Vinnie completed the sale of the disputed fish to the Chinese housewife, gave the pan a final toss, emptied it into a wad of paper, and passed my dinner to me, steam rising, oil and fluid from the mussels already seeping through the bottom.
I tossed one of the smelts in my mouth, the skin popping, soft flesh all but melting, tiny bones crunching.
A perfect moment. But for the murderer atop the car.
Two of us in such close proximity was a grave imbalance of things. But such was the world now. It was not rare to find two sets of hands covered in so much blood dining at the same establishment. And it would become less rare with every passing day. Our numbers would grow. That was the shape of things.
Sad world.
Vinnie took advantage of a pause in the line of customers and pulled a can of Tecate from one of the coolers, popping it open as he came around the counter and lowered himself onto another of the buckets.
"Mara Salvatrucha cocksuckers. That kid, he brought his grandmother here to try and start shit. One of their jefes was by last week. They're trying to lay claim to the fish trade. They already take a piece of every job down on the ports. All those empty shipping containers that piled up in '08, '09, MS-13 is running protection on the Inland Empire drought refugees FEMA has been stuffing into those things. Those are the lucky ones. Newcomers are being housed in the cars that never got off the docks when the dealers went belly up. Anyway, they run the ports, they think they should have a piece of anything that comes out of the Pacific. This punk, tattoos on his eyelids, like red monster eyes on his eyelids. His thing is, he tells you what he wants, what he's gonna take from you, then he goes eye to eye with you, but he closes his eyes. Supposed to freak you out, those monster eyes, plus the idea that he's so tough he can close his eyes in front of you and not worry about what you're gonna do. Vireak there was over at the port-o-potties. And don't think it was some damn coincidence that the asshole came around to baksheesh me while Vireak was taking a crap. So he tells me there's a new tax on fish. They're gonna be needing one pound out of every three I bring into the carnival. One-third of what my uncle Paulo and my cousins catch on my boat. A third of what I buy from the guys who ride their catches over from the piers every sundown. Guys who still hang their lines over the rail and put their catches in wicker creels and ride it here on bicycles. Not just from Venice and Santa Monica; I got a guy who rides up from Huntington. One-third. So he tells me that's the new tax, and then he puts his face close to mine, and he closes his eyes. And stands there waiting for me to fold."
I sucked a mussel from its shell, bit into it.
Vinnie took a long drink of beer and wiped his mouth with the back of a thick forearm stained with a faded blue network of nautical tattoos.
"So what I did was--"
He smiled, showing big square teeth the color of old scrimshaw.
"I went back to work. Asshole is standing there, ten, twenty seconds, half a minute maybe. People who'd been watching this go down, they're starting to giggle. I'm fileting some yellowtail for the sushi guy down the way, asshole is standing there with his eyes closed. And he's not alone. Got his posse with him. Three more assholes with face tattoos, standing there, they don't know what to do. Looking at each other. What do we do? I don't know. What they know is, none of them wants to be the one to tap jefe on the shoulder, have him open his eyes and see I've just thrown him a steaming pile of disrespect. No one wants to be looking at him when he realizes just how much face he's lost. So they all stand around, the crowd is laughing now, and then the asshole opens his eyes."
Vinnie spit between the scuffed toes of his chef's clogs.
"He wanted to make a move pretty bad. But I had the filet knife in my hand, the meat hook right there where I could get to it. Him and his boys were packing God knows what, but none of them had fisted up. He knew he made a move, he was gonna get opened up asshole to gullet whether his boys capped me or not. So we did the Salvadoran/Italian-American standoff thing for a few seconds. Then Vireak came back from the crapper."
He chugged the rest of his beer, crushed the can, tossed it back into the cooler he'd taken it from, and belched.
"And that was pretty much that. They shoved some old ladies around, stole a few oranges from the produce cart over there, swore I'd be eating my own cock within the week, and fucked off."
He took a box of Ukrainian knockoff Salems from a pocket of his black-and-white checked pants and lit one with a disposable Chiapas Jaguares lighter.
"That asshole today was the first any of them have come back. Promise you, the play was supposed to be that he brought his grandma because she always starts some kind of argument with the baker or the butcher over prices. He was gonna step in, shank me, and get the fuck out. No one told him that even if he stuck me he was gonna end up dealing with Vireak. No one told him shit because I guarantee you that he's someone's asshole baby cousin and no one is looking out for his ass. They figure maybe he gets lucky and puts the knife in me and I take a dirt nap. Whether or not he gets wasted they don't give a shit. Main thing is, they want me to know it's not over. But they wanted at least for him to get his blade out and cut me a little. Something. Didn't count on grandma being more savvy than all their asses combined. That old broad, she knew what the score was. Got her nino out of here. Good for her. Not that the world couldn't have afforded one less asshole around, but good for her getting him out."
He took a long drag and sent a plume of smoke up into the night.
"Good for her."
I poked through the empty mussel shells, trying to find one I might not have already eaten, looking for a last shrimp or smelt hidden at the bottom, but alas, it was not to be. I balled the now sopping paper around the shells and tossed it into another of the white plastic buckets.
"Delicious, Vinnie."
He flicked ash from his cigarette with a thumb callused and scarred by a thousand fishhooks.
"You let me, I'll make you something for real. One of those bass, I'll score it, pour some olive oil over it, rub in some sea salt and some pepper, shove a couple lemons inside, and drop the whole thing on the grill just like that. Get some red potatoes from the potato lady, wrap 'em in foil, drop 'em in the coals. Some arugula from the lettuce lady. When the bass is done, skin is crispy, the eyes are starting to pop out, I'll put the fish over the greens, toss the potatoes with some oil and salt and pepper and some dill, put 'em on the side, give you a lemon. Eat it just like that. Grilled bass alla salad. Shit, I'll even give you a real fork. You say the word, you can have that whenever you want."
I held up my hands.
"It sounds more than delightful."
I gestured at my rumpled slacks and jacket.
"But I'd have to come properly attired for such a feast. Evening clothes. Nothing less would do."
He smiled.
"You do that; you put on your tux and come down here. I'll find a tablecloth. Somewhere in here, someone is selling linens. I'll get a tablecloth and a napkin you can tuck in your collar. Real class."
I took a handkerchief from my pocket and wiped my greasy fingers and lips.
"Something to look forward to."
He dropped his cigarette butt and let it hiss out in a puddle of melted ice that had drained from the coolers.
"Yeah, something to look forward to. Who couldn't use something like that?"
I carefully folded my handkerchief away.
"Vincent, there was something I did want to have a word with you about."
He reached over the counter, took one of the empty frying pans from the grill, and banged it on the side of the El Camino. In response, the passenger door creaked open and a chubby brown teenager in a bloody white apron and checked pants climbed out, rubbing his eyes.
Vinnie rose and replaced the pan on the grill.
"Gonna take a walk, Ciccio."
The boy nodded, yawning.
Vinnie pointed at the coolers.
"Push the eel before it goes bad."
The boy scratched at a head covered in curly red hair.
"Si, Zio Vincenzo. Anguilla. Si."
I rose, dusting my backside, and followed Vinnie away from his fish stand, winding through the aisles of the carnival, away from the food stalls and carts that clustered near the gates where they could be easily accessed by visitors who did not care to take in the esoterica that lay deeper within.
If those outer layers of the carnival bore the character of a frontier marketplace, long on commerce and short on law enforcement, the interior felt much like a war-zone souk, bristling with opportunities to lose oneself, figuratively, literally, mortally. It was entirely of your choosing how far you cared to penetrate.
As the desires catered to became more perverse, the density of the sleepless increased. Existing on the far verge of human experience, there were tastes only they could reasonably be expected to acquire. The appeal, for instance, of being injected with mass volumes of amphetamine and then sealed in a sensory deprivation tank escaped even myself. But it was a service with popularity attested to by a long and twisting line of the haggard.
The concentration of sleepless in the darker zones of the carnival had led to rumor and superstition. A belief among the ignorant that one could contract SLP in this area simply by breathing the air. As if the sleepless were shedding and exhaling the SL prion in thick clouds. Not so. Of course one could be infected if one inhaled a sufficient quantity of SLP, but the sleepless did not walk about in a miasma of the illness.
Now, if there had been an incinerator on the site cremating sleepless remains, that would have been a definite threat. Prions, notoriously resilient, remain active even when burned. Prion ash is every bit as infectious as a wad of it residing, for the sake of argument, in a hamburger. Early in the course of the pandemic, before it was even known as such, CDC guidelines had called for the burning of SLP corpses.
SL response teams in orange vests would appear at hospitals, and increasingly at homes, unpacking electric saws. The bodies of the sleepless dead were decapitated so that tissue from the brains could be catalogued. Anomalies were sought, anything that might give promise of a cure. No one wanted to throw away the brain that might hold the key. But once the heads were packed in dry ice and sealed in a bucket, the bodies had to be dealt with.
Infection rates around crematoriums and landfill incinerators were well above national and global averages. Eventually the incongruity was noticed. Sleepless were no longer burned. They were limed and buried in concrete-lined mass graves. Deep.
Some countries were still burning. If one cared to track such things via the many thousands of SLP-related blogs, one gathered that the hinterlands of civilization had not gotten the word. In wide swaths of Africa and Asia, corpse pyres burned nonstop, the new dead piled on by the lowest castes. The longer the fires burned, the larger they grew, their plumes of smoke and infection creating more fuel. I'd been told by a Navy airman I'd met in casual circumstances that his carrier strike group fighter wing had flown escort for tankers dropping flame retardant on those blazes. The natives restarted their fires in short order, and the strategy shifted. Before his group had been recalled to waters closer to home, the airman had flown multiple missions firing Maverick missiles at towering piles of burning human bodies. The logic behind this new strategy, if one can use the word "logic" in this scenario, was not only to decimate the burn site but to terrorize the populace out of the practice of corpse burning. The fact that the attacks rained SLP ash and mist upon the locals seemed to be considered an acceptable level of collateral damage.
I never saw the airman again, naturally, but I have occasionally thought about him. He woke in the middle of the night, crying. He had reason. And I held him until the sun brought some light into the room and he said he had to go. His CSG was setting sail again, for where he was not certain. But the George Washington was soon offshore of Venezuela, and I am certain he became embroiled in that bit of twenty-first-century gunboat diplomacy. Finding new raw materials for his nightmares.
No, contagion was not an issue, no matter how deeply or extensively one chose to plumb the Midnight Carnival. Which is not to say that there wasn't an ample supply of unpleasant deaths available to the unwary. Along with perversity in their desires, many sleepless also brought with them an absolute disregard for their own well-being. So it was that Vinnie and I maintained a prudent watchfulness as we strolled.
A thick-bodied boy in a faded Los Angeles Raiders hoodie shuffled past, offering a whispered chant.
"Dreamer. Dreamer. Dreamer."
It would be bootleg, of course. A compound of heroin and ketamine most likely. Called double horse, it was the most popular home brew version of the real drug. So potent, it could knock even a late-stages sleepless to his knees and offer a brief period of sensation that I'd been told felt much like severe food poisoning without the diarrhea and vomiting. That this should be desirable was all one really needed to know about the ravages of SLP.
At a table filled with hand-painted miniatures of stock nonplayer characters and creatures from Chasm Tide, Vinnie paused to look over the selection.