Slob

Eichord the hero

He told her the whole thing of course, screamed it at her, cursing, pacing up and down, she whispering and softly mellowing him out, cooling him off as he raged about the "fucking morons" downtown. But somehow she didn't really let it register. He could tell that by the way she kept talking about how the paper said this or the television said that. She liked it that he was a cop star, for right or wrong, it was hard for her to let go of it, so he finally shut up about it.

There were too many reporters around and she talked him into taking a somewhat extravagant suite in an outrageous but quite private "XXX-rated motor hotel" in a nearby suburb. And this is where she took him to lick, among other things, his wounds—both real and imagined.

And what wild fantasies of eroticism held him spellbound as he lay there on the satiny sheet, eyes closed on the sexy lighting and oblivious to the quietly insinuating background music? Two cops named Pat McTeague and Penny Butts. Pat and Penny. Sounded like two broads, he thought. I'm layin' here next to this fox thinking about two cops. I'm in trouble.

Penny Butts weighed 250 pounds and ate onions like they were ice cream cones, and Pat McTeague was equally attractive. He was a borderline alky with a face like a Rand McNally, topped off by this big Rudolph-colored honker of a hose-nose with veins so big they had their own little veins. His whole face looked like a huge, ugly busted capillary.

Eichord was thinking about them because it was them he sat with when the contingent from the squad room moved en masse to the cop bar the night before. Their conversation was mostly jokes, one of the less obscene was a particularly ornate thing with the following punch line:

"So the judge says, say what? And the lawyer says, your honor that's when the plaintiff took an alpha cyanoacrylate monomer and created anionic polymerization bonding my client's erectile member to the subjacent faying surface of the sleeping unit. And the guy yells, Yeah, Judge, an the bitch glued my cock to the mattress too!" Laughter.

They started ragging Jack about his heroism.

"Man that fuckin' McTuff can solve the tough ones, can't they, bro?"

"Damn straight, ace. I gotta' get on that team, man. Can you see my name when they do the TV series about me. 'McTeague of McTuff; has a fuckin' ring to it."

"I like 'McTuff Butts, Private Eye.' " Eichord laughed dutifully.

"Shit, man, I mean you fuckin' get down on them whodunits." And on and on. After a few minutes his smile muscles were starting to get that pinched-up feeling and he finally was able to con his way out the door and managed to ease out without looking like an asshole who couldn't take a joke. They were flakes. But the teasing was just their way of saying they knew it was out of his hands. They damn well realized it could easily happen to either of them, to anybody else in Homicide. Still, it rankled. He didn't like any of it.

The hero thing was serious business to him. He had come from a time that now seemed so remote as to be part of a lost world. He had come from the never-wuz yesteryear of a kid's dreams, back in the forgotten past of an America that believed in the mythologized hero. Larger than life. Pure of spirit. The good guy in the white hat.

Eichord had been a kid when the golden age of the heroic image tarnished in the onrushing high-tech era, disintegrating, the pieces of rust scattered by the fickle winds of time and evolution. But he still remembered the hero world that had formed his early years into something resembling a normal childhood. Jack recalled those giant-size images that his dad had taught him about. Stillwell! Damn. Salk, DiMaggio, Harry Truman, for Chrissakes—these were great, looming, awesome personalities like the six-sheets out in front of the Orpheum. And Eichord's generation had grown up with seriously revered heroes in sports, the military, science, and even—believe it or not—politics.

When Jack wasn't swimming or shooting baskets or climbing trees, he was reading about heroes. First the Hardy Boys and then the great autobiographies and then the military histories. He devoured The Washing of the Spears again and again. He read Seven Pillars of Wisdom twenty-eight times in two years, reading it night after night, reading paragraphs at a time, sight-reading great chunks of it over and over, letting it mold him, shape his self-image.

He was raised in the shadow of the Invincible Nord-Americano, the legend of the White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Male Hero. The elitist spear-carrier; the warrior responsibilities of middle-class noblesse oblige shaping him into the only acceptable professions of career military man, policeman or fireman, paramedic, whatever. He had to be at least symbolically in uniform, and out there on the cutting edge.

And then something went wrong. And the weight of all the input and the information mixed with the liquid realities, and it all combined to take him under like an anchor, and he dropped into the impenetrable depths of Jack Daniels' Lake, sinking down to the cold, muddy bottom, another victim of the Black Water Fever. Another muddy thinker trapped in a hero's rusting, one-man sub down in the Land of Lost Souls. A booze-battered casualty of the heroic era.

So now, Eichord thought, here I am next to the soft and warm lady of my choosing, on exquisite sheets in a room of erotic mirrors and sexy lighting, basking in adoration and tenderness, drenched in musky aromas, hearing the soft, whispered phrases of love, and all I can think about are two ugly cops and their bad jokes, and all I can feel is the chill of the land of the lost.

And underneath all that, hiding down there in the dark substrata, I sense the foul presence of a human thing who kills for pleasure, taking hearts for God only knows what reasons. Ripping bloody hearts out of freshly killed corpses. And this thing is still out there, no matter what the newspapers would have you believe. And the cloud of menace hangs over the bed like a frightening shadow and I detumesce without dying the little demise, Jack thinks.

But Edie is here and the nearness now is what matters. So he opens his eyes and ignores the mirrors, and blocks out the thoughts of blond silicone twins and French maids and all the other silly, childish fantasy stuff that goes with a bed like this, and he relaxes and breathes her in. And in his new state of grace he feels his humanity slowly ebbing, then shifting current and flowing back into him, and the softly fluttering eyelashes, and the hot fingertips begin to work their electric magic on him again.

And his hands catch in that dark pillow of long hair and he pulls her near so that he can see nothing but the closeness of her, a mesh of flesh and bone and warmth and delightful mewings, and mouths and limbs and organs and souls rock and explode together and they go down into that hot pit of flame again, and let go in an achingly sweet and perfect, bubbling, delicious honey pot. And not caring then.

Now he only wants this moment to freeze. This second. This timeless, detumesce, textbook-perfect, classic, heartthrobbing, madly exhilarating love explosion between them. Suddenly this is the only thing, the only important thing, the only thing that matters to him, and he prays that he can make the world stop and hold on to this, this joyous, shouting, lovely, love-drenched instant of full-tilt, kissy-face, huggy-bear, jailhouse tango blues.