Beast Of The Heartland And Other Stories Part 26

"You wanna know my business?" he shouted. "f.u.c.k you! You wanna know my business?" He shoved Mizell back against the van.

The Vietnamese kid had taken a stand about ten feet behind Moskowitz; in his right hand was something black and snub-nosed. The journalist noticed the gun, too, and edged away. Lonesome Heartbreak hadn't moved a muscle.

Moskowitz gave Mizell another, less violent shove and pointed to Anna, who lay where she had fallen, staring vacantly through the tangles of her hair -- Mizell could tell that she had done up again.

"Man," Moskowitz said, "you need to employ a more accomplished actress. This b.i.t.c.h is way too smacked out to do good work." He pitched his voice high and sugary. "'David, do you have contacts in Laos? David, can you get me some heroin?'" He let out a brittle laugh, and the laugh seemed to rekindle his anger. "f.u.c.kin' amateurs! The h.e.l.l you were thinkin', messin' with me?"

"What do you want?" Mizell asked, trying to control fear and anger, calculating his chances at the gun. Judging by his erratic behavior, Moskowitz's heart would be playing hip-hop beats, fueled by a potpourri of stimulants; but the Vietnamese kid looked solid.

"I figured you for a cut-to-the-chase kind of guy." Moskowitz adjusted the hang of his jacket, gestured at Anna. "Meryl Streep heah tells me you're a fountain of knowledge concernin' Saigon. You'rea conduit. You perform a service. Izzat right?"

"I like to know where I live."

"Do you now? Wellsir, I intend to be a blank spot on your map. One of those mysterious Abandon-All-Hope-Ye-Who-Enter places. And know what else I want? I want you to work for me. I can use a smart young fella like yourself. Someone knows all the back doors and the bear traps."

Maybe, Mizell thought, what had been unthinkable in Djakarta and Goa was doable in Vietnam.

Maybe he was ready to step up to the next level. His fingers trembled with hits of adrenaline. It would be very satisfying to kill Moskowitz. Messy, but satisfying.

"You still theah, ol' son?" Moskowitz peered at him, his delicately boned face washed dead white by the moonlight. "We didn't lose you now, did we?"

"I was wondering if it would be possible to work for you."

Moskowitz's expression was one of mock incredulity. "Did I lead you to believe I was offerin' you a job? No way, chico! You're being shanghaied."

"If it'll give you a kick," Mizell said, "I can swear eternal fealty. But I thought you'd appreciate a measured response. Y'know, one based on an estimate as to whether I can keep both you and my contacts happy."

Moskowitz studied him a moment, then chuckled. "Am I gon' wind up likin' you? I'd purely hate that."

Lonesome Heartbreak gave a decisive-sounding sigh and stood. "I must go," he said; he picked up his guitar by the neck and turned to the van.

"Whoa there, Hiros.h.i.+!" Moskowitz said. "Don't be in such a hurry."

Lonesome Heartbreak paid him no attention.

Moskowitz signaled the Vietnamese kid to handle this spot of bother. The kid approached the van, stepping over Anna's legs; as he planted his left foot, Mizell saw the muscles of Lonesome Heartbreak's right arm tense, saw what was coming, and started moving forward at the same instant Lonesome Heartbreak swung his guitar by the neck, bringing it up in a short, windy arc to smash into the kid's jaw.

It made a much softer sound than Mizell would have antic.i.p.ated, almost a plush sound, like a two-by-four whacking a pillow. The kid dropped, all his synapses shorted, his legs twisting beneath him, and the gun fell to Anna, half-burying itself in the sand. She stared at it with dazed fixity, reached out a hand. But Mizell s.n.a.t.c.hed up the gun and trained it on Moskowitz. Its weight, its cold compacted power, unnerved him, set his thoughts to flurrying, and he backed away, needing to get the picture completely in frame. On an illuminated patch of sand, the stumpy figure of Lonesome Heartbreak holding his busted guitar neck; the crumpled Vietnamese kid, face dark with blood; Anna struggling to her knees beside him, breathing hard; the journalist stepping into view from behind Mizell; Moskowitz in a half-crouch, mouth open, arms out, palms down, like a surfer whose wave and board had vanished from beneath him, left him sailing through the air; and beyond, s.h.i.+ning them all into being, the lunatic bone-faced moon riding above the silver-edged peaks of cloudy Alps, like a painting on black lacquer.

The journalist said something, and Mizell told him to hold on, give him a second to think. He could make a phone call, deal with Moskowitz that way. Call Eddie Pang in Cholon. Eddie was no f.u.c.king bargain. The cost would be heavy, lots of favors, but it might be the way to go. Better than pulling the trigger himself. Not as safe, maybe, but less messy. Somebody had to do it, that's for sure. Moskowitz wouldn't go away on his own.

"You gonna shoot me, Mistuh Mizell?" There was a touch of curiosity in Moskowitz's voice, as if this were something he wanted to know, and not what it truly was -- the start of a negotiation.

"I might," said Mizell.

"If you're gonna shoot him, man," said the journalist, "I'm outta here."

"Shut the f.u.c.k up!" Contrary urges were scooting about in Mizell's head, as if contending pressures within his skull were squeezing thought into new alignments.

"We have some room to maneuver heah," Moskowitz said. "We have choices available."

He was regaining his confidence, and this infuriated Mizell -- he took a shooting position, legs apart,elbows braced, and felt something hot spike down through his body, a unity of anger and intent nailing him to the moment. Moskowitz put his hands out to stop the bullet and turned his face away. In the strong moonlight, the stubble on his scalp resembled dirty residue left in a sink.

"This isn't wise, Mistuh Mizell," he said. "I want you to think about it. Theah must be a way you can establish some guarantees."

"What sort of guarantees?" Mizell was disconcerted to hear in his own voice an eagerness to deal.

"For your security, of course." Moskowitz had a peek at him, lowered his hands a bit. "You require a defense against the possibility of recriminations. And rightly so. I believe we can work somethin' out along those lines. P'raps we can become allies. Theah's a big pie to cut up heah. A very big pie. We can all pig out if we just ease back a little."

It was not going to happen: Mizell was not ready for the next level, and he realized he probably never would be. He didn't feel one way or another about this, just accepting, perhaps a little ashamed; but that wasn't important. The problem still existed.

"Let me put this on the table..." Moskowitz began, but was interrupted by Lonesome Heartbreak, who made a growly noise and got to his feet; his cowboy s.h.i.+rt was draped over one shoulder. He held up a hand to Mizell, staying him, and crossed to Moskowitz. He grabbed Moskowitz behind the neck with his left hand, and before the man could let out even a yelp, he delivered two short punches to the head with his right. He let Moskowitz fall, unconscious; then he set to ripping the cowboy s.h.i.+rt into strips, doing all this with a stolid efficiency that seemed quite unreal to Mizell.

When he had done with tying up Moskowitz, he took the gun from Mizell. "He will shoot me," he said. "Afterward" -- he tapped Mizell's chest -- "you put..." He waggled the tips of his fingers, grimaced; then he brightened. "Fingerprints! You put fingerprints on gun. His fingerprints. Call police."

"f.u.c.k you mean he's going to shoot you?" said the journalist. "That guy's not shooting anybody."

"I shoot myself!" said Lonesome Heartbreak, frowning. "Then fingerprints." He backed away a few steps and appeared to be inspecting his torso for a good place to park a bullet.

"Bulls.h.i.+t!" said the journalist, and Mizell said, "Hey, man! No!" and reached for the gun. Lonesome Heartbreak fended him off.

"Look," said Mizell, panicking. "You don't have to kill yourself! There's another way, just let me figure it out."

"In the arm!" said Lonesome Heartbreak with some perplexity. "I shoot myself in arm!"

"All right," said Mizell, relieved; then, having thought it over for a moment: "s.h.i.+t! You know, maybe this'll work!"

"You're f.u.c.king insane, the both of you," said the journalist.

Mizell was beginning to feel ordered once again. The situation was sorting itself out. There were tremendous potentials here, he realized. Symmetries. Ironies. "Actually," he said, "it's a pretty great idea.

The police will love this motherf.u.c.ker. They'll squeeze him 'til he s.h.i.+ts pennies. Then they'll throw his bones to whoever barks the loudest. But I have to be the one who shoots himself."

Lonesome Heartbreak offered an objection, but Mizell -- startled to hear himself arguing for the right to bleed -- said, "No, listen. I know all these cops. Police. Important guys. I've done favors for them.

There's a guy here in Vung Thao. Colonel Vinh. He'll take care of this. But if you do it... they don't know you, so they don't care if you get justice. Maybe a.s.shole there can buy his way out. If I do it, he's history, because they don't want those favors to stop. You understand? He's out of the picture."

"Okay," said Lonesome Heartbreak; he clicked his tongue against his teeth and nodded. "Okay." He handed the gun to Mizell. "You shoot yourself."

"I don't know about this s.h.i.+t," said the journalist.

"You're going to back us up, aren't you?" Mizell asked him. "You're going to tell the right story?"

"Hey, I'm down for it. I just find this all a little weird."

Mizell glanced at Anna. She had curled up on her side in the sand. Asleep. Dreaming. Do it quickly, he told himself; don't think about it. He pushed the muzzle against the fleshy part of his upper arm, trying for an angle that would merely crease. He drew a deep breath, exhaled, closed his eyes. His fingertightened on the trigger. He stayed in this position for quite some time. "f.u.c.k!" he said. He drew another breath, tried to prepare. "f.u.c.k!" he said again.

"I help," said Lonesome Heartbreak. He took the gun, gripped Mizell's left shoulder. Mizell closed his eyes, felt the muzzle press firmly into his bicep. He jerked his arm away. "Not like that, d.a.m.n it!" he said. "Just graze me!"

Lonesome Heartbreak's brow creased with bewilderment.

"Don't shoot me straight on. Make it a flesh wound." Mizell ill.u.s.trated the concept by flicking his s.h.i.+rtsleeve with a finger.

"Okay. I understand!"

"I'm going to sit down." Mizell dropped to the sand, stretched out his legs, propped himself on his right arm. "Give me a minute."

Lonesome Heartbreak kneeled beside him. His wide face was calm, like that of a doctor with a needle. "Look at the water," he said, pointing with the gun.

Mizell did as he was told. He could have used some of Anna's stash, but the water would have to do.

The sky. This was so f.u.c.ked. But what the h.e.l.l, he had a tattoo. Now he'd have a scar to go with it. A vaccination against the Moskowitz disease.

The lopsided moon was perfectly balanced on a cloud edge; it seemed to be rolling along it as the cloud pa.s.sed beneath; above and to the right of the moon, a single star winked bluely, big diamond rays from an atom heart blowing out to be somebody's angel, some diviner's fire. It was all pretty cool if you kept your eye on the sky and never looked down. It was all black velvet and pointy Christmas stars and a pink hotel ablaze with party lights. After a while you could let the light in straight to your brain. Anna knew that.

"I'm ready," he said.

When he heard the shot Moskowitz began shouting for help, and Lonesome Heartbreak was forced to gag him. Then he set about bandaging Mizell's arm. That done, he propped Mizell up against the van, a few feet from where Anna was lying, still asleep, and squatted down to have a look at the Vietnamese kid, who was moaning.

"Hurts like h.e.l.l, huh?" The journalist sat down cross-legged facing Mizell. "I got shot once. With a rubber bullet. But it still hurt like h.e.l.l." With his face in shadow, he looked like a Stalinist ghost, an old Marxist pirate.

Mizell said, f.u.c.king A it hurt, but he was amazed how quickly the worst of the pain had subsided.

Partly due, he supposed, to the tightness of the bandage.

Lonesome Heartbreak slung the Vietnamese kid up onto his shoulder in a fireman's lift. "Need doctor," he said, and shook his head vigorously, as if in a.s.surance that a doctor would fix the kid right up. "I go now. Come back maybe... half-hour."

"Bring me back a beer, will ya?" said the journalist humorlessly. Mizell had the notion he was feeling left out.

"Don't forget the name," Mizell said. "The policeman, you know. Colonel Vinh."

Lonesome Heartbreak tapped his forehead. "No problems."

Mizell wanted to understand what had happened, he wanted to know how the World Tour would end. More than that, he wanted to acknowledge the relations.h.i.+p. Incidental though it was, just two people working together, probably unmindful of each other's purposes, perhaps even somewhat at cross-purposes... despite all that, he felt the strange synchronicity at its heart was worth acknowledging.

But he couldn't think how to do it, or what he would say even if they could communicate subtleties.Language was not the only barrier here. It seemed there were some occasions when it was not so bad to shoot yourself, and there were other occasions you were born not to understand.

"Okay," said Lonesome Heartbreak, regarding him solemnly; he gave the thumbs-up sign. "Okay."

Then he set off along the beach with his burden.

"That guy's whacko," said the journalist. "You wouldn't think a guy could be that together and be whacko, but he is."

Mizell had nothing to add.

The wind blew harder, stinging Mizell's face with sand grains, and as it faded, tattering into gusts, he could have sworn he heard something panting in the tall gra.s.ses waving atop the dune. Anna sat up, rubbing her eyes. She caught sight of him and came crawling over, collapsed against his bad arm, causing him to cry out. She saw the bandage and said with blinky concern, "Oh my G.o.d! What happened?"

"Don't worry about it."

Like magic, the words seemed to absolve her of the need to worry. She settled happily beside him again, avoiding the arm. "Let's go back soon. I'm really sleepy."

He couldn't believe she had no questions. About Moskowitz, about any of it. Chalk it up to doper logic, he figured. Denial and modern chemistry twisting events into some acceptable shape. Or maybe she was farther gone than he'd thought, maybe without his marking the change she had pa.s.sed another landmark on the road to dissolution, stepped closer to the zone of stellazine and long afternoons in a quiet room with a shaft of golden sunlight striking through a high window, so articulated by dust, it looked almost solid, a thing of gauzy crystal, and dark blue shadows siting in dim corners with their heads down.

And yet she was beautiful, a bit mussed but essentially untouched by the sorry rituals that had played out on the beach. That had been playing out for years. He was going to have to do something. No putting it off any longer. He started to make a promise to himself, but recognized that making it would be too easy a moral satisfaction.

"You all right?" he asked; the throbbing in his arm intensified, and he tried to calm his heart.

"I don't know. I've been thinking."

"What about?"

She sighed, a little girl noise, a half-voiced musical note coring a breath. "I don't know." Then: "We could go to Hong Kong. You know, for the handover? That'd be fun, wouldn't it?"

"Fun!" said the journalist sourly. "There's just not enough fun in the world. That's the problem."

The lights were still on at the pink hotel. Ant-sized black shapes were scurrying about on the sand in front of it, carrying off crumbs and bottles from the party, running into the sea to laugh and drown one another under the death's-head moon in the opium water between China and the end of time. The wind blew hard again, lifting scatters of bright foam from the wave crests.

"Yeah," said Mizell. "Forget this mess."

BEAST OF THE HEARTLAND.

First published in Playboy, September 1992.

Mears has a dream the night after he fought the Alligator Man. The dream begins with words: "In the beginning was a dark little G.o.d with glowing red eyes..." And then, there it stands, hovering in the blackness of Mears' hotel room, a twisted mandrake root of a G.o.d, evil and African, with ember eyes and limbs like twists of leaf tobacco. Even after it vanishes, waking Mears, he can feel those eyes burning inside his head, merged into a single red pain that seems as if it will go on throbbing forever. He wonders if he should tell Leon about the pain -- maybe he could give Mears something to ease it -- but he figuresthis might be a bad idea. Leon might cut and run, not wanting to be held responsible should Mears keel over, and there Mears would be: without a trainer, without anyone to coach him for the eye exams, without an accomplice in his blindness. It's not a priority, he decides.

To distract himself, he lies back and thinks about the fight. He'd been doing pretty well until the ninth.

Staying right on the Cuban's chest, mauling him in the corners, working the body. The Cuban didn't like it to the body. He was a honey-colored kid a couple of shades lighter than Mears and he punched like a kid, punches that stung but that didn't take your heart like the punches of a man. Fast, though. Jesus, he was fast! As the fight pa.s.sed into the middle rounds, as Mears tired, the Cuban began to slip away, to circle out of the haze of ring light and vanish into the darkness at the corners of Mears' eyes, so that Mears saw the punches coming only at the last second, the wet-looking red blobs of the gloves looping in over his guard. Then, in the ninth, a left he never saw drove him into the turnbuckle, a flurry of shots under the ribs popped his mouthpiece halfway out and another left to the temple made him clinch, pinning the Cuban's gloves against his sides.

In the clinch, that's when he caught sight of the Alligator Man. The Cuban pulled back his head, trying to wrench his right glove free, and the blurred oval of his face sharpened, resolved into features: blazing yellow eyes and pebbly skin, and slit nostrils at the end of a long snout. Although used to such visions, hallucinations, whatever this was, Mears reacted in terror. He jolted the Alligator Man with an uppercut, he spun him, landed a clubbing right high on the head, another right, and as if those punches were magic, as if their force and number were removing a curse, breaking a spell, the Alligator Man's face melted away, becoming a blurred brown oval once again. Mears' terror also grew blurred, his attack less furious, and the Cuban came back at him, throwing shots from every angle. Mears tried to slide off along the ropes but his legs were gone, so he ducked his head and put his gloves up to block the shots. But they got through, anyway.

Somebody's arms went around him, hemming him in against the ropes, and he smelled flowery cologne and heard a smooth baritone saying, "Take it easy, man! It's over." Mears wanted to tell the ref he could have stood up through ten, the Cuban couldn't punch for s.h.i.+t. But he was too weak to say anything and he just rested his head on the ref's shoulder, strings of drool hanging off his mouthpiece, cooling on his chin. And for the first time in a long while, he heard the crowd screaming for the Cuban, the women's voices bright and crazy, piercing up from the male roar. Then Leon was there, Leon's astringent smell of Avitene and Vaseline and Gelfoam, and somebody shoved Mears down onto a stool and Leon pressed the ice-cold bar of the Enswell against the lump over his eye, and the Cuban elbowed his way through the commission officials and n.o.bodies in the corner and said, "Man, you one tough motherf.u.c.ker. You almos' kill me with them right hands." And Mears had the urge to tell him, "You think I'm tough, wait'll you see what's coming," but instead, moved by the sudden, heady love that possesses you after you have pounded on a man for nine rounds and he has not fallen, Mears told him that one day soon he would be champion of the world.

Mears wonders if the b.e.s.t.i.a.l faces that materialize in the midst of his fights are related to the pain in his head. In his heart he believes they are something else. It could be that he has been granted the magical power to see beneath the surface of things. Or they may be something his mind has created to compensate for his blindness, a kind of spiritual adrenaline that inspires him to fiercer effort, often to victory. Since his retinas became detached, he has slipped from the status of fringe contender to trial horse for young fighters on the way up, and his style has changed from one of grace and elusiveness to that of a brawler, of someone who must keep in constant physical contact with his opponent.