Boot Tracks Page 8

  “No, please!” from his mother. “Help me, somebody!”

  Compared to Chester Rhimes she weighed hardly anything. She screamed at him, “Why are you doing this?”

  He twisted her legs, flipping her over. She had on no underwear. Her skin was as white as a corpse’s skin; the hair in her groin as sparse and faintly colored as vegetation in a desert. Mascara running all over her face. A perfume smell from her privates; all dolled up for one of ‘em. Rankin thinking, what to you was I? A mistake, a single live round some asshole john out of hundreds—thousands?—fired into you that came back out of you as a living thing you took to dragging around behind you with the other worthless keepsakes (that bedraggled red-bottom monkey you claimed to have slept with as a kid, the cracked statue of the Virgin Mary given you by a nun who likely as not was passing ‘em out by the dozens from a street corner, a coffee-stained book of poems you only rarely flipped through but thought was something special from the no-name poet who wrote it having scribbled his name into it, a few moth-eaten story books missing their covers an old bird with a hand in raising you supposedly read to you the way a couple times maybe a year you’d read them to me) you couldn’t bring yourself to dump. All of it beat up, broken, shit. And me just another piece of it. He climbed up her torso, toward her head. One of his mother’s knees came up into his groin.

  He fell onto her, groaning.

  A gush of air rushed from her lungs. She grabbed and yanked at a clump of his hair. Rankin hammered a fist down onto her breastbone. Her hand fell away from his scalp; another exhale exploded out of her, with the gasped words, “Do it, only don’t kill me—”

  Blind rage at hearing her take him for just one more son of a bitch (only ten times worse in that he was flesh of her flesh) looking to take a hump from her.

  He reached up and grasped her by the shoulders. He grappled his way up her, got astride her belly. He seized her throat in both hands. She pushed at his forearms, whispering, “don’t hurt me” or maybe, “look at me ...”

  * * *

  “Please hang up and dial again.”

  He opened his eyes at the space directly in front of him from where he’d heard a voice clearly speak.

  No one was there.

  He spun his eyes in a circle about the room. He saw only the man he’d earlier seen, reading by a fireplace, now laying mauled and dead in the open front doorway. He heard a noise beneath him.

  He looked down.

  His index fingers and thumbs were in a white-knuckled clench on the throat of a woman he’d never seen before (her face a contorted, hideous mask with blood-streaked, bulging eyes) urinating onto the floor. Her pee, soaking through Rankin’s jeans, warmly touched his knees where they rested on both sides of her waist.

  Rankin jerked back his hands.

  The head beneath him flopped onto its right shoulder.

  “If you’d like to make a call,” repeated the voice from the space before him, “please hang up and dial again.”

  The woman released a sound that recalled to Rankin the donkey’s hee-hawing, only a fraction as loud.

  * * *

  He stood up.

  Chester Rhimes ordering Little Charlie to describe to his mother the fuck-up for which Little Charlie, with his pants around his ankles, was about to be strapped raw by Chester Rhimes (a fuck-up clear only to Chester Rhimes who wasn’t sharing the secret).

  He walked to a high-backed sofa against the facing wall; from the floor just left of the sofa he picked up the portable phone.

  Little Charlie knowing that to describe the fuck-up wrong would add to his beating as much, if not more, as would his complete silence.

  He turned back to the woman, thinking how’d she get into it?

  “If you’d like to make a call—”

  A normally pretty woman, he guessed, lying before a stranger to her in her own urine, her legs, chest, face, and neck bruised and scratched, every part of her under her torn, disheveled nightgown visible to the world.

  “—please hang up and dial again.”

  He dropped the phone.

  With his right boot heel he smashed it, then ground it into the hardwood.

  The woman’s eyes followed him as dispassionately as buzzards circle over a dying animal.

  Rankin snatched from the couch and carried back to her a knitted afghan.

  Her expression said whatever he did to her with the afghan was God’s will.

  He dropped the afghan onto her mid-section. The woman gazed up at him, as if for instructions from him as to what she should do with the afghan. Rankin turned away from her, as ashamed that his voice had suddenly frozen up in him like that time Chester Rhimes couldn’t even beat it out of him as he was embarrassed for her nakedness. He wondered if she’d pegged him a retard. Her painful croaking, her bare skin squeaking on the floor behind him.

  He faced her again.

  She was sitting up, the afghan wrapped around her. Rankin could see the clear impression of fingerprints on her neck.

  An internal voice told him someone needs to finish her.

  Buddha saying compassion paved the road to the gas chamber.

  “There’s money,” the woman said in a crepitating whisper. She gazed vacantly at the guy in the doorway. “In his study safe.” Rankin wondered what to her the guy was. The woman touched the outside of her throat as if every word coming through it tortured her. “I can get it for you.”

  Rankin determined to shut the front door so someone going by on the road and gazing up through the trees wouldn’t see a shaft extruding from the house. He tried to tell the woman, “Stay put.” Only gibberish and spastic movements of his lips came of it. To get across the warning in another way he pointed emphatically at her. The woman shied away from him as if he would smack her. Rankin moved his hands pacifically in the space between them. Again he pointed at her. She only cowered more. His frustration heading toward anger Rankin decided, fuck it. He left her there and strode the thirty-odd feet to the entranceway.

  He grabbed the guy by the shoulders, dragged him clear of the door, dropped him, then shut and bolted the door. He’d seen in his head countless dead people (including several versions of his own corpse); he’d seen in reality scarcely any. This one let out noises—an airy fart, an exhale—like a live person. Rankin had no doubt it was dead. With its wide open eyes, paralyzed expression, mangled torso, and shit smell it fit with the cadavers he’d seen in his head. Rankin had trouble believing it had ever been a real person at all.

  From a switch near the door he killed the exterior lights.

  He returned to the woman, who, since she’d come back from the dead (that’s how he saw it) struck him as being too real, even appearing as she did glued to the spot he’d left her in. He motioned to her to stand. Holding in one hand the afghan together at just beneath her neck, she tried with the aid of the other one to rise. She made it only to her knees. She added to the effort with her second hand; the afghan fell off her. Rankin reached down, picked up the afghan; he shielded her body from him with the afghan until she got to her feet; then he handed it back to her. He could see from her face she was hurting. “I’ll take you to the money,” she said in her haunted whisper.

  Rankin shook his head.

  The woman gazed numbly at him. Her eyes brought to his mind shot animals staring out from back deep in their dens at who’d shot them. “What then?”

  Rankin wasn’t sure what. He assessed himself as too lame to retrace his steps to the Mazda and too bloodied to be out in public. He’d have to clean himself up. And do something with the woman. What he would do with her and how he’d come to needing to do something with her he couldn’t make himself think about; his mind refused to move past his most immediate need. As if soaping himself he rubbed together his hands, then slid them slowly over his chest, shoulders, arms to convey to the woman his want of a shower.

  Giving his gestures a darker meaning the woman said, “I don’t—I’m having my period.”

  Anger th
e woman must have sensed or seen in his eyes hit Rankin.

  She backed up a step. She whispered hoarsely, “Okay.” Her eyes moved, as if pulled by a force outside her, to the dead guy. They came back slowly to Rankin. “Just, please, don’t hurt me more.”

  Rankin pictured himself as a photograph of a deformed creature, which at any moment might come to life, the woman was attempting to identify. With the sensation they were taking hours to do so, he watched two strands of her long, blonde hair fall away from her forehead. Thinking to mimic himself shampooing he reached a hand up to his own hair, realizing as he went to run his fingers through it he was still wearing his gloves. And ski mask.

  A relieved feeling knowing Charlie Rankin was safely out of sight; knowing he wasn’t the mute retard standing before this woman.

  He moved briskly his fingers in the air over his scalp.

  “I don’t understand what you are saying,” whispered the woman, her voice bringing to Rankin’s mind the sound a wire cleaning rod makes when forced through a rusted gun barrel. “I’m trying to do what you want me to only—”

  Rankin seized her by her left elbow, realizing only now how slighdy built she was and marveling that her neck hadn’t snapped in Little Charlie’s hands.

  “You don’t need to do that,” hissed the woman.

  In his exasperation at his inability to make clear to her his thoughts, Rankin pulled her with him across the room, past broken chairs, an assortment of nuts, an upturned table, shattered glass, streaks of blood on the floor, into a long, lighted hallway, containing three or four closed doors, thinking one of them had to lead to a bathroom. He stopped before the first one, pushed it open, saw in the hallway light a small space containing exercise equipment and large mirrors on all its walls.

  He closed the door. The woman moaned. Rankin eased his grip on her. She whispered, “Maybe you could write on a piece of paper what it is that you’re looking for and then show me the paper and I could help you find what’s on it.”

  Rankin wondered if she’d guessed he couldn’t write much past his name and was making fun of him for it. He didn’t think she looked the sort who would make fun of people less educated than she was but he’d learned long ago that sort looked like anyone else. He pushed her ahead of him to the next closed door. Releasing her arm, he opened the door to an unlighted room; as he stepped past her into the room a voice inside the room said, “Hello, wiseguy.”

  Rankin darted into the darkness left of him. He yanked out the empty .38.

  “Hello, wiseguy.” The words came from behind him now.

  Rankin spun around in a half-circle, crashing into and knocking down an object taller than him. Struggling to regain his balance he banged into a wall. He heard a fluttering noise and what sounded like a squawk. Then, from in front of him, “Hello, wiseguy.”

  Rankin with his non-gun hand found and flipped on a wall switch, bathing the room in a soft, yellow glow.

  A crow-sized, orange-and-black parrot perched on a floor lamp a few feet before him and its knocked-over cage and above a giant fish tank filled with multi-colored fish, some close to a foot long. Rankin approached the tank. He pushed the .38 back into his belt. He watched transfixed a blueand-white fish, scarred by what looked to be bite marks, circling the tank ahead of a group of larger, dark-green fish menacingly shadowing it. He remembered a dream he’d started having around the age of ten of killing someone, no one in particular. In each version of the dream he’d kill a person (often a stranger to him) in a different way (with a gun, a knife, a rock, his bare hands, by throwing them off a cliff, by running them down with a car). For a few minutes after waking from the dream he’d feel relaxed, as if he was in charge of his fate. Then he’d get out of bed and see or hear a real person in his world and that safe feeling would disappear.

  “Hello, wiseguy.”

  Rankin looked up at the parrot, looking directly at him. It had small, penetrating eyes that made Rankin feel transparent. Its beak formed what struck him as a disgusted smirk. He thought of the jackass, now this bird and indoor fish the size of lake trout, and wondered what sort of people had he encountered. He remembered the woman. He looked at the doorway.

  She wasn’t in it.

  He ran out into the hallway. It was empty.

  He glanced to his left, down the corridor, into the large room he’d trashed. She wasn’t there. Jesus! How far could she have gotten, hobbled as she was, in a couple of seconds? Then he realized those Goddamn fish had made him lose track of time; for all he knew they’d hypnotized him into watching them for several minutes while the woman had limped out to the driveway and driven away in the Saab.

  He wheeled in a frantic circle, slipping on a wet spot and nearly falling. He looked down to see on the hardwood floor water droplets.

  Not water droplets. Piss droplets.

  The woman’s piss, dripping, he remembered, from her nightgown.

  The drops led from the big room up the corridor to, then past, Rankin. Rankin sprinted to the first door on the corridor after the one he’d just come out of. He opened the door onto a dark space rife with detergent. Flipping a switch right of the door, he brought on an overhead light, illuminating a washer, a dryer, a sink, baskets of clothes, mops, pails, cleaning fluids. He withdrew from the room and ran twenty-odd feet to the next door.

  It was locked; a sliver of light shone from beneath it.

  He pushed on the door. It didn’t open.

  He rammed it with his shoulder several times. It stayed shut.

  He turned his back to the door and mule-kicked it with his right foot, sending a searing pain from his toes into the center of his spine. The door barely budged, even as its lock could be heard snapping. Bracing himself with his hands on the corridor’s far wall, Rankin gave the door all he could put into a kick, groaning from the pain it caused him.

  The door and something wedged against it from the inside moved inward half a foot.

  Rankin put his arms through the space he’d created between the door and wall and, pushing aside a heavy chair behind the door, opened the door all the way into a pink room containing, in the corner nearest him, a baby’s crib beneath several ceiling-mounted mobiles, across from a large desk holding a computer at which the woman sat typing next to a telephone off its hook.

  That chewed-on blue-and-white fish swimming faster and faster till the sons of hitches chasing it made it so dizzy it couldn’t see anything but itself swimming and them right on its ass.

  The woman’s face and body, from which the blanket had again fallen, so ghostly looking as to suggest that Little Charlie hadn’t pulled his hands back from her throat in time, that, sitting there, she was as dead as the guy out front. Her fingers hitting the keyboard, her eyes staring intently at it, as if Rankin, as he strode to and picked up the phone’s receiver, weren’t even there.

  Not so much as a hum came from the receiver.

  Rankin wondered if the woman had understood before or after attempting to use it, or if she still didn’t understand, that the portable phone she’d taken off its hook in the big room was still occupying the line.

  Rankin dropped the receiver onto the desk.

  He looked at the monitor; whatever the woman was typing wasn’t coming up on it; the screen displayed only the static message:

  Connect Error

  The modem has reported no dial tone.

  Rankin unplugged the computer. The woman kept hitting the keys. Rankin felt as disgusted at her for typing letters no one could see as he did at Little Charlie for mouthing words no one could hear. He put a hand on her fingers to make her stop. She did, but didn’t look up at him.

  Rankin hoisted her to her feet. He pulled her over to the crib. He peered into it. But for a neatly made up tiny mattress and a pillow, on which rested a stuffed bear, it was empty. Rankin wondered where the baby was. He hoped it was a long ways from here. He made the woman look into the crib, then at him. She seemed unaware that the afghan no longer concealed her body from him. “T
here isn’t one,” she whispered tonelessly.

  Rankin, guessing she meant there was no baby, wasn’t sure whether to believe her or what to make of what she had said if he did believe her. Her exposed front suddenly reminded him of the parrot’s mocking stare at him. He walked to a small, open closet behind the crib and, from among less than half a dozen items hanging in it, took out a terrycloth bathrobe; he handed it to the woman. He half-turned away from her as she mechanically shucked the afghan, put on the robe, slid it off over her legs and dropped on the floor her torn nightgown. She tied the robe. Rankin faced her again. “Please let me help him,” she whispered.

  Rankin was a moment realizing she was talking about the guy; she didn’t know he was dead.

  “I won’t run from you again, I promise. I’ll do whatever you want me to.”

  A gnawing sensation commenced in Rankin’s innards; he pictured a carnivorous animal chewing on them. He wanted desperately to get the hell out of there before whatever it was inside him came out of him through his belly. He walked back across the room to the desk. He tore the telephone’s extension cord from the phone and the wall. He returned to the woman holding the cord. “What are you doing?”

  He guessed her voice, filled with panic now, had been kindly until Little Charlie had crushed her vocal cords; that she herself was kind; the sort of woman who would, and who would mean it, take up for people like Little Charlie. He forced her to lay on her left side on a love seat next to the crib. “There’s no need to—please—I haven’t seen your face.”

  Suddenly the woman, everything about her (her haunted whisper, her piss smell, Little Charlie’s handprints on her throat, her blanched complexion, her benumbed look) struck him as being too intensely vivid, as if Rankin had been abruptly thrust into the movie he’d earlier had the sensation of watching her, the guy, and Little Charlie perform in.

  He tied her hands together behind her back, then ran the cord down to and knotted it around her ankles. He knew the thing eating him was going to come out of him, he just didn’t know when. He shook his head at the woman to tell her the guy was past help and to quit talking about him because it was having a strange effect on Rankin.