CHAPTER  ONE

 

 

 

 

Dirk Black is a deadbeat hitman who sticks to me like a shadow.

     Together we flee the city of Winston-Salem, threading a stolen muscle car through a box bridge overlooking the rags of the Roanoke River. In the seven hours since we first met over breakfast tacos and the barrel of a gun, Dirk has yet to do anything aimed at keeping me out of trouble with the law and what little conversation we pass the time with usually revolves around his hate for people and all other living things. Aside from me, he takes exception to anything that has a pulse and insists the sole purpose of other people is to infect you with a lunatic virus the minute you're born, so that you too will wish to remain among the living.                                                               
      He demonstrates his hate for people and things by talking up mass murder in big city malls and church killing sprees. He's busy dreaming up plans for a killing spree of his very own as it goes. But don't worry, this particular shitstorm ain't forecast to blow into Stokes County until late tomorrow, till then he's a pussycat.
     With his head rested against the butt of his moose hunting rifle like it's a pillow, he faces off beyond the passing traffic into the Sauratown Mountains, his upturned profile as dusky and distant as any rocky range - only much too calm for sleep. See I already know him better than to trust he's sleeping, then without warning he snaps back into life with a yawn and bursts right out of his flak jacket.
  Dirk is forever altering his appearance. The only visual consistencies I see in him are bodybuilder biceps, a ludicrously straight moustache that so far hasn't offered the slightest concession to the world's natural curvature, and a pair of macho aviator shades. Now that I think about it, I've yet to see his eyes, so I can't speak of their colour, or say with true conviction that they maintain steadfast hues. All I really know for sure is if this scewball life of mine was a movie, Dirk would be a terminator - a homicidal binary code of ones and zeros lurking behind oversized shades.
    "Just the facts, ass clown?" Hold that thought, Dirk, I'm explaining it all, like we both agreed I should. You'll have to forgive Dwight... I mean Dirk (he still hasn't settled on a name) he can never sit still and behave decently for substantial lengths of time. That's the main reason we got launched out of Missy Bimbo's in a cloud of tear gas and topless bar brutality. Like since when did they make it a crime to talk - and I do just mean talk - to lap dancers? Dirk made a real effort with that uppity Cuban chick today, God love him. He tried so hard at fitting in around the midday drunks and their peepshow hystrionics, now we're looking at a shared sex harassment lawsuit.
     I'm driving down to Salem Lake through red halos on account of some lowlife zealot doorman who wasn't satisfied I was out for the count till he saw me bleed tears. Rubbing my eyes only makes me lose the road that's directly ahead, and it's hard enough steering when I'm numb from the left shoulder all the way down to my bandaged hand. Dirk got hurt too, but not physically. I can see how bad he wants to open up about it; unsaid words bubble inside his mouth as we bounce around on the ribbed spine of some old dirt road.
   He glares at me till the radio cuts out. "That filthy fuck-shit."
   "Tell me about it," I mumble in reply. "Bastard emptied a whole can of mace into my..."
   "Not the fuckin' bald guy, dickhole, that lousy stripper. It was all her fault, bitch was climbing all over me. You saw it."
   "Yup, she had a major hard-on for ya, bud."
   "And the rest. I had like fifty fingers crammed down her thong, minimum. First it was only my two hands, I don't know where the rest came in from. What was the big fuss about us making her strip naked, she was getting to it anyways."

     What little breeze roams these back roads leaks in through a gash in the passenger side window and I notice tremours in the shades Dirk hides behind. Sure, he's pissed about what happened at Missy Bimbo's, but that's not the real reason he's so inflamed. He's angry because he can’t cough up the nerve to ask me about the house I live in and its other occupants. He's already decided he hates them, if they even exist, so I guess now’s as good a time as any to tell him about the two crazy hens I’m forced to roost with and that every moment being under the same roof as those sisters is routine torture. It amazes me how well he takes the news of Saint Eunice and her demon twin Butter Queenie, whose monster lust is famed throughout the Southeast states for transforming even the mildest motel into a garish whore colosseum. He just smiles and supposes he can stand it – as it will only be for one night.

     See, this is the remarkable thing about Dirk – it’s impossible to predict his reaction to bad news; it’s as if he’s making up his entire persona as he goes along – name, age, appearance, background, occupation are subject to endless change. Before we met this morning he could have been anyone, a surly soft drinks salesman from Macon, or a carefree Kentucky busboy; but today he's definitely Dirk Black – the mean-spirited misogynist from Manhasset, the Long Island hitman – cool as any matinée idol could look sat beside me in this beat up ‘74 lime green Mustang, smiling that perfect         way he always does. He could do Speedo commercials he's so good-looking with his deadpan face and bleached blonde crew cut. Me, I feel every imaginable kind of ugly being just on the wrong side of thirty. So mace red frickin halos is the last thing I need.

    But enough about me, this is the story of contract killer Dirk Black and all the head trauma that’s gonna happen around the time he guns down a heap of mall cops and those devout dipshits at the Calvary Hill Pentecostal Church this Easter weekend.
   "It's arma-fuckin'-geddon, baby." Dirk hoots as I revive the radio. Yeah, Dirk, don't I know it.
   My insides ache like ulcers when I think how Christine Fisk will react to Dirk. That agnostic angel on the local news will have a conniption fit live on air as soon as the bullets start to fly and a ton of raw flesh comes undone. For Christine and her flock of secular progressives it will be a major wake up call, a sure sign – the four hitmen of the apocalypse selling their wares across every billboard in the city, drinking in its bars, sizing up its junk dealers then jabbing the bejesus out of them on its backstreets.
    Dirk detests Christine for being such a snug fit inside a woman's skin, but I love her something insane.
    I don't pretend to understand Dirk's hatred of women, it makes zero sense to look down on someone who's kinder and more compassionate than you. "Weaker, don't you mean?" No Dirk, that's not it at all. Well maybe, I dunno. The only women I've ever come close to hating are the two sisters I room with – and they're hardly women at all. Oh I don't say that because they'll treat me like a son and try to parent the hell outta me should lawmen kick down the door and drag me off to jail; it's just that they tell me they're not really women – only not in so many words. They never talk to me except to labour on the toxicity of sex and the scrapes it gets me into. Saint Eunice (alive with only Holy drivel to spew) is so consumed by her idiot ministry to save souls that three mornings a week she makes pilgrimages to the motel where she cleans; she calls it 'washing sin off the hands of the heartland' when all it really amounts to is disposing of the leftovers from one of Butter Queenie's all-night mattress binges. They always arrive home together mornings – one with bruises on her wrists and boozy leopard print panties; the other with a broken-hearted bible.
    As tomorrow will be Dirk's last day on earth, mine too most likely, I don't have the heart to tell him that on our final morning we'll be compelled to listen to Saint Eunice and Butter Queenie dishing the dirt on tonight's motel horror show. And boy do those freaky dames know how to preach it, those two non-women, those braying asses of the Lord with their quotes of scripture and pornography lined up in readiness to sermonize.

    Saint Eunice always gets to it first, her born-again pitch prolonging the gestation of dawn as she spills on sordid sex acts, full disclosure no less, biblical detail; talking in freefall about how lurid the motel room looks when she creeps inside while Butter Queenie sleeps in. I know that’s what she'll say; in fact I know this dismal story so well that I’m fixed firm on the belief that the afterlife is a twenty dollar flophouse full of jacked-off sinners and ejactoplasm the morning after doomsday, with Saint Eunice an angel walking tall among the lame.
   Then Butter Queenie will stomp in on her walking-frame, slot ceramic teeth into her disfigured mouth and relive her dirty deeds while making stabbing motions with her butt plug.
   Crying into her prayer book, it's a preview of heaven to see how Saint Eunice is beginning to realize, little by little each newborn dawn, that while her prostitute sister's life may be grim as hell, it is still a life - and anything's better than the anti-life of bleak probity that she herself is hurtling through. You see Saint Eunice doesn't sell her body in a marketplace of beast men and upturned horns, but at a rampant death alter instead. But she's no martyr that one, she's too hungry for sainthood and shows zero relectance to fall for her faith. For her there's only dumb-animal willing instinct and not much else mattering.
   The sorry truth of it is I'm the only fall guy in this whole headcase scenario. What, you think I wanna be an acomplice in Dirk's crazy murder scheme? I'm the last man on the planet who would choose to gun people down at the mall, then open fire on innocent church bystanders. But what choice is there? Get real. God knows I've tried to warn people about Dirk; made numerous calls to gun-nut radio stations to tell them about the immense dread shadow he casts over the light of the living.
    Dirk tugs at his shades, ice blue pupils, rings of cobalt steel. "Don't you pussy out on me, now. Don't you even think it."
    Look I never agreed to play patsy to no spree killer. Dirk looks daggers at me. My God he's leviathon-like in his hate for life - which is why tomorrow night he'll make sure that everyone he meets either dies or sees death prey upon someone they hold dear.
   Come Holy Saturday the city of Winston-Salem will give up its blood like an amputated finger of the world.
   "Dry your eyes, Princess Tits." Dirk spits out.
   You see what I'm up against?

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                               CHAPTER TWO

 

 

 

 

A stray bullet runs squealing into the woods.

      None of the translucent brown blurs in front of me quiver, that much I can see. I ain't hitting a Goddamn thing with these toasted eyes, no sir – couldn't hit Butter Queenie's mammoth G-spot my sight is so bad. Dirk assures me he could wipe out this whole useless firing range of beer bottles set along the stream's stone crossing with his Winchester 270, and though I've never seen him shoot, I hold nothing back in believing him. He doesn't need the practice; I can tell just by the way he carries that rifle behind his head, resting his arms around it as it holds him cruciform – a no-name cowboy on a mobile cross, kicking open saloon doors, chomping on a cigarillo.

        "Say, Lee Harvey, try focusing on something aside from sucking balls." he yelps, hopping in the tall grass. "Like the target. For Christsakes."

        With this mummified left hand I can barely keep hold of the rifle on recoil, even in prone position. The bandage accounts for the only useful part of my fingers and I'm relying on the tips for grip. Must be broken, or fractured, something. Dirk won't let me anywhere near his state of the art Winchester so I'm lumped with an old service rifle, an inheritance from a Wisconsin grandpappy who knew of no crueler world than farming cheese and runner beans. The bolt-action is slick but sluggish and the barrel muddles the sounds of combustion and corrosion to produce a screechy thud upon discharge. It's fine for plinking, but the slow reloading phase would make spree killing read like my frickin laundry chores.

        "No excuses, Pre-Op." Dirk rotates from side to side on his .270 caliber crucifix, "would a scope help any?"

        At this distance? I swear he's doing it on purpose.

        "Don't act so defensive."

        Who's acting defensive? "My Goddamn hand's broken is all."

        To prove a point I fire several more rounds and I'm glad in secret that, despite my best efforts, I hit none of the bottles. Dirk shakes his head; even with his eyes masked behind mirrored lenses, I know precisely the look he's fixing on me and he's within his rights to look disappointed. If only I could be more Dirkesque – a foul-mouthed joker who's rock solid on the draw. Free of worry, free of feeling as if I'm waking up on the turnpike moments before a head-on collision with a Deputy’s roadblock and faced with a split-second life or death call to stick with the car wreck or throw myself clear and take my chances with the flying shit debris. Yeah that pretty much sums up how I'm feeling, floating off somewhere between sick exhilaration and an unplaceable ache in the gut. My insides disintegrate when I let myself think thirty hours into the future. Surely even dying couldn't hurt this much?

        Listen I ain’t counting on anyone getting startled by (much less motivated to print) the news that Dirk has changed clothes again. Now he's wearing navy blue sweatpants over hiking boots; a Yankees T-shirt under an orange safari vest.. "See somethin' as amusin’ as your aim, cock-teaser?" Seems he ain't too pleased by my appraisal of his restless wardrobe – and who can blame him? I'm hardly kitted out for a trek into the wilderness myself. These flimsy canvas Keds are flabby with dirt, and my tight-fit jeans made it a real struggle getting over those felled oaks at the mouth of the ravine.

        Between us we decide my shooting won't haul its sphincter within sniffing distance of lethal till I get access to eye drops, so we rediscover the fire road and tumble down to the lake. For half a mile we shimmy along the shoreline, ankle-deep in medicinal muds. The water, near as I can make out with this impaired vision that only picks up primary colours, is a vast spill of blue, capped off with a sheen of yellow and walled in on three sides by deepest green.

        I hunker down at the water's edge to soak my bandaged hand and catch the scent of pickerel weed as it leaps up off the lake. I shake a fist that's too weak to squeeze out much water; wish I hadn't dunked it now, it's cold and sore whereas before I was getting along fine without it.

        Good Friday's a hellfire day this early into April, must be making inroads into the high eighties, but it ain't the sun I feel on my back – it's another species of heat that's lifting behind me. Look, don't believe anyone who tries to sell you on the icy hand of death – it burns brighter than frickin solar flares. The way it rears up on you, breathing silently at the rim of the world and throwing up shadows so tall they might be ladders into heaven.       

        Feels like I'm being burnt alive in the shadow of a dead thing that's up and walking, cooking the very guts in me. I spin around to see Dirk standing on top of a boulder, his silhouette looming large above me, the very Black of him blotting out the sun. Dirk Black, a man of implausible contradictions: a reckless sociopath with a sharpshooter's careful aim; an aspiring mass murderer in a comedy flap hat who leans big on his culling rifle. Don’t let him fool you, he means to do it; he'll dispatch bodies to the morgue by the dozen if they don't think to run, if they too get mesmerized by his silhouette.

        He'll cremate them in the furnace of his dread shadow.       

        "Hey, Ass-to-mouth," he cusses, "s'pose we get to takin' care of business, yeah?"

        "Sure thing, Dirk. No worries." I show him my back for a handful of seconds to collect my rifle and backpack, slinging them over my one good shoulder. When I look around he's out of sight, so I crow-hop to the blind side of the boulder where I might see him, but he’s already well into the trees.

        Nothing else to do but follow on behind as we climb the foothills of the Sauratown mountains. The land that borders the lake meets us at a sharp incline – a tricky terrain with bumps and ridges washed smooth by the rains. Above us there is no sky to speak of, just a black wash of harmonic clicks and shrills, a speculative livingness teeming with caterpillars: Monarchs and Dogfaces humping their way high to bloom and fly. Under this live canopy of spruce tree towers that fortify the hill, the sunlight smears thin across bulging bug swarms and with the dying of the light the woodland's wild colors shrink tamely to grey. Now only the synthetic shades of sweatpant blue and safari orange are visible amid the gloom and I see Dirk clear as day, though he's some forty feet ahead of me, scissoring over a splintered log, his gun barrel carving out an imaginary line for me to chase.

        "Things gettin' a little too tough down there, Britney?" he snarls.

        "I'm doing the best I can, Dirk." I got beat up pretty bad during the lap dancers' riot and he knows it. He was right there, making enough trouble for everyone.

        Surviving the slope on lungfuls of humidity, I finally make it to the dregs of the woods – some frantic fringe of boggy underbrush rising and unfolding a little way either side of a ribbon of asphalt that runs harder and darker than the hilly earth it laps around. Moving out of the thicket, I'm given little time to catch a breath as Dirk hurls himself down the steep bank into a dehydrated roadside levee, leaving behind a murky clone that hovers above mud red footprints and for one instant I feel the urge to reach out and touch it. But as I creep closer to the bank, I think better than to grope, reminding myself that it's a prickly and spiteful apparition, impaled everywhere by barbed stems. 

        The road crooks north but we don't talk about our ascent or anything else for the next mile. It's fine by me if Dirk needs headspace – he's hungry for the summit and just keeps on eating up the road. Besides, I know nothing I say in the here and now will cool the furnace set ablaze within my homicidal best buddy – not so long as this Easter sizzle holds. Perhaps the nudie bar really was my best shot at saving Dirk's life – he looked so relaxed and happy as he turned the fire hose on those bikini-clad serpents, before they snagged us on viper's teeth and made wanted men of us both.

        "Wanna talk about it, bud?" I shout ahead, trying to come off calmer than I feel.                                                                                   

         Dirk stops and spins rooted to the spot. He moves only once, unhitching his thumbs from orange vest pockets to remove his aviator shades. Even at distance I detect ruptured vessels leaking into twitchy, bloodshot eyes that rush towards me as if they're being propelled through shotgun barrels.

         "And whose ass-for-brains idea was it to bring this business up here."

         "I know it, Dirk. Only..."

         "Only nothing, Jizz Addict." He throws a blindside hook over the shoulder opposite and jabs the butt of his rifle. "It was your idea."

         True. Shit even if I wanted to back out, where the hell would I get to? Do I really wanna slink back into the city, my face crimped and teary, and take what's coming from the law? But Lord I'm stiff with fear for what we're doing, what we're headed towards.

        Turning off onto a ditch hog's trail that leads on to an isolated farm, we steer for the sun till we're hot and bright in the citrine sands of the yard.

        It's curiously quiet up here, an air vacuum at altitude. I screw up my face, looking  as far off as my eyes allow, past the hushed blood-sea of velvet flowers stretching all the way up to the bedding planes, past the silent smoke forms of the mountains themselves, till there's nothing left to fixate on but a vacant blue sheet forbidding beliefs in schemes bigger than my own oblivion. Suddenly I long to feel like a kid again; a critter in church acrylics, schooled in the terrorism of biblical plagues.

        I stomp out of the yard and follow Dirk around the rear of the house where we reclaim the stolen Mustang we find hidden amid the stunted spurts of a weed field. While I sit stiff-legged at the front fender, Dirk tosses his rifle over the hemi hood-scoop before climbing aboard and backsliding to the windshield. We rest up a while, quiet and watchful as the water drools down the mountain with sweetgums and leatherleaf shrubs clinging for dear life to the writhing line of the stream, everything itching for nourishment and light.

         I dunno, maybe Dirk's right to see life as a viral infection, a germ they drip-feed into you from the confines of the cradle. Why else would we kick up such an unholy stink about day to day survival when dying comes to us so easy? The shortest eternity of dark nothing, then falling down and never knowing. If you believe Dirk’s take on modern life, the grim reaper's gone soggy with age, he's a toothless coot with a dud heart turning tricks in funeral parlours for make-up artists and taxidermists. Dirk swears on my life that in modern thanatology you could seat preserved relatives round the dinner table and it'd be years before you'd have to hold in your vomit at meal times.

        "Hey, douche, would I lie?" Then for no real reason he makes a harelip face and snorts moisture from the humid air. "That no good hand of yours... reckon it'll be like prom night pussy after a visit from a broke-dick dog. Here lemme see."

        Before I let Dirk anywhere near the ring-shaped wound 'neath the bandage spun around my left palm, first I make my own tentative study of the torn webbing between the thumb and index finger. Seems the tear ain't nearly so bad as I'd built it up to be; the clotted flesh has already started to bind and looks nothing like a shiv got into it.

        Dirk leans in close, his blonde head bowed just low enough for me to see the tapered dragon claw of his neck tattoo. Sheesh, he's practically having seizures to see the hole a stiletto heel trod into my hand.

        All the same I'm real careful to uncup my palm and unfurl the bandage.

        "Sheeeet, boy," he lurches headlong into a hillbilly skit, "I seen bigger lesions on a botfly's ball sack."

        "Yeah well," I simper, snatching my hand away and tucking it inside my varsity zip coat, "it stings like a son of a bitch. Maybe next time it'll be you left stranded in a nudie slut-stampede. I'm tellin' you, man, a cage dancer's heels could pin Goliath to the cross, and with so much smoke and them alarm bells raising hell... I thought I was a goner for sure."

        Dirk starts to laugh, "Naw, not a minute of it Cody. I had your back."

        I start to laugh a little too, but it's a forced laughter intended to disguise the doubt pursed around my lips.

        "Ya really think we outta be out here doin' all this? I mean for real, Dirk?"

        "Listen, C, I saw how you got to be so mashed in the head. You trying to be all candy sweet and how she made you eat her shit."

        "Yeah, sure you did, you were rock solid, man... Still, I dunno 'bout this, Dirk," I do my utmost to whisper, in case any stray tremors in my words loan their frequencies to fear, "she's just a kid, some dumbass kid."

        A kid. Thirteen. Jesus Lord.

        "Some kid. Did you sneak a peek at the wild ivy growing inside them Daisy Dukes?" Dirk spring-dismounts off the hood and comes skidding along the muddy fender. "Look, if it's gore you're afraid of, I told you we can drop a match in the fuel tank."

        I don't have so many upright bones in my back that I can answer right away, first I check to see if Dirk shifts uneasy in his boots. "Not this again, pleeease."

        "What's the matter, you think she's keen on reaching maturity, mixing with a loser asshole like you?"

        I retreat to the dashboard and jab a forearm through the open window. The custom suspension idles and groans as the trunk pops open. "I ain't listening to this."

        "The hell you're not." Dirk growls his outbursts like a beast bred for captivity in a cage nobody had the speed to assemble.

        "Look, lets just take her the food... like we agreed."

        "Aww, did you bake?"

        "Quit it, Dirk."

        I swear if I had any lingering instinct for self-preservation I'd fuck Dirk off and avoid the meltdown I just know he's scheming to inflict on me. Heck if it wasn't for him I'd be long gone already and there'd be nothing left for you to know me by but blood and brain splatter, a gruesome decoration they could hang a picture frame around on the wall of the employees' cafeteria. That's how I planned it. I had the gun prepped, had my excuses in writing made out to my darling Christine. I was gonna check out cold as stone wearing one of Butter Queenie's ceramic smiles, barrel in mouth, no pause, no looking around at all those name-tagged faces and basking in that End Glory, just a ballistic skull fuck that’d see every shrink in the city booked solid for the whole of the next decade.

        This morning I ate breakfast in the cafeteria with no one else around to see how violently I shook trying to suppress my stomach with coffee and tacos before the eight thirty rush, before the room filled with banality and bustle, before I slotted a loaded steel cylinder into my mouth and blasted out the Life virus. Okay so my revenge plan went a little awry and what I got instead of suicidal vengeance was Dirk Black in stained janitor's overalls. But oh my, you should have seen the way he came busting through those emergency doors, executing badass roundhouse kicks like no cage fighter you ever saw. He didn't mutter a word, didn't sit, didn't eat, didn't protest the gun creases in my pocket, he just flashed that OMG-handsome smile of his and I was sold on a weekend of rampaging strippers, partial-blindness and crazy lawless times.

        Not that I’m blaming Dirk for the evils of Easter. It's not as if Dirk marched me out the building at gunpoint as he fled the office and took off in the direction of my old high school where Kitty Stoley was waiting in denim shorts and white canvas pumps, cutting gym just like she'd promised.

        She looks up at Dirk and me from the carpeted floor of the trunk, a bound and gagged adolescent with porcelain cheekbones and Kewpie doll skin that, when touched, gives off a powdery residue of the crayola cosmetics she dips her head into. Her runny left eye goes off someplace, perhaps scrambling towards the vacant sheet of sky for all the good scrambling will do her now.             

        I let Dirk approach her first, but Kitty never looks at him directly and keeps her right eye locked tight on me. I'm slow on the approach without really meaning anything by it. To her I might look sorry or plain scared, but right this minute I'm just numb all over.

        At least now she knows better than to wail through her tears. She's much quieter since she's had time to reflect on her crime – so wicked was it, so needlessly cruel that I can scarcely find the right words... Maybe it's better this way, she can tell you about it herself just as soon as she's ready to spill her sin. Yup that should teach her the right way to treat another human being. See you don't just brand a guy with livestock slurs like 'pervert', 'liar', or 'sicko freak' when he declares his unconditional love. No, that's not right at all.

        A firm hand's needed to straighten out this impounded doll, drill some core values into that hollow porcelain skull of hers.

        It's what any loving father would do.    

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                            CHAPTER THREE

 

 

 

        In mirrored shards, the visible fragments of my face form an angry other self, a stranger of uplit contours in broken glass, caught in the beams of my flashlight. A little of the dirt I see on him is from our trek through the woods, but most of it is imprinted onto him and him alone. I rub a clean spot into the largest piece of mirror with my bandaged fist and a streak of squeaky dirt spreads across his cheek and rolls up over his nose then disappears completely, leaving bruises and long red scratches and I'm one with my own reflection again. Bottled water feels good and chilly around my eyes but brings a sting to my split upper lip that I'm unprepared for – yet I hardly raise a heckle.

        With my shoulder frozen stiff, I'm made to brawl my way into a clean, dry shirt. The heat is near unbearable, even on the brink of sundown. I pine for the gravity of a full moon to fan me cool, committed as I am to an old wood-frame house bypassed by electricity and running water. I don't fear the approaching darkness, nor its predatory musics and mottled-green hues – all I want now is an end to Good Friday.

        Maybe then I'll sleep sound and long. Who knows, maybe Holy Saturday won't come my way at all.

        But you should know by now there's zero chance of that with Dirk on my case – he's had 'gun-toting rampage' inked on his Hooters calendar for weeks, and there's no way him and D-Cup Kendra will let me sit out the slaughter – not when I tell you about all the hours I clocked deciphering the subliminal billboard messages on my bus rides home from work, then staying up past midnight to catch every last cable news headline Dirk had been covertly planted into. Those elusive film star looks of his are everywhere and nowhere, cameos in nano-second dreams.

        If only he'd cut me loose, find himself a more willing accomplice. Talk-radio land is littered with loners denouncing life in coded Dirk-speak. ‘It's all south from here, man, everyFRICKINthing dammit... nahuh this time you're gonna listen to me, jackass... hey don't hang up you fuc...’ Every night I hear these phone-in misfits biting their fingers to the bone fretting over guerilla media smears and unfounded claims of a re-animated Lenin zombie running a hammer and sickle up the flagpole on the Whitehouse lawn.

        Ideal companions for Dirk, I’d say. So where is the East Coast's finest looking hitman? Why him and his steel-plated cojones are out touring the city – took off almost as soon as we got here; mumbled some feeble cover story about casing the mall for sniper nests and plotting the bullet trajectory of a church drive-by; but between you and me I have suspicions of him stooping in a velvet seat at the Carmike theater on 3rd and Hanes, jerking off to Hollywood's latest fuck-buddy flick.

        Whatever he's busy with, I just wish he'd wrap a cold towel around it and hurry on back. Together we'd have a much firmer grip on the riot going on upstairs – that's my baby girl slapping the soles of her feet against the bed frame I got her tethered to, in case you're wondering. She's crying out for release, gasping and cussing "lemme the fuck out." Rage and profanity are loud in her stop-start breaths, louder still in her screams, loudest of all in the blind hell of night.

        Heading out into the structureless ruin of the hallway, I'm almost chloroformed by dust swarms from felled beams and brickwork. What's more I've got this uneasy feeling of being watched. Oh I don't say it's impossible there could be someone else inside the house, none of these old oak doors lock, but I doubt anyone would get it in their head to crawl up this way in the half dark unless they had a pressing need for privacy or a sixth-sense for deadbeat dads.

        The funk of this old place is embedded, nothing moves, There are shadows so old they must have stained this place many generations ago and serve as a reminder of departed souls who ain't made trips to this or any other earthly place in years; but still the shadows of them remain and only half die away when the rays from my dinky flashlight creep up over sheeted furniture and mount the stairway. The stairs underfoot give off a creaky sensation like I'm walking up a tyrannosaurus tailbone, a museum fossil that might implode at any second.

        I make an immediate three o'clock turn at the summit and heel along the skirting board, mindful of straying too near the corridor's middle lane and crashing through the great sag in the floor. For no particular reason I hover outside the bedroom door, my hands refusing to steady. Something about this trip feels weirdly familiar. Looking back, I was seventeen the first time I got up close and personal to a bedroom door that had a firm carnal promise behind it. In my youth, Nicole Stoley was a name synonymous with a first-timer's bodily delights – way back when she was a goddess of the primal fires, with jet-dyed hair and rock groupie ambitions.

        So the way it happened with Nicole was this: I crept inside the room, a sex-brain chock full of fantasy tastes and smells I could do nothing to repress, programmed as I was to decrypting the arrangement of the most perplexing folds of her anatomy while she slept off a cocktail of tequila and tranks. I didn't go near her mouth, her throat was laced with puke and I smelled the same acidic substance on her bra as it unhooked. I tried to wake her – you gotta believe me, man I really tried; only she was adamant about her sleep. Another thing she was adamant about was letting me in, she'd promised. I had her total consent. See she'd been giving me the 'come on' the whole week leading up to the party at the Wilbertson house. I kept my promise too, I was gentle and clean. I forgot to bring rubbers – but it was too late to call it off, I was enlarged and, like I told you already, she'd promised.

        When it was over I rolled off her onto the floor, weeping and biting down hard on pink cotton panties. I wanted to bite that whole rotten night out of my life history. That was my one and only sexual encounter with a woman. After that night pink became a doubled-edged color in me – the color of numb animal lust and baby girls.

        Our baby girl Kitty was bathed in a pink glow from a waning battery powered nightlight when I left her to stew. Now the only glow that sets her alight is from my flashlight, its glare is weak but still concentrated enough to make her squint and thin out her screams. I'd made sure to put her in the prettiest room in the house – scarlet rug and white cabbage rose wallpaper, a full-body mirror; not at all like a rape boudoir. 

        Lying there like a startled child evicted from a bad dream, her eyes scan for some trace element of light. Finding it in my flashlight she slumps her head back against the bedroll. She's seen too much of this mean world not to know what it is she's so afraid of, but it ain't fear she needs to guard against, it ain't fear that gets abducted girls killed – it's despair and 'why me' self-pity. ‘Don't give in to it, girl.’ I want so badly to tell her.

        Besides she has no reason to fear me. She'd know that for herself if only she knew the First Thing about me. She knows trivial things – a surname (her mom insists on calling me Mr. Elletson), a description she could give to a police sketch artist, several rumored social misfit misdemeanors.

        But Kitty doesn't know the First Thing about me. She doesn't know that I'm her real Dad and that Lonnie Stoley – that cuntprick zero-class bum – don't mean shit to the blood hurtling in her veins. Nicole refused point blank to let Kitty know the First Thing about me, made numerous threats to tell people about the underhanded method I used to get her pregnant. But fuck me if she ain't mastered the art of bleeding me for child support. To Kitty I'm just some poor sap she's seen around the trailer park perimeter having his pockets picked by her drunk mom.

        The bedsprings groan as I lean into them. I sit some distance away, a dumbstruck fool. I don't dare move in close. Already she's too close. The air around her is hot and sweet smelling and on those rare occasions when she rights herself, she kicks up rodent scents – hell anything could be listening in behind these walls, surrounding us.

        "Shout if yer gonna," I somehow manage to stutter "no one'll hear, see."

        I holler till I'm hoarse.

        "We're miles into nowhere. Go right ahead... loud as you want."

        I'm really screwing this up right? Yessir, this ain't the Father Daughter Hallmark moment I was pitching for.

        "I brought you here to talk, missy. Can I trust you'll be all grown-up sensible?"

        She's fast-blinking and stubborn with her rebuttals. "I won't do anything with you... sick fuck..." she blurts through spit and teeth. "I'd sooner..." she stops, unable to weather the idea that she might lose her life inside this derelict ruin.

        "Listen, Kitty darlin', you got me all wrong outside the school. I wasn't coming onto you." I swear I wasn't.

        "You said you loved me..."

        Goddammit. "Look here... you muddled what I was meaning to say. Then all of a sudden you were screaming, calling me so many unjust names."

        "I just wanna go on home."

        "It scared you, huh? Gettin' grabbed like that. Of course it did. I'm sorry, Kitty, I'm sorry… for real."

        I could lie (and you'd only have my word for it) I could lie and tell you my smile puts her at ease and stops her from having the shakes; but she's miles away from me at this minute, busy shutting out countless nightmare scenarios, trying to make herself believe she can fight her way free if the need arises.

        "Nothing bad has gotta happen to you here."

        I get no response.

        "Look I don't know the rules of this any better than you. But I ain't no sex fiend, nothing like that. I brought you here to talk, just talk."

        "Who the fuck are you?" she bawls.

        Who am I? Who are you kiddo? A no-clue cluster of noise, that's who. Filthy cuss words and chained kicks at an iron bed frame – the wrath of a grounded little brat so hopelessly restrained.

        "You are going to be good for me, d-o y-o-u u-n-d-e-r-s-t-a-n-d? No more tantrums an' little girl's games. And yer gonna eat." I won't have that trailer park bitch Nicole tell me I didn't take steps to care for our baby.

        I watch her eat and drink by flashlight: chicken on rye bread, cheese; some cokes. Yeah yeah.

        "Somebody... hurt you?" she's real tentative in asking about my cuts and scratches.

        "Oh these, it's nothin'," humiliation lurks in plain sight, "just some lousy strip..." On second thoughts she doesn't need to hear the story of how I got carried semi-conscious out of a titty bar blaze. "I got in a bar fight, it's not a big deal."

        "Yeah, I know what that's like."

        "Say what?"

        'Covering for somebody that hurt you."

        "I ain't coverin' for nobody, girl." I snap back, "What's the matter with you? Wanna go your whole life with a headful o' useless ideas?"

        She drops her gaze and tugs at her skinny T-shirt, tethered hands shielding tiny breasts. Shit. Moron. I try to calm her. "Listen pay no attention to me, I didn't mean nothin' by it." She relaxes enough for me to feel safe to touch her. "These marks?"

        My shamed little girl folds her arms to conceal the bruises.

        "There ain't no brothers on the scene, no big sisters either. It was your old man, he did that, huh? He beat you regular?"

        "Sometimes," she shrugs.

        "Sometimes regular, sometimes just one time?"

        "Sometimes regular, other times he don't and whole weeks go by."

        "He make you say stuff like that, does he? Make you lie for him?" I swear to Almighty God I'll pistol whip that lowlife prick-scum into a crap pile. "I'll bet he does, huh?"

        "He never says nothin' to me about why he does it, my mom... she tells me it's his job, the quarry and the hours."

        Before I can help it, I begin to wonder if Kitty's mom is sat fretting by the phone in pink underpanties. "Nicole." The word rolls outta my mouth like the intro to a shitty power ballad.

        Kitty tries to sit up "You know my mom, don't ya? Yeah I seen you around before... at the park."

        I smile. "Uhuh I know your mom. See nothin's gotta happen here, you just stay strong and in no time at all this whole mess'll be forgotten. You'll see."

        "So you gonna take real good care of me, for my mom?"

        Jeez, can you believe she'd even think to ask me that?

        "You know it." I affirm.

        "But that other guy, the one I heard you talk to?"

        Oh shit no. She didn’t just go there. "You didn't hear what he said, did you?"

        "No mister. Just you,"

        I stand up and hand her another coke. "It's Cody to you, none o' this mister shit. And nothin' bad is gonna happen here."

        We sit up and talk boys, clothes, whatever TV dross she's switched on to. None of which makes a snippet of sense to me, but I see no reason to tell her that. Hey I'm doing my best here to seem relatable, to appear to her as the kind of man who has traits a girl might like to inherit. All the while I'm obsessing over Dirk. If the surly gun nut and smut-movie fanboy was to walk in on us, see us bonding over girly pillow talk, he'd make me 'do' her with a single hollow-point blast to the base of her cranium.

        He's out there, somewhere, doing his utmost to make trouble in a world that could be so different – if only Kitty could let herself love me. I'd forgive all past wrongs and gladly let the world take me to its heart and learn my name for all the right reasons. The alternative is a nationally-syndicated bodycount with mine and Dirk's morgue mugshots newsflashed across all major networks.

        It can't be healthy dwelling on death this long. Fukkit. Think maybe I should rest a while; leave Kitty to do some private reckoning of her own. She's beat too, I can tell. Hell, that much adrenaline in a day would sap a wild horse. My eyes keep on needing to be prized open by a widening motion of the jawline that brings back the red halos around my vision; then there are the redder inner-visions in my heavy head, paper-thin prologues to dreams; transparent times and places, vapor-histories plotting to overthrow the solidity of the present day.

        At some point my sight shuts down completely, leaving me staring out into dead space with my brain adrift. A comatose outlaw. A time traveler.

 

        One of the wildest times to be had is running from cops right after church, I learned that right after I was done with being a kid. Picture the scene: twelve years old, sitting small and alone in front of my old man's casket, belching out tears in a rented black suit. No way is this funeral fair and balanced, it's got political – a burning at the stake after a trumped-up witch trial. Fuckin’ pastor is so outraged by the escape velocity of my daddy's suicide, he refuses to participate in any sham farewells; instead him and his frisky motel hooker sneak away into the confessional box, further damning the oversexed souls of Adam and Eve.

        Many times I try to shout in protest but the only response I get from my momma Eunice is a spiteful eulogy that won't quit piling on the blame.

        "Lousy no-good dirtbag husband." She speaks coldly, like she's reading the rap sheet that's been chiseled into my daddy's tombstone. But you had something once, Momma. You made a good boy.

        Even leaned over the pastor's pulpit, preacher lady Eunice is tall as serpents on the vine, and the hellfire set aflame in her eyes tells me I'd best look elsewhere for parental salvation. So I focus on the stained glass window which boasts of the church-righteous heroics of a Knight in plate armor – his mighty blade held aloft, his ludicrously straight blonde moustache poking out through a pig-faced steel mask. With a child's grasp of geometry I estimate this S.O.B. has gonads the size of planets so I'm assured he would never have squandered four-fifths his brain just to clear a few measly gambling debts, nor would he have left me at the mercy of my bug-crazy old preacher momma with as many reasons to twitch as a moth bereft of original notions of the flame.

        Looking down I see a rifle resting in my lap. It feels warm and I just know my dead daddy's DNA is all over it. Hmmm. What to do, what to do…

        …The preacher lady holds up her bible as a shield, but I ain't buying a second of her stalling tactics. A headshot takes her down. Next in my sights is the butt-naked Pastor and his gummy motel whore who come tumbling out of the confessional box to witness the hell I'm raising. Blammo! A sucking chest wound settles the pastor down after he makes such a stink about his exploding knee cap. The aged motel whore hobbles to the font, douses her entire body in font water then strikes a match from her purse and goes out with a resounding whump.

        I ditch the rifle and flee the church, running headlong into a squad car two lazy cops are slumped inside. After retuning the police radio to reports of a church massacre they're parked no more than twenty feet away from, they stumble out the car sporting unbuttoned shirts and donut crumbs. In some dismal attempt to look semi-competent they tell me they've been waiting for me the whole time, said they took peeks through the colored windows and saw everything. It's all lies. One of them doesn't even try to hide the fact that it's a set up, he shows doctored Polaroids of me hunting ducks with my Daddy. "Fuckin' pigs," I yell, "ain't got no respect to show for my grief. So I'm handy with a rifle, don't prove a thing, dirty bastard cop."

        For all he knows some homeless nut shot up the church, pissed at being made to wait in line for penance behind a washed-up motel nympho. 

        Now I’m on the run from a squad of idiot cops, my legs pumping to the beat of the siren. Sunday morning well-wishers and busy-bodies step outdoors to scream encouragement while I run myself ragged on their pristine lawns, hurdle privet fences in my shredded funeral suit. A tawny shape-shifter paddling through dewy mulch

        Nothing on this Godforsaken earth is gonna catch me now. From this day forth running will be my way of life – running, running, and not a thought in my head to halt for roadblocks. Next thing I know this bullneck in plain clothes leaps out of an unmarked van. A linebacker of law enforcement, he could hulk me over his head and stub me out like a cigarette butt on the sidewalk, but instead he moves aside and lets me stagger past, then from behind I hear the hammer-cock of a .38 and seeing no reason to spare a scared kid with desist warnings, he takes aim.

        Stained-glass images of Dirk explode in my head as I hear the clap of gunshot.

 

        I jolt upright and blink several times to make sure I really am awake, but as the black of the room is no less absolute than the black of being assassinated in dream form, it's only when I locate the flashlight jammed into my crotch that I discover I'm still more alive than dead, if only by the slimmest margin. My watch says it's coming up for nine. Crap, how long was I out?

        Kitty lies motionless beside me, sound asleep with her muddy right foot pressed into my throat. I hear impatiently planted footsteps behind the door and direct my flashlight to whatever is moving in the corridor. A presence and no mistake.

        "Whoever's out there I'm armed and I ain't for fooling."

        I'm sluggish getting to the door but lightening fast in cranking the handle. For a moment it appears as if there's no one there, but a second later Dirk's radiant smile materializes in the doorway.

        "Got a minute?" He queries as silvery glints from my flashlight rebound off his mirrored shades.

        "You know it," I yawn, "I got all the time in the world for you, bud."

        The precise rationale for why Dirk's wearing a white disco tuxedo is lost on me. And before I even know it he's perched upright in his shiny new Italian shoes, peering over my frozen shoulder. "So how's Baby Doll enjoying her slumber party with her new loser dad?"

        "Oh real funny, Dirk." I hiss. Okay so maybe Dirk has a valid point about me getting pissy over personal slurs.

        "I reckon they had you sussed already." He rolls his head and sniffs around the wood structure, "You sure this place'll hold her?"

        "Unless we snatched Houdini by mistake."

        "Aww, now would ya just look here in the jamb, most of the wood is chewed through, see?"

        He goes into hysterics when I paw at the doorframe and the brittle wood shakes loose. "Bug infested," he squeals, "red spider mites most likely."

        No surprise there – this old joint has stood empty so long the very air could corrode in such close proximity to its cloying aluminum shingles.

        "Hey pussyphobe, they don't give a two-penny fuck about shingles." He gets right up in my face, now he's really rocking in his expensive loafers, "You just make sure she sleeps, eats and soils herself in one spot. I don't want her movin' around, see?"

        Without meaning to I glance over at Kitty. "You don't need worry yourself about her..."

        "Who said I was worried? She say something about me?"

        That’s done it. "Nup."

        Dirk slants his head and traps me with an expression that reads 'Think I was born yesterday, asscrack?’

        "As God is my witness, she ain't said a word." I'm crazy keen on telling him.

        "I'm holding you to what we agreed, the second she mentions me her throat gets sliced, right?"

        What the hell should I say?

        "No hesitations," he snaps, his finger wagging before my bleary eyes, "no letting the little bitch plead her case."

        "Yeah I hear you, Dirk." Jeez relax.

        Dirk backtracks into the corridor and signals for me to follow. "Listen, C, I've been thinkin' about tomorrow night,"

        Uhuh?

        "It's gonna be a night for the history pages. That soccer-mom rifle you got won't do it justice."

        "That's what I've been saying... all this time."

        "Well? You know someplace we can get a remedy?"

        I do as luck would have it, but telling Dirk would mean promoting his kill-spree agenda. Then again I don't much care for the crude poses he's striking in those tight white pants whilst drooling over my sleeping baby girl.

        "Or we could stay here... have ourselves a play-date, see what kinda toys li'l teenies are into these days," he inserts a twisting pussy finger into the word 'toys'.

        My God I just couldn't take that. No way. I just couldn't. A horny Dirk, a clawed komodo dragon let loose on my little girl. He'd hound her sweet ass, room after room,  his Dread shadow scorching the gentle ancestral shadows of the house. He'd play for time, making sure not to catch her till she got free and clear, sniffing her out in the woods where her blood would look its Blackest under the moon. Black blood-curdled screams as Dirk gnaws on denim shorts and adolescent wild ivy.

        I shiver as I breathe out two disjointed syllables. "Fear-less."