The Night of the Autumnal Equinox
1
Once the anticipated anti-climactic dinner rush of two two-tops, three three-tops, one apparently significant party of four, and a few loners eating solo at the bar had been served and the back of the house began its transition into pre-close, Kieran poked his head past the bar doorframe, squinted into the kitchen, and said, “Pumpkin.”
Abuse, delivering a short stack of grimy, used non-sticks to Jux at the dishpit, looked over at the sommelier peeking around the hall corner. “Don’t you ever call me that again,” he said. “Are you looking for your bloody piece of meat?”
Kieran’s injured eyes widened for a moment, but he quickly shook his head. “Not yet.”
Jux took the pans from Abuse after a brief glance at Kieran and began working them through the sinks.
Abuse was still looking at the sommelier. “What can we do for you, then?”
Kieran, still just peering around the corner, ticked his head sideways. “Brian just called,” he said obviously. “He wants the pumpkin.”
Danny looked up from his work plastic-wrapping steel ninth containers of brie-and-fig tarts. “Bro, we got like ten orders of punkin bread ready to roll. We could make more, but, like, nobody orders that shit until that holiday season.”
“And it’s on the menu year-round,” Abuse added.
“So he can take all of it for what I care,” Danny said.
Kieran frowned. “Not pumpkin bread,” he clarified. “A Halloween pumpkin. You know, with a face? Nobody’s going to eat it.”
“You mean a jack o’ lantern?” Abuse asked. “He wants a jack o’ lantern already?”
The sommelier pulled defensively away from the doorframe. “Don’t get mad at me,” he said, pressing a hand against his chest. “That’s why there’s a pumpkin.”
“I don’t see no punkin,” Danny said, eying the exchange suspiciously.
Kieran rolled his eyes. “I’m not touching it,” he said. “It’s over by the produce case.”
“What?” Danny cried. “You don’t want to touch a punkin?”
The sommelier scowled at him. “It was in the dirt.”
“Stop, stop,” Abuse urged. “I will collect this pumpkin and I will design and carve it, as per the annual tradition.”
“It’s not even October yet,” Danny observed. “What the fuck do we need a carved punkin in September for? This ain’t Target.”
Abuse shrugged. “Tati always likes to get the season primed,” he said. “A little earlier than usual, maybe, but, why not? I’ll carve a goddamned pumpkin for Christmas if you want. Anytime.”
“Oh snap,” Danny said, looking over at the prep list on the whiteboard. “We didn’t make the ingredients for Illinois day tomorrow.”
“Illinois day?” Kieran asked.
“Fiddy pizza, fiddy states,” Danny said.
“Oh,” Kieran said, obviously horrified. “That. At least he stopped wanting to call it ‘The USA Is Flat-breads.”
“I don’t even know what we have to make,” Danny said, scanning a printout that was taped to the border of the board. He looked over at Abuse. “What goes into making ‘inverted mini-pizzas?’”
“No fucking clue, dude,” Abuse said.
“Why don’t you just do deep dish?” Kieran asked. “Illinois, right? Go Chicago style.”
Abuse held out his hands. “Look at them,” he said, turning them back and forth like the Queen of England. “Tied. The pizzas need to be shaped like the state of Illinois, but, also, they need to be ‘inverted mini-pizzas.’ And this was drafted by Brian himself, who continues to insist that we don’t have pizzas on the menu. Flatbreads.”
“Huh,” Kieran said, scrunching his nose at the floor. “What does ‘inverted mini-pizzas’ even mean?”
“Yeah, pretty much that,” Abuse said. “I’m going to go carve the pumpkin.”
2
About half an hour later, Jux scraped a mound of burnt pumpkin seeds from a hot sheet pan straight into the trash and then went out to the dock. Abuse was seated on an upturned distributor crate with the gutted pumpkin on a knee and a black permanent marker tucked over an ear.
“I burned the seeds,” Jux admitted as he fished a cigarette out of his pack, which was hanging on a wall peg along with a sweatshirt and a couple of old aprons next to another peg from which hung Danny’s Raider’s cap.
Abuse grunted. “Fuck the seeds,” he said. Then he spun the pumpkin around and displayed it to Jux. Pac-Man eyes and a typical toothy grin. “What do you think?”
Jux shrugged. “I mean,” he began, “it doesn’t really showcase your talents at making things both interesting and esthetically pleasing, but, yeah, that’s a jack o’ lantern.”
“I don’t think Brian would appreciate it if I drew some titties on it,” Abuse said. He set the pumpkin on the concrete and palmed a chef’s knife. “You, sir, should go into my bag and get my sketchbook,” he added, pointing with the blade. Then he poked the tip of the knife into the surface of the pumpkin and began carving.
Jux walked back over the storage room and located Abuse’s black backpack, which was on a lower storage shelf along with Danny’s backpack and the bulky, plastic-wrapped slicer. In the main pocket, he found a hardbound volume with a scuffed black canvas surface. “Been working on those tarot designs?”
Abuse thrust the blade into the flesh of the gourd and sawed briefly before removing the blade and carefully pushing out an eye with his thumb. “Something like that,” he said. “It’s kind of toward the back.”
Jux flipped through the book, appreciating some of the ink drawings along the way. Some he had seen before—an amoeba with a protruding mouth-within-mouth akin to the Giger alien, a two-headed witch monster sewing a child into a football, a zombie munching on the arm of another zombie that was in turn munching on the first zombie’s thigh. One of his recent favorites: a pimply young man, dressed somewhere between a conquistador and a mail carrier, planting a flag into the distended belly of some kind of hairy five-eyed gorilla monster. But there were new ones, too. Grotesque beasts rummaging around in piles of books toppling out of an overfilled dumpster. A busty female, with nipples clearly erect through the apparently thin material of a scanty top, holding up a smoking pistol in one hand and flipping the bird with the other. A surprisingly frightening potato, complete with exaggerated stink lines. “This shit is great,” Jux muttered, stepping out to the dock and lighting up while continuing to scan the pages.
Abuse was hacking away at the pumpkin. “Toward the back, dude,” he said. “You’ll know it when you see it.”
Jux skipped ahead and found that toward which he immediately figured Abuse had been directing him. Over a series of pages were various reimaginings of the tarot, from a Lugosi-Dracula fool traipsing across the cobblestone of a castle bridge to a zombified hermit with lips sewn shut dangling before him a lantern fashioned out of a jaguar’s head to a busty (again) Elvira-esque heirophant apparently suffocating a corpulent man between her thighs. There was even a new strength concept, which involved a sharp-toothed, skinny waif in a Santa outfit wrestling a rabid Easter Bunny into submission.
“You have got to do something with these,” Jux said. “It’s like some high-concept, grotesque pop-culture grimoire.”
Abuse shrugged as he continued working on the mouth of the jack o’ lantern. “Grimoire is a spell book.”
“Whatever,” Jux continued. “This is really great. And holiday-themed, which can be really profitable. If you made up a set and—”
“Done,” Abuse suddenly erupted, fetching up the carved pumpkin and chef’s knife. With his free hand, he collected the sketchbook from Jux as he passed into the back room and tucked it back into his backpack and zipped it up before moving on to the kitchen. “Let’s light this fucker up.”
Jux cocked an eyebrow at him and lingered at the dock for a minute to finish up the cigarette before flicking it across toward the ashcan in the corner by the yawning back gate.
3
The dishpit drains were backing up again just as Kieran, Crystal, and Juniper left the few patrons in the front of the house unattended in order to witness the lighting of Abuse’s jack o’ lantern, so Jux was frantically sweeping filth water back toward the dishpit basin from the walkway as they entered the kitchen, noses scrunched up at the mess.
“Nothing to see here,” Jux muttered as he swept at the muck.
Fortunately, Abuse had already established the jack o’ lantern at an optimal place on the prep counter and installed it with an unlit tealight candle. He grinned at them like an awkward and unwilling employee of the month between anxious glances at Jux struggling with the drain.
“This can’t last all night,” Crystal said. “There are still people out there, and I suspect that some of them are capable of looting the bar.”
Abuse nodded and looked back at Danny, who was positioned near the door to the back room, hand on the light switches and slightly hunched, like an eager troll.
“You ready?” Danny asked ceremoniously.
Abuse nodded, taking the tealight candle out of the jack o’ lantern and readying his lighter. “Do it,” he commanded.
Danny flicked off the kitchen lights.
They were in complete darkness interrupted only briefly by a few strikes of Abuse’s lighter until the wick caught and he was able to direct its warm illumination into the pumpkin’s recess, which immediately lit up the carved face and radiated an orangish red light through the sculpted face.
“Yay,” Juniper said, clapping.
“Brian is going to love that,” Kieran said, grinning.
“He’d better,” said Abuse.
Crystal was nodding as she evaluated the jack o’ lantern. “Simple design,” she said. “Classic, and these are impressive cuts. I say good job, sir.”
Abuse winked at her.
“I’m just surprised there aren’t any tits on there,” Crystal continued. “Are they on the other side?”
Abuse shook his head. “Just going for the classics here.”
“That’s probably wise,” Crystal said. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten the Halloween tit backlash of 2006.”
Abuse nodded in the flickering candlelight. “Carving these pumpkins is more important to me than carving breasts into them,” he admitted. “I learned my lesson.”
“I would hope so,” Crystal said.
“Are we going to put it on the bar?” Juniper asked.
“We’ve been over this,” Kieran said. “The Halloween pumpkin sits on the dessert cart, not the bar.”
“That’s what I meant,” Juniper said. “It’s right next to the bar.”
Kieran rolled his eyes. “Maybe usually,” he said, “but it isn’t the bar.”
Jux was splashing around in the near darkness of the dishpit corner. “Hey, uh,” he called, “can I get those lights back on? This washer is about to blow another load and I’d like to see what it looks like down there.”
“Gross,” Crystal said, grinning.
“I know, right?” Kieran said. He giggled and they left, followed closely by Juniper and, finally, Abuse, who was carrying the jack o’ lantern.
“Lights on, Danny!” Abuse announced.
Danny switched on the lights and the kitchen seemed immediately to resume its unmagical and relatively disgusting pallor.
Abuse smiled sympathetically at Jux on the way out. “You got this, dude,” he said.
Jux nodded and banged the drain filter empty into the cold-side trash can.
4
Not forty-five minutes later, around ten, when all the patrons but a couple of regulars at the bar were gone and the kitchen was given the official signal that they could close up, Abuse and Jux went out back for a pre-breakdown cigarette.
“What about me, bitches?” Danny yelled at them as he scrubbed the chemically-doused ranges with a wad of smoking steel wool.
“You don’t smoke anymore,” Abuse responded from the back room.
Danny kept scrubbing. “I’m about to start back up, then.”
“What the fuck,” Jux said, gripping at the strap of his bag, which was unzipped. “Seriously, what the fuck.”
“It’s not fair you smoking-ass bitches taking a break right now,” Danny hollered.
“Just finish the stove and get out here, then,” Abuse said. Then he looked over at Jux, who was digging around in his bag.
“What the fuck, man?” Jux muttered. “Someone went through this. My phone’s gone, and my lighter, my cigarettes. The change I was keeping in here to buy more cigarettes.”
Abuse scowled at him for a moment and then looked to the low shelf to see that his bag was not there at all. Danny’s backpack was still there, but it was unzipped, too. Abuse swallowed several times and then walked into the kitchen.
“You fuck with my backpack?” Abuse asked.
Danny coughed at the hot chemical fumes and tossed the steel wool into the bin before directing a hard look at Abuse. “Did I what?”
“Fuck with my backpack,” Abuse said. “One of your pranks.”
Danny switched off the burners and got away from the noxious smoke, nearing Abuse by the ice machine. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“My backpack,” Abuse said, “is gone.”
Danny’s eyes widened and he immediately pressed past Abuse into the back room, where Jux was still sorting through his bag.
“Yeah, just that old flip phone and change,” he was saying. “And my cigarettes.”
“What?” Danny asked.
“We got robbed,” Abuse said, staring out at the dock through the open back room door. “All our shit is just sitting here and we didn’t remember to lock the back gate.”
“Aren’t you the one with the key?” Danny asked.
“I was cutting a pumpkin,” Abuse said. He balled his hands into tight fists for a moment and then inhaled deeply and unbuttoned his black chef’s coat and took it off and threw it onto the wrapped slicer apparatus and then stormed out the back through the dock.
Danny watched this and then looked down at his pack, which was unzipped. After a quick search, he looked up at the bare peg on the wall by the door and said, “Fucker took my Raiders lid.”
Then Danny was out the back, too.
5
By the time Danny caught up, Abuse was rooting around in a patch of dwarf oleanders lining the restaurant’s parking lot fence opposite the light rail stop.
“You really think they’d ditch it that quickly?” Danny asked as he approached.
Abuse scowled at him.
“Seriously, bro,” Danny continued. “You remember when that raggedy-ass hobo stole one of the dessert displays last year?”
“An inedible cup of chocolate lava cake that had been sitting on the cart for two weeks? Decaying strawberries on top?” Abuse asked. “Yes, I remember that. Poor fucker probably ended up with indigestion.”
Danny nodded. “This isn’t like that,” he said. “That fool was pathetic and had no goddamned sense. Whoever jacked our shit tonight might be pathetic, but they’re not going to just go through your bag right here in the parking lot.”
“You don’t think so?” Abuse asked. “You don’t think it only takes twenty seconds to dig around in a bag to see if there’s loose change or a cellphone—like the crap they stole from Jux?”
“That’s a point,” Danny admitted. “Maybe they were just going to go through the bags and then they got spooked and snatched yours before running off. That’s not how I’d do it, if, you know, I was into snatching bags and shit.”
Abuse frowned at him.
“Don’t look at me like that, motherfucker,” Danny said.
Abuse still stared at him.
“You’re being a fucking racist right about now,” Danny said accusingly.
“You told me yourself about how you used to steal shit out of cars at your high school,” Abuse said.
Danny held up his hands. “That was just the teachers’ lot, bro,” he explained. “Look, I said you got a point. Let’s have a look around.”
They quickly circumambulated the complex, checking the municipal trash cans along Central as well as the dumpsters behind the Amoebius PhLoft complex, at the base of which was housed the restaurant. When they were finally completing the circuit by investigating the fancy cans on either side of the loft complex’s resident entrance, a man in a designer tracksuit passed them on his way inside and, in the process, gave Danny a suspicious look.
“You like what you see, motherfucker?” Danny cried as he tossed a handful of garbage back into the deposit slot of the can.
The man hurried inside.
Before the door had closed behind him, Danny was able to add, “You look like a bitch.”
Abuse, who had been digging into the can opposite, gave up the search. “Did you look in those bushes over by the wall there?”
Danny nodded. “This is a waste of fucking time, bro.”
“So what are you suggesting?” asked Abuse.
Danny inhaled deeply and looked around like a rural sheriff scanning a bleak range. “Well,” he began, “they might have hopped on the light rail.”
Abuse frowned over at the stop in the middle of the avenue. “Then they’d be long gone by now,” he said. “There’s no hope.” He slapped the fancy trash can and immediately cringed at his thumb.
“True,” Danny said, nodding. “But, if you want to know the truth, I think they probably just rushed off into the alleys. Don’t these all connect around here?”
Abuse looked toward the dark western end of the lot, where the fencing had gaps around old patches of ironwood. “I happen to know that there is a drainage ditch over there,” he said. “Don’t ask me why. But it is there, and beyond it are alleys, indeed.” Then he looked Danny in the eyes. “Are you coming?”
“Fuck no,” Danny said. “I don’t have a strap. You go strolling up in there, you’re looking to get set upon, bro.”
Abuse stared at the distant gap between the fences. “I don’t care what they plan to do,” he muttered. Before Danny could respond, Abuse was halfway across the lot.
Danny sighed and shook his bare head and went back to the dock and into the kitchen, where Jux was alone, swatting at the air near the dishpit. “What the fuck are you doing?” Danny asked.
Jux, startled, looked over at him for a moment before glancing about at the air nearby. “Mosquitoes,” he said. “I think there are like six of them in here now.”
Danny sniggered. “You’re on crack, motherfucker,” he said, shaking his head.
“I’m serious,” Jux protested. “I saw one right here by my eye, and when I looked around, there were a bunch more.”
Danny positioned himself by the cold side cooler and stared down at the wrapped containers in the ingredient spread, still shaking his head. “My fucking Raiders lid.”
“Where’s Abuse?” Jux asked.
“That fool went off on his own adventure,” Danny said.
Jux directed a concerned look across the kitchen at the door to the back room for a moment before flinching and swatting at the air around him.
6
Abuse winced as he traversed the mushy ground around the drainage ditch lined by overgrown thick brush.
“This is what I get,” he muttered, staring down at the dark space where the grate was as he carefully passed in his black no-slip slip-ons. “One time you dump a vat of putrid fat into the water system and you’re doomed to feel it forever, even if you were coerced into doing it in the first place.”
He exhaled through his teeth and briefly regretted having not brought a few pairs of plastic gloves along.
His shoes were designed for kitchen work, made to resist the temptation to slide recklessly across puddles of grease as well as facilitating a quick exit strategy in case a slosh of scalding oil happened to spill upon the wearer’s feet. They were open in the back and not designed for fishing around in urban jungles soaked with wastewater. As dark as it was, he was able to make out the pools of slime by their grainy shimmer, reflecting one distant streetlight or another. He used his lighter sparingly, as he didn’t want to arouse whatever might be lying about.
After a few moments of scanning the deep center of the ditch, especially where the pool of water was kept from draining into the sewer by a great and various mass that densely clogged the circular grate, he rounded a patch of bushes and approached the mouth of an alley that stretched a few dozen meters further and then made a blind left turn. He squinted in the night and pressed on, passing up the oasis of wreckage and dodging the huge shards of broken bottles that lined the dusty gravel. One side of the alley was blocked off by the chain-link fence that ran the perimeter of the vacant lot adjacent to the restaurant’s parking lot. The other side was a high brick wall, fairly new-looking, that seemed to hope to keep the unwanted out of the environs of the Amoebius PhLoft condominiums.
As he walked, he meticulously scanned the base of the wall and the fence, while remaining aware of any approaching persons or, as it may have proven to be, animals or monsters. He winced at the thought that his knife, which he primarily carried for protection on his many late-night walking tours from work, usually to home, had gone off inside the bag.
He made it to the turn. The alley quickly branched off and then split, one stretch heading down along the complex and the other turning right toward the rear parking area of the chain pasta restaurant, the mildewy smell of which lingered even above the still-rank smell of the ditch. On the lower, older brick walls of this latter route, a near-distant fire cast dancing waves of orange light upon their surface. Abuse furrowed his brow and strode purposefully forward, glancing occasionally about for any sign of his bag. The firelight was produced, he found out as the alleyway opened into a wider vacant lot just behind the pasta restaurant, by a modest bonfire burning in the hollow trunk of a long-abandoned vehicle. The car was itself burned out, and faced directly away from Abuse as he approached the end of the alley. The snaps of rising fire crossed the empty back windshield like a hotly guarded entrance into the hellish lair of some demonic being with seventeen eyes and three mouths on either side of their rectangular face. The torso and legs of the demon would be those of a fit young woman, but the arms would be snakelike and pierced dozens of times over at random by horrible long shards of twisted metal and the mouths would be emitting a low moan charged with potential desire and evisceration.
Abuse found that the bonfire was surrounded by a seemingly vacated shantytown. Small huts, fashioned out of sheets of scrap metal or cardboard boxes and draped with found strips of burlap and canvas, sat silently as the bonfire’s questionable fuel cracked and popped in the warm autumn night. Far past the central car, Abuse saw that the lot, lined by sad vacant makeshift hovels and drooping old campsite tents, tapered only a bit before quickly emptying out onto the street that he and Jux and others had so often used when walking from the Central Library to the Handsome Addiction for coffee and hijinks on many a night some years before. It must have been a relatively new settlement, because otherwise how this slum had gone unnoticed by passersby such as himself he could not determine, although it was quite possible that people either saw it and didn’t do anything or their minds actually disallowed them knowledge of what their eyes had received. A kind of body control, perpetrated by the mind, a possessing force outside of the control of the conscious thinking entity. Within and without, enveloping and determining. Abuse was momentarily paralyzed by existential perception; all things clear and clean and immediate, and him part of it, but only for that little time he knew his life would mean in the long run.
The shantytown was yet without a trace of movement apart from himself and the rising fire, which formed in its separate flames images akin to those he’d sketched out in the book as tarot designs. A man fending off sticks with a stick, the toppled cups pouring into the three tentacle-ears of a pustuled leviathan, bound lovers separated and presided over by a nameless, senseless mouth. Fire titties unextinguishable.
Abuse went to the nearest of the huts and peered into its darkness, covering his face with his elbow. Nothing was visible; silence and sightlessness penetrated the moment and forced him back toward the fire. He stared at the bonfire until a train pulled into the nearby rail stop and clanged its bell.
Abuse doubled back and this time went down the alley lining the Amoebius PhLoft complex of luxury condos, the ground floor at the north side of which being occupied by the restaurant. Along this stretch, he passed busted refrigerators and shopping carts, overturned and hideously mangled and most likely impossible to discern from even the loftiest of the lofts because of the tall cinderblock wall directly against which they were settled. Further down, he passed a locked gate to the complex, outside of which along the wall were lined several matching dining chairs and a soiled mattress, which seemed not so much the product of the alley but the refuse of some affluent denizen of the complex who didn’t know what else to do with their old shit when their new shit was delivered.
All this time, there was no sign of the bag, the book, his clothes, or even another person. The rubbish he was encountering was probably fresh enough, but still it all seemed ancient, as if the rusted bottom of the refrigerator had been designed by some long-transcended Babylonian occultist to lay gaping for eternity at the base of the brick wall awaiting some novice ill-prepared but nonetheless ready to utter the proper linguistic key and loose all the unutterable meanings and those consequences commensurate.
There wasn’t enough light, he figured, determining to return on the next day to look again. He retraced his path and finally crossed the restaurant’s parking lot, detouring before the entrance to the loading area. The building at the base of which the restaurant stood had a small, gated courtyard next to the restaurant’s semi-closed back area. The manicured plants and polished metal park-benches sickened him; it was certain that yuppies and hipsters executed all forms of devious and depraved plans from their penthouses above just after crossing through this entryway into the lobby. Abuse checked the chic trash cans by each bench again, even though he and Danny had already checked them, and spat furiously onto the faux-cobblestone path.
7
The enclosed dock to Tati’s restaurant was right there, but he only glanced momentarily at it and passed it up and headed for Central with the distinct gait of one that is consciously neglecting a responsibility out of both ethical principle and personal necessity. For a moment, he stood in front of the restaurant, staring through the tall windows at the warm lighting of the dining area, vacant but for a couple of loners at the bar and an occasional glimpse of a harried server, hoping, wishing that someone in the front would notice him out there waiting for a gap in traffic and then jaywalking to the giant parking lot of the Central Library on the other side where, futilely, the management demanded all employees park so that the restaurant’s small lot would be open for customers. Abuse had no car, but the audible demand was one of many that added fuel to his already-boiling loathing.
Abuse crossed the southbound lane, both rail tracks, and the northbound lane. The little traffic he’d had to wait for was, apparently, all there was going to be anytime soon. This was not surprising, considering how dead it was downtown, even on a weekend. Occasionally, the restaurant would get slammed for a period of about an hour and a half; after that rush of business, the house overseated and the kitchen and servers dashing frantically to accommodate, anyone on their own time disappeared and the city slept. The typical night ended around eight.
The library had closed hours before. It was near ten o’clock when Abuse crossed into the expansive empty lot, brilliantly lit by dozens of tall lamps. The Central Library was five stories tall, dwarfing everything around it. Its front was covered in lengths of fiberglass that were built to shade the windowed façade, and they looked like a hundred sails would to a person with a terminal crick in the neck. On the other side of the library was the long park that had been set in place after the highway tunnel had been built underneath. Without a vibrant downtown, such expanses of public space were sure to convert naturally into living quarters for the impoverished. The ornately-arranged and cavernous modern fountains at the back of the library, long-unused, had been consistently occupied by any number of transient persons with nowhere to go. Shelters and outreach groups would come by daily and hand out brown-sack lunches—a baloney sandwich and a mealy apple, usually, or something equally appealing—to anyone who was sane enough to take advantage of the free food, as unappetizing at it may seem. Cops would occasionally shake the place down, but its location was so appealing and the overwhelming need for a place to live was so strong that efforts to clean the homeless out of the park were fruitless. A police state would have to be triggered. Abuse had long known about the park by the library as a gathering place, a city-within-a-city, for bums and ne’er-do-wells, but on this night he wasn’t yet prepared to venture there. Hobo Central, as it was known, would be the place to check, but Abuse, despite his antipathy for the restaurant at that moment, knew he’d need to get back. Not out of duty, since he had already been preparing to go, but because Ogre was on his way to pick him up.
8
By the time Abuse had made it back across the library’s lot and crossed the street and light rail tracks, he found Ogre’s car sitting in the lot and clutched his forehead.
In the kitchen, Ogre and Jux were talking about the theft while Jux bleached down the cutting boards.
“I mean,” Jux was saying, “I already called the bank to report the debit card, and, honestly, it’s an inconvenience bordering on a blessing that they took that old flip phone. I’ve been looking at that new—Abuse!”
He had entered from the back room. “Are we going to leave this dock open all night?”
Jux stared at him. “You have the key,” he said.
Abuse scrunched his nose and nodded at Ogre. “So, what,” he asked, “are we going to Gloomy’s?”
“Did you check the dumpsters?” Ogre asked immediately.
Abuse frowned at him. “Of course I checked the dumpsters,” he said. “Dumpsters, random trash cans from here to Pasta Works. Bunch of bushes. There’s a miniature hobotown right up the alley and nothing there, either.”
“What about Hobo Central?” Ogre asked.
Abuse shrugged. “Didn’t make it in there, yet,” he admitted. “Don’t you want to go to Gloomy’s?”
“I got a diaper to change,” Jux said gloomily as he rinsed a long white cutting board.
Ogre was staring at Abuse.
Then Kieran leaned in from the doorway to the bar. His look was somewhat excited but also obviously full of concern, and everything about him was sparkling from the aura of admonishment. “You’re back,” he noted with a look at Abuse. “Did you find the book?”
Abuse shook his head. “It’s gone.”
Kieran squinted at him. “Seriously?” he asked. “That was amazing work.”
Abuse smiled bitterly.
“How do you know it’s gone?” Kieran asked.
Abuse sighed.
“He looked everywhere,” Jux explained.
“Everywhere,” Kieran repeated. He looked at Abuse. “Did you look everywhere?”
Abuse frowned at him. “No,” he said. “Of course I didn’t. How can you look everywhere? I’m just saying it’s long gone.”
Kieran shook his head. “Maybe you don’t know how to look,” he suggested. As Abuse, Ogre, and Jux contemplated this with brief exchanges of glances, Kieran clapped the doorframe and invited them to join him at the bar, adding, “The losers and regulars are all gone now.”
Indeed, the front of the house was empty but for the muffled sounds of some server or another toiling in the beyond of the old cheese service station at wrapping flatware in napkins and the shuffling of a broom down the hall at the bathrooms. As soon as they’d taken positions across the bar from the sommelier, however, Kieran seemed to have forgotten why they were out there waiting for him to tell or show them something.
“I told you to come out here?” he asked, eyeing them suspiciously.
“It was only thirty seconds ago,” Abuse noted. “Do you have some wisdom to bestow upon us or not? I don’t know what’s going to happen tonight, but I’m pretty sure standing out here for no reason isn’t part of it.”
“Jesus,” Kieran said woundedly. “I just forgot.”
Abuse held his forehead. “You’re playing fucking games with me,” he muttered.
“Just a minute,” Kieran said. He scanned them. “Which of you will pursue the book tonight?”
Jux shook his head, but Ogre and Abuse both nodded.
Kieran then set two tall shot glasses on the bar along with two bell glasses. “This place gets robbed all the time,” he began as he set a cocktail shaker before him and plopped in a couple of macerated cherries. “Usually it’s just regular industry stuff: a distributor getting an unsuspecting cook to sign off on a dump of rotting produce, servers siphoning wine for themselves, street Indians stealing patio furniture that staff neglected to cord up, your regular dine-and-dash. That kind of thing. Sometimes there’s even armed robbery. Abuse remembers last time that happened.”
“I wasn’t there that night,” Abuse said, “but I know what you’re talking about.”
“Two guys came in here one night a few years back with ski masks and sports costumes,” Kieran added for Jux and Ogre.
“Sports costumes?” Ogre asked.
“And did you say ‘street Indians?’” Jux added.
Kieren glanced in total befuddlement back and forth between Ogre and Jux for a moment before saying, “Yes. What?”
Jux held up a hand. “I can’t deal with it right now,” he said.
Kieran frowned at him.
“I’d like to know what a sports costume is,” Ogre said.
Kieran rolled his eyes. “You know,” he said, muddling the cherries in the shaker with allspice and chili powder, “what they wear when they do sports.”
“Like a tracksuit?” Jux asked.
“No,” Kieran said. “Shirts with numbers.”
“Jerseys,” Jux said.
“Whatever,” Kieran said. “The point is they had matching sports shirts but with different numbers, and they had firearms. One of them was a Sig Sauer P320 with an expanded clip, which isn’t even legal, and the other had a really nice Glock G45. It was unreal. There were only a few customers in house because it was later in the night like it is now, so one of the guys was already plastic-wrapping me to the beam by the time anyone saw and one of the customers screamed so loud that some of the bottles fell off the rack over—”
“They plastic-wrapped you to the support beam?” Jux asked.
Kieran grinned. “It was so exciting,” he said. “I thought they were going to shoot that stupid woman, but all the commotion did was keep them from actually wrapping me up all the way, which was actually important because if they had, I wouldn’t have been able to put in my pin and open the register for them. They made off with 3000 dollars.” He collected a small bottle of hopped grapefruit bitters and dashed a few squirts into the concoction.
Abuse was again clutching his forehead. “Sounds right up your alley,” he said. “Did you get their numbers?”
Kieran chuckled, now adding ice and London dry gin to the shaker. “I wish.”
“So what’s the point?” Ogre asked sourly.
“The point,” Kieran said as he began shaking the mixture violently, “is that restaurants in general and this place in particular are no strangers to theft, and what’s done by employees or shady distributors or career criminals isn’t all of it. There’s a special class of robbery that what happened tonight fits into.” He uncapped the shaker and strained the cold elixir into the two shot glasses.
“And what’s that?” Ogre asked.
Kieran thumbed the shots forward. “A willpower tincture,” he said. “If you’re going to Hobo Central, which is what I think you will need to do, then you should fortify yourself.”
Ogre and Abuse eyed the glasses, filled as they were with a purplish liquid.
“I think he meant what class of robbery,” Jux clarified.
Kieran shrugged. “Drugs,” he said, almost whispering. “Whenever this kind of thing happens, like bags get stolen or stolen from, it’s usually just some tweaker on his way to or from Hobo Central who happened to see the back gate open and decided to try his luck. It’s not like they’re going to catalog what’s in the bag and then sell it on the internet. They’re going to take it all down to Hobo Central and barter for drugs with it.”
Abuse, who had picked up one of the shots and was presently sniffing it, said, “This isn’t very profound, Kieran. I have to say I’m a little disappointed.”
Ogre was staring at the sommelier. “What about Cash Pyramid?” he asked. “That’s just up the other street, but in the opposite direction to Hobo Central.”
Kieran pulled the cork out of a bottle of Barbera d’Asti and poured some in each of the wine glasses. “Pawn shop’s closed by now,” he said. “Any self-respecting tweaker would know that. And you can bet your ass they’re not waiting until the morning, because they need their meth as soon as possible.”
Ogre nodded reluctantly with a little grimace.
“So what you’re saying,” Abuse began, “is that you think the best chance of recovering my sketchbook is dealing with the tweakers and winos at Hobo Central, and, to be fully prepared for that, we need to drink this, uh, willpower tincture?”
“Those drawings were amazing,” Kieran said. “I wouldn’t give you anything but my best advice in this situation. You know that.”
Abuse inhaled deeply and then sighed it all out. Then he lifted up the shot glass as a kind of silent toast.
“But first,” Kieran said, “you have to consult the Oracle of the Drain.”
“The what?” Ogre asked.
“The Oracle of—”
“No,” Ogre said with the swipe of a palm. “I’m not consulting the Oracle of the Drain. Any oracle at all.”
Kieran stared horribly at him. “But you have to,” he said gravely. “It may or may not provide you with guidance, but you have to check.”
“What the fuck are we even talking about?” Ogre asked. “What is it?”
“The Oracle of the Drain?”
“Yes, the fucking oracle,” Ogre cried. “We already know all about your goddamned willpower tincture. What else do you think I’m talking about?”
“I got to admit this is sounding pretty crazy, Kieran,” Abuse said. “I remember the last time some bags got rooted through during a shift, pretty clearly, actually, even if it was three years ago, and I don’t remember hearing anyone talk about Randall and Natalija looking for guidance from a drain sprite.”
Kieran scowled at him. “Don’t say upsetting things,” he whispered. “You don’t know what kinds of power might be listening.”
“Jesus Christ in a taxicab,” Abuse muttered. He slapped his palm on the bar. “You know what? Fine. I’ll talk to the drain.”
“You don’t talk to anything,” Kieran said with a smirk. “You just, you know, look to see if there’s a message or something.”
“A message or something,” Ogre repeated.
Jux looked at the glasses of wine. “One of these for me?”
Kieran smiled and nodded. “Wait, though,” he insisted.
Jux sighed.
“I’ll bite,” Abuse said. “I’m biting. Where is it and what do we do?”
Kieran bit his lip, eyes filled with excitement as if he were about to be plastic-wrapped to a pole by a couple of armed men. “There’s a storm drain out on the other side of the parking lot by the trees.”
Abuse and Jux immediately exchanged looks of guilty concern.
“You know it?” Kieran pressed.
Abuse nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t think it drains well, to be honest. It’s like someone recently poured a bunch of grease into it or something.”
Jux swallowed thickly.
“Did you already see it tonight?” Kieran asked eagerly. “After the incident?”
Abuse nodded. “I did,” he said, “and, other than it being a disgusting and probably dangerous hole in the ground, there really wasn’t anything notable about it.”
“You should look again just to be sure,” Kieran advised. “You didn’t know to look for anything.”
Ogre shook his head. “If we’re going to Hobo Central,” he asked, “why do we need to look at a storm drain?”
Kieran chuckled as if he’d been asked by a patron what tannins were. “Because the storm drains around here all direct water by the underpass,” he explained. “When they built the park over the interstate, and then built the underpass so that Central Avenue would go over the park, the storm water had to go somewhere. All the earth around here is connected, like a monster underground. And then there’s all the sick shit people did on the ground, before and after, mainly before, well, after, too. Both.”
Abuse stared down at his tincture and then looked up at Ogre, who shrugged.
“I’m following your lead,” Ogre assured him.
So Abuse held up the shot glass and Ogre did the same and Kieran and Jux took up their glasses of wine and they all clinked their cups and drank.
“Hoo, that’s spicy,” Ogre said as he stamped the empty shot glass down onto the bar.
Abuse set his empty glass down and slapped the bar twice. “Let’s do it,” he said. “Time’s wasting.”
9
The kitchen was empty and the lights were all still switched to full power, but it seemed dimmer than usual and as Abuse and Ogre crossed toward the back they both noticed the sparkling blades hanging on the magnetic rack by the countertop deep fryer. They paused for a moment, staring at the knives.
“Fuck it,” Abuse said. He plucked the short paring knife from the rack.
Ogre nodded. “You go small,” he said as he took down the fifteen-inch, double-handled cheese knife, “and I’ll go big. Balance.”
Abuse winked and then they were off through the back room and dock to unlock the loading gate, which they had to leave unlocked because it could only be locked from the inside. They split up momentarily, Ogre heading to his car and Abuse crossing the lot straight for the drainage ditch. As his service clogs crunched on the gravelly rise, he turned at the sound of a car’s revving engine and watched as Ogre drag-raced his four-door compact down the lot and came to a tire-squealing, skidding halt.
Abuse waited while Ogre got out and shut the driver’s side door, leaving the car idling. “Fancy,” he said.
Ogre eyed him. “Are you telling me how to drive?”
Abuse shook his head. “Never,” he said.
“Let’s just look at this goddamned drain and get to the park,” Ogre said.
They walked slowly up the berm and then carefully down into the sloppy recession in the dirt, at the center of which in the darkness loomed the dark central grate of the drain, shimmering faintly in the ambient light of the lot’s lamps. There was presently no sign of any trunk bonfires from the shantytown in the alley and everything was quiet but for the occasional sound of vehicles speeding down adjacent streets. They edged closer and closer to the drain, gripping the handles of their culinary knives.
“What, exactly,” Ogre managed, “do you suppose it is we’re looking for here?”
“No fucking clue, dude,” Abuse admitted.
They continued the slow, careful descent toward the center of the ditch and the glistening drainage grate, but their steps seemed to bring them no closer and, at the same time, inexplicably, the grate seemed to swell before them.
“Did I ever make you watch Universe Bitches in Heat?” Abuse asked quietly as they continued their slow, fruitless slog.
Ogre was squinting at the grate. “I don’t think I ever agreed to that, no.”
Abuse kind of grunted. “This is kind of like a scene in that movie where their ship is approaching the event horizon of a black hole.”
“Well,” Ogre said, “it is a hole, and it is black. I don’t see shit.”
“That’s why you have to look closely,” Abuse said. “So you don’t step in the shit.”
Ogre sighed and shook the long cheese knife nervously at his side. “Are we actually getting any closer to it?”
“It’s only three feet away,” Abuse said, “but, no, it doesn’t appear that we’re getting closer, even though we’re creeping. Maybe we have to stop creeping?”
“This is goddamned ridiculous,” Ogre said.
Abuse took another small step and his foot slipped slightly in a patch of slime, revealing a section of the grate beneath him. “Holy fucking Lynch,” he muttered. “We’re already on top of it.”
The full diameter of the slotted metal grate was obscured all around the edges by thicknesses of hard mud and slick refuse, so they were already both standing on the drain and had been for some time.
“All right,” Ogre said, scanning the much around his feet. “Don’t panic. We’re here. If we don’t see a message, we just walk right back out like we came and—”
“Don’t move,” Abuse whispered, staring down behind Ogre.
Ogre started to turn.
“Don’t move,” Abuse repeated. “There’s something sticking out of the drain.”
Ogre was trembling. “Is it,” he asked, “moving?”
Abuse nodded quickly. “Don’t talk,” he warned.
“Unbelievable,” Ogre muttered, quickly turning his body and stepping away from where Abuse was looking and closer to the fully-exposed center of the drain.
There was something that looked like a tapered log jammed up out of one of the drain’s slats, and its slim, rounded tip was moving, slightly but quickly, back and forth, as if its other end plunged down into the drain were being agitated by some current.
“Is that a root?” Ogre asked, peering at the strange animated nub.
“I don’t know if this counts as a message or not,” Abuse said quietly, “but I think we’ve seen everything we need to see here.”
Ogre nodded and started slowly up a patch of muck, inadvertently catching the tip of a boot on something thick that turned out to be a similar mass protruding from the drain.
“Be careful,” Abuse said.
“You just going to stand there?” Ogre asked.
Abuse was looking down at the grate, where, in several places, it looked in the scant light as if several other, if smaller, ends of something were beginning to poke their way out. He reluctantly nudged one with the toe of a shoe and it seemed to recoil, flexing just slightly like a tongue.
It took them almost a full two minutes of anxious, careful steps away from the exposed center of the drain to find secure footfalls on the sloping dirt around. For a brief moment, they looked back and saw that some firelight was glowing from the nearby alley, its source unseen, but in the flickering of the light and the dancing of the shadows, whatever those tubes were emerging from the grate looked very much like tentacles.
Out of sight of the ditch and back on the solid ground of the lot next to Ogre’s humming car, they took a moment to collect themselves.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Ogre said, “and I don’t want to hear it.”
“Fucking Cthulhu, dude,” Abuse said through harried breaths.
“It’s not Cthulhu,” Ogre assured him. “It looked weird as hell, I’ll admit, but I think they’re just roots.”
“Roots,” Abuse echoed. “Tree roots in a drain.”
Ogre nodded as he opened the car door. “That’s right.”
“You sound like Almo,” Abuse said.
“And you sound like a fucking crazy person,” Ogre responded, tossing the cheese blade into the backseat.
Abuse glanced fearfully back at the rise, beyond which was the drain.
“Get in,” Ogre commanded.
10
Having worked at the library for years, Ogre was more familiar and comfortable with the area directly adjacent than Abuse, although they, along with a few other friends, had risked titillating forays into Hobo Central in the past out of some desire to find novelty amid their otherwise stale and relatively sanitized life experiences. After parking near the East entrance and concealing their knives—fortunately Ogre had a jacket in his car that was of sufficient length to cover the entirety of the blade that he palmed at the bottom handle to keep it flush with his arm—they walked around the side of the building through a gauntlet of bespeckled winos holding paper-bagged beverages and asking for change and, failing that, cigarettes. Abuse ignored them all in his silent rage, but Ogre gave a cigarette to the first one after shrugging at the scraggly man’s request for change. Three seconds later, when a similar request had been made by a different brown-bag-holding person, Ogre shrugged about the cigarette as well.
Having got through the gauntlet unscathed, Ogre and Abuse rounded the library’s own loading dock and descended into the pit of the park by the decaying fountains. They exchanged soured looks as they passed a motionless figure laid fetally at the base of a bench and wrapped completely in a greenish blanket.
They were no bum-haters. They shared fond, if sometimes a bit frightening, youthful memories of eccentric neighborhood vagrants and outcasts: the Monkey Man, a Vietnam war veteran who was well-known for ranting incoherently at various bus stops along 32nd Street; Man of Steel, an aged bodybuilder seen daily walking proudly and silently along the street in a Superman costume, iconic curl of black hair on his forehead invincible to the sun and its one-hundred-plus-degree heat; the Cyclist, bone-thin and bearded like a recluse, who rode his old bike, legs slowly pumping the petals, back and forth across the city all day every day and sometimes veered uncaringly into traffic. But those gathered at the fringe of Hobo Central on this night near the library were not like these men who they remembered. Some of them had bikes, and one or two probably had a Superman costume packed somewhere into the tattered bags containing their possessions, but, generally, it wasn’t interesting. It was just sad, and that became its strangeness, its novelty. But they were on a mission to find a stolen sketchbook, not to discover novelty in mundane human suffering and hope in the face of bleakness, so while they were not gazing with naïve wonder as they pressed toward the underpass, they were also not dismissive of the humanity of these people who had by some series of events in their lives found themselves desperate for twenty-five cents and a fresh pair of socks. If Ogre and Abuse ever frowned, their sour stares were simply the natural response of the human body to trying to incorporate the thick odor of stagnant urine.
As the sommelier had noted, many years before, the city had invested in a massive project to direct interstate highway traffic into a tunnel bypassing the city center and build a park on top of it. In order to keep the park contiguous, the primary cross street was converted to a bridge under which those strolling through the park could walk unimpeded by speeding vehicles. The plans for the park had been ambitious and hopeful, envisioning a place where citizens could enjoy beautiful temperate February days with their families and attend a variety of cultural events. In reality, the park and underpass had quickly proven to be an ideal location for the congregation of downtown’s many homeless or outcast citizens, and, though not nearly all of these unfortunate souls were psychotically deranged, the underpass was not a particularly safe place to go, not even for its own denizens.
Ogre and Abuse walked to the cavelike underpass and saw that beyond a smattering of rumpled tents and sun shelters there were dozens of makeshift rooms that had been apparently erected to last indefinitely. Sections of plywood had been secured together into walls, nooks, rooms, social areas. Along the fringes of this limbo metropolis were many less-fortified hovels fashioned out of cardboard or jury-rigged sections of sheet metal and tarpaulin. Near an open hibachi grill in which burned a fire of reclaimed wood, a few men sat on folding chairs with frayed support ribbons playing Scrabble on an overturned shipping crate. The crying of an infant somewhere nearby was accompanied by the cooing sounds of its mother. A bottle shattered from somewhere further in, immediately followed by cursing and a wave of laughter that interfered with the waves of engines whirring along the road overhead. Just a few feet away from Ogre and Abuse, a young man in what appeared to be a genuine full set of warmups in the style of the local basketball team leaned against a concrete pylon, staring at them wordlessly as he smoked a bowl out of an ornate glass pipe. He presently let out a billow of dank but slightly-sour marijuana smoke.
“You like what you smell?” the young man asked them.
A couple of the men playing Scrabble looked briefly over and then turned back to their game.
Ogre just shrugged, but Abuse walked over to the young man. “Is that kind?”
The young man chuckled. “Bitch,” he said, “if I had kind bud, I wouldn’t be smoking it right here in front of every-fucking-body. You want a toke of this shit?”
Abuse eyed him. “Thanks,” he said, “but I’ll pass.”
“Whatever,” said the young man. He took another hit from the pipe, which was of blown glass and, for a moment, looked to Abuse like it was shaped like a squid tentacle.
“Smells decent, though,” Abuse added.
The young man frowned at him. “Why are you talking to me?”
“We’re, uh,” Abuse began.
Ogre sidled up next to Abuse, covertly adjusting his grip on the handle of the cheese knife. “Anyone you know around here got their hands on some loot tonight?” he asked. “We might be interested.”
The young man stared at him. “You a fucking pig or something?”
“We’re not police,” Ogre assured him. “We’d have to tell you if we were, right?”
The young man shook his head dismissively. “I heard that’s bullshit.”
Ogre nodded. “Yeah, I heard that, too,” he said. “Especially suspect is the fact that, one time, an actual pig told me that himself.”
The young man eyed him strangely.
“Are you going to answer my fucking question, or not?” Ogre asked, stepping up and leading with his left so that he could better conceal the grip he’d managed on the handle of the cheese blade.
The young man flicked his lighter and took another big hit from the glass bowl, staring with uninterrupted wide bloodshot eyes at Ogre.
“I’ll rephrase,” Ogre offered. “If someone came through here tonight with stolen shit that we could maybe buy off them cheap, where would we go to find them?”
The young man exhaled a plume of smoke so voluminous that it blotted out the underpass wall completely, along with the side of the library in the distance. “You’re fucking skimmers,” he said, coughing a bit in the process. He began shaking his head. “Naw, man,” he continued. “I don’t get involved in that type of shit. Anything like that comes around here, I ignore it. I’m not a fucking thief.”
“And it’s a triple word score, motherfuckers,” cried one of the men around the crate table.
“What the fuck is ‘synchronicity’ supposed to mean?” another challenged.
“It’s when shit comes together in a way you’d never expect,” the player explained. “Like how you played ‘city’ down here earlier and then there’s this ‘o’ here from when Tucker was being smart and played ‘macro’ along with a little ‘c’ from where Humberto got his ‘zinc.’ Just so happens I got the missing pieces is all.”
“This is some bullshit,” one of the others muttered.
“Naw, it’s just like a hundred thirty points or something,” the man said. “Maybe more. I’m about to count that shit up, so just you wait.”
Ogre relaxed a bit as he looked over at the men playing Scrabble. “That’s fine,” Ogre said, turning back to the young man, “but you can at least—at least—tell us where we would go to find thieves who want to sell their loot.”
The young man looked around. “Go over to the west side of the tunnel,” he told them. “Fucking tweakers and junkies pretty much ruined everything.”
Ogre nodded. “Thank you.”
The young man shrugged.
Abuse suddenly piped up. “What do you mean they ruined everything?”
The young man frowned at him. “Like different from how tweakers and junkies always ruin things?” he asked. “What the fuck do you care? You want cheap stolen shit, that’s where you go. This might be a pretty dope anarchist community if it weren’t for them stealing from everyone.”
As Ogre and Abuse headed into Hobo Central, they passed closely by the Scrabble table. The man who’d just scored around a hundred and seventy points in one play leaned back to tell them, “Hands on your pieces, gentlemen.”
Ogre kind of grunted, but Abuse was walking quickly and maybe didn’t hear.
The interior of the underpass was lit by a series of safety lights along the eaves of the tunnel, but many of these were unlit, either because they had been shattered or because they had burned out and not yet been replaced, so as the light of the city dissipated and they pressed further into Hobo Central, things were mostly lit by occasional small fires around which families were gathered to cook or, strangely, both Abuse and Ogre thought, large coals fires at which women and men were hammering heated lengths of metal into various shapes. As they continued on, they came across a young woman apparently training a pack of javelinas to discern between various smells—lavender, duck liver, rancid engine oil, Dairy Queen Butterfinger Blizzard. Not fifteen seconds later, an old, bearded man wearing nothing but about six coats, all of which were unbuttoned or unzipped at the front, strode by, throat-chanting the esoteric doctrines of “eight-six-seven-five-three-oh-nine” as his hairy nutsack just about scraped against the concrete in pendulous arcs. A group of children were playing a game that looked to be a take on bocci involving rubber bands and rat skulls. Inconceivably, as they passed a complex hovel, they glimpsed a functional television surrounded by fifteen people fighting over genuine Nintendo 64 controllers. Elsewhere: a young man in shorts and a ski jacket and goggles eating store-brand cereal straight from a family-size box with grimy fingers; someone grinding an avocado, or what looked kind of like an avocado, against the concrete wall; a candlelit display of dolls handmade out of found plastic, twine, sharp aluminum, leaden paint chips, and buttons; a headless, naked mannequin bungee-corded with its back against an oversized bust of Beethoven, or someone similarly disturbed and crazy-looking. Where did these things come from? Who made a bust that size, only to have it perpetually attached to a sexless doll? Who got their hands on legitimate N64 controllers this late in the game? Rat skulls? And where on God’s green earth did that fucker ever manage to get his hands on a family-size box of cereal when there wasn’t a grocery store in a fifteen-mile radius of here, let alone one that would offer that particular generic brand?
Then they encountered Gimli. At least, that’s what the tall, thin guy with infected piercings all over his puffy red face who was wearing a shredded Stüssy sweatshirt called himself.
“I’m Gimli,” he told them, unsolicited, just out of the blue. Or, more appropriately, out of the darkness, because they were emerging from the central area of Hobotown and beginning their encroach upon the West End where the junkies and tweakers ran the game when he appeared out of nowhere.
Abuse frowned at him. “Gimli’s short,” he said. “He’s a Tolkien dwarf.”
Gimli closed his eyes and seemed to process something painfully. “I am not a token dwarf,” he finally said.
“You’re not a dwarf,” Ogre told him.
Gimli cast his gaze at the dewy concrete floor.
“Sorry to break it to you,” Ogre added.
“Tolkien,” Abuse articulated. “Jay are are. As in The Two Towers?”
Gimli looked around. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t been up to Central for a couple days. Are there towers I should know about?”
Abuse frowned at him. “Anyone selling the contents of a stolen backpack around here?”
Gimli’s eyes widened. “Stolen?”
Ogre eyed Abuse with frustration and then directed his look at the man who he suspected was a tweaker. “We’re skimmers,” Ogre said. “Where’s the shit? We’re not rich, but we have a little something for purchase or trade if we find something we want.”
Gimli had locked eyes with Ogre for a moment before looking away, from here to there several times until, finally, settling on a large, bluish tent near the western opening of the underpass. “Hapgood.”
“Hapgood,” Ogre repeated. “Is that a person? Someone we should speak with?”
Gimli nodded. “Hapgood,” he said. “If it happens, then it’s good.”
Abuse grunted.
“That’s just about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Ogre said, staring at Gimli, who was making only occasional eye contact. “Who is he? A fence? A boss?”
Gimli shrugged. “Heywood’s over there,” he said, ticking his head toward the blueish shelter.
Abuse shuddered.
“Heywood?” Ogre asked. “I thought it was ‘Hapgood.’”
Gimli nodded. “Hapgood.”
Ogre leaned in. “Don’t make me show you how serious I am,” he warned. “We’re skimmers of the highest class. We don’t allow two-cent tweaker shit in our environs. Does Hapgood have any freshly-snatched backpacks? Maybe some original artwork?”
Gimli lifted a finger. “I have an idea,” he said. “Instead of Heywood—”
“Here we go with this ‘Heywood’ shit again,” Ogre said.
Gimli smacked himself in the forehead. “Sorry,” he whined. Then, with peculiar clarity, he added, “You got a smoke?”
“Get the fuck out of here,” Ogre told him.
Gimli shot him an injured look. “But I live here.”
Ogre motioned vaguely at Abuse and they left Gimli to sulk.
“It’s good we left him,” Abuse whispered when they were a few yards away. “I think he was just looking to land a punchline with all that ‘Heywood’ stuff.”
Ogre eyed him. “I’m about to land a punch in his ugly fucking face,” he said, glancing back, although Gimli had already receded into the shadows.
“So what do you think about this over here?” Abuse asked, ticking his head toward a nearing cluster of ragged tents beyond which a line of grungy loiterers rested against the wall stretching to the western opening of the underpass. Some were engaged in low conversation, sharing cigarettes, but most of them were partaking in some kind of communal exercise involving the weaving of twine. In pairs and small groups, sections of twine were blended and passed along the chain to be added to by others, until, further along, the product appeared to be a thick, sturdy rope that those at the end of the line were carefully turning into a mound of coil out of the center of which the head of a large jackrabbit was peering frightfully, as if waiting for a chance to escape.
“I don’t like it,” Ogre said. “I also don’t see any backpacks.”
“You think we should ask for Hapgood?” Abuse asked.
Ogre stared at him. “I didn’t drink a potion and consult with a goddamned drain just to give up before we’ve even asked around.”
Abuse leaned in. “You see them, don’t you?”
Ogre glanced about. “See what?”
After a wince, Abuse shook his head quickly. “Nothing.”
“Oh, no you don’t,” Ogre said. “You don’t ask some weird shit like that and then say nothing, nothing, tra-la-la.”
Abuse sighed. He leaned in again and whispered, “The tentacles of Cthulhu.”
Ogre tilted his head a bit and then nodded and inhaled deeply and threw up his hand that wasn’t still slyly securing the long cheese knife under his jacket. “You appear to be hallucinating more than usual,” he said. “Whatever that tincture was that Kieran gave us must be affecting you differently than me, because I feel fucking primed to start sawing off fingers if we don’t get some information from these fuckers soon.”
“Just be careful,” Abuse advised.
“It’s your sketchbook,” Ogre reminded him.
Abuse nodded sheepishly and glanced over at the row of sketchy-looking collective weavers, some of whom were casting cautious glances their way.
“You’ve seen your share of craziness in the restaurant, there’s no doubt about that,” Ogre told him quietly, “but I need you to understand something about working at the public library, especially this public library: potentially dangerous encounters with mentally-ill and/or ill-meaning transients is a daily occurrence. A daily fucking occurrence. Don’t get me wrong—you know I don’t prejudge just because someone is obviously some kind of social outcast, but there’s no pretending that sometimes in places like this there are complete fucking psychos that would just as soon piss on your throat hole after tearing your head off as wipe their filthy ass on a children’s picture book and slip it back into the stacks. Not joking. That happened last week. The part about the shit in the book, not the decapitation. But you see my point?”
Abuse shrugged. “I think so?”
“Of course you didn’t,” Ogre snapped, “because I didn’t make it yet. Stay sharp. My point is that I have seen some real veteran librarians deal with the trickiest of situations not by talking reasonably or trying to be intimidating but precisely by acting crazier than the one who’s crazy. Shifty would tell you the same thing. He and I were both working multimedia a couple years ago when a guy came into the main foyer with a dead squirrel on a bicycle wheel, no tire, like it was an entrée he was about to serve, but he was also talking to it, all loud and grandiosely as if he was trying to show off to everyone in the library that he was having a personal conversation with the King of Turd Mountain. I heard him all the way up on level four, and not just because of the acoustics of the open foyer. He was practically screaming, and kids and parents were freaking out in the checkout line. Nobody knew what to do. The security guard called for backup and had his can of pepper spray ready, but he was trying to talk the lunatic into leaving and it wasn’t working, so, finally, this woman Marta who’s been working at the downtown branch since before it moved to this building, so like thirty years, comes over to the crazy guy, up all quick babbling about false chicken gods and bone soup—in English, Spanish, I think Korean, and also just straight babbling some nonsense language—and then she starts paper-cutting her forearm with a large print copy of a collection of Stephen King short stories. The guy stopped ranting almost immediately and watched her for a minute before offering her the bicycle wheel, which made her turn that shit up a notch and she was the one screaming now, multiple languages again, and nonsense probably in there, until the guy just smiled in terror and backed the fuck out of the library. Never saw him again.”
Abuse was staring at him.
“Get it?” Ogre asked.
“But I don’t have a book,” Abuse said. “Also, dude, the expression is ‘King Turd of Crap Mountain.’”
Ogre rubbed his eye. “I’m saying we need to be the craziest motherfuckers around if we’re going to get anywhere here,” he said. “Are you prepared for that?”
Abuse shook his head quickly.
Ogre sighed and dug around in his pockets until he produced a short cylindrical metal tube painted vaguely like a cigarette that had packed at one end a tasty nug of kind bud. “I was saving this bat for the drive to Gloomy’s,” he said, offering the piece to Abuse, “but I think you need it now, to take the edge off of whatever that shit was that Kieran gave us and get you in the right state of mind. Drug-crazed abandon.”
Abuse’s eyebrows bounced. “Sin—degradation—vice—insanity!” he cried.
A bunch of the weavers looked over momentarily, but, apparently because such outbursts were not uncommon, they mostly went immediately back to what they were doing, which, again, was working together to make some kind of thick-ass rope, for whatever reason.
Abuse took the bat and waited as Ogre got his lighter out and sparked up the marijuana. “See youthful marijuana victims,” Abuse said as he held the smoke in his lungs. “What actually happens.” Then he unloaded a plume of thick sour smoke that drew the attention of a number of folks around, including not a few of the weavers.
“Tell your children!” Ogre called out, fondling the handle of his concealed cheese blade.
“You got any extra?” asked a small, thin man in a ragged Insane Clown Posse t-shirt and cutoff denim shorts, who just happened, apparently, to be walking by.
Abuse cached the bat, blew out the smoke, and tapped it empty with extra panache like it was a delicious stogie. “Gentlemen,” he announced, “Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot. But don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.”
“What the fuck did you say to me?” the man hollered.
The line of weavers had already been disrupted, by some mixture of the display of pot-smoking and the ensuing conflict, so some of those who had been working on the rope had come to check out the scene along with various others who’d emerged from tents or shadowy nooks.
“Babalabaloobala,” Ogre cried, transitioning what was at first nonsense articulated by the movement of his tongue and lips alone but transitioned into a series of noises made by his manipulation of his lips with a horizontal forefinger. “Babbaloob! Babbaloo!” He then began to hit his left hand down against the air like he was banging on a bongo.
The Insane Clown Posse guy, who was obviously a poser because he wasn’t wearing edgy clown makeup, stared strangely at them. “I’m just looking for a hit, bro.”
“Well, that covers a lot of ground,” Abuse said, continuing wryly. “Say, you cover a lot of ground yourself. You’d better beat it unless you know something about a sketchbook.”
The guy frowned. “What the fuck is a sketchbook?” he asked. “I don’t know shit about a sketchbook.”
Abuse gently tapped the aluminum bat against a temple and addressed the gathering generally. “Behold the rising of the seventeen-tentacled chicken god,” he shouted, “who arrives upon the platter of spokes aforementioned only in the secret but recently disclosed archives of Krug Stillo, risen—”
“Bababaloo! Babaloo!” Ogre was still howling.
“—from the lair of the cult of impersonators of Cthulhu,” Abuse continued, increasing the majesty of his voice, “the false prophets. They’re coming to get you, Barbara! Fifty fucking tentacles now, growing, rising! They who don’t wanna off someone first night out. I mean, it’d be a shame to get this floor all messed up with blood. Watch as the ultimate sacrifice is beheld by those beholding the final ritual. My brain is burning! ‘Nam flashback! ‘Nam flashback!”
There were now at least two dozen spectators gathered nearby, all of whom were watching in horrific awe.
“Long live the new flesh!” Abuse added, apparently for punctuation.
Then Ogre stopped babalooing and made systematic eye contact with everyone nearby. “You heard the man,” he said. “There’s some crazy shit about to go down if we don’t see some stolen sketchbooks and backpacks like right the fuck now.”
A couple of people split off from the crowd in different directions, each going to a tent and returning quickly, one with an armload of hardcover books and the other with two books and a yellow backpack. All of this was gently placed on the ground a couple of yards away from Abuse and Ogre between them and the crowd.
Abuse nodded curtly and then stepped forward, one hand on the handle of the paring knife in his pocket, like a priest about to bless an offering. He ignored the backpack completely, since it was neither the color nor general style of his own, but he did toe at the books for a moment to examine their covers. Then he cleared his throat and looked around slowly. “These,” he pronounced, “are not sketchbooks.”
Ogre moved to his side, looking down at the volumes. “Let me see that,” he said. “Goddamn. How to Win Friends and Influence People? The Lincoln Lawyer? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you don’t know what a sketchbook is, considering your taste in literature.”
One of those who had brought books forward pointed at the stack. “There’s one called The Notebook,” she said.
Ogre shook his head. “First of all, notebooks and sketchbooks are different,” he explained. “Notebooks typically have lines, while sketchbooks don’t. Also, that book fucking sucks, too.”
The young woman shrugged. “That’s all anyone brought through here tonight.”
“Cthulhu is watching you,” Abuse warned.
The woman, as well as most of the spectators, stared at him with a mixture of confusion and fear.
“Let’s go,” Ogre suggested.
They hoofed it away from the underpass, cornering the stairwell and heading up to the street above. The front of the restaurant was in sight only a couple of blocks away and they walked with a purpose.
“Can I ask you a question?” Abuse suddenly said.
“Sure,” Ogre grunted.
“What the fuck was that Ricky Ricardo shit?”
Ogre shrugged. “It just came out.” He frowned. “And what of it? You were only marginally better. Was that a Last House on the Left reference I caught in there?”
Abuse winked. “Also TCM 2, Videodrome, Night of the Living Dead, Duck Soup.”
“Of course,” Ogre said. “How did I not catch all that?”
“You probably did,” Abuse said. “It was kind of intense back there. Besides, you encouraged it when you picked up on my initial Reefer Madness references.”
The Central Avenue bridge curved up along their right as they approached Tati’s. It was now after one o’clock and the lights were out and everything locked. It was time to give up the search and get over to Gloomy’s in time for a couple of drinks before closing.
The Night after the Night of the Autumnal Equinox
The next evening, Abuse went back through the alleys and again to the underpass during the lull after the dinner “rush” (they’d only had three tickets, a four-top and two couples). He insisted on going alone and wasn’t gone long.
Jux looked up when he got back. “How’s Hobotown looking?”
Abuse grimaced. “Hobo Central,” he corrected, “is just as underwhelming as it was last night. Only thing new was a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and a new blanket.” He swiped his hands face-down and outwards as if he were smoothing out a bedsheet.
“Moving on up in the world,” Jux said, grabbing a small ramekin off of the metal shelf above him.
“Fuckers didn’t say anything to me,” Abuse added. “Just stared at me until one of them brought out the book. I suppose I earned enough cred to get free books whenever I want.”
“How’s Trainyard Steve?” Jux asked. No such person, to the best of their combined knowledge, actually existed.
“Not present,” Abuse said. “Not Crazylegs McIlheny either.”
Jux laughed shortly, but it sounded more like a grunt.
Then Kieran came into the kitchen holding the grinning pumpkin Abuse had carved only the night before.
“Sorry,” the sommelier said. “I had to take it down.”
“He looks like he had a stroke,” Jux said, eyeing the pumpkin’s wilting mouth.
Abuse cocked his head in puzzlement. “Hm,” he said. He shrugged. “Well,” he finally said, taking the jack o’ lantern into his hands and walking back to the dock.
Jux followed him. “What the fuck happened with that pumpkin?” he asked. “Don’t people leave them on their porches for weeks before they get all sloppy like that?”
“Until X-mas at least,” Abuse said.
Jux looked at the pumpkin. “Was it particularly ripe last night?”
Abuse shook his head. “I don’t remember it being too weird,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, exactly, but this place will add years to your age.” Then he unceremoniously chucked the wilted pumpkin into the dumpster and brushed off his hands. “The magic is gone, dude.”
What the Sommelier Says…
“This isn’t a castle. Castles are imaginary lies. There is no safety. Everyone wants to feel safe and have a little castle for themselves, but it’s all jackoff nonsense. Just be ready to kill things. You want to know what I think.”
-Kieran
Tati's Wine and Spirits 