Interpreter #8

"Went down to the levy, but the devil caught me there. 'Took my twenty dollar bill and vanished in the air"
~Grateful Dead


Hooah!...

Gildge said it, clearly wasn't feeling it. By this point, though, every snivel and whine is making my job a little easier. I let the deadpan delivery pass in service of a greater victory.

The Interpreter was to his left, i sat facing him from the next rack. There was a battered footlocker between us. I leaned in. I looked him in the eyes:

Specialist, I have concerns. This unit's never lost a man to discipline, and you will not - I cannot ALLOW - you to become the first. Are we clear?

Sir, yes Sir...

Way too quiet. We were not clear. I flashed a look at the Terp and he cleared out, leaving me and the kid in a dark tent. I leaned in:

Speak freely. This is the only chance I'll give you.

***

So that's how i got this job...

They drove through the frigid Kazmir night at speeds that felt very dangerous to private Gildge. The interpreter talked the entire time, but with the rush of air over the chassis, and the rocks and dust crunching between bigger road noises, Spec 1st Gildge was getting every tenth word and understanding none if it. After almost an hour on high desert hardscrabble, the road got at least semi-passable and the Terp's narrative came into focus:

...Fuck I'd been offered shit like this gig my whole life since I had no dick-hair, yo. The el tee, though, he's the first white man could meet my price. Six languages, six dialects or more in most of em, I know the high roads and the low roads. You gotta have self worth right? Dollahdollabill y'all right?

Gildge said nothing.

Going back ain't a thing to be ashamed of mang. I've seen it before too. Shit many times bro! I hear about these guys, Americans, big tough guys right? Hard. They be killin themselves faster than the tags can get 'em. I'm sayin "fuck bro...where these guys been workin? " Cause I know the aint seein' what I see, and they still eatin voluntary lead? What the fuck, right? Last week we napalmed a school after barricading the doors. Ain't a guy with us killed anything but a ragheads. Shit you saw the bus. That's our thing dude. Fuckin hellish. Death squad motherfuckers. We hard. You gotta be!

Terp's mention of the bus made Gildge all loopy again. He tried to stem the flood of disgust and confusion, tried to keep the awful images from his mind's eye. It was no use. What the fuck happened to that bus? Those people...

Specialist Gildge realized he'd spoke it inadvertently as he thought it and studied the interpreter for reaction. He was relieved to see none, then felt silly for all his worrying. All the noise, he could hardly make out the sound of his own voice much less an...

Glad you asked dude. The El Tee had a feeling you would so I got orders to make us a detour.

He jacked the brakes and the un-belted Gildge went head up against the windshield.

Interpreter #7

"Use all your well-learned politesse, or I'll lay your soul to waste"


Later I took a small group to observe the scene and establish body count. Specialist Gildge accompanied, as did the Interpreter, two more medical officers, and sgt. Mason. We'd been on the ground for approximately 45 minutes before private Gildge became physically ill.

This occurred just after we scoped the wreckage for the body-count. It was high. We found 19 people - 15 adults and four kids - burned and butchered near the top of the high rise. We found whole families of people crammed into shitty, 1940's elevators burned alive and fused with the metal and wiring of the melted cars. We'd counted almost 50 enemy dead inside the primary target.

Out in the streets we had cooked six cars plus the old Laidlaw schoolbus. It was to these impact zones that I sent Specialist Gildge to scan for body count and assess the security component. I found him there 35 minutes later, no body count, no report. Gildge was hardly conscious, shaking, covered in his own filth. He tried to speak but could produce only convulsive grunts and dry heaves.

I sent him to the rear that night. By then word was getting around about Ris. Our orders mere to maintain position and assume a security posture while division tried to untwist the collective nutsack. With no spare parts and a soldier who's presence had become a danger to anybody around him, my choices had dwindled. The interpreter rode out with Gildge at 11:00.

Interpreter #6

"My Shangri-La beneath the summer moon...I will return again."
~Led Zeppelin

We were southwest of the Kasmir border, moving on a small city called Tatet. I took a position on a high embankment and scattered the rest of the Mech down both sides of the hill facing the pathetic, burned out skyline.

The Interpreter was speaking into my right ear. He wasn't talking to me - I knew exactly what was about to happen. He was talking to the new guy Gildge, our replacement medic of almost one whole week. Specialist Gildge was about to witness Tarantula Hawk for the first time, and the interpreter was talking him
through it.

Sgt. Mason Dawes came up with the 'Hawk crew and began setting up while the 'Terp babbled out his lesson:

Fuck. Don't talk about this shit dude, right? Not even here. Fuck. Especially not here. See the bus?

I could see the bus: an ancient American model, no tires, no windows, parked down the block facing us at about 300 meters. Across the street was Tatet's only block of buildings. The highest one was seven stories, a burned out hi-rise poking like a dandelion from the rotted slums at it's base.

The interpreter ran a detailed play by play as Mase's crew prepared the rocket. He said:

The rag heads are gonna break for it They'll hear the strike and then run out the bottom. They gonna go out the back and up from the basement. Bad guys will run with they women, children, whatever the fuck, thinkin' we wont shoot. Gaines 'gonna put one on top and you watch...

Mase shouted "fire in the hole!!!" and there was a huge "whoosh!". We watched as the rocket cleared the quarter of a mile to the target in a split second. In movies, rockets are slow, with a billowy contrail to follow. A real rocket is like a giant, exploding bullet, clearing range in an instant rush of noise and impact and lingering aftershocks. The top of the hi rise burst like a salute, the ground shook beneath us, and the 'Terp spoke up again:

Here they come. Watch the fire escape, the doors...

Within seconds the street outside was full of people. We saw a few men, one or two with weapons. Mostly we saw women and kids, mostly running, some carried. There was a confusion, short lived, about who was going where. Within a few minutes the street was clear again. Silence on the hillside until I heard Gildge:

So that's it? Why'd..

The interpreter ignored him:

The fuckers think we're gonna shoot out some walls and move out. We blew the building to get 'em in cars.

Now fire teams on both sides of the hill begin an enfilade down the streets on both sides of the building. Short bursts punctuated the Terp's dramatic whispering, adding drama to his usual sense of the moment. As he spoke Sarnt. Mason brought up another detail: four men carrying two large black canvas bags. They worked without speaking in a miniature swarm of urgent movement. In seconds they were ready. Two simple black tubes on braced, four-point mounts now stood beside us on the hill-top, their long graphite appendages anchored deep in the ground. Mase turned on the juice as the last refugees made the bus. An odd sound came up, like a television running white noise. It seemed to come from everywhere, filling the air around us.

I watched the crews run their system checks and fall back, and I backed up a few yards myself, more out of habit than any realistic sense of danger. I heard Mase give the orders to hang fire, and the Hawks began to wind out. The TV noise in the air morphed into a din, like a fleet of prop-bombers over- revving on a runway. It rose in volume and octave to a haunted, mad wail, and a brilliant flash of red and orange light brightening the distance between our position and the targets in the street. Then it was over.

Frye

Frye was beginning to get sick. The plan: drop off daughter - drive fast as fuck to get dope - drive fast as fuck back to retrieve daughter in time and none-the-wiser.

Frye dropped the girl at her party and the clock in his head began ticking. 1:30 minutes he had, with the place he needed to be about 40 minutes away. It would be close. He galloped back to the car after a rushed hug and brief pleasantries, bolted like hell for downtown.

It ended up taking 34 minutes to get to the spot and Frye was definitely sick: all farty and with fluctuating body temp. Along the way he'd fired off a confirming text:

Fifteen mins. Good?

Flying in his Yaris through the tiny narco-hood streets with thoughts stacking like jets in a holding pattern, Frye was having trouble. He could feel his eyes twitching in his skull...Dude wasn't getting back...One thing to be late picking up the girl...another whole thing to retreat empty...Frye was definitely getting sick.

A generic-sounding beep sequence announced a reply as Frye was pulling up. He read as he un-belted and turned off the car. It was a shitty, druggy, low-everything neighborhood but it was freezing, and just three days after a giant blizzard. Somehow that made him feel safer. Frye thought about weather or not people got robbed in freezing weather, decided probably not. The reply was:

Make it 20. I'm across town.

Disaster, possibly. "20" might mean "50", "100", "1000". His guy had no respect for time. The party-clock was still ticking off in his head and faster than before. Frye was sick. He opened the car door and dry-heaved stuff that looked like egg yolk for five munutes. Then he closed the door, prepared $50, waited.

He'd left the party 40 minutes ago. Frye wiped muddy sweat from his brow and thought about the social graces at stake as regards lateness to children's functions. He sat for 27 minutes, each second of which seemed both interminably long and amazingly brief.

Finally the guy showed, served, and disappeared back into the house. Frye, mega-late, and realizing the guy'd forgotten to take his $50, stabbed the throttle in reverse. By that time he'd been away from the party for one hour and thirteen minutes. Best case for pickup was 20 minutes late. "fuck" he thought, unable to think of a follow up. As it happened, that was the last thought Frye would have for a while.

The car that hit his car was going way too fast for the tiny street. It was also much bigger and heavier than the Yaris. Poor Frye had come blasting out of the driveway, reaching across his body with his right arm, for the seatbelt. At impact his car spun violently through 720 degrees and the centrifugal jolt send him ricocheting off the dash board and out the driver's side window. He landed in a snowball across the street, woke up seconds later in blinding, screaming pain from the ancient rebar once piled on the sidewalk, now forced through his back, out from his chest like a spear.

A few minutes later, an ambulance-and-cop siren symphony getting loud quick, Frye's guy comes out once again, runs over, frisks Frye's pockets (working efficiently around the rebar), tosses Frye's Yaris. There's cash - two 20's, two 5's - scattered around the driver's side. Before sprinting back to beat the first-response, the guy reaches over the rebar once more, this time to grab Frye's wallet, sticking neatly from the center console like a labeled tab on a file folder. He hadn't planned on that at first, but looking at him now, the guy knew Frye was dead, and, as such, would not miss the cash.

Interpreter #5

After I finished with the dude, Mink came up. I said : "that's the extent of it" gesturing at the prisoner with dramatic hands, like a magician presenting the rabbit-hat. Mink set his pack down, brought out the book, opened it up and began to read in a slow, raspy growl while the Interpreter did his thing:

"Cave Wave". Common name for the anti - bunker incendiary DC 190. Cave Wave was developed at Los Almos labs in 1987 and designed by Emmit Oslen at the instruction of Team Leader Scott George. It was tested in Los Almos in summer of '89 and commissioned in January of 1990. First stock was deployed in march of '90 during operation Desert Shield.

The guy's eyes were still bored. I kept watching, Mink kept reading:

"...Designed to strike at targets deep in the earth, or protected by reinforced earth. Cave Wave's explosive charge is equal to about two tons of TNT and its effectiveness is enhanced by a load of molten iron that deploys seconds before the explosive charge, spraying with force onto anything within a 20 yard radius. Dropped from an "invisible" height of 37,O00 feet, Cave Wave can burrow and penetrate to 100 yards depth, inundate the entire target depth with hot metal, and explode with enough heat and force to displace the earth in two hundred yard circumference.

The Interpreter motor-mouthing in Farsi the whole time, and now the guy's face is changing. The 'Terp finally stops so it's complete silence as we sat and regarded one another. I flash Mink a glance and he goes on.

"Cave Wave has a special second stage to its attack which makes timely retaliation in kind a virtual impossibility. Seconds after the initial detonation, another charge sets off what's known as a "Jacob's ladder" effect. A parcel of white phosphorous is blown into the impact zone from the remaining length of projectile, just after this ignition a third, smaller explosion blasts nano-thermite powder into the breach, setting every cubic centimeter of impact zone on fire for up to 24 hours.

The guy's face has gone shock white. His lips dissolve into an unbelieving rictus. He begins to speak but he can't find words. I turn to Mink, point at the guy:

Tell him ten minutes.

The Interpreter turned to him as well, said something, then another thing. None of it sounded like "ten minutes" but the guy started singing pretty quick.

Later on we watched the strike. I had the guy brought back. Left his family doing whatever in the village. Yes, that's some tough shit. this is a story that begins with me doing some tough shit.

Something that never comes across when you see fighting on tv: the noise. War is loud as fuck. Louder - probably - then anything most people are going to be exposed to during the course of sleep>work>fuck, unless they happen to work in demolitions. Even then, there's nothing like the sounds of armed, industrialized combat.

We took a position at the high point of an arroyo overlooking the village, and for a few minutes we looked down on them. There were kids playing. Goats. A group of women were gathered on the far side, tending to what looked like a stage coach from the old west.

I had them bring the guy up to watch. They cooperate, and they think that's it. They think they're going free. They need to be taught. The guy looked puzzled, but he was smiling. The interpreter wasn't around.

Interpreter #4

"A man six foot tall, you could fit 30 billion of them into the earth. That's how big the fucker is: 30 billion dudes, big.

The interpreter - bringing up the rear, walking behind two prisoners - was speaking English. Loudly. He always spoke very loudly, like he wanted everybody around to get what he was saying:

"That's a thing they don't show on the news. On the news, the earth? Fuckin too small. 30 billion? Fuck no. 7 billion and shit is crowded - dudes fighting over gas and food. The news tells us that shit! why these guys over here fuckin whichoo! 7 billion. Ain't enough, no room right?

The interpreter's chosen method of thought completion was usually some variant of abbreviated rhetorical confirmation.


"So they bring me along, an I gotta talk to these guys...they ain't learning, they don't wana know. Easier they get a guy. Guy talks, says shit they want, the way they want, right? So Awright.

I was following behind by a few yards, alone. Listening.

"...but the news ain't tell you shit these guys don't want you to know. The news is all "them" not "us". Part of my job...Bring a little "us" to these Marines, Right? Look at this guy:

I knew without turning he was talking about me, and I knew what was coming. Daily occurrences since Quat: the interpreter running me down to prisoners / townspeople / other assorted ragheads, then laughing about it - loudly and with great purpose - with same ragheads. I didn't even turn around. He went on for a while and then he and both prisoners were laughing so hard they were almost silent.

Interpreter #2

I've spent my entire life doing the same thing over and over again, and I bet you have too. Let's run down the list:

First: we get up from having slept. I'm only 23 years old, and so a lot of my "having slept" meant "having slept more than anybody needs to sleep".

We eat. Some more than others, most more than we should.

We get a dumb fucking job. I only ever had one - my dad owns a car lot and I worked only there.

After work I usually call my friend Beece, and go out to a place where I'd a) eat dinner b) watch sports and c) drink beer and other alcohol Until a) somebody wants to fight me (or me, they) b) somebody wants to fuck me (rare), or c) I puke in the bathroom and go home to smoke weed. It seems like a pretty good list of options, I'll admit, until you run through the menu a few hundred times.

That's what sparked all this. If you pan back a bit, isn't that what everybody does down here? The lucky ones anyway: We sleep, get up, work, come home. Lather, rinse, repeat. It's the best we can do. Throw in an occasional vacation, a wedding or whatever - we get plenty of holidays - but for the vast majority of our time on planet earth, the best we'll ever do is a variation on that theme.

"The earth only ever spins one way" is how my own father put it. inspiring guy, my father.

We'll get into him later. For now, the important part is simply this: I joined the United States Marine Corps, got sent to the desert, saw and did really fucked up shit...and did it all because my world only ever spins one way, and I wondered if that way was the only way. I didn't think it was and - as it turns out - I was right.

Amazing Grace

"The air here, it's breathin' fine fine fine.
We cooked us up an ass-kickin' lifetime"

~WP

Contrary to traditional interpretations of certain physical laws - there's a strong kind of benign energy that's actually created when people gather.

There are waves in music - acted upon by sonic landscape instead of ocean floor, created by group-instinct and cooperation, independent of genre, venue, and instrumentation. Individual players provide the building blocks, and each piece evolves, constantly adjusted according to the rest of the mix. A wave begins to gather as different components of the audience start keying on the different parts. It's building as those parts start feeding into a whole and everybody in the room becomes aware.

The band is not just playing, they're also listening, appreciating, adjusting their approach with every passing second to build a better whole.

The audience isn't just listening and appreciating, they're playing. Every shout, every murmur, every fist pump and scream and bodily convulsion is feeding into a group energy that's in constant reflection back to the players. It's a perfect feedback loop that produces effects - long term and short - that are unique and beneficial but essentially nameless and inexplicable.

The wave crests as the band hits an important note. The crowd screams and swoons as one, and for one tiny series of moments, everybody in the area agrees with everybody else. Them all that positivity and wonder reverts to square one. The wave breaks, band and audience breathe out, and everything starts again.

It's a strange conundrum in modern societal construct that we celebrate the individual - always - and never the collective that rises in creative support. Society celebrates the Kennedy brothers, but American foreign policy is as bloody and imperialistic as ever. Americans dedicate a national holiday to MLK, but organized group civil disobedience in 2012 might credibly end in a tazing. We teach children to regurgitate information, and we grade them according to their performance on tests they take by themselves.

These are shitty, pre-historic ways of doing things, dismissing as they do, the idea that people can and do function on higher levels as a group mind and collective actor.

One obvious corollary to all this is that music need not enter the proceedings for the beneficial effect to be obtained. Any gathering of any number of people doing anything can create a similar effect. Speeches, lectures, sit-in, infantry array - any time humans gather, our potential increases. An important facet of this idea is that its malleable enough to never duplicate itself, yet novel enough to induce true, delighted surprise every time it does.

We are greater than the sum of our parts, but it's a truth you have to discover for yourself, through years and miles and heartbreaking trial and error. That's not good. Of the gajillion things music might teach us, this is arguably the most important.

Interpreter #1

The guy was twitchy. His eyebrows jumped ugly with his arms and head, and he told his stories using the whole of his person, as if mere conversation wouldn't be enough.

"it's funny what they show you. Not even show you, it's the whole...how can I say it? Like, they talk about this, the prison, Abu is this and that, kept this guy naked and water boarded this guy, whatever. And waterboarding is part of it too, By the way: I ain't seen guys gettin' water in the nose and it feels like drowning so the guy talks. What I seen: they take a guy's wife and like drown her. And not even the guy talks or doesn't talk, no. This, they take the guy and chain him up and bring in his wife and hold her head underwater until she's fuckin' dead. Not for interrogation, intel, information...No. They do it just to do it. Just because.

"You know what they did all the time? Like this is almost...it's funny cause one of the pictures this broad took...You see this, this girl she looks like a dude? Little dude? She was on HBO saying shit about how she didn't know this and that. Dude I seem this girl, on the phone they'd have her call a guys family. His cousins, aunts, kids, fuckin' like who's ever at the house, right? And say:

"This is Sargent so and so down at Gharib, uh we got y'boy, and we gonna execute this guy, today, so you better come say goodbye."

"Then they'd wait, and sooner or later a family of Iraqis gonna show up, and this little girl come up with ten dudes with guns and take everybody. This family, dirt poor, got nothin' , dad killed or he disappeared, now they gotta sell the whole house just to come to Gharib and say goodbye. Instead the little dude meets em, takes 'em an lock 'em up.

"Now you talkin' . Now he gonna talk, right? Cause the gang's all here son, right? These guys start makin' shit up. This dude, they killed everybody in that car, a young kid too, a little girl. Six. This guy wrote a fuckin' book, cause I heard him. He named everybody in Iraq! Fucking guy recited the phone book. No dice. They chained him to a wall and trotted them out. They dumped gas on the little girl. This guy named everybody and they still burned his daughter in front of his eyes...

Porridge

He was drunk. "Make no mistake" he was telling them all, "Make no mistake: mucho - steenko-boracho!"

And the boys, gathered around Settiz Faquek later that very night, cracked up and bought him drinks as he celebrated. The party raged into the night. I watched every bit of it, from the bar, the bandstand, the bathroom...I watched all of it.

"God knows why"

Is what my uncle Egrit when I came home that day. At the time I was delicate. Perhaps I overreacted, but I detected a tone in his voice that I didn't like. You can't let stuff like that go by, because every time you do a piece of your soul dies in your chest and your manhood is severely diminished.

I helped Egrit to his feet, because punching him had taken the tension out of the situation and we could speak like gentlemen. Egrit - fat fuck - he said he saw the men come. Egrit said they were loud, and obviously from the government and there were men there, bad men, who he'd recognized. He thought about calling me.

The shop phone is out. Undependable...

He said it like gospel, but the phone worked fine. It had been out just once in my entire life, for a two week period in the summer of 1999.

I felt I should hit him again, and I did. Afterwards, what else? I went where Egrit told me to go. For vengeance, for my family.

Afterward

In Carlisle we humped past two dudes eating another dude. No big deal, right? Dudes (and the occasional girl I guess) were the only things to eat for a hundred miles in any direction. They watched us come up for a mile from the porch of a house that had burned long ago. They were old. Two old men, decked in the standard rags and plastic bags. There was a firepit between the porch and the muddy washout where the road once was, a crude spit, half a guy (or half a human anyway, all burnt up you couldn't tell) speared and roasting. It was small enough to be a child, looked like, but - everybody knows - cooking makes a body smaller by half. The air smelled like sweet pork roast. The old guys made no effort to conceal the dirty work, but they stopped preparations to leer at us going by, watching with raw, grey eyes as the company made its way. They were probably thinking about which one of us they could rip out of line...to grace the spit for breakfast, maybe. Nobody ever mentioned it again, but I remember later on in camp it was a big deal, the first crazy thing we'd seen at war.

Mutiny #3: The Last Thousand

"He'll be seventy-some inches tall. He'll be drinking a beer, and he'll be grabbing his balls. He's the remote explosive waiting for someone to call"

 

This fucking guy…The raincoat’s demise…rental adventure…A pony discussion…The smiley motorman…Things get ugly…Texas…A package arrives…A Cadillac burns…Rest stop.

The yellow rain coat had been effective. There was rain the whole way from Midtown to the park, and wind - swirling and modulating - in the vast cement canyons, driving the water before like a team of horses. Even so, the dramatically colored jacket had kept it all off of him, including the most important parts: his forehead and his hands. Over the past few weeks – wet as they’d been - he’d had great need, and great use of the raincoat, and he thought it was a shame to have to leave it behind. Nevertheless, he was down to a $1000 roll of 50’s and 100’: Soon the coat would have to go.

***

He followed them for three blocks. A small girl – he was guessing around seven - and a young mother, walking along park between 77th & 78th. He'd overheard a conversation, downwind of them at strawberry fields. The plan was uptown for lunch, then Astor Place to spin the cube and St. Marks for t-shirt buying.

They were heading for the station at 72nd, which would make things easier. He could envision the scene: The R was coming, uptown / downtown express, with the N train moments later, uptown express and local, seconds apart. There were steel trusses spaced three feet apart in the station, separating uptown from down, two sets on each side. They were rusty, tons of trash and shit strewn around them, piling at the concrete base, infesting the steel frame like termites in ancient Oak.

They stopped at Starbucks so he watched them from a few feet away. The girl was cute. A brunette, an easy smile, easy laugh, nine years old instead of seven, turning ten the very next day. He could see the three of them in his mind’s eye, entering the station on the downtown side, on 71^st and Park. They finished and he followed them at 15 yards. They never turned around. Talking – all the while - about horses.

Moments later in an almost empty mid-afternoon subway station, he closed to within five yards, leaning on a tiled pole, watching them move up to the yellow line. He could hear the train coming, it was almost time, and they were still talking about horses. He moved up. Six feet away now, the two of them standing close, waiting. He briefly considered doing both, but quickly opted no. The girl was getting louder:

I do want a pony, but just not now, you know…

She was yelling over the metallic concussions popping off all around as the old train moved close at full throttle.

***

Two quick steps closed the gap and the mom was still eyes locked on the 9 year old. He bounded off his left foot, brought a knee and thigh into the kid. She flew only a few feet before the uptown express seemingly vaporized most of her, leaving no trace but a bleach white “Keds” sneaker in almost immaculate condition. He and the girl’s mother watched it bounce and spin across the platform like a badly hit ball dribbling foul.

He’d thrown low. The motorman had seen nothing, felt nothing, so the train continued on through the station. In an instant he can see the immediate future unfold in front of him like a brilliant sunrise.

The downtown N train on the opposite track (separated by those rusty old trusses) is coming in. He can see it in his head and he can hear it in real, super HD fidelity, showing up about 30 seconds after the downtown express on the opposite platform. Both trains coming in, feel the station shaking and feedback echoes of echoes. Commuters on the opposite platform begin crowding up toward the tracks, jockeying to gain a predictive advantage over envisioned subway doors soon to open. The whole place is vibrating, and the woman whose daughter he just murdered begins to scream - not cry, or wail, but scream - at the ragged top of her voice directly into his face. She’d waited about five seconds before starting in, and he’d spent the entire time staring into her eyes right there on the platform. Now things began to happen all at once: The awful train roared past, and an imaginary count-down began:

At twenty seconds the speeding uptown express is finally past them, and he’s leaping away from the now wailing mother, who – in retrospect – seemed younger than he’d originally thought. At 18 seconds he lands between the tracks on his side of the 72nd street station and considers that perhaps the young woman hadn't been the mother after all. A nanny, perhaps? An elder sister? At 15 seconds he’d leapt from his position between the first set of tracks, over the infamous third rail and into the gap between the second set of tracks. He could still hear the mother/nanny belting it out, even in spite of the sound of the R local, now fully out of the tunnel and lurching to a halt, breaks screaming, grinding into position between he and the hysterical woman.

At 14 seconds he sizes up the truss situation from up close. At 11 seconds he’s through the truss and jumping out over the entire first set of rails, landing between the tracks with the N express blasting from the tunnel, bearing down on him like an artillery shell. At six seconds he can see the motorman fixing him in a terrified gaze through the front window of the downtown express. At five seconds he leaps for the far side of the tracks, shedding the bright yellow rain coat just before take-off. He doesn’t see it hang there for an instant before the massive air-wave of the speeding train blows it high up and out of sight, deep into the duct-works of the old train station. At two seconds his hands meet the far platform as the downtown local – just on time – comes sliding up. At one second his matador, gator-suede boots are finally safe atop the ancient concrete of the 72 St. Station, and the doors of the downtown N train open like a mother’s arms to welcome him in. 

***

There was a van rental place at 59^th and the west side highway. The guy took his fake license without looking at it and said:

$165 for the next 24 hours. You want the insurance?

Without waiting for the reply, the guy threw the keys to a 2011 Charger on the high counter between them and continued speaking:

Black on black. Tinted all the way around to the legal limit. Fuckin’ sweet. Where you headin’?

***

In minutes he was on open track, 120 and climbing, leaving great chunks of the Henry Hudson Parkway behind him with each stretching second of travel. At the very top of the George Washington Bridge he let off on the pedal, looked south out over the bay past the Statue of Liberty, imagined himself jerking the wheel hard left, ripping through guard rail, Jersey barrier, and giant cable-spans like so much tissue paper. He saw himself floating into the windy void hundreds of feet above the Hudson River with hard trajectory and total silence. How long falling? He wondered.

Instead, he rolled the passenger window, reached into his inside pocket, flung his brown leather wallet out over the rails. He rolled the window back up and dipped into the Charger’s throttle once again. Hours later he was out of jersey, heading south at over 100mph, the $837 dollars unprotected in the pocket where the wallet had been.

***

He pulled off into a rest stop at 3:05am. There were signs for Burger King, Dunkin Donuts, Mobile, and Krispy Kreme Donuts. It took him 10 steps to get from the glass vestibule to the bathroom and making them he counted eight people in the rest stop. There was a man wearing a Red Sox hat in the bathroom, pissing into a urinal, and he could hear somebody else in the stalls. As he was washing his hands, the first guy – Red Sox hat – stepped up to do the same, saying:

Holy shit man. Fuckin’ guys, right?.

Red Sox hat caught a flash of movement to his left. He leaned over the sink to wash his hands as a gush of hot, crimson/black blood flooded from a great gash in his throat onto his hands. He caught himself in the mirror looking helpless and scared, and he began to panic. He saw the reflected bathroom door swinging closed behind him just as the darkness began creeping at the edges of his vision. He reached up for his throat, fell to his knees and pitched forward onto the formica counter top between the sinks.

***

He walked out of the bathroom without tending to the stall. He saw seven of the eight people he’d seen before. There were four people at burger king, two on either side of the counter, females selling, men buying. Similar ages. 20’s, early 30’s. He walked over to them, eavesdropping. One was having trouble deciding and the other was frustrated:

Fuck. Alex. Fuck. Really? Really? Fuck.

Shut up dood. Fuck. Gimme a minute fuckin’…

He closed in, smelling a cloud of alcoholic vapor enveloping this are of the rest stop. The women on the other side, both dark, heavy, and aggravated-looking beamed at him as he arrived with pleading glances. He was not moved. One of the men turned as he arrived and fixed him in a bloodshot stare:

Dude…You look just like…

Just as he’d been about to say the words “Keith Richards”, the man drove an ice pick through Alex’s right eye to the wooden handle. There was a sound like a water balloon hitting pavement, a weird fountain of fluids and blood began oozing and bubbling from the wound as Alex – still standing up – began repeating the word “like” at strange intervals and weird tones of voice. The girls were gone as soon as the pick happened, dialing 911 in the back, or maybe just fleeing, he thought. Alex’s friend, however, was too scared to run away. He seemed transfixed by Alex’s ruined face, but the assailant only allowed a few seconds to indulge the fascination. Swinging his right arm up through its full range of motion, snatching the ice pick on the upswing, he drove it into the friend’s lower abdomen and wrenched his hand up hard and fast through skin, bone, cotton and nylon. There was a gasping noise as his Alex and his friend fell, side by side on the rest stop floor in an expanding blood slick.

***

Outside he heard the sirens, closing from both directions out on the freeway, but instead of making for the Charger he went for the woods. As the troopers lined up outside and began to staging he was already in the darkened neighborhoods off the rest stop exit. The neighborhood was nice. There was a gigantic late 80’s style contemporary commanding a cul de sac off the street he found himself on. He made for that, taking careful note of the new, muted glow low the western sky.

It was set back farther than had been apparent, and he made his way up a winding, unlit driveway with the sirens blaring back at the rest stop. The house was huge, basically a giant rectangular box with a great open space carved out of the center to form a carport and circle-back. He went silently about, testing doors and windows for an unsecured latch, when a light went on at a window close bye and he hit the dirt. Noise from inside “Yeah yeah yeah” or something like that. Not the voice of somebody who’d been sleeping. Then he heard the sound of scraping paws against kitchen flooring and understood. He began moving along the ground, making for the doors he’d seen in the back.

The guy opened the door closest to him and he offered a tiny “thank you” to the universe as he acted. The guy inside was insulting the dog, angry at having been woken:

Fuck dog! You push and you push im tellin’ you. You bring this shit on…

He stopped, because there was a very strange looking intruder standing in the door from which he’d intended to fling the pet. It was a man, taller and wiry looking, dressed in what looked like velvet pants and black leather.

***

12 hours later he was eating at a diner three miles away, dressed in a three piece suit he’d borrowed from the guy with the dog. The weather section said storms coming, but calm further south, and he took the info to heart. The bill for his breakfast was ten dollars, 47 cents, which he covered with a hundred dollar bill before leaving. He walked south, heading for easier weather.

He found a big supermarket and began going door to door testing locks. It took him almost an hour, and three more big parking lots, before success. The car was huge, a caddy, 1979 or so. The rear door was opened, and he ducked in to wait. Storms were gathering and the air felt old and cold and angry. The parking lot served what looked like a hundred smaller stores and outlets. An hour went by, then another. He was drifting, thinking about the wife and the little girl from the grey contemporary.

Eventually they came. Two girls. Teenaged or at least very very close. They carried bags of different designs. Big day shopping. They did not notice the passenger upon pulling out. One of them – the prettier one judging by voice – was talking about a long drive ahead:

Fuck it’s late. O M G Katie we are in soooo much trouble. Holy shit holy shit holy shit. It’ll take hours!

The other – not nearly so incensed – shot back casual:

Longer. We’re on ”E”…

***

He left the caddy burning on the side of the road in an area he’d thought was Texas. After dealing with the girls he’d discovered that disposal of their mortal remains wasn’t feasible considering his circumstance. Instead, he left them in a bloody, rank smelling stack in the back seat and drove south as fast as he could, until the daylight, and the horrible smell forced a decision. He’d put a hundred dollar’s worth of gas in the trunk, so the last 1000 had become the last 737 dollars. He watched the police converge on the scene from all directions, but stayed undetected in his flight, hidden by the grassy tufts and boulder piles almost a mile out from the road.

That night, long after the excitement on the highway had been scrubbed away, there was just the road. He walked back out towards it, grabbed a hundred dollar bill from the wad in his pocket, and held in a clenched fist with the thumb extended.

5 hours later he rented a room just over the Texas/Oklahoma border, paid the man a hundred dollars in advance of two nights stay, then walked quietly out to his room. Arriving, he fired off a text:

Moving day – send everything over night for tmrw: Texas Motor Court, 50 Alamo Drive, Plano Texas, 02320

then fell asleep for ten hours. By 8:00 the next morning he was dressed and in motion, headed for the front desk to pick up a package. He found the front desk guy cutting cardboard boxes up behind the counter, before he could open his mouth to speak the guy stopped his cutting, turned his attention to his guest:

Fine Mess! Fine Mess?

The front desk guy was air-quoting as he said it. After a while, though, it became apparent that no reply was coming, he bounded over to a rack of mail cubbies on the desk behind him. Our hero noticed a sign on the wall reading “Don’t rush me. I’m making mistakes as fast as I can!” The man said:

First this!

Picking from one of the cubbies, the front desk man handed our hero a postcard, then began sifting through a small pile of packages. He finally pulled out the only black envelope among them, held it up, saw confirmation in his guest’s eyes, and handed it over without another word. Almost.

Hey that’s weird you look…

That was the last our hero heard of the front desk man before making his escape. Out of the office and into the dull dust of the hotel parking lot, he quickened his gait, rushing toward his room in something like a slow jog. Inside he studied the postcard. It featured a picture of a man in dread locks smoking a gigantic joint. Across the top, the words “Wish you were here” were written in script. At the bottom, in the same hand, were the words “Wait, I forget: are you here?” and under that: !JAMAICA AGAIN! In bold black caps.

The main package was about shoebox size. Upon opened it, he removed a smaller item inside amongst balled newsprint. The smaller package was soft, wrapped red and green tissue paper. It contained three wholly expected items, one of which – a small red wallet made of climber’s webbing - would have to wait until a healthy portion of the first two could be dealt with.

***

Later on he called a cab, paid 29 dollars getting to (ballpark), paid a scalper 100 dollars apiece for a field box ticket, a grandstand ticket and a bleacher seat. He arrived deep into the third inning and went straight to the bathroom. Ten guys on line, 12 stalls with another 5-6 dudes que'ed. He didn’t wait long before a stall opened.Once inside, he took a tiny white canister from a pocket and dumped a great pile of its powdery white contents on to his hand, then jabbed his wrist up into his nasal area with a mighty sniff. After that he doused the first caniupster, took another one from a different pocket and repeated the process. This time the powder not so white, the pile not near so big. He pulled his legs up under him and listened.

Public bathroom usage takes on some unique characteristics during baseball games and the closer the game, the more pronounced the effect. Football, concerts, festivals…Most public entertainment deals with great chunks of time during which attendees will delay bathroom trips for as long as they can. Nobody wants to miss stuff so they suffer, willingly. Baseball is the same way, but instead of long hours of delayed peeing, the side changes every inning, creating an irresistible pocket of opportunity for anybody holding it in, and an easy decision for those who can hold it for another go-around. Inside the bathroom, this effect manifests as a tiny “rush” to the bathrooms every 10-20 minutes with periods of relative emptiness between the crowds. Our hero had come to the stall during just such a rush and now, after sitting through it, was waiting for the next.

It came quick. Within five minutes, he heard a gaggle of noisy guys come roaring in to the tile echo chamber of the first room, nobody came back to the stalls. An instant later he heard another small group come into the bathroom. He heard seven people at first, but they’d all stopped in the urinal section. He was trying to hear their voices but the auto-flush echo was fucking with his understanding. Finally he heard a distinct, useful sentence. An older man, talking to another man, pissing next to one another:

Hey did Ben leave? Ben!?

The other guy came right back:

He’s hear. Still shitting…Right Benny boy?

The water was running. He heard dudes washing hands, and he heard a voice from the stall next to his:

Just fuck off JUSTIN. Dad I’m fine. Just go, I’ll be there.

There was no reply. The man’s partners had left the bathroom. Our hero let his feet down and – waiting until the last footsteps rang out in the exit tunnel – began to speak.

***

The shits, and on game day too. Billy Lukens was dejected, sitting alone in his own rotted stink while Josh Beckett struck out more Ranger,s and the innings rocketed by. He was missing precious at bats to his awful guts. Two weeks, he thought, probably time to go see the doctor. He spent the next few minutes thinking about cancer and dying, but was interrupted in short order by a voice that sounded more like a hiss:

Hey. Buddy. I need help. Can you help me?

The bathrooms tile interior was fucking with his ears, and it sounded like the voice was coming from everywhere. Some primal feature in his darkest self sprang awake upon hearing it, and began assessing the surroundings for threat, and escape routes. It was like a put on, this voice, a horror film parody of something dreadful. He answered back:

Uh. Well I’ll do what I can. I’m not sure I can stand up…

The voice came back directly at the “P” sound:

Perfect. That’s perfect. You see, I’ve dropped my ring, and it’s terribly important to me. It’s just over there, in front of you on the right.

Lukens looked. Saw.

Ok yeah. I can see it. Ok, you want me to slide it back over?

Hand.

Excuse me?

Hand it over.

The primal dread was cresting, pounding on his thought process and signaling immediate evacuation, but it was too late. Lukens leaned, grabbed, and tried to hand back. Holding the recovered jewlery – a miniature silver skull and crossbones – in his hand for a fascinated few seconds, he said:

Cool ring

before u-ing it under the stall to allow access on the other side, and that’s as far as he got.

***

He’d just come from the ATM at the El Al gate (New balance: $100,000) and a drunken stranger spoke to him, pointing to an article in the newspaper on our hero’s lap and bitching up a vapor cloud of Marlboro and Corona.

That is scary. I mean can you believe it? That’s why I’m going! That’s it! People look at me as if I’M the fucking nut!

Judging by the smell, the guy would have been happy to go on, but a soft sounding female voice issued from speakers high above them and interrupted him into concerned silence:

This is a last pre-boarding call for El Alal flight 911, direct from New Orleans Louisiana to Montego Bay. Once again final pre-boarding begins in just a minute folks. Make sure to have your ID’s ready to present. You will not be allowed on the plane without valid ID. I repeat: you may not board the airplane without proper photo ID.

At this our hero got up from his place beside the nosy American and walked over to a trash can mounted in the wall near an ancient bank of pay phones. Anybody giving a shit would have observed him plainly, taking an pristine-looking black leather wallet from his pocket, tossing it into the trash, removing another, very different looking wallet from a well-hidden pocket and turning back towards his gate, and the future.

 

Mutiny #2

 

Chapter 2

 

We meet Neccas…March, 1968…Not Vietnam…Familiar faces…Freedom of The Press…A fucking blood bath…Stop, drop, and roll…Starving, man…Tom Speed…Disappearing face…Mop-up…Lead and fire…

 

“He Loves Games? Then let him play for stakes. This, you see here these ruins, wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye and again, with other people, with other sons.”

***

The reporter had crossed the line, and now there was only the “when” of it. The LT – his name was Pierce – was straight up Company, working deep in the rubber when he got the call to My Lai, he said. He’d debriefed Major Neccas on the fly in between half a hundred other tasks:

This fucking guy’s cashed in his chips. Reporter from the Nation. Stevens or some fucking thing. The company has given the word. If you get a chance…

Pierce didn’t have to finish, and so he didn’t. Neccas understood him perfectly. Company business on the battlefield was always complicated and dangerous, and Maj. Pierce’s obviously capable hands were also quite obviously full. To Dunc, the guy seemed to be everywhere around them all at once: He’d started the day going hooch to hooch, directing fire and shouting warnings and encouragement and bigoted invective. Dunc saw him again minutes later, quicklime – ing the new dead in a shallow mass grave. There he was grabbing a shovel, directing the fill-in, throwing dirt over bodies. Next, directing strike teams to move onward in upward into the valley, shooting down a young mother, passing her baby to the rear, calling in air support, setting a hooch on fire, and – now - ordering the expedient assassination of a pencil whose time had come. Neccas was impressed.

He found the doomed newspaper man Stevens hawking a sheep Captain from Division, following the poor bastard around the festivities, crying in the guy's ear on what must have been a shit day already. Neccas could see a gook family, alone in the open space between the village front and the Company killing fields, eyeing this pathetic running battle with great interest on their faces. Duncan listened for a minute, caught the words “Geneva”…”Hostile intent”…and “atrocity” above the sulfuric hiss of the war-works. Finally Neccas walked up behind the two of them and tapped the nosy fucker gently on the elbow. The wielded, tensed and geared up for whatever, then softened visibly when he found the smiling face of the spook named Duncan Neccas. Dunc showed some insignia, motioned northward to a hooch some 300 yards distant from the firearm reports and rotor-wash of the raid. He leaned in and gave the guy’s elbow a comfy grab, got in his ear:

Let’s walk, I was told to look out for you.

The guy heard, stalled out for a second, rocked on his feet in the mud, then obeyed, something like understanding creeping into his look. Dunc didn’t turn, but he was quite certain the gook family would fall in at a distance. It got quieter halfway to the hooch and the guy started in:

Fuck this is insane. Who commissioned this fucking thing? It’s a goddamned blood bath. Fucking goddamn BLOOD bath!

Dunc couldn’t resist a little stagecraft. He stopped walking, turned the guy face to:

I lied about looking out for you. Recognized your face from the press pool at Hue last year. You’re one of the good guys. That’s why we gotta be quick.

The guy got smart:

I thought you looked familiar. Let’s double time it. I knew this was fucked up. I fucking KNEW!

The guy – round and pale and glistening sweaty – started out toward the hooch in a fake “run” slower than most people walk. It took minutes, and they were silent the rest of the way. Dunc could hear a flamethrower now, belching up flat white noise, over burning screams. The reporter had to have heard it too, Dunc was thinking. Then they were at the hooch, and Stevens went for the door. Dunc said:

Not inside, they’ll get out here quick. Besides, what you need to see is out back.

The shithead agreed for the last time in his life, walked ahead of Dunc and around the rear of the hooch.

Neccas reached into the leather clutch fastened just below his left arm with a silent, lightning quick sweep of his right hand. When the pencil wheeled around, the smiling, wholly reassuring face from moments ago had been replaced by the hellish barrel of a carbon-black, .38 Colt Anaconda. Neccas said:

Sorry.

and gently squeezed the trigger. The reporter’s eye, and everything behind it, disappeared into a vague red mist. The blowback covered half of Sgt. Neccas’s face with a shiny red slick. He emerged from behind the hooch, saw the gook family about ten yards out, inching across the field. Neccas held up a friendly hand that became a friendly wave when the gook family noticed him. He waved them in, smiling.

 

***

 
The weapon was made by a company called Saltech. In the catalogs they called it the “BurnTarget 1050”, but in the field its name was much simpler: flamethrower. Saltech had stopped manufacturing them in 1949, after unfavorable DOD reports referenced its excessive weight and narrow scope of strategic application. Recently, however, Air Force intelligence had created a modification that stripped the weight of the entire apparatus by more than ten pounds, going from an unmanageable fighting weight of 55 pounds to a feather-light 38.5 pounds. Saltech bought the patent on the fix, and by August of ’67 there was at least one BT 1050 in every platoon. The 1050 had been particularly effective in this My Lai operation. For the last few days it seemed to Neccas, he could hear the white noise of the flame-jet almost constantly, barely masking the awful moans cresting and wilting before it.  

Walking back, Neccas found the BT 1050 crew and sent them to deal with the mess behind the far hooch.

***

Wow. I’m fucking starving man. What’s lunch?

Dunc picked it up from somewhere behind. He was within five paces of Speed and the LT Pierce, walking and talking, humping towards a shitty looking buffalo graze to trade c-rats. Sgt. Speed spoke like they were standing in Washington Square, musing a carefree point just because. The LT answered back though, and sunk the conversation back deep in the shit, where it belonged:

Fuck yes. Sun’s brutal. Sporty this morning.

A guy from the old days named Alfonso was somewhere behind them:

Fuck yes LT. fuck yes Sarnt Speed. Fucking sporty, sir.   

My Lai wasn't a village, it was a region in which there were three or four population centers. The grunts had their orders, mostly play acting, sending any Vietnamese they could find rearward to the Company boys after short, loud "interrogation". The operators were working together as usual. Duncan was overseeing the photogs, Speed was watching the diggers. Both were keeping corpse count on tiny, army-green notebooks. The Company boys needed pictures and inventory to get full credit. Six mass graves dug 10 feet down bounded the tree line south of the the villages. Three were ready half full after only three hour's work. Duncan had to call up a shovel detail – Alfonse and two other grunts - from division just to keep up with the flow of confused cadavers-to-be.

Speed and Pierce was covered head to toe in dark black blood, as was most of the rest of Charlie. Speed’s pant leg was ripped from ankle to knee on the right side, and when he walked Neccas could make out a deep gash, bleeding and oozing onto the butt of a carbon-black pistol strapped to Speed’s ankle. The cut looked very painful, yet Speed was hurrying along with no obvious limp or scowl. Just arrived in the 3rd was Sargent Thomas Winchester Speed, from an Air Cav detachment somewhere in the mountains, “deep in Indian country” he said. Dunc had asked for him by name, and he’d arrived ten short hours later. Tom Speed – Neccas knew from hard experience - was the kind of operator that made everybody around feel a little bit safer.

As for Dunc himself, he wasn’t hungry. Wasn’t anything really. Bored, maybe. He’d been in-country almost five years – two with the Marines and three with the Company – and in that time, Dunc Neccas had done a lot of really awful things. He remembered a time, in the far distant past now, that the bullshit had some effect on him. Luckily he’d smartened up before fucking up in any kind of mortal way. The battle field – he’d learned long ago – was no place for reflection, or questions. Instead, Neccas had learned to trust the people around him, and the people above him. He studied their weaknesses and strengths, what they were capable of, and how to make use of them. These days, when the brass needed body-count in Southeast Asia, they turned to Duncan Neccas.

***

Then, something was happening.

Dunc heard three things all at once: First, the unmistakable sound of AK-47 rounds coursing through heavy brush from a long way away. Behind it, there were three quick reports, so closely spaced that the grouping sounded like one sound - a low, menacing growl – instead of three. Finally, Dunc heard screaming from somewhere in front of him. The squad - HIS fucking squad - was taking fire.

Dunc was on the ground instantly, getting small, thinking about the space around him. He rolled to one side of the single track and rolled again off a soft shoulder and into giant tee-pee of Cyrus root. He heard a noise rolling alongside him and felt somebody’s arm brushing by his calf. He spared a quick look down and confirmed: Alfonse from the old days, he’d hit the deck but not until taking a few instinctive steps down-trail. He was practically in Dunc Necass back pocket when the two of them heard the gunfire, and now they were lying in a big, stationary hunk of green-camouflage. Neccas hijacked the guy’s attention with a leg kick. The guy looked up, Neccas commanded:

ROLL!! Far shoulder!!...ROLL ROLL!!…

Alfonse looked, for just an instant, like he might not be so into the command, but no sooner had the shifty look made manifest, than Dunc watched it fade again to grim compliance. Neccas watched him roll across, and he was watching still when another burst of AK fire split the air around them. There was a sound like a very small rock, falling into calm water from a very high place, and Alfonse from way back’s head popped like a balloon full of bright red paint.

Sgt. Neccas took the shot the way a sprinter takes the crack of a starter’s pistol: he ran as fast as his legs would carry him in the direction he was facing just before the shots rang out. In a few seconds he heard the helicopters, charging in low from some place north of him. He said a silent prayer they’ land near a place where he’d be, and tried to run faster. The greenery around him was twitching and moving from bullets and down-draft, and Duncan Neccas realized as he ran, that he did not expect to make it. A wave of panic broke all around him, and all became suddenly louder. Neccas ran at top speed, but even as he went, he felt panic grabbing at his legs, dragging him down. He heard voices, felt a blow to his lower back. He fell. He was thinking about his daughter, and the lies they’d have to tell her.

Mutiny

Chapter One

 

A kitten’s misfortune – Jay does some work – KC steals drugs – A rat is dead – Pressing forward despite urine – An awful smell - Cocaine and hamburgers – The beast discovered – Illegal hit – Aftermath.

 

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms”

 

The fucking kitten was NOT the solution. Kim Nicole Cayenne, 23 years young and having given real, painful, vagina-centric birth two times, harbored no disillusions on that point. Nothing that shits, she knew from cold experience, ever solved anything. Her mother had told her that, on her 15^th birthday, and KC remembered thinking how wrong that sounded, and saying how stupid her mother was.

Mother…

She’d said, in a mock whisper deployed to portray rage held back,

I’m aware of no such thing, and you’re embarrassing me.

Her mother had always been an asshole, but these days KC found herself wondering if maybe she’d been just a bit out of order herself. She'd felt her second marriage (the one to this boy Mickey’s father, Jay) crumblintg to dust in her hands for a long time now, and Jay let her know - everyday - how much of that shitty condition was her own fucking fault. Maybe they were both right. Either way, In these last few days, KC found herself holding on harder than ever, even as she watched the last bits blow off on a grey New England breeze, prisoners to the wind, lacking even the weight to plummet successfully.

The kitten wouldn’t fix any of that. Her mother was still an asshole and so was Jay, KC Cayenne had serious doubts about her own self, and far worse, she still lived in Vietnam (the resident’s pet name for Venetian Corner, the “Mobile Accommodation Development” of North Kingstown, RI where KC had lived since she was 20). She was still broke, and her ass was still growing, dripping from its original housing, and melting towards the ground at a dependable clip. So, she figured, while the new kitty couldn’t reasonably be expected to douse the various and plentiful raging infernos of her life, it might at least be counted on to cool-mist the hot wreckage, perhaps make preparation for rebuilding. Besides, Ames Michael Cayenne (6 years old, mega-cute, “Mickey” to all that knew him) had been asking for a pet since he’d been born, and the closest thing KC’d been able to muster was the schizoid meth - beast that was his father. That – more than anything else – was what brought KC here today: She couldn’t remember the last time she’d done right by her son, and she felt she owed him – at the very least - the effort. Besides, everybody loved kittens.

***

To be completely fair, the kitten actually was the solution for a while. From the minute she’d arrived at the house-trailer, the new pet had been making friends, dissolving old feuds, and – generally - uniting the household with the singular, optimistic cuteness that only very young kittens can possess. Tammy Fay Justice ( KC’s other bundle of joy, from another crack-head, and twice the boy’s age), playing against type for – perhaps – the very first time, welcomed this new, miniature princess into their midst with enthusiasm that actually seemed genuine.

Mickey was floating around the yard two feet off the ground, charging his buddies loose dimes for a look, and quarters for a brief cuddle with his new, awesome kitten. Tammy Fay was talking about shoplifting kitten clothes from the dollar store, and thinking about what she’d have to do to her boyfriend to convince him to drive her there. KC actually got laid twice in one night. So subtle was the kitten’s power and so potent, that it was able to move even Jay’s coke-damaged penis by the sheer force of its fluffy, benevolent presence. For three weeks, the mini-cat held sway over the entire household and things were – for the first time in a long time – better than tolerable at the Kim-Nicky Stroam-Cayenne’s. But just like always, the minute KC realized this, the whole shit disintegrated before her like a sandcastle dissolving at high tide.

As usual, the entire situation could have been avoided if Jay wasn’t such an asshole. The kitten, right up till the event, had been much more than a mere feline-shaped aphrodisiac. The occasional bouts of not-too-terrible sex were but a by-product of a top-down renovation, coming quick after the little cat’s arrival. Other tell-tale signs had included an apparent determination to begin drinking after lunch instead of before breakfast, a one-bag-of-coke per weekend rule, and the chronic wearing of both shirts and shoes, sometimes at the same time. KC was too shocked to be impressed, and found herself appreciating Jay’s efforts with a matching coke policy, and a vague commitment not to fuck anybody else for a while. At night they’d taken to rescuing the kitten from the kids room and teasing her for hours on end with fake mice and (jay’s favorite), the “kittylaser” cat toy.

it’s an army issue laser. You know, from the sights? On a gun? These guys are geniuses. They’re like: “let’s remove the laser, and cats and kittens ‘ll fuckin’ love it!” Sick!!

Jay loved that fucking kitten.

***

KC had gone over that night every night since that night at least a thousand times. Each time she recollected the same, and each time she found herself more confused about the way things ended up. Things had been great, she felt certain they would stay that way, and she felt like celebrating. Thus Wednesday through Friday of that week became one long day. Since Wednesday was almost Friday, KC was drinking. Since it was A day, Jay was drinking. Since they both felt awesome, and since they both got their SSI checks late Tuesday, there was a big bag of weed on the coffee table next to small bag of cocaine. Both bags would spend the next three days disappearing in slow motion, then reappearing, only to slowly melt once more as the duration passed. The kids, both already possessed of a keenly developed sixth sense regarding their parent’s partying, mostly slept out. The kitten spent the binge leaping and buzzing around the house-trailer like a stray bullet, ears pinned back, eyes reduced for the drug-toxic atmosphere. Eventually, nobody would ever know quite when, the kitten disappeared.

At some point, the mini-cat had gone into the recliner. What about that fucking recliner? It had been vestigial in the last few years, forced out of the living room furniture rota by virtue of the fact Jay’d pissed on it once in his sleep a few years back. After that, nobody wanted to sit there, but because there was always other shit to be paid attention to, and because nobody wanted to deal with the piss-chair or even look at it, it never got thrown out. Eventually (Jay said) it stopped reeking of pee, and he’d been sitting on it again the last couple months. In fact, Jay had taken it a step further, now spending the majority of his free time during the day in the chair, watching conspiracy documentaries on his iphone with his favorite blanket up over his head.

This is exactly what he’d been around the time the kitten disappeared, and KC – thinking back on that fateful morning – had been able to trace the kitten’s demise back to one memorable instant: She’d been washing the weeks dishes and yelling at Jay to feed the kitten, trying to get to him in those key moments between bed and chair when he was far more apt to honor her commands.

“Jaaaaaaaay feed the fucking cat!

She jumped when he surprised her, out of bed so early:

“Im right behind you asshole. We got bacon?”

This next part stood out in T’s memory like the HD commercials during reruns of “Sanford and Son”: Jay asking about bacon, avoiding her cat-feeding request, and suddenly airborne, heaving his entire six-foot-something, composed-mostly-of-fat, frame

into empty space,

then onto the chair,

hard.

Tammy heard springs and fabric giving way as if the whole works might be seriously considering disintegration, took an extra 3-4 seconds to actively hate her husband, and went back to deciding not to wash the dishes. Jay burped and said:

They’re taking more and more of your liberties away every day sweetheart, and you don’t care. For fuck’s sake WAKE UP!

The “Up” part sort of faded out, as Jay flipped to one of his favorite episodes of “Magnum” just at the best part.

***

The smell. Looking back on it, her strongest memory was of the smell. The kitten was a stinky motherfuck to begin with, with a litterbox that needed cleaned immediately after voiding, lest an angry, ammonia-reek settle over every room in the whole place. But whatever death-blow Jay’s untimely sitting had visited upon the thing, the stench in the aftermath made any litter box of ANY cat, anywhere. It began two days after the chair-jump, amidst a chaotic, house APB for the lost kitten, gone these two days.

“Fuck. You fuckin’ stink”

said Jay, deadly accurate in his situational awareness, as per usual.

Hours later, the Mr. and Mrs. Jay Stroam-Cayenne were way deep into a hard-target search that began with a thorough up-fucking of the house-trailer, continued through a massive, and severely disorganized mauling of the general area around the house-trailer, and ended with late night speed-smorgasboard during which the kitten was mourned lightly, and discussed at some length:

Fuckin stinks in here, even with the piffs…

Said Jay, looking around the place as if he’d just beamed in from deep-space. He continued after a long, snorty pause:

Fuckiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin…Fuckin’ you gotta tell the kids. NofugginwayIMfuggintelina’fuckinkids…Fuck.

And the next day, a miracle occurred: KC did tell the kids. What’s more, instead of leaving again, the vicious brats actually responded. It took the whole family – operating with something like unity for the first time since untold previous lives – 48 hours to turn everything for three square acres to a wretched, disgraceful, multi-faceted search-scar. Jay, in an incredible and amazingly rare feat of community galvanization, had selected and trained three guys from his horse shoe team to help him upend his prized 1993 infinity (leather AND a roof! Kayce! Dream Car!!), and flip it to it roof so that Jay could remove its guts and root out his kitten. The car was still roof-bound, gutted, and spun sideways in the driveway, its component pieces scattered about the thing in a smelly array of parts, fluid, and ancient motor oil. They all of them slept elsewhere that week, as the smell inside the trailer was ramping up. By Friday the air inside the house-trailer was un-breathable to any human whose nasal function hadn’t been severely compromised by drug use. The kids, again, had sought refuge in other trailers in other parts of Vietnam. Jay and KC kept the faith

***.

Even so, when Sunday came around, the kitten still hadn’t, and despondency was giving way to the inevitable paranoid blame-laying. The smell had gotten worse and worse until Saturday, when it disappeared altogether. KC did her best to disregard all of it: the kitten, Jay, the awful smells, and was successfully tuning out everyone but the Zach Brown Band. She was cranking his latest, and shaping raw hamburger into patties for the Patriots. The kitten had been lost, but football was football.

Because of this, the loud music and the raw meat, KC didn’t see the actual event evolution. To be fair, things happened awfully fast and it’s doubtful she’d have been able to stop the fateful events even with eyes and ears on the proceedings. As it happened, she never got the chance to find out. It took minutes: Tammy Fay said something about how she would have never let the cat out, started trying to spit on the boy, sitting next to her on the couch:

Ptew! Tew! Ptew!

She was thrusting her head at him, trying to get some distance, but her mouth was dry, and she could muster only microscopic blips of saliva in groups of twos and threes. Even so, the boy understood what was happening and began to sound the alarm:

WahhhhhhhhAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

It was his high note, perfected over years and deployed only in the most sensitive geo-political episodes in the house-trailer. KC stopped her meat-smooshing and tried to override the boy’s screaming with some strident banshee-cries over her own, enhanced a few clicks by the cocaine she’d stolen from Jay before he’d gone to “work” for the day. To be fair, he’d owed her 50 bucks since before they moved in, so KC’s conscience was clear as a bell. Besides, Jay’s “Work”, was stealing basic cable and hard wiring it for anybody in Vietnam that had anything he could eat or drink or snort while he did the deed. Tonight he’d be home with his “Wages” for the day, and the pilfered yayo would go unnoticed. All that in mind, she hadn’t been shy in the dosing. By the time of the exchange with the kids, KC was gritting her teeth and stuttering, reeling off patty after patty like a hamburger factory. Just then Jay rolled in, three hours early and speaking in one long, fast, word:

FuckinbullshitMacsaysIstillowehimmoneyandit’snottruethatfuckerowesMEmoneyanywayshe’sgotmethlikeathousandtonso’dynamiteandIneedsomeregularcoketotaketheedgeoffandIneedtimet’fugginthink…

He went through the entirety of the house-trailer hiding spots during the tirade, and ended up posted, like some vibrating totem, directly in front of KC breathing in gaspy huffs. KC could see no pupil in his head, just microscopic black pinpricks on a field of twitchy brown. KC found herself backing towards a drawer with sharp things in it almost before she knew what she was doing. Jays breath smelled like two skunks flattened by a semi, KC knew how he could be. Instead though, his tiny eyes were showing the rut. With Jay it was almost always about food.

KC was feeling pretty speedy herself, and Jay’s weird advances felt like interrogation even though the few lucid brain cells she had left were politely insisting that the feeling was incorrect. She spun and ducked but the sequence hit a snag when thousands of flight-reflex synapses cracked off in her skull at one cokey instant. Instead of hitting the door and escaping out into Vietnam like she should have, KC stopped when she reached the trailer-house front door, turned, and sat instead on the couch and began miming a frantic search for the remote.

Jay observed the odd behavior and immediately sensed that drugs had been stolen from him. He forgot about sex and hamburgers, and bore in on KC, still fake-searching under couch cushions for the channel changer.

Heyyougotuhhhhyougotsomeshitinyou’renose.

Jay threw it at her like acid, and KC vapor-locked again. She sat back, leaned forward, and sat back ten times before Jay spoke again:

Wellwhat?Well?Yougotsomethinginyourfaceuhhhyournose.

Jay got focused then. He bent at the waist, mushed his nose into her personal space, and rasped:

You fuckin’ bitch. Where?

Then he was tossing the place, same route as before, muttering and spitting:

Hmm. Fuckin’ bitch. Payin the rent. I fuckiiiiiiin. Where is it? Fuckin bitch fuckin’ bitch fuckinnnn…

***

Thinking back on it, years later, KC would always remember every second of it - in crystalline, HD resolution - from the minute Jay came back around to the couch, and shoved his hand down into the gap, on the opposite side from where she was curled into a coked-up defensive ball. He was muttering still, but KC recalled that by the time he’d sunk his hand into the cushion gap, Jay’s already jumpy grasp of syntactical coherence had fled the scene. His pathological stream of toxic invective had become a buzz of slow-phasing vowel sounds:

Nehhhhhhhuhhhhhmm?hmmmmmmehhh…FUCK!!!

He jumped and KC looked up. This was the part she loved best. Sometimes, when she was feeling discouraged or depressed, she’d sit down wherever she was, and watch just those 40 odd seconds of her life, running through it from different imaginary camera angles until she felt better. She’d start just then, leaning her whole body across the couch and pulling back on the cushion Jay had been fiddling with when he’d cried out. She’d take care to acknowledge Jay’s suffering on the way over. His vowel noises had morphed back into profanity with the pricking of his finger, and he was whipping it back and forth going:

Oooh. Fuck. Oooh. Fuck. FUCK! Hurts…

She’d thrill, remembering how she pulled the cushion back, and stuck her head down close to the gap. How Jay stopped swearing, touched his forehead with hers, looking from the opposite side. How they’d both sucked in concerned gasps with the extraordinary reveal:

The Kitten, along with the empty, blue-tinged cello-bag, looked up from an open space of one square foot at the bottom of the couch. The hideous smell, more concentrated this time, released face-ward as Jay and KC looked in. The tiny, enraged animal was working over the meaty skeleton of a Vietnam garbage rat like a team of piranahs consuming a wildebeest. KC could hardly suppress a laugh, realizing almost instantly, where the kitten had gone, why he’d stayed away, and what the cause of the haunting smell had been. Jay wasn’t near as quick, and so the laugh-spasm only made him angrier. He knew KC had stolen his drugs so fuck a rat and fuck a kitten. The time of beatings had arrived, and Jay started thinking about places that would hurt, yet keep realizing about the pilfered coke and just about to act, and – finally and best of all – the kitten’s attack.

Jay didn’t even have time to let go the couch before the coke-addled cat was on him. KC watched, shocked, as the little beast ran up Jay’s arm like a rocket-sled heading for a cinderblock wall. It smashed into Jay’s face with a fierce-looking head of steam, but instead of bouncing to the floor, making for underneath something, the little shit stuck fast. The scene froze for in front of her for one split second and KC saw the kittens claws release, burying themselves into the left side of her husband’s face and causing a weird scream / bellow, barely audible through the feline belly covering his mouth:

 Mrrrrf…UUUUGGHH….HMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmm…OHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

Then he was dancing, grabbing at the painful, furry facemask and thrashing about the already thoroughly tossed house-trailer. KC was laughing out loud by that point, but she caught her breath quick and tried to decided that enough was enough. She stood and rushed the twisting Jay, but her intoxication had betrayed her spatial awareness, and she came in way too hot. Instead of maintaining a helpful distance, KC plugged Jay with a shoulder-lowered chop block. He’d been standing at the door, twitching great twitches, and she lined him up with the complete momentary focus of a champion coke-fiend. Jay took the hit in his soft ribcage and immediately felt his entire torso crushing into his lungs. He went slack, but instead of submitting to gravity and falling to the sanctuary of the 1970’s – era trailer-shag, Jay felt himself flying. KC felt herself flying. Most importantly, the cat felt itself flying, and drove its claws deeper into Jay’s face to ensure a safe landing. The three of them launched backwards, through the unlatched trailer door, and down – hard – on the steamy August pavement. Another muffled exclamation issued from Jay’s mouth in flight, but it was cut short by the inevitable meeting of Jay with the ground:

MmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF…AHHP!!

She landed on Jay, so KC was actually OK. She bounced up quick as she could just in case the neighbors caught the act, whispered toward Jay’s unmoving form, still – she noted with some degree of amusement – covered at the face by cocaine cat.

OK Ok. Get up. We’re fine…OK. Come on. People will see and the kids’ll yell at me Jay…

Cmon Ja…

And that’s as far as she’d gotten before Jay began screaming again.

KC started at the new yelping, and again when the cat finally loosed its claws and split the scene. She watched it bolt for the front gates of Vietnam, meowing and spitting all the way. Then KC looked down.  Her first thought, seeing Jay’s wrecked countenance after the great cat battle, was that he’d somehow landed face down on some eggs. “He must have taken a few in the face”, she thought, “Serves him right”.

But eggs wouldn’t explain the continued screaming. KC knelt for a better look, but Jay’s thrashing was making examination unsafe. Then she watched most of Jay’s left eye come squeezing from between his stubby, twitching fingers, and KC ran inside and made a call to the local police.