So Special in Dayville Read online

  Jackman notices the reaction even as he shrugs. “Don’t think I’d go that far. Let’s just say, we’re drawn by the tingle of danger or horror to the . . . outside. To something or someone that’s doesn’t belong here. To the unexplained creak of a floorboard at midnight. To the mythical monster beneath the bed.” He follows her glance at the tall man across the street. “To the extraordinary which, for the privilege of seeing it, will surely destroy us.” His grin is quick and not a little sad. “Lot’s wife lives in most of us, you know.”

  “But Lot’s wife sinned,” booms Eddie. His look is reproachful as he prepares to wheel away the garbage cart. “And for her sin, she suffered a salty damnation!”

  Jackman guffaws as if Eddie has made a witty observation. “Exactly . . .”

  The garbageman grunts, shaking his head, and moves on down the street.

  Jackman turns back to Crystal. “A salty damnation—that’s good, right?”

  She nods, struck by the memory of the light. It makes her forget even about Ruiz. “Yeah, I guess so.” For a moment, it feels as if she’s back in her apartment, sitting in the chair by the window. Watching like Lot’s wife watched. Was watching sinful?

  Jackman, observing her with a knowing smile, leans in close, whispering, “But I don’t need to be telling you, Miss Crystal, of all people, ’bout this.”

  “Oh!” she says, startled. “Yes, that’s true.” Her nod in parting is polite. But she wonders, how had he known of the light? She can’t remember ever mentioning it.

  ***

  Across the street from the Eden Palace, Ruiz stops to send a text, notifying the cartel that he’s received yet another hand-off of an FRC. The doctor from the Eden Palace has just given him the codes for chips implanted in law-enforcement women undergoing breast surgery.

  Slipping his phone back in his pocket, he keeps his attention fixed on the demure black cat limping away, toward the bus stop across the street. He fingers the memory stick in his pocket. With a start, he realizes that obtaining yet another FRC has brought him very little pleasure.

  The transaction had undoubtedly been smooth. As was the one the night before when, at midnight, Ruiz had warily approached the corner of Squint and Largess. He was surprised to see Maynard standing there, waiting by himself. A quick glance around showed no evidence of Flannel Shirt lurking. The young bodybuilder looked nervous in the darkness.

  Ruiz took the lead. “Hello.” He held out his hand as if to shake Maynard’s muscular digits.

  The young man, showing the whites of his eyes, groped in his pocket before responding with his own grip. A memory stick passed between them. But the sweat on the other’s palm conveyed to Ruiz the genuineness of his fear. But of what? He had not been afraid like this two nights ago.

  Could Flannel Shirt be out of sight, possibly poised in a darkened factory window with a high-powered rifle equipped with night vision? Ruiz concentrated, sensing the space around them, but felt no danger. “Where,” he asked Maynard, “is your friend?”

  “That’s not funny, is it?” A piteous whine could be heard in the other’s voice. “Look, I don’t want trouble. Sanderson just told me to meet you here and give you what you wanted.” His palms flew up as if Ruiz had threatened him with a gun. “I don’t want no trouble, man! I gotta go prep dough for tomorrow’s baking; that okay with you?”

  Now, standing across from the Eden Palace, Ruiz clicks the memory sticks together in his pocket. He likes the faint sound. Like casino chips. But he is indifferent to his success. Securing his target has become merely automatic, instinct born by years of similar transactions ensuring all necessary precautions.

  He shifts uncomfortably in his dark leather shoes. It suddenly occurs to him that he is deeply and fatally . . . bored. Having done his job so long, he feels like someone with an outdated toy. It chafes that he’s being held back from bigger and better things.

  Ruiz was brought up in the datos culture; his earliest memories, aside from that of his mother’s death, were of floppy disks being traded in dark alleys, scantily clad women disposed of as casually as tissues, bloody corpses with their typing hands chopped off, rap songs—bada boom, bada boom, bada boom, boom, BOOM!—celebrating data kingpins, more guns than tamales on kitchen tables, lovers kissing through prison bars, bullet-riddled cars, and parents weeping at the dried earth of graves.

  So, when the night is cold in Dayville, USA, and he longs for home, these are the images that warm him, reminding him like the glow of a working hard drive that he belongs . . . somewhere. So to actually contemplate spending his life doing something different feels impossible. It would be to cut himself adrift. To turn away from all that is familiar into the unknown. To essentially walk alone, never again to have a place to call home.

  He exhales while straightening his jacket. It is pointless to consider a different path. His road is set. Life, his life, started with death, and only another death, his own, will free him. He starts down Tenth, away from the Eden Palace, his dark mood blinding him to an excess of cars.

  It is only a stray thought, quickly dismissed, that begins to break through the gloom. He wonders. Why had Maynard been so afraid the night before? And why had Ruiz smelled blood and flannel in the other man’s sweat?

  ***

  Cars are whizzing past, all carrying reporters who have poured in from surrounding towns. They’re heading for the southern shore of the Byhalia River, their destination a concrete structure two miles from the spitting, spinning cataract of water. Once there, those unfamiliar to the area emerge from their vehicles holding their ears. The water’s roar is even louder here, just below the dam.

  The mayor, already nested in a crowd of reporters, waves in more and more newcomers. His pearly whites flash for the cameras. “We’re living in a frigging production paradise, people!” He steps back to allow cameras to pan at the factory stretching out behind him. “Just look at this textile manufacturing plant right here. Not only do we offer it tax breaks for employing our good citizens, but,” his arm sweeps across the gray current of the nearby river, propelled by the falls, “unlike other locales, we got our own waste-disposal scheme. Courtesy of nature, all those volatile solvents used to prettify plastic just wash away.” His meaty paws slap together. “Leaving Dayville just as clean and healthy as it ever was!”

  ***

  “But how could they leave?!” wails Crystal. She had just arrived home from school when Jackman accosted her. Unaware of the apartment building’s loss, she’d rushed to speak first as she was collapsing youthfully onto the stoop. “Oh, I’m exhausted. The children today were so quiet. All I could do was hear myself think! By lunchtime, I was pulling my hair out. I’d have given anything to get one of ’em to laugh or speak.”

  Jackman, obviously eager himself to talk, was still leaning against the brownstone pillar. She resisted the temptation to enquire if he’d been there all day. “You know better’n me,” he observed with admirable restraint, “how kids are full of high spirits. Makes ’em moody some days.”

  He checked around them for eavesdroppers, but only Rosie Newman loitered nearby, her expression typically angry. “You hear about the Stoffers?”

  “Darla Sue and Conrad?” The girl was immediately apprehensive, thoughts of the night before having weighed on her heavily all day. “What’s going on?”

  “They are. Going, I mean.” The older man leans in to confide, “Or rather gone. They caught a cab ’bout noon. Along with boxes and bags carrying all their stuff.”

  “But how could they leave?” Crystal gasps. “You mean they’ve left for good?!”

  Jackman nods. “That’s what Conrad said. Said as how he couldn’t stay anywhere he wasn’t appreciated.”

  “Oh.” The girl’s saddened at losing her friend. “I’m really going to miss Darla Sue.”

  Behind them comes the wheeze of Ajeno, who’s plodding down the front steps. He gives Crystal a small wave. “Going to work.”

  Both the girl and Jackman wave back as h
e marches down the crowded sidewalk to disappear down an alley. Half a dozen men in bulging powder-blue suits take the same turn down the alley right behind him.

  “Did you see that?” Unease tugs at Crystal’s heart even as she grieves the loss of Darla Sue.

  “What?”

  “Those men who followed Ajeno into the alley.” When Jackman shakes his head, seeming unconcerned, she presses him, “Doesn’t that seem odd to you? That they’re following Ajeno?”

  “How do you know they’re following ’im?” Unconcerned, the older man shrugs. “Probably they’re taking the shortcut to Vine, like Ajeno does when the sidewalk on Tenth is crowded like it is this afternoon.”

  Considering this, Crystal finally nods. “Yeah, I guess so.” She suddenly cranes her head to look back up at the building. “It just feels like the world’s not as safe as it once was.”

  “Violence is part of being human,” observes Jackman. “And killing’s nothing new around here.”

  “What do . . .” she falters. “Do you mean the street gangs?”

  Jackman laughs. “Hell, all amateurs compared to our tenants here at the Eden Palace.” At her surprised expression, he explains about the Epsteins, in 301A. They were charged in the fatal car crash of their babysitter, who’d gotten drunk on their Passover wine. Then there was Calvin Smith in 229C, who shot and killed a thief robbing his unit. And down the hall in 221B, Felicia Tashie, whose grip had relaxed too soon while holding the ladder for her estranged boyfriend, who’d been fixing a satellite dish. And Jack and Brenda Cooper, 130A, who didn’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater whose popcorn maker had gone up in flames.

  He pauses to catch a breath. “Then there’s Theodor Abernathy, 515C. He didn’t stop a disliked coworker from walking straight into noonday traffic. Omar Ahmadi, 1113C, who donated his gas grill to a city charity. Problem is, he forgot to mention a leak in the fuel line. Then there’s Svetlana Anasenko, in 1113B. She voted for a political candidate that promised, regardless of provocation, no more military campaigns. And John Babic, 1066A, he voted for a candidate that promised only war.

  “So you see,” he quips, “we’re none of us innocent.” His palms stretch out to the street. “Blood on all our hands.” He glances at her curiously. “Except, maybe, for you, Miss Crystal. There’s nothing on your hands, is there?”

  “Blood?” Involuntarily, she glances down at her hands. “I wash my hands frequently, you know. Momma always said how cleanliness was next to democracy.”

  “That’s an interesting motto of your dear, dead mother.”

  Crystal relaxes. “Oh, yes, Momma had a lot of sayings like that.” A smile touches her lips, remembering. “There’s no accounting for taxes!” This had often sent her mother into peals of laughter. “Every cloud’s got another cloud, even darker, right behind it.” “Every time a door closes, there you are stuck in a room with no air.” “When life hands you lemons, best to pucker up!”

  Jackman, smiling genially, pats her shoulder before ambling down the sidewalk toward the corner liquor store.

  She bites her lip. Why hadn’t she told him? He’d have understood. Not that killing one’s parents is reasonable, but there is, like he said, “blood on all our hands.”

  The fact is her parents had died on the gumbo flats six months before she’d moved into the Eden Palace. A freak rain shower during the flea market had sent the girl scrambling to save herself even as her mother and father screamed for help. Guilt thereafter blossomed in Crystal until she could barely breathe. So much so that she finally sought the ultimate absolution. She just couldn’t live with what she’d done. So, she had decided to end it all. To die as they had died, drowning in mud. It seemed the only way to cancel her act of cowardice.

  And so every day that summer, shaking with fear, she’d traveled to the edge of town, to the gumbo flats, to stand amid nothingness waiting for rain, waiting for the ground to consume her. But nothing happened. Dayville had entered a serious period of drought, and for the three months she waited, not a drop of water fell.

  Finally becoming more impatient than fearful, she resorted to artificial means. She started pulling buckets of water loaded into a child’s wagon out onto the vast expanse of dried dirt. And there she stood, emptying bucket after bucket of water over her head. Nothing. The ground stayed firm.

  So she tried a different tactic. She started soaking one section of earth, roughly three feet square. Sweating herself to the point of exhaustion, she fastened a makeshift harness to herself to pull the multiple wagon-loads of water buckets. And finally, after hours of backbreaking labor, a stick she threw on the muddy spot began to sink. Relief flooded her. It was time!

  She fell to her knees, whispering the only prayer she knew: “And if I die before I wake, please, oh God, my soul to take!” Fear then left her, as did panic. It was with an actual eagerness that, on all fours, she crawled to the wet spot like a farm horse returning wearily to its stall at nightfall.

  A deep breath and a lunge forward found her in the slick, slippery, gooey-ooey mire. “Momma!” she gasped, going down. “Daddy! I’m coming. I’m comin’ . . .” She closed her eyes against the bright summer sun. Death was inviting her to waltz. She reached out an accommodating hand.

  Down, down she was falling—her feet, her knees, her thighs, her. . . . She stopped; the fall halted. Wiggling, she huffed and puffed. She vainly tried pulling her grave up over her like a blanket but to no avail. She was good and truly stopped . . . and stuck; she couldn’t move anything below her waist, where the mud was quickly solidifying like concrete.

  Thirty-six hours later, a troop of boy scouts found her. They came out on the gumbo to learn survival techniques. Instead, they found her, wiggling like a fat crawdad, half out of a hole. It took them another six hours just to dig her out with their scout-issued camping spades. Then there was her ignominious transport back into town, strapped onto the children’s wagon that she’d been using to haul water.

  Once back in Dayville, each boy scout was rewarded with a community badge to count toward his becoming an Eagle Scout. But Crystal, suffering from dehydration and exposure, was hospitalized for almost a week. Undaunted, though, she spent that time planning and planning. This time, she’d get it right!

  A month later, with her strength regained, she hired the same boy scout troop to transport her, via mule team, up the blasted sides of Mt. Inselberg. “It’s for my perspective,” she told the gullible troop leader. “From a great height, I’ll be able to see with greater clarity, you know.”

  Once the mule team, overseen by two of the older scouts wielding bullwhips, reached the top of the mountain, Crystal had smiled sweetly, wishing them a safe descent.

  “But,” asked the troop leader suspiciously, “how will you get back down?”

  “My parents,” she told him, “they train Tibetan Sherpas in the Himalayas. I’m meeting them here as a surprise. They’ll take me down when it’s time.”

  The troop leader relaxed. “Oh, well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?”

  Crystal listened to the gaily tinkling mule bells growing fainter as the troop climbed back down the hillside. She smiled. This plan was much better than her first. One, it’d be quicker. Always a plus with suicide. And two, it’d give her, if only for a few seconds, the illusion of diving into an ocean of air, a sweet image to buoy her onto eternity’s distant shore.

  Carefully, she began stepping over brittle shale to the eastern cliff. This hung over, far below, bare ground. Wasted land with little vegetation lay like a corpse at the mountain’s foot. Sudden vertigo made her fingers clutch at the shale. She felt her skin being sliced a dozen times as, clamping her eyes shut, she waited for the swoon to pass. Funny, she thought. Who knew she couldn’t stand heights?

  A moment of not moving steadied her. It would all be okay. How could it not be? She was wearing the dress her disco-loving mother had made from her old wedding gown. Intended for Crystal’s senior prom, it had a full polyester skirt to which her
mother had taken cutting shears.

  “Oh, but darlin’,” she’d exclaimed as Crystal stood still for a fitting, “it’ll just be gorgeous when you twirl about the dance floor! All those skirt strands lifting higher and higher till you’re a freaking firecracker!” Reminiscent, her mother had then smiled. “And once I cut the sleeves from the bodice, you’ll look just like,” an upward glance filled her eyes with stars, “. . . like Donna Summer!” She giggled. “’Cept white, of course. But, hell, that’s not fair to hold against ya, is it?”

  “No, Momma,” Crystal had answered dutifully. “But it’s not really what the other girls are wearing to dances.”

  Her mother had snorted. “Hell, child! Are you a dance majorette or the leader of the band?” This was another of her mother’s favorite, if mystifying, expressions.

  To maintain equilibrium, Crystal steadied her gaze on the horizon. She knew she had to act fast. Anymore reflection and she’d start wondering whether she’d get dizzy falling. And whether, instead of diving like an Olympic swimmer, she might in her last minutes be vomiting.

  She forced herself to unclench her fingers from the shale. Rising unsteadily to her feet, she fixed her eyes on where land met sky in the distance. Rock slid slightly beneath her feet. She heard it rattling down the mountainside. She fought to stay in place.

  Coolness, blowing up the rock, dried the sweat on her cheeks. “Daddy,” she called into the air, “Momma, I love you.” Her right foot stepped into empty space, followed by the left. “I love . . . WHOA!”

  Unexpectedly, Crystal found herself dangling upside down, the many strands of her mother’s wedding dress having freakishly caught in a rock crevice. Blood was rushing to her head, making it hard to think.

  Even to this day she believes the problem would have worked itself out. That is, if it hadn’t been for the boy scout troop. The boys, alerted by her screams as she swung like a whacked piñata across the cliff face, dutifully returned. The merry chimes of the mule bells got louder and louder as the bullwhip, cracking, reversed the animals.