Nobody contradicted him.
The road sloped downward and narrowed yet further as though the woods were a fist closing in on them and at the bottom of the hill stood a tall bald black man in dark neatly pressed suit and tie with his hand raised and his assault rifle cradled in the crook of his arm. Billy stopped the car. The man walked over to his side, taking his time. He stooped and peered in, smiling.
“Welcome to Hole-in-the-Wall, gentlemen,” he said.
The man had no trace of an accent at all. The black man in the dark expensive suit was from Anywhere, U.S.A. Their welcoming committee. Very civilized. Uh- huh.
“Directly on top of the next hill there. Can’t miss it.
You can state your business to the gentleman at the bar. Have yourselves a pleasant evening.”
He stepped aside and watched them pass and Janet turned and looked back.
The man was following them on foot, his rifle slung over his shoulder, moving at a graceful, easy pace.
Marion thought, Humpty Dumpty.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again.
It was something about the tree, something about the huge ancient solitary oak tree in front of the house- the mansion, really, Hole-in-the-Wall was a three-story, gabled, corniced, fucking bay-windowed porched-in old mansion, some hole! some joke!-something about that tree and the tire hanging from the chain that depended from a limb, the skeleton of a big openmouthed dog or maybe a wolf, the wolf-dog grinning, arranged seated on the tire with hind legs dangling, another fine joke, the four thick nooses swaying in the wind hanging from another limb higher up, the nooses not so funny, something about the tree had put that stupid old nursery rhyme into her mind.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall…
A marching song. A drum cadence. Her dad had been VFW all the way. Dat-da-dat-da-dat-dat-dat-dat…
As Marion herself marched along behind Emil, as l hey all did, past the hogs and pickups and Land Rovers and Jeeps and Mercedes and black stretch limos and Rollses. Marched up the stairs to the porch, the suited black guard with the rifle ambling along behind, dat -da- dat, to the dimly lit porch with heavy chains hanging from the eaves like a thick metal curtain, parting them, chains ringing in her ears like strange dull wind chimes and the scent of oil and metal on her hands as she touched them, stepping onto the porch hung with mobiles-inverted bone crosses and rusted knives and studded belts and weathered leather collars-where six wooden barrels filled with what looked like old automobile and motorbike parts stood in an orderly row to her left and a smashed-in Wurlitzer jukebox lay on its side to her right beside a broken plough propped up against the siding, its handles carved into knobbed human phalluses and flanked by two painted wooden signs- TREE FROG BEER and DWARF SNUFFING STATION NUMBER 103.
Somebody around here’s got a real strange sense of humor, she thought.
She saw Emil hesitate at the door and heard the black man behind them tell them to go on in, folks in his calm soft voice and so they did.
They walked into a fucking party is what they did.
She could feel her heart thud all of a sudden fast and heavy, making her tits tremble, was aware of her eyes going wide and her lips pulling up into a smile she had nothing to do with at all.
Daddy, she thought, if you could see your little girl now. You’d be fucking floored by this.
Beyond the heavy oak door was an enormous open space and the goddamn place was swarming. Motorbike headlights slung from the rafters handled the lighting, streaming down on them like spotlights. She saw bikers, skinheads, longhairs straight out of the goddamn Sixties, men in tuxes and women in gowns all mingling and laughing. She saw a male tattooed hand go to a female pearl-draped breast. She saw steroid freaks dressed for combat and guys naked and limp-dicked and emaciated all to hell. She saw martini glasses and Budweisers and joints and in the comer to her left, the sharp glitter of needles. She saw crude prison tattoos and elegant multiple piercings. They had weapons all over the place. Handguns in shoulder holsters. Shotguns and automatic rifles propped against the wall while their owners roamed and drank and did whatever the hell they were doing.
The whole first floor had been completely gutted, the walls knocked down to expose rough support beams that reached twenty-five feet all the way to the ceiling-a ceiling draped and webbed thick with a canopy of chains. At intervals they dangled to the floor. Six feet or so up one of the support beams a naked brunette dangled too, suspended by ropes wrapped around her wrists and elbows. She looked drugged out of her fucking gourd and like she’d been up there quite a while. There were bloody welts along her tits and thighs and the blood was already drying. Everybody just ignored her.
They moved through the crowd toward the bar, Emil first with her behind him and then Ray and then Billy behind Janet bringing up the rear. Some asshole head- banger music was pouring off the speakers. The floors were long wide slabs of polished hardwood, expensive as hell she bet. By contrast the bar was crude and cut of rough naked oak with the bark still attached where it wasn’t planed down smooth and it crawled the whole length of the room all the way to the open staircase in back like a living thing. The six beefy guys who were working it were dressed in formal white starched shirts and black ties. Directly across from the bar a fire blazed in an open stone grate cut into the wall like the huge open mouth of hell. It must have been over a dozen feet across. Considering its size it didn’t seem to throw much heat, just the smell of wood smoke.
She guessed that on the air-conditioning bill alone this place could probably buy and sell her.
She saw bright primitive murals on the walls, scenes she recognized right away from Revelations. Daddy? Momma? You’d just love this shit! The Dragon. The False Prophet. The Great Whore. The Beast. The Woman in Scarlet. Religion? In this joint? Between the murals meat hooks polished to a high sheen, dozens of them, substituted for what-in someplace less bizarre than this-might have been stuffed moose or deer or bobcat. Somebody’d painted the words BILGE RAT next to one of them. Under another, MEN ARE NECESSARY FOR THE GODS. Huh? Beside a third, the numbers 666. She sure as hell knew what that meant.
Jesus, she thought, who are these people?
She glanced back at Janet. Janet was looking decidedly twitchy and tense, eyes darting around the room as though she expected somebody to come out after her with a goddamn meat cleaver. Poor baby.
Their bartender was a neatly dressed Jabba the Hut made flesh.
“Heineken,” said Emil. “Five of ’em.”
The bartender reached for the beers and popped them.
“We need a car,” said Emil. “First we need a place to stay tonight and tomorrow we need a car.”
The bartender shrugged. “You don’t get anybody too pissed off at you, you can stand right where you are till you drop dead or hell freezes over, whichever comes first. I could give a shit.”
“What about the car? We need a car.”
“You can pay? Got money?”
“We can pay.”
She wondered how much Emil did have. Billy and Ray seemed freaked about the whole money thing.
She watched the bartender walk the length of the bar and stop in front of a black man who looked like the twin of the suited guard who’d pointed them toward the house-right down to the shaved bullet-shaped head and the assault rifle slung across his shoulder. The bartender spoke to him and the man nodded and turned toward the staircase and the bartender waddled back to his post.
“You’re Rothert, right?” he said.
“How the hell do you know that?”
“You’re the news tonight. Shot a cop. That gives you three whole minutes of glory. Enjoy yourself. I could give a shit.”
She heard a sudden commotion behind them, raised voices and heavy footfalls and clanking, grating sounds and felt the crowd shift around her and turned and saw two big men in studded boots and leather pants and vests hauling a woman off the floor by a chain attached to a pulley twenty feet away. The woman wore police cuffs and nothing else and the look in her eyes was drugs and fear and then pain shooting through her wrists as the men tugged the chain through the pulley and she could see that somebody’d shaved her completely, both head and cunt too.
They hauled her five feet or so off the ground and then slipped a link of the chain through a hook set into the floor and she hung there and the men were smiling and saying something to one another and then they weren’t smiling, they were all pissed off all of a sudden. With the pounding tide of music she couldn’t hear what it was they were saying but they were pissed off all right and the crowd was moving back in her direction even though some were laughing as though the two men arguing were the center of an oncoming twister.
One guy had a short goatee kind of thing and the other didn’t but they were matched pretty well physically, she thought, big raw biceps and beer bellies so goddamn hard that when the bearded guy gut-punched the other she could hear it over the music like a basketball smashed down from a hoop. He doubled over and the man kicked him in the face and sprayed the crowd with blood and spit. The man went over backward and scrambled across the floor and came up with a length of chain, stood and started flailing, catching the bearded guy across the back and then the shoulders and then the head as he fell, going for the head over and over again-and the crowd was wild by then and so was she. She could barely fucking breathe. The bearded guy’s head was a mess but he must have had something amazing left inside him because his hand swung up from the floor and he took the other guy’s balls in his great big hand and squeezed. Then they were both rolling groaning along the floor.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, she thought and she couldn’t help it, she giggled like a goddamn little kid and as the pair of guards in combat gear parted the crowd and dragged the two men away across the bloody floor a skinhead with tattoos of a swastika and a bolt of lightning on his arm prodded the shaved naked woman hard in the ribs with his rifle as though it were her fault all this had happened so that she jerked away in pain, more pain, and Marion finished her beer and set it on the bar and turned toward where she hung and started forward.
Janet watched her move through the crowd. The others didn’t seem to notice she was gone.
“You want this?” Emil said.
He pointed to her beer on the bar. She shook her head. The last thing she wanted was a beer. He upended it and she watched his throat move. The man is nervous, she thought. Fine.
“Just four this time,” he said to the bartender. The bartender set them on the bar. He passed one to Ray and one to Billy and only then did he realize they were missing somebody.
“Where’s Whatsername?”
He sounded more annoyed than she’d have expected and there was something else there too. Fear? From Emil? If so, fine again. The only question was as to why.