Dead Boys (8 page)

“What, go back to
Earth
? What a horrid idea!” said Leopold, snorting. “What could you possibly gain by traveling there? The breathers won’t throw a parade for the first corpse who staggers up Main Street, I promise you that.”

“You’re not being paid for your expert opinion, Leopold,” snapped Jacob. “I’ve hired you as our navigator, nothing more, and once you’ve done your job, you’ll be free to pursue your own aspirations. I’ll do you the favor of keeping my judgments about their triviality to myself.”

Leopold cackled, then held up a hand, growing suddenly contemplative. “Then again,” he said, “despite the patent absurdity of your quest, the paucity of your logic, and the utterly fictive hope you have of returning to the living world, your enthusiasm has plucked a jaunty little tune on my heartstrings. Gentlemen, the decision has been made!”

“What decision?” said Remington.

“Make no mistake,” said Leopold, “I am a proud citizen through and through, and aspire toward nothing more than to show Dead City the very girth of my quality, but it has recently occurred to me that a chance to travel might be just what I need to provoke my transformation into permanent greatness. Why, when your little troupe of misfits found me, I was in the midst of raising funds to hire a tour guide of my own! Adventure beyond this city’s borders is what I seek, Jacob, and you have just inspired me to raise my fee.”

“I beg your pardon?” cried Jacob.

“Six months’ credit is a wonderful start,” said Leopold, “but if you want me to take you any further, I’ll require more: namely, a spot in your caravan! Should you find the man you seek in these Tunnels, take me along for the ride.”

“Absolutely not! You must be drunker than I thought. There’s no possible circumstance that could cause me to consider bringing you with us. You’re hardly what anyone could call reliable, much less trustworthy. No, Leopold, I’m afraid we’ll have to stick to our original arrangement.”

“Ah, well!” cried Leopold, leaping up from the table with an expansive bow. “In that case, I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding an eager helpmate among this crowd. They all have the best of intentions, I’m sure. Lads!” he shouted to a group of skinless urchins relieving a tattooed corpse of his many piercings. “Six months’ credit for anyone who can lose these rubes in the labyrinth!”

“Happy to help,” shouted a nearby drunkard, staggering up from his table.

“I’ll lose ‘em thrice for a year!” said his neighbor.

As more corpses crowded around, Jacob held his head in his hands. “Very well,” he murmured. “You may join us.”

“Splendid! Then let’s drain these dregs, boys, and see what we cross at the cross!”

Remington dumped his swill onto the floor, then followed on, noting how mutable the path became as it progressed. Now it was a subway tunnel, now a sewer pipe, now a dungeon with an unstable floor, and never was it silent, for even when they weren’t speaking amongst themselves, the echoing of nearby chambers, slick with swill, brimming with babble, caroused around their silent silhouettes. Remington wondered how many bars there could possibly be, and how many drunks must be lost in them, drifting without direction on currents of swill.

“Not far now!” said Leopold time and again as he consulted the map, until, after untold hours, a single train car hulked over the chaos of a noisome crowd. “Here we are,” he whispered, pulling the others close. “Our quarry, the Crowded Car. We’re far from any entryway, fellows, so let’s take care: the bastards in here have been drunk for so long it beggars belief.”

CHAPTER FIVE

The Crowded Car

D
ented and scraped but still watertight, the Crowded Car was lodged securely between a low ceiling and crumbling concrete floor. The company entered through its rear door, finding a dining car replete with ancient leather booths, awash in leaked swill and profanity. Presiding over the motley drunkards was an elephantine barman trading a pitcher of swill for a fistful of rags. “His preferred payment is stuffing, the better to keep his belly from collapsing,” murmured Leopold as they wended their way toward an open booth toward the front of the car. “That’s Barnabas the Barman, stout and surly as ever.”

As they passed, a woman missing the skin on the left side of her body banged through the front door, pushing a wheelbarrow overflowing with sodden refuse. “Gotcher gear, Barney,” she rasped. “Can I get that drink now?”

Barnabas took a disgusted look at her catch and lumbered to his feet. “What’s going on?” said Remington. “Why’s she bringing the trash
in
?”

“She’s a runner,” said Leopold, “an employee sent out to scavenge the river for the basic ingredients of swill. She’s botched the job, hence the big man’s discontent. Let’s take this booth over here.”

“You make swill with goddamned vegetables,” Barnabas was saying. “Fruits, houseplants, algae, even meat will soak down into a decent batch, but what do you expect me to do with
this
?” He pulled a fistful of purple cotton from the wheelbarrow, slapping it on the bar.

The half-peeled runner looked sidelong at her employer, who’d been shouting into her good ear as if the raw half could hear him any less. “Stuff it in your belly when you think no one’s lookin’?”

Barnabas kicked the wheelbarrow onto the floor, one hand on his gut. “You shut your face or I’ll smack off the good side. Go on and make another run—and don’t even
think
about taking a drink until I get a decent haul!”

“Might get another job first.” The runner righted the wheelbarrow and staggered up to the door of the train car, struggling to work it open. “I got options, you know.”

“It’s a
push
!” yelled Barnabas, snatching up the purple cotton and stuffing it surreptitiously into a hole in his hide.

“Mind yourself,” warned Leopold. “The lummox is an inveterate liar, as stuffed with deceit as his belly is with rags.”

“Indeed,” said Jacob, barely listening as he stepped through the Car’s silent scrutiny, sidling up to the bar and laying a small piece of cardboard on its surface. “Barman. A round on me. For everyone.”

Barnabas peered down at the circle and approximated a gasp: it was a coaster, printed in faded letters with the name of a popular aboveground liquor.

“A round on the gentleman!” called Barnabas, then stowed the offering and lined up the drinks before his announcement pulled in a crowd from the surrounding Tunnels. Jacob was briefly drowned in shouts of goodwill, then forgotten.

He made his play when the patrons were midway through their drinks. “Now, I’ve seen moose-heads hanging in bars,” Jacob said, “I’ve seen stuffed stags, bears, and boars. I’ve seen marlins mounted, and large-mouth bass, and here in the Tunnels I’ve seen mighty vultures nailed to the walls, but never in all my days, above nor below the ground, have I seen a dead man’s head displayed as a trophy. What, may I ask, was this melancholy fellow’s offense?”

Barnabas shifted on his stool, regarding Jacob and the subject of their discussion at once. Behind him, bolted to a plank of driftwood, hung the ragged shape of a severed head, white teeth gleaming among blackened gums, eyes squeezed shut against some final, intolerable vision, cracked skin painted long ago in black and white, with a frowning clown’s mouth and black tears below the eyes.

“This poor son of a gun didn’t do anything wrong,” said Barnabas. “This is Pierrot, the Crowded Car’s good luck charm! He isn’t much of a drinker now, but in his prime he could put a man with no stomach under the table.”

“Must be quite the story,” said Jacob, hoping to egg him on.

“What’s that? You want to hear the tale of the Head on the Wall? Gather ‘round, chums, it’s time!” A dutiful cheer erupted, and several corpses crowded around, pressing too close for Jacob’s comfort. “Now! Before this dive was mine, it was run by a lady so fine you’d think she was breathing if you’d had a few. Old Pierrot was a mooner, and he’d sit right where you’re leaning,” said Barnabas, waggling a sausage-shaped finger in Jacob’s direction, “night after night, just to watch her work. He’d feed her every corny line in the book. He’d overtip her with baubles he’d found in the river. He’d carve her initials into the rotten flesh on his arm. But did she pay him any mind?”

“No!” cried the crowd, which was filling in around him.

“Why, she never even noticed he was there! Pierrot was a kindly soul, but the kid didn’t have any game.” Barnabas lurched off of his stool, thumping his hands on the bar before Jacob and adopting a stage whisper. “Now you might not think it to see me, but I wasn’t always a titan of industry. Why, I used to be a drunk myself!”

“Now he’s a whole twenty minutes sober,” yelled a woman over Jacob’s shoulder. Barnabas gave her a why-I-oughtta, then took a theatrical swig.

“All right, so I’m still a drunk. But a lucky drunk! When the lady of the manor decided to give up the ghost, she tossed me the keys. She must’ve had a feeling I was never gonna leave! I was as grateful as a vulture after a battle, but that’s when Pierrot’s troubles started, for she left without telling the poor fella goodbye.” The crowd made a mournful noise. “Well, most of these reprobates could give a damn who’s serving their swill—”

“So long as they does it quickly!”

“—but Pierrot sure did. The poor fella hounded me for weeks. ‘Where’d she go, Barnabas? When’s she coming back, Barnabas? Did she leave a message, Barnabas?’ So I says, ‘Listen, buddy, she just went down the river to get herself a few supplies. But I promise you, she’ll be back!’ Then I sold the sucker another round. It’s my sacred oath to keep ‘em in their seats.”

“You always was a sacred oaf, Barney.”

“Har, har. Now, I had high hopes that Pierrot would let the whole thing drop, but he did not go gentle. No, he paid ahead for a year’s supply and went on the worst bender I’ve ever seen. He was singing serenades! He was crying on the bar! He was hugging folks!”

“Anything but hugging,” a man moaned into Jacob’s ear.

“Finally he said to me, ‘Barnabas, I’ve drunk all I can and I can’t drink no more. I’m going to stay right here until my true love comes back for me. Help me, Barney: pull this head of mine right off my neck and plant it up behind the bar, so that my face is the first thing she sees when she returns.’

“Now, who among us was here to witness what came next?” To Jacob’s disbelief, every hand in the crowd shot up. Barnabas guffawed. “That’s right, we’ve all been here forever!”

“Here’s to forever more!”

“And it sure seemed like Pierrot would go on forever, too. He was so persistent with his bellyaching and his caterwauling and his carrying-on that I bought myself a nice sharp sword just to shut him up. I laid the poor fella down on the bar, and I said, ‘Here we are, old friend! The knife in my paw and your neck on the block. Now, are you sure this is what you really want?’

“‘The next words I’ll say are
welcome back
,’ he cried, and he would not stop his crying until, whammo! I swung the cleaver down and lopped his head clean off!”

“Thought it was a sword?” screeched a woman from the crowd. “Wunnit a sword a moment ago?”

“Everyone’s a critic! Pierrot’s head tumbled down, mum as a floater’s toe, and that, I swear upon my grave, was the last we heard out of him, and the last we ever will. I had my runner carry his carcass up to the river, just as he’d requested, and I hung his
cabeza
right where it stands.

“Poor, poor Pierrot,” hollered the barman, lifting his mug in the air. “At least your broken heart is far from your mind!”

Joining in this familiar refrain, the crowd cheered wildly and drank to Pierrot’s health, as Jacob had no doubt they’d done dozens of times before.

“A fascinating tale!” said Jacob, setting down his drink as the corpses behind him dispersed. “Do I understand, then, that he’s hanging there voluntarily?”

“Well, of course he is,” said Barnabas, settling in on his stool. “He don’t owe any man a moment, least of all me.”

“Then if he wanted to, he could leave the bar for awhile?”

“The head is his own man. But before you go trying what’s been tried before, let me make it clear. The head is not a toy. The head is not a dartboard. The head is not a ball for playing games. The head is not for sale, not for any price, so don’t bother trying to add him to that broken-corpse collection you came in with. The head stays where he is unless he says he wants to get down. The head does not want to get down.

“But don’t take my word for it, let’s ask him. What do you say, Pierrot? Want to go walkies?”

The head was silent.

“I guess you’re not his type,” said the barman, polishing off his drink. “Say, thanks for the coaster. What a find! I remember this one fateful evening, up above, we uncorked two bottles of this stuff and somehow found ourselves—”

“I understand that a lot of oddballs must ask after Pierrot,” Jacob interrupted, “but I assure you I mean him no harm.

“My name is John Tanner, preservationist. My associates at the table and I are the vanguard of a research team seeking to achieve a renaissance of our noble art. We envision a future in which corpses like Pierrot will be able to walk again through voluntary partnerships with other disadvantaged dead.