Fuckin' Lie Down Already (2 page)

Then I pushed the glowing taper into a little vase full of sand and, suddenly lightheaded, exited the church … and promptly stumbled on the last step to the sidewalk, bumping straight into a pack of Latino teens in full colors, hopped up on testosterone and the noise of something like gangster-salsa that was following them out of a nearby club.

I mumbled an apology, which I knew, as it emerged from my throat, would only make matters worse. And it did. They pushed me like a party toy from one thug to the next, got right in my face and yelled things that, very likely, had to do with my mother. I tried to run but one of them grabbed my jacket. I shirked out of the coat and kind of lurched forward – just as that wonderful Crown Vic pulled up onto the sidewalk, throwing a big, hulking block of Detroit steel between me and the St. Lucy’s Boys’ Choir.

I believe that Pic saved my undeserving ass that night. It should be noted that he feels my memory of the evening is, shall we say, skewed, and, beyond this, that I’ve surrendered, in the recounting, to my bone-deep tendency toward melodrama. As it often does, the truth may reside somewhere in the middle.

Which brings us, the hard way, to Fuckin’ Lie Down Already. Because only a guy who would drive a sketchy acquaintance on a nonsensical mission to honor an almost-forgotten, morbidly depressive paperback novelist could write the story you’re about to read.

I’m guessing that the majority of his fans know Pic primarily as a horror writer – appropriately enough, as I’m convinced that A Choir of Ill Children will come to be regarded as a classic of the genre. But while I’m a lover and proponent of the terror story, raised on Matheson and still drawn to Lovecraft, sometimes in spite of myself, I think Pic is, at heart, a stone noir scribe.

For me, FLDA starts out as homage to Goodis and Thompson and McCoy and Brewer and Willeford and that whole cadre of 1950s paperback noir-ists. That it ends as something else is the source of its startling and upsetting power.

Up front, the story feels like a Lion/Gold Medal fable crossed with a slew of those wonderfully gritty, blue-tinged cop flicks of the ’70s – The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Mean Streets, The Outfit, Serpico, The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three (with just a dollop of southern-fried cornpone like Walking Tall and Macon County Line thrown in). It feels like The Getaway as reinterpreted by Cronenberg – the road, the guns, the plummet toward an inevitable and bloody doom plus the leaking bodily fluids. Death Wish as reinvented by the young Kathryn Bigelow treating a bout of the old bipolar with some Michigan street crank.

But if our story begins as homage to the originators of pb noir, it takes a turn into territories toward which those guys usually only pointed. (With a few significant exceptions: Think of the finales of Thompson’s Savage Night and A Hell of a Woman).

Piccirilli isn’t content merely to hint. He isn’t willing to save the horror, the horror for his exit line. He moves into hell immediately, colonizes the country and then begins to mine the land, digging ever deeper toward its molten core. About three pages into this tale, we speed right through – and then past – the boundaries of traditional mid-century noir and into a land adjacent to Kafka and de Sade and the legend of snuff films.

Our hero, Clay, starts out as the Grim Reaper and turns into a devouring angel powered by a gearworks that runs on a relentless and insatiable need for vengeance. A kind of demon of mindless regret and fury behind the wheel of an ’89 Caprice.

There are images in this story that I’m never going to get out of my head. I won’t cite them here for a number of reasons, the least of which is that you need to trip over them in your own time and respond in your own way. But midway through my first reading, I was reminded, suddenly and violently, of a moment in 1976: I was 16 years old and feasting on my first course of those ’70s crime films that I referenced above. Friday, Saturday nights, my buddies and I would tramp the three miles downtown, cans of Narragansett smuggled in our pants, to the Paris Cinema to gorge on double-feature reruns of Peckinpah and Don Siegel, Sam Fuller and Robert Aldrich. Straw Dogs, Vanishing Point, Across 110th St., The Seven-Ups. You’re holding this book, you probably know the canon.

One night we wandered, unaware, into John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13. Five minutes in, I was confident and happy that I’d purchased two hours of gunplay and hard-guy dialogue. But shortly after that, I witnessed a moment in American film so brutal, so nihilistic, that it brought me up short and silenced the giddy, wiseass bullshit from my little gang and me. You know the film, you know the scene – the little girl and the ice cream truck: “I wanted vanilla twist.”

Here on the plains of middle age, I’ve seen and read and, yes, lived enough that it’s hard to nail me with that kind of Rinzai slap. It’s not so much that I’m entirely calloused as it is that, like the washed up pugilist of any number of bus station paperbacks, I’ve refined the flinch and the cover-up to deep reflex. But the fact is that, with this story, Piccirilli led me down that fabled dark alley and did to me what those East L.A. gangbangers did not.

I’ve written elsewhere about my sense that the very act of writing, of making words into story, is an act of faith and a sign of hope. But what does it mean when the writer chooses to make a story about a universe void of faith and hope? Void, in fact, of logic, of joy, of even the smallest scrap of redemption?

That question is at the heart of why I’m drawn to the noir scribes. Because in the face of all good sense, they repeatedly climb down into the gutter and wrestle with the oldest and meanest bear of them all – the elusiveness of meaning.

Some years back, my brother-in-law came into possession of a parcel of letters handwritten by Charles Manson. These were sick, ugly, occasionally nonsensical texts. The kinds of things you scan, cringe over and drop. And afterwards, you wash the hands with Lava and walk around nervously humming saccharine pop tunes for a week. FLDA has little in common with the Manson letters. Pic, of course, is a thoughtful and talented writer and Manson is a babbling sociopath. But both those letters and this story have that same kind of power. Both leave you with a primal sense that words are dangerous, which is to say, a sense that words can change consciousness. In all sorts of ways.

Make no mistake, FLDA is a bleak and brutal little journey. And you know you’ve got no choice but to take it. So brace yourself, reader, and then hit the gas. I promise, one of these nights, I’ll light a candle for you. –by Jack O’Connell, author of WORD MADE FLESH and BOX 9

CHAPTER ONE

Coincidence only carries so far, and then you’ve just got to figure the universe wants to fuck you up as much as possible.

Clay had been on the road for two days straight when he got pulled over for failing to signal. He was in upstate New York someplace, a few miles outside of Winnoroneck, a small town where everybody had a half acre of yard, picket fence, and an enormous bird bath you could set a helicopter down in.

Still had a while to go before he hit Saratoga. Nothing out here but fields, orchards, meadows, and bumpkin cops laying in wait behind billboards.

The air conditioner roared against his knees, the constant thrum of the fan cooling his fever some, but the thick fluids leaking from his stomach had begun to ice up. Clay kept chewing his tongue, wondering why he’d never bothered to try and leave Brooklyn and make a run for a better life. What it was that kept him rooted in the Heights when he could’ve just as easily moved Kath and Edward up here, gone for hay rides in wagons every Saturday afternoon. Raked his lawn and trimmed the hedges and gone cherry picking in summer.

It sounded like it might’ve been all right, so long as he didn’t go shit-smearing insane from boredom.

Clay didn’t wait in his seat for the cop to come right up.

With a groan, he shifted sideways, grabbed his service revolver from under the seat, and pocketed it. The obscenely colorful frost on his torn shirt and exposed stomach cracked loose and disintegrated. He zipped up his jacket knowing he had to make some kind of play before the cop ran his plates.

There was still a little time left, maybe just enough for him to finish the job. He patted Kathy’s hand, rubbing at the small rosebud tattoo on her wrist and upsetting the flies. “Nice place up this way. You can smell them cooking cider in the valley. This could’ve worked for us, I think. Christ, Kath, they got oak trees all lined up and down the roads like an estate.”

It was tough leaning over into the passenger seat, but he had to snatch another wad of paper towels before he did anything else. Clay wiped his sweaty face down with them, and then jammed a handful up under his jacket against his rotting belly. The stink of his own shit oozing over his belt buckles gave him the dry heaves again but there was nothing left to bring up. Straining, he managed to clamber out of the car without letting loose a scream.

The cop couldn’t have been more then twenty-one at the outside, rail-thin but trying to puff his chest out, showing off the badge with pride. Bet he polished it every night before his bedtime prayers. Tremendous shoulders that proved he did plenty of military presses in the gym, spent at least four days a week on the machines. The kid was new enough on the job that he still chased after every small street infraction he found on the road. It was a pretty good way to buoy your manhood, Clay remembered, until you saw your first shotgun victim. You quit worrying about writing up tickets for loose mufflers right around then.

Crew cut, blonde hair, but with a touch of Asian in his features. He had no radio on his belt, and Clay had watched him park and get out. He hadn’t called in the stop. The hell kind of county was this? What sort of training program did they give the rookies up here before sending them into the sheriff’s department or the state patrol? The kid didn’t even unsnap his holster, didn’t place his hand on his gun.

They were five hours out of Brooklyn, and it was a whole other world.

“Please get back into your car, sir. I need to see your license and registration.”

“Sure, Officer,” Clay said. “Gotta make the streets safe.” He couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice-amazing how the old habits could bubble up even now, with Edward eyeing him from the back seat.

“Excuse me?”

“Never know when those produce smugglers might come through and try to filch a few apples.”

“Sir, there’s no need to take that tone with me.”

“You’re right. Sorry.”

“License and registration please, sir.”

“Just take a second.”

Only a slight breeze stirred the treetops, and the grass of the meadows gently rippled as if some unnamable sorrow or beauty were slowly shrugging closer. The kid hadn’t even looked inside Clay’s car yet. These people up here weren’t prepared for anything.

Clay’s wallet had been soaked through with blood and digestive juice, and the contents had dried together into a filthy lump. If he could just work the leather flaps open and get his badge out, maybe the ignorant cop would get back into his cruiser and go home and mow his lawn for the third time this week.

But the flies started coming after Clay, and the wind shifted enough so that the kid finally glanced up and furrowed his brow.

“What’s that smell?”

“I don’t smell anything.” Clay tried pulling his wallet open again but flakes and chunks of his own shit fell to the ground. The flies kept after him-he hadn’t shut the car door all the way and the heat had roused the insects inside. They congregated now on the window, crawling over the glass. The buzzing grew louder.

“Jesus…what…?” The kid said the name “Jesus” the same way that Clay’s mother and grandmother used to, with reverence and a hint of very real fear.

“Okay, I lied,” Clay said. “That would be me. Peritonitis.” His fist was crusted with black blood from his seeping intestines.

The young cop started to pick up on the fact that something bad was going on here that he’d never run into before. He took his ticket book and held it out in front of him as if it might help him to figure out exactly what was happening. He still thought all the answers were in the manual. The kid’s mother probably had a pumpkin pie waiting for him on the kitchen table, fresh out of the oven.

A rush of rage and jealousy burst inside Clay. His mouth began to frame his son’s name but he couldn’t speak it aloud.

“Jesus God,” the kid whispered as he started to choke, trying to hold down his puke. “The flies. Your car.”

“Yeah, it’s getting pretty rank in there.”

The kid spotted Kath in the passenger seat, her ashen face slack but inflexible, still beautiful in its own way. Clay watched the cop turning now, looking through the back window at Edward strapped into the car seat, lips black, and his once tiny face now bloated to three times its normal size. The crushed Chihuahua was lying near his lap, almost bent in two, with its muzzle frozen into a snarl. Edward’s eyes were half-open and somehow sharply focused into a bitter glare.

“They’re…”

“I’m a New York City Homicide Detective,” Clay said. He’d never sounded more ridiculous in his entire life.

The young cop drew his gun and pointed it with a trembling hand at Clay’s chest. Finally a reaction that Clay could understand. It instantly relaxed and comforted him. Maybe he’d brought a little of Brooklyn along with him.

“Why don’t you do your job, kid?” Clay said, holding his wet and slithery stomach, surprised at the frenzy in his own voice. He thought he’d been holding up pretty good until then, considering. “There’s a killer on the loose.”