The Preserve Page 7

  And now I know, now I am absolutely certain, call me Kreskin because I am fucking positive this is going to end badly.

  Everything happens with the rapidity of fireworks going off. Dade reaches inside his jacket for the .38 we all know is there. Deacon claws at his waistband to free a Webley but it’s jammed, the cylinder won’t clear, and now Dade’s got the drop.

  These are the decisions you’ve got to make as a leader. Who stays and who goes. I don’t relish them. I wish it didn’t have to be like this. But it is, and all I can do is make the decision, who lives and who dies, and live with it.

  These are the choices that made me old when I was young.

  I pull my .45 Chief’s Special from a Bianchi shoulder holster and extend to Dade the same mercy I’d offer a rabid dog.

  BOOM.

  The middle of Dade’s face explodes inward, the bullet blowing Dade’s teeth out the back of his skull, molars and canines pinging off sheet metal and there’s just this hole, this stark emptiness where Dade’s face used to be and the blowback throws his body against the rear doors which buckle outwards like a bomb-bay and then Dade’s body is tumbling across the highway, a dead dusky tumbleweed.

  “Jesus!” Malik screams, cupping a hand over his ear. “Oddy, what the hell—?”

  “Just drive, son,” I say. “Get us to that parking lot.”

  Nobody says much as we pull into a Pay-n-Park lot and transfer the cash to a VW Minibus we’ve stashed there for days. Deacon sets an incendiary charge that’ll gut the Chevy van, torching any evidence. We drive in silence to a motel on DC’s outskirts.

  The total haul, tills and vault, is $310,580. Nearly eighty grand a head, split four ways. Tiny’s got a wife and kid in Sioux Falls; Malik promises to get Tiny’s cut to his widow.

  “This wasn’t the way it was supposed to end,” Malik says as I hand him his split.

  “No, it wasn’t. But we don’t have script approval, son. Sometimes things just end the way they end.”

  Malik opens the door. We shake hands, clap one another on the back, and fall into a half-embrace that is the closest thing to tenderness men like us can achieve. He stares towards the shrouded DC skyline, then at the unbroken stretch of blacktop leading in the opposite direction. He knows, as I know, there is nothing for us in either direction.

  “I’d go over the top with you anytime, Oddy,” he says. “My life in your hands.”

  He leaves. Deacon is sitting on the bed.

  “I shouldn’t have said those things to Dade,” he says. “Called him Section-8. Shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Not really your fault,” I say. “A man turns that way, well, there’s not much any of us can do to save him.”

  “What happened?” Deacon asked. “How did he end up like that?”

  I shrug. “As to Dade’s particular story, I really don’t know. All I know is that in Vietnam, soldiers were told to take all their pity, their mercy, their compassion and lock it away until it was no longer part of them. They were taught to fill that void with the emotions they needed to make it out alive: cruelty and hatred and rage. A soldier who did enough Tours became emotionless, you know? Became a creature of drives: eat, sleep, kill. Just a cog in The Big Green Machine. I’ve seen men like that, Deacon. They existed, and they weren’t exactly human.”

  An early twilight hung suspended over the undeveloped land across the road, patches of dull orange burning between the trees. “I once read about something called an Act of Erasure. It’s common in soldiers; they lose touch with reality, stop caring about living or dying. So a guy starts acting crazy, taking stupid risks, putting himself in harm’s way when there’s no need, even hurting the people he cares for. Trying to kill himself, in a roundabout way. That’s what happened to Dade, I think. Same thing happened to my father in Big Two. They were good men. Weak maybe, but good men. It happens.”

  Deacon nods. “It’s just, when he shot those cops…they were harmless and he had to go fucking murder them? I mean, there’s no…” he shakes his head violently. “Where’s the fucking sense in that?”

  I wrap a rubber band around a thick stack of bills and drop it on the bed.

  “We’re only human, Deke. We all got our breaking point. Why did Dade become like that? I honestly don’t know. But humans are half-devil. Three-quarters, even.”

  We sit in silence for awhile. Then Deacon says, “You saved my life.” He states it as a simple fact. “Saved my life and there’s no way I can pay you back.”

  “Saved your life, took Dade’s: all one and the same, son.” I stare out the window, where a fine layer of snow blankets the landscape. “It’s a hell of a thing.”

  “He had it coming.”

  “We all have it coming.”

  I shake Deacon’s hand. “You’re a good kid. That thing with Dade, don’t let it eat at you. Nothing you or I or anyone could’ve done. Get out of here, now.”

  Back in A-303 Blackjack, my man Tripwire hung the nickname “Oddy” on me, short for Odysseus. And it’s stupid, but over the years I began to see myself as the ancient Greek hero: put your faith in me and I will lead you through the clashing rocks, deflect the Siren’s song, lead you to a safe harbor. Give me your hand, trust in me, and I will take you home. And up until today, I had.

  Except that one time. That one time deep in the jungle, in the tiny village where skinned bodies hung and we fought a monster who killed two of my men and might have killed us all…

  Stop. Best not to think of those times.

  I take a cab to the Dale City bus terminal and catch a Greyhound to Pittsburgh. The miles peel away and I try to sleep but every time I close my eyes I see Dade as he looked after I shot him, Dade with a gaping pit where his face should’ve been. At a P.O. box in Pittsburgh, the closest thing to an address I lay claim to, I find an envelope containing a plane ticket, an unsigned check for fifty grand, and a letter:

  Mr. Grant,

  I have a business proposition for you. If you are interested, meet me at the bar of the Sheraton Hotel, downtown Toronto, on December 8th, at 5 o’clock. If and when you arrive, I will sign the check. Fifty-thousand dollars for a no-strings-attached meeting—interested?

  Sincerely,

  Anton Grosevoir

  — | — | —

  Tony “Tripwire” Walker—Auteur

  Los Angeles, California.

  November 30, 1987. 12:05 p.m.

  We’re filming in a beachfront bungalow in Malibu owned by a B-movie producer who’s a fan of my stuff. This producer—a rickety old potbellied perv wearing a silk robe and yellow-lensed sunglasses—has spent the morning in a wicker chair overlooking the set, sipping Glenlivet and kneading his crotch like an infant who’s recently discovered the pleasure principle.

  The dick I hired for this flick—working title: Butt-Blasted Nymphos—is a midwestern bohunk named Chad or Thad or Brad. His screen credit will read “Rock Hardson” so his name’s a moot point. He’s twenty-two years old, six-foot-one, two-hundred pounds of grain-fed Nebraska farm muscle with defined delts, ripped pecs, absolutely shredded abs and, most importantly, a cock of equine proportion that seems to embarrass him.

  The chick’s name is Charity Chest but she sure isn’t giving herself away: it took three grand to secure her platinum ringlets, collagen-pumped lips, and Hindenburg tits. She could be anywhere between thirty-five and fifty, nipped and tucked and smoothed out of all proportion by Hollywood’s most persistent carrion crow, the plastic surgeon. Her “handler,” a fey Latino whose only job appears to be keeping her stoned, is doing his duty: Charity’s nostrils are frosted whiter than the rims of margarita glasses.

  “We cued, Freddy?”

  Frederico Achebe, my steadycam man, nods. Freddy’s been with me since my first feature, The Butt-Ripping Cocksman. He stayed on through my sophomore efforts (Snatches in Batches, Buttplug Blastoff, The Grapple Humping Gangbang), my European (Hirsute Hoes), artsy (Pygmalion Pussy) and experimental (Barnyard Follies) periods. Frederico’s gay as
a French horn and I think the sexual detachment allows him to maintain a calm hand.

  “Ready, Thad?”

  “It’s Chad, sir.”

  “Right. Ready?”

  Chad’s wearing a T-shirt that hugs every ridge of his torso, Levis so tight they make poetry of his ass and leave no doubt as to his religious convictions.

  “Action.”

  He mounts the front steps and knocks on the heavy oak door. Charity answers wearing red silk panties and a push-up bra on the verge of collapsing under its unfair burden.

  “Are you the handyman?”

  “I am,” Chad says, “and I hear you have a crack that needs to be…um, filled.”

  “Why yes, I do. Come in.”

  Charity leads Chad into the living room. It’s an ivory oasis: white shag carpet, bleached calfskin sofa and loveseat, walls painted eggshell white and hung with paintings of snow-covered vistas. I’m concerned that Charity—whose skin tone roughly approximates meringue—will be invisible.

  “So where’s this crack?”

  Charity doffs her panties with the practiced air of a magician performing an oft-repeated trick. Her pussy is outfitted with a racing stripe of downy blonde fuzz, the pornstar hairdo du jour.

  “Can you plug it?”

  “Lady, I’ve got just the right tool.”

  Cue bass guitar riff: oom-chaka, oom-chaka, oom-chaka-lacka…

  What’s that old wheeze about sons either becoming their fathers or the exact opposite of their fathers? Well, it holds true for me. My father was a Baptist minister who plied his faith in the remote reaches of Devil’s Lake, North Dakota. By the time I’m finished, they will change the name to Savior’s Lake, he’d say without a trace of irony. My father possessed a body naturally predisposed to fire and brimstone: tall and lean and angular, thin nose hooked like a raven’s beak, blue eyes like crosshairs and a disturbing solidity, a sense he could weather any storm, continue on while others fell and died.

  Thank God perserverance is about the only trait to clear the generation gap.

  The human body disgusted my father. The muscle and sinew and tissue so prone to desiccation, the blood and bile and semen and other dreadful liquids that eventually soured or coagulated, bones that warped, skin that yellowed and wrinkled and lost elasticity…these natural changes revolted him. I’d catch him looking into the bathroom mirror, stretching the skin of his jowls taut and grimacing at the way it slackened around his long, bird-like neck. Sometimes he’d just sat and stared silently at his hands, the fingers twitching slightly, the hairs on the back of his wrist grey and hoary. My mother and I knew to avoid him at those times. This delirium carried over into the bedroom. In many ways it’s a miracle I’m alive, since my father’s distaste for sex was all-encompassing. I imagine he viewed my mother’s privates with the same foreboding he’d accord a pagan ritual site: one wrong move and vengeful demons would swoop from the folds of her labia, roasting his eyes in their sockets.

  One afternoon he’d returned early from a spiritual retreat to find my mother masturbating in her bedroom. He proceeded to lash her with an extension cord until her flesh was a roadmap of ugly purple and black welts that split open and bled onto the floorboards. When I came home after school she was huddled on the porch swing in a white sheet. The sheet was crisscrossed with bloodstains. I remember a gash running from her neck down beneath the sheet, the skin split open, puffed red at the edges. She stared at me—stared through me, it seemed—at the hilltop marking the perimeter of our property, as if she expected someone to come walking over the rise. When she spoke her voice was distant and toneless, like the automated telephone voice telling you you’ve dialed an out-of-service number.

  “Go,” she said. “As soon as you can. As soon as you’re able. Just…go.”

  I wanted to rescue her. But all I could hope was to save myself.

  I enlisted on October 7th, 1966. I was seventeen.

  At a training compound near Corpus Christi, I discovered an ability that had long lain dormant: I was good at blowing shit up. Dynamite, C-4, cordite, gunpowder: these substances fascinated me. Feeling it in my hands, the destructive power contained within a few slender red sticks or a fist-sized lump of gray, oily plastique…mesmerizing. I even loved the names: Toe-Poppers, Bouncing Betties, M-40s, Willie Peters, Claymores. I was the fuckin’ Albert Einstein of demolitions; an idiot savant. Top Brass transferred me to Camp Pendleton, where I underwent an intensive medic aide’s course, and then to Duc Phong, a training compound fifty miles north of Saigon. There I became a member of A-303 Blackjack, a seven-man Black Ops unit.

  After the madness of the Green Hell, I had no desire to return to Cold Lake. I wasn’t sure I wanted to return stateside at all: there were rumors of vets being spat on by scraggly-haired, pot-smoking, guitar-strumming, flower-picking hippies—I was afraid I’d lose my cool, firebomb a Wavy Gravy concert. Instead I boozed myself from one Far-Eastern country to the next, crossing borders in a fogged-out haze, until I washed up, down and out, in a flophouse on Kho Phet road, Bangkok. One night, staggering back to my room drunk on Mekong, I found a pamphlet jammed under my door. BIZZARRE SEX ACTS, it promised. Intrigued, I went the very next night.

  The venue’s entrance was a scarred black door at the end of an alley smelling of piss and rotting vegetables. Behind the door was a low-ceilinged room with a stage in its center. Chairs lined the walls on all sides. Seated on those chairs were a parade of button-down executive types, all male, who wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this back home. But this was Thailand, a carnal candyland where any pleasure or depravity could be bought with cold, hard green. Thai women in sequined underwear circulated with trays of ice-cold Singha beer, lithe bodies weaving through a throng of desperate male flesh, contours molded lovingly in blacklight.

  A young woman took the stage. Tall and slender and shockingly pale with crooked white teeth. A bullseye was painted on her pussy and thighs and lower abs and I was momentarily rocked by the memory of…

  …Neil “Crosshairs” Paris, Blackjack’s sniper, drawing a bead on the thing we’d found snarling and gibbering amidst a hanging garden of skinless Vietnamese bodies. Silhouetted by the glare of burning huts, the bullet-riddled corpses—glistening red, tendons and ligaments running in long twisting ribbons, large bluish veins threaded like nightcrawlers through a bed of soft tissue—spun lazily on copper-wire garrotes. Their shed skins pooled in dusky yellow puddles beneath blood-glazed feet. Then the thing turned to face us and its eyes, oh Christ those eyes, and its head bluntly misshapen, snouted, with the features of a boar or a horse or…

  …a donkey was led onstage by a dwarf wearing a white satin codpiece. The donkey’s head swayed side to side and its hooves clip-clopped the floor. The woman cooed as her bestial suitor approached, fingering her bullseyed cunt which was, somewhat surprisingly, very wet.

  The dwarf yoked the animal to a ring bolted onstage. It brayed sonorously, nostrils flared, eyes focused on the woman caressing its flanks.

  I scanned the crowd. A man in a thousand-dollar Armani suit stroked his cock, a stain already darkening his slacks. Another guy straddled his chair, thrusting his crotch against the molded plastic seatback. They had the powerbroker look of men who wheeled and dealed with sums of money vaster than most would ever earn in a lifetime. Yet here they were, united in their desire to see a beautiful woman shagged by a donkey.

  The gears started to mesh.

  Two days after the show, I bartered my Silver Star for an Edelweiss 8mm film camera. I returned to the club and asked the owner if I could film the night’s performance. He told me to fuck off. I offered him my Combat Infantry Badge. We had a deal.

  The performance was a good one—the donkey blew a load that nearly tore the chick’s head off. I placed ads in Screw, Hustler, a couple European sex rags, advertising:

  BESTIAL SEX FILM

  FROM THE FORBIDDEN EAST!

  The response was overwhelming. Money orders flooded my P.O. box. I shipped the f
ilm—titled, appropriately but apathetically, Woman Fucked by Donkey—in plain paper packaging—which, as far as I’m concerned, is every bit as conspicuous as a package stamped “Deviant Pornography.”

  Soon afterward, I received my first request. It was written in a jittery hand on business letterhead with the company name scratched out:

  Dear Sir,

  I am very much impressed with your film, “Woman Fucked by Donkey.” It has provided me many moments of pleasure. I understand Thailand has many transsexuals—I believe you call them ladyboys? Could you film a beautiful ladyboy—blonde, elegant, big-breasted—being sodomized by a dog? A collie, preferably?

  A price was quoted. Either the nutjob was filthy rich or held his fetish dear enough to drop his life savings on the thrill! I found a broken-down ladyboy named Keith who agreed to be buggered by a stray pooch for five-hundred baht and a bowl of sharkfin soup. I cleared a cool five grand on the deal.

  Business boomed. I changed my ad to read:

  FREELANCE ADULT FILMMAKER

  WORKING OUT OF THAILAND.

  NO PERVERSION TOO PERVERSE!

  ALL FETISHES EXPLORED!

  The proposals poured in:

  Dear Sir,

  …could you film two pregnant woman rubbing themselves with spawning carp?…

  …men dressed as SS stormtroopers shitting into diapers?…

  …a women dressed as Shirley Temple getting reamed with a broomstick?…

  …a chorusline of men in shower shoes and bathing caps buggering each other?…

  My answer was invariably the same:

  Yessir, I can do that.

  No problem, bucko.

  You got it, Pontiac.

  The money was great and the work steady, but I was beginning to suffer the Far East jitters: an overload of yellow skin, jabberwocky dialect, flayed cocker spaniels hanging in restaurant windows, the irrational fear that the next pussy I saw would run horizontally instead of vertically. I had to get back to the States. But I needed to go someplace where a man in my line of work could operate free of restrictions, somewhere I could blend among a colorful parade of freaks and weirdos and sycophants, a place so self-absorbed that my own down-and-dirty ventures wouldn’t merit a second glance.