Multiplex Fandango (21 page)

Ronnie’s mouth had fallen open sometime during the telling.
It seemed to take a while for it to close, but when it did, there was a new cast to the young man’s jaw.
He swallowed, his prominent Adam’s apple diving in and back out.

“Does that sound like something you’d like?” Harry asked.

Ronnie shook his head.

Although Harry looked perceptibly pleased at the answer, he was becoming frustrated with the boy’s lack of commitment.
“What then?
Really, Ronnie, I don’t have all day.”

“The ear.”

“What’s that?” Harry asked.

“I said the ear,” Ronnie repeated.

“What about it?” Harry asked.

“I remember somewhere that it only takes seven or eight pounds of pressure for someone to rip off an ear.”

Harry felt the
Sahara
enter his mouth.
He licked his lips, wondering from what dark and dreary corner of the boy’s mind this idea had sprung.
Still, he’d made the vow.
“I heard something like that, too,” Harry heard himself saying.

“If I was to take off an ear, you could always put it back on,” Ronnie mused.

Harry blinked.
“I’m sure they could at a hospital...as long as I had the ear,” he added.

“I wouldn’t do anything with it.
I’d just take it off.”
The young man smiled grimly.
“If that’s what I decided to do.”

Harry tried to see through the reflecting squares of Ronnie’s lenses, but he might as well have been trying to peer through a mirror with the success he had.

“Now wait a minute.
You have got to stick with something, Ronnie.
Name it and commit to it.
We could be here all night going through the catalogue of things that could be done.”
He shook his head.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you found a good one.
It’s painful as hell, it’s totally disfiguring if I can’t sew it back on, and it’s something you can live with.”

Ronnie seemed to agree with the argument.
He leaned against a gravestone and began to untie one of his shoes.
After a minute, he rose with a black Converse high-top in his hand.
He began to murmur as he pulled the lace free.

“What are you doing?
What are you saying?” Harry asked.
Then he glanced to the dark.
“What is he saying, Enrique?”

“Math,” the Salvadoran replied.

“What?”

“He’s saying math.”

“How do you
say
math?”
Harry shifted from one foot to the other.
“What’s Enrique talking about, Ronnie?
You mumbling math?”

“Physics actually,” Ronnie said.
He dropped the shoe and slid his foot into it, fighting for balance.
Then he held the string out in front of him with both hands.
“Hooke’s general law of mechanics states that that stress is directly proportional to strain.
Although Hooke’s paradigm referred to coiled springs, using the zero-length spring and a two-dimensional stress state instead of a three-dimensional stress state, I can figure the force necessary to remove your ear with a non-elastic linear object.”

“The string?”

“Exactly.”

“And Hook’s Law tells you how to do this?”

“If applied correctly.”
Ronnie gestured towards a tombstone with a flattened top edge.
“Lay across this,” he said.

Harry looked at it and felt his knees weaken.
That Hooke was one nasty fucking physicist.
He took a step forward and felt his resolve weaken.
Was this how it felt?
Was this what all of his victims felt when the inevitable was presented to them?
It was as if karma were dancing spider fingers along his spine.
He gulped and walked over to where Ronnie indicated.

“Now lay your chest over here and balance it.
Yep. Face down just like that.”

Harry lay across the top of the tombstone, the rock cutting into his chest.
He faced the ground but couldn’t see it.
Ronnie began to tie wrap the shoe string around Harry’s left ear, then tie it off with a granny knot.

“That should do it,” Ronnie said.

Harry wanted to say something, but a fist of bile clogged his throat.
His eyes watered as he fought to stay balanced.
He struggled against the urge to run, not because he knew Enrique would bring him back, but because of the vow and what it meant to Harry.

“So I guess we count to three,” Ronnie said.
He held each end of the string in each hand.
His arms were out stretched and his knees were flexed.
“One... two... three!”

Ronnie swung his arms down and threw his weight to the ground.

Harry screamed and flew ass over head, landing with his back on the ground.
His ear burned as white stupendous pain shot through his neck and head.
He reached up and felt for it and was surprised to find it still attached.
The pain had begun to die down and he felt himself breathe.

“Damn.
I don’t know what happened,” Ronnie said.

“What?”

“I guess I better try it again?”

“Try it again?”

“Of course.
I didn’t do it right the first time.”

“But—“

“You told me to be committed, Harry and now I’m committed.
Get up and bend over the grave.
I promise I’ll get it right this time.”

Harry crawled to his knees and found his feet.
He stood shakily and made his way back to the tombstone.
He wished it was over with.
Having to do it again was worse than the first time.
Now he knew how badly it was going to hurt, and worse if he did it right.

But he bent over the grave in the same position and allowed the boy to count one more time.
Harry thought he’d puke when the boy got to three, and then he was flying through the air again.
The pain was once again cataclysmic, Armageddon rainbows of pain firing through his head.
But in the end, his ear was still attached.

He rolled over and clawed his way to his knees.

“What the fuck, Ronnie?”

Ronnie leaned against the tombstone and tapped his front tooth with his forefinger.
“I don’t get it.
My equation is just right.
What could it be?”

It was then that Harry noticed the playful lilt to the boy’s rhetorical question.
What could it be my ass
, thought Harry.
The boy knew.
This was all part of his game.
At that point, Harry almost smiled.

And they tried it again with the same result.

And this time Harry did puke...from pain and fear and giddiness.

“Aha!” Ronnie said finally.
“It’s my fulcrum!”

“Your what?”

“Fulcrum.
Your chest is all wrong.”

Harry felt himself being helped to his feet and led back to the tombstone.

“Here, let me have your jacket,” Ronnie said.

Harry struggled out of his lightweight denim jacket and passed it to Ronnie.
The young man took it and folded it several times until it presented a square.

“Here, hold this against your head,” Ronnie said.

Then he led Harry down so that his forehead was resting on the square of denim which was balanced on the top of the tombstone.
Had he not the fabric as a pillow, his head would be roughly scraped by the stone.
Harry couldn’t help but appreciate the thoughtfulness of the gesture.

“There.
Now I have it right,” Ronnie said.
“Hold still.
This might hurt a bit, champ,” Ronnie whispered.

Harry remembered hearing those words somewhere before.
Then he remembered.
He’d said them to the boy just as he’d snipped off the pinkie.

Then Ronnie fell before him.

Harry felt a great tug from the side of his head followed by so much pain as to fill the vacuum of space and time and the entirety of history.
Harry screamed something that came from his toes, bile and spittle shooting free as he gasped and sobbed and created a new agony-based language.

Then he felt a cold icy warmth as the blood began to gush.

Ronnie stood, holding Harry’s ear on the end of the string.
He swung it several times like a pocket watch then let it fall to the ground.

“Better stop the bleeding, Champ, or it’s going to be worse than it has to be.”

Harry swooned as he remembered that he’d said those very same words to the kid as well.
Ronnie had a good memory.
Even better, he had the killer instinct.
Harry had made the boy into his image and he wasn’t so far off.

Harry somehow managed to get to his feet.
He used his jacket to sop the blood as he pressed it against the hole in the side of his head.
He picked up the ear and pushed it into his mouth.
He gagged for a moment but he’d heard this done once before.
He had to keep the ear moist.
If it dried out, it would be no good.
His body heat and saliva would help in the short term.

“So long, Champ,” the boy said from the dark.

Harry waved blindly and got into his car.
It took him a moment to figure out how to work it through the pain, then he shoved it into reverse, took out a couple of stones with the rear bumper, and then shifted into drive.
Soon he was roaring like hell’s fury straight to
Lordsburg
Hospital
which was no more than ten miles away.

As the lights of the city came into view, with the frogs wailing in the night, Harry allowed himself the reminder that there were six more phones to be answered, which meant six more
come to Jesus meetings
.
He wondered what he’d look like when it was all said and done.
He wondered if he was even making a difference.

***

Story Notes: The geography of this story is where I live now in Arizona. After writing a lot of stories about L.A. and the South, I wanted to begin writing some located here. After I read
The
Straw Men
and
The Intruders
b
y Michael Marshall I was intrigued by the idea that there can be something going on in a story like that akin to Clive Barker’s
The Great and Secret Show
. Almost as if the crime thriller had become an epic crime thriller. I decided to take that idea on a small scale and create a person whose job it was to create sociopaths and serial killers. Then I wondered how is it that someone would go about doing such a thing? This unabashedly violent piece of crime fiction is my answer to that.

NOW SHOWING ON SCREEN 9

Low Men Weeping

Starring homeless heroes Homer and Hemingway

“Totally destroys the idea of randomness in the world.”

–
L.A.
Times Weekender

Filmed in High Definition

Only when the morning winds shift landward and the sun rises above the marine layer to beat down upon a city prismed by smog and the neon aftermath of another
Los Angeles
night, do the Low Men emerge to journey across the land.
Not the smirking revenants of the evening, nor the drifters waiting for an easy mark, nor the beggars shouting Jesus Saves to whomever will take a moment to listen, but the Low Men
—
those contemptible few who tread a higher path, balancing salvation and redemption with the cruelty of necessity as they divine the trajectory of our lives.

***

The flat face of the trashcan lid ate the man's smile in a bright detonation of blood and mucous.
He crashed into the side of the wall, then fell in a heap.
Three other men and a woman ignored the fallen man as they scrambled to find a better position.
The hunger in their eyes supplanted any kinship as they gauged how best to defend, how best to attack.

Hemingway twisted the lid just in time to block a thrown bottle meant for Homer's head, shifting to protect his blind friend behind him.
Homer placed his hand in the middle of the larger man's back to keep track of where Hemingway moved.

Suddenly the woman lunged forward, the tip of a broken umbrella slicing millimeters away from Hemingway's abdomen.
He kicked out.
The woman slinked out of his reach, then lunged back like a dog.
She picked up another bottle from the alley floor as one of the men decided that he'd had enough.
He turned and ran, his soiled raincoat flapping behind him.

"Stay behind me, dammit!" Hemingway screamed, as he backed down the alley several feet, fearful for his best friend's safety.

Try staying behind someone you can't see
, came the thoughts of the blind man.

"Then grab hold."

You say it ruins your timing.

"We won't have any
timing
with you dead."

The remaining three came at once.
Hemingway spun, his taller frame shielding his smaller friend.
"Which one is he?"

They're moving too quickly. I can't get a fix.

One of the men rushed Hemingway with a length of rebar, the dark metal easily capable of smashing his head or skewering him to the spine.
Three steps and the man swung the metal in a sideways arc.

"Oh Hell," cried Hemingway, pushing Homer roughly to the ground.
The larger man then sidestepped away from the blow, catching the length of metal under his arm as the energy of the swing dissipated.
He growled at the pain of the impact, grasped the ridged rebar rod with his hand, and ripped the metal free from the grip of his attacker.

"Give it up and we'll let you go," snarled the woman.
She might have been beautiful once, but meth had been an unforgiving mate.

Tell her we don't have anything.

"We don't have anything," replied Hemingway.

"You have more than me," she hissed, then launched herself at Hemingway.

Holding the trashcan lid with one hand and the rebar in the other, he felt like a knight from the days of old.
He caught her in the side of the head with the lid.
She gasped as her eyes rolled skyward.
She tried to grab the trashcan lid as her balance deserted her.
He swept her feet out from under her with the rebar.
When she hit the ground, her head bounced twice.
Her sneer slipped away with her consciousness.

Now there were only two left.

"Which one?" asked Hemingway.

The one on the left.

"Are you sure?"

Definitely.

Hemingway roared as he leaped to attack the man on the right.
The rebar whipped round and round through the air then came down in an arc barely missing the target.
The man lurched backwards, stumbling on the alley debris until his back struck the wall of a building.
He brought his arms up to ward off a blow.

Hemingway roared again, this time banging the rebar against the trashcan lid like a demented berserker.
The man bolted.

Gak!

Hemingway spun and discovered Homer on the floor of the alley, the remaining man's hands throttling his neck.
Both men's eyes bulged
—
one from the effort to kill, the other from the effort to live.
Tossing his weapons aside, Hemingway dove across the separating space, desperate to save his friend.

The big man caught the attacker in a body block, his weight carrying the man from Homer to the alley floor.
They tumbled into a brace of trashcans.
Hemingway scrambled to his knees before the other could recover.
Larger and well-heeled in the fighting arts, it wasn't but a moment until Hemingway had the smaller desperate man in a headlock.
The man thrashed for several seconds, grasping at Hemingway's iron grip.
By the time he'd began to punch Hemingway, he was too weak to affect any reasonable power.
His struggles swiftly grew weaker with each passing moment.
Ten seconds later it was all over.

Hemingway tossed the unconscious man aside and crawled to where Homer lay gasping.
He helped his friend to his feet then examined the bruising around the neck.
Although the damage was slight, the muscles would ache for several days.

"You okay?" asked Hemingway.

My own fault.
This is what happens when you follow the directions of a blind man.

Hemingway understood, but as always, there was nothing that could be done.
Homer only saw the target in his mind's eye.

"Now what?" asked Hemingway.

Place the letter
.

He reached into his back pocket and brought out an envelope that had been folded in half.
He knelt before the unconscious man and slid the letter deep into a side pocket in the man's jacket.
The letter identified the man by his name, date of birth, and place of birth.
The oracles had dreamed of him the night before.
Although they couldn't see that far into the future, they knew that he'd be of help to them sometime later on.
The letter would come in handy when the man was hit by a taxi this afternoon.
A record's search at the hospital would indicate that the wife he'd left five years ago had died, leaving his son without a family.

Half an hour later, after cleaning themselves in the back of a Tommy Burger fast food restaurant, Homer and Hemingway stood on a street corner.

"Hey Homer?" asked Hemingway watching the traffic rush by.

Homer's hand rested on the larger man's shoulder, as they both waited for the light to change.
Yeah?

"What does it sound like right now?"

Why do you care?

"Because I miss all the sounds that other people hear," said Hemingway.

How can you miss something you've never had?

"I could leave you in the middle of the cross-walk, and let you answer that question."

Father Jim had long ago explained to Homer and Hemingway that their symbiotic relationship was proof that a higher power existed, for who but a divine spirit would provide the trajectory of friendship between a deaf boy and a blind boy.
Father Jim always spoke of trajectories, as if the world were a physics equation, and the answers formulaic.
Nothing was by chance.
There
w
as no thing as accident.
Everything
is
an intersection of time, space and physical objects.
Everything
has
a trajectory.

Now, middle-aged and closer than any married couple could ever be, Hemingway and Homer stood at the crossroads of Sunset and La Brea.
One stared across the street at the red light waiting for the light to change.
The other had never seen the color red.
One led, and the other followed.
One spoke, the other listened.
Such was the life of Homer and Hemingway.
Named by Father Jim at the Lost Angels Children's Home, the pair had arrived within days of each other back in the summer of 1962 and had been placed in the same rusty bunk.
Homer, who slept on the lower bunk, was a born storyteller.
Like his namesake, he'd been cursed with blindness; only
his
disability came from a bullet that had stuck him in the head when he was just a toddler, leaving him blind and unable to speak.
Born deaf, Hemingway was by nature more reclusive.
But if there was ever an opportunity to prove himself a man, it was the strapping young ten year old who dared anyone to challenge him, whether it be a race, or a fight, or a game of chance.
He was the one who championed young Homer, protecting him from the other boys at the home.
And because of his generosity, Homer spoke to him, his, the only sound the sandy-haired boy would ever hear.

But if you left me, then you'd have no one to talk to
, said the rail-thin man wearing blackened John Lennon glasses.
Homer wore an LA Dodgers T-shirt, jeans and canvas tennis shoes.
His clothes were well-worn, but clean.
The jeans even had creases from where a lady at the home pressed them.

"Such is the conundrum," said Hemingway, dressed in a similar style.
His only difference was the Spearmint Rhino T-shirt over a broad muscular chest, an advertisement for a
men's only
social club with the outlines of a naked woman the centerpiece for his torso.
A pie-shaped wedge of dirt spoiled the picture at the shoulder, a souvenir from his scuffle in the alley.
"So what about it?"

A young black woman in a too-tight denim skirt and tube top standing next to them glanced over and gave him the stink eye.
Hemingway leered hard enough to make her glance away, well aware that he and Homer appeared nothing more than two homeless men in search of a Mad Dog afternoon.
Theirs was a disguise they'd cultivated.
Low men such as themselves needed to blend in, or else they'd be too easily identified.
Here in the
Los Angeles
landscape, nothing was more at home than two homeless men shambling from street to street.

When the light changed, Hemingway grabbed the hand that rested on his shoulder, and guided Homer across busy Sunset Blvd.
People hurried past in both directions.
Homer and Hemingway crabbed like rummies, cumbersome steps mostly in balance.

Obscene horns blaring from cars with impatient drivers.
The buzz of a billion trillion volts of electricity ominous as it powers everything around you.
Shouting from the laundry down the block, where two Hispanic women are arguing over a man.
A jet passing overhead, the roar temporarily drowning out every other sound.
The beep of the warning from the stop sign, telling us sightless fools to hurry up.
A siren somewhere proving the savagery of man.

As Homer set the aural scene, Hemingway stilled his chaotic thoughts and concentrated on each description, attempting to translate the words into impulses to stimulate his brain into
hearing
.
But just as Homer dreamed the black dreams of a blind man, so did he dream the soundless dreams of a deaf man, his imagination unable to make that leap across a chasm it couldn't find.
All that he had was Homer's descriptions.

Sometimes he felt cheated.
Sometimes not being able to hear left him feeling morose and bitter.
But then he'd remember his friend Homer and the oracles of the home, and was thankful that he'd been spared their trajectory.

They had a busy day ahead of them and a lot of ground to cover.
They had to reach
Los Feliz Boulevard
which was nearly twelve miles of city s
treets away.
Neither Hemingway
nor Homer looked forward to reaching their destination.
But luckily
Balas del Dios
were rare occurrences.
After all, most of the times that bullets were fired into the air during celebrations, the trajectories were benign.
But then there were those rare times when the bullets seemed destined to find a target.
The bullet lodged in Homer's skull was the direct result of a reveler firing a .38 Special in celebration of the outcome of some long forgotten wrestling match, the bullet arching towards God, then falling back to strike a nine year old Homer as he stood beside his mother as they waited at a bus stop.
Six weeks into his coma, with the doctor's bills piling up, his mother had left him for dead.
One week after that, he awoke and was taken in by Father Jim, who'd arrived just in time, as if he'd known the boy had nowhere to go.