Installment Number 3. 

By T W Ladd 11/15/2020

I had been forced to choose before. One Christmas time, while riding in the car with my mom and brother, my mom said, apropos of what I have no idea, “It’s either Jesus or Santa. It can’t be both. But if you want to go to heaven, it’s gotta be Jesus.”

I remember being viscerally startled at that. As far as memories that stand out, memories of ideas that I found utterly offensive, of ideas that seemed shockingly wrong, ideas that were not just inconvenient but part of an existential threat, having to choose between Santa or Jesus was one of the most salient of my pretty comfortably dull life.

When did this happen? How old was I? I can’t be sure. It had to be after the year when we stood in line at the Santa Train to meet the big guy himself. Now that is a really early memory and very very sketchy memory.

My dad worked for Grand Trunk Railroad. I think that Santa was only there for friends and family of employees. I think you needed a ticket. I’m assuming here based on memories. It seems like when we finally did get up to the fat man in red that I was terrified of him and wanted no part of sitting on his lap.

I wonder if that was before or after my brother told me point blank, “Santa’s dead.” I went into a fit of hysterics. We were in our bunk beds. Mine was on top. I have no idea why I had to sleep on the top bunk. Wasn’t I afraid of falling down the ladder? I don’t remember being afraid of that. I remember loving the climb. I’m surprised I didn’t fall when I had to climb down in the early hours to pee. That never happened.

But I distinctly remember Chuck laughingly tell me Santa was dead. He died a long time ago, you baby! That kind of thing. No, no! That’s not true. Oh, yes it is true and so forth. Through lots of snot I bawled that “He’ll come back to life for me!”

I had powers over death, I guess. What was this? 1974, maybe? I can’t be sure of the sequence of events with these dim, early recollections. I do know we were in the first house I lived in, beside the freeway on the end of a dead end street. I-94 was about a hundred yards away. Trucks roared by at all hours. Sometimes an 18-wheeler would have a blow out that sounded like a canon going off. That would wake everyone in the house. If I woke up I’d watch the headlights go around the edge of the ceiling. First one way and then dart back in the opposite direction. And then a vehicle would come from the other direction and light would ride around the reverse of the first. If light could go backward, maybe time could too. Maybe the dead could rise again. Maybe we just had to want it bad enough.

Installment Number 2.

By T W Ladd 11/14/2020 

Robert Lee Shotts was 54 years old in 1980. A tall man, six-two in his leather Oxford wingtips — the only kind of shoes I ever saw him in. He also always had on either dress slacks or sometimes dark olive chinos, which also had a crease over the knee. Six days a week at least he wore a tie — it was always a full Windsor knot. (His son Jimmy once told me the half Windsor was for liberals.) When the whole church went camping he would sit around the campfire with either the sleeves of his Oxford shirt rolled up, or maybe he’d take the shirt off and sit around in an undershirt covering his generous paunch. No dungarees, as he called jeans, for him. James Dean, after all, was no Christian gentleman. 

Pastor Shotts was an odd looking bird. His nose was very long and a little pointed on a very long face. His was a massive head. He kept his hair as short as Navy regulations required at all times. He had a nice round bald spot in the back like a medieval friar. His ears were also enormous and the tips ever so slightly pointed and tipped outward. Since I was a big fan of the Salem’s Lot miniseries with David Soul, I saw a resemblance to the show’s hairless vampire monster. It was very Nosferatu. It didn’t help his appearance any that he had dark wiry hairs growing out of his ears — a sight I don’t recall often seeing since, especially not in persons under that age of a hundred. 

But Pastor Shotts, though large, socially awkward and physically unappealing was a very gentle man. He was warm and kind. I liked him. He wasn’t macho, talking about sports or hunting or monster trucks. He was quick to smile or laugh — he had a comically loud laugh. In fact, his whole brood had the same odd, boisterous laugh, mouth wide open, head tipped back. Where others might simply exhale a little sharply to express amusement, the Shotts clan would give a blast on their hilarity horn. As a kid, I found it equal parts annoying and amusing. 

In one of his sermons you were likely to hear an anecdote about Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. (He had accepted the common misconception that Michelangelo painted the ceiling while lying on his back.) Or he would site statistics on how many times the average heart would beat over a lifetime. He loved odd facts. And he loved tales of survival in harsh conditions. I recall several stories about Shackleton’s exploration of Antarctica. Shotts was a sucker for any of that overcoming adversity crap. Anything that was like the Donner Party with a happy ending. He loved Corrie ten Boom’s book The Hiding Place.  There was definitely something sentimental about his mind. On the one hand he was like a Hallmark Holiday Special. On the other he was quoting “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” He frequently told the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man from the Gospel of Luke:

The rich man died and awoke in hell. “And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.” 

Pastor Shotts reading those words in his resonant bass voice, so full of conviction, made me see the flames and picture the pain and suffering of the damned. The rich man only wanted one drop of water to ease his suffering. But even that was impossible. 

This didn’t strike me as an unfair punishment. Hell had it’s own rules, I suppose I thought. I don’t know. All of the adults in the room accepted these things. This wasn’t my first time hearing about hell. It had to be real, right? Black holes were real, and they didn’t make any sense. Hell was just like that. It didn’t make a lot of sense but the main thing was just that you didn’t want to go there. 

I don’t remember what sermon Pastor Shotts preached the first time I heard him. Maybe it was the Lazarus sermon. Maybe that was when my brother and I went forward after the sermon during the altar call. If you haven’t experienced an altar call, you really should. You’re missing out. The piano and the organ play, the people sing something like “Just as I am without One Plea,” a hymn from the 1860s. The plunking piano and the humming Hammond organ, the anemic effort of the singing are all part of the tragicomedy. And in between the melody phrases is the most important part: the pastor intones an almost broken invitation to come forward and give your heart and your life to Jesus. “If you were to die tonight, do you know where you’d spend eternity? Will it be in paradise with the poor man Lazarus, or will it be in the fiery torment of hell with the rich man? This will be most important decision of your life — of your entire existence!” 

I was not made of such stern stuff at ten that I was able to resist that kind of emotional manipulation. What fool wants to spend eternity burning in hell? That’s a no-brainer. 

So we went forward, Chuck and I. I believe he went first. It may have been one of the few times when needed a cue from my brother, who was three years older. We knelt on the green carpeted steps of the podium in that windowless church — a pole barn with paneled walls — and deacons read to us the “Romans Road.” I still remember Deacon Burkhardt kneeling beside me, his farmer’s hand gently on my back, mumbling in my ear. He went through the series of six short verses in Paul’s Epistle to the Church at Rome: We’re all sinners. The wages of sins is death. Jesus died for our sins. Confess that you’re a sinner and declare that Jesus is Lord.

Boom, you’re a Christian! 

I’ve known a lot of people who have gone forward at an altar call and said all the words only to go about their lives with no lasting effect. That was not the case with my brother and I. We were definitely changed. That decision changed us. It changed me. Not in the way that my mom and dad had hoped — especially my mom. But it opened up new possibilities for me. I wouldn’t be who I am today, even if I no longer think of myself as a Christian. How I see the world would be so very different. I never would have gone through so many labyrinths of elaborate horrors — imaginary landscapes, visions of Armageddon, fears and reassurances of the Rapture, a sense of calling and mission (to what I wasn’t ever sure, but I knew that God had something planned for my life). Where would I be without my fascination with the USSR? I suppose some of it would still be there, but it wouldn’t have felt so personal. I used to have a National Geographic map of the Soviet Union on my wall. My dad asked me why I would have a map of that Godless country up. My mom was also popping her head into my room at that moment and without missing a beat said, “Well, he’s praying for them.” 

Did I pray for the Russians? I don’t remember doing that. I remember imaging myself stuck in frozen Russia. I pictured being a prisoner in one of the Gulag cells, starved and beaten like Haralan Popov or Richard Wurmbrand, both of whom were obsessively discussed in the fundamentalist Baptist circles I moved in. 

And this was no accident. After the service where my brother and I went forward, Pastor Shotts approached us and grilled us if we had really asked Jesus into our hearts, or were we just going through the motions to please the adults. I’d never encountered a question like that. I recall mumbling something about really believing — visions of damnation still filling my head. The Pastor Shotts said one of the strangest things I’ve ever heard anyone say to me. “Would you be willing to die for your belief in Jesus? Because some day you may be forced to choose. Would you deny Christ?” 

Your savior or your life? The gun is held to your head. What would you do? 

I assured him that I would not deny Christ. I, ten-year-old asthmatic weighing all of fifty-something pounds, was willing to forfeit my life for my belief. Or words to that effect. Pastor Shotts smiled and laughed and said he believed I would. Then he put one of his giant paws on my boney little shoulder and asked if he could say a prayer, into which he immediately launched. 

I was left wondering who would ask me to give up Jesus or die.  

by T W Ladd 11/13/2020

In 1980 I had no idea just how far down the fundamentalist rabbit-hole I was heading. How could I? I was ten-year-old living in rural Michigan. I went to public school. We went to church probably three weeks out of the month. My favorite things were riding my pony or my bike. Star Wars and Thundarr the Barbarian were good, but my brother and I were really into Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park. I had seen every episode of Gilligan’s Island so many times I lost count. I’d never read more than a verse at a time of the Bible. I do remember being very impressed with Franco Zeffirelli’s blue-eyed Jesus, but, hey, I was even more impressed with the Six Million Dollar Man.

This was all very typical for a white male in Anywhere, USA. It was about to become very atypical. See, we had been only sporadically attending our local Bible church when a new pastor came along. This was one Robert Lee Shotts, born in Vina, Alabama, 1926. (No, his middle name was not an accident. The South shall rise again.) During the Great Depression, his parents moved to Detroit with the hope of finding work.

Bob Shotts was a bookish child and did well enough in middle school to qualify to enter Detroit Cass Tech, a public school of distinction, located near Downtown Detroit. I don’t know what the demographics of his classes were, but in 1930 Detroit was about 92% white. And that percentage barely went down by 1940. In World War Two he joined the Navy, having been in the ROTC program in high school. I don’t know if he saw any combat then, but he would be called up again during the Korean War.

His time in the Navy gave him a Bachelor’s degree. And at some point he got a master’s in education from the very fine University of Indiana at Bloomington. My guess is that he got the master’s after attending Bob Jones, Sr’s college, which moved to its Greenville, South Carolina home in 1947 because of growing enrollment, thanks to the GI Bill. Yes, folks, socialism helped fund this stuff. When he was in his forties, a surgeon at the Veteran’s hospital implanted a pig valve in his heart. The final years of his life were spent in a Veteran’s hospital. Does that mean at any time he regretted being a member of The John Birch Society? I doubt it. Just as he didn’t have any qualms about accepting Government Cheese or any other benefits, state or federal, he might qualify for with his family of eight children and stay-at-home wife.

In 1950, Bob Shotts was ordained at Temple Baptist Church in Detroit. I believe he was ordained by one J. Frank Norris. This was the same man who had been called The Texas Tornado. According to David Stokes, Norris was indicted four times by a county grand jury: once for perjury, twice for arson, and once for murder.

In 1926 Norris shot and killed an unarmed man who had come to his church office. The coincidence of this being the same year that Bob Shotts was born attracts my brain. I can imagine a very melodramatic made-for-TV movie in which Norris murders a man on the very night Bob Shotts is born. Lots of lightning and thunder. Rain coming down in sheets. But in mundane reality, baby Bob was born in April. And Norris fired three shots into D. Elliott Chipps one hot July afternoon. Time Magazine did a story on the crime. The trial that has been called one of the most famous of that decade in Texas. The New York Times covered the trial as well.

There was more than a little of Elmer Gantry (1927) in Norris, the barnstorming radio preacher and pastor of multiple churches. He lived in Texas the whole time he was working as a preacher in Detroit’s Temple Baptist Church. He would fly up for the weekend in his own small plane. He did this from 1935 to 1950. This was a man who got a bachelor’s from Baylor and then a master’s in theology from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary — but then he went on to get into feuds with both institutions. Norris seems like the kind of person who invited irreconcilable differences. Any bridge he could burn down in a big way was a cause for celebration. “Come Out From Among Them!” could have been his war cry. And he would have been the sort to have a war cry, despite the man never even serving in the military. But he was God’s soldier, the war he fought was against the forces of Satan. He claimed that Baylor was teaching Darwinian evolution. His beef with the Southern Baptist Seminary was with their “modernist” tendencies — which likely meant they were marginally influenced by contemporary trends in biblical scholarship.

On his radio show in the 1920s, Norris openly backed the Klan. He was vociferously anti-Catholic. The wonder isn’t that Norris shot a man to death. It’s that he didn’t shoot more. Or wasn’t himself shot. I don’t know anything about his court case, but it strikes me as a screaming injustice that he got off on a claim of self-defense. There was after all no weapon found on or near the body of Mr. Chipps.

Such was the man who presided over my pastor’s ordination. Norris, who had also been born in Alabama, must have been something of a hero to young Robert Lee Shotts.

Getting Lucky, Part Three

by

T.William Smith

After I told Jorge to have Spooty give up and return to base where we could meet him, I drove east toward Silver Lake away from the rioting. I hoped I could skirt any trouble, thinking the cops would have enough to keep them busy, they wouldn’t feel the need to stop a black Pontiack with a corpse propped up primly in the front seat. In the middle of the day. Not a cloud in the sky.

“You know, Nake, if there’s no justice, there’s no injustice. No crime, or truth, mercy. It’s all just us making up words, imposing patterns on chaos,” Parker said.

I tried to ignore him.

Pretty soon that became very easy. Stake trucks were rumbling down Hollywood Boulevard toward us. They were loaded with people.

“What the hell?” Parker asked.

“Reinforcements.”
“How’s that?”

“This was no spontaneous riot. The protest was planned.”

“I suppose Marx is one of the things they don’t have here?” Parker asked.

“No Marx. Not that they really need him. They have Edwin Chadwick and it hasn’t seemed to faze them any.”

“Who’s Edwin Chadwick?”

“The father of the London sewer. He believed poor people had a right to clean water. He changed our whole conception of the purpose of civil government. Put to bed once and for all the libertarians.”
“How’s that?”

“After Chadwick, modern infrastructure was simply too expensive and too sophisticated to justify anyone rationally being a libertarian.”

“The operative word being ‘rationally,’ ” Parker said.

“Right. And this Earth has no TR let alone an FDR. Not that it makes any sense. You know what you call a libertarian road?”

He didn’t.

“A field.”

When we got to where Hollywood turns into Sunset we saw three more trucks filled with protestors. As soon as they got past us, the last truck lagging twice as far behind the others, there was an explosion behind us. I slammed on the breaks, jumped the curb and came to a stop over the broken up sidewalk.

Parker turned all the way around in the back seat and looked out the rear window.

“Did a plane just bomb that truck?”

I looked ahead and saw a small plane pulling up. I could hear its engine now as it throttled up. I realized I had heard its approach too, but thought little of it.

Stunned, I sat gripping the steering wheel, looking out at my left-side mirror. There was a wall of smoke and fire. After I don’t know how long, survivors began to stumble out of the fire. Parker may have said something to me. I opened my door and stepped out. I wasn’t connecting thoughts too well.

This was union busting at a whole new level.

Out of the dowdy gray storefronts a few people emerged to gawk and point. No one was too eager to offer help. Some were pointing at the sky in the direction the plane had gone. It was only a one-seater, single prop. I doubted it had another bomb. Would it come back to strafe? The people from the shops were probably asking themselves the same question.

A warzone – that’s what this was now.

I heard sirens. Some were close and some more distant. A black-and-white rushed past us and skidded on the gravel road to a stop. There were two uniforms in the car. They both got out. The one had a Tommy gun. He immediately chambered a round and opened up on the survivors of the bombed stake truck. I jerked at the sound of the gunshots. Then I started running. Parker jumped out and yelled something at me. I told him to stay put and lock the doors.

The people from the truck were unarmed. I saw the bullets rip into them. Most of them appeared to be women. They were dressed in worn out clothes. One with no shoes on twisted around as she was hit, the big caliber bullets splashing out blood from the exit wounds.

I had this feeling like I might never take another breath when she hit the ground.

I took out the Bren Ten from under my arm, flicked the safety off and aimed at the cop with the Tommy gun. He was about twenty five yards from me. I stopped and aimed. The supersonic round hit him in the ear and puked his brains all over his partner, who noticed me then. He had been firing rounds off survivors too. I’m not sure if he had hit any. Now he was turning to get me in his sights. It didn’t matter. I shot him in the face before he could close his left eye. The 10mm liquefied his head as well.
I must have holstered my gun but I don’t remember doing it. The next thing I knew I was staggering through the rubble looking for anyone who might still be alive.

Parker was standing near me.

I got smart.

“Jorge!” I shouted into my watch.

“I read you and I have your present location.”

For once I was relieved the silly AI had been spying on me.

“Can you read for life signs from any of the satellites – the orbitals?”

“Si. Turn to your left. Ten more degrees. Now ahead of you, two metric yards.”

Ordinarily, Jorge refused to use the metric system. I have never figured out why. Mainly I think it’s to piss off Spooty. He might have thought that right now was a good time to for simplicity. In my head I still had to translate that to about the length of a body. There were several bodies in that area. There were also pieces of bombed truck. The smoke was terribly acrid and making my eyes tear up. Parker was trying to breathe through his shirt. Even so he was having a coughing fit. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled over to the fallen protesters, knowing that only one of them was alive.

“We gotta go!” Parker shouted. Sirens were getting louder. “More cops.”

I had found a pulse. It was slender girl. Probably not older than in her teens. Three others were practically on top of her. A man and two middle aged women, I think. Two of them had no pulse and one seemed to be missing the larger part of three limbs.

I carried the girl to the car and told Parker on the way to drive us to Spooty’s compound.

Just as we got the car started a cop car pulled up. Cops jumped out and gave us dirty looks. One of them shouted at us to stop. I told Parker to gun it. Our tires threw up dirt and a cop with a Tommy gun opened fire us. Bullets bounced off the back of us like popcorn.

“What the hell!”
“Oh. I did I forget to tell you that Spooty retrofitted this car with bullet proof everything?”
“That would have been nice to know.”

“I doubt we’d be able to take one of those bombs, though.”

“Anyone ever tell you you know just what to say to give a guy comfort, Nake?”

“Not that I recall.”

“There’s probably a reason for that.”

I could tell you about dropping the girl off at Spooty’s, about how he his surgical robots to patch her up, about how he took the corpse of Lucky Parnell off our hands. The girl made a full recovery. If I remember right, Spooty got her set up in Prague. He spirited her away to somewhere in Eastern Europe, anyway. She’s doing well. Yada. But the plight of the poor and immigrants the ACR was never the point of this tale.

No matter how I may have been haunted by killing those two cops – and the way I did. The dispatch and celerity, the athletic precision. There was no way that muscle memory could not have been a part of taking those men’s lives. It’s no exaggeration that I couldn’t get the image out of my mind of the rushing bullet, the destruction of the skull, the blood. In an instant I had taken two lives. I’d become a killer. Again. I’d killed before. It had never been so automatic before. It wasn’t that those cops didn’t deserve it. If you open up on unarmed civilians, you’ve called on karma. You’ve taunted Nemesis. She’s an unforgiving deity. Clemency is unknown to her. She can appear in person or send the Furies to rip apart the sinner.

That’s the story we tell anyway. The sinners don’t always suffer. Many are even cossetted in the sweetness of their success.

Those cops were dirty, working in a dirty town. It’s like Parker said, we’re caught in a war. Leben ist Krieg, Spooty is fond of saying.

Back in my office I cracked open the bourbon. It was perfectly rancid. Just like my guilty mood. My cat Pang was none too pleased with me. He cursed my absence. He cursed his empty bowl. He cursed my beverage. Pang is cat of great imprecation.

“Were you gonna share that bottle?” Parker asked.

He got up and got himself a glass and poured himself two fingers. I didn’t begrudge him the booze. It was the company I could’ve done without.

Parker took a quick quaff and said, “You sure have changed since college, Nake.”

“Yeah, for starters I’m green.”

“I know it’s been twenty years. . .”

I swirled my bourbon in the tumbler. “Has it? Because that’s the problem – for me it never happened.”

“You still don’t remember any of it?”

“Nah. Wish I did. Wish I remembered a lot of stuff.”

Parker wasn’t looking at me and I doubt he was listening to me. He was lost on his own trail of thought. “I don’t think you liked me too much at first.”

“No?” I poured myself another drink. And him one too. Maybe out of some sense that I should have some sympathy, though I felt none. I just wanted him to leave. I knew I shouldn’t blame him because the Cat had summoned him here. It wasn’t Parker’s fault.

“No. Your roommate didn’t like me. I know that. That Robert character. Of course, I don’t think Robert liked anyone. Especially anybody that looked like competition.”

“Was Robert the hairy one?”

“You remember him? They were all hairy. Hairy Matt is the one you’re thinking of. Robert and that Sikh. At least he had a religious excuse to be so hirsute. Your shower must’ve always been clogged.”
“I don’t remember any of it except for you telling me stories, trying to get me to remember. I appreciate the effort, but I don’t recall any of it.”

“So you don’t remember when we first met?”

“Nope.”

“Well, you had come to one of those philosophy symposiums the department had. That was because Robert dragged you there, I guess.  Philosophy wasn’t your major. So you heard me talk about arguments for the existence of God. And then it was after that. Maybe a few weeks. Maybe a month. I remember because it rained the day I gave my talk. Some of my papers got soaked in my bag on the bike ride there. I don’t remember you in the group, to be honest. But you told me later you had heard it. Then we walked the bar. Something nautical. The Eagle’s Landing or something.”
“That’s not nautical.”

“Anyway. We were there. It was snowy. Practically had the place to ourselves. You, me. I don’t remember who – other than Robert.”

“Naturlich.”

“He was giving me hell. About whatever. He liked to give everyone hell. It was my turn. That was when you slammed your hand on the table and said he should shut it since I was one of the smartest people you’d ever met. You said I had established that the universe had to be infinite, that I had provided reason evidence of this. Oh, and that I had independently reproduced Zeno’s most famous paradox at the age of nineteen.”
“I did? Is that true? Zeno’s paradox? Which one?”

“I hadn’t really ever thought about it until you said that. But I had mentioned some of my ideas about the infinite that I had after high school. Maybe you overstated the case. I was grateful. Robert was always lord over others the fact that he could read so fast and had a photographic memory.”

“He does?”

Parker shrugged. “He used to claim that. I think he just skimmed a lot and faked it.”

“What about the infinity stuff – did you have some kind of proof?”

“Oh, what was my argument about that. Let me see…” He sucked on his drink and stared at the ceiling as if the answer was written up there. “Oh, right. The universe has to be infinite because all of this had a start. The big bang. But what was before that? Let’s say that there was nothing before that. Within that nothing was the potential for all of this. And it was an eternal potential. Let’s say this universe burns itself out or has a big crunch and we go back to nothing. What then? Well, all of that could sit forever and nothing more. Or at any point it could spring back into life. And this is an eternal potential. It has to be. We’re here.”

“Interesting but it feels like there’s a flaw. Though the neo-Taoists would appreciate being coming out of non-being. I do admit though that if the bang only happened the once, it would be very weird. Nothing explodes into something, and in all of eternity it can only do it once. Why? The mind recoils from a finite universe.”
I looked at him hard.

“Almost as much as the mind recoils from the guilt of killing another human being.”

“I gave that gun to Spooty. I’m sure he won’t find my finger prints on the trigger. And he has very sensitive equipment. I’m sure he could tell if any of my epithelials were ever on it. Any of my sweat or anything – even if I tried to wipe it off. You know how amazing Spooty’s lab is.”

“Right.”

There was nothing after that until I woke up chained to the floor.

 

“Getting Lucky”

Part 2

by

T.William Smith

“You sure have changed since college, Nake.”

        “Yeah. For starters, I’m green.”

 

One of the things that makes this Earth so hallucinatory and nightmarish – I keep getting knocked on the head. When I woke up I my wrists were bound – and not in a fun way. The metal was the hardest, heaviest material I’d ever felt. There was no breaking it. I was connected a big chain made of the same stuff. There was about ten feet of chain.

In the dim light I could see Parker lying near me. We were stripped down to our underwear. There was just bear dusty floor beneath us. It was hot – oven hot – well over a hundred degrees, if I was any judge.

I scooted closer to Parker. He had a helluva shiner. Other than that he seemed to have all of his parts in working order, though he may have been dead. I couldn’t see him breathing. It was very awkward getting my ear over to his mouth with my hands bound, but I did it. He was breathing. Gently. That’s never a bad thing, right?
Parker only had a chain on one ankle. It connected him to the wall with about three feet of slack.

I heard something and turned. On the wall at the nearest end of the room were two people. They were also lying on the bare floor. The also had a chain around one ankle. They were looking over their heads at me like I was a green man in the clouds. I almost laughed.

They started speaking to each other in a language I didn’t recognize. It could have been Bulgarian for all I knew.

My mouth was parched. My tongue felt like corduroy. Maybe I’d been talking fustian in my sleep. I wanted to rub my eyelid but my hands were powdered with dust. I did the best I could with the crook of my arm.

Looking up at one of the two dimly lit naked lightbulbs at either end of the long room, I tried to figure out what the hell could have happened to bring me to this pretty pass.

Parker had pulled my car around to the back of the bar. When he came back in we hoisted Lucky Parnell between us. Frog-marching a corpse is quite a trick. You should try it sometime.

“How are we doing this? Guy must weigh two and a half bills,” Parker gasped.

“I just hope his belt doesn’t break,” I said. I had my right hand on his belt and the left tugging on his left around my neck.

“I don’t think I’m doing much of anything. How are you holding him up?”

“Just put your shoulder in his armpit,” I told him.

“I’d have to be part ant!”
The backdoor was reached by going down a short narrow hall. We somehow squeezed through there, the dead man’s shoes sliding over the dirty linoleum. In the back alley we flopped Parnell into my car on the passenger side. I had already called Spooty with my watch radio.

“It’s a hundred in the shade,” Parker said.

“Yeah. He’s gonna start to curdle in my car. Maybe I’ll give Jorge a call and find out where the truck is.”
I tapped some buttons on my watch.

There was a beep.

“Jorge, are you there?”
“Si.”
“Can you give me an estimate on the truck’s arrival?”

“From your current location – nine minutes. Is there a problem?”

“No. Not really. It’s just very hot out here, considering our cargo.”
“Si, muy caliente.”

“And it’s miserable with the humidity.”
“We used to say such a day was hotter than the uterus of the chupacabra.”
“Wow. And you’re from Mexico.”
“Si. Yucatan.”

“I was going to say it was hotter than the rectum of a T. rex. It’s just a hypothesis – not that I know from experience.”
“That would be open to debate.”
“Not if the T. rex could help it.”

“The internal temperature of dinosaurs is still a matter of conjecture.”
“Even on your planet?”

“Si. Paleontology is woefully behind the times.”

“I swear that robot brain has a sarcasm chip,” I told Parker.

He stood so no one inside the restaurant could look out the back door and see Parnell collapsed on the front seat, squinting against the brightness of the Kaliphornia sun.

“What did you mean by ever action getting a reaction?” he asked.

“You know – the butterfly on one side of the world and a hurricane on the other.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning nothing – except keep your eyes peeled.”

“For?”

“For anything resembling whatever comes between a butterfly and a major meteorological event.”

“What are you worried about?”

“You gotta ask?” I looked at what was in the car and then back at Parker meaningfully.

“I don’t follow you.”

“The Cat isn’t going to like this. He sent the guy, after all.”

“So? He can’t blame us for an accident.”

“He could. If that was what it was.”

“What does that mean?” Parker was clearly getting heated.

“It just went off on its own?” I whispered.

His voice dropped, “That’s what I said and that’s what happened. In fact, I’m going to hand the gun over to Spooty. He can look at it under a scope and show you that there aren’t any fingerprints on the trigger. I never touched it. And you ought to sniff it.”
He looked around to make sure no one was watching and put the breech up where I could smell it.

“Any magic?”

I could in fact smell the faintest whiff of what might be magic. Besides being green, nearly bulletproof and quite healthy, I was able to smell magic.

“Isn’t it possible that the Cat or someone charmed the gun or a bullet to go off and kill him?”

“Anything’s possible, just like in pictures. But why would he do that?”

“How should I know! We don’t know the first thing about this guy.”

“That make him look more and more like the butterfly from the proverb,” I said.

“Are you afraid the Cat won’t like it? We’ll just have to beg his forgiveness.” He grinned slightly and tapped his jacket where it bulged over his hand-cannon of a gun.

“Forgiveness is a nice thing. But I think most of the world opts for deterrence. Seems more prudent,” I said, frowning in the sunshine. “You do know Wild Bill Hickock was shot in the back, right?”

“Wild Bill didn’t have you around.”

That was fair enough. Something he had said bothered me. I had to force myself to think about it. Would he really know that his finger had never touched the trigger? The only person confident of that is the one who wiped it off. I tried to remember if Parker had much of a chance to wipe the gun. He could have.

We were close to a dumpster. Skinny stray cats were jumping into it. Crows watched from the roof, squawking their criticism. I took my hat off to fan the flies away from me. I wondered how long before they started on the corpse. There was no way I was closing the car up with a dead man in it. Broiled body was not my idea of a good thing. No air freshener in the world can erase a memory like that.

“My theory is you bumped that trigger without realizing it.” It wasn’t exactly my theory but I needed to keep the ball rolling.

“Nope. I told you I never touched the trigger. I would know if I touched it. And anyway, it’s not like you can make contact and have the thing go off. It has to be enchantment.”

He scuffed his feet – indecisively, it seemed to me.

“Y’know, sometimes people do stuff without paying attention. Like you drive to work and you don’t remember all of the road once you get there.”

“What are you saying?” Parker didn’t like the direction I was taking this.

“Oh, it’s just that things can happen without us really thinking about it or being aware. Take if something’s a habit or if you really want something bad. Sort of like a Freudian slip of the trigger finger.”
“You think I wanted to kill this guy I just met?”

“It might serve a purpose.”

“And what purpose would that be?”

“Getting the Cat to show up.”

He had to think about that one. He took his hat off his bald head and mopped his brow with a hanky. His bosky eyebrows prickled. He put his hat back on and tugged at his goatee. Whenever he was angry he reminded me of a sawed-off Lenin. One that could stand to lose forty pounds of paunch. I was really getting under his skin.

“I don’t know how to respond to that. It’s preposterous. How would I know that offing this jerk would produce the Cat? I wouldn’t. I barely knew the first thing about him. I can’t believe you think this was intentional. Maybe it was all part of the Cat’s plan.”
“And what does he have planned?” I asked.

“How should I know. But maybe this was all set up for a reason. One that has nothing to do with what I want. One that has everything to do with what the Cat wants.” He looked at me hard.

I had to concede Parker’s reasoning wasn’t totally devoid of merit.

“Maybe the point was no more than to drive a wedge between us.”

“Us?” I mused.

“Yeah. Think about it. What would be the most logical result of you just shooting someone in front of me? I might trust you less, right? I’m not likely to trust you more.”

I sighed, “A valid point.”

“Are you really that paranoid, Nake?”

“You wouldn’t be the first to accuse me of that. But then you haven’t had your brain monkeyed with. You didn’t have memories stuck in your head of things that never happened. Besides that, I’ve seen some real facking weird stuff.”

“Don’t say facking or I’ll have to shoot you too.”

I gave Parker a hard look.

“I’m joking! It was a joke! I swear to you it was an accident. I didn’t try to shoot the poor bastard.”
He turned around and looked at the body inside the car.

“Of course I feel bad about it. But it wasn’t my fault.” His voice trailed off. He stood facing his victim. I didn’t know what more to say.

“You know the only thing I want is to get back home,” Parker said, his head still down, facing the corpse of Lucky Parnell.

“I’ve got a wife and kids to get back to. I know you can’t remember your life, but I’m sure you want to get back too. Just as much as I do,” he said.

“I would do just about anything to get out of this crazy carnival, Parker.”

“Me too. But I’m not going to murder the innocent. You have to believe me.”

“I do believe you. Or at least I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. Hell, I believe you didn’t want to kill this sap. But this is a dangerous place and some here are playing a very dangerous game. They won’t care what you say. And maybe this whole thing was exactly what you said before – a set up. A trap of some kind. Or a psycho’s test. We have to on our guard all the time.”

“Look, I’m really sorry that this guy is dead, Nake. I really am. But it’s like I told him – this is a war. It sure as hell isn’t my war. I didn’t start it. And I don’t plan on sticking around to see the end of it. I just want out of it.”

“But the Cat doesn’t want you out of it. That’s the thorny patch,” I said.

“I’m not so sure this Cat is all that you think he is. Even if he is the reason I’m here, he doesn’t like to step out of the shadows too much. I’ve been here months and months and not seen anything of him, not even heard others say they’ve seen him any time recently.”

“There are other things to worry about besides the Cat.” I realized my words sounded lame but I was convinced they were true.

“Other things? What? The gods? Karma?”

“I didn’t say that. There’s not even any justice in the world and you think I’m afraid of karma?”

“No justice?”

“Ask Lucky about justice.” I jerked a thumb toward the car.

“There’s a talking cat but no justice.” Parker seemed almost amused.

“There are too many victims. Too much evil and never any reckoning.”

“Never?”

I could hear the usual buzz of traffic. There was also the sound of trucks in low gear passing on the other side of the restaurant and storefronts. I checked my watch. Spooty was late. I pushed a button and said, “Call Jorge.”

“Si,” his voice crackled. I swear he put static on there for effect.

“Where’s Spooty and that truck?”

“He has been delayed.”

I was looking up at the sky in the general direction that Spooty was coming from. There was a narrow but black plume of smoke.

“What’s going on?”

“Manifestaciones.”
“A riot?”

“Disturbios, si.”

“What have you gotten from the police radios?”

“Many units were called to assist in rounding up some people who had no work cards. It was then reported that the police were attacked by those who gathered to demonstrate the prefecture’s indifference to the problems of the impoverished and unemployed. But I have recorded phone messages made to city newspapers. They say the demonstration was already underway when the police arrived. That the police shot into the crowd. Beyond that there is the matter of the fires.”
“Fires?”
“Si. Senor Spooty is caught near the scene. On opposite sides of the street there are two buildings: hotels that have been converted into – ”

“Cheap flophouses. Down Sunset?”

“Correct.”

I let Jorge go. Damn! If things didn’t start to shape up in the next five minutes I might have to go rescue Spooty rather than the other way around.

Parker had moved Lucky’s feet over so he could sit on the edge of the car seat. The sun had moved to the west enough that we were now in the shade. That was the only mercy we were going to get.

I found myself thinking back a couple of weeks when Parker had found what he thought was a lead. There was supposed to be this prostitute who used to service a fortune-teller guy. The fortune-teller had moved on or died. No one knew which. But the prostitute was alive, if barely. She spent her days stoned on smack or whatever drug she could score. Parker asked me to go along. I only did because to let him go by himself was unthinkable. When we got into this stinking hellhole where the old whore slept, we ran into something very odd. Parker called it an orc. It could have been an oni, mogwai, ifrit or goblin, for all I knew. It was mean and nasty and had by all appearances just finished eating our prostitute. In the end its liver succumbed to power of Parker’s Desert Eagle. Were we caught in the crossfire of devas fighting asuras?

When the beast had finally stopped flailing, Parker had heaved a great sigh and said it was one for the good guys. Had justice been meted out? Maybe would should’ve asked the dead hooker with her guts torn out. By the time I got to her she was still warm, but there was no saving her. Parker’s bullets could do nothing for her.
“I haven’t seen jot of justice and barely the least particle of mercy. Those are just words. They don’t really exist,” I said.

“Don’t exist? The wheel didn’t always exist. Then we built it. Maybe we have to build justice,” Parker said. “Besides, saying that justice is just a word would make you a nominalist. I know you don’t want to be a nominalist.”

“Is that what it makes me? No, I’ll tell you what it makes me. It makes me a guy with a corpse in his front seat. Now help me buckle him in so we can get out of here.”

I could have done it myself but I wanted Parker to do. In fact, I wanted to drop this whole damn mess on him and tell him to deal with it.