“That’s the ticket.”
For some reason Niko takes off his coat and sets it neatly on top of his hardcase. He starts away, rolling his eyes at the unseen canopy of rock and still shaking his head.
“Niko.”
He stops. “Yeah?”
“Try to be in. Conspicuous. These blocks didn’t just. Grow here. You know?”
Niko thinks he does know, but he merely nods and sets out.
SAM GAMUNDI. SAMWISE, for Christ’s sake. Of all the people to run into down here, the last I would have expected. When was the last time I saw him? High school? Yeah, he came back for a week or so and stayed with me and my family after he’d moved away with his mom. And even then I hadn’t seen him since… eighth grade? First time I ever got drunk was with Sam. Skipping school and getting into his mom’s gin. Jesus, a gin drunk at fourteen. Watered the bottle down so she wouldn’t know we’d been at it. Caught us anyway. Caught Sam that is. He never narked on me. What did she do to him? Can’t remember.
Dark as hell here. To coin a phrase. Not much to trip over at least. I hope.
First time I smoked pot was with Sam too. Hell we were trouble, weren’t we? Poor Mom and Dad. That time they picked us up from the movies in that old white Ford and me and Sam so stoned we would’ve giggled if you hit us with a shovel. Sam had somehow got his shoelaces knotted together and couldn’t get them untied. Tried to karate chop them and knocked his feet out from under him and landed on his head on the sidewalk just as Mom and Dad pulled up and I laughed so hard I banged my head on the roof getting into the car. Which only got us laughing harder.
I used to wonder what happened to you, sitting tuning my guitar or reflecting on someone else’s story from their youth or just daydreaming on the tour bus during those long stretches of paved America between dates. Were you still alive then Sam? How did you finally die I wonder? Would it breach some etiquette here to ask you? And would you tell me if I did?
That week you came back to visit me at my parents’ house. You’d been Saved. Some Baptist summer camp you’d been to had gotten to you in some lonely fearful hour. You were worried about my life and my soul. The way I was carrying on. Pot speed booze girls coke smokes and never never never any sleep. I called you holier than thou. Saint Samwise. That was a long week huh? That party my band played. Howyadoin, we’re The Spanish Flies. And me getting drunk and scoffing at your thinly hidden disdain. At some point I decided to throw all that contempt back in your judgemental face, only I threw it out through my guitar. A pawnshop Les Paul that’d be worth a pretty penny now I’m sure. And you heard that volleyed contempt all right but you stayed on because I could see you couldn’t believe what was coming out of those beatup Fender amps. To this day I sit amazed six wires on a piece of wood can make a hundred thousand people crazy. That gig got dark and scary, the whole band picking up the vibe and magnifying it, and everybody drunk or stoned or tripping or just plain fuckedup somewhichway. And you better believe they grooved on it, St. Samwise, because they tore that joint apart, throwing bottles and tearing stuffing out of the couch and beating the hell out of each other. You said I was possessed and you ran off while feedback howled up to the bleeding edge and I surfed it all the way and felt maybe just a little bit of bad I’d run you off. But mostly it felt good to be the voice of that crowd’s anger. Good to drive you off in your sanctimony, good to drive those people wild enough to turn on themselves like dogs, good to push the amplifiers to the limit, good to push. And when you walked into Mom and Dad’s kitchen hours later, having walked all that way home, you suffering martyr, I remember looking up still drunk and hunched over a cup of reheated coffee and seeing both your umbrage and your concern, and Sam I think that was the moment I realized something writhed inside me with an appetite for self destruction. And perhaps we kept our distance after that night not because of your unswervable faith but because of the dark mirror you had held before me. And maybe you backpedaled with equal horror from the pleasure you saw me take in that reflection’s corrupt and ruinous bent. I had a demon inside me and I hated him but loved him too. Or maybe I just felt I needed him.
Your black bible and your suffering jesus. My black Les Paul and my suffering blues. You find salvation your way, I will find it mine.
Only—what hope of redemption or salvation or even some small reprieve is there for anybody if our own St. Samwise lies crushed and suffering beneath a granite slab on the outskirts of what deranged god’s mad Hell?
Ah, Sam.
NIKO’S FINGERS JUST clear the top edge of the granite block when he jumps. He raises himself up and clears the edge. He climbs up and rolls onto his back and stares up at the solid blackness and then scrambles to his feet. He looks around the surface of the smooth granite cube, looking for a… tool… that got dropped there.
It’s so damned dark. Then again, the cube is only ten feet square, and anything that would help dig Sam out from under his own particular Lego block from Hell ought to be fairly easy to—
He steps on a bump and bends to find a metal rod. He picks it up. It must weigh fifty pounds. About eight feet long. Projections on the bottom end. Some kind of shovel? He turns the rod over and regards the arrowheaded trident splayed above his head.
Pitchfork.
IT RINGS DULL and steady as it drags behind him on the hard flat plain. Niko is trying not to think about what the pitchfork implies when behind and well above him he hears something flapping. He turns and sees motion just as whatever flies above him yells Bombs awaaay! in a guttural delighted voice like whirring blades chopping meat. Then twin descending cartoon whistles as of plummeting bombs.
A large gray square occults the sky.
Shit oh dear. Niko bolts, realizes they may have taken his running into account, and cuts left. He runs as fast as he can, left arm pumping and the trident jouncing along. Behind him comes a deep slam he feels in his chest and an earthquake tremor that shudders through his feet. Niko glances back at a granite block that wasn’t there a moment ago.
From the sky come curses. There are two voices up there. Niko has a moment to take in jaundiced lantern cateyes and mottled membranous leather wings and impossible combteeth fangs that bristle as the demons grin wide enough to split their heads. Dangling legs that end in talons. Upcurved warty penises the size of Niko’s arm.
One of them yells Booooo.
It isn’t easy running fulltilt with a fifty pound pitchfork. It’s easier when you think something the size of a minivan is about to plummet down from the Great Unseen and flatten you like a fruit rollup. Niko runs.
Sam is waiting—no shit—when Niko returns. “Thought they got you,” he says as Niko draws up panting.
Niko drops the pitchfork and puts his hands on his knees until he catches his breath. “Can I expect much more of that?”
“If you were. One of us. I’d say. Definitely. Safe bet you could. Expect more of that. Forever. But with you still alive?” Sam turns his free palm up. “Reckon I don’t know. The rules there. Pardner.”
Niko grins albeit grimly. Sam had always done a creditable John Wayne. “Found your toadsticker.” He holds out the pronged iron rod.
“You are. The man.”
“How do you plan to get out from under there? Dig?”
“Thought you might.”
“Sam. Look.” Niko looks around and then squats down, feeling absurd. I’m in Hell! I’m talking to a dead guy! And he’s squashed under a fifty ton block! “We were friends, Sam, a long time ago.”
“Setting me up. For the brushoff. Mister Rock Star?”
“If I were dead and stuck down here forever with you I wouldn’t think twice, Sam. But the clock is ticking and the longer I hang around the less my chances are, and this ground is hard as rock and it’d take days to dig you out of there.”