Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (13 page)

The knife cut Father’s thumb to the bone, but he tugged it, jabbed his chest with it. “Do you remember the face of God, son?”

“Father, I won’t hurt you…” he said, but he remembered.

It was his earliest memory. The night his father saw it in a dream after fasting for a week. The drawings, the paintings, the carvings, the cutting, the commitment. Three months in a foster home until his father got out, totally cured, coming into his bedroom and hacking the face into the lampshade so it projected on the ceiling and far wall, and the beating when he said it looked like a monster, Father roaring, “He is your God! He is the Word Made Flesh, the Lord of Hosts, and
He sleeps in you
!”

Father, eyeless, stared up at him. The shiny scars of the image on his chest glinted in the firelight like the unconnected dots of a surgeon’s coloring book. “Take the knife and call Him, Caleb. Like I showed you. Do it.”

Someone shoved Caleb and he fell down on one knee. Father lunged onto the knife, then arced back as reflex kicked in. He thrashed in the mud with the knife up to its hilt in his belly. The mob closed in behind Caleb, drumming on his back.

Father clasped the knife and wrenched it out of Caleb’s hands. Caleb fought to get it back, but only cut himself on it. The crowd pressed him down, their screams crushing his father’s prayer.

“Lord, look to your servant, and awaken in this, thy unworthiest vessel!
Lord, make me Your own
!” Father coughed a gout of blood in Caleb’s face.

The crowd sprang back as if from an electric shock, then began to pound the ground again. Caleb climbed off his father and wiped the gore from his eyes.

Father lay on his back, crushed into the mud, his hands working the knife deep into his abdomen. Caleb was revolted, shocked beyond breath, but he bore witness.

Jubal Gibbons was nearly finished completing the image of his God, worked in the transient medium of his own flesh. The knife had cored out grievous circular holes in his pectoral muscles, and the spirals of radiant fury spilling out of them, converging upon the third eye over the sternum and the heart. His hands shook and nearly failed as they completed the
seppuku
slash of the wide, downturned mouth in the floor of his modest potbelly. Until the last foamy freshet of lung-blood splashed out of his mouth and jetted from the eyes cored out of his chest, Father prayed, “Awaken in me, Lord, make a miracle, Lord… teach my son to love you…”

The Goddess was displeased. She laid into the prone worshippers with the pail, spilling stew onto some so that others attacked them to lick it off. “Come here, boy,” she growled, but Caleb didn’t look at her. She had no power over him so long as he didn’t look, didn’t breathe…

“Come here, Caleb,” she said. “You’re a man, now. The Goddess has something to show you—”

Caleb turned to look at Father, who was quite dead. His arms lay out to the sides. The knife stood upright out of the corner of his drooling abdominal grin.

Caleb wanted to tear out his own eyes, but for what his father had said, just before he died. Knowing the Lost Gospel was an insane lie, he’d given his life for his faith, not to escape this hell, but to save his son’s soul, to awaken God—

The hag raised the hem of her bathrobe up over her hips. A stench like mothballs and old flypaper soured the air. Caleb looked at his father and prayed.

Deep in the heart-blood mandala bored into Father’s chest, a red eye opened.

The Goddess came closer. Caleb gagged on her rancid perfume, but he was so choked up with love and rage, that he was quite beyond her power.

“Here is your offering, children! The Goddess is well-pleased. Now, feast!”

They closed in on Father and began to tear at him. Caleb tried to break in, but he was clubbed and thrown away.

The mob exploded and broke apart, bodies flung and broken against the walls. Father stood as if he’d been yanked upright by a noose.

One worshipper tried to strike him with his fist, but Father’s yawned abdominal cavity gnashed jagged ribcage teeth and bit off his arm at the elbow.

Father moved through the crowd on puppeteer’s strings, arms pistoning to hammer down anyone who got in his way, or to feed them to the mouth. As he waded through the slaughter, Father soaked up horrendous blows, shrugged off men who tackled and stabbed him, and advanced, step by step, on the Goddess.

In his mutilated chest, the lower pair of eyes rolled and flashed in their settings of dead flesh, while the third bored straight ahead into the infinite, beholding all futures, all secrets. White light blazed out of the eyeholes like a radioactive jack-o-lantern. Scalding blood bubbled out of its nose slits as it snorted in scornful, Mosaic rage. The gaping, saturnine mouth quivered and sprayed sizzling gore and offal in a frustrated attempt to speak. Caleb sank to his knees and prayed silently as it lumbered past him.

The Goddess backed up to cling to the bas-relief idol carved into the wall. A weeping throng of worshippers struggled to lift her up, but her illusion faltered, and their strength was sapped. She tumbled on them and lay prone at Father’s feet.

She screamed curses at him, but the lips of God spoke in the First Tongue, and though none understood it, all fell still. The mouth dropped open wide, and blobs of inflammable bile roared out and smashed her flat. The blind mob backed away as the hag writhed in a cocoon of napalm, leaving a snail-trail of ash and burning fat, mewling like a litter of kittens.

Father lurched away across the basement to the door, which still stood open, spilling heavenly sunlight into the dark. Tripping on his own intestines, he collapsed against the cinderblock wall, beckoning to Caleb, and pointed up.

The divine light of the eyes in his chest had gone dim, and the mouth was only a fatal wound like what samurais gave themselves when they royally goofed up. No strings held him up, anymore.

Caleb pushed through the motionless crowd and stepped into the cradle his father made with his hands. Shaking, Father hoisted Caleb up over his head and within reach of the threshold. Caleb caught it and wedged his elbow against the door, was almost vaulted head over feet into the kitchen as his father threw him.

He turned and reached down for Father’s hand, but Jubal Gibbons backed away into the pool of sunlight. As his knees buckled and he sank to the floor, his bowels spilled out and coiled around his hands, which steepled at his belly. “Thank you, Lord…”

One by one, the heathens fell down before his corpse and bowed in worship.

Caleb went to find a phone, numbly wandering among mountains of old tabloids. He felt itchy all over, as if something crawled under his skin.

Looking around, he noticed another rash on his arm where Father had touched him. Angry red sores swelled and spread down the length of his forearm, bursting open to bear witness and speak in tongues. He tore off his shirt and scratched. The Word was alive in him, and needed no knife to let it out.

Stumbling out the front door into pounding sunlight, and birds exploded from the trees and swirled over his head like leaves in a hurricane, their flitting bodies defining a shifting but unmistakable face. The shoals of clouds masking the sun knitted into a beetling tri-ocular brow that bore down on him and pinned him to the earth until the Word lifted him up and sent him flying into the street.

He could not find the breath to scream or to pray, but the eyes and mouth of the Word opened all over him, and sounded a call to worship that shattered every window, knocked down every door.

Gone and forgotten was the time of humble begging, when he would plead with them to accept the god that slept in his flesh as their savior. Now, it was their turn to beg…

It wasn’t in the nature of the place for anyone who worked at The Tender Trap Adult Books & Video to notice what went on in the #9 coin-op video booth. Real human contact was not what anyone came there for, and those who lurked and groped themselves in the booths were the most painfully shy customers, like ghosts sure to vanish under a good strong stare.

Violet was a quick study, having learned early in life the connection between constant vigilance and not getting hit, but she had her own problems. It was only when those problems began to fade into the background that she noticed that many patrons who used the #9 booth simply never came out.

The Tender Trap was the last growth industry on J Street, the embattled border where urban renewal had surrendered to sleaze, and the stately Gaslamp District degenerated into seedy downtown.

Violet came in on the bus from Riverside. Wade would be gone a week, maybe a month, and when he returned, tearful and pleading if he remembered what he’d done at all, she had planned to be set up in a new town with her own home, job and life. She had run away before and always came back to the trailer park within a day or two, so this start had gone better than most.

She found no room at the Salvation Army Women’s Shelter, which was packed with wives worse off than her and crawling with children. Wandering the streets, weighing the relative merits of going back to wait for Wade or sleep on the street, she found the Tender Trap.

When Violet walked in a month ago, drawn by the Help Wanted sign, one of her eyes was still too swollen to see out of. She looked like what she was, but while waiting to speak to the manager, she caught a shoplifter stuffing EZ-Whip cartridges in his pants, and was hired on the spot. The rest had come with it—a room above the store to sleep in and a few people to talk to, and money to save for something better—and she began to feel safe.

Then she began to notice #9.

The booths were a relic from the pre-home video era, when porno theaters and hookers thrived on the local sailor traffic. While all kinds of perverts came into the store, only a few virtually invisible types still used the booths. The homeless who begged on the Boulevard all day and night came in to jack off as a kind of conjugal coffee break. Illegal aliens, filthy and shaking from exhaustion, often had to be chased out because they tried to catch a nap in them. Then there were the businessmen, the upright solid citizen types whose wives would never tolerate such filth in their homes.

They were as broad a cross-section of masculine humanity as could be found in the city, but once they came in the door, they adopted uniform customs, darting past her roost at the elevated cash register to duck into the back of the store, stopping only to get quarters from the change machine. They stayed inside for a few minutes or an hour, then darted out just as quickly, while Lupe, a hunchbacked Latina crone who sat on a stool at the end of the row of booths, cleaned up the dregs of their ardor with paper towels and 409.

Violet had zero interest in the private lives of the customers, but just keeping her eyes open, she soon noticed how, every so often, one would fly into the booth alley, and never come out. The Tender Trap had no back door, but Violet didn’t ask questions. She watched a little closer when she saw a customer go in. She came out onto the floor to straighten the bargain VHS carousel closest to the batwing saloon doors that blocked her view, glancing over them at the retreating masturbator. It took several of these spying expeditions to discover that only #9 held onto its suitors.

After an hour or so of whatever went on inside, Lupe went to the booth and opened it with a skeleton key, sprayed down the interior, and shuffled back out, always carrying a bundle wrapped in towels in the crook of her arm, which she brought back to the closet that was her workspace and where, for all Violet knew, she slept. Lupe, the manager told her, was a Mayan Indian and didn’t speak a word of English or Spanish. Whatever language she did speak, Violet never once heard her use it, no matter how many times she tried to draw the cleaning woman out.

She asked the other clerks about it, but got nowhere. Merle, the defrocked carnival-ride operator who ran the counter through the dinner hours, eyed her warily and snapped, “What’re you, a cop?” Crayonne, the ugliest, gayest, blackest man Violet had ever seen, told her there were peepholes, if she wanted to watch them jerk off, then laughed at her the rest of the night. Judith, the early morning cashier, sighed in obvious relief. “Do you see them right now, too?” she asked, sweeping her shaking bird-claw hands and jangling silver jewelry around to accuse the whole empty store. “I do, too…”

Violet did not ask the manager, Zoe, about #9. Zoe hired her and set her up with the studio apartment upstairs, asked no questions but seemed to understand everything. When she thought of bringing it up, Violet began to doubt that there was anything amiss but her own fucked-up nerves misfiring. Besides, every time she got deeper than surface chatter with Zoe, she was pressed against the ceiling of her own ignorance. After a few days of the job, Zoe had asked her how she was doing.

Violet stuttered, “Doesn’t any of this stuff, you know, ever make you feel, you know, weird?”

“How do you mean, honey?”

“You know, being a woman,” she said, feeling a flush of shame fill her face. She wasn’t offended by the wares, but she failed to see what the pixilated video couplings and sterile rubber hardware they sold had to do with sex. Not that what passed for sex in
her
house would come any closer to a romantic ideal. “Doesn’t it, you know,
objectify
women?”

“Oh Gods, Vi, where’d you ever get such a big, dumb word?” Squat, doughy Zoe was about as sensuous as a garden gnome, and acted like they were selling plumbing fixtures. “Men objectify women, Vi. They look at us and see machines to make them come, to fill their bellies, and we see them as machines to make us feel special and safe. This stuff—well, we should all breathe a sigh of relief that some men whack off to it and leave real women alone.”

“I don’t mean, well… You know, Wade, he used to—” and she shut up when she found she could not articulate her feelings or thoughts without Wade stories.

“Men come in here for all kinds of reasons, Vi. We don’t judge. Nobody is beyond forgiveness.”

So she let it lie. But night after night, she caught glimpses out of the corner of her eye: when she rang up a gross of nitrous chargers for a gay biker couple, or rousted drunken frat boys who tried to climb into the Swedish Swing, or when Cowboy Chuck Berry or any of the regular street people came in to beg bus change or read her a poem. She would see a man dart in the front and vanish through the saloon doors, or she would only see them swinging.

And then one day, she caught one.

Above the sounds of sweat-slick hands pawing rubber and neoprene and leather, the whisper of licked lips and spastically blinking eyes, the idiot-music of the door sensor jerked her out of her trance. He was already halfway across the floor to the booths, and Violet slid off her stool and banged her knees on the counter. She followed the phantom into the dank corridor and peered around the corner and yes, the hunched figure stood before the door of #9 with a roll of quarters in one shaking fist.

The full weight of the stupidity of her obsession sat upon her chest and struck her dumb. The plans she’d hatched as she lay in bed in the morning, wishing she’d had the brains to bring the TV from the trailer, scorched and fell away like film stuck in the gate of a jammed projector.

She reached out and touched his grubby flannel shirt, but the man jerked away as if her aura burned him. Only when he turned and faced her did she realize that she’d feared, hoped, he was someone else. “Excuse me, mister, you can’t use that one—”