Slice

BUCKHEAD SPRINGS

Eichord, who has not had one of THOSE nightmares—for over a year, comes floating up to the surface of a screaming hell, dreaming the word “INTEGUMENT,” something that covers or encloses, an enveloping layer of skin, a membrane or husk. He is unable to break through to the air, but finally comes up fighting, lungs bursting, and it is one of the worst of the screaming dreams. It's a nightmare of tortured, mad, blue-eyed twins from the Mengele clinic, a fearsome thing borne of his most redoubtable adversaries. Searching for parallels in the demonology of classical antiquity, he finds a face that resembles a dead assassin in his dream of the necropolis, and he comes awake screaming in fear. No! HEARING a shrill, frightened scream, the agony of his amanuensis, and he comes out of the dream fighting for the surface hearing Donna Scannapieco fighting her assailant.

He breaks through the integument woven across his old boozer's face to find himself facedown on his own bed and safe, but Donna is screaming. He is wide awake, dazed, on his feet with his revolver in his hand. Stubbing his toe against something as he runs through the house toward the back door.

“JACK! JACK!” Donna's screams fill his head as he crashes through the door nearly taking it from its hinges. Donna has the kitten now and he sees that she is safe and the cat is hurt my God it was just the kitten not Donna oh Jesus not Donna oh God his heart is thumping pounding threatening to burst through his chest and then he sees the black cat the mean fucking little yellow-eyed tough-guy tomcat and he draws down on it drawing down on all the Cabreys and Mansons and Zodiacs and Williamses and Houtchesons and Gaceys and fucking Spanhowers and sniping, torturing backshooting crazies and squeezes through sleep-encrusted eyes.

BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM! The fucking thing sounds like an H-bomb going off in his back yard and of course Christ he's asleep and the little cat is fifty feet away and moving and Eichord can't hit shit with a handgun and never could and all the missed shots that have cost him, perhaps even the ones he doesn't know about yet, all those fantasies from a thousand Johnny Mack Brown and Durango and Wild Bill Elliott westerns in the Uptown and all those movies and TV show cowboys and cops and perfect, perfectly wonderful sharpshooting mothers come back to kick his ass as he misses. Nothing but a fucking yellow-eyed bully of a tomcat. Still, the noise scares the poor kitten and it scratches Donna, who screams again and runs into the house with the little cat. Tuffkins has a mangled ear, and Eichord is filled with a blue-eyed, dadgummed Mengele clinic rage the likes of which has not possessed him since the old hard-drinking days of alcoholic, mindless frustration and self-flagellation. He stomps in through the house and out into the garage, where he pops the cartridges and the spent shell casing out of his service revolver. For whatever combination of reasons—out of control, fucked over and fucked up by the thousand and one inequities and irritations and shit he's had to swallow—he cranks that vise handle down tight, cranking down on case-hardened steel, twisting down on good ole Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson, tightening down on his weapon. Shit—he can't believe he's doing it even as he twists the vise—he's just so fucking mad! If he could only laugh, stop for a second, count to ten. But he's out of goddamn maniacal, shit, fucking CONTROL. He just can't take any more and there are limits. But maybe part of his brain is still asleep still fighting his way through the husk or whatever it was, as he puts it all into the first shot, with the four-pound mini-sledgehammer. Jack puts all his weight, his shoulders, his upper-body strength his biceps, his triceps, forceps, foreplay, foreskin—FUCK FUCK FUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!

He's pounding that barrel, that sight, that trigger guard, that hammer, slamming down on all the bullshit and the bad guys and the B-movies and the bad jokes and the bad shots and the people who would hurt sweet ladies and innocent kittens and oh fuck do you want a list of them—DONT YOU FUCKING KNOW WHO THOSE SONS OF BITCHES ARE? ARE YOU A FUCKING IDIOT—? CAN'T YOU DO SOMETHING ABOUT THEM? CANT YOU STOP THEM SOMEHOW YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE SOME HOT FUCKING SHIT GENIUS THEN PROVE IT STOP THEM FUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK SHIT PISS DAMN IT TO HELL pounding as hard and as fast as he can and then falling apart laughing just roaring to think he was so nuts for a minute that he has taken a four-pound hammer, this is Mr. Control—now—Jack Eichord for Chrissakes we're talking about here, and he's turned his service revolver, a PERFECTLY good weapon that he actually liked and trusted, and he just can't believe it he's rendered it into a full month's take-home worth of metal garbage. Just brilliant. And he gets up, lays the hammer down, leaves the semi-unrecognizable Magnum in the vise, and goes in to see how his wife and their cat are doing. Thinking as he does so that they will almost surely never film the Jack Eichord Story now. Mr. Eastwood would probably balk at starring in anything titled Magnum Farce, particularly when he would have to play a character called Stupid Harry. It just doesn't have that same ring to it. Oh, well. He walks in and Donna is standing there. Looking at him as if to say. Okay, what OTHER weird tricks can you do?

He makes that total body gesture that begins with the wrinkles in the forehead and goes down through the hands that says, “I know. I'm sorry. What can I say?"

And turns and goes back to the bedroom and goes back and gets his oldest 12-gauge down and carries it back through the house, saying to Donna on the way out into the garage, “Don't worry. I'm not going to do anything else weird,” but he goes out into the garage and does something very weird indeed. He pounds his workbench vise open, drops the remains of his revolver in a box to be buried with full honors later, and wrapping an old oily towel around the gun, he puts IT in the vise, takes a hacksaw, and begins sawing the barrel off. Gunsmithing for the terminally insane.