A red mouth stretched and parted slowly on Dr. Blake’s bald scalp—his head had taken a bash at the end of his helter-skelter, ass-over-tea-kettle tumble down the ravine, and now dark red blood was pooling around the widening split in the skin, forming a lake of crimson that soon spilled over the sides of his head and went cascading down his forehead, darkening his badly damaged spectacles. His ever-present midnight blue slacks had been torn to shit, his right knee skinned raw and flecked liberally with bits of gravel and dirt, while his right elbow throbbed at the most minute of movements—up to and including the nearly imperceptible shifts it made when, cradled gingerly in his left palm like the fontanelle of a newborn, Blake inhaled or exhaled. He was fucked up.
And yet, for all the agony that wracked his meager, run-down frame from all his manifold injuries, contusions, and ailments, only one thought crossed and, indeed, obsessed Blake’s mind: I need to write!
“For I must share my revelation with the world!” he rasped through a mouthful of hot blood and broken teeth.
Former big-league backstop Servais (nine taters in the strike-shortened 1994 season)and hard-nosed investigative journalist Rance Hartley stood hunched over the bar in the dimly-lighted confines of the Tapioca Room. Servais drank double shots of rye while Hartley tried to pace himself on his J&B with milk but when their contact failed to show up at the appointed time, he switched to typical J&B rocks and, with his nerves well into work on an overtime shift, began crunching ice cubes with his teeth.
Servais glowered at his companion. Hartley chewed more ice before noting Servais’ opprobrium. “What?” he asked, a few chips of ice lying on his tongue and tucked in his cheek, crushed to varying degrees.
“It’s bad enough you dragged me out to this fucking shithole, now I have to listen to you chomping your goddamn ice cubes?” He fired up a Lucky Strike. After a quick pull, he added: “You gonna smack the bottom of the glass when you’re done? Make sure you didn’t miss the last couple of cubes? Tired of this fuckin’ shit.”
Hartley swallowed the ice in his mouth and then riposted, “Oh, fuck off. The guy whose goddamn farts I’ve been hearing—and smelling—the last hour is gonna get precious about eating ice?”
Servais bristled, taking an aggressive drag off his cigarette before saying, “No. No, not fuckin’ precious—annoyed,” through the plumes of blue smoke that billowed from his nostrils. He added: “And I told you, I don’t bust my fuckin’ heart for you or anyone else, pal!”
Hartley scoffed, “What? ‘Bust your heart?’”
Servais nodded many times in short succession, bowing up a bit thereafter. “Yeah, that’s right, fuckface. I’m not gonna blow up my goddamn heart holding it in ‘cuz your delicate little nose and your fuckin’ soft-belly, smooth-hand Anytown Gazetteer sensibilities can’t handle a little gas!” he now roared, his already sun-reddened face darkening a few additional shades, veins throbbing and pounding at the sides of his neck, slamming his coarse palm on the Formica top bar.
Hartley, despite the terrifying sight of Servais worked into a full-throated angry lather, chuckled softly. “What the fuck are you talking about? Your heart’s going to burst if you don’t fart every 30 seconds?”
Amazingly, given the sheer number of chemicals coursing through Servais’ bloodstream as well as his natural volatility—whom amongst us will ever forget the time he tried to strangle pre-steroids Jeff Bagwell on the steps of dugout during a rain-delayed ‘Stros-Braves game at the old Fulton County Stadium in ‘93?—cooler heads prevailed, and the fractious pair went back to drinking in tense silence, their bad blood simmering under the pacifying strains of “Something in the Air” by late-1960s/early-70s curiosity Thunderclap Newman.
“Hey man, turn that up a second,” someone called from the other side of the bar.
The bartender, a man in his early-30s whose favorite activity was discussing his tattoos, nodded wearily and turned up the little 19” television set mounted above the liquor shelves behind him. Hartley hadn’t even registered its presence before but now, with his eyes watering from Servais’ latest “something” in the air, he found his attention drawn to it.
“Turn it up some more, dude?” the same bar patron requested.
The bartender glanced disinterestedly over his shoulder in the voice’s general direction before turning the sound all the way up, rendering the words spoken by local news anchor Trace Crabtree tinny and muffled, virtually unintelligible as language, sounding more like the post-verbal skronks and blurts of a half-sentient brass section.
Hartley’s gaze nevertheless fixed into an intense, unblinking stare, drawn to, locked on the mouth and flawless, pearlescent white teeth of Crabtree, whose droning intonations became somewhat more somber after a moment or two, in conjunction with his face disappearing and being replaced by a black-and-white photo of a smiling child, identified as “Parker Dabb” by a little graphical overlay, the boy’s picture in turn supplanted by B-roll footage of his family’s tastefully appointed Dutch Colonial in Anytown’s quiet West End, here cordoned off by yellow police crime scene tape, and a “lower third” that read: “DABB BOY, 7, REUNITED WITH FATHER, IN HEAVEN”.
It was at this moment that the thunderous din of Crabtree’s incomprehensible voice took on a rapturous quality—just in time for the on-screen imagery to switch to video of a glorious, glimmering, shiny gold car, familiar to all citizens of Anytown for decades now, speeding along the Beltway. “MAN W/GOLD CAR SENDS TOT HOME TO DAD” the text now read, as a blissed-out Trace Crabtree returned to the screen, tears of joy streaking down his cheeks, wreaking hell on his bronzer.
Hartley’s head was pounding, a throbbing, stabbing pressure building behind his right eye. Mercifully, the din of the TV was silenced, but the relief he felt at having some relative quiet in which to nurse his excruciating pain was short-lived, as it returned, stronger than before, and he began to feel as if his head might explode, as if he might die.
“What’s the worst that could happen? You could die,” he heard his father’s voice—its unmistakable Southern baritone—say rather off-handedly from somewhere very near-at-hand.
“Pop!” and then, fzzzzz… like the tab on a can of soda being opened. The first thing he was conscious of was the taste—the rancid, rotten flavor—that filled his mouth. The thick, hairy, caterpillar tongue that wriggled weakly and seemed to want to adhere to every tooth that it touched. And then it was the feeling of needles rubbed in his eyes. His eyes? He’d forgotten he had them. Upon opening them to the harsh, blinding light all around him, he wished he hadn’t. But what was that sound? Speech, and he realized it had been going on for some time.
“Are you listening, young man? You’d better be! This isn’t the kind of thing you’re gonna hear over at, at, at… at Podunk U!” the excited, somewhat nasal or adenoidal voice said with an airy chuckle. “What’ve you got there? You don’t drink that, you drink gin! No matter, I suppose. You’d drink aftershave if you thought it would get you ‘stoned’, eh? Well, that’s as may be, but you write beautifully. Beautifully!”
“What?” he croaked, feeling as if an anvil were sitting atop his chest. “I’m a hack! Even by the standards of——”
“Oh, poppycock! Spare me the false modesty, we haven’t the time.”
“Oh. No?”
Blake stood over him and, bracing himself and with great effort, leaned over until their faces were close together. The man’s face was a step up from hamburger, covered in a number of boils or pus-filled abscesses, and even from this angle he could see that Blake was gaunt and emaciated, and though the stench of garbage and standing piss was thick in the alley in which Hartley lay, the abiding odor was that of lingering death on Dr. Blake’s pathetic person.
“No indeed, young man. And you’re going to take down my vision, because I’ve forgotten how to write,” Blake said with an ironic smile as he showed Hartley his hands, which were a fiery red and had fingers gnarled and tangled as a copse of dead trees in some gothic forest.