God Laughs When You Die Read online

  “Reckon I’ll start with Moniqua,” Buster said. “Gut her like the hog she is and put my wallet outta its misery.”

  Cyrell chewed his bottom lip, swallowed liquid iron.

  “Hand me my goddamn rod,” Buster said. “Came out here to catch me some catfish and here I sit, talkin’ to a natural born fool.”

  Cyrell stood there with blood dribbling down his chin.

  “Oh, move outta my way, dummy.”

  Buster shoved Cyrell out of the way and bent over.

  Cyrell drew out the wrench. He gripped it with both hands and raised it the over his head. Then he closed his left eye and drew a bead on the hole in Buster’s afro.

  “I know you two been doin’ it,” Buster said. Cyrell’s eye popped open.

  “What?”

  Buster stood up. Instead of his fishing rod, he was pointing his Redhawk .44 Magnum at Cyrell’s nuts.

  “Y’all must think I’m stupid too,” Buster said.

  “Uhhh…”

  “I got eyes everywhere, Cyrell. Ears too.”

  “Wait…” Cyrell said.

  “Got me a certain lady friend who uses special equipment to keep up with Queen Moniqua when I’m gone.”

  “Special equipment?” Cyrell whispered.

  “Video, Cy,” Buster said. “I got forty hours of you and my wife humpin’ like rats.” He lifted the Redhawk. “You stabbed me in the back, motherfucker.”

  African terror teamed up with Baptist guilt and sucker punched Cyrell in the kidneys. He raised his other hand, the one without the wrench.

  “I - I have to pee,” he whispered.

  “Show it to me.”

  Cyrell froze. “What you say?”

  Buster stepped closer, his eyes hooded, a hulking silhouette in the half-light of the full moon.

  “Show me what she’s been cheatin’ for, Cyrell, or I’ll put a bullet through it.”

  Buster thumbed back the hammer on the Redhawk - CLICK - and Cyrell reached down with his left hand, unzipped his pants and let them fall to his feet. Buster stared for a long time. Finally, he nodded.

  “You two was ‘bout the only family I had in this world,” he said. “That’s a sorry ass thing for a man like me to admit to a man like you. Pull them britches up.”

  Cyrell complied. Meanwhile the malignant puffer fish living in his bladder giggled and doubled its size.

  “We gonna settle this like men,” Buster said. “If you win, you get the girl. I don’t hold no grudges.”

  Cyrell’s brain was screaming around the inside of his skull like a Hot Wheels racer on a bright orange plastic loop-de-loop.

  “What if you win?” he said.

  Buster waggled the Redhawk.

  “Me and Moniqua gonna make our own video,” he said. “Something featurin’ a lot of closeups of my foot breakin’ off in her ass.”

  Cyrell’s racer flipped off the track.

  He’d had Moniqua every way that lust, opportunity and business hours at the animal shelter allowed. He couldn’t have been more busted if he’d filled himself with helium and tried to float up a porcupine’s ass- crack.

  “You - can’t - hurt her.” he said.

  “You and me gonna settle up fair and square,” Buster said. “Soon’s you drop that nigger-beater.”

  Cyrell’s eyes narrowed. Buster was as slow as molasses in January when he wasn’t drunk, and he made Cyrell do all the heavy lifting at work. Cyrell, on the other hand, could move like good gossip when he wanted to.

  A smile flickered at the corners of his mouth: He was beginning to think he might finish the evening with the same number of testicles he began it with. He dropped the lug wrench and raised his fists.

  “I been fightin’ since I’m two years old,” Cyrell said.

  “That’s true,” Buster grinned. “Fightin’ common sense.”

  Buster smirked. Then he shot Cyrell in the chest.

  “Fair and square!” Cyrell screamed as he fell. “You said fair and square!”

  Buster grinned and kicked him in the nuts.

  “Didn’t build a culinary empire so some half- Mexican whore and her back stabbin’ retard could take it away.”

  Then he stooped and grabbed the lug wrench.

  “Been good to you, Cyrell. Ever since mama made me play with you ‘cuz you was feeble in the head.”

  Buster raised the monkey wrench and brought it down hard on Cyrell’s right kneecap. Cyrell howled.

  “I gave you a job, man,” Buster said. “Good job too.”

  Buster belched and smashed Cyrell’s other kneecap. Cyrell whooped in a great shuddering breath to scream. The hole in his chest whistled Dixie.

  He scuttled backward, his legs dragging behind him through the blood trail he left in his wake. Buster minced through the blood, hoisted his left foot…

  “Smilin’ faces tell lies…”

  …and brought three-hundred and fifty pounds of beer, barbecue and bullshit down on Cyrell’s ankle.

  “Snap. Crackle. Pop,” he said.

  Pain put on a Fourth of July Extravaganza in Cyrell’s brain. He heaved his upper body up onto the side and stretched his right hand out over the water.

  “Comin’ - comin’ to save you, honey,” he said.

  Blood droplets dripped from his fingers like rubies thrown into the abyss. The droplets left a thin black film on the surface for a moment. Then they were absorbed.

  “Cold - Hurts,” Cyrell gasped.

  Buster’s beard stubble scraped his left ear.

  “Ain’t even a piece of what I’m gonna do to your girlfriend, Cy.”

  “Don’t - don’t hurt her,” Cyrell said.

  Far below them, a ripple of light flickered in the depths of the lake. Buster didn’t see the light, not even when, a moment later, it flickered again, closer this time. But Cyrell saw it.

  Something was rising toward them.

  “Help me,” Cyrell whispered.

  “I tried to help you, asshole.”

  Buster grabbed Cyrell and head butted him. Cyrell staggered and almost fell over the side, but Buster grabbed him. He lifted Cyrell off his feet and crushed him to his chest in a bear hug.

  “Ooopppshh,” Cyrell said.

  Buster looked down: Two of Cyrell’s teeth clung to the pocket of his Walmart XXXtra-Portly bowling shirt.

  “Xtra-Portly my ass,” Cyrell giggled.

  Buster went crazy then. He beat Cyrell with his fishing rod; beat him some more with the wrench; even busted a full Black Ram upside his head. Finally, when he’d run out of blunt objects, Buster shoved his head underwater.

  Cold rushed in and shoved twin railroad spikes up Cyrell’s nose. His ruptured lung didn’t permit the luxury of holding his breath; he sucked ice instead. Stupid, he thought.

  Ignorant.

  Mentally inert.

  Idiot.

  Then he saw her.

  Through water as black as the heart of midnight she rose, shimmering like the memory of a childhood dream.

  The Mermaid slid between bright beams of moonlight, slipping into shadow one moment, aglow with mutant sea shine the next. Ghost lights danced along fan-like ridges lining her skull and spine. Her eyes shone like pearls in the gloom. Her skin was the color of pitch, smooth and scaled like the new hide of a great black serpent.

  Buster hauled Cyrell half out of the water. “We’re right over the Drop, cousin.” he said. “But don’t worry. You’ll have company down there real soon.”

  Then Buster let him go. Cyrell tried to swim but his legs were dead stumps and he sank like a stone.

  Goodbye, Monie-love, he thought.

  But instead of sinking Cyrell was rising, pulled upward in the Mermaid’s wake. Her momentum slammed him against the hull of the Sweet Minnie. A moment later, his head broke the surface.

  “You might’a got my pap, but you ain’t gettin’ me!”

  It was Buster.

  Cyrell clawed his way up the side of the boat. He managed to grab Buster’s cooler
but the top flipped up and smacked him in the mouth.

  Stupid.

  Stupid.

  Stupid.

  Cyrell held on anyway.

  Above him in the Sweet Minnie, Buster’s Redhawk went off. The explosion seized the muscles in Cyrell’s neck like a vise. Buster’s second shot tore the air over his head. Cyrell heard a sound like a sharpened Louisville Slugger punching through a sack of pig guts and Buster squealed.

  “Hurts! Ahhhhhhh, that huuurrts!”

  Cyrell closed his eyes, but he couldn’t block out those sounds: neckbone twisting, frogleg sucking sounds that pan-fried the meat between his ears; couldn’t do anything except cling to the Sweet Minnie until the sounds stopped and his strength gave out.

  Then he let go.

  Safe now, he thought, as the waters closed over his head. Safe now.

  Cyrell took that with him, down into the dark.

  He awoke to the sound of teeth grinding against bone. The pain in his legs was gone. Cyrell looked down and he understood why.

  Buster’s corpse gaped up at him from the weeds covering the sandy bottom. His throat, chest and stomach, torn open, made feasting places for the mermaid’s children.

  Nearly three dozen semi-human shapes arrowed through the water, their cries filling Cyrell’s head with clicks and moans.

  A young female, half Cyrell’s size, rose to peer at him. Her skin was pale, her eyes twin pearls. Something that was not hair surrounded her head; a white flurry of thin tendrils. The feelers reached for Cyrell but with a flick of her head, the little mermaid pulled them back. The glowing edge of her tail sliced once at the skin on Cyrell’s bare chest and withdrew.

  She was carrying Buster’s face in her hands, black claws hooked through empty eye sockets.

  The Colored Mermaid floated out of the darkness. She was nearly invisible in the shadows save for the burning streamer of red mist rising from two holes between a double row of nipples lining her chest: crimson testament to Buster’s marksmanship.

  The children encircled her, grasping, darting in and out of the incandescent blood cloud through which she drifted; singing.

  She was singing for Cyrell.

  Her voice was the cold whisper of eels; her song a dirge, the requiem for a dead and distant sea. She sang of debt and duty, of endings and beginnings. Cyrell moved, drawn forward by her song.

  Shining spines flexed along the muscular silver tail that extended from his lower torso. He pumped the new appendage and felt its coiled power propel him closer to her. Cool currents slithered over naked new flesh as he swam, moving as she moved, at one with the black water. They joined. His spines lifted, engorged, and pierced the flesh between the mermaid's shoulder blades. She screamed. Teeth sharp enough to pierce bone bit into the knot of muscle at the joining place between Cyrell’s neck and shoulder.

  They hovered there, limbs and tails entwined, while the water around them burned.

  And Cyrell understood it all.

  He smelled the woman before she saw him. Startled, Moniqua dropped her cool drink. The tinkle of shattering glass was a symphony in Cyrell’s ears.

  “I thought you wasn’t coming back, muchacho,” she said.

  He tasted her confusion; old lemon and dark chocolate. She hadn’t counted on facing him alone. But Shed Wilbon lay a few yards away, his spine shattered, his last cigarette burning the webbing between his broken fingers.

  “Is it done?” she said.

  “It’s over,” he said.

  Cyrell stood in the shadows sifting the dregs of human desire from the air of Buster’s Barbecue, the smell of grease from the cold grills, Moniqua’s musk mingled with Shed’s cologne and the iron bite of gunpowder.

  “Why don’t you come inside, where I can see you, Cy?”

  “I want to show you something,” he said. “Come walking with me.”

  His fingers twitched. The legs he wore would only last while the moon shone upon the waters of the lake, and the children hungered for the things he could provide.

  For them. For her.

  “You’re scaring me, Cy,” she said.

  Cyrell nodded, tasting her fear now.

  “I know.”

  He stepped into the light and Moniqua screamed. Love, the first he’d ever known, had made a new man of him.

  Wise now, Cyrell began to sing.

  KATCHINA

  My husband is not a monster.

  Leona Brinkmore stared at the photographs. The twelve pictures of murdered women could have been fakes.

  Why would Lester fake something like this, Leona?

  Many of the women looked like Leona - brown skinned, black or Hispanic women. Some looked underfed. Some were missing teeth. All of them had been strangled, their eyes swollen shut beneath bruised folds of flesh. Someone had bashed the women’s faces in.

  A sound from the bedroom made Leona jump.

  She dropped the pictures back into the little space under the floor in Lester’s closet, her heart thundering in her chest. If he found her there, rooting through his ‘personals’ he would beat her.

  She peeped around the corner into their bedroom. She half expected him to be standing there. But she was alone.

  Been alone since the day your daddy gave you to Doctor Lester Brinkmore, a voice reminded Leona.

  She closed her eyes, forced herself to breathe.

  She reached back into the hole in the floor.

  Some of the dead women were naked, or only partially clothed. In one photo, the woman had been posed, her head tilted back to expose her throat. The angry bruises around her neck shouted accusations.

  There were other things in the hole: a pair of silver eyeglasses with one lens smashed, a single gold hoop earring with dried blood on the clasp. And a doll.

  The doll was a tiny replica of an Indian baby, wrapped in a red and white blanket. A lock of black hair had been attached to its head. Leona had seen similar dolls in the shops inside the Indian casinos across the Lake in Michigan.

  This is a Katchina, Leona thought. Yes that’s right.

  They’d visited the Indian shops when Lester took her to Michigan on their honeymoon. Sometimes the Indian women adorned the dolls with locks of their own hair to entreat the spirits to protect their newborn babies.

  Leona stared at the doll and the pictures until her vision swam and her head ached. It took her a moment to realize that the alarm clock on the stove was chiming.

  She wiped her eyes. Lester was due in from the hospital any minute. If he found she’d cooked his porterhouse too long or not enough...if it wasn’t exactly the way he liked it, she would suffer for it.

  Leona put the doll and the pictures back in the hole.

  She’d finished shining Lester’s shoes the same way she’d done once every week for the last twelve years. But when she’d set them down in their usual spot, on the floor in the back of his closet behind his suits, one of the floorboards had come loose. Leona had pushed down on the floorboard and found the hollow space beneath.

  Then she’d seen the pictures.

  Like a cry for help, she thought.

  Leona pushed such thoughts away, put them away with the terrible faked pictures. The stove was chiming again.

  She went and got Lester’s dinner.

  Ivy Horse dragged herself out of the mass grave she shared with eleven other corpses. The Pain, like a ringing shriek in her mind, refused to leave her in peace. She coughed up the pebbles and dirt her killer had forced her to swallow before he’d strangled her, and climbed out of the hole into which he’d tossed her like so much trash.

  She didn’t see the rude staircase that led up to the first floor of the fire gutted old house. Rats had taken her right eye the second night of her internment. The Pain guided her feet toward the stairs. As she walked through the halls of the dark old house, the Pain sang to her. As she stepped out into the moonlight the Pain told her who she’d been: the granddaughter of African slaves and Seminole Indians, descended from the Florida tribes who f
led Southern hatred during the Great Northern Migration of the nineteen-thirties and forties.

  She’d been poor. During the toughest times she’d hooked a little to pay the bills. She’d promised herself a million times that she would stop; Just one more “date.” But two part time jobs weren’t always enough. Then she’d met Joe, a good man who treated her well. Together they’d fallen, and she quit the life for good.

  A few months later, they’d gotten the good news.

  They’d decided to leave the City. Chicago was no longer the Great Northern Dream it had been for their parents. A housing project was no place to raise a family. She’d been on her way out to her parents’ house in Hammond when her car quit on her. The last thing she remembered was starting at the sharp rap on her window. And the successful looking black man who asked if she needed help.

  The Pain comforted her as she walked alongside the dark stand of trees that bordered the highway, not far from where her car had broken down exactly one month ago.

  Ivy Horse walked on into the darkness, listening.

  The Pain was instructive about many things.

  ***

  Lester hit Leona so hard that her eyes rolled back into her head; for a moment she thought she was going to black out.

  “You think I owe you anything, you dumb monkey?” he snarled. “You think I owe you another day of breathin’ my air and walkin’ on my floors?”

  “No, Lester,” Leona said.

  “Every morning I go out of this house and take care of people who call me ‘nigger’ behind my back.”

  “Yes, Lester.”

  “Last thing I need is you naggin’ me about where I’ve been and who I’ve been with.”

  Lester let her go. Leona half staggered/half fell trying to get away from him.

  He’d come in two hours late from the hospital. In a panic, she’d done everything she knew to keep his porterhouse from drying out. But he’d come in stinking of expensive whiskey, sat in front of the television and eaten his dinner without a word to her.

  Leona thought about the pictures. The women with their heads tilted up. The bruises on their throats. He’s gonna kill you, fool.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the blare of sound from the television.

  “…police have bee been hard-pressed to come up with any leads in the disappearances of a dozen women from the Alderman-Brody housing developments and the surrounding area. Terrified residents of the ‘projects’ are calling for an investigation.”