Nothing Down Read online

  It seemed the kid that he saved had himself a rich daddy.

  A rich and grateful daddy.

  There was a big reward for saving the kid.

  So the Canary, or whatever his name was, got his picture in the newspaper.

  They even named an art gallery after this guy.

  I go see him every now and then. I stand there and grin at him and drink his liquor while he tells me the same damn old stories, every time.

  He serves good whiskey, the fancy stuff.

  The truth is, I can’t stand the guy.

  The truth is, I don’t think he can stand me.

  But I remember the way he looked in that sea of burning flame, with me handing the kid out to him before the floor gave way.

  Nearly burned me alive.

  The only thing that saved me was a sewer hole in the cellar. I crawled through and found safety amongst the rats.

  Who offered me no reward.

  I still go to see him and he always invites me in and he pulls the blinds like the sun is shining in his eyes.

  I know the truth.

  I stand just as close to him as I can.

  It makes him nervous.

  Even now I can smell it.

  The reek of burned pin feathers.

  An angel who flew too close to the candle.

  Some of us make it.

  Don’t Bet On a Wet Horse

  Forget about what the poets tell you. The ocean stinks. This one was no different. Calling it a beach would only be putting on airs and the air around here stinks. Am I repeating myself? So are the waves. The waves crawl in and the waves crawl out, pawing and rooting at the shore like they’ve been practicing this fruitless infiltration of theirs for an awfully long time.

  The place is alive and crawling. Sand fleas hop and pop from out of the dead seaweed that draggles across the bare bone rocks like the tangled-up neon-stained and bobby-pinned death-wig of a three hundred seventy-eight pound cancered-out conga dancer. A fiddler crab is conducting a one-claw rendition of a Gypsy G Major Hora blindfolded while a seagull plunks a harp solo on the bones of the last catch of an old man who had fished alone in a Gulf Stream skiff, going eighty four days without catching so much as a cold before blowing his brains out with a double-bore-metaphor-stuffed shotgun. The shrimp are calling out “Tekelili, tequila,” in an eldritch mocking key that hits all of the resonant frequencies of the all-is-definitely-not-right-with-this-world call center of my instinct.

  And here I am sitting in the cold and dark freezing my caped ass off. I should have stayed in the cab where it was warm and stank of cumin stained armpits. The cab driver who drove me here had watched me warily in his rear view mirror. Warily, because he didn’t get all that many customers wearing masks.

  I didn’t care.

  I was used to this sort of treatment.

  At least he drove a pretty good car. It looked like a sixth generation Buick LeSabre, a big comfortable blood red ride. I’m saving up for a brand spanking new Captain Nothing Mobile with four on the floor and eight out of twelve cylinders pumping in internal combustive unison but until then I’ll settle for taking cabs. So far I’ve saved up the deposit refund on three empty beer bottles, a fistful of change in the bottom of a rusted-out coffee tin, and a counterfeit IOU that I wrote to myself in a reasonable facsimile of Marilyn Monroe’s handwriting.

  Goodbye Norma Jean.

  “Are you a bandit?” the cab driver had asked me. “Why are you wearing a mask?”

  That was a pretty good question and I wasn’t sure I knew the answer. I had decided sometime ago that my calling in life was to be a super hero and so far this was as far as I could get. Driving around in the back of gypsy cabs, staring out at life through the double bore of a hand stitched Lone Ranger mask.

  “I’m in disguise,” I said.

  “My grandfather was a bandit,” my cab driver went on, not really wanting to listen to my answer. “He carried a tulwar and would ride down on travelers and take what they had. He never used the tulwar on anyone, you understand. He was a good man who supported his family. The tulwar was nothing more than advertising.”

  I thought about that. I looked at his taxi permit. It said his name was Something Unpronounceable S’dhintzski.

  I told myself that it might have been an alias.

  “False advertising,” I said. “If he wasn’t going to use the tulwar.”

  S’dhintzksi smiled at that.

  “No sir. My grandfather always told the truth. He could have killed if he had to but for most people the threat of death is enough to make them listen.”

  He had a point.

  “Threats sometimes have to have a proper snarl of teeth behind them to back them up,” I said.

  S’dhintzksi shrugged. “Sometimes the only thing that is needed to back a threat up is the belief that it is real.”

  He was still making sense, so I gave it to him.

  “So are you a spy?” S’dhintzski asked.

  “Not a spy,” I said.

  “Then what?” he asked.

  I looked around the cab for some sort of inspiration. There was a plastic hula dancer on the cab driver’s dash board. It bobbed and shimmied as the car moved down the road. I couldn’t take my eyes from off of the little Hawaiian hootchy-kootch mama. Man, she sure had rhythm.

  “I’m a hero,” I said. “A super hero. Do you believe that?”

  He laughed gently.

  I let him laugh.

  “So tell me the truth,” he said. “Who are you?”

  I shrugged.

  “I have heard of heroes,” he said. “The Lone Ranger, the Batman, the Green Hornet and Roy Rogers. Men who stood up for what they believed were right and bared their teeth in the face of bad danger.”

  He smiled at me in the rear view mirror.

  “So what is the truth? Who are you?”

  “Sea patrol,” I said. “I’m going down to see the sea to see if it’s still sitting there where I left it.”

  “I believe you,” he said. “But I also believe in this.”

  He patted the side of the cab meter.

  “And this,” S’dhintzksi said, holding up a battered Louisville Slugger – as real a credential as any naked tulwar I had ever seen.

  So it was my turn to laugh.

  We kept on driving.

  I noticed that he drove with one hand on the wheel while he fiddled nervously with a string of navy blue Muslim prayer beads with his other hand. There were worse things to fiddle with, I supposed. Normally such careless driving habits would have bothered me but given the mess I was getting myself into I figured a prayer or two, even by proxy or possible osmosis, couldn’t hurt.

  “This is a bad place,” S’dhintzksi said. “Are you sure you want to get out here onto this beach?”

  I wasn’t sure but I told him I was.

  “Maybe I should stay,” S’dhintzksi said. “Or I could circle back to see if you need any help.”

  I nodded, figuring I’d never see S’dhintzksi again.

  I didn’t really want to get out here.

  I needed to.

  Which brought me to where I was, right here sitting on a tombstone-sized slab of oil stained beach granite staring out into the world’s dirtiest body of water.

  And it was dirty. Eight years ago an oil spill had erupted from the belly of a tanker that ran aground while the ship’s skipper was studying his charts through a blurry eyed blend of root beer schnapps and Dr. Pepper. The oil had clotted across the coastline, mixing and mingling with the unholy combination of the root beer schnapps and the Dr. Pepper, killing off flocks of seagulls and a few wandering sea lions.

  Some folks will tell you that there’s been a series of underground nuclear testing down here, back in the late forties. I know for a fact there has been toxic waste dumping going on for the last decade.

  That’s what the ocean is for, isn’t it? We dump ourselves into it, one molecule at a time. Stand in a rain storm or your morning shower and you
’ll feel the bits and pieces of yourself slicking away down the drain to where all roads lead to the sea.

  In the lexicon of the realist, the word “ocean” is a synonym for need. Take a look around you the next time you find yourself next to one. The ocean is deep and restless and damn near bottomless. It is need and greed and feed all wrapped up into a single stinking sudsy wet bundle. Fish eating fish. The drowner’s forever swallow. The waves always reaching for the shoreline and never quite touching – it’s a moving performance art wet dream demonstration of raw unrequited hunger.

  My name is Nothing.

  Captain Nothing.

  The Captain part of it stood for nothing. I’ve never served in the military. I don’t think I could really take it. All of that brass polishing brown nosing knee jerk aggression, it wouldn’t suit me. I’m far too sensitive a soul for such militant crassness.

  What shit. If I had to be honest with you I just liked the way the word Captain sounded echoed against Nothing. Everybody needs some kind of rank and I’m as rank as they come.

  I was down here to investigate the disappearance of someone who had been close enough to me to pass for a friend. He’d been camping out down here in an old fish shed because he’d lacked the funds sufficient enough to qualify for the cheapest of flop houses.

  His name was Jerrod and he’d been hooked on horses and whores. First he started with the betting and then later one of the whores told him that he’d stay sharper if he laid a little smack down before he laid his money down. Too bad no one ever told him his addiction was fashionably out of style.

  He burned his life down. This spontaneous act of self inflicted soul-arson left him parked down here with no fixed address.

  “Hey!”

  Somebody was calling from behind me, trying their best to get my attention. I let them get a little closer, staring out to sea like I hadn’t heard. I may be just some guy in a sewn-on leather mask, but I sure as hell wasn’t a cab to be hailed.

  “Hey!” the voice was getting closer.

  I kept staring at the sea. There was something compelling about the way the water moved, like the shimmy of a painted plastic bob-along hula dancer’s skirt. I just couldn’t take my eyes from off of the motion.

  “Hey,” the voice barked, just behind my ear. I felt a hand clamp down onto my shoulder blade, squeezing like a starfish muckling onto a likely-looking mollusc. “Didn’t you hear me?”

  I turned to look as if I hadn’t. It was a policeman or at least he was dressed as one. He wore a name tag that said C. Garry but there wasn’t that much there to see.

  I studied his tag closely. There was no rank, just C. Garry. That seemed strange to me. Did policeman even wear name tags? I couldn’t remember. I reminded myself to take nothing at surface level.

  “Beach police,” I said, thinking warm Jedi thoughts. These are not the droids you are looking for. “I’m supposed to be down here.”

  “So why didn’t you answer me?” C. Garry asked.

  “Hay is for horses,” I said.

  C. Garry looked at me strangely as if I’d said something I shouldn’t have.

  “This is a crime scene,” he said. “You shouldn’t be out here.”

  Oh shit.

  Where was Gil Grissom when you really needed him?

  “It just looked like a beach to me,” I said. “Why make a scene out of things?”

  I wanted to flash my fake badge and identification card but if C. Garry really was a cop than his trained deductive skills might pick up on the flattened aluminum foil badge and the photocopied identification, which was all of the forgery I could afford.

  “The beach is my beat,” I said, trying to sound worldly. “There is a story for every grain of dirt washed up upon it and I’m the hourglass it sifts through.”

  Joe Friday, eat your heart out.

  “It’s a crime scene,” C. Garry doggedly repeated. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “So where’s the yellow tape?” I asked, trying to appear both reasonable and semi-professional.

  “The high tide took it,” C. Garry admitted. “Have you ever tried to cordon off a beach?”

  Something was not right here but I couldn’t figure out what.

  “Life’s a beach,” I said philosophically, giving C. Garry my best Buddha smile. “We all get to surf it up until the tide runs out.”

  “You’re damned straight,” C. Garry said.

  “You never know,” I said. “People who wear masks can be pretty kinky.”

  That was it. That’s what was bothering me about the whole situation. Here we were standing face to face, a police man and a full-time superhero and part time lunatic and he hadn’t mentioned the cape or the mask yet. I took a deep breath in, smelling seaweed and dead fish with a strange unmistakable undercurrent of manure.

  “Ah,” I said. “Smell that good sea air.”

  “Dead cunts,” C. Garry said.

  I gave him a look. As ice breakers went this one could have served in the Coast Guard.

  “You want to run that by me again?” I asked.

  “You ever smell a dead cunt?”

  I allowed that I hadn’t had much of an opportunity.

  “I like to do it when they’re slabbed out in the meat house drawer. I just stick my snoot down into that old bacon hole and sniff it up.”

  I couldn’t help but ask him why.

  “Pheromones,” he explained. “The stink gets into your nostrils and whips up a little instant hornification into the old purple headed avenger.”

  He grabbed onto his crotch to demonstrate. I considered that a pretty tacky breach in scrotocol.

  “I’ll take your word for it,” I assured him.

  Still clinging to his crotch he performed a magnificent pelvic thrust. Laka Tahini Wombat Pahu-uli-uli-quim-banger – the goddess of Hula dashboard ornaments would have been pleased and proud as a pitcher of pineapple punch.

  “It’s what’s good for you,” he said. “It can make a Moby Dick out of your Gilligan in jinky-jig time, you bet.”

  “You really need to lay off the red meat,” I said. “All of that artificial coloring is getting to your brain.”

  “Wuss,” he said.

  At least I think that’s what he said. It sounded a little like “wuss” and a little like “woof.”

  I didn’t bother contradicting him.

  “So what went on down here?” I asked.

  “You’re the Beach Police,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to know?”

  “Let’s dialogue this out,” I said, stepping in close to give him a big toothy you-got-me kind of grin, letting him know that I knew he had my number. Then I shot one hand out, aimed straight at his crotch where I caught him by his woolly Christ apples.

  “Now are you going to tell me what I want to hear,” I asked him, squeezing his testicles just a little to keep his attention firmly in hand. “Or am I going to have to reap this here pair of peaches?”

  Actually, from the heft of them they were more aptly apricots, but I got his attention all the same. It’s a funny thing about a man and his eggs. Nobody likes to see them scrambled.

  “They found some bum on this beach,” the cop said, forming his words carefully as if he were afraid that his throat might crack in the process.

  His throat or something else.

  “The bum’s name was Jerrod,” I said, squeezing just hard enough to mash his spuds and cream them.

  Jerrod wasn’t a friend of mine but he was the closest I had to it. He had disappeared and I’d come down here to make things right. Either that or it was a slow night on television.

  You pick.

  I’m going to stand on my Miranda and remain completely ambiguous.

  “That’s right. Jerrod,” the cop sputtered, correcting himself. “We found him over there,”

  He pointed down to the beach.

  “And there and there...”

  He kept pointing madly in all directions like a twelve legged shorthaired pointer, cann
onballed collarless into a universe of unlimited duck preserves.

  “I get the picture,” I said. “Is that all you found? What about clues? Shit, you’re a cop aren’t you? Didn’t you find a matchbook or a business card or a hand written confession signed by Professor Plum?”

  I squeezed a little tighter, hoping to wring out a bit of spontaneous inspiration. C. Garry mumbled something that might have been the sound of him clearing his throat or perhaps he was muttering his last dying confession in ancient bastardized Sumerian.

  “Say that again,” I urged him.

  “Hoof prints,” he coughed out. “The beach was covered with hoof prints.”

  “Holy shit,” I said, inadvertently squeezing my fist shut.

  C. Garry did just that. He shat himself in spontaneous agony, unloading a great reeking bale of fecal fall-out. I looked down. He’d hit the bull’s-eye, two boots full. Too bad they were my boots. Call them collateral damage. I was standing in a pile of something shot through with deep water kelp and lavender sea slugs. It looked a little like a pre-chewed human liver.

  Don’t ask me how I would know.

  I squeezed harder, ignoring the shitfall.

  “Now cough and say ah,” I ordered.

  He coughed like he had something caught in his throat.

  “I wasn’t being literal when I said cough,” I told him, trying hard not to laugh at his panicked stupidity. I had been worried that I was into something way over my head but this poor asshole was nothing more than a cop, scared stupid and shitting his pants.

  How wrong I could be.

  C. Garry coughed again, a wet kind of cough that sounded a little like eel-clotted waves crawling across slabs of beach granite. There was something in his mouth, hiding behind the cough. Something long and hard and tubular.

  He coughed again and his face seemed to elongate, his lips stretching out like the pale withered fish lips of a ninety eight year old hooker’s sushi taco. The tip of something long and hard and vaguely oaken spit out between the policeman’s rubbery teeth.

  Holy Christ.

  Was he regurgitating a back-swallowed dildo?

  “Stop that,” I said.