Jog On Fat Barry (16 page)

“Grace is having the baby,” he said. “Can you cover for her?”

“Yeah… sure,” I said back. “I’ll be right in.”

Chilly Doyle
would have to wait. I hopped into the shower, threw some clothes on and left. Two boys standing on the sidewalk outside my apartment building called me over when I stepped out of the lobby. Dark storm clouds were drifting across the sky.

“Look at this, mister,” one said. “It’s the craziest thing.”

There was a fish no bigger than a carrot-stick swimming around the shallow, murky water in a puddle.

“How’d it get in there?” I asked.

“Fell outta them clouds,” the other said, pointing up at the sky.

“Never knew no fish could live up in the sky,” the first one said.

“Motherfucker could live in a glass of water,” the other replied.

That messenger of God said I’d been selected to “clothe the naked.” What that meant exactly was still a mystery, although I was hoping it didn’t just mean unearthing the decomposing corpses of people buried in makeshift graves. I also didn’t understand what she meant when she said they’d be “drawn to me like moths to light.” The coffee at Eastman tasted dusty as always, but I still drank it as the principal ran through my schedule. I couldn’t remember how much time had passed since I last taught: maybe fifteen or sixteen weeks. Not that it mattered. Nothing ever changed. Grace taught first grade and I did too: had been for twenty years, but the pain in my back stopped me working full time a couple of years ago, and relief teaching at Eastman was pretty much all I did. Still, it kept me in the loop, and I did get some sense of usefulness doing what I could.

The hallways stank of ammonia and the stink hurt my eyes. Nasty smells were to be expected though because most children were messy little bastards. In any case, the school janitor was forever mopping up the halls, and, because of that, he was often derelict in his other duties. Hinges were seldom greased and were forever squeaking. But this dereliction of duty proved providential, because if the storeroom door hadn’t squeaked, I wouldn’t have turned when I did, or seen Ruby Wright slinking out of the storeroom looking scared and bewildered.

Up until that day, the janitor had always been invisible. He was, of course, always there, pushing a broom or cleaning windows, but I never really saw him. I guess, like everyone else, I’d never really looked. I now saw he had a tattoo on his forearm. I saw it as he reached for the door to pull it shut. Ruby had begun to run when I called out. I did start after her but then changed my mind. I tried opening the storeroom door but it was locked. I held my ear against it. Things were being moved about on the other side and something was burning. The air was sharp and sour. I spoke to the janitor through the door. I told him to let me in; said the police were on their way, but he did nothing. I started to beat my fists against the door. A few moments later I began to kick it.

“Open the fucking door,” I yelled, and kicked even harder.

The door finally gave and I stepped inside. Containers of toilet paper, industrial cleaners, brooms, mops and buckets lined the walls. The janitor was standing at the far end of the room holding a book of matches. Something smouldered on the ground by his boots, but there was another smell in the room that immobilized me. I was frozen to the spot.

“I know what you’ve done,” I stammered.

“You’re not meant to be in here,” he shot back.

I began to vomit: had no control of my stomach. That’s when the Janitor pounced. I tried to get out of his way but couldn’t move a muscle, and he caught me with a wild haymaker that sent me reeling.

According to the International Society for the Study of Pain, physiological pain is subjective, which may be true. I don’t know. I haven’t a doctorate in psychology and wouldn’t argue the point. What I do know though, is that while the janitor was kicking the crap out of me, I didn’t feel anything. I was on the floor; could feel his fists pummelling me, but wasn’t really there to feel it. I was in another place; watching a movie. Someone said it was called
My World is a Fucking Nasty Place
and was being shown just for me. It showed kids: kids in apartment buildings and in orphanages and in schools and in public toilets and in hospitals and in churches and in shopping malls and in abandoned buildings and in campgrounds. Showed them being raped and beaten and murdered. And I couldn’t feel the janitor kicking shit out of me, because I was too busy feeling them, their anguish; their pain: the treachery and destruction of youth. I was unable to hear my screams because I only heard theirs: the fallen and forsaken. I felt like I was drowning. Or maybe I was being baptised. I was soaked through. Sodden in tears of abandonment of misery. And suddenly, just like that, a desire to right every wrong committed against those children began rushing through me. This crazy determination to avenge every one of them rose up from the pit of my soul. I felt alive. I was born again. And an unequivocal chorus of some 10,000,000 children began to chant my name.

There were 1170 reported and convicted rapes committed in the City of Los Angeles in 1992: 748 in 2004. The police say crime was down in 2005, but arrests to date were up 3.2% from 2004, and 10.5% from 2003. Crime could be up or down: statistics and God demanded you put your trust in them. That’s what Shanley had done, and he showed no surprise when he saw me in the hospital. My left eye had ballooned and closed up; there was a second laceration on my lip; the stitches were missing from the first; my left incisor was missing; I had six fractured ribs; industrial bleach had burnt 17% of my body; 28% of it was badly bruised, but my back felt great and was pain free for the first time in fifteen years.

Shanley told me it wasn’t the first time the janitor had done it: he’d been arrested for molesting a girl in Oakland, and spent five years in Victorville. I was surprised, and dismayed. I thought some kind of process was in place to stop things like this from happening again. Shanley could only shrug and tell me that was what he knew. But they did get a positive DNA match on Wisdom for the dead girl in the woods, he said. Her DNA matched the knife in his apartment, and Wisdom had plea-bargained for 12 to 15 years. Moments later, a doctor walked into the room. He put some CT scans up on a light box and looked at them for a minute or two.

“You’re good to go once your lip’s stitched,” he said. “But go see an otolaryngologist for that ear, and a periodontist for that tooth.”

I asked him for Demerol, saying I took it for spondylosis. He said I didn’t have spondylosis, tapping the scans before he left. I got up; looked at my spinal column. The lumbar region was flawless.

“That can’t be right,” I said.

“Did you catch the janitor in the act, or just see it all inside your head?” Shanley asked.

“I smelt it,” I said. “He had this stink. A mixture of shit, and piss, and vomit, and putrefied flesh. And I saw something. I saw him dangling at the end of a rope. He’s going to hang himself. But we can stop him because I know when and where he’s going to do it.”

Shanley stopped playing with his puzzle for a moment.

“Let him hang,” he said. “He fucks little girls.”

“Okay,” I said. “But there was another thing.”

“What other thing?” Shanley asked.

“I saw kids being tortured and raped and murdered. And people chopping them into bits; throwing them into dumpsters; burying them in backyards; dropping them down old wells.”

“Do you think you could ID the perps?” Shanley asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I remember every face.”

Shanley stared at me for a moment.

“What was it like?” he asked. “Seeing things like that?”

“Like a part of me was dying with them,” I answered.

Shanley continued to stare until the fear had left his eyes. Then he said I looked like shit, but there was a twinkle in my eye he hadn’t noticed before. And he was about to say something else, but went back to his ball-puzzle instead. Not that there was any need for him to speak. I knew what he was going to say. And he knew I knew it. Things were about to get ugly.

Of the thirty-eight people that Shanley arrested over the following week, thirty-three were adults and five were juveniles; thirty-five were male and three were female. The brutal nature of the crimes so outraged the public, pandemonium swept through the city, and Shanley was mobbed wherever he went. But he always kept me out of it. I was the informer, his inside man with no name.
Fox News
was first to call me
The Exposer
. O’Reilly told his viewers there was a soapbox at the end of every street waiting for a prophet to climb onto, and he wondered out loud if that prophet just might be me. Politicians ranted; preachers wailed; opportunists rose to the fore. Suckers were born every minute, and you didn’t need to own a circus to know it.

The country was ravenous and gorged itself on an assortment of molestation and murder. The hue and cry of retribution deafened the wise and swayed the good. Demonstrations spilt onto courthouse steps; fingers pointed; tongues wagged as the city got turned upside down inside out. A loving husband and father of three shot another man dead outside a liquor store because he overheard the man say to his friend: “If twelve-year-old girls are old enough to bleed, then twelve-year-old girls are old enough to butcher.”

That month of May was a blur; days drifted into nights drifted back into days. I’d sometimes sleep for an hour or maybe two, but seldom more. I never washed, rarely shaved; ate every other day, if I ate at all. There was too much work to do. No sooner had one child molester been brought to justice, than another stepped up to take their place. I recorded names on sheets of paper; gave precise details of the crimes committed, and Shanley had them arrested. They were booked, arraigned, and held (for the most part) without bail before the whole process began again. It was endless. A panel beater was arrested in Boyle Heights; a speech pathologist in Pasadena; a retired compliance manager in Silver Lake; a sprinkler fitter in Inglewood; a financial controller in Beverly Hills. The police unearthed them everywhere: in trains; on buses; in supermarkets; at restaurants. I was both exhausted and exhilarated at the same time. And there was the other thing. At the end of that first week, all my bruises disappeared and my hair turned silver. By the end of the second, all my burns and lacerations had healed, and there was no evidence my ribs were ever fractured to begin with. When the third was over, I was thirty pounds lighter but never felt weak or tired. I felt no pain whatsoever if I knocked a leg, or burned a hand, or took a tumble. And my back never played up again.

Shanley, on the other hand, wasn’t doing so well. He was plagued with ulcers; his bowels were irritable; kept getting cluster headaches. He had no time to himself. There was always someone who needed to see him. And if that someone wasn’t the mayor, or the chief of police, or the district attorney, they were from the State Assembly, the House of Representatives, or the Senate. He made guest appearances on
Dr. Phil
,
Larry King, The
O’Reilly Factor
, and
The Tonight Show
; was offered multi-picture deals with Universal, TriStar, and Paramount. Major corporations made endless offers to win his endorsement. He said he’d had no idea there was so much money in misery, or the ends that people would go to for a Kodak moment. I told him time and again I hated what the media were calling me.