So Special in Dayville Read online

  So Special in Dayville

  By: D. Clark Gill

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  So Special in Dayville

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  About the Author

  To My Mother

  And

  Her Cats

  Chapter One

  An unnaturally handsome man does two things at once. He emerges from a doorway belonging to a pharmacy on the wrong side of town. Not that Dayville has many good sides, but on this grimy street, down by the docks in the Third Precinct, few people notice the town’s mayor picking up a prescription. And he also sucks hard on a breath mint. That’s number two of the two things he’s doing.

  His leather shoes, immaculate and expensive, slide noisily through the grit of broken sidewalk. He ignores it, as he’s addicted to breath mints. His fingers fish the dwindling roll from his pocket. Removing yet another perfect white circle, he pops it into his mouth, savoring its frosty aroma. Slowly his tongue massages the disc as it melts. He’s about to follow it with another mint when, pausing, he studies the candy instead. Lifting it curiously to his eye, he peers upward, through the whole in its middle, his imagination transforming it into a telescope.

  He shrugs, the whimsy of the thought depressing him slightly. Why, he wonders, can’t life be as extraordinary as a breath mint being a lens to the farthest reaches of the galaxy? When had life become so predictable? So devoid of new discovery? “Jeez,” he mumbles to himself, “I need a vacation.” Maybe after the fall election, he promises himself.

  The mint, having been popped onto his tongue, melts.

  ***

  Meanwhile, not far, at the corner of Tenth and Hoskins, stretching uptown, is the Eden Palace Apartments. In a unit on the fifth floor, two delicate hands rinse a washrag in tap water, tea-stained from the water heater. Crystal squeezes its heat hard before climbing back onto the bed. Relentlessly, she then works it over her fiancé’s copious rolls of nude flesh, shiny pink, with continents of pimples.

  Half an hour passes as the petite young woman climbs, explorer-fashion, over every inch of his enormous spread-eagle bulk. He lies naked on the king-sized mattress in their one-bedroom apartment, which smells of cat urine and beer.

  “Ajeno,” she asks finally, “you think I’m big enough? I mean, I could eat more, if you want.” Ajeno’s large eyes, fixed on the television screen, flicker disinterestedly. He grunts as she slaps him hard on the balloon of his stomach, telling him, “Flip it, hon!”

  Slowly, laboriously, the four-hundred-plus-pound baby rolls in the trough of a mattress so he’s facedown. A pale pig hunting truffles, he pushes his face forward, gathering elbows beneath to prop himself up. The game show gets louder due to the faulty volume control on their television. Pretty soon the more aggressive alternate personality of their multiple-personality-afflicted neighbor, Beth Phillips, will pound on the wall separating their units.

  Ignoring Crystal’s question, Ajeno licks his lips. “We got cookies?”

  The young woman casts a quick glance at the kitchen counter. The sack of Meeper Cheeper Chocolate Peepers is gone from beside the toaster. “Nope.”

  “Can we get some?” Ajeno’s tone has turned plaintive.

  “Tomorrow morning, baby. Bakery won’t open till seven.”

  An hour later, with Crystal running herself a bath, Ajeno tells her that he’s leaving. “I’m hungry,” he tells her as she pours bath oil into the steaming water. “I gotta go out.”

  She smiles with a little wave. “Good idea, hon. Walking will distract you from cookies.”

  He pulls shirts and pants from a plastic garbage bag near the mattress. All his clothes are handmade by Crystal, as stores sell nothing in his size. He’s not even sure what his size is. Or, for that matter, his weight. He only knows it’s more than four hundred pounds and less than five hundred. The outdated scale at the truck-weighing station at the town’s edge only measures in hundred-pound increments.

  Other than Ajeno’s weight, his appearance is largely unremarkable. Only his big, spherical eyes looking right through you make him at all memorable.

  He doesn’t much like clothes. His time in the apartment is always spent naked, but Crystal reminds him to dress if going outside to play. So silly, he thinks, his arm windmilling behind his back, trying to find the sleeve to his shirt. Why put clothes on if it’s not even cold outside?

  Finally, decently dressed and broken free of the Eden Palace Apartments, he plods through Dayville. Though a big man, he oddly attracts little notice. Tonight, it is well past curfew, but he wanders past the shantytowns of the homeless and up and down Dayville’s wet alleyways, careful not to glance at the stars.

  His stomach growls as he looks for new people with whom to chat. He likes talking with strangers. “They teach me things,” he proudly told Crystal once. She instead calls this constant parade of new acquaintances his “collection.” Now he spots a possible addition. Just ahead of him, turning a shadowed corner, a tall man moves as a silhouette against brick walls.

  Silently, Ajeno follows, his whole world narrowed to this silhouette and the soft tapping of its shoes. The fat man feels the ground through his own soles. They anchor him to the earth, even as its asphalt breaks down beneath his weight, the pebbles of its foundation resurfacing like bodies from shallow graves.

  He watches as, up ahead, the tall man fades into darkness. But before disappearing altogether, his foot sets down and a puddle of moonlight shatters. Shards embed themselves in hard soles. He vanishes from sight. Ajeno stops to catch his breath. His prey tagged, he can now walk slower, nursing the arthritis in his knees.

  ***

  Back in the apartment, Crystal sensuously reclines in hot water. The bath beads that she found on sale perfume the tiny bathroom in night-blooming jasmine. Lifting her arm from the liquid, she marvels; the drippings of scented water from her flesh look so pretty beneath the overhead fluorescents.

  She makes a mental note to tell Ajeno about the next day’s weather forecast. It’s not that he needs to know, but she enjoys telling him everything. It’s like she’s his lens through which to view the world. The normal world, that is. A world of going to work, paying bills, talking to neighbors, arguing with bill collectors, doing housework, and worrying about the future—a world, she considers, from which he is disconnected.

  The next day is Sunday, and in the morning Crystal carefully dresses herself for church. She stands at the closet door, dressed only in a slip, panties and bra, flipping through the hangers until finding The One. Her best Sunday dress, the navy cotton pressed the week before, easily slips off its hanger.

  Church is important to her even if it isn’t to Ajeno. So, alone, she’ll walk Hoskins Avenue to Third Street. And there, on the corner, the big double doors of the Sixth Presbyterian Church will stand open for a dwindling congregation. It’s an old house of worship; the warmth of its pink brick is an ember of her desire.

  But for what? Noah Jackman, a neighbor in the building, has asked her this more than once. For God? Or just as an escape from the ordinary? She doesn’t know, and to be honest even asking the question disturbs her.

  ***

  Five miles away, a man with a strange appearance sits in the rear of a powder-blue SUV. He’s waiting for traffic to clear, as never-ending sprays of water wash over the bridge from Byhalia Falls. His is the first of many id
entical powder-blue SUVs preparing to cross the bridge over Byhalia Falls into Dayville. But no other passenger in this armored division is as distinctive as John Doe. Skeletal and whiter than normal, Doe adjusts the vest of his powder-blue suit with a smirk. With only ribs to hold its polyester in place, the vest tends to bunch up beneath his suit coat.

  There! Now that he’s readjusted it properly he can rededicate himself to the task at hand. Knitting needles, steel glinting in the reflection cast by his blue-tinted glasses, fly as his hands knit, purl, knit, purl, and so on. Doe’s father taught him how to knit when he was very young. “It focuses the brain,” he said. “Either like this,” he tapped the boy’s head hard with a dull end of a needle, “or like this.” Needles clicking at top speed, he churned a knitted row out faster than a howitzer does bullets. “See? That’s concentration!”

  Feds call John Doe “The Weatherman.” Explanations as to why range from the simplistic—his obsession with the National Weather Service—to the complex, namely his role in analyzing the conditions of targeted communities. He’s an expert, a federal agent working at the highest level of government. His job is to discern unfavorable social currents and atmospheric threats drifting in-country across national borders.

  Today, Doe’s destination lies across the water-slick bridge over Byhalia Falls; his target is Dayville, USA. This town, somewhere north of Texas and south of Ottawa, has become less a place and more a series of jobs. Jobs in temporary pop-up factories for the few industries not farmed out overseas. To compete globally, unions are naturally prohibited and the jury-rigged plants are specially designated by the government to pay workers a fixed decrease of the minimum wage. This allows Americans the privilege of third-world salaries in a place where’s there’s always enough day for some kind of backbreaking labor.

  John Doe’s current assignment is simple, really. He is to determine the path of an economic/geopolitical storm and then to act accordingly.

  ***

  Back at the Eden Palace Apartments, Crystal races up the stoop and passes an old man and woman also reentering the building. “Mr. Bratcher,” she says, nodding gaily, buoyed by the early autumn chill, “Miss Zielinski, how are you two this morning?”

  The old man, Sam Bratcher, eases his square, stern face into a smile as the old woman, with bird-like fragility, stops just long enough to pat the girl’s hand. “I’m tip-top, my dear,” says Muriel Zielinski, regal in her threadbare faux fur. “I haven’t just attended Mass with murder on my soul.”

  Sam Bratcher turns from smiling at Crystal to scowl at his companion. “You got proof of that, you bitter old crone?”

  “See?” trumpets Muriel, giving the girl a knowing look. “See how he goes immediately to violence?”

  Matter-of-factly, Crystal enquires, “So Mass was good this morning?”

  “Not bad.” Muriel tries to be unobtrusive in brushing away the acrylic hairs that shed in great sheets from her coat. “Father Townsend is apt, though, to be long-winded.”

  Sam leans into the girl. “And they ran short of communion wine.”

  “Oh, yes! Thank you for reminding me!” The old lady rummages in her pocketbook for a piece of paper. “I meant to make a note to complain to the pastoral council.”

  Wishing them a good day, Crystal races inside to the rickety elevator, which deposits her on the fifth floor. Ajeno will be hungry for lunch and the service at Sixth Presbyterian Church had run late today.

  “Oh, it was real nice,” she bubbles as Ajeno lies naked on the mattress, watching television. “They’re trying new things. This morning we all stood up, dancing to the choir music. It’s so social and such good exercise!”

  “I’m hungry,” he complains. “Is lunch ready yet?”

  Some time after their consumption of reheated frozen meals, Crystal lifts her head from folding laundry. She likes cleaning and ironing or folding clothes. For one thing, the detergent smells so sweetly domestic, and for another, it makes her feel like everything’s in order. That everything is as it should be.

  “Ajeno,” she says without thinking, “do you think we could have a baby?”

  Ajeno lifts his head from the mattress. “Coulda, woulda, shoulda.”

  “Is that a ‘yes’?” She turns a hopeful glance on him.

  He rolls himself up on his elbows, much like a seal preparing to play. “Were there Peepers at the bakery?”

  Deflated, she nods. A quick two-step takes her into their tiny kitchenette and back. “Baked fresh this morning,” she says, handing him a brimming sack.

  “Goody.”

  The girl smiles faintly at his enjoyment. But even the chocolate-smeared sight of Ajeno’s chin does little to alleviate her disappointment. For a minute, she’d been so sure that today would be the day. The day he’d agree. That it was time. Time for them to start a family. Now, heavy with refusal, she sits down tenderly in a straight-back chair that’s set against the wall. Two bags of trash wait at her feet.

  On the mattress, the naked, fat man munches cookies, his eyes fixed on the flickering screen. Born Jenofonte Manuel Garcia thirty years before, Ajeno has been a resident of the Eden Palace for over ten years. There were plenty of babies in the building when he first came. The apartments were then mostly leased to young families, with toys littering the hallways and dirty diapers stinking up tenant dumpsters.

  It had also been noisy, with so many people crowding a building unsuited to long-term housing. Originally built as The Darlington Hotel in 1929, the structure had been known as the vacation spot for the rich. Back when the town had been more grass than concrete. More law than drive-by shootings. And more civic pride than forced labor.

  The Darlington’s flower planters, famous for its red geraniums, have long since gone, replaced by overflowing trash cans outside the main exits. Lobby windows remain, but are now behind iron security grilles and dull rather than sparkling. The stucco façade, painted cream, is almost identical to that of the 1950s, at least if you’re extremely nearsighted. Ditto for the gracious ceiling heights and marble flooring in the lobby.

  “Howdy.” Outside the Eden Palace, on Hoskins Avenue, Sally Howie calls out her favorite greeting. A middle-aged woman with white, doughy marshmallow skin, she starts every conversation with the H word. It’s her standard greeting. Others who live on the streets—social workers, police, even strangers from whom she panhandles—get saluted with this word.

  It’s what she learned as a child, watching Saturday afternoon movies. The movies were always black and white, the Old-West characters completely good or completely evil, and right always won out, usually at the point of a gun.

  Carrying her bags of trash, Crystal steps out on the stoop. A cloud of motorcycles roars over the hill, to the north. She drops the bags of garbage to clap hands over her ears. Nearby, Sally stands at an open garbage can. She has to steady her teeth to save them from shattering.

  Bikes zoom past like Huey helicopters in a Francis Ford Coppola movie. They belong to a gang named Stormin’ Hamsters. They terrorize, not with guns and knives, but with the stink of exhaust. They claim a trapezoid roughly defined by Second and Marshall to the north and south, and Preston and Waldickii to the east and west. Daily, they target strikes on embedded shopkeepers and factories, sucking dry all those who haven’t yet coughed up protection payments—small, painful fees meant to keep employees breathing.

  “Hey!” protests Crystal to the deafening explosion. She spots Sally, quaking, across the street, next to the garbage cans of the Chinese joint. The riders are fading into the distance down Hoskins. Hurriedly, Crystal crosses the street, bounding up to the older woman. “You okay, Sally? That was a terrible noise, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” nods Sally, “bad, very bad. Dogs growling. Hungry.” She fingers the top button of a frayed sweater. Because it’s a chilly morning, she wears three layers of clothes. She’ll have to discard at least one layer by noon. It’ll find its spot in the nearby grocery cart, which is missing one wheel. She’ll peel off
another layer by late afternoon, when the temperature hovers in the seventies.

  But now, she’s casting a worried glance up the street. Stormin’ Hamsters isn’t the only gang in town; it’s just the only one that “protects” the neighborhood around the Eden Palace. It’s also the most frightening for the sheer jaw-dropping ballsiness of its name. Over on Third Street, Third Boyz patrol near Dayville’s only police station. The other gangs, the ones guarding the town’s south side, are the Skull Facers, Nutz Brokers, No Skins, Cock ’N’ Ballers, Beasts of Burden, and, the most harmless of all, Los Muerte Demonios.

  Crystal holds out her hand. The other woman, looking confused, is visibly trembling. “Sally,” the girl asks gently, “do you want me to take you home?” When Sally nods, the girl takes her hand.

  Tentatively, as if fearing a trap, Sally allows herself to be led. “One, two, three,” she counts as Crystal pulls her and the shopping cart away from the garbage can and across the busy city street. “Four, five, six, seven.” Together, they reach the curb with Sally, retrieving her hand, noting down the number of their steps in a cheap notebook plucked from the pocket of her denim overalls. “. . . Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one.”

  Finally, they stop. “Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four!” Satisfied, Sally Howie caps her pen. They’re now standing in front of her home—a crevice formed by the juncture of the Eden Palace’s stucco façade with the brick building, holding a sweatshop shoe factory, to the east. Her roof is a fire escape, and her front door, the hastily arranged shopping cart, heavily loaded with junk, which she now angles as a bulwark against busy street traffic.

  “Sally,” asks Crystal, “would you like to meet later on the stoop?”

  Doubtful, Sally’s eyes dart from side to side, not meeting the girl’s. “Maybe, barring disaster.”

  “Great. Then I’ll see you later.”

  The middle-aged woman lifts her gaze. “You feel that? Maybe a small earth tremor. Or a sinkhole opening to gobble us up?” She looks fearfully down at her feet. But when the ground stays solid, she again uncaps her pen, scratching out a nest of words in the small notebook. “Bye now.” Forgetting about the girl, she checks her notebook before turning around carefully, exactly 180 degrees. “Three, two, one.” She stops counting once her spine is pressed into the crevice. Her relief emits a sweet odor that tugs a smile from Crystal.