Hell's Half Acre (7 page)

I touched her hair and whispered yes, I like you.

There is an obscure musical instrument called the theremin that produces sound without ever being touched. The player moves his hands in a slow circular motion between twin antennae thin as ghosts, calling forth eerie underwater noises akin to whalespeak. Brian Wilson was particularly fond of the theremin. He used it sparingly on the
Pet Sounds
album, I believe. Anyway, Jude and I have always managed to extract sound from each other, without ever touching the skin. And I think that’s love, or something like it.

John Ransom Miller is nowhere to be seen and I hear Jude’s voice in my head.

Do you believe in fate, she says. Or not?

I want to go back to that hotel room and I might need to bring her a strange man’s severed finger to gain entry. It sounds like a bad joke but now I’m anxious that I’ve lost him. I have lost the owner of the finger and I hurry through a demilitarized zone of postmodern Italian shoes. Gucci and friends. A green and black spaceman’s boot catches my eye and I pick it up by the laces and let it dangle. Prada. Nine hundred dollars and I laugh out loud, nervous. I don’t want to
hunt this man and I don’t want to lose him, either. I want to go back to the obscene hotel room. I want to get good and drunk. I twirl the boot and stare at it until mesmerized. I feel like a monkey confronted by the miracle of a yo-yo. A salesman glares at me and I put the boot down as Miller walks right past me.

I follow him. What the hell, right.

John Ransom Miller doesn’t drift and meander the way I do. He knows where he’s going and he obviously expects people to get the hell out of his way. He takes the escalator two steps at a time and bullies his way past a throng of Japanese tourists, then outside. This no-nonsense attitude of his gives me a sense of purpose and I hit the street at a cool ten yards behind him. There’s a nasty wind coming off the bay and I button my coat against it. I light a cigarette and wonder grimly if I will have to ration them, as I have no cash on me. Then I start to worry that Miller will hop into a yellow cab and leave me standing on the sidewalk, a scarecrow equipped with useless skin and teeth.

Options.

If he does get into a cab, then I could get into the next cab and tell the driver to follow him. This maneuver probably doesn’t work outside of the movies, but who knows. I might get a driver who has seen a lot of movies and secretly wishes his life was more interesting and I can always show him my gun when the subject of money comes up. But I don’t like this plan. It has been my experience that big-city cabdrivers are not to be fucked with and you never know when you will meet the one who has his backseat boobytrapped with poison gas and spring-loaded spikes and is in fact driving around all day just hoping to encounter someone like me, a stupid asshole with a gun.

I keep one eye glued to the back of Miller’s head and scan the street with the other. A half block away I see a stout, middle-aged guy buying coffee at an outdoor espresso hut. The guy wears gray pants, a dark blue blazer. Bright red suspenders under the jacket, white shirt. He wears glasses and his hair is long and wispy. The man is distracted and soft. I watch as he pays for the coffee and receives his change.

He puts his wallet into the left breast pocket of his jacket and proceeds toward me. I take a breath. I have done this more times than I can count, with mixed results. But this guy looks like an easy mark. He takes a drink of his coffee and cringes as if he has burned his tongue. He’s perfect. I look ahead to be sure that Miller is still in sight, then lower my head and stumble directly into the guy with red suspenders and that hot coffee pretty much explodes all over his white shirt and now I see that it’s not actually coffee but some kind of giant mocha with whipped cream, which of course not only burns him but makes a fine mess. The poor bastard yelps and nearly falls over, which is not at all what I want. A good pickpocket is fluid and graceful and easily forgotten. He doesn’t cause a scene.

Jesus, I say. I am so fucking sorry.

The guy is sputtering and I catch him by the lapels, as if to help him up. The mocha is dripping down the front of his pants in little chocolate rivulets and the guy moans in despair. No one pays us any attention and I glance up the street to see that Miller is disappearing around a corner. I apologize loudly and use my right hand to smear the whipped cream around on my guy’s chest and slip my left hand into his breast pocket, palming his wallet.

My favorite shirt, the guy says. My favorite shirt is ruined.

It’s not ruined, I say. Take it to your dry cleaner and it’s good as new.

I can’t, he says. I’m a communist.

What?

I don’t believe in dry cleaners. They are servants of the ruling class.

How about that. I just mugged a communist and I will eat my hat if his wallet is not empty. The last time I looked at a newspaper, the Russian government was running vodka into Canada and selling used office furniture for pennies. This guy has probably got moths in his pockets. I give his collar a brutal tug and he flails weakly at me. He is so mournful that I’m tempted to slap him around but I don’t have time for such indulgences.

You motherfucker. What kind of communist drinks a mocha with whipped cream?

The guy moans. I can’t help it, he says. I’m a victim of advertising. I walk past a Starbucks and I become a robot. Their mochas are divine.

The gods are laughing at me. I can hear them up there.

You’re a class traitor, I say.

The communist goes limp in my arms and I drop him like a sack of compost. He immediately curls up on the sidewalk and I imagine he will lie there until the stormtroopers come for him.

I
RUN LIKE THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN IS BEHIND ME
and come around the corner in time to see Miller walk into a drugstore maybe a block away. I take a breather and fade into the shadowy mouth of an alley to inspect the comrade’s sticky wallet.

Two dollars.

The wallet holds three yellowed clippings from a communist newsletter, two sad dollars and one expired library card. Leonard Brown, 2112 Valencia. I regard the dollars with a gassy sigh and lean back against a wall of red bricks to contemplate life. One man is soft in the belly and clumsy. He is confused. He drops three of his last five dollars on a capitalist mocha and is allowed a brief moment to savor the hot, bittersweet chocolate. Then another man, thin and hungry and only slightly less confused, comes out of nowhere and uses that mocha to fuck up the first man’s favorite shirt and thereby ruin his day.

For two useless dollars.

I could buy a pack of gum and god knows gum will be handy when I run out of cigarettes. I won’t go insane and I will have fresh breath and this shit should be funny. Jude will surely think so, tomorrow. John
Ransom Miller might think so. I leave the two dollars untouched and dart across the street to drop Leonard’s wallet into a mailbox.

What to do.

I can’t grab another wallet. My skull is still tingling from the first. I stare at the dark windows of the drugstore and wonder what the hell Miller is doing in there. I could use the gun to rob the store and maybe take him out in the crossfire, thus solving two problems at once. I could empty the cash register, then chop off his finger and hustle back to the King James. Then I would have plenty of time to get good and drunk before dark.

I feel a headache coming on. My vision goes black around the edges. Blackbird on the wing. I’m tired of walking. I’m tired of stink and vapors. I’m tired of California already. Winter is gone, a torn wing. The horror of Christmas lights in the month of May. The swab of yellow glimpsed through trees is nothing to fear, the yellow is nothing but the sun. I have to keep walking. But when did you last eat something, when did you become sick. Such a simple thing, to ruin the body from within. Child’s play, chutes and ladders. Easy to poison the blood, to wither the precious organs. The nervous system is consumed by Phineas and already the sense of smell is gone. Perhaps it’s time to kill yourself and soon, before madness sets in. The fingers and toes will be first to fall from the host. The shadow that walks beside you is neither man nor woman. The shadow is a friend, the shadow is your beloved. The shadow beside you is death.

Come on, boy. Don’t you know me.

Death is always on the wing.

Lucy. Henry. Eve. Moon. These are my dead. They died on my watch, all of them an arm’s reach away. The beautiful dead flutter beside me always, torn clothes I can never take off.

John Ransom Miller exits the drugstore, a small white paper bag in hand. Prescription drugs, maybe. I hope he has some good stuff, something I can steal from him later. He heads up the street and I follow him, still penniless. Three blocks pass and I start to wonder if the bastard is just walking home. Now he’s entered a BART station. I follow, wondering how far two dollars might have taken me. The machine that dispenses tickets informs me that for two dollars one can gain entry on BART, but not necessarily return. I am weirdly cheerful as I hop the turnstiles like the scumbag I never wanted to be and luckily the guard is off taking a crap somewhere, or shining his shoes.

The train isn’t crowded.

Windows streaked with fingerprints. Smoke blue carpet. There are so many empty seats that I feel indecisive and find myself standing across from Miller. He is too restless to sit. He stands with his feet wide apart and his hands in his pockets. The train lurches forward and as I reach for the bright steel safety bar, a smile edges across his face.

The smile disappears without recoil and maybe I imagined it.

I feel warm, though.

John Ransom Miller is staring at me, or through me. His eyes are unfocused and this is but the etiquette of trains. I tell myself to let my own eyes glaze over, to look at the flashing windows. I tell myself to close my eyes but I’m stubborn. I can’t help but stare at him. I am thinking of killing this man, unlikely as it sounds. His name is John Ransom Miller and he is the force behind a lot of evil doings in the velvet. I tell myself that if I kill him, none of what follows will come to pass.

I want to remember his face and at first glance, he is near perfect. He looks like a movie star. Upon close inspection though, he is not so perfect. He leans hard on the umbrella. His black, square-toed boots are fairly ruined. The leather is gouged in places and streaked with brown and yellow grime. He recently stomped through some nasty shit. His pale charcoal suit is a fine Italian wool and silk blend and probably cost five thousand dollars. But the jacket is soiled and wrinkled, as if he slept in it. The trousers are flecked with curious stains and his gray shirt is missing a button. He licks his lips once, then stops himself. His lips are red and cracked, as if he’s dehydrated. His left eye is bloodshot beneath the drooping eyelid, which makes the right eye appear very white in contrast. There is black stubble along his chin and upper lip.

John Ransom Miller played rough last night, obviously.

He slept on someone’s floor and went to work without changing clothes. He slept in the trunk of someone’s car. He’s having a nervous breakdown, or his marriage is fucked up. Or none of the above. He continues to stare through me and one thing is clear. He doesn’t look vulnerable.

Ten minutes pass, pushing twenty. I relax. And then two white guys come hopping down the rabbit trail and my heart begins to wiggle around like a spider caught in its own web because the headache ratchets up a notch and I have a vision of what’s going to happen, real or false. I know what’s going to happen.

Dirty clothes and expensive tennis shoes and fierce rabbit faces. They have the look of those Nazi rabbits in
Watership Down
, the ones that shredded the ears of their enemies. Those rabbits were tough motherfuckers but they were still rabbits, and they ran like rabbits when
that big black dog showed up to eat them in the end. They died like rabbits and now I watch these two human rabbits approach us from the rear of the car and I am not surprised when Miller moves his hips to force a little unnecessary physical contact with them.

John Ransom Miller is a black dog at heart.

The first rabbit is muscular and rubbery, with red hair that falls in greasy shanks. He stumbles into his friend, a bald skeletal kid with metal studs through his eyebrows and blackened lips. The two of them turn to stare at Miller with the splintered flashes of hate and love that usually mean violence is on the wing. The adrenaline kicks in and I feel the muscles tremble in my arms.

This is a scene from the dark side of my skull. This is a product of one of my seizures but it can’t be. This is random. This isn’t my drama and I tell myself to back off, to relax and let it happen. As if I’m watching television.

Miller smiles. How clumsy of me, he says.

His voice is a soft, metallic monotone. His voice is computer-generated and I believe these rabbits are fucked. The bald one wobbles a step back and glances fearfully at me. He knows it too, perhaps. I look at him without emotion. I don’t know him and I don’t care if he lives or dies. I truly don’t give a shit. The rubbery rabbit-boy sneers and tosses his red hair out of his eyes.

Every motherfucking day, he says. Every day I pass your narrow ass on this train and every day you bump me.

I know, says Miller. It’s weird, don’t you think?

You a faggot, says the rubbery guy. Or what.

He wants to be mean and dangerous, a human razor. He looks the part but his lips tremble slightly as he says these words. His little bald pal shifts from one foot to the next and the tension is like jelly. I’m thinking I might as well stick out my finger and taste this jelly as
the rubbery redhead smiles and leans forward and Miller steps into him, bringing his forearm around like the butt of a shotgun. A great purple scarf of blood billows from the redhead’s nose and hangs in the air like comic book art. He buries his face in his hands as the train rattles to a stop.

Miller shrugs. Excuse me, he says. But this is my stop.

The redhead is bent over, bleeding onto his own shoes. His little bald friend has already bolted from the train. The redhead tries to speak but his voice is far away, underwater. He is gurgling and I wonder if he is swallowing his own blood.