Carver’s Dog

Conrad assumed the balanced stance, weight on the balls of his feet, knees slightly bent. “And what do you have to say about Sea Wolf, London? Marxist malarkey or a little boy’s adventure at sea?”

London delivered a hard left jab directly from the chin with no wind-up. Sharp delivery and sharp recovery. Conrad stumbled backward, momentarily shocked senseless, then regained his balance and control. He rubbed his long beard with a red boxing glove. His gum lines betrayed rivulets of blood when he smiled.

“Is that the best you got, London? You call that a punch, you sissy?”

London executed a hard right, simultaneously rotating the hip and shoulder, driving off the ball of the rear foot while swiftly stepping forward with the front foot. His glove sailed into Conrad’s jaw, lifting the man off his feet and slamming him onto the canvas and onto his painfully inflammed back with a bone-crunching thud.

“Fuck you,” Conrad sputtered, breathless, spitting blood onto the sweat-stained canvas. “I have Heart of Darkness. What have you? Call of the Wild. A dog book? John Barleycorn? All that proves is what a boozer loser you are.” Conrad’s eye brightened. “Hey — boozer, loser, I rhymed. Do you suppose I may try my hand at poetry?”

“I dunno,” London snarled through his mouthguard. “Why don’t you try going a few rounds with Yeats? Or maybe Shelley is more your speed.”

If there was one thing Conrad could not tolerate it was any breach of his manhood, any whisper or insinuation that he was lacking in masculine virtue. He slipped the Derringer out of his boxing glove and pointed the small pocket pistol at his opponent.

“Oh, come on, Conrad, you’re not gonna try that happy horsehit, are you? Not here.”

“Why not, Jack?” Conrad leered. “It’s Heaven; we can do whatever we want.”

The snout of the gun sparked and flashed and Jack fell off the cloud, spinning into darkness.

Previously: Tender is the Night of the Living Dead

“The best way to kill a zombie is with a rocket launcher,” Brent insisted from the back seat. “You know that as well as I do so I don’t see the argument here.”

The Packard hurtled down Hollywood Boulevard. Ace was the wheelman, his eyes darting about nervously for traffic cops as he upped the acceleration.

“The argument here,” Wolfe said from his perch in the front passenger seat, “is that we don’t have access to a goddamn rocket launcher, Brent. For chrissakes, it’s just one guy we haveta take down.”

“A nice cranium blow with a machete oughta bring ‘im down,” Ace grumbled. “But I forgot to tell ya guys the weird part.”

“There’s a weird part?” Brent laughed and lit a Pall Mall.

Ace hung a left on Highland, nearly trading paint with a bulky red Buick. “The call came in from this funeral director in Culver City, see? Says the corpse just stood up and walked away from the table like nobody’s business. Then, like I told ya earlier, he attacks and eats the brains outta the skull of some poor schmo working a Christmas tree lot on Culver.”

“Tis the season,” Wolfe cracked.

“So I asks the funeral home director fella, I asks him ‘Who is this guy? We gotta know his name in case we gotta call out to him to, you know, get his attention. Zombies ain’t so attentive, ‘cept when they’re looking for victims, right?’ So the guy tells me — get this — the guy tells me that it’s this famous fella, see, a writer type named Fitzgerald. Goddamn Mick name, if ya ask me.”

Brent leaned forward in the back seat. “Scott Fitzgerald? Jesus Christ. Yeah, he died yesterday. Heart attack, I think they said on the radio.”

“You know the guy?” Ace forced the Packard into a hard right turn at Wilshire.

“Personally, no. But I read some of his stuff. Back when he was somebody. He ain’t done much lately.”

“Except eat the brains of some poor bastard working a Christmas tree lot. A Christmas tree lot, for God’s sake. You’re right, Ace, only a fuckin’ Mick zombie would do something that uncouth. I’m gonna enjoy killing this sonofabitch.”

Fingers of frigid air slithered through the kitchen window, night and autumn coming on. Esme Westerhazy settled at the hand-carved oak dining table with a cup of English breakfast tea and a spoonful of honey with a wedge of lemon.

Nothing good on TV tonight, she thought. “Survivor” is a repeat.

She stirred the honey into the hot brown brew and found her mind wandering back to … what year was that?

Stirring and stirring the honey absently with a slender silver demitasse spoon.

 It was 1964. She was thirty-years old that summer when Neddy Merrill did his crazy thing, attempting to swim the eight miles from the pool in the backyard of her parents home in fashionable Shady Hills to his own home eight miles away. One swimming pool at a time, she remembered, that’s how he did it, leaping like a mad frog from one well-manicured backyard to another.

She sipped at her tea. Too hot.

The whole task, she reasoned, should have taken Neddy half a day but in his demented state he would pause in a neighbor’s yard after swimming the shimmering length of their pool and languish in the bushes in his wet swimming trunks, sometimes for days. God knows how he received any nourishment as the months progressed, one swimming pool after another, eight miles stretching into an eternity. By the time he found his own swimming pool at the end of the dark rainbow — and only Neddy himself knew what the ultimate goal was, what the aquatic accomplishment at hand entailed — he found nothing but an empty and haunted house. His wife and children had left him.

The tea was much cooler now. Esme took a long drink and smiled as the cool autumn air carressed her withered cheeks and gray-tinged hair.

A swim would be nice right about now, Esme supposed, I haven’t been swimming in ages.

The community pool on Lakehurst was closed this time of night, of course.

Esme rose from the kitchen table and ambled down the dimly-lit hallway of her modest home to the main bathroom. She drew a lukewarm bath in the porcelain tub with brass feet. She clawed her way out of her nightgown and squeezed into an off-white one-piece bathing suit. It was very snug. She had not worn it in years.

Esme posed on uneasy feet on the creaky toilet lid, held her trembling hands together as if in penitent prayer, and dove into the bath tub head first.

Friedrich Nietzsche awoke from a long black ribbon of dreams. Snow was drifting outside the window and piling neatly upon the sill. A flaming log of cedar gently hissed and crackled in the fireplace, the orange glow warm and reassuring.

He turned on the bedside lamp, heavy hands molesting the stack of reading materials on the table. He chose at random, a German edition of an American dime novel. Die Abenteuer von Doc Holliday. The tawdry and colorful exploits of the tubercular gunfighter thrilled Nietzsche more than Grete’s tender kisses.

Chapter three opened explosively with a vibrant shotgun battle in a lush canyon overrun with rambling thicket and misshapen boulders. Holliday waged war with a family of corpulent land barons, mercilessly pumping buckshot and hot lead into their fat bellies, laughing as the green-brown guts of his combatants oozed out of the still-smoking cavities of their well-fed flesh.

Nietzsche fished a pencil stub out of the pocket of his red silk bathrobe. Recalling what Pascal wrote, he scribbled with the dull pencil in the wide margin of the book: Anyone who tries to act like an angel is acting like a beast.

Hazel left a steak on the stove for him but Tracy couldn’t chew with the ill-fitting new dentures. He sat at the lonely kitchen table and spooned oatmeal into his toothless mouth and thought about the dead.

Pruneface. Broadway Bates. Breathless Mahoney.

Gone.

The Brow, the Nazi spy who gave him a run for his money, impaled on an American eagle atop a flagpole after falling from a window. September 24, 1944

Littleface Finney, lost both ears trying to escape the detective. Died in prison. Cancer of the esophagus. 1952.

The counterfeiter Alec Penn

Gang underboss Ribs Morocco

Mumbles, drowned in a lake on July 27, 1945

Texy Garcia

Trigger Doom

Gone

Trusty Hubbub

Jesus …

… clawed to death by his own leopard in 1961

Tracy spooned more oatmeal into his mouth and sipped from the mug of bitter black coffee.

Irma committed suicide on March 3, 1946

The Claw, with that hook to replace his missing hand, electrocuted after getting caught in high voltage wires while fleeing from Tracy. When was that? 1947?

That crooked lawyer George Spaldoni. Tracy shot and killed him in 1934

Gone

Shakey, dimwitted bodyguard for street hoods. Accidentally shot himself while surrounded by coppers. February 1948.

Gone

Tess Truehart

Gone, baby, gone

Now all he has is the costume of doomed hope worn by impending Death, and the fading yellowed comic strips clipped out of newspapers to remind him of who he used to be.