The Canal (16 page)

"Why did you do it?" says Alan, doubting.

"Why did YOU do it," say these losers, these
fugitives from common sense.

"How did you do it?"

"How did YOU do it!"

"Get this clown out of here."

"Get YOU out of here!"

And so on. And so forth. And etcetera.

Meanwhile, as the calls and answer-beggars
and decision-needers and look-at-me'rs pinned him down, the greater
mess, the mess dome, problems number 1 through all of them, the
whole fucking thing, continued to hover precariously over his head.
And the dome thrived on time. It murdered the hours en masse.
Stunned them with the jabbing second hand, battered them with the
long reach of the minute hand, and did them in, finally, with the
wide, cleaving blade of the short hand.

Until the clock, rather implausibly, thought
Alan, now read 9:26 PM.

No, wait...9:27.

That's what this place did to you. A whole
day -- where had the time gone?

Certainly, some time had been lost in the
bathroom. Alan was returning there now. He had made a number of
visits throughout the day, and every time it was the same ritual:
water, soap, scrub, rinse, and then, if he wasn't careful, wasn't
monitoring himself, he'd immediately reach for more soap, ready to
repeat.

This time though, Alan had a different
mission. Before the bathroom mirror he pulled up his beleaguered
shirt and at last confronted the peninsula of pain. It was a cosmos
colored bruise that ran from his armpit to his underwear. The
terrain there was varied and interesting. It and his knee and his
ankle were clearly keeping close contact, attempting to form a
debilitating alliance. The audacity of the lavender and teal skin
dared him to touch. It hurt tremendously.

This was the kind of day that you had to let
pass. Let it turn to trash and stay there. There would always be
these days, hopefully not many, but when they came, you gave them
wide berth. You went home, you vacuumed, and then you went to
sleep. You woke up the next day, clean, renewed, refreshed, and
then your brought down the fucking hammer. You brought it DOWN. You
gave your enemies the English, you handed them the business. You
made them pay for this day, making sure that they never gave you
another.

Yes, all he needed was tomorrow. Then there
would be hell to pay.

Alan replaced his shirt and emerged back into
the hallway. There was a bit of commotion there. Commotion? He
didn't want to know about that. He had plenty of problems as it
was.

"There you are! Alan!"

This commotion seemed to be a station-wide
thing -- as if this big, snoring beast of a building has finally
been prodded awake -- although the noise was most acute in the
unit's office. There were others waiting for him. They were very
loud. Go home, counseled a sage inner voice. Get some clean
clothes. Yes, the present moment seemed to call for immediate and
monumental ignorance of whatever was brewing.

"The canal," was the next thing Alan heard.
And from there it only got worse. "Another body." Another corpse.
Skinless. Beneath the bridge.

The peninsula hurrahed.

Now...now this was a mother of a problem.
Problem #8: huge. Or was it #583? Alan couldn't keep track of them
anymore. Not knowing what else to do, he scowled, mostly for the
benefit of those gathered. Then he allowed a very majestic, very
authentic profanity. And it seemed to Alan, in that moment, that
something deep in the bedrock of his brain, something that should
have been a permanent fixture -- something was starting to break
apart.

*

At night the brownstones turned gray, or, in
the shine of a streetlight, an unhealthy eggplant. Alan nervously
sped past them, the whole rotting patch, leading a small caravan to
the bridge. At least three squad cars trailed behind him, and more,
seen through peeks in-between the avenues, followed parallel
streets.

Alan's car squealed around a corner, doing a
roller coaster dip through a pothole, and came fast onto the
bridge. He mashed on the brakes and brought the car to a sliding
stop. Others began slotting in around him, the street was loud with
the whine of brakes, the disappointment of defeated momentums.

Alan opened the door: then instantly closed
it. Jesus. Holy mother of. Everywhere there was the pop of hastily
recalled doors. One car over a pair of cops stared back at him
wide-eyed, stunned, locking themselves in. Alan let the window
down, just a millimeter, just to be sure...yes, it was for real.
The canal had reached critical mass. It had cooked up an entirely
criminal species of stink, an olfactory Gorgon that froze boogers
into solid marble. It was so bad you smelled it with your eyes. You
smelled it with your hair, your mouth, your fingers. You even
smelled it in your soul -- out across the trans-dimensional plane
your celestial essence was retching into a bag. Alan's nostrils
sputtered like a pair of blown-out speakers.

Outside a few policemen were already
headquartered on the street; more were reluctantly fanning across
the bridge. The same barge that had called in the previous body sat
upriver, winged insects rioting in the spotlights.

Nobody was bothering to wait for Joe this
time.

Alan gave the door another try. Again the
stench heckled him with its immense talent. It wasn't just the
reek, it was also the terrifying scale, how it ruled the atmosphere
with mocking impunity. There was no other recourse: rather than
fight, Alan had to surrender. He got out and humbly fell in line
behind the death march, a shuffling train of patrolmen staggering
toward the river. He borrowed a flashlight and mounted the bridge
railing, sliding over and then climbing down into the gravel
patch.

Alan went to the water's edge. The corpse was
in the same location as the last one, at the far end of the bridge.
The same position too, save for one skinless arm that was tucked
instead of hanging. One thing about it though, it was still gooey,
still wet, still fresh. If Alan had to guess he'd say the victim
had only been dead for a few hours. The first corpse had staled,
turned brown and hard, this one was luminous, the chunks of red
still glistening vibrantly in the light.

The water was casually contemplating Alan, an
enormous liquid lens. He was supposed to make this gone. And now
here it was, all over again. How was this possible, he wondered.
Not just the corpse, but also the river. Here was Alan, in the
midst of his city, inside the citadel walls, confronted with this
canal, this unruly deformity. Such a thing shouldn't be. Why hadn't
it been attacked with chlorine, paved over and a plaque stood in
its place, "Here Lies the Enemy?"

Your literal wilderness -- your actual wilds,
your swamps -- well, there was hardly such a thing anymore. It had
been taken care of -- all the woodland animals had been bagged,
tagged, and assigned a work shift. Forests were now parks, mountain
ranges were now preserves, and any stupid acre of heathen mud was
now roped off for recreation, admission to be paid and paths to be
stayed on. So far so good, right? But everyone was so busy clapping
themselves on the back, thinking that the war was over, that
mankind had won, when that just wasn't the case. Nature wasn't one
to roll over so easy -- it hadn't been vanquished, it had just gone
guerilla. Its evil was no longer out there, out in the country --
now it was inside. It slithered its watery way right down the
middle of your neighborhood. It moved into abandoned tenements. It
made beasts of men.

And how was this evil faring? Had its
campaign been successful? A day ago, Alan would have said no. He'd
have said it with the blissful conviction of a man without doubt.
But now. Oh buddy, just look under the bridge.

Had he...was it possible...could Alan have
underestimated? Could Alan have misjudged? Because right now, he
was wrecked, he was burned. While the canal, it pranced. Chaos, it
ruled. The hammer had been brought down, not by him, but on him,
HIM, Alan D'Angelo.

Alan made his way back up to the street, a
funeral procession of one. Womack's hand latched onto his, helping
to haul him over the top.

"Thanks," mumbled Alan.

Womack's hair was infested with humidity,
inflating from beneath into a kind of bunker shaped pompadour, a
bouffant like a melted record. Vincent sulked a few feet away,
dodging Alan's eyes.

"This is some picnic," said Womack, swatting
at his neck and killing a fat bead of sweat. "How's the
damage?"

"Same as yesterday," said Alan. "Almost word
for word. I can't believe they slipped it in right under our noses.
You sure nobody saw what happened? Weren't any of our guys
posted?"

Womack shrugged. "Guys are here and then
sometimes they're not. Or they're looking in the opposite
direction, I guess."

"And the building. All day and neither of you
saw anybody?"

"Some foreman, from a warehouse down the
street a ways, he said he'd sometimes seen people there. Like you
described, unclean looking. Mostly he thought they came and went at
night. But all day today and up until a few minutes ago, forget it.
Quiet as the grave."

Alan abruptly swung toward Vincent. "And
what's your problem?"

Vincent twitched. "I don't have a
problem."

"Go on and tell him," goaded Womack, his
strange hair billowing. "See, Vincent's got this idea. It's real
great -- he thinks it's a cannibal that did it. Laid it all out for
me on the ride over. What'd you say? 'I've seen a man eat -- no,
'I've seen a dog eat a man,' what was it? 'And it ain't like this,'
he told me."

"Shut up," hissed Vincent. "What I said was,
'I've seen an animal eat.' I mean, it was a dog, but a real dog,
not the sit and fetch kind, a wild one, real just...they go full
in, there's no carefully peeling back the...the upholstery." He
described it with his hands. "They go ears deep. It's not an animal
that did this, nuh-uh no way. It took decision and control. It
takes a mind."

"Oh man," said Womack. "You're one strange
nut, you know that Vince."

The pair were squaring off for some kind of
mountain goat showdown, something skull on skull. Alan tiredly
tramped into the space separating the two.

"Take a fucking pill," said Alan. "Look, the
autopsy. The dentist -- when are they going to know for sure about
those bite marks?"

"They said soon," said Vincent.

"So in the meantime, don't make any
conclusions. You've got no basis. And until we know for sure from
the scientists, I don't want to hear another word about it."

Cannibals, thought Alan. So what? That said
it all, really: so what. Cannibal or animal, so what? Be they fire
bug, fleecer, flasher, hoser, brawler, tranny, nanny, skeev,
flim-flam, peep creep, saddlebag, jailbait -- SO WHAT. It didn't
matter the name because they were all the same in the end -- they
all picked at the fabric of order, they all clawed at its gleaming
and golden suspenders.

The three of them stepped aside as a police
van nudged its way onto the bridge. Alan waited for it to pass
before pulling Vincent's and Womack's faces down to his level and
whispering, "Joe's been keeping information." He felt strangely
guilty as he said it, tattler's remorse. Alan briefly described his
episode with the squatters, leaving out the more sensational
details, and mentioned his talk with Kozar. His tongue tripped when
he got to the words "Joe's wife."

He turned to Womack. "I want you to go get
him. Joe. Try his apartment. If he's not there, I don't care how
you do it, just find him and bring his ass down here."

"Roger that."

"And Vincent--" Alan paused. Vincent was
gazing intently past Alan's head. Something in his expression was
profoundly unsettling. The anxious set of the eyes, the held
breath, the guise of rapt attention. Womack quickly followed suit.
The men around them, everyone stopped what they were doing, grew
quiet, unfurled to full height. They all grew while Alan shrank. He
knew what was coming, the onset of superior rank. And already he
could sense its pressure, its wrath.

"Better let me handle this," he uttered.
Wordlessly, Vincent and Womack hastily backed away into the hot
night. Rather too hastily Alan thought, and without their presence
he felt utterly exposed, like a right and proper target.

"D'Angelo."

It came from behind, the voice remarkable
only in its pitilessness. Alan slowly turned, and there he was,
Lieutenant Bob Bleecker. His nostrils were curled in perfect
affront. Alan received a brief and demoralizing view up one snout
-- Bleecker had hairless nostrils. Hairless. Fucking bald. Fucking
shaved.

"It's a toilet out here," he announced. And
another thing about the Lieutenant -- he'd changed, as in his
clothing. At some point since the morning he'd replaced his entire
outfit, trading darks for tans, wing tips for oxfords, impeccable
for immpeccabler. And for contrast there was Alan's own shirt. That
poor fallen dove, once so free and clean, now forsaken, laid low by
BB and decaying on a park bench.

"We have a problem," said Bleecker. His eyes
rumbled toward the canal. "I thought we were going to nail this
scumbag."

"I've got leads," announced Alan, hoping it
was true. "Solid ones." Alan began talking at length about tramps
and how they steal and squat and subvert. About their rituals and
their voodoo. He talked about the autopsy. He talked about the
skin. And when there was nothing else to tell, he mentioned how
he'd seen a real animal eat, going ears deep, and it wasn't like
this...

Bleecker's mouth tightened to a straight
line. "Sounds like horseshit, D'Angelo." He leaned in close to
Alan's face. Alan found himself enveloped inside an impenetrable
perimeter of cologne. The air there was impossibly cleaner, drier,
and temperate. Alan's shirt was suddenly overtaken with something
like static electricity, pressing flat against his chest --
painfully along the peninsula -- yet in the back it lifted, pulled
away, ballooning out as if...as if the filth there were being
repelled. By the Lieutenant.