Chaingang

24

NEAR NORTH QUARRY ROAD

Daniel Bunkowski awoke precisely one hour before dawn, yawned, stretched, and heaved his quarter ton from the rumpled bed, urinating carelessly onto the bedroom carpeting.

He waddled across the carpet, stepping over the inert bodies of Frank and Lucille Stahly, entering the bathroom and taking a long, steaming shower, preparing for a good day by availing himself of the Stahly conveniences, making a big breakfast, eggs and canned ham, and eating it where he could watch Lucille's face while he swallowed. Lucille had been a treat. Lively, and then—when he was spent—quite delicious. Who would have guessed that she'd have been so rich?

A quarter hour after first light he was crossing the road and moving into the field, feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and pleasantly surprised by the warmth of the early dawn. It was going to warm up.

By nine o'clock, according to both his inner clock and the position of the sun in the sky, he had almost reached the turnoff to Whitetail Road, which led to the pond and the conservation area beyond the North Quarry.

The odd weather pleased him: a near-freezing November one day, tropical heat the next. He registered the field in his mental computer, noting that there were eats to be had here. In season he could gather and devour a found meal of mouse-ear, pokeweed, lamb's quarters, wild mustard, and assorted “soul greens."

He stepped down into a thick scrub of staghorn sumac, wild carrot, black locust shrubs, butterfly weed, horse nettle, common mullein, and a rampant Mother Nature lode of weeds and edibles even he could not identify.

He crossed a mud-and-sand-filled ditch, weapons cases and duffel sinking those huge pawprints even farther down into the soil, and he clambered up on a rock road. Quickly moved across it, over heavy chunks of broken machinery, a tap and bolt the size of a golf ball, and—on the adjacent ditch—turtle tracks left in the mud like the marks of a bike tire.

Something prodded him and he moved into the protective arms of the overgrown road ditch, trampling bright red careless weed, the bloom like sumac, the stalk scarlet to bloodred, and his scanners were on full alert. He registered everything that moved, that lived, that pulsated: a row of barn swallows lined up and evenly spaced along an overhead power line; a mockingbird that sat on a rusting advertisement for Northrup King Corn; yellow butterflies. He moved cautiously through the overgrowth, up over another bank, and saw the ditch forty feet below.

The ditch contained moving muddy water that appeared, variously, as olive drab, khaki, brownish green, and black. Wind and the current rippled the water and left it looking like a wrinkled, moving sheet.

The ditch almost stopped at a point near a fallen tree that had dropped across some mud flats that extended to nearly meet and touch in the center of the dirty stream. He could jump across there. The mud was dark black in the shadows, gray in the light.

A table leg stuck up out of the water. It could have been part of someone's trot line or fish-box. Gnarled tree roots grew down into the ditch from the centuries-old oak and sycamore that blanketed the other side. He saw the old bridge.

The bridge was made from mighty planks the size of railroad ties. He stepped across deep cracks in the parched earthen pathway and walked out onto the bridge.

It is a railless bridge, and forty feet up one gets a sense of vertigo, a high anxiety that attacks not in the head but in the feet, and he feels himself swaying a bit, losing his balance. It enrages him for no reason other than it fucks with his head. Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski is tired of people fucking with his head and no more Mr. Nice Guy, so to punish himself for this offense, he grasps his own hands together and squeezes as hard as he can, really bearing down on his own hands, squeezing until he almost passes out. There. Maybe that will teach you, he thinks.

Pushing his limits is an old hobby. He forces himself to stare down between the two-inch cracks of the bridge planks until he gives himself a queasy acrophobic feeling of disorientation. He sees fishing line caught in a nest of vines and tree roots under some overgrown limbs. Feels that nauseating, swaying feeling in his huge feet again and immediately clasps his hands together to dish out more punishment to his obstreperous brain, but something pulls him off the bridge.

First it is the two diving dragonflies, their wings beating maniacally as they swoop and soar across his field of vision like a pair of Cobra gunships in an aerial dogfight. Does he see the dragonflies or hear them first, or does he hear the distant chopper noise and free-associate the Huey slick comin’ for to carry him home? He makes a dive for the underbrush nearby.

The bird is coming closer and is audible to the human ear now, with the water giving it an intermittant turbine sound, and the dragonflies adding to his misperception, but the helicopter turns out to be a loaded eighteen-wheeler rumbling around the corner and over the bridge.

OUT

OF

NOWHERE

THE

RED

TIDE

IS

ON

HIM

AND

HE

WANTS

TO

TEAR

SOMETHING

APART!

He can hardly focus for the scarlet roar in his head and he grasps his huge, meaty hands again—frustrated and enraged—squeezing with a grip that can make the FUCKING ACID OOZE FROM A FLASHLIGHT BATTERY—squeezing with all his might, and then the worst of it passes. How did he get in such a foul mood? He tries to remember Lucille, the live one, who reminded him in some way of the girl who once bore his child. He cannot think of them now. He realizes it is the monkey presence that has brought about this black mood.

Even here, on the dark side of the booniemoon, there is traffic. It never ceases to amaze him—the busy business of the monkey people. They are always in such a hurry, populating every isolated, distant corner of the planet, dropping their unwanted frogs hither, thither, and yon, hurrying to copulate again, to impregnate, to bring to term, to propagate once more, to make more screaming and unwanted monkeys. Daddy must drive his eighteen-wheeler seven days a week to make more money so he and Mommy and Buddy and Sis can buy a poorly constructed, overpriced home in the burbs, and drop more frogs, who will someday drive their own eighteen-wheelers and so on. If he was mad, what were the monkey men?

How he hated them with their credit-card vacations to Yellowstone, and their squalid romantic interludes, and their tireless, remorseless quests for fur coats and tax shelters. If there were a nuclear button that would wipe their millions off the face of the globe in a series of all-kill mushroom clouds, he would push it in an instant.

His unbounded loathing and murderous desire act as his flexible chain mail, the lust and the killing, linking themselves together to form a kind of neurological protection from normalcy—or so his mindscreen suggests, as he thinks of the chain reaction of mushroom blasts, and he moves across the bridge, into the next field, and sees a rust red, discarded refrigerator with a heavy chain around it. His life has been a chain of violent events.

Enters woods, surefooted now, pulled by his homing mechanism. Finds the old shack. Rectangular blocks of scorched steps, with bent iron pipe and broken conduits and reinforcement rods protruding. Charred timbers, combat-assault concrete, battlefield brick, exploded masonry, mortar fragments, and twisted firefight wreckage—this site suggests.

Half the shack is gone. A fire consumed it, seemingly in one big black bite of hungry flame, then it was extinguished. What remains is half a shack, roof and walls more or less intact, one side open, and a square of burnt earth where the rest of the shack stood, bordered by what was left of the stove and the blocks the house sat on.

A sharecropper's place, perhaps, tucked into this little woodsy grove of trees and shrubs, not a hundred feet from the rock road, but hidden and safe from prying eyes.

With one level of his mind he is rebuilding a temporary wall, sealing off his newly acquired snuggery from the elements. With another he is thinking about the sign he's seen for the last half a klick, remembering the abandoned end of a railroad spur now far fields away, and the assorted tracks and messages he has duly recorded.

His entire life, both institutionalized and—for wont of a better word—free, has been spent in close proximity to riffraff, robbers, rascals, ruffians, scamps, scoundrels, scoff-laws, scumbags, burglers, buggers, brutes, bangers, deadbeats, derelicts, desperadoes, degenerates, criminals, cutpurses, cracksmen, crooks, tramps, tricksters, thieves, thugs, fakers, freeloaders, fugitives, felons, freebooters, footpads, fag-bashers, and fruit-rollers of every type, size, shape, creed, kind, and color of the rainbow's dirtiest oil slick.

He is—therefore—multilingual and fluent in street guinea, gypsy, carny, cowboy, bum, drifter, grifter, and the assorted dialects of homeboy, gangster, and juju man. He reads hobo chalk-talk easily, and watches—with no small degree of amusement—the crossbar variations advertising free medical aid, handouts of clothing, food, and the quid pro quo expected of the recipient in the way of work, con, or fast moves.

He puts no store in such childishness, but it pleases him to watch for the intersecting circles, stick-figure-and-triangle art, and the slashes that speak only to the brethren of the boxcar and the denizens of the drunk tank about such monkey dangers as hobo-haters and men with guns nearby.

His doughy baby face is distorted by a beaming, dimpled ear-to-ear grin when he sees the ticktacktoe scratches on the side of the foundation cornerstone nearest the front door, that is, nearest to where the door would have been before the fire.

But only if you speak hobo do you realize it is five lines and not four. It is a serious, adult signal, not a child's game. It reads, to the initiated:

EXTREME DANGER! A CRIME WAS COMMITTED AROUND HERE, AND THIS IS A BAD PLACE FOR STRANGERS.

Night takes its time, this day, but it does eventually come and erupts layers of liquid black lava over Tinytown, slough, dump site, and reservoir. Light is gone from this remote and moonless spot, and the fortresslike factory brick is gone, the ramparts of the old water treatment plant, the tree-line silhouettes and false horizons, and the look of country, town, warehouse, walkway, railing, and water all blend into darkness.

Death waits here in ticking readiness, tremor-sensitive, vital signs stilled to a near-motionless flutter-crawl, in absolute menacing silence, waiting and hating, precognating and gestating, alembic poisons refining, transmuting, distilling the venomous loathing into its most lethal essense. The beast lets it build, boil, bubble over into the red-hot tidal thing that will sweep over humanity in a murderous mutilating frenzy of destruction.

This hatred, which has a life of its own, has changed, mutated, and—hypertrophied and swollen like a tumorous membrane—it will sicken him if he does not expunge it. It wells up inside him now.

He knows that he has been extrinsically controlled by this, even partially manipulated into position by suits who play his fierce, deep loathing like a finely tuned instrument of mayhem, and this only worsens the hating, amplifies his hunger, deepens the thing that lives on the hate essence, forcing him to kill. Death is troubled by the unseen hands that set him in place. And he uses this, too.

Arising from his temporary den near the reservoir, concealing his burrow with twigs and boughs, he inhales deeply, light-headed by the musk of bloodlust, awash in his own sewer fumes, faintly nauseated by the sudden purity of pine, spruce, and the sweet scents of fern and earth.

The man is in the small cottage, and dogs bark inside, fueling the beast's madness. His mental computer takes over now:

VIRGIL WATLOW, he screens.

LEFT PROFILE. Grainy shot of an unshaven man. Late twenties. Close-cropped black hair. Unimportant history. Irrelevant statistics.

DOSSIER: He hits DOG BUNCHER, skips the details. His anger is already beyond the manageable stage.

He is at the door, having deposited duffel nearby. No weapons. No chain. This is hands-on work, and if he has the bowie, he will waste this BUNCHER. And that would be wrong.

“Yeah?"

“Mr. Watlow,” he says, in a mincing sissy voice, “I'm Kenny Harman, from the clinic?” Kenny hep you?

“Eh?"

“I'm buying dogs for the clinic.” He foists a huge pawful of documentation at the man, who dumbly stares at the papers. “We were told you'll sell direct. We'll take all you have.” The papers have the local clinic's imprimatur, along with trash from drug companies that he's rescued from local trash bins. “What do you charge per dog."

“Aw ... that depends ... uh...” Barking is a constant accompaniment to their dialogue.

“Would you mind terribly if I came in? I think we should keep our transaction private, don't you?” Chaingang as a simpering homosexual is something that must be witnessed to be believed. He has the actor's naturalness.

“Yeah. Aw’ right.” Virgil Watlow moves back into the living room of the home which stinks of urine and feces and animal smells. A woman, surprisingly, comes out of the next room, looking at Chaingang as if he were a float in a parade. Mouth agape.

“Could I see what you have?"

“Get the dogs,” the man says, and his significant other sulks off, returning with the weight of a file drawer.

“Uunn.” She drops the drawer.

Chaingang sees movement in the drawer under a wire screen. Noise. Hears the man say something.

“—only got four right now. I'll have some more next week and—"

There is a blur of movement. Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski's hand-to-eye coordination is extraordinary. He would have quick hands if he were an NFL wide receiver. But on a human blimp they are always a surprise.

He bops the woman on the head with a hammer-fist, a bottom-fist blow that sounds like a bolt gun taking a cow down in the abattoir, and she snaps that dirty whore-hole of a mouth shut when he pops her head, dying even as she goes down for the count, and the elbow is across and striking, focused beyond the back of Virgil Watlow's head, smashing between his eyes just to stun—not to kill.

Bop. Pop. That fast. Both down.

He secures Mr. Watlow and begins work on the drawer. Gets the screen off. Tries not to look into the stinking thing. Dumps the four live ones and the dead one onto the filthy kitchen floor. Proceeds to open every can, jar, dish, and container in the Watlow refrigerator and kitchen shelves. The small dogs feed. There is more barking out in back of the house, he now realizes, and he will tend to the others later.

He opens drawers and finds a kitchen knife of just the right sharpness. It must be just sharp enough, but he does not want a scalpel edge—this needs to be painful and just a tad blunt. The cuts must require a certain degree of pressure.

He has pedicured Mr. Watlow and is beginning the manicure when the man comes around for the second time. But he passes out on the first cut, so Chaingang gets smelling salts from his duffel, and returns. Revives him yet again. Saws at the next knucklebone and—bang! Mr. Watlow passes away.

Sad at this tragic and untimely loss, the beast cleans up and frees the dogs, preparing to leave. There were twenty-one digits that required attention, and—unfortunately—he only got to twelve of them. Tenderly he opens the woman's mouth and inserts the parts from Mr. Watlow's extremities, placing the tips of the toes and fingers in, so that the mouth will remain agape. He wants to leave her just as he found her. More or less.

He realizes some of the dogs may not be able to fend for themselves, and that it may indeed be cruel to turn them loose. He fights the impulse to stuff a couple down in his shirt for pets. Perhaps they will survive—the hardier ones. He observes, not for the first time, that life is cruel.