Kicking Tomorrow (23 page)

Gaunt came in, wheezing, spilling coffee onto his hand. He cocked his head at Robbie and crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue out of one corner of his mouth: a man hanging by his neck. Robbie tried not to laugh. A crust of shaving cream still fringed Gaunt’s beard, and the skin of his neck was raw around the Adam’s apple.

“I’ll tell you a secret, lad, if you want.”

Robbie shrugged.

“No, really, you may find it hard to believe, but I used to be a lot like you are.”

“Whut?”

“Well, confused, I’d say. Pushing mama’s teat away, and bawling at the same time cause all you really want to do is suck.”

“Speak for yourself, man.”

Husker entered. He exchanged nods with Gaunt and sat at the table across from Robbie. Lit a cigarette. Closed his beefy eyelids and drew in smoke through his nostrils. Robbie fidgeted. Husker tilted his head back and held it there, like a man suffering
from a murderous hangover. He was creased and balding and his flesh looked dense with booze and undigested meat. Behind his back, Gaunt pulled an unstrung face and fanned his hand rapidly. Robbie sent a grin back at the exact moment that Husker opened his eyes. Pulled himself together, did his Man With No Name for the detective.

“Oh, come off it,” Husker said. “We’re not going to eat you. Stop being such a pussy.” Which made Robbie realize that he’s not wearing a face like the visored helmet he’d imagined; that his tough iron grin is closer to a weepy wiggle. “OK, now. We’re not saying you set this fire, so fucking relax. But we do think you know some things about it. Like the boy who died. Am I correct?”

“Uh, not exactly…” Robbie looking down at the floor. Inside his sneakers, his toes wiggled like maggots in a heel of bread.

“He was so badly burned it’s hard to say, but we think he took a serious blow to the back of the neck – medulla oblongata, to be exact – which could’ve been enough to knock him out, kill him maybe. It probably didn’t kill him, since he had soot in his lungs. Which means he was still breathing during the fire. It’s also likely the amount of smack in his blood would’ve done the job just as well, had he lived long enough in the first place. The only thing in his stomach was a stick of gum and a pint of grain alcohol. This little idiot was headed for a fall.”

Robbie propped his chin in his hand. He glanced over at Gaunt, expecting a clown face, but Gaunt was impassive.

“You look bored,” Husker said.

Robbie, hand to chest, mouthing
me?

And now Gaunt signalled his own boredom behind Husker’s back by making like his eyelids were lined with lead and jerking them forcibly up again, and Robbie found himself on the verge of cracking up. What was with this guy? Was he doing this on purpose? To get him into shit?

“Or do you find it funny?”

“Funny haha,” Robbie said, “or funny peculiar?” He felt like his lungs were full of laughing gas. His cheeks puffed out as he restrained himself.

“Look, you little
FUCK
. You think this is a
joke?”
He banged out a cigarette.

Robbie focused hard on Husker’s fingers. The thick ridged knuckles. The split thumbnails.
Claws
. The mat of hair creeping out from the sleeve of his Human costume.

“OK, OK
,” Gaunt said. “Let’s allow you’re only hysterical. Scared, like. We can help you, if there’s something you want to confide.”

“Yeah,” Robbie said. “I’ll confide this much: I want to go home. You can’t stop me. Am I under arrest here, or what?”

“No,” Husker said, “but we
can
charge you with obstruction of justice. Your fucking smirking attitude totally baffles me. What do you think you are, a clever little nihilist?”

“No-o.…”

“No?”

“I mean, I don’t know what that is.”

Husker closed his eyes and summed up some energy. His face showed the peculiar concentration of a person working a fishbone out of a mouthful of trout. Robbie licked his lips.

“A dry mouth means you’re hiding something,” Gaunt said. “Did you know that?”

“I’m not hiding nothing, man,” Robbie said. “Anything you wanna know, just inquire.”

“OK,”
Husker said, opening his eyes. “What’s that swastika on your arm? A tattoo? You a neo-Nazi?”

“Nah, got it in a cereal box. It’s just a style.”

“A
style?
Fuck me gently.” Husker pounded his fist on the tabletop, and ash went flying from the end of his cigarette. Robbie’s ears went numb. The room filled with water. His mouth
wobbled like a rubber life-raft on its surface. He wished he’d never saved Ivy to begin with. She didn’t really deserve it anyway. He held his forehead in one hand, surreptitiously licking his thumb and rubbing off the ballpoint swastika. He gritted his teeth and looked away, scanning for something to distract him. He felt like a rattled window. He looked at the sky. The tumbling wet clouds. Some birds whipping away like black rags.

He confessed, “To bug people’s ass.”

“All right,” Husker said. Now he was opening an envelope and pulling out some photographs. “I’m going to jog your memory. Brace yourself. This will make you sick, but I want you to see it to shake the fucking knee-jerk anti-authority compulsiveness out of you. Take a look.”

A body. As black as the charred room it was in; you could hardly see a thing. Big deal, Robbie told himself, there’s much better stuff in
Gutbath –
the special effects fanzine that features slasher flicks like
Bloody Fucking Sadist Butcher Heroes of Rape County U.S.A. –
only in colour, and with better close-ups. For Husker’s sake, though, he made a grave and thoughtful face, nodded the way he always did for Mom on sight-seeing holidays to Museums And Churches Of The World. Though in spite of his efforts he’s shaking…

“Obviously,” Husker said, scrutinizing him closely, “I can’t ask you if you recognize this person.”

“Nope,” Robbie said, as regretfully as possible. “Oh, well. So, see ya, bye.” He rose to walk out of the room, to recapture some of those lost Z’s. But his legs were unexpectedly rubberized and he fell over his chair.

It’s a privilege of the truly inspired artist, Robbie told himself, to lose track of time. So, if another week later, or maybe two, he still
didn’t have his Hell’s Yells concept drawn up completely – or if, in fact, he still hadn’t exactly begun – that didn’t mean he wasn’t serious. Anyway, he had actually done one serious thing: arranged with the manager of the Roxy for the great and powerful Hell’s Yells to practise in the cinema after midnight, when the movies were over.

That morning, Louie Louie had helped load the equipment from Robbie’s apartment into his chicken factory truck, and stowed it behind the movie screen. Inside, they’d marvelled at the crumbling mock-Egyptian fixtures of the old burlesque follies, and examined the plaster-dusted dressing rooms up in the galleries. Louie Louie found the box of programs featuring Jacquie Diamantine and Regine Argent. “Uff uff. Uff. Look,” he said. “Dey ad to ave de cock surgically remove from dis one’s mout before dey take de picture.”

Now it was the middle of the afternoon at the Toe Blake Tavern, and the boys were gathered to celebrate. Brat was buying.

“I’m on a generosity trip,” he said. “Get this: last night I hold up a sealed envelope to my old man and I says, something’s in here that’s worth a ton of dough to any pharmaceutical company you care to name. Ever since the hippies stopped washing their hair, see, the toiletries industry has been in a slump, and I, Baimy Goldfarb, have the solution! If you don’t want it now, says I, I’ll sell it to the highest bidder, and you’ll be sorry. How much do you want for it, he says. For you, Dad, one million smackers, I says. He thinks I’m joking, eh, but I hold out, and eventually we compromise on an executive position in his company if he likes what he sees.”

“So–?”

“So, he opens the envelope and reads one word:
Repeat.”

“Repeat.”

“Yeah! Like, repeat
procedure
. I just doubled Lovely Bathroom Products’ income.” Brat snapped a claw. “Like that.”

Six glasses of draught on an empty stomach and the air’s looking very thin to Robbie – a haze of smoke is suspended in nothing, no oxygen at all, just hanging there, billowing aimlessly like sheets of miasma, gathering in pinwheel swirls, breathing in and out like Nicotine Nebula galaxies. Matter of fact, gravity’s not taking care of anything in here – the light is jumpy, the front door keeps swaying open to let in a whipping frosted gust, and the
TV
’s flipping
Hello World! Hello World! Hello World! Hello World!

“Hello world!” Mom says sunnily, and it has to be a repeat; she’s in the garden, attending to a rose-covered trellis. Robbie, meanwhile, is perched on the wooden chair, cuffs of his Italian sweater pulled over his knuckles and gripped there with thumbs, thighs crossed to keep warm, penis a hardened nub. He shivers deeply, the skin of his scalp crawling above his ears, his frigid bowling ball of a bladder announcing itself from amongst the organs. It’s been cold in his apartment all November, ever since he threw that frying pan through the front window – plus, there’s a three-inch gap under the kitchen door where now a ridge of snow piles up on the linoleum – but what’s the excuse for
this
place? Chrissake, is heating not included in the price of beer, or what?

He tells Brat about Husker and Gaunt. He doesn’t tell him the whole story – just how the pigs are hassling him, and how brilliantly he’s stymied them in their efforts to nail him down.

“Fuck me,” Brat says when he finished. “Are you ever an arsewipe.”

“Whut?”

“Scuse, uff uff,” Louie Louie announced. “Got to ang my rat over de porcelain.”

“You’re an innocent asshole not to tell anybody. You should know your rights. Like,
SHAZAM
!, get an attorney. The pigs are just taking advantage. Bet they’ve even promised you leniency in court if you tell them the truth.”

“Yup.”

“Well, you might be off the hook, at least, cause of what’s in the Juvenile Delinquents Act. When’d you turn eighteen?”

“January 13th. One minute after midnight – Dad says I kept him up.”

“And when was the fire?”

“Umm, January 12th.”

“You’re shitting me. Where’re you hiding that horseshoe, guy? The Juvenile Delinquents Act,
OK
, is there to protect rubes like you who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. To coin a phrase. There’s a statute,
OK
, that says ‘no confession or statement accepting responsibility for an act made by a person under eighteen is admissible if that person has been promised better treatment for confessing in the first place.’ “

“Too much,” Robbie said. “Talk about under the wire.” He looked up and Mom was on the box with Mendoza. It’s the Pets on Pollution part of the show. “Chrissake!” Robbie exclaimed. “He looks like an old doormat.”

“Mendoza’s only six,” Mom said, and the camera closed in on his blotched muzzle, “but he’s already got arthritis.” She rubbed his face and kissed his nose, and now the camera panned down to his flank. Mendoza’s fur had clearly been dropping out in clumps; his flesh was visible in raw, pink slabs.

“More or less what Gaunt’s dog must’ve looked like on the inside,” Brat said with a smirk, sucking his beer through a straw. “After I fed him that Drano.”

“At first we didn’t pay attention,” Mom was saying, “but then he started licking his paws, and vomiting. See these cysts? And the mass on his abdomen? He’s developed a thyroid problem and a tumour in his testicles. Now we’re going to have to put him to sleep.”

An interview clip followed in which a Kilborn doctor allowed, under pressure, that he’d noticed some insignificant behavioural abnormalities in his human patients since EPX moved to town.

“Must be hard to tell, out there in Kilborn,” Brat said.

“Har har,” Robbie replied, and got up to stand closer by the
TV
. Mom talked about how reluctant Kilborn’s working townfolk were to make a fuss about little things like blackheads, bumps, boils, lesions, and pustules, even if they were showing up on their own children. Then she related reports of pets, in other places, drinking from orange streams and rolling in grass near other factories; in Midland, Michigan, where Dow operated, puppies were being born with water on the brain. This episode must have been made over Indian summer, Robbie calculated, but no one ever phoned to tell
him
about the mutt. He’d lost track of time. How long was it exactly since he’d spoken to the family?

“Fuck me,” Brat said. “Living in your home must be a constant laff-riot.”

“Yeah, well,” Robbie said. “Ask me anything about boils and pustules, I know it off by heart.”

“Naw,” Brat said. “Don’t bother me with details.”

Louie Louie returned from the can. Robbie’s turn now to cross the floor like a zombie and take a jet-stream leak, his eyes full of tears. On the way, lots of old guys, stringy as strips of beef jerky, watched him weave his way. Their bodies have been checked against the boards more than a few times, he observed, they’d taken their share of pucks in the teeth. The only chicks in the joint were on that
TV
, flashing their frantic jiggly bods to an audience that had come here specifically to escape them.