Everybody Scream! (14 page)

“That’s terrible,” Del said, half sincerely, though he would have liked to have known what the teenaged Walpole was running away for. “I don’t think Garnet would have gone that far, from my knowledge of him.”

“Well, you many very well be right. He was discharged, though.”

“That’s the pattern with Car Thirteen, he’s told me. The force puts their toughest men in Thirteen on Forma Street to keep the people scared, but it’s a real war and the forcers have to fight rough. So after enough complaints and charges and stink from civil groups and lawyers and whatnot the force discharges the man or men and starts over. Once you’re detailed to Car Thirteen you know your career is in its last stage…it may be months or it might be five years if you’re real lucky. But the force martyrs its Thirteen boys. I guess Mitch liked the challenge but he wasn’t looking forward to the boot–he managed three years on the street. He gets a nice pension.”

“And he must have so many notches on his gun handle it doesn’t have a handle,” twinkled Eddy Walpole. “I heard that some Thirteen boys take trophies; ears or hands or even heads.”

“I’d say that’s mostly talk. Maybe they start it themselves.”

“You ever kill anyone, Del?” croaked a voice from deeper in the cool blue shade of the tent.

Again Del strained a smile. “Thousands. Does bad breath count?”

Roland LaKarnafeaux chuckled softly. His courageous lawn chair squeaked as he shifted his bulk. He was tall and huge, the great fat belly whale-like in appearance sheathed in its tight black t-shirt. Over that he wore his metallic purple windbreaker with the sleeves pushed up thick arms on which a dragon and a panther stalked through the underbrush of his forearm hair. His hair was long, frizzy, an even mix of white and black, his thick beard more white than black but eyebrows more black than white. Shiny black eyes, pouched and crinkled, his brow furrowed. He looked like a benevolent Santa Claus on vacation, a cigarette in one hand and a plastic cup of beer in the other. With his granny glasses low on his nose, he looked like he was waiting for someone…the baboons, maybe, or Del…to come sit in his lap. Though the shine to his eyes was dull compared to Eddy’s twinkle, the constant little smile to the lips was oddly identical. It was this smile Del hated most, even more than the flaunted purple windbreaker.

“No, really, have you ever? I’m curious,” LaKarnafeaux drawled in his molasses-thick monotone. It sounded drunk, but the eyes were a bit too focused. Some kind of drug maybe, or just too many through the years, but much of the glow in his eyes was currently a sober light, and he studied Del.

“No,” Del admitted, his joking manner drained away already. “I’m lucky I never had to.”

“You are lucky,” said Eddy. “And of course you’ve been insulated a long time, being who you are. You’ve had guys like Garnet to watch out for you, be your walls. That’s a blessing. I read somewhere that three out of five Paxton males will have killed a person either as a murder or in defense by the age of fifty.”

“Well, I’m only thirty-seven, so I still have plenty of time.”

Eddy laughed, and LaKarnafeaux chuckled softly in the shadows.

“I’m forty-three,” chuckled LaKarnafeaux, who looked ten years older at least, “and I killed my first person when I was twelve.”

“Show him the bat, Karny,” said a boy of about seventeen who was sitting on a cooler back by the van, beer bottle in hand. He wasn’t recognized by Del; just a parasite.

“The bat?” said Del, feigning interest.

“Oh, ah…ah…”

“Cod,” said the boy.

“Sorry–Cod. Cod, go in the camper and get that bat.”

The boy set down his beer, stepped up into the spacious hover vehicle.

“Pull up a chair–beer?” offered Walpole.

“I’m all set, thanks.”

Meanwhile a third man had appeared, emerging from the van lighting a cigarette. Mortimer Ficklebottom, he called himself. Skinny, long-haired, and Del had never seen him without his rumpled black top hat or his black vest with rawhide fringe down to the ripped knees of his jeans. He wore granny glasses also. It was a thing of fashion, Del didn’t doubt, since these men certainly had the money for corrective medical treatments, but he also wondered if the various drugs they took had a damaging effect on their vision. Of LaKarnafeaux and his men, only Johnny Leng ever seemed somewhat vital or fit…and then, not electric, just blandly purposeful.

“Nice suit,” said Ficklebottom. He carried an aura of seaweed smoke; it still wafted in the air from when the van door had opened.

“Thanks.” Del heard a young girl’s voice coughing hoarsely in the van.

“Here ‘tis.” The boy Cod leaped down from the van. In his hands he carried a baseball bat made from a blue-colored metal, scratched with silver nicks and gouges, with a black grip. He handed it to the seated LaKarnafeaux with both hands almost as if reverently presenting him Excalibur.

“Mm.” LaKarnafeaux sucked out the last of his cigarette, flicked the stub, handled the bat with his smile fond and pink in the nest of frizzy beard. “Yup…here it is…Exhibit A.”

“What happened?” Del felt obliged to ask the wizened storyteller.

“Well,” began Eddy Walpole, surprising Del into turning his head, “Karny used to live with an aunt and her husband in a little suburb of Diamondcrest–a beautiful place, but beautiful places seem to have the worst slums, ever notice? It was a tough little shack town by a moss marsh…”

“Everything was moss,” LaKarnafeaux interrupted. “In the corners, moss in your toilet, all in the closets. You could wake up with moss starting to grow in your mouth. Moist dark places,” he chuckled-wheezed. “I ended up sleeping with a painter’s mask on.”

“You couldn’t kill it, very persistent,” said Eddy. “Anyway, a neighborhood kid had this big mutant dog–no hair, all bald wrinkles, a real monster. One day Karny was down under a sand cliff batting pebbles out into the marsh when this dog came along and started growling at him. Karny swung the bat at it and pounded the dirt to scare it off but that made it lunge.”

LaKarnfeaux chuckled and wagged his head, pulling at his beard, bat across his knees.

Walpole said, “So Karny smacked it, brought it down. He was a rough boy, lemme tell ya. Couple more bonks and he kills it–and who should come along but the dog’s owner. Now this kid was fourteen and he was no slouch either–not in that neighborhood. He was not too pleased about Fido, to say the least.”

LaKarnafeaux was red from his chuckling, pulling more and more on his beard.

“The kid took out a knife and they went at it. Karny caught him a good one on the wrist and he dropped the knife, and then a few good swings and it was over. Nobody had seen. The dog and the boy went into the moss, and by the time they were dragged out they were slime balls. Nobody ever questioned Karny about it. Twelve years old.”

“And I still have my bat,” said LaKarnafeaux, using it as a cane to help him pull his groaning hulk up out of his lawn chair. Cod skipped over to take his arm and help but Mortimer waved him back. Del saw the word
Dozer
embroidered in gold on the back of the purple jacket. There were clothing racks set up for display outside the tent, with black
Dozer
t-shirts for men and women, flame-eyed skulls and monsters and demons adorning their fronts, Mukas and Flemm and Sputum and Sphitt t-shirts, and clear rubbery jackets made from the leather of giant amphibians, and of course the bulky, many-zippered white leather jackets favored these days by most
Dozer
types. Two boys of about fourteen going through the t-shirts had stopped their browsing to listen intently to LaKarnafeaux’s story. He grunted, “It’s like a good luck charm…whatever. A piece of nostalgia.” He held the bat up loosely in one fist, more a nightstick or truncheon to him now than a bat, and smiled over at Del.

“You had a rough life,” Del said, at a loss.

“It’s been interesting. Ups and downs.”

“Yours hasn’t been all ups either, has it?” Eddy twinkled.

“No.”

“See? We’re all the same. Fundamentally.”

“Where’s the lovely wife this afternoon?” drawled Mortimer Ficklebottom, popping a tab on a can of beer. He motioned to the two boys at the clothing racks; they came to him grinning. Passed them each a beer and they thanked him eagerly. “Last night, boys–enjoy.”

Del watched the boys, breathing slowly. “I don’t know where she is. Around.”

“You’re a lucky man. She is something.”

“Thank you.”

“She is that,” agreed Eddy Walpole. None of them had ever had a real girlfriend around, from Del’s observation, except for Johnny Leng for the first week or so of the season but she had disappeared. Sometimes a dourly pretty woman with two children had come around but Del didn’t know to whom she and they belonged, if anybody.

“Nice being married?” asked Eddy

“To her it must be,” smiled Mort.

“It has its ups and downs,” Del said.

LaKarnafeaux chuckled, leaning the metal bat against the side of the camper. “But you wouldn’t undo it.”

“No,” said Del.

“Sure. It’s like kids. It’s tough, but you wouldn’t give them away.”

“You have kids?”

“Oh yeah,” answered Eddy for him. “A son fourteen and a daughter eleven in Diamondcrest.”

“Good kids,” drawled LaKarnafeaux in a fond monotone.

“No kids?” asked Eddy

“No.”

“Why not, with her?” Mort grinned.

“We move around too much. We…ah…I dunno. Need to be more settled.”

“Why have kids anyway?” mused Cod. “They just weigh you down.”

Ficklebottom laughed and slapped him on the back. “You tell ‘im!”

The van door slid open again, again releasing a genie of iodine smoke, and down stepped an exceptionally pretty teenage girl with wild dark blonde hair streaked with a few tendrils of pink, wearing only pink sweat pants. Her breasts were heavy for a teenager, and she could see to it with a little money that they never sank too much, lost their fresh ripeness. She sneered over at Del with a disgruntled twisty pout which looked like it might be her constant expression, eyes half-lidded. Sixteen, seventeen?

“There’s my wife,” Mort snickered, swatting her on the bottom. She grumbled groggily and went to LaKarnafeaux the vacationing Santa Claus, who had lowered himself wheezing back into his lawn chair, a fresh beer and cigarette in hand. The girl curled cat-like in his lap, drawing her legs up tightly, tucking in her head. “Aww!” teased Mortimer.

“Shh,” smiled LaKarnafeaux, stroking her tangled mane.

“She’s a sweet one,” Eddy smiled.

“Cute,” Del said quietly. Cod stared enviously, hunger…a dog waiting to be tossed a scrap. It wasn’t inconceivable. Del had seen some real tasty females around this tent, and with some of the biker gangs that came through, many of them ranging in their teens. Not often as stunning as the models or model-like beauties he’d seen on the arms of business executives in Kodju silk, or Chauncy Carnal and his ilk (riding in their luxury cars, sports cars, instead of on the backs of
Dozers
), but still very impressive. It sickened him.

“Hey, Karny!” Two boys had shambled up to the tent, the speaker wearing a black wool ski cap with a pom-pom, a Sphitt t-shirt and black sweat pants with the trapdoor open in back.

“Later, later.” Eddy shooed them away like flies. The boys skulked away, tossing glances back at Del.

“Fucking twinkledinks,” Mortimer sniggered. “We should take that jacket back–bad publicity!”

One of the two had been wearing a purple
Dozer
jacket. A good number of them hung on the clothing racks.
Dozer
didn’t market them–LaKarnafeaux had them made specifically for him, Mitch had informed Del. A kind of trademark. His own line of clothing, it seemed, despite
Dozer’s
embroidered name and logo.

“Let them be,” benevolent LaKarnafeaux wheezed sleepily, still stroking his napping kitten.

“I should go,” Del said. “I’m holding up business.”

LaKarnafeaux’s eyes lifted over the tops of his granny glasses, met Del’s, containing that glow again behind the black fog. Del regretted his jab for a moment, embarrassed, but then didn’t. The bearded man said, “Don’t worry–stay and have a beer. It’s last night.”

“No thanks–I don’t really drink.”

“Your lovely wife came by a few nights this season and stopped in to have some beer, with Johnny Leng and the rest of us,” said Mortimer Ficklebottom, smiling. He was twisting a piece of rawhide fringe around and around a finger.

Del stared a long moment at him. Inside he groped blindly for a casual response. They were having fun, watching him squirm–he was the boss, in their perception. The authority, with Mitch as his fist, the police. He was Kodju silk and they were white leather. He had had fame, and money, but he had never killed a man, as if he had thus earned his power dishonestly. They didn’t respect him. He might have respected them if they respected him, all else aside. Not liked them, but at least respected their individuality. What was it Fickleasshole was prodding at now–his wife’s drinking habits? Or more of his sexual innuendoes? Either way, Del bubbled with lava inside, but held onto a cool facade. Waxen but cool.