Slob (14 page)

"Where's 'a beer?" coming toward her like a human King Kong, this human garbage disposal that nearly hits his head on the ceiling of the room now swilling the last of the milk as she says:

"Rat there inna frig, ova' to the rat." Wrinkled old cunt, he thinks as he lets out a loud belch and opens a Michelob on his teeth the way he always likes to do when somebody is watching him and spitting the cap off, letting it hit the floor as she looks at him and says halfway under her breath:

"Ah hope yew kin pay fer all that food," but thank God he doesn't hear or pay any attention to her as he chugs the cold beer and belches most offensively again, taking a quart of Wild Turkey off the shelf and spitting it on the counter. She no longer worries about the bill as this last item legitimizes his movements, and not only is he apparently going to pay, this is the first thing he has done that resembles the actions of an ordinary human, actually picking out something and not consuming it there in the store. She looks up at this mastadon and with the luck of the stupid says:

"Gols, yet a stout one. Whatcha' weigh there?" He looks down at her like she is a dog turd he has just stepped in. For just one second her life is in some serious danger but she says it again, "How much d'ya
weigh?
Ah betcha go ovah three hunnert 'n fifty?" He can't help it, a blast of noise explodes from him, the monstrous balls of this wrinkled old prune-faced hag, Chaingang can't restrain himself he actually laughs, saving her life as he goes off to get canned goods saying over his shoulder:

"Four thousand pounds, Lucky." He rumbles good-naturedly. He likes the old crone. Also he doesn't want to have to relocate as he has a nice place to crash tonight all picked out. Very safe. Still, as he steals food from the shelves, he thinks how amusing it would be to take one of the large cans of V-8 juice there and pound it into her temple until she died and how easily he could snuff out her dull existence. Perhaps he'll come back tomorrow and do the old bitch a favor. Put her out of her misery.

He takes a can of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee Spaghetti and Meatballs off the shelf and puts it in his left hand with the other cans he'll pay for, then slips a jar of deluxe olives, a can of Bush's Best hot chili beans, and a large can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew into the voluminous chain pocket of his coat. He goes back to the cold section and gets a quart of milk, as he puts fourteen-dollars' worth of various meats and cheeses into his other pocket. He goes up to her and pays for $6.95 worth of food, a quart of beer, and the quart of Turkey, and walks out with another twenty in canned and packaged— foods. As a—shoplifter he has no equal.

He has a large sum of money in his pocket but he never or seldom ever pays for everything. It is, as he sees it, a matter of principle. He loves to steal and is an accomplished thief. Had he not opted to be a murderer and let his warped life gravitate around crimes of violence he would have been a spectacular major thief. He knows everything about antiques and collectibles, fine art, numismatic coinage and precious metals and, stones, stamps, weaponry, both arms and edged, music, virtually any field in which memorabilia is of value falls under the omnivorous umbrella of his computer retrieval system and general expertise. The thing is he has no interest in material goods or money.

Waddling along, a little less uncomfortable now that he's taken the edge off his enormous appetite, he heads back to the fence row where his duffel is hidden. Carefully, very carefully, he reaches under the duffel bag and his viselike fingers get a firm grip on the spoon of the 'nade that is wedged under the corner of the bag. Carefully he eases it back out and with the fingers of a skilled surgeon slowly slides the pin back in the retaining apertures, bending the cotter pins back with a fingertip as you would bend a wet straw. That done he shoulders his burden and limps on down the road to his private cabana.

His accommodations for the night will be cramped but secure. He is burglarizing a concrete block building owned by Ma Bell, sometimes referred to by the misnomer
utility building,
used as an equipment repeater station. It is carried on the Illinois Bell Systems books as RS-724-B, and locally referred to as Repeater Hut 724,- 724 is a middle-aged hut and has a fairly sophisticated security system which is buried straight down under the ground with Ma's long lines, he building being used to boost signal for tolls.

If you take a crowbar and pry the heavy steel door open, a silent alarm is activated in Chicago Central and the dispatcher calls the boys in blue to investigate. Depending on the time of day and the fates, you have anywhere from two minutes to half an hour before you're in the backseat of a patrol car. Ma can't take a joke when it comes to screwing around with her repeater stations.

Of course you can get lucky. About once in every thousand times somebody does any work on the equipment they forget to hook the alarm back in after it has been disabled and that would be a free ticket to ride, roughly the equivalent of winning $100,000 playing Blackjack in northern Nevada.

Chaingang knows things like this and so he removes a small black case from his duffel. It contains a full set of Deluxe Taylor Picks, a set of homemade picks and levers, a small mini-key unit, a massive ring with 250 masters for everything from old time skeletons to the latest GMs, house keys, ornate keys, you name it. His case contains half a dozen jimmies and slim jims and pry bars. He also carries a cold chisel and a small sledge which he sometimes kills with when it suits him.

And he is inside standing there very still breathing in the electronic noises and just checking out the vibes, inside Ma's Repeater Hut 724 before you can say in-like-Sean-Flynn. And something is awry. Something doesn't quite, let's say, parse. His astounding mental computer is whirling away a mile a minute, tired as he is, and he is rethinking the last hour of his dark life even as he scans his close quarters for the thing that has disturbed him. Is a hidden, surveillance camera now taking his picture? He blinks and begins to still his vital signs slightly, involuntarily and automatically, putting himself on hold as he scans and excogitates.

It is a presence, a feel that something is out of place. What went undone. What detail was overlooked. What carelessness will be paid for in heavy dues. He senses being watched somehow. It is very strong and he never ignores these things these hunches these vibrations—call them what you will. His strange and amazing instincts that have kept him alive a thousand times in as many ways are nudging him. It is something outside there.

He cracks the door slightly with his killing hand, his right hand, hanging at his side. He flexes the huge, steel cigarlike fingers making a massive claw and then relaxing the hand. He has a grip that cannot be believed. Once, enraged, he squeezed a flashlight battery as you might squeeze an empty beer can. For many years one of his small amusements was to try and squeeze his own hands so hard that it would take him to the edge of his pain threshold, a small eccentricity born in lonely, dark places.

He thinks of little babies before his brain registers the noise and then he realizes what it was—the faraway call of birds flying south and no, no, that's not it—he can hear babies crying now, and then even before he has found the box he knows what it is and he hopes with the part of his soul that is still human that he will not find something bad in there, something that will make his rage go all bright scarlet and bubble over into a sudden kill fury. But when he determines that there are no passersby about he goes over to the large tree next to the hut and peers down into the box. It is a pair of tiny, starved pups of indeterminate lineage, huddling together to try to stay alive as they take heat from each other's tiny, emaciated bodies, shaking and quivering as this huge shadow looms above them.

He allows himself to breathe for the first time in the last sixty seconds or so, and shrugs his great shoulders. He goes back to his duffel and returns to the box. In a couple of swift, sure hand movements he has opened the can of beef stew and he dumps it down into the corner of the box and watches as the starved dogs attack the cold stew with a ravenous hunger. They tear at the food insanely, as starved things always do, and within a few seconds the larger chunks of food are gone. He tries to decide whether or not to open another can, wondering if they will become sick gorging themselves, but he opens a small Vienna Sausage tin and tears the sausages into fragments, mincing them up with his big fingers and dropping them down on the dogs. Some of the sausages go into his mouth.

He goes back inside and spreads his huge sleeping bag out as much as he can in the open area of the but, and then he goes back outside and picks up the little puppies with surprising tenderness, feeling them wiggle in his fingers as they whimper excitedly. He is glad he didn't see the one who dumped them as he could have gone berserk. Once before he saw a man dump an abused dog. First, he had put the dog to sleep, and then done a very bad thing. He had made the man ride with him in the man's old truck back to where he lived and they had gone inside his home. He had tied up the man's wife and two children and made them watch the things he did to the man as he slowly killed them, taking his life inch by inch in his maddened fury.

Inside the repeater hut he spreads a newspaper for the dogs, out of habit from his own tortured childhood, but when he lies down in the bag he pulls the puppies to him and they snuggle next to him still whimpering with joy. He opens a package of meat and cheese and the three of them devour it together, the enormous man whose bulk takes up the entire interior of the small hut, and the two tiny, starved mutts, wiggling all over him as he feeds them bits of his dinner. And that is how they finally go to sleep after they eat, the two little abandoned pups and the man called Chaingang, all huddled together, each of them as close to knowing love as they will ever know in their lives.

In his deep sleep the monster dreams of a beautiful woman with whom he has shared a wonderful and intimate experience, and he thinks of her several times during the night. But in the morning he will wonder if indeed the one named Cody Chase was real or if it was only a fantasy he has dreamed.

T
he second time was like the first time, a repeat performance of their first ersatz lovemaking. He caught himself thinking a lot of thoughts that he really wasn't that crazy about but what the hell. He was nuts about this woman. Eichord wasn't used to it all anyway. The fervor and the damn consuming passion of a love affair were so alien to him. He saw himself as an old middle-aged man and the pounding of the old valentine was something he couldn't get used to. Christ, he thought, am I falling for this old girl? Old girl is what he said as he looked at her smile lines and tiny wrinkles and the dishwater hands, kicking himself even as he thought the disparaging thoughts.

He made himself concentrate on the tiny lines of aging, and the creases and the imperfections. Think about the wrinkles and don't let yourself get swept up in the mass of long, silky hair or those gorgeous knockout eyes or those legs that just seemed to keep going. Don't look at all that stuff. Don't, whatever you do, don't dare look at that mouth. No. That would be a serious mistake. Not if you want to shake this fever and get well. Shake this Saturday-night fever of yours, old man.

So he concentrated on her hands, and it was all he could do to keep his lips and tongue and teeth off those wrinkled hands of hers, those sweet fingers of a slim, good-looking, vibrant adult woman who had done her share of work. Pulled her part of the load and then some. Washed some dishes and diapers. Those hands that were now doing something that he couldn't get used to.

He was no cocksman. No way. But his women were of a kind. He was used to women wanting him and telling him that. Saying "I want you." And "I want you inside me." Variations on that theme. She didn't want that. Not yet, she said, it just wasn't right, and he tried valiantly to understand, and the electricity kept on surging between them, unmistakable and definitely high voltage, but still she kept a grip on the situation, kept it in hand.

It was certainly not that Edie found the act repulsive or even mildly repugnant. No. The thought of sex with this man was exciting and something she would eventually learn to anticipate the way a foodaholic looks forward to the next banana split. But it was just the inappropriateness of it, somehow, of what she still thought of quaintly as going all the way. To do it now, with this newfound lover, this new friend, so soon after their meeting, it was—well, it would be rushing that final stage of intimacy. Yet for all of her ambivalence she wanted it, needed the closeness, and knew he did too. She wanted and needed to solidify this thing that was zigzagging through the ether between them like tiny lightning bolts, this hot, new electric charge of desire and mutual attraction. And so for the time being this would do.

She knew about men. She knew she could make it do for him too, at least for whatever time she had to wait before she gave more of herself to this man. It made no sense, whatsoever, she fully realized. But somehow in the confusion and the befuddlement of her upside-down life that was slowly coming back up to sail on an even keel again, she saw this as something they could both live with. She knew this man wanted her very fully, and also she sensed that Jack Eichord would do nothing to chance losing what they both had found and were finding with each other every day. There were no ultimatums that would come from Jack. And just the knowledge of that did much to relax her and help her begin to drop the barriers that so far had kept their sexual touching an adolescent thing.

And so it went. And when her arm started getting tired she did what all women do, she came up with a much better idea. Edie went out and got an old pair of panty hose and cut the foot out of it, don't laugh now dammit, and smeared Vaseline (the widow lady's K-Y Jelly) all over it and really went to town. Wow. Some widow lady.