Just North of Nowhere (41 page)

“So, Joe says, ‘well and good, but, all due respect and this creature hasn't done you many favors lately.’ He says pogroms, Hitler, terrorists. ‘What does it matter,’ he says, ‘study, ritual cleansing, preparations, the care of numbers. What good is your fairy tale and millions are dead and more dying!’

“’Fairy tale!’ I said.”

“Rabbi.” Clay’s voice was hard in the darkness.

There was another silence.

“'Fairy tale,’ I said, ‘huh? I'll show you,' I said. See? It was all irony. A joke. That was some time ago. And then, I did it.”

Something creaked. Not far. The sharp edge of it sent a bolt up the killer’s backbone. His hand wanted the revolver in the small of his back. His eye wanted the target, the customer. He fought the impulse, kept his eyes on the Reb.

The rebbe’s mouth moved without a sound. “That may be he, she,” he whispered a second later. “It,” he amended.

Clay steadied the Reb by his shoulder. He turned. There was nothing in the darkness yet something was. Another First Principle:
When it’s time to go, be there already.

They went. He steered the Reb by his shoulder. Clay moved surely. His feet found the level despite broken asphalt, weed and gathering river mist. The Reb stumbled but Mr. Clay steered, kept him vertical. They moved quickly and were halfway to the screen when the rabbi’s bike hit asphalt. Then they were there and the screen had their back. Mr. Clay smelled rotten wood. The Reb had pissed himself. He smelled that. Then a new smell made an entrance. The new smell was sewerage, old vegetation and more. It came from the fence, the woods behind? He didn’t know. He didn’t like not knowing. With it was a rustling of leaves, a wind through rushes, a cold sweep across the lot. The rush in the air picked up old dust and plastic bags. It shook the trash that had gathered and been dumped there. The weeds crackled and Mr. Clay saw childhood. The boy played where buildings once were. The open space they all called the Field. Several blocks of city gone to ruin, bulldozed. Waiting. It was theirs. His. Tenements had become holes in brick-scaled dirt. Like shell holes. He and the others played on the shores and bluffs around the tiny lakes that filled the basements holes. Around heaving blocks of concrete, they played war, space, old west. Trash remained and more gathered. Dead things rotted. He and the others watched them as they vanished. They did in just a few days. Flesh, maggots, bone, gone. Dogs, cats, rats, birds. Dead smells mixed. And mixed among the small carcasses, the leftovers of human lives. Beds, pictures, chairs, plates, frames, dolls, clothes, spoons, toys were left, not needed. They mixed slowly with muck and bones. Their smells mixed. The smell of the place came to him, now, and what a wonder of a place to play in it was when he was what? Seven, eight. A wheel of the Reb’s bicycle turned. Mr. Clay was back to the here, with the Reb and now. He blinked himself back. An act of will.

“It’s here,” the Reb said. The Reb did not point. He pressed his face to the wood of the screen.

“You have been a bad boy, Rabbi.”

The Reb said nothing.

“This can be killed, you say? You can kill this? How can it be killed? How would you kill it?”

“Reach in. Remove the name of God.”

“And I can do that?”

The Reb said nothing.

Mr. Clay took a breath. The smell. It wanted to draw him back. He clamped a fist on the memories and squeezed them. Still, they squirmed, twitched, they flickered trying to ooze in elsewhere. Faces, remembered names, music. He felt…

He smashed his fist into the base of the screen. The skin on his knuckles broke as the soggy wood shattered. The structure vibrated. Mr. Clay was back and the Reb was panting. Mr. Clay stepped away from the screen and looked across the lot.

There was a thing, like a man but not. The thing was a man’s height and width but moved like something else. It moved light, like tumbleweed, half floating, bouncing with the breeze. The smell, yes, came from the thing.

Forget that ‘thing’ business,
thought Mr. Clay,
there is the customer. It is alive. It can be dead.
The .38 was in his hand. Small, light, simple. For close work. “Reach in, pull out the name of God,” Mr. Clay said.

Night was complete now. The two approached one another. A damp mist covered the ground.
From the river
, Mr. Clay’s memory again. He came to the river on hot nights in the city where he’d lived… He shook off the memory. …when he was a kid. Cooling off. The morning snakes of mist raised heads from the gray river, and the water cooled the air like… He wiped his eyes. Focused.

The customer was less than a meter from him. It was still. A gentle wind, a cool wind, stirred parts of it. The parts ruffled like wind shadows in a field of wheat. Its arms were at its side, its weight rested on its right leg. Its head was cocked. Mr. Clay could see no eyes but the customer looked at him. Into him. Into his eyes. Down into him. He knew that.
He knows I’m here to kill,
thought Mr. Clay.
He wants it.

The wind stirred again, again the smell of dead things, live things, mud, earth and love… The customer’s hair swirled. Long and fair. The hair whipped round and pointed toward Mr. Clay. Mr. Clay caught the scent of hair. Fresh.
She, then,
thought Mr. Clay.
The customer’s a woman. Okay.
He’d had women customers. The revolver was in his hand, warm from his body. “Where do you keep the name of God?” he said.

The creature’s head cocked to the other side, a dog looking at some strange thing. Mr. Clay remembered dogs. His dog... He fired at the center of the body mass. A heart shot. The muzzle flash showed a glint where the eyes would be. The crack came back to him in a fraction of a second, then back again, and a third time, diminished. Over Clay’s shoulder, the Reb moaned. She didn’t move. He fired again. A head shot. Same effect. The reflected flash where they eyes would be. Three echoes and a moan from the Reb.

“Name of God,” the moan said.

The customer’s head straightened.

Mr. Clay smiled. “Okay,” he said. He holstered the weapon. Its warmth pressed his spine. She waited. She raised her hand to him.

There was something in her gesture, her look – though why he should call that flash he’d caught in her eye “a look” he couldn’t say – but so what? He was there on business. He felt his heart. Funny. He didn’t normally. When he’d been in Fal… Never mind. Now his heart was moving against his ribs. He knew it was there. The old pump.

“Get this over with,” he said to the trash heap that stood before him, her hair blowing sweetly in the night air from the river. “Do not need a gun to take apart a compost…”

He did not finish. Her hand was on his heart. It was not as warm as the chamber and barrel of the Smith and Wesson, but there was something. Something like pain. Something he almost… Without speaking he reached for her. His hand sought the Name of God in the place he thought it should be. He did not find it. Instead there was a hole.

The hole became the night, then the world.

Vinny’s prowler eased up to the gate at the drive in. The kids who’d found the dead guy waited for him. They were jumping back and forth, one foot, then the other. Half-way hopping at the same time.

Cripes. Why me?
Vinny thought.
Enough
. And no Danny Kiddof either. “Out of town. Indefinitely,” the machine said, then beeped. Cripes, this was his place. Where was he, out of town?

“Okay, first off, what the heck’re you guys doing playing in there anyways? It’s private property don’t you know that? I oughta run youse in.”

He didn’t scare them. Not them. Still, they were scared. They rocked, one foot to the other, like they had to pee. The middle one pointed inside the lot.

“He’s got no heart,” the fat one said.

Part One

ONE-EYE BLIND

Love messes with the best of us. Karl brought the J back to
Einar’s,
middle of the night. She scraped in from the dark, dinging the service bell one tire at a time.

Einar crawled out of his flop, back-end of the garage, each clang of the bell, a shot to his head.

This time the J was one-eye blind, her pouty front-end drooped as though someone had cocked her nose. Creases rippled down the driver’s side from her snout, to damn-near her tailfin. A spray of blood streamlined from that Goddamned 2-by-12 bumper, over the hood to the passenger compartment. The driver’s half of her split windshield was gone but black blood fanned along her roof in air-swept streams that stuttered all the way to her rear. The old car smelled of fear, sweat, and torn shrub.

“Well she was, an eight-point buck,” Karl said. He was breathing heavy. “One night. Tonight. Buck done that,” he pointed his chin at the windshield, “Clipped him here,” he pointed where, “and he goes over the hood and whoosh…” Karl stuck a beer in Einar’s hand. “Rear hoof damn nearly took my face off. Eight-point! I counted every one, you know, like they say you do in that last minute before you know?” He shook his head. Safety glass glinted in his thin gray hair like dandruff. “Passed before my eyes in whatdoyoucallit? Slow motion. Shame, huh?” He chuckled into the neck of his
Pauli Girl
. “We hardly bruised the meat, Einar.” Karl nudged the J’s fender with the side of his knee. “This piecea crap’s a good little killer. Light, snappy...”

Einar ran his eye along the J’s front quarter-panel. He was calculating.

“Cripes,” is what came out of him and he set the beer on the bench, unsucked.

Karl took another draw on his
.
His voice misted. “They was more out there.” He gave it a moment. “More’n you can imagine. Cripes, Einar, their
eyes
in the dark. Oh, that piecea crap’s somethin’! Knew I was right about her.”

Karl waited. Waiting, he touched nothing in the shop, everything in the shop being greasy and a mess even for a guy in blooded flannels and old-time waders.

“How long you figure?” he said.

Einar ran his palm over the faded red fender, gauging the depth of her injuries, figuring whether he’d best go on under and pound her out or drill her from the outside then pop and fill.

“Ah, Cripes!” He didn’t know what the hell to do, he honestly didn’t.

“What d’ya say, Einar?” Karl said. His jitters were smoothing out some.

Einar
did not
know!

See? Love messes with damn near everybody. Karl Dorbler’s ’52 Henry J Vagabond family coupe and Einar—Einar who runs the
Good Service
(formerly the Amoco station) out where Commonwealth T-junctions into County H – now they were a pair.

If Einar had been forced to say at the moment Karl asked, he’d have said life felt like a load of beans had backed up from gut to heart and missed his ass entirely. ‘Course he didn’t say. He just sighted along her body.

The J whimpered in the hum of the fluorescents.

“Crineoutloud there, Karl, I’ll have to...” But Einar didn’t want to say what, not in her hearing. “I got to...” He held his arms close to his body and made like he stretched an invisible line between his fists. He still did not say what he might have to.

“Yeah. Okay Einar. I got to hang and drain them deer.” He gave it a second. “Look, get this piecea crap at least legal
looking
in a couple, three days, ‘kay?”

Einar said nothing. He stalked, squatted.

“Einar, y’okay? A lot more of my meat’s out there, still on the hoof. Y’get me?”

Still nothing. The little weasel was thinking.

“And this...” he waved his hand at the J, “ain’t costing me more’n fifty bucks. You got me? I require no beauty of this thing,” he jerked his head toward the old car, “just that it moves! Get me?”

Einar circled the J and sighted, rear to front. “Hsss, cripes,” he said.

“Yeah, you get me.” Karl snatched back Einar’s untouched beer and was gone into the black.

“Aw heck, pretty pear,” Einar said. He ran his hand around her empty headlight ring.

The J purred in a blue 60-cycle fluorescent hum.

The busted lamp nicked blood from his finger. “Shit!” Einar said.

Part Two

HE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN

Relationships! Most went right over Einar’s head, but vehicles! The son of a bitch knew vehicles. That J had spent its late years – the 70s and 80s of the last century – in a shack out in the Driftless being birdshat on and ratnested in. It later moldered in a stack with other chunks of Detroit iron down in Cruxton at
Wayne’s Fine Wrecks, Auto Specialties Since 1949
.

Einar went simple, first time Karl towed that piece of crap Henry J Vagabond into the shop. Yeah, there was something there.

Karl had said, “You can get this piece of crap on the road, know what I mean, on the QT, can’t you? I pay you, of course!”

“Daman straight you pay.” Einar said. He walked a circle around the mostly red Vagabond.

It was a piece of crap, just a memory of an automobile, but Einar heard her hum. She had lines. She was little and curvy and a little bit mean. She might have been meant for a family, a small family, but she was to tool around in too. Yeah, you’d go to the store in her, weekends, Church, Sundays, but maybe you’d take her to the Drive In out on the banks, the one that wasn’t any more, Saturdays. Saturday nights! Wherever folks went, she was meant to take them in threes and fours, maybe fives if the five were small and didn’t mind a tight ride. But she was finned in the back, too; her styling cuts gave her a little jaunt, and she had enough oomph so the old man didn’t have to feel like a bow-tied dick-in-the-pants when he was out by himself. And she was light enough for the wife to handle and the kids to learn on.

In her day, that was.

Einar shook his head. To hell with her day. Today was today and today, on her front, an I-beam had been gut-welded with re-bar to the frame – right to the damn frame! On the I-beam was bolted a great honking hunk of 2-by-12. Looked like she had a punch-swollen lip under a pretty overbit grill. Einar kicked the wood. Rust showered from under. “You do that shit?” he’d asked.

“Yeah. Well, me and Bunch done her,” Karl had said. He gave the clunky wood bumper another kick, “Saves wear and tear. Huh?”

Einar said nothing. He’d taken other hunks of crap and turned them into hurtling iron Karl used on the roads and trails around Bluffton, nights, for his business.

Back to that first day: Back end – no bumper, nothing. Body cancer, holes where the continental spare had hung. Einar squinted, twitched, scratched. “Yeah, you’ll pay. Course you’ll pay, course you will for cripes’s sake!”

Even crapped out and squatting the little two-door had the look of going. Her sleek body sat like flying. Her engine compartment still leaned over the road like it couldn’t wait for the rest of her to keep up, her hood thrust out between two torpedo headlamps. Kaiser (or Fraser or whoever the hell) had designed her good.

Karl and Bunch’s goddamn wood muzzie ruined her lines, stopped her dead. Damn two-by bumper. Einar jumped on it and again. Her shocks squealed. Still, there was something.

Then Einar stuck out his ass and sat on her. Just to rock her body, check her shocks.

She shimmied.

“Cripes!” he yiped. She tickled him down there. He felt it! Something jumped between them at that moment, Einar and the J!

“Cripes, Karl, yeah you’ll pay. What do you think? Think I do this for fun? Criminies Karl, I don’t even know if she’ll take the lift, the hydrohaulic Goddamned lift! Don’t know as she’ll take it, I honest to God don’t!”

She did.

Einar stood under looking up, the work light hung from a strut, swinging bright and shadows across his wattles and whiskers.

Leftover day heat glowed down on him but she was rusty and cold, under there. She had a body odor of burnt bearings and too-hot rubber gone dry. Exhaust residue and spit up oil scabbed up her pipes. A million yards of mud clod, mummified bug parts and petrified road slurry dangled like berries from her underskin. All that played in the shadows that swung from his work light, all of it whispered at him.

Einar hadn’t heard the voice, not for years. When he tugged a rod to feel the play in her, the grease nearly jumped off his hand, a zero-buzz ran his backbone almost through his head.
Home!
Your
home! You remember?
the fluorescents hissed.
Hey there, you sumbitch,
the kerosene heater wheezed,
Mom says, hey,
the little radio on the bench chattered between static and crap music from Cruxton. All of it met in a place somewhere between Einar’s ears and behind his eye.

Einar staggered against the lift. “Cripes.”

“Naw,” Karl said, watching Einar twitch. “I was just saying. Get this piece a crap running and I pay you something GOOD, what I was saying. You know?”

“Cripes,” Einar said, blinking his eye. “The sister I never. Or cousin. Some Goddamn thing.” That was in grumbles and spit but Karl caught it. Karl caught things; no idea what the little weasel meant but he didn’t say. He wouldn’t have. Karl was smart that kind of way.

“Why the hell not?” Einar said. He picked at a curl of ancient goose shit on her fender. “Cost you? Hell yes. A shit-load she’ll cost.” Einar did not grumble. His attention was in heat, reckoning as the fingers of his mind walked, so to say, over the machine. “I don’t do this shit for fun. No sir!”

“Course you don’t,” Karl said, “Course not. Oh.” He turned at the door. “One of them little spotlights? One you aim from inside, like Vinnie’s got on the prowler? Want one of them. I expect to be doing some night driving, off road, you know? Yeah. One of them.”

Einar expected a week of cussing, every knuckle smashed, other jobs of work gone to shit. He remembered the J’s big old momma, the Kaiser Dragon. Now her! She’d been a bitch!

That J Vagabond healed herself, damn near. Folks did that, given half a chance, rest and love, they improved. Doc Mouth said that once, back when he was talking.

Automotive vehicles did not, Einar knew that one Goddamned thing. But with the J, his mitts steered the parts and the Vagabond did the rest; damn-near turned herself into the soulless killer thing Karl needed.

Which should have told Einar something.

It didn’t. Like most guys when they fall, Einar went shit-blind with the plummet.

Some handle it. Brought up lonesome on the Kiddorf Banks by a ‘53 Kaiser Dragon, though, Einar was ill prepared for love or all things like it. Gentle emotions put squirrels up his chute.

Part Three

EINARS GOOD SERVICE (FORMERLY AMOCO)

There had been a service station, top of Commonwealth, since the first horseless carriage showed up in Bluffton – about the time the Old Rattler went blind from snake hunting, bad grub, or whatever. For a good part of the last century, it was just
the AMOCO
and was out of the town’s way.

The town caught up with it. Then the guy who ran the place got old. One day he was dead. No wife, no kids and no one wanted to run
the AMOCO
.

In Chicago the Company looked at the numbers and said, “Cripes, we’re barely making our nut up in Bluffton, there. Pissant operation like that? Shut it down!”

Einar bought the whole deal, outright. Kept the pumps but bought his gas from anyone who’d sell to him at a price.

The day he took charge Einar climbed a ladder and painted
FORMERLY
in front of
AMOCO.
That covered that, he figured.

Bothered him though so he climbed back up and painted
EINARS
before
FORMERLY
. He took another look then slopped
SERVICE
after
AMOCO
so the whole thing said
EINARS FORMERLY AMOCO SERVICE
.

He squinted, grumbled, pecked around the pole for a couple hours and still it crabbed him. Finally, he climbed the ladder and whited it all out; painted
EINARS GOOD SERVICE (Formerly Amoco)
and that was that Goddamned thing. Names stuck, he knew that damn much. A man’s name, ought be what a man wants and ought to say what the man is all about. Anyway,
EINARS GOOD SERVICE (Formerly Amoco)
was a name and a little bit of story too.

Everyone said Einar would belly up and die. They said it at the
Wagon Wheel
, at the
American House—Eats
, probably at church.

“That Einar, now? He thinks he’ll make some kind of go of it up there? Huh! He’ll do what Amoco down in Chicago, there, didn’t? Well, we’ll see about that damn thing!” That was pretty much what they said.

At the Sons of Norway there weren’t so many words. “Einar,” someone might say, one end of the bar, shaking his head.