raincoat. I thought of him as "Fred,"
but that would probably change to something more noble and tough,
like "Roman." Yeah, Roman would work just fine. Roman would be
looking for his wife, who had run off in the middle of the night
with his best friend. Naw, that was too banal—

"Honey!"

"Okay, I'm really coming." I hit the "save"
button on the word processor and jogged out of the study and into
the kitchen and gave Karen a husbandly peck on the cheek. I turned
before going out the door. "Be home this evening?"

"No, I've got to pick up Susanne after her
soccer and then I've got a fundraiser meeting at the library."

"Then I'll grab a burger on the way back
in."

"No, you're going to heat up the pot roast
and microwave some potatoes for us."

"Oh, yeah. Bye. Love you."

I was two minutes late at the magazine stand
where I worked. I liked the job. From my position at the register,
I had a clear view of the street, and the company was good, mostly
educated people who actually relished honest differences of
opinion. And it was great place for scoping out characters, finding
faces that I could press into the two-dimensional world of
fiction.

Henry, the store owner, gave me a little
ribbing about being late, but he was never in a hurry to be
relieved. I tried to picture his life outside the shop, but when my
imagination followed him down the street, with a couple of
newspapers tucked under his pudgy elbow, my imagination always gave
out when he turned the corner. He was like a minor character who
served his plot purpose and then dutifully shuffled off the
page.

I restocked a few monthlies and had to
rotate a couple of the afternoon editions that had just rolled off
the presses. One of my favorite parts of the job was getting to
smell the fresh paper and ink. I'd open a box of magazines or comic
books and take a big relaxing sniff, like one of those turtlenecked
actors "savoring the aroma" of a cup of expensive French roast.

To me, words on paper were magic: entire
universes lined up in neat rows on the bookshelves, filled with
heroes and heroines that dared to dream; fantastic voyages to the
outermost edges of the cosmos or the inner depths of the mind;
unthinkable horrors and profound rhapsodies; the vast revelations
of consciousness, all for cover price and tax.

I was arranging the cigar showcase when
Harriett Weatherspoon came in. She had parked her poodle by the
door, and it pressed the black dot of its nose against the
glass.

"Hello, Sil," she said, in her canary
voice.

"Afternoon, Mrs. Weatherspoon. What will it
be today?"

"I think I'll just browse through the
bestsellers today."

"We've got the new Michele McMartin in. And
probably a R.C. Adams or two. Seems like they come out every couple
of months nowadays."

"Now, Sil, you know those are ghost-written.
They come out of one of those prose-generating computer programs I
read about in Writer's Digest."

"Million-sellers all. What does that say
about the state of literacy today?"

"Charles Dickens is rolling over in his
grave."

"Along with the ghosts of several
Christmases."

Mrs. Weatherspoon bought a paperback and a
couple of nature magazines and went out into the bright spring
afternoon. She stopped at the door and unhitched her poodle's
leash, and for a split-second, I thought she was going to hop on
the little varmint and ride off into the sunset. But she wrapped
the leash around her wrist and went down the sidewalk,
chin-first.

I was watching her slip into the human stream
when I saw the man in the raincoat. He stood out from the crowd
because the coat was canary yellow and also because the day was
sunny and warm, with not a cloud above the skyline. Unexpected
showers occasionally blew in off the coast, but most of the other
pedestrians needed only an umbrella in their armpit for security.
The raincoat-wearer was on the edge of a meaty crush at the corner,
waiting for the light to change, and in the next moment he was
gone.

"Canary yellow," I said to the empty store.
"Good piece of detail. Roman's slicker will be canary yellow
instead of just plain yellow."

I searched my memory to see if I could dredge
any more fictional sludge out of the fleeting vision. He had been
Roman's height, and he had a jot of black hair. Not the dark brown
that most people call black. This was shoe-polish black. But I
could steal no other features from him, because I had only seen him
from behind.

Arriving home after work, I started warming
up dinner and went into the study. I turned on the word processor
and began spewing words, with my tongue pressed lightly between my
teeth the way it does when I'm onto something and I forgot where I
am, when I get sucked into a world that is trying to create itself
before my eyes.

"Business is my pleasure," he said, his voice
a clearinghouse for phlegm and bitterness. I hadn't heard that
corny line in a few months, but I wasn't about to bring up 
his lack of originality.

I looked into the pits of his eyes. His
pupils were as dark as his shoe-polish black hair, and they were
ringed by an unusual reddish-gold color. Our eyes met for only a
second, and mine went back down to the bar.

In that instant, I had seen plenty. Pain.
Anger. And unless I'm a bad judge of character, which I'm not, a
touch of crazy as well.

"Odd place to do business," I said, with
practiced carelessness.

"I'm looking for somebody." His voice was
grave-dirt.

"Ain't we all?"

I saw movement out of the corner of my eye,
and suddenly his hand was on the bar, palm-down. The back of his
hand was a roadmap of blue veins, lined with tiny creases, and wiry
black hairs stuck out in all directions. But what really caught my
eye was the fifty-dollar bill underneath.

"Bartenders see things, know things," he
muttered under his breath.

It was an occupational hazard, all right. I
saw lots of things and knew things I wouldn't tell for twenty times
that amount. But a fifty didn't walk in every day, and a G-note
never did. I nodded my head slightly, to let him know I
understood.

His hand suddenly balled into a fist, his
veins becoming swollen with rage.

I smelled something. Smoke. I ran out to
rescue the pot roast and was just sliding its black carcass out of
the oven when my wife and daughter walked in.

"Order out for pizza?" I asked in
greeting.

We ate the pizza, then I plowed ahead with
the story. After a couple of pages, I was fighting for words,
torturing myself through painful paragraphs, dangling from the
cliff-edge of plot resolution like a sixth-grader's participle.
What do I do with these people? I needed some fresh ideas.

After work the next day, I stopped down at
Rocco's Place. Rocco was a short, paunchy Italian who was born into
bartending. He wasn't a close friend, but I figured he was fair
game as a model for my story. Marco. Rocco. Close, but he'd never
know the difference. He probably dangled from the cliff-edge of
literacy by a thin rope anyway.