Pushing his limits is an old hobby. He forces himself to stare down between the two-inch cracks of the bridge planks until he gives himself a queasy acrophobic feeling of disorientation. He sees fishing line caught in a nest of vines and tree roots under some overgrown limbs. Feels that nauseating, swaying feeling in his huge feet again and immediately clasps his hands together to dish out more punishment to his obstreperous brain, but something pulls him off the bridge.
First it is the two diving dragonflies, their wings beating maniacally as they swoop and soar across his field of vision like a pair of Cobra gunships in an aerial dogfight. Does he see the dragonflies or hear them first, or does he hear the distant chopper noise and free-associate the Huey slick comin’ for to carry him home? He makes a dive for the underbrush nearby.
The bird is coming closer and is audible to the human ear now, with the water giving it an intermittant turbine sound, and the dragonflies adding to his misperception, but the helicopter turns out to be a loaded eighteen-wheeler rumbling around the corner and over the bridge.
OUT
OF
NOWHERE
THE
RED
TIDE
IS
ON
HIM
AND
HE
WANTS
TO
TEAR
SOMETHING
APART!
He can hardly focus for the scarlet roar in his head and he grasps his huge, meaty hands again—frustrated and enraged—squeezing with a grip that can make the FUCKING ACID OOZE FROM A FLASHLIGHT BATTERY—squeezing with all his might, and then the worst of it passes. How did he get in such a foul mood? He tries to remember Lucille, the live one, who reminded him in some way of the girl who once bore his child. He cannot think of them now. He realizes it is the monkey presence that has brought about this black mood.
Even here, on the dark side of the booniemoon, there is traffic. It never ceases to amaze him—the busy business of the monkey people. They are always in such a hurry, populating every isolated, distant corner of the planet, dropping their unwanted frogs hither, thither, and yon, hurrying to copulate again, to impregnate, to bring to term, to propagate once more, to make more screaming and unwanted monkeys. Daddy must drive his eighteen-wheeler seven days a week to make more money so he and Mommy and Buddy and Sis can buy a poorly constructed, overpriced home in the burbs, and drop more frogs, who will someday drive their own eighteen-wheelers and so on. If he was mad, what were the monkey men?
How he hated them with their credit-card vacations to Yellowstone, and their squalid romantic interludes, and their tireless, remorseless quests for fur coats and tax shelters. If there were a nuclear button that would wipe their millions off the face of the globe in a series of all-kill mushroom clouds, he would push it in an instant.
His unbounded loathing and murderous desire act as his flexible chain mail, the lust and the killing, linking themselves together to form a kind of neurological protection from normalcy—or so his mindscreen suggests, as he thinks of the chain reaction of mushroom blasts, and he moves across the bridge, into the next field, and sees a rust red, discarded refrigerator with a heavy chain around it. His life has been a chain of violent events.
Enters woods, surefooted now, pulled by his homing mechanism. Finds the old shack. Rectangular blocks of scorched steps, with bent iron pipe and broken conduits and reinforcement rods protruding. Charred timbers, combat-assault concrete, battlefield brick, exploded masonry, mortar fragments, and twisted firefight wreckage—this site suggests.
Half the shack is gone. A fire consumed it, seemingly in one big black bite of hungry flame, then it was extinguished. What remains is half a shack, roof and walls more or less intact, one side open, and a square of burnt earth where the rest of the shack stood, bordered by what was left of the stove and the blocks the house sat on.
A sharecropper's place, perhaps, tucked into this little woodsy grove of trees and shrubs, not a hundred feet from the rock road, but hidden and safe from prying eyes.
With one level of his mind he is rebuilding a temporary wall, sealing off his newly acquired snuggery from the elements. With another he is thinking about the sign he's seen for the last half a klick, remembering the abandoned end of a railroad spur now far fields away, and the assorted tracks and messages he has duly recorded.
His entire life, both institutionalized and—for wont of a better word—free, has been spent in close proximity to riffraff, robbers, rascals, ruffians, scamps, scoundrels, scoff-laws, scumbags, burglers, buggers, brutes, bangers, deadbeats, derelicts, desperadoes, degenerates, criminals, cutpurses, cracksmen, crooks, tramps, tricksters, thieves, thugs, fakers, freeloaders, fugitives, felons, freebooters, footpads, fag-bashers, and fruit-rollers of every type, size, shape, creed, kind, and color of the rainbow's dirtiest oil slick.
He is—therefore—multilingual and fluent in street guinea, gypsy, carny, cowboy, bum, drifter, grifter, and the assorted dialects of homeboy, gangster, and juju man. He reads hobo chalk-talk easily, and watches—with no small degree of amusement—the crossbar variations advertising free medical aid, handouts of clothing, food, and the quid pro quo expected of the recipient in the way of work, con, or fast moves.
He puts no store in such childishness, but it pleases him to watch for the intersecting circles, stick-figure-and-triangle art, and the slashes that speak only to the brethren of the boxcar and the denizens of the drunk tank about such monkey dangers as hobo-haters and men with guns nearby.
His doughy baby face is distorted by a beaming, dimpled ear-to-ear grin when he sees the ticktacktoe scratches on the side of the foundation cornerstone nearest the front door, that is, nearest to where the door would have been before the fire.
But only if you speak hobo do you realize it is five lines and not four. It is a serious, adult signal, not a child's game. It reads, to the initiated:
EXTREME DANGER! A CRIME WAS COMMITTED AROUND HERE, AND THIS IS A BAD PLACE FOR STRANGERS.
Night takes its time, this day, but it does eventually come and erupts layers of liquid black lava over Tinytown, slough, dump site, and reservoir. Light is gone from this remote and moonless spot, and the fortresslike factory brick is gone, the ramparts of the old water treatment plant, the tree-line silhouettes and false horizons, and the look of country, town, warehouse, walkway, railing, and water all blend into darkness.
Death waits here in ticking readiness, tremor-sensitive, vital signs stilled to a near-motionless flutter-crawl, in absolute menacing silence, waiting and hating, precognating and gestating, alembic poisons refining, transmuting, distilling the venomous loathing into its most lethal essense. The beast lets it build, boil, bubble over into the red-hot tidal thing that will sweep over humanity in a murderous mutilating frenzy of destruction.
This hatred, which has a life of its own, has changed, mutated, and—hypertrophied and swollen like a tumorous membrane—it will sicken him if he does not expunge it. It wells up inside him now.
He knows that he has been extrinsically controlled by this, even partially manipulated into position by suits who play his fierce, deep loathing like a finely tuned instrument of mayhem, and this only worsens the hating, amplifies his hunger, deepens the thing that lives on the hate essence, forcing him to kill. Death is troubled by the unseen hands that set him in place. And he uses this, too.
Arising from his temporary den near the reservoir, concealing his burrow with twigs and boughs, he inhales deeply, light-headed by the musk of bloodlust, awash in his own sewer fumes, faintly nauseated by the sudden purity of pine, spruce, and the sweet scents of fern and earth.