The Acolyte (23 page)

“How . . .
much
?”

His quote for the rabbit and cage was outlandish. Amira was over with the goat now. She scratched the bristly hair between its amputated horns; it bleated and chewed the sleeve of her parka. She looked at me.

“Who wants a goat?” I said to her.

“Me,” she said.

I sighed. “How much for the goat?” I asked the owner.

Another outrageous price. I agreed so long as he’d throw in a bag of barley pellets. I tossed the sack of pellets over my shoulder and grabbed the goat’s lead. Amira carried the rabbit.

“You can’t leave with live animals, officer,” said the owner. “It’s against the law.”

I booted the door open. “Feel free to make a citizen’s arrest.”

“We need to give them names,” I said, walking home. “Pets need names.”

Amira said, “Can’t we call them Goat and Rabbit?”

“No. They need real names. They’re yours now. Name them.”

The goat gnawed at a patch of scraggly weeds sprouting round a telephone pole.

“Any names I want?”

“Whatever names you want, yeah.”

“Okay. The goat will be . . . Dighet.”

“Dig it? Dig what?”

Amira pronounced it slowly: “Deeg-hat.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Goat.”

“So, wait,” I said, “you’re naming the goat
Goat
—only in Arabic?”

“You said whatever I wanted. And the rabbit . . . Hoppsy.”

Visit from a Quint

Afternoon into early evening was spent getting the animals settled in.

Hoppsy was an easy matter; his cage rested by the window. Dighet the goat was trickier. He could not be given free rein on account of a destructive appetite: his first order of business upon entering the apartment had been to eat the laces out of my sneakers.

The apartment next door lay vacant. I clambered onto the fire escape and cracked the window with a screwdriver. We lined one of the empty bedrooms with newspapers. Amira positioned a sheet from the society section—a full-page photo of The Prophet—face-up where Dighet might be inclined to piss on it. We filled a bucket with pellets and another with water.

“You should check on him twice a day,” I told Amira, who nodded solemnly.

We were eating canned stew I’d scavenged from the next door apartment when someone knocked on the door. I put a finger over my lips and nodded to the bedroom closet. Amira slipped into the closet while I slipped into my shoulder rig and unsnapped the trigger guard.

Another knock. I went to the door. The bedroom closet made the softest click.

“Who is it?”

“Mary Kay calling.”

Fear stole over the crown of my skull and shrink-wrapped the skin down my throat. I knew that voice.

I opened the door. I had to.

The Quint—Number Two; the one who’d stabbed Exeter—stood squared in the frame. He had a good head and a half on me, though there couldn’t be more than a hundred and fifty pounds cladding those bones. He was dressed the same as earlier with the addition of a wide-brimmed felt hat; he had the look of travelling preacher.

He pressed a finger to my heart. “You’ve been touched.”

His car shone like an alligator skull under the streetlamp. Its interior was coffin-dark. Its roof was strapped with shotguns, pistols, what looked to be a sniper rifle. A pine-scented crucifix was garrotted from the rearview mirror. The backseat was full of children’s toys. Teddy bears and ragdolls. All the eyes had been inked out with a black marker.

“You’re looking at my tattoo,” he said once we’d gotten on the road.

I hadn’t but it struck me as unwise to contradict his assumption.

“Nobody does tattoos anymore,” Two went on, “bodily adornment being a sin. An old Navy man did ours. He’d never learned to draw much more than anchors and hearts and skulls, those being the sum of the shipmen’s requests.”

The car hit a pothole. The Quint cracked a window; wind hissed through the slit, ruffling the hair of the black-eyed toys in the backseat.

“Your city stinks of rotten meat.”

He wrenched the wheel, whipsawing across the opposite lane. The Buick’s tires skipped up over the curb and back to the macadam. Reaching out, Two brushed his fingers across my cheek: like being brushed with the bone-stubs of something long dead.

“Tell me, Acolyte Murtag . . . does the name Victor Appleton tickle your brainstem?”

“No. That’s a blank.”

The Quint offered the most animal smile ever to grace a human countenance. Every square inch of his face was scarified: wire-thin scars crisscrossed his cheeks and lips and even eyelids, horizontal intersecting with vertical, overlapping like the cured reeds of a wicker basket.

Why not just tell him? Tom Swift, Porter Rockwell, Damascus Towers, Jeremiah. It would be no different than siccing two packs of rabid dogs on each other. But I didn’t.

We pulled up beside the gutted remains of The Manger. The club’s back end was blown apart, blackened rafters poking at the sky. The sidewalk was littered with wilted bouquets and candles melted to pools of colourful wax on the concrete.

The Quint kicked his way through the flowers and crunched a framed photo of Eve under his boot. He knocked around inside for a few minutes and came out with streaks of char on his face.

“Come, Acolyte. We’ve the Lord’s work to do.”

The joint standing catty-corner to the Manger was nameless: only a buzzing neon martini glass marked it an establishment currently accepting clientele. A bleary porthole window was inset in its swinging door; the Quint shouldered it open and I trailed him inside.

The bar was dark, the only light shed by the cathode rays of an ancient TV bolted over the scarred bar. Even the air tasted scummy. High-backed booths ran up the left side; all save the last were unoccupied. A gilt-edged portrait of The Prophet—his more censorious expression, as required by law in such establishments—hung over a rack of dusty RC bottles behind the bar. A jukebox played “Missionary Man.”

The bartender possessed the plastic face of a used car salesman. Brilliantined hair, plaid shirt with rolled-up sleeves, flyspecked apron. His was a face best served by mood lighting.

“What can I get you fine Followers?” he said a little queasily.

“Soda water,” said the Quint. I nodded the same.

The Quint sipped his soda and, finding it to his liking, downed the glass. The bartender refilled it swiftly. A cockroach scuttled down the bar ledge. Big as a communion wafer. I slipped my coaster over top of it. The coaster scuttled forward a few inches. I set my glass atop it, pressed down until it went crunch.

“Sorry for the state of the place,” said the bartender, wiping a grotty rag down the bar.

The Quint said, “There was an explosion across the road.”

“That was a while back.”

The Quint’s arm snaked out, corralling the bartender’s rag-hand. “I trust your memory goes back that far?”

The bartender squirmed. “It does.”

“Tell me what you saw.”

“Saw? Nothing. It’s a different breed of clientele: they had all the young ones, the spangly nightclub crowd; we . . .”—he cast a desperate eye around the place, urging us to draw our own conclusions—“. . . appeal to earthier tastes.”

“So you didn’t see anything?”

The bartender’s hand turned white in the Quint’s grip.

“Heard the explosion alright. We all rushed outside to look.”

“So you saw . . . not a thing?”

“That place over there was none of our concern,” the bartender said. “No reason to spare it a glance.”

“No
thing
? Not a single thing?”

The Quint’s nails punched into the bartender’s hand.

“Please,” the guy blubbered, “I’m a loyal Follower. . . .”

“If you saw nothing,” The Quint said equitably, “tell me—what good are you?”

Withdrawn from the folds of his albino duster, the Quint’s gun didn’t quite resemble one: only a black effigy in the rough shape of a gun, dark traceries wafting from the barrel like raw diesel smoke. Speaking, it made hardly a sound: the
whuph
of a propane barbecue igniting.

The bartender’s head split open. One half vapourized into a fine red mist while the other hung like a waxing gibbous moon, the remaining eye staring out with horrible awareness.

The Quint walked to the last booth with cool momentum, duster flapping like the wings of a crippled moth. He surveyed the two old men who occupied it and shot the pair. Their heads ricocheted off the wall, bodies tossed out of the booth. One of them wasn’t quite dead; his liver-spotted hand reached out to the Quint.

“What do you see?” the Quint whispered to him. “Please, tell me what you see.”

But the man was past answering. Two shot him in the face. Next he shot the jukebox and walked out the swinging batwing door.

By the time I staggered out to the street the Quint was walking back from his car with a jerry can in each hand. We bumped shoulders—his body was cold steel—and the collision sent me sprawling to the wet flagstones.

“You butchered them,” I choked.

He faced me down. “The Lord butchered them. I was only His blade.”

I lay dumbfounded out on the street until the Quint emerged from the bar trailing a line of gasoline. He hooked his fingers into my collar and yanked me backwards with him. I let myself be dragged a few feet before pushing off with my heels to get myself partway to standing, at which point he shoved me in the direction of the Buick.

I crumpled into the passenger seat. Another
whuph
. A vein of fire wound across the street under the bar door. The porthole window lit up orange. The Quint watched awhile, and when the door blew off its hinges, felt his work was done.

We drove. Steam fumed from manholes to form curtains of vapour. The Quint drove casually, three fingers guiding the wheel. Face flecked with blood. We came upon an oil-drum fire. Indigent men clad in rags were warming themselves by its light. The Quint slowed down.

“Hand me one of those,” he said, indicating the toys.

I gave him a teddy bear. Heavier than a stuffed animal ought to be—then I saw the pin looping from the fur of its belly, a pin the Quint pulled before tossing it out the window where it landed with a soft thump.

“Christmas comes early,” he called chummily.

We pulled away as the men peered with bafflement at the bear. They had receded a quarter-block into the rearview when an explosion rattled the windows.

We came upon two Followers trundling a shopping cart. A man and a woman, both quite young. A black-eared dog was yoked to a lead tied round the cart’s handle.

“Hand me another.”

In the cart, dozing atop the couple’s possessions with a pom-pommed toque snugged over his head: a young boy.

I said: “No.”

“They’re agitators.”

“They’re a homeless family.”

We cruised on past. Two’s eyes were riveted on me. I sent a prayer up:
Please Lord, a few days to set my house in order. Make amends. Save whatever I can.

What is the velocity of a prayer?

We pulled over. The Quint’s revolver butted my chest.

“Open the door.”

The pressure of the barrel intensified. I jerked the door open and went down on my ass on the curb, my feet still in the Buick’s foot well.

“When you’re needed, you’ll be summoned.”

I’d been cast out a few blocks from the apartment. I limped home. Amira was still up. I walked into the bathroom and stripped for a shower. Water too icy to work up a lather so I just stood in the spray with my teeth chattering.

I dressed and retrieved the spare key from the cupboard above the fridge. Amira was sitting on the floor cross-legged—Hopi Indian style, my mother would’ve remarked. I sat the same. The key rested on the bare wood between us.

“It’s yours,” I told her. “Put it somewhere safe. Come and go, fine by me.”

I slid the key toward her. She put it in her pocket.

“The day may come I don’t walk back in that door,” I said. “If that ever happens, think to save yourself. Let the animals go. A pond for Frog. Bird can fly away. Rabbit and Goat . . . don’t worry, they’ll figure it out. Worry about
you
, okay?”

“Okay.”