Leather Maiden

43

I went into the bedroom and set the alarm for a couple hours’ sleep and stretched out on the bed. The clock tower was in my head. That and all the things Gregore had told me. I wanted to jump up and start running toward campus.

I thought about it over and over, trying to come up with some plan that solved everything, but nothing would come beyond what we already planned to do. At some point I felt myself drift into sleep, and it seemed that almost at the same moment the alarm went off.

We decided nine a.m. was about right for us to be there, because the campus was not too far away. We could park some fifteen minutes’ walk from the tower, and start across campus on foot. I would look like a student on the way to class, and Booger, who wore a lot of khaki duds, might even look like a janitorial worker carrying a duffel bag. The duffel bag part was a little tricky, and the more I thought about it the less I liked it. Then I thought about him putting the broke-down rifle into a toolbox I had. We dumped the tools on the carpet and put the rifle parts in there, and when Booger picked it up and shook it a little, he said, “It’s light.”

About eight we drove to the far side of town and got breakfast and coffee in a filling station that had a few tables and some stuff you could buy from behind the counter. All of it was deep-fried. It didn’t matter if you were having doughnuts, catfish or pigs in the blanket, it all tasted like greasy batter and crackled to the touch.

We sat inside the little place and ate and drank. It was all I could do to not get up and run out and jump in the car and drive over there without Booger. I no longer gave a damn about Judence, or Jimmy. All I cared about was Belinda. I was starting to think like Booger, about killing because it was an easy way to solve your problems, and the thought of that began to crawl up inside my gut and squirm around and make my stomach growl. I bought some chewable stomach tablets, took those and had another cup of bad coffee, and tried not to look at my watch every thirty seconds.

I thought some more about killing, and the idea of it bothered me, but mostly it bothered me because I was getting used to it. When I left Iraq, I thought that was over with, and now here I was, having not so long ago watched Booger not only torture but kill a man, and now we were planning on killing another, a woman too, and we were having breakfast and drinking coffee. If we only had a board and some checkers.

A girl in a tight T-shirt and white shorts came in, and Booger looked her over like he was inspecting her for the USDA. She paid for some gas and went out. I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes had gone by.

We sat and sipped coffee and then my stomach started to hurt, so I went to the bathroom. My bowels were loose from nerves. When I was through in there I washed my hands and looked at myself in the mirror.

I didn’t look like a killer.

I went out and sat back down, said, “Man, I hate this.”

“I love it,” Booger said.

When it was a couple minutes until nine, we went out to the car and started over there, down the main highway, and just as we passed Wal-Mart, the car started acting funny, and then I realized what had happened. A flat. We had a goddamn flat.

I pulled over to the side of the road and got out and went around and looked. The back right tire was blown. I looked at my watch. Five after nine. I opened the trunk as Booger got out of the car, and pulled out the spare tire.

“Take it easy,” Booger said. “We still got it made.”

But we didn’t have it made. I had a spare tire and a jack, but there wasn’t anything to take the tire off with or to jack the jack up. I remembered I had the tires replaced a year or so back, and probably someone at the tire place had left the tire iron out. I didn’t have a way to change the tire.

A man and his young daughter stopped and he asked if we needed help, but he didn’t have the right tool to take the tire off. He was the only person who stopped, and he discovered to his surprise that he too was missing a tire iron. What were the odds?

I thanked him and he left and I walked over to Wal-Mart, leaving Booger with the car.

It was nine-fifteen when I went inside. I walked as fast as I could without running over to the automotive section and looked around. At first I thought there weren’t any tire irons to be found, but then I stopped one of the workers and he located them for me. They came as part of a set with a jack. I wasn’t sure the jack was right for my car, but I was pretty certain the tire iron would work as both handle and lug bolt remover; the directions said that was its purpose. I thought I might also be able to go faster if one of us worked the lug bolts loose and the other jacked. I took a flier and got two different kinds of jacks and went to the checkout counters.

All twelve registers had lines. I went over to the one that was supposed to be a dozen items or less, but there were two people in line with buggies full of groceries. I was the third in line.

I looked at my watch.

Nine-twenty-two.

I yelled up to the checker. “Hey, isn’t this supposed to be twelve items or less?”

The checker, a lanky, greasy-haired white kid with acne, looked at me in desperation. I had opened a can of worms, something he hadn’t had the courage to deal with. He turned to the fat man who was first in line and said, “It is supposed to be just twelve items.”

“I don’t give a shit,” said the fat man. “I’m first in line. I’m a paying customer. It’s no set rule, is it?”

“Well,” the lanky kid said, “it’s supposed to be twelve items.”

“Just check me out,” said the fat man.

“Hey,” I said. “And this lady in front of me. She’s got a buggyful too.”

The lady had already turned to look at me, perhaps sensing she was my next target. “Well, I never,” she said. She was a short lady with a nice face and an ass about the size of a travel trailer.

“Let me go first,” I said. “I only got these jacks.”

The fat man looked at me. “Maybe if you had been nicer.”

“I certainly wouldn’t let him go,” said the woman to the fat man.

“How about this,” I said, calling past the lady to the man. “How about I give you twenty dollars to let me go first. I got a car broke down on the side of the road, and not in a safe place.”

“Then you should have moved it to a safer place,” the fat man said.

“All right, then,” I said, looking at my watch, seeing it was nine-thirty, “what would you say to moving your buggy before I kick that package of frozen peas so far up your ass you’ll have to get a pair of salad tongs to pull them out of your throat?”

“Well, I never,” the trailer-ass woman said again.

“I bet you haven’t,” I said.

“I think the customer with the fewer items should go first,” said the checker.

“Fuck you, pimple face,” the fat man said and gave his buggy a boost that sent it sliding past the counter and over into the wall next to the photo shop. It hit so hard a box of crackers and a can of chili hopped out of it and landed on the floor. The can of chili rolled along and out of sight, as if on a mission.

The trailer-ass woman left her buggy and went on past the counter, heading for the door. Maybe the two of them could commiserate in the parking lot.

I went up and paid for my jacks and went out, and there in the parking lot near the door were the fat man and the trailer-ass woman, doing exactly what I thought they might be doing, commiserating. She said, “You shouldn’t talk like that,” as I walked by.

“You’re right,” I said. “Sorry.”

“He doesn’t mean it,” said the fat man, as I kept walking, talking louder so I could hear him. “He doesn’t mean it at all. He’s not the kind of person that cares about anything.”

I didn’t pay any more attention to them. I liked to think I had put a fat man and a trailer-ass woman together on the road to romance. I darted rapidly across the lot, which was no small stretch of real estate, and on out to the side of the road where the car was. The morning had already turned hot and I was red-faced, and sweating.

Booger said, “Give it here.”

I dropped the jacks by the car and used my knife to cut them out of the packaging and gave one to him. He put it under the car and starting working it. “It doesn’t fit exactly right. It’ll scratch your car up some. It’s not tapered enough on the end.”

“I don’t give a shit,” I said. “Do I look like a man who gives a shit about scratching a car?”

I looked at my watch. It was twenty-six minutes until ten.

Booger went to work on the jack while I turned the lug bolts with my spare tire iron. I got them loose just before the tire was off the ground, and then I twisted them the rest of the way off with my fingers. I pulled the tire off and got the spare and slipped it on and twisted the lug bolts back as Booger lowered the car. I used the lug iron to tighten the bolts better when the tire was settled on the ground. I put the wrecked tire in the trunk and closed it and was behind the wheel again.

Booger got in and tossed the jacks and the tire irons in the back seat, because I had forgotten, and closed the trunk. I drove us out of there.

“Scratched the car some,” Booger said.

“Fuck it,” I said.

The traffic was pretty thick. By the time we got to the campus and I found a parking place, which might have been the only place left in the visitors’ area, it was ten minutes till.

We went on across the campus, walking fast, but not so fast we looked like we were in a Charlie Chaplin movie. It should have taken fifteen minutes at a comfortable stroll, but we made it in about five. Booger had the toolbox, and I had forgotten the backpack.

I looked up at the clock tower. For a moment I thought I saw someone move across the face of the glass, but it could have been expectation. What I did notice, however, was that my watch was not in line with the clock’s time. According to the tower clock, we had another five minutes; then I remembered it was slow.

We saw a crowd had formed between the tower and the building that housed the history department. We went around behind the tower. There was some tall shrubbery there, and I could see the narrow door that was at the back of the tower. There was no one there. We looked around carefully, and there were people to be seen, but they all had their backs to us, were already in position at the sides of the tower so they could hear Judence speak. A lot of the people we saw were black.

Without breaking stride we made our way to the tower door and Booger had his lock-beating tools in his hand before we got there. He put the toolbox by the door and put a little crooked tool in the lock, and worked it. The lock snicked. We went inside quietly, into the cool dark, and closed the door quietly.

Just inside, near the door, was a cloth trash buggy that I assumed Caroline had used to carry Belinda inside. I looked in the buggy. If she had been there, she wasn’t now.

The inside of the tower was nearly all clock, and the clock had huge gears that were designed in a kind of German Gothic style; the big gears were turning slowly and meeting the teeth of other huge gears and causing them to move; the gears looked to be larger than ancient round Greek shields. You could hear the gears when they clicked and rolled. You could feel them moving the hand on the big clock because the tower vibrated. Way up you could see light coming through the face of the clock, and all along the little quarter-moon windows was more light, and there was dust floating up from the smooth wooden floor and it hung in the air like a tan mist. Near the gears, as if they were different levels of geological strata, were wooden platforms. There were stairs that wound up between the gears and up through trap openings in the platforms; the stairs zigged and zagged their way up. I could see something halfway up the stairs on one of the platforms. It was in shadow and it was odd and I couldn’t make it out. I started up the stairs. I took out the .38 with the silencer Booger had given me. Booger was ahead of me, going up with the toolbox. He was going to find a place to take his shot. I wondered about the glass. How would he manage to take his shot? I wondered about it only briefly, because I was more worried about Belinda. Had Gregore lied to us? And what in hell was it I had seen on the platform? All of these thoughts charged through my brain like an electric shock.

According to my watch, it was just after ten o’clock. That meant it was right at ten, big-clock time.

When I reached the third platform, I could see one of the huge gears, and I realized, now that I was closer to it, that it was much larger than a Greek shield. It was turning and its teeth were causing a somewhat smaller gear above it to precisely catch its teeth in the bigger gear’s fangs. They temporarily clicked together and the big gear moved the small gear. This was part of the complicated mechanism that moved the hands on the face of the clock. I could also see just behind the gear what I had seen before from below, but due to angle and shadow had not been able to make out.

It was Belinda. There was a cloth bag over her head, a pillowcase probably, but I knew her body and was certain it was her. She was wearing a white terry cloth bathrobe, her ankles pulled together and bound. There was a rope around her neck and it was stretched up into the darkness. Her feet were tied to one of the struts that came out of the platform and supported the huge jagged-tooth gear wheel that was next to me.

“It’s her,” I said.

“So it is,” Booger said. “You get her. I’m going to be busy. She’s got nice legs.”

Booger was already moving up the stairs when he said that, leaving me behind.

I went out on the platform, and now I could see and understand what was happening. The rope was wound around a gear above me, and as the gear turned it wound the rope, and the rope was pulling at Belinda’s neck. Her feet, bound the way they were, didn’t allow the rope to hang her. Another instant, caught between the ropes and the pull, the rig would most likely jerk her head off.

I put the .38 back under my shirt, took out the clasp knife Booger gave me, and popped it open and tried to rush over to Belinda.

As I rushed forward something flashed and I caught it out of the corner of my eye, and I moved, but I was too slow. A long blade caught light from the quarter-moon window in front of the big face of the clock and winked at me. In that moment I saw Caroline’s beautiful face twisted up in a knot of rage under a head of dyed black hair. The blade hit me, slicing down my back. But I turned quick enough that it went in shallowly, then it stuck my hip. I let out a yelp.

I slashed out with my knife and missed. Caroline moved away quickly, to the side of the gear, then she came at me, the knife moving like a lightning strike. I was cut on the arm before I felt it. I knew enough about knives and knife fighting to bring the backs of my arms up. You’re going to get cut, that’s the part you want cut. Soft sides of the arms, that’s where the vital vessels are. You get cut deep there you can kiss your ass goodbye because you’re going to bleed out fast. Caroline knew the knife, she knew what she was doing; someone had taught her.

I skipped back, tried to catch Belinda out of the corner of my eye. Her head was lifting as the rope pulled her. I did a somersault, rolled up to a squatting position in front of her. I used my knife to cut the rope at her feet. She went up on her tiptoes as the gear pulled. Now, instead of being pulled apart, she was only in jeopardy of being strangled slowly.

Caroline’s blade struck as I rose to my feet, trying to cut the rope around Belinda’s neck. Her blade went into my back and I saw a white light, almost fainted. I turned as she was stabbing again. I dodged, went low and hit her just above the shins with the side of my body. It made her bend in half over me and the downward thrust of her knife carried her forward and the tip of the knife stuck in the wooden platform.

I whirled to face her. She was trying to pull the knife out of the platform. I kicked her in the ribs as if I were trying to make a field goal from the fifty-yard line. She rolled almost to the edge of the platform.

Above me, in the darkness, amidst the clicks of well-oiled gears, the moving of the clock hands, I heard Booger say, “Peep-eye, motherfucker,” then there was a sound like a tubercular octogenarian coughing up phlegm, followed by, “That knocked a turd out of him.”

Caroline recovered. She jerked the knife free, came at me. The rope lifted Belinda off the ground. Her head twisted beneath the hood. She shook her head hard and the hood came off and fell. It landed on Caroline’s back, caused her to jerk around and slash at the air.

I tackled her, drove her back. We almost went off the platform. She came down with the knife and it went into my shoulder. I let out with a grunt and my butt cheeks pinched together hard enough to crack a pecan. I caught her knife hand in my left hand, brought my knife down. As it descended, in a micro-moment I saw all those bodies in Iraq, saw Gregore’s head jump apart, then that damn shoe in the fork of the tree. All of it rushed at me like a freight train balling the jack down a deep grade. The blade went into Caroline’s throat and the force of it was so hard I could hear it stick in the platform as it came out of the back of her neck.

Her eyes flashed with surprise and then something moved there that almost appeared pleasurable. She dropped her knife and her fingers clutched at my shoulders, dug into me like talons. She let out a birdlike shriek and then blood was shooting up from her throat and hitting me in the face and her hands fell back and the backs of her knuckles slammed against the platform.

I stood up, leaving the knife in her. It was then that I remembered the .38 resting at the small of my back.

I looked at Belinda.

The gear had turned, raising her up. I grabbed Caroline’s knife, ran toward Belinda, but the gear turned again and lifted her higher than I could grab.

She was wriggling and thrashing. I turned and raced up the stairway to the platform above. When I got there I couldn’t reach the rope. Another moment she would be equal with me and there wouldn’t be anything I could do but watch her pass. Climbing higher to another platform wouldn’t change that. It would be the same thing all over again all the way up.

I leaped and grabbed at the rope, ended up clinging to it like a spider, just above Belinda. I cut the rope above my head and it dropped. As we fell there was light and shadow and then a sudden jolt and an explosion of lights. The lights went away and for a moment there was darkness; the floor felt like it was spinning. When the spinning stopped, I opened my eyes slowly. I was looking up at the ugly face of Booger.

“Belinda?” I said.

“You’re lying on top of her, bro.”