…eyes no longer rest. There’s a swishing sound he barely notices anymore.
The office is so sad 'n' gloomy even the ray of light from the teensy lamp on his desk corner is Hank Williams-ing through "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." The desk itself, an oblong number salvaged at a fire sale and missing a leg or a foot –he hasn't gotten around to investigating which – is blanketed in piles of case folders and scattered photographs of crime scenes, of acts of brutality not for the fainthearted or those whose tum-tums easily upset. Bllam was guilty of both. Somewhere outside the cone of light, behind his desk and the clouds of cigarette smoke he sat, breathing through his nose the way he believed some guru might have taught him to do at one time in order to maintain composure in times of stress. The windows were shuttered, the door to his office closed.
It’s not a swish…swish… swish kind of raw clawing, like the scratching of chickens on the bald coop ground; it’s more of a swishswishswish. As if the chicken scratched as the baker beat his batter.
The office is in a building in the worst part of town, across from the Spa. Both office and building are scheduled for demolition, but by some strange miracle the power is still on. Between the first joints of his forefinger and his middle finger a cigarette either grows its ash tail or shrinks its pure, untouched tobacco. He slouches. The pouches beneath his eyes sag. Reluctant, heavy, his hand rises in slow motion mouthwards, his elbow seeking purchase on the desk to support the weight of his upper body, which threatens daily to crumble in its own 9/11 event. It costs him precious time and energy to smoke, but not doing so is too close to silence: the mere thought sends him to dark places.
What WAS that swishing sound? he finally thinks.
His gaze skitters and traipses over the files and pictures, force of habit, despite being sure he would, again, spot nothing new. His head sags to meet his smoking hand with cracked, parched lips. Immediately after expiring a healthy cloud he returns to nasal breathing. The ashen tail of his coffin nail looses itself, uncouples, and plummets to its resting place.
Onceupona he had a life, a wife and a kid, a baby boy. Then the case overran everything he was, produced a Bllam no one foresaw. He would lapse into deep thought, come home late from work, check out of conversations, wear his pants or underwear backwards, forget the medications he started taking, wonder why his feet felt funny and look down to find his shoes on the wrong feet. Billie suspected infidelity but he just found it hard to escape his own mind. He trailed something too large to comprehend, far larger than himself, bigger than the world he had known.
No one else saw it the way his eyes did. Either his vision was off or theirs.
Where he saw a case others saw nothing at all. Though that was another thought that kept him from being home on time, from getting any closer to catching the perp. The chief himself had grown frustrated, and accosted the young policeman one night while he changed. It was Christmas Eve–Bill, Jr.'s third on the force–and he was expected for dinner.
Sir? he asked, his Ked mid-air, halfway to his foot.
I said 'Do you desire a future with our force, Bllam?' Captain Rozette said. His eyes gripped Bllam's fiercely, the way a starving jungle cat might a rabbit. His slightest movement, of eyes or body, was lunged at by the Captain's gaze, eyes first then head. His lips were tight against his jaw, his jaw thrust out in the manner of someone who enjoyed his chewing tobacco. You have no case. I hired you as a favor to your father. I've been more than patient with you.
No case? Bllam snorted. The bodies...
Don't you snort your ass at me, the good Captain said, loud but not loud. His hands never left his duty belt. It looked natural, by now, the Captain's hands on his duty belt. As to your…victims–natural causes, he added in a calmer voice. Natur...a..are you serious, Captain?" Bllam stood, without a shoe, in a white tank top and a pair of Calvin Klone jeans. You've seen the dismemberments, bullet holes, hearts carved out, lungs scorched...
All natural to the lifestyle led by each of your...victims. Leave it son. You're young and have a whole career in front of you. No need to make your mark now. Besides, our department doesn't have the resources to follow up on your mystery case.
What if I worked it on my own time?" Bllam asked. Won't bother a soul. Captain...," he turns the shoe over in his hand, ...you've seen the kids.
The muscles in the Captain's jaw flexed. Twice. Three times. If he blinked Bllam didn't notice. He felt only the man’s hatred spill out and wash over him. The Captain deliberated: his tongue herded his chaw from one side of his mouth to the other. His weight followed, from right foot to left.
I don't want to know anything about it, the Captain said low, suddenly with a small smile. I don't want to hear about your progress. If you get in trouble you're on your own. If any of it comes out I'll be coming down on you...hard.
At first he thought Great! I'm doing something meaningful. But Billie and Bill, Jr. waited at home for a good husband and father, not for the crumbling wreck he was morphing into.
When his mouth opened the case came out. When he thought of the case his ears closed. Lapses on the job got him demoted to beat cop. Lapses at home landed him on the couch, out of the core life of his small family. Never one of the more respected members on the force, his regular negligence and mental distance ensured he was tolerated, not accepted, until there were no friends or supporters left to protect him from wrathful and/or impatient superiors, from his cold and despondent wife, from the look of disappointment and the lack of expectation Bill, Jr. showed him.
After giving up his gun and badge, his one-time pals at the station house did not throw him a party. They danced on his face in the locker room. Some cases you just gotta know to leave alone, they said. You couldn't just leave it be, could you? they said. You make us all look bad, they said. Cretino, Get out and stay out, Take your high and mighty principles with you, they said. He's innocent, they did not say. Telling.
Back when he was in their club, after a week of sleeping little, he shot a llama outside town on a botched roundup of a local drug ring. His explanation–that it was a case of mistaken identity–did not prevent his pals from hanging the moniker "Bllam" on him. The llama survived. He still sent letters written by ex-friends as pranks.
His smoke curls upwards slowly and deliberately in the still, lifeless chamber, with its weird angles, sloped flooring, cracked ceiling, irregular, nine-sided polygonal shape, and hollowed-out acoustics. His nasal breathing echoes through it, a constant ebbing and flowing like a day at the beach, one never to be visited by humans other than Bllam. His mind wanders back to Bill, Jr. in the backyard, to Billie riding shotgun and trying hopelessly to navigate him through foreign lands.
The bell in the church tower, he remembers, hangs alone. Tornado, air raid, and/or civil defense sirens like the Federal Signal Thunderbolt 1003 or the glorious ACA Allertor 125 also sounded their banshee yawps over the rooftops to annoyed populaces far and wide – solo. Bllam has an ashtray somewhere, but these days his ashes scatter the floor. The bags under his bloodshot eyes hang like wet, white flags, the skin on his knuckles is chipped and chapped, reddish. Itchy. His beard is far from kempt, well over the border into 'un-.' He manages to brush his teeth and wash himself down at the Y now and then, but his diet is poor. Live insects often provide protein when there's no cat food. Which reminds him... He digs in his coat pocket and removes a doggie biscuit, but the crunch disturbs the airwaves and sends a portion of a stack of folders floorwards. Papers and pictures, some tickets and receipts, scatter and blanket, creating a geometrical Rorschach test he has already failed many times, ones he had up until now conducted consciously with a swipe of a hand. He sees a blackened lung. He sees a severed limb. He sees a mass grave. He sees a newspaper clipping describing another body and a pic of a vic with tiny hands tied behind her back. He switches cigarette hands and removes a bottle of Ol' Rotgut from his other coat pocket, unscrews the cork, gulps a mouthful. Maybe tonight he will sleep. He caps the bottle and uses it to lengthen his arm: the cap now fingers a body or two aside, showing more bodies below. Then he pops a Bums, his favorite antacid, swallows it dry. Gulps. Burps. Pounds his breast, thumb to chest. Outside a train rumbles its rolling thunder, one end of the sky to the other. Fat raindrops splat on the shudders; not forty days of it but almost. In the street below a car will drive by and fjord the puddles leaning up against the high curbs, a doppler wooosh one end of the street to the other.
It's this killer's numbers that keep him going. All other totals of similarly executed crimes, even those generated by heads of state atop vast nations of resources, are laughable.
Again he divines that swishing sound, but this time looks down to see his hand, on the desk, sentient, trembling, rustling papers, engaging in a life of its own. swishswishswishswish
Yet, does this killer sport a clever nickname when described by the press? Is his name whispered in hushed tones by mothers and grandmothers? Does the mere thought of him promote insomnia and acid reflux in anyone (other than him)? Is this hunter hunted at all (by anyone but him)? The thought alone, that he is the only person devoting any time to tracking down this most heinous villain, is enough to keep him smoking, drinking, snorting paint thinner, etc., and from sleeping. To keep him alone, banished, an outsider, a freak, someone not worth wasting time, love or affection on. From his pants pocket he draws a black notebook and flips pages around to look at a barely legible scrawl he scrawled standing outside the Our Lady of Sorrows Church. No steeple? it said. The shadows come, as always. Snaking from corners and darkened spaces like prehensile pseudopods, clinging to and climbing the drapes, his chair legs, eating away at spaces well-lit the way the waves wipe away edges of shoreline. They seek, like worms, like legless centipedes, lines of ants; they have places to be and purposes unknown, hidden. One popular destination is the space between baseboard and wall that Bill, at first, hadn't known was there. That space is full of shadows now. He notices his right leg is tired. Then he realizes he is dribbling it up and down the way a drummer might when hammering his bass drum pedal. Like a piston revved. He tells it to stop then pulls his wooden folding chair closer to his desk. Somewhere under his mountain of evidence he unearths a lack of a pencil, finds it behind his ear, and, after a search by agitated hands, he unearths his diary. It has a pony on it and a lock he broke open months ago to rip out the only four pages containing some girl's teenage traumas; he makes it his own. He found it next to a trash can loaded with a rich smorgasbord of human and pet food. He piles more piles of notes, pictures, and folders atop of each other, clearing a place for himself. He leans forward and licks his pencil tip. Until his weariness takes him, he writes himself all the way to Lake Van
and to the Yin on its western shore, up on the mountain behind it…
