Hank toured hells he had known-Detroit got him ready for the hill, in the hammer shop at Huron Forge and Machine. Twelve drop hammers blowing out your eardrums in an acre of fiery steel forgings. The men and machines all hot, loud, dangerous, dirty, and sharp.
Mainly he thought Sartre was right in No Exit; hell was just other people, especially if they were Jolene, Allen, and Earl Garf.
Right now hell was Wisconsin, which was all he could see out his studio windows, and the Wisconsin river bluffs looked like a mass grave of dead technicolor porcupines.
And then, along came Garfinkle. The made-up man who hated his name and his past and was trying to reinvent himself as Brad Pitt from The Fight Club or Keneau Reeves from The Matrix.
He walked up to the bed and greeted Hank with the nickname he thought was so funny: “So how’s the Big Lebowski today?”
All Earl’s wit came from the movies, and Hank figured that’s what Earl and his whole slacker generation had instead of experiences. But he had not seen The Big Lebowski, so he was at a loss. It was the least of his problems.
“Know what?” Earl said. “Your old lady has another suitor. First Doctor Allen and now the canoe guy from up north. .”
The canoe guy.
Broker’s back.
“. . he’s out there in back of the garage knocking the wood in little pieces. I think he’s practicing up to knock a piece off of Jolene. Just like Allen is. But, for my money, I think the sleeper candidate has the inside track. When I took her to Milt’s office yesterday, Milt kissed her hand. It was very suave.”
What’s Broker doing back here? This could be a case where Earl was right.
“At any rate, we’ll know who rings the bell.” Earl walked over to the bedroom doorway and Hank could barely see him fumble around at shoulder level on a bookshelf next to the doorjam. He moved some books aside and pointed. “State-of-the-art miniaturization, batteries, and transmitter. This baby is what the CIA uses. I cut a little hole in the wall and trained this camera on her bed. The camera transmits to long-playing tapes on a VCR in the basement. Forget voyeur TV; this is the real thing. I was thinking lighting would be a problem if it happens at night. But you know what? Jolene always sleeps with a night-light. So I upped the wattage in the night-light bulb. When she does the dirty, we’ll have broadcast-quality audio and pretty good video. Unless, of course, she does it in the cot at the end of the bed. I didn’t think of that.”
Earl scratched his head briefly, then grinned, proud of himself as he tented the books back over the concealed camera. “You know what would have been good? I should have got your buddy Stovall on tape. He was a riot, a regular worm. Except he loved the hook.
“It was his fault, you know. I gave him every out. All he had to do was come up with some bread to pay the hospital bills. You know what he said? He said, not as long as I was hanging around. Can you believe that shit? I rented that hospital bed you’re laying on. Me.”
Earl pointed an accusing finger. “I mean, she didn’t have shit. She couldn’t pay the fucking mortgage, man. Jolene told me about his hangups so I left his dumb ass pinned to a tree so he could think about it. I figured if he did it, he could undo it and Jolene could get access.”
Earl paused. “It was kind of a mellow day when I lured him out there. You know the place. Where you cut wood. In fact I used a trunk from a tree you cut down. And I left him with the hammer and two quarts of Johnny Walker Red.”
Earl grinned. “I thought that was a nice touch.” He shrugged. “Any rate, I never figured it’d snow and get below freezing. I thought of going back out there but I didn’t have the right shoes, and I figured the van would get stuck. Besides, snow is good. It covers evidence. They already closed the investigation. They aren’t even calling it suicide, man. He just fell in over his head getting his weird kicks. You sure know some real degenerates.”
Suddenly Earl frowned and stared at Hank and Hank realized that he’d stopped roaming his eyes and was glaring at Earl. He let his eyes droop and roll. Then, like a tiny yellow cloud, the smell of urine seeped up from his diapered crotch. Just a few drops.
“Lookit you, you pig; you’re pissing yourself, aren’t you,” Earl accused, wrinkling his nose. “This is where I draw the line, like I told Jolene, I’ll turn your ass, feed you, and wipe your drool, but I definitely don’t do diapers.”
What a horrible experience it was to watch an idea slowly form on Garf’s face.
“On the other hand, maybe I do,” said Earl as he crossed to the windows and looked off to the left. Reassured, he came back to the bed and pulled Hank’s gown aside and opened the Velcro stays on his diaper.
“That was hardly a sprinkle, so tell you what I’m going to do.” Earl swung his eyes in a mischievous look over his shoulder and unzipped his fly. “This is for the time you fucked with me, Lebowski.”
Hank watched Earl take his Average White Boy dick out of his pants and aim a stream of pee onto Hank’s crotch.
I can feel that, fucker.
The urine splashed hot-chrome yellow and smelled like greasy rotten eggs. It pooled briefly between Hank’s thighs and then soaked into the thick, absorbent material. Earl went up on tiptoes and stretched forward to shake off the last few drops. Then he put himself away and refastened Hank’s diaper and straightened the gown. Very satisfied with himself, Earl picked up the TV clicker off the cabinet, zapped on the TV, and thumbed up the volume. Carefully, he inserted the remote under the clay fingers of Hank’s right hand.
Another of his little mockeries.
Then Earl left the room.
Fucker pissed on me.
Helplessly soaking in Earl’s urine, Hank tried to remember in detail the night more than a year ago when this cyber punk had walked into his house for the first time. Like some pimp, he’d ordered Jolene out into his car. Called her bitch, cunt, whore.
Called Hank geezer.
Yeah, well-a few minutes later Earl wound up on his ass in the driveway with a bloody nose-Hank’s attention suddenly wrenched away from the pleasant thought of thumping on Garf. Christ, his hand was on fire.
This stinging in his right hand. Jesus, his right index finger, like something hot was under the skin squirming to get out.
Hank tried to turn his eyes into a magnifying glass and his mind into the sun. He tried to concentrate his thoughts into a beam of flame on the finger. If. If. . he could move his finger an inch he could. . hit the red button on the top of the remote-the one with the two letters: TV-and turn the sucker off. The red button was right between his first and second fingers. If he could do that, he could message. He could communicate. Maybe find a way to fight back.
Then he shut his eyes and drove his thoughts into his dead flesh. He visualized wrecking crews beating through debris, pushing against collapsed tunnels and fried nerves, searching for something that could hook up.
Just give me one thing. One thing.
Nothing.
Just Earl’s taunts and his wet piss.
And the cryptic snatches of Jolene’s and Earl’s conversations that confirmed Cliff was dead. Lost in the woods in his special pain, with the cold shadows lengthening, the snow creeping over his shoes, and the booze for comfort.
Allen, Garf. They were coming in with cold, blunt noses, sniffing like jackals, tearing off hunks of him, thinking he was a corpse.
The question mark was Jolene; would she land heads or tails? She’d shown signs of empathy since his accident in the way she attended to him, talked to him, played music for him, left the TV on. She kept looking into his eyes and believed that he was looking back.
Could he trust her?
Or Broker?
Okay. Okay. Get squared away. Nothing good is going to happen. It’s a question of how much bad you have to eat before it ends. Those are your options.
If he didn’t dangle just so on his single thread of sanity it got like Auschwitz in his head. C’mon, Hank, don’t overwrite, he chided himself.
Cliff was dead but he’d done his job. But Jolene wasn’t strong enough to stand up to Garf. He’d take everything if it wasn’t locked away. Milt would score his legal settlement. Allen had seen to that.
Then Ambush the cat appeared in midleap, lightly dropped on the bed at his side, sniffed the wet diaper, and moved a distance. Then she curled up at his hip and purred like a big, warm fur cricket.
Hey, kitty. At least we’re still pals.
Ambush stretched against him and nuzzled the hand that covered the remote. Then she concentrated on the first two fingers, licking them methodically with her tongue.
Needles.
Jesus. I felt that. More than before. An excruciating but wonderful thawing sensation in his index finger brought on by the pink sandpaper of Ambush’s tongue.
C’mon.
Hank sent all his thoughts back into the dead spaces of his right arm and commanded them to fight their way down through the wrist and the palm to link up with the painful tingle in the finger.
Right now it all seemed to depend on a cat’s tongue. Keep it up, Ambush. Good kitty. And then he was gone-deep inside again, with random movies flickering in his head.
After the hill.
Her name was Mai, a slender former medical student at the University of Hue, who spoke French and English and left it all behind to get rich running the laundry concession at Camp Eagle. Mai, who sometimes threw a fuck his way. She didn’t really need the carton of cigarettes he brought for her.
But it wasn’t going to happen, maybe never again. The hill had definitely busted his dick string, so she lounged back and smoked a Salem while he tried to explain that Americans were going to the moon.
“Bullshit, Hank.”
“No, I swear, in July they’re going to the moon.”
“How can you go to the moon? You can’t even go to the Ashau Valley? You can’t even get a hard-on.”
And then in July he came out alive and was back in Michigan, in a darkened motel room, not sure who the naked woman asleep next to him was, not remembering her long white body or her long brown hair. The TV was on just like it was the day he left to go to the war thirteen months before. Back during that time he’d come to and squinted through the dirty windows of another hangover, and they kept showing the pictures over and over and the volume was off and it took him forever to get up and focus, and then he realized he was looking at the churning footage of Bobby Kennedy lying in a pool of blood in the kitchen of a Los Angeles hotel and that was the going-away party.
And this was his coming home. A discarded champagne bottle on the floor blew its cork and he came up all jangled and alert just in time to hear Neil Armstrong say that’s one step for mankind.