Spider’s Cage (19 page)

Windrow was ready, but Dweem didn't go for it. He had the shotgun leveled at Windrow, and he was breathing heavily, but he didn't just throw the gun down and try to kill the big-mouth detective with his bare hands, as Windrow hoped he would.

Oh well.

Windrow was shaking. He tried to calm down, and he was thinking clearly enough to notice the numbness in his right arm had gone away. But then he began to talk again. He couldn't help himself. He was quivering with rage. But what difference did it make? The spiders… He knew Dweem had something nasty in mind with them, something extenuated and nightmarish. So the idea was to set Dweem off. Maybe he would make a mistake, a false move, maybe he wouldn't. But, in any case, why not get it over with? Flesh out the sordid little tale in the isolated shack in the vast, unheeding desert until the maniac got infuriated to the point of blasting him into oblivion, to hell with neatness, and to hell with the spiders, too. So Windrow pushed.

“What about old man O'Ryan, Dweem? What was it like, being a gay couple in Texas in 1925? Not all that bad on the ranch, I'll bet. Maybe only a few of the hands knew, eh? On the other hand, maybe the whole crew was gay—yeah, that's it. Talk about a fantasy. Gay caballeros, eh? Lots of fun. You never had to leave the ranch, or when you did it was a big goof fooling the people at the barn dance in total drag. And oh—those slow buggy rides home across the moonlit prairie…

“But then—what happened? O'Ryan go straight? Too tough being queer on the rodeo circuit? Probably not, no. Wait. I got you figured for going soft when the life got too tough. You lost the ranch, the cattle, the boys…. Whose fault was that? Did you blame O'Ryan for the Depression, too? So it got to be a life without money. O'Ryan did alright, riding rodeo. But it was too tough for Dweem, with his soft hands and careful education, his tender feet and tight ass… .”

Dweem looked at Windrow with eyes that modulated from pure hatred to sheer malevolence and back again, like
a cheap astrological chart. Congruent tones of bluish-grey wafted just beneath the surface of his artificial complexion.

“So you headed for Greenwich Village, or L.A., or Provincetown. Key West? Some place. Anyplace, so long as the life was easier, the scores richer. So long as somebody else was footing the bill. A lot happened to both of you, but one thing for sure: you broke O'Ryan's heart when you left. He couldn't take city life. And you couldn't take work.” Windrow sighed a loud fake sigh and turned it into a sneer. “Just two separate… careers, shall we say?

Dweem stared at Windrow a long moment, the shotgun shaking in his hands. Abruptly, he stopped shaking and smiled. Quickly kneeling, keeping the cannon trained on Windrow with the trigger hand, Dweem expertly shuttled the feisty Mexican tarantula out of her cage into the one with the straps and closed the lid. He stood up, holding the cage in one hand and the shotgun in the other, and stepped past Jodie Ryan's rasping body to stand in front of Windrow. He lowered the shotgun until it was aimed at Windrow's crotch.

“This is going to give me a great deal of pleasure, Mr. Windrow,” he said. “Even more than when I did it to her.” His eyes slid a fraction of a millimeter toward Jodie Ryan and back. He smiled, a thin horizontal smile, a corner of it twitched, and he tilted his head slightly to one side.

“O'Ryan was a silly boy,” he said. “He had a knack for winning and losing with equal facility. I wasted my youth on him, let him use me—for what? To live in a plywood trailer behind a pickup truck? He
failed
me. And when he made money again?” He shrugged. “He married a woman.” He paused, then screamed. “
A woman
!” Windrow watched him. “I was educated, elegant, beautiful. All I needed was
comfort. I couldn't continue without a little, simple comfort. A bath every day, a kitchen… There was no place to
shit
for godsakes…!”

Before Windrow's eyes, the rotted and tortured soul that saturated the fabric of Dweem's body seemed to transude through the sheen of his vanity, leaking out of every pore and imperfectly manicured suture in it, the suppurating osmosis of an unspeakably purulent decay. The strain of the man's corruption suffused and ruined the expensive, painful artifice of the surgeon and the gymnasium, until nothing remained but sodden, nervous machinations, and Dweem's voice trailed to nothing.

Yet, he held the gun.

“I've wandered all over this godforsaken world… When I walked into this room, after fifty years…” His voice cracked, “Edward looked up at me and, he looked up at me and, he, he
croaked. He just died
—right there in that chair! Without a word!”

Dweem's eyes implored Windrow's understanding, but their plea metamorphosed to blame, as if Windrow were somehow responsible for the difficulties behind them; as if, indeed, Windrow himself had perpetrated the horrible trail of death that led to this small building in the desert, and now, somehow, Dweem had become the righteous avenger.

“Like Argos,” Dweem muttered, as if to confirm this thought. He skewed his lower jaw, his open mouth formed and deformed odd shapes. “You don't even know what I'm talking about, you ignorant fuck,” he hissed. “Odysseus' dog, Argos. When after twenty years Odysseus returned home, the dog took one look, recognized his master, whimpered and died.” He gestured with the cage. “
Mr
. Windrow,” he sneered, “have you ever read Orwell's
1984, Mr
. Windrow,
forget Homer?” He barked a chopped, mirthless laugh, and answered his own question. “No, of course not. You're an ignorant fuck.” He reiterated this idea, as if now reinforced in the opinion. “Ignorant fuck.” He gestured toward Jodie Ryan, to his left, with the cage, not taking his eyes off Windrow. “
She
had read it,” he said. “I watched an entire day of exquisite torture induced upon her by her own imagination after I merely showed her this, and made a slight reference to Orwell.” He twisted the cage so that its lid faced Windrow, the hinge on the bottom. A strap dangled off the left edge of the cage, made a loop and came back to the right edge. A second strap came off the top of the cage, just behind the latch, its other end was stitched to the middle of the loop. Each had an adjustable buckle.

“You put it on like a mask, Mr. Windrow, so that the open end of the cage encircles your face.”

Windrow looked at the grey eyes in the artificially smoothed face and tilted his head a little, raising an eyebrow.

“Oh yeah?”

Dweem lowered the gun again, until it pointed at Windrow's crotch.

“Or I blow your pelvis through the bottom of that chair, Mr. Windrow, and you bleed to death in about two hours.”

Windrow lowered his eyes to the cage.

“Take it.”

He hooked his right thumb through the loop and placed the fingertips of his left hand under the sheet-metal bottom. Dweem removed his hands.

Dweem had the butt of the shotgun rested against his right hip, the breach and triggers in his right hand. He held his left hand away from his body, palm down, its arm floating as if for balance, as if he were walking a tightrope. Now, still
in front of Windrow, he backed up a step and tilted the shotgun so that the very end of its pair of short barrels rapped the bottom of the cage. The tarantula spun to face Dweem.

“Open the lid first, Mr. Windrow. Then put it on quickly—or you are emasculated.”

So silent was the pause that followed this instruction that Windrow thought he could hear the world turning, and the rush of its atmosphere in his ears. A drop of perspiration fell from his armpit onto his upper ribcage, and his stomach twisted a little tighter against the stench exuded by the chair. His right ear rang mercilessly.

“You know what that means?”

Dweem jabbed sharply and accurately at Windrow's pelvis with the muzzle of the shotgun. Pain rose into Windrow's abdomen. “Do it,” Dweem hissed.

Windrow slipped the metal clasp and eased the door open.

The spider turned again.

He had to hold the cage away from his face to allow the door to drop all the way, until he'd carefully folded it under the bottom of the cage, where he pinned it with his thumb.

The tarantula, easily as big as one of Windrow's hands, stood not two inches from the hinge, on the flat piece of sheet metal that formed the bottom of the cage. Its knees, Windrow observed, were a very bright orange. They buzzed with the color. Its mouth and jaws facing Windrow were as big as his two thumbs would be if held together.

Without warning the spider suddenly crouched its rear legs.

“You did this to her?” Windrow whispered.

Dweems's voice was tense with excitement. “Only with the the other spider, the gentler one. It merely… explored her features… curious, interested in the superficial wounds
I'd earlier inflicted…” He raised the shotgun so that its muzzle was just beyond the back of the cage, pointing through it at Windrow's face. “ …She was hysterical, of course… .”

Windrow's mouth was dry. Fixing Dweem's eyes with his own, he said, “You'll have to kill her after you kill me, Dweem, now that she's awake.”

And for the first time, Dweem took his eyes off Windrow. He turned his head; the grey eyes and the chin under them jerked toward Jodie Ryan, bound to the chair on Dweem's left.

Windrow unwound. As his wrists rotated, his left foot came up and planted its boot against the trigger guard on the shotgun, and he slid his weight under it, toward Dweem, dropping his head beneath the line of fire. His right foot came up too, but caught the shotgun much higher up, toward the end of the length of its short barrels away from the trigger guard. Dweem's eyes came back to see what was happening, his face not far behind, and what they saw was the bottom of the tarantula, as the spider, flipped by the snap of Windrow's wrist out of the mouth of the open cage, landed on Dweem's face. Two of the legs hooked the corner of his opening mouth, and another stabbed into the tear duct of his right eye.

He'd been opening his mouth to scream and his scream was well on its way past the larynx, pushing his tongue before it, out of his throat. But its sound was overwhelmed by the roar of the shotgun. The two barrels discharged their loads straight up, the triggers squeezed by Dweem's convulsing fingers, and the detonations sheared Dweems's expensive face clean out from under the tarantula. The spider dropped, unharmed, to Windrow's knee. It landed lightly, on its feet, like a cat.

Dweem's faceless body floated, the feet rising up until just the toes pointed straight down, its limbs stretched full length, and collapsed backwards to the floor. The shotgun
lay clasped in his arms on top of him like a commemorative lily, in much the same position as when it fired.

Something dripped from the cavity in the ceiling.

Windrow considered the mess. He thought it had been the easiest thing he'd done in a long time.

He began to shiver, as if chilled.

Then the tarantula bit him. The effect was of a charged electrode applied to the dimple next to his kneecap. He brushed it to the floor.

Windrow applied a waffled boot to the spider.

That was easy, too.

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978-1-59020-202-9
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