Busy Monsters Read online

  The effects of shock and dehydration, in concert with my hungry woe, were beginning to make themselves known to me: throbbing forehead, a mouth like drying cement, intestines pretzeled into artwork, and jagged thoughts that aspired to destruction and deliverance both. Part of my floating brain wanted to imagine Gillian and our relationship, how we met and what she meant. But a private under fire does not stop to consider the history of the projectiles whirling by his limbs; he soldiers on until he is either out of death’s path or else perforated in a ravine. Man liveth after the Fall. Axl Rose, that rock-n-roll maniac from the late 1980s, once screamed, “Welcome to the jungle,” and we’ve all heard that higher-seeking seer Jim Morrison warning us, “No one here gets out alive.” Yes. It hadn’t occurred to me to click on the radio.

  The two hours were up and I couldn’t find this harbor anywhere; I wasn’t even sure I was on the East Coast anymore. North and south no longer made sense; a compass would have come in handy. A giant Mainer gas station attendant, six feet six inches of meat descended from the Visigoths, gave me succor, but not before tipping back his cap and looking at me askance. We were leaned against the trunk of my car, beneath the bug-frenzied fluorescent lights. As I could tell from the stitching on his shirt, his name was Thud, and apparently, before asking for directions, I had mumbled something cryptic about the kraken and prelapsarian bliss.

  “You need a soda pop, fella?”

  “That I do, Thud.”

  “I’d get you some water but the pump don’t work ’cause the vandals took the handle.”

  Wha…? Did he just…? Did I hear him…? My ears were all tricks.

  He handed me a Fresca free of charge and the chill of the thing nearly pushed out my tears. Imagine if I had allowed myself to weep in the grizzly grip of Thud: all would have been lost, my mission squashed. One can’t let loose with an automatic rifle after coming nose to nose with the fact that all human kindness has not gone the way of the plesiosaur.

  The neon OPEN sign in the window blinked on and off at odd intervals as if trying to make up its mind. Eviscerated autos all around this Exxon had opened up and were saying Ahh. In the woods nearby rotted all types of rusted-orange auto pieces, a carbuncle of a sight to my seen-too-much self. Untold tons of junk on the earth. I like my nature living and very close to God, my gas stations clean enough to lick in. Thud pointed at my map with a black fingernail and said, “Go there, then here, then there, then back this way, then around, then around again, and then you’re there…mostly,” and I knew I wouldn’t remember a word of it.

  “Thud,” I said, “I feel as if I’m hunting the fair-haired child who used to be me. Does that English make any sense?”

  “Be thy own son,” he said, me not knowing if he meant sun or Son, or even if I had heard right and he actually said, “Fee-fi-fo-fum.”

  We shook hands like passing travelers on our way to and from the Land of Nod. I said, “Thank you, Thud. May you find the spot we call paradise.”

  He muttered, “Never heard of it,” and I left that odd place.

  Hours later, after many wrong turns and another gas station attendant who appeared to share a mother with Thud, I was there, in a parking lot at the harbor, among all the GMC trucks and trailers, gazing at the wet planking of the piers and the bright boats bobbing in dark water. A horror-film thunderstorm gathered out there on the horizon; swirls of gray and black were no doubt coming closer as if intent on more midnight. Directly in front of me, wanting to taunt or chide, was The Kraken, Jacobi’s multimillion-dollar laboratory-at-sea. My headlights showed me that an artist-for-hire had painted my brother, the giant squid, on the fiberglass hull. We were hideous twins, neither of this world nor any other.

  I had all night to wait before marauding, and I considered driving through town to see if I could locate Gillian’s car but was sure I wouldn’t be able to find my way back. Raindrops began bursting on my windshield and soon I was so sleepy I couldn’t keep my eyelids from slamming shut. I crawled onto the backseat, placed Groot’s rifle and magazines on the floor, curled up beneath a beach blanket, listened to the lulling rain, and trembled like a man with malaria until a wrecking-ball slumber shut me down. With what dreams would a person in my situation be visited? I tell you, that night I had none. Dreams are for those who have not yet passed under the sign ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE. Yes, that dirty word, hope. Admit it: things did not look good for me.

  With what visions would you be visited for those few moments before slumber? A child’s funeral in the snow? A mother and father savaged by grief but too spent to weep? Or a teenager’s trembling in half-light, terrified the genetic spade that scooped a ditch through his kid brother would come for him next? An acned freshman in high school, his hormones in hee-haw, is supposed to grasp what genetic means? He knows only that it means family, that it means him. That would make two of us never holding an Emma Bishop…a Gillian.

  Sleep clobbered my body for nine hours uninterrupted, and I woke in the morning to chattering, well-rested voices eager for something. I had to remind myself where I was, and why I had come. My windows were fogged but I could tell that the rain had ceased and that the sun was trying its best to bust through a velvet mantle of clouds. When I pushed open the back door and fell to the graveled pavement, I looked yonder, and there on the pier boarding The Kraken were Jacobi, Gillian, and the henchmen Groot knew would be in attendance. I was able to get to my feet with about as much suavity as an epileptic under seize. Then I was running—or jogging, I suppose—toward the ship, yelling her name and trying not to slip on the wet planks. The sight of her, my Lord.

  They stopped boarding and turned to squint at me as if I were the squid himself. I said my lady’s name, and she said mine: Charlie.

  Let’s face it: movies and television have programmed us like the empty heads we were born to be, so I admit that my first sentence will win no points for originality. I said, “How could you do this to me?”

  “Charlie,” she said, “Jesus, what are you doing here?”

  I believe I ogled and ogled and could not speak.

  “You shouldn’t have come here, Charlie. I was going to send you a letter. Why did you come?”

  “Why?” I asked. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe to put an end to this flim-flam?”

  “We don’t want any trouble here,” Jacobi cooed, “just relax,” and his mustachio lifted in the breeze.

  He was built like a two-hundred-pound lunch box, and what’s worse, he wore a navy-blue New York Yankees sweatshirt and not the proud red and white of the Boston Red Sox, which is, as any New Englander can tell you, sacrilege on par with what the Achaeans did to the temples at Troy. The guy had dandruff in his eyebrows.

  “Trouble,” I said. “Speaking of which, wait here. I have a rifle.”

  He said, “A what?”

  “A rifle.”

  “Charlie, stop,” Gillian said. “You’re not a gun person. You’re smarter than that. Don’t be rash.”

  Huh? What? What kind of person was or was I not? The denim jacket she wore had been a present from me on her last birthday; this seemed a great upset to my generosity as a gift-giver.

  “I don’t think you understand,” I said to Jacobi and his cohort. “Let me be clear: I have a rifle. Automatic, very arresting. This woman is my kraken and there will be many maimed humans on the dock before I let you take her from me.” I pointed at the mustache. “You, sir, are a thief and scoundrel, and the sea, from what I know of it, peddles karma and vengeance. Your voyage is doomed.”

  “Perhaps you two should talk this out,” he said.

  To which I retorted, “Perhaps you should remember that desperado and desperate share a root.”

  He ascended onto the ship, his ass-kissing graduate students in tow, all of them dressed in Communist clothing, a few of whom eyed me evilly and enjoyed it. Gillian came closer and I almost instinctively reached out to embrace her. If only I could suckle at her swollen breasts I was sure we could arrive at some kind of ag
reement, one that involved her coming back with me and forsaking her squid-related dream. But as we stood there staring at each other I was overcome with an incredible dread, one that clamped right onto my guts. I had always been afraid of her, it seemed, because all Homo sapiens live in fear of the mighty who strike with lightning.

  “Gillian,” I said.

  “Oh, Charlie. Just go. Okay? There’s nothing I can say to you that will make you understand this. That’s why I just left without saying anything. I need to do this. Please go, Charlie.”

  This? I thought. What’s under discussion here? Was now the time to talk of sacrifice, the debts we owe as organisms on the earth?

  “This is insane, Gillian. You’re just leaving? Nixing the wedding? Two great years? I’m a shish kabob.”

  “Sit here with me,” she said, and we parked ourselves on a wooden bench many a fisherman had used to contemplate the various faces of ocean ferocity. “I love you, Charlie, I do. But I’ve never loved you more than I love the squid.”

  That sounded to me so intensely aberrant I considered using two pinkies to clean out my ears. When I looked at my ankles I saw that one sock was green, the other brown.

  “Please understand,” she said. “I watched my mother give up her dreams of being a scientist”—her mother had dreams of being a scientist?—“so she could marry and have children and basically support my father’s career. And she did, and she never complained about it, but I could tell that it was always a regret for her. And I won’t be that woman, Charlie.”

  “Maybe you could have told me this a while ago? Like when we first met? Like before we moved in together? Or maybe when I asked you to marry me? Or how about when we put the deposit down on the wedding? Any of those times would have been good, Gill.”

  Really—this realism was too much for me. The wind off the water mistreated her hair and then carried the familiar scent of her shampoo straight into my face: a hint of coconut, a splash of mint. Loss, I thought, has a smell, and you can purchase it for about twelve bucks at your neighborhood drugstore. Seagulls said something not far from my feet; one aired out its armpits and, I think, spat.

  “I’ve done a lot of waking up over the last few weeks, Charlie.”

  “I have too, Gill, every morning, right next to you in our four-post bed, and it would have been real nice if you had shared this shit with me much sooner than now.”

  I bent toward her slightly in emphasis and dyspepsia.

  “And Charlie…did you really go down to Virginia to kill Marvin?”

  “You read that, huh?”

  “Yes, I read it. Did you really think you could hide it from me?”

  “I bought all the copies at Food World so you wouldn’t see it.”

  “I have a subscription at work, Charlie. And my God, Food World, I despise that place. See, that’s what I’m talking about. I never want to walk into another Food World for as long as I live.”

  Despise Food World? With its mom-and-pop owners and chicken rotisseried fresh each evening, and only the choicest meats from Connecticut farms, to say nothing of their customer service, so caring and true?

  “That reminds me,” I said, “what are you doing about work? You’ll just quit your job so you can go fishing for a while? Lose all your health care and pension?”

  “They gave me a leave of absence. And I don’t want to live my life in deference to health care. Don’t change the subject, Charlie. I don’t care one bit that Marvin is dead, but it scares me a little that you were willing to murder him.”

  “I just wanted to talk to him, Gill, that’s all. Tell him to quit harassing us. I wasn’t really going to kill him. That was just macho talk for Groot. I did it for you.”

  “And then hid it from me.”

  Wait a minute: She was the angry one here? She had been double-crossed, duped, deceived? You should have seen the look on her face, her pursed lips pissed off.

  “Ms. Lee,” a henchman called from the boat’s railing, “Professor Jacobi asked me to get you now.”

  “I’m coming,” she said. “I have to go, Charlie.”

  We stood and faced each other, a welter in me.

  “When are you coming back, Gill?”

  “I can’t say. Three months, maybe more. Time doesn’t really exist for me right now.”

  I had a watch on my wrist to prove otherwise; it was there, ticking and turning—I almost showed her.

  “But our wedding,” I mumbled. “My parents.”

  She shook her hair, solemn, and told me the diamond engagement ring was in her underwear drawer, on top of her black thongs. The mention of her panties caused a jig through my inner parts. I looked up and spotted Jacobi in the porthole, his expression that of a convict half bored with his crimes. Apparently I would not be killing him this day.

  She waved goodbye from the deck with neither sadness nor joy, and I thought I could read her lips: Wait for me, Charlie. As I stood there, I imagined myself with patience: I’d wait at the harbor and sleep in my car, a man with a gun surviving on fast-food burgers and his own capacity for psychic mutilation. I would not consider the overdue bills piling up in my mailbox, nor the fact that I’d most likely get fired from a magazine job it had taken me a decade to acquire. I’d become an observer of seagulls, a bearded seer, a from-the-pier fisherman with a cheap rod and reel I’d always be mending with duct tape. I’d watch the boats come in and go out, by sun and by moon, knowing that The Kraken and my lady were due to land sooner or later, in weeks or in months, or, okay, if you insist, years.

  But ultimately, I had to admit, I was not the waiting type. A maternal aunt, educated and obese, had once told me that I was three parts impulse and one part woebegone. I stomped back to my car, smashed a clip into the rifle, stuffed another into a back pocket, sprang the first round into the chamber, and then stomped back down to the boat. And I did this partly because I was aware that if you put a loaded firearm in reach of the afflicted, said firearm will sooner or later discharge. The Russian doctor Chekhov said that or something else close to it. Who was I to haggle with Chekhov?

  Gillian and the sailors had gone belowdecks to…I didn’t know—make a toast? I dropped to one knee, aimed the rifle at where the hull met the water, and squeezed the trigger, only half surprised when nothing happened. No discharge. I examined the gun with what must have been the most quizzical look on my face, and it took me a minute or more to realize that the safety latch was on. I hoped nobody was looking at me and laughing; Groot hadn’t told me about a safety latch; for this I would scold him. But soon I was unloading. I had expected an intrusive rat-atat-tat, but what came out of the barrel was more akin to a rapid thump-thump-thump, like a—what else?—a heartbeat. Empty shell casings spit from the chamber and clanged onto the dock near my feet. I nearly fainted from adrenaline.

  The rounds pierced the fiberglass with loud knocks and made the lapping water go splash, though I couldn’t have been firing for more than twenty seconds before the clip was empty. Overalled fishermen dove for cover; a car in the parking lot sped away. It didn’t occur to me that I might be hitting human beings inside the boat. The only human that mattered was Gillian, and at that moment I felt certain she was armadilloed, impervious to gunfire.

  I unloaded the other clip in the same fashion; then it became clear to me that the boat would not sink. A rocket launcher or its equivalent would have been ideal. Still, I had a duffel bag full of loaded magazines in my car, and I once again stomped to it, the butt of the rifle resting on my right hip bone as I had seen in photos of various masked militants.

  Waiting for me in the parking lot was a vigilante fisherman, an old-timer named Bart or Sid, who had taken it upon himself to patrol the dock in the name of all things lawful. When I reached my car, there he was, crouched down near the front tire of his dented pickup, charged with the initiative of a Vandal, shooting his cap gun in my direction without asking me to drop my weapon or mend my sinful ways. His was a philosophy primal and much like my own: shoot now, wor
ry later. Bart or Sid the Fisherman had me perplexed; if he hadn’t been firing his tiny-caliber pistol at me I would have wanted to sit down swami-style and get all Hindu, ask him questions about the cosmos and my uncertain place in it. Here was an old man with the dance still in his bones. Instead, I ducked and ran, dropping Groot’s gun to the wet pavement.

  Little bullets were whapping into the things around me but, thankfully, not into any of my moving parts, because Bart or Sid the Fisherman was an awful shot, probably three-quarters blind and having flashbacks to the beachheads of Normandy. I was running now at full sprint in the direction of the water at the end of the pier. As I ran past the boat I saw—imagine this—Gillian’s dismayed face in the porthole.

  And then…I was in the sea, almost frozen in time—that daffy fifth dimension Einstein was certain of, said could be warped—cold-swimming in slow motion as if through sludge, suspended in blesséd silence full of bubbles, the dim light at the surface my only clue of heaven. In another twenty minutes, I would find myself handcuffed aboard a police boat, accused of profanation and peccadillo alike, crimes not conducive to society. I had once promised Gillian, at the apex of our love, that I would dive to unknown depths to capture her prize and drag it back for her to hold. Now, swimming, I felt determined to find that wretched kraken, yes, but not to kiss it, no—I would choke the bitch to death, damn its every breath.

  See the last words of Mr. Tennyson’s poem about me: “In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.”

  Dying is a ball; it’s the roaring that hurts.

  3. THEM PRISON BLUES

  MY MISSION SHAT upon by the Miocene logic and cruel outcomes afflicting all those with pluck but no punctilio, with hearts that run on gasoline: okay, I overreacted, I admit it. Today in our America you can’t discharge an automatic weapon and not go to prison for it, and so I crouched for three months and change in a no-security state facility, mostly for men with wily checkbooks, after crouching the first two weeks in a not-bad county lockup, jinxed and well read because neither I nor kin could or would produce the bail bond to spring me. I told the detectives in charge—not a single one reminiscent of cops you’ve seen in Dirty Harry flicks but rather collegiate types with good hair—that Davy Crockett was a distant uncle on my mother’s side and Daniel Boone on my dad’s, but they did not care, not a whit. “Life is about the living,” one said, and I pondered that aphorism for about seventeen minutes straight.