The Exterminator Page 3

  Mary was concentrating so hard that she didn’t even hear him come in, though he always made plenty of noise when he came in, for this was a neighborhood where an opening door could mean someone intent on murder for no particular reason.

  “I just won a million dollars in the New York State Lottery,” Michael Jefferson said.

  With her fingers still, positioned above the keyboard, Mary turned her face for a kiss.

  “That’s nice,” she said absently, and went back to her manual of typing exercises. Mary’s ambition was to become a manuscript typist for authors who could afford it. That way she could work at home and charge up to $1.50 a page. She had been told that cracker jack typists could make as much as four or five hundred dollars a week.

  Jefferson’s two children came out of the bedroom like rockets and nearly bowled him over. He picked them up, one to an arm, and swung them until they squealed.

  “What’re we gonna do, Daddy?” Lisa asked. “Daddy, what’re we going to do after school?”

  “School comes first, then we’ll see,” Jefferson said. “See you at four.”

  Wendy said shyly, “Superman II is playing again. Please Daddy, this is the last time we want to see it.”

  “Till the next time,” Michael Jefferson said, no great lover of movies. Television had spoiled movies for him, if for no other reason that you couldn’t get a sandwich and a beer in the middle of a movie. But it was hard to say no to his little daughters, and so far he had seen Superman I three times and Superman II twice. By now he knew more than he wanted to know about Star Wars, The Black Hole, Close Encounters and The Empire Strikes Back.

  Lisa said seriously, “Daddy, you think a space ship will ever land in the Bronx?”

  Not if the space men don’t want to get mugged, Jefferson thought. But that wasn’t what he said. You didn’t say things like that to little girls who lived in the South Bronx. He hoped they would be gone from there by the time cynicism and bitterness touched his children.

  “What could space men tell you that you don’t already know?” Jefferson said.

  “Oh, I wish they’d come,” Lisa said.

  Mary switched off the typewriter and stood up, smoothing the creases in her white nylon uniform. At the door the children waited with their school books.

  “Twenty-three zillion hamburgers sold this year,” Mary said wearily. Then, seeing his frown, she said quickly, “That was just a joke, honey. We could live on what you make. Honest we could. Don’t you see I want to work? It’s for all of us.”

  Jefferson said sure.

  “You’ve got to learn to be a liberated man,” Mary said. “It isn’t a one-way thing.”

  “Sure,” Jefferson said.

  After his wife and daughters left, Jefferson went to the kitchen and popped a can of beer before he chopped onions to make a western omelet. Eggs by themselves were the absolute pits. He started on a second can of beer before he turned the omelet. No gourmet, he slid the ragged, slightly burned omelet onto a plate and ate it between sips of beer. Usually he was only too glad to grab a bite, take a quick shower and fall into bed, but now he found himself thinking about Smiley’s warning. And he remembered Eastland’s words—watch yourself all the time. There might be trouble with the Ghouls, but there was no way to tell. The Ghouls knew what he looked like; they didn’t know where he lived. Shit! Who in hell was he trying to kid? If they wanted to find him, they’d find him. A few dollars would buy his name; his address was in the phone book. He hoped the bastards would take their beating as the fortunes of war. If they didn’t …

  “Fuck it,” Michael Jefferson said. You couldn’t worry about everything. Right now he had to get some sleep or he wouldn’t be worth shit the next morning.

  During the hours while Michael Jefferson slept, the Ghetto Ghouls were busy. In the clubhouse on Simpson Street—the condemned tenement was one of the few buildings still unburned—they nursed their injuries and plotted revenge. Two Demerol tablets had dulled the pain in Smiley’s throbbing skull and he had shot up some Meth to offset the effects of the synthetic morphine. All the Ghouls were there, all that could be rounded up on short notice; all that weren’t too wigged out to walk. A big stolen Sherwood stereo—why not the best?—was throbbing with a Sid Vicious number. Sid himself was dead—a suicide after he murdered his girlfriend—but the Ghouls liked his name and played his records out of sentiment.

  The small apartment in the abandoned tenement had been done over in Street Punk Chic. The windows had been painted over with thick black latex paint; the walls were a deep purple. On the floor was an expensive shag rug they had liberated from a truck stalled in one of the daily traffic jams on Bruckner Boulevard. Once it had been white. Now it was greasy with fast food chicken, spilled wine, chili dog sauce, semen and blood. Some of the grease had been put there by vaseline, for what was sodomy without a lubricant?

  When Smiley drove his injured warriors home from the market a few bitches were fooling around in the place. Smiley told them to go and sell it for a few hours. He had things to talk about—gang business—and he didn’t want to hear any yapping from a lot of cunts. On the stereo Sid Vicious gave out with a loud schlock-rock howl and Smiley told one of the Ghouls, a guy named Vinny, to turn it down.

  “And fix me a rum and Corona,” Smiley said. The rum—160 overproof and Corona, a sticky brown soft drink made in Puerto Rico—was a drink of Smiley’s own invention. There was something wrong with the sugar level in Smiley’s blood; he put sugar in all his drinks and he had to keep stirring to keep the sugar from settling at the bottom of the glass.

  After he sucked down half the drink, Smiley felt groggy in spite of the Methedrine. To counter this he selected a “racer” from a jar of pills with all the colors of the rainbow. Racers were the pills they used to hype slow horses at the track; and all but the toughest Ghouls were afraid of them, because a pill strong enough to hype a horse sent a man into orbit. However, Smiley had been taking racers for several years, and they just made him crazy. Sometimes, high on a racer, he knew he was going to be supreme dictator of the world. He felt like that now.

  “First we got to get the nigger,” Smiley said. “Then after the nigger the Irish bastard. Irish, whatever he is. But he comes later. Shimmy and Paco will tell you what happened. This fucking nigger and the other guy, the white guy, came at us swinging bats. Fucking christ! All we wanted was some beer and they came at us with bats when we had our backs turned.”

  Smiley paused to suck on his drink while Shimmy and Paco nodded agreement. Macho men, like Smiley, they couldn’t admit even to themselves that two squares had kicked the shit out of them.

  “Fucking right they did,” Smiley went on. There was a hot white light in Smiley’s head. He felt good, very much in control of the situation. “The nigger, that’s what burns my balls. A fucking nigger using a bat on guys like us.”

  Smiley’s voice held a trace of wonder, as if the nigger’s crime was beyond human understanding.

  Paco said, “Niggers, they got the right idea down South about niggers.” The musclebound goon had been into the fortified wine in one of the many jugs strewn about. “Hey man, listen to this. How about we lynch the nigger. I mean, haul him up till the fucker strangles. Dies slow. One time I seen a picture of a nigger they lynched in some old Life magazine. They put a sign on his chest before they pulled him up on that branch. We could do the same.”

  Most of the Ghouls liked that; nothing like it had ever been done in the South Bronx, where nearly everything had been done. People had been decapitated, disemboweled, castrated and forced to eat their own balls while they bled to death. But never had a nigger or any other shade of human been lynched.

  “That’s toooo fucking much,” Shimmy said, getting into the spirit of the thing. “Niggers have a psychological thing about getting lynched. Some guy told me it’s the death they’re scared of more than like getting shot or stabbed.”

  The word “psychological” had been gleaned from Shimmy’s two years
of high school before he was expelled for jerking off in front of a pretty new teacher.

  The Ghouls’ smiles faded when it became obvious that Smiley didn’t favor the lynching idea. At least, he didn’t like it for Michael Jefferson.

  “Fuck that Southern shit,” Smiley said. “Maybe we’ll do it sometime, but not this time, not with this nigger. I want that cocksucker to live a long time and remember what happened today.”

  Pissed off at having his idea shot down, Paco came up with another. “The same guy that told me about niggers says if you cut off a guy’s cock and leave his balls, he still gets horny as a bitch, but can’t do anything about it. What I mean is, you can’t fuck a woman with your balls. You can’t even jerk off because you got no cock. What I’m trying to say, cut off a nigger’s cock and you take away his life. Everybody knows that.”

  Smiley said, “I’ll cut off your cock if you don’t keep quiet.” The other Ghouls laughed and Smiley felt good. What the hell was so special about Freddy Prinze? He was just as funny when he wanted to be—funnier.

  There was a cargo hook, the kind used by longshoremen, embedded in the wall and Smiley yanked it free, throwing down a shower of plaster. Cockroaches ran up the wall in panic.

  “This is what I’m going to use on the nigger,” Smiley said. He stopped talking when a Ghoul came in with a satisfied grin. Everybody turned to look at him. He was short and thin and looked smarter than the others. The Ghouls called him “Riddler” because there was something about him that suggested the impressionist Frank Gorshin on the old Batman TV show. Ever since this was pointed out to him he tried to play up to the part, though he wasn’t very good with the riddles.

  “You get it?” Smiley asked.

  Riddler nodded. “The nigger’s name is Michael Jefferson. The middle initial is T so it has to be the same guy. Only one Michael T. Jefferson in the Bronx book. I told you it’d be a snap, Smiley.”

  “Big deal,” Smiley sneered, swinging the cargo hook. He snapped his fingers and Shimmy handed him another rum and Corona. There were two shots of overproof in the drink, but Smiley sucked it down like chocolate milk. Life was good, Smiley thought, smiling at the Ghouls. These guys were a bunch of stiffs but he needed them for now. Later he woud leave them far behind when he moved on to better things.

  “Let’s go,” Smiley said.

  Michael Jefferson got his sleep in two shifts, half in the morning when the apartment was empty, half in the evening when he went to bed with his wife. When he got up after the first shift, he didn’t do anything in particular until his wife brought the kids home at four o’clock. Battling Ben had allowed him to set up a woodworking bench in a corner of the basement. The bench stayed in the basement; the other woodworking tools, even the vice, were kept in a chest in his apartment. Sometimes his wife scolded him mildly because he was always building something they didn’t need. Right now he was working on a toy chest for the children; they already had shelves for their books, and a long bench where they could do their homework.

  Now, bent over the bathroom hand-basin, splashing cold water in his face, he wondered if he should do some work on the chest. But he hadn’t slept well and he decided against it. All he wanted to do today was have a few beers with Eastland and maybe shoot a little pool. After that he guessed it would be Superman No. 2.

  “Man of Steel my ass!” Michael Jefferson said, grinning at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He dried his face and began to dress.

  Now and then his wife got after him for taking the kids to all weird movies, insisting that he’d do a lot better to take them to the Museum of Natural History. Well, he’d done that too, and the kids liked it well enough, but they liked space movies better. Mary got mad when he kidded her about being a culture vulture, but that’s what she was. Mary was big on buying prints of Mexican primitive art. Why Mexican he couldn’t say.

  It was a few minutes to two when he finished dressing, and he guessed he’d find Eastland having a cold one in Smitty’s or looking for a game at the 8-Ball just down the street. Eastland didn’t do much of anything with himself. He liked to read and when he wasn’t doing that, usually you could find him at the bar or the pool hall. Eastland was bright but he wasn’t ambitious. Jefferson guessed he’d been pretty ambitious at one time, but that was before Vietnam. There were ways of being wounded in Nam that didn’t show. They hadn’t known each other before Nam, so he could only guess what Eastland wanted to be, and might have been, if his Uncle hadn’t grabbed him off the street and wrecked his life.

  “Fuck it,” Michael Jefferson said to the empty apartment. He was thinking too much about what couldn’t be changed because already it was in the past. A cold beer and a game of pool was the here and now. The rest of it could go screw.

  Dressed now in well washed jeans and denim shirt, Jefferson went downstairs and around to the back of the building to cut across the rubble of vacant lots that seemed to go on for miles. The sun shone brightly on the wilderness of rusting cans, broken bottles, rotting mattresses. Somewhere the same sun was shining on green grass and flowers. Arsonists had burned down half the South Bronx and the urban renewal jokers had torn the rest, then forgot to build it up again. Smitty’s bar was three blocks away and he could walk to it almost in a straight line, allowing for a slight detour here and there. Now you couldn’t do that in most other parts of the city, Jefferson thought with sour humor, so who said living in the South Bronx didn’t have its advantages?

  He was between the wall of an abandoned building and a rusted chain-link fence when they came at him from all sides. His eyes darted to the wall and then to the fence. They had picked just the right place. There were six of them and some had chains and some had baseball bats with six-inch nails hammered through the thick end so that the nail stuck out for half its length on the other side. For an instant, the only sound was their sneakered feet crunching in the sand and rubble, then he heard the giggling of their girls on the roof. A bottle came sailing down and shattered at his feet; the first Ghoul swung a chain at his head. Jefferson grabbed the chain away from the Ghoul and sent him tumbling with a high karate kick to the chest. A nail-studded bat came whistling at his head and he blocked it with the chain. Blood pounded in his head and he knew he didn’t have a chance, but he swung the chain out wide, trying to drive them back. Then one of the Ghouls behind him ducked under the whirling chain and snapped a chain around his neck. It was Paco, the one who looked like a circus freak. Paco’s weight lifter’s arms tightened on the chain and Jefferson tried to suck in air that wouldn’t come. The chain was torn from Jefferson’s hands and they all bored on him, kicking him in the crotch, raining blows on him from all sides. His body tried to jackknife with pain, but Paco held him in place. The world spun in front of his fading eyes and he thought, I’ll never see my wife and kids again. Then, with the last light left in his eyes, he saw a Ghoul raise a bat with most of the thick nail driven through. The bat swung upward and the nail glinted in the sun. In an instant it would bury itself in his skull. His eyes followed the upswing of the bat, and then it began to come down. The blow would have killed him instantly if Smiley hadn’t blocked the downswing with the cargo hook and turned it aside.

  Smiley screamed, “You fucking stupid clown. I told you not to kill him.”

  Powerless, unable to stand, Jefferson was turned by Paco and thrown face down in the dirt. “Hold the nigger,” Smiley yelled. “Do it like I told you.”

  Paco pulled Jefferson’s head forward with the chain and somebody sat on his legs. Up on the roof the whores were giggling and clapping their hands with excitement. It got quiet and Jefferson knew that Smiley was right behind him. One of the Ghouls ripped Jefferson’s shirt from neck to belt; and Smiley tested the point of the cargo hook with his thumb. A surgeon about to perform an operation that required the most delicate touch. Red spots burned in Smiley’s olive face; the pain in his skull was coming back in spite of the booze and the pills.

  “Hold him steady,” Smiley said.

>   This was something Smiley had always wanted to do. He wanted so much to do it, and yet he wanted to prolong the moment, like, he thought when you’re fucking some honey-cunt you really dig and you want to come in her and at the same time you want to keep on fucking.

  Bending down beside Jefferson, Smiley ran his fingers up the ridge of his spine with almost loving care. He stopped when he felt the little knob of bone right below the back of the neck. The Ghouls watched, fascinated, as his fingers lingered there. Holding their breaths, they watched while Smiley made a few practice swings. Finally he was ready and he smiled his hate.

  “Have a nice life, nigger,” Smiley said and sank the needle-tipped hook in the top of Michael Jefferson’s spine. Jefferson screamed and then he felt nothing. The life went out of his body and there was no pain after that. It was as if his body had been severed from his head. The body was gone and only his head remained. His brain still worked, but he had no body. He could hear the whores calling down from the roof. He could smell the filth under his face. He could hear the Ghouls going away. They were laughing, telling the whores to come down and join the party they were going to have.

  Michael Jefferson tried to turn his head, but it refused to obey the command of the brain. Only his eyes moved and he closed them into a blackness that he hoped was death.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Hey John, what’re you doing here?” Mary Jefferson said when she saw Eastland. School was letting out and the children came yelling through the doors, glad to be liberated for yet another day. This was a fairly new grade school and its newness made it seem out of place in the devastation that surrounded it on all sides. There was a playground with swings and slides, but the molded concrete figures that were supposed to charm the kiddies could have been anything—Pooh Bear or Abbie Hoffman.

  Mary Jefferson’s smile died when she looked into Eastland’s face. Her heart seemed to stop breathing. “Something’s happened to Michael,” she said, wanting to cry if her eyes hadn’t been so hot and dry. She hardly heard the children when they came racing over to her.