The Last Bender, Chapter 1

 

           

THE LAST BENDER

 

By Buzz Callaway

 

 

 

Even damnation is poisoned with rainbow.

Leonard Cohen, The Old Revolution

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

Blood. Never have I seen so much blood. It was on the ceiling in big raggedy ovals and splashed on the walls. It formed a vinyl slick across the floor and dribbled off the fixtures of sinks and cabinets and into thickening puddles in a chorus of pit pit pits, punctuated by occasional dunks. No, I have never seen so much blood, not even in the war.

            There were no bodies. Just the path slicked in the blood when the killers dragged the corpses out the door. A man was doubled over in the hall retching; women searched for bone fragments, hair and tissue samples and fibers. They dusted for prints, but they didn’t find any.

            Lab 7 had been wiped clean and painted with fresh blood and that was it.

            Laraby, SVP of security, handed me a pair of gloves, boots that came up to my knees and a face mask, all made of the same heavy duty black rubber. A snorkel fit into the mouth hole of the mask. The end of the snorkel hooked up to a corrugated hose which was connected to a machine about the size and shape of a Sumo wrestler. It bristled with gauges, dials, and spigots.

            “Clean air,” he said, indicating with lips and eyebrows that I shouldn’t hesitate to wear this rubber junk.

            “How do I know sharing air with that crew isn’t worse than wading into this, this, mucilaginous sea of grenadine?”

            “Put it on and shut up, Jack. We’ve got work to do.”

            The mask smelled like macaroni and cheese. Gurgles echoed and raced through dark chambers. We entered the room. At three-foot intervals, women bent like lawn chotchkies scooped samples into sterile containers. Another group waited outside with the wet vacs. Behind them was a sterilizing crew.

            I pulled open a drawer here, a cabinet there with a pen. They had awakened me at three in the morning for this. Most of the time I felt like a whore pretending to come but that morning I couldn’t even do that.  

            Now my world was full of dead people. I imagined them shrieking into their gags, chests heaving as each of the others is carved into pieces. Nothing boring about that.

            It wouldn’t just be the cops sticking their noses in, either. They were the appetizer to a seven-course meal of private dick. Insurance men. Lawyers who get a strong whiff of lawsuit. It was the rusty razor for me.

            I chewed on it so hard it made my mouth sour, so I lifted the mask and popped a Lemon Drop sucker in. It bit sweet and dry before dissolving into syrup on my tongue. I sucked and loafed as inconspicuously as possible in the corner farthest from the door. As I stared at my cuticles, wondering if maybe I needed some more zinc supplements, I noticed a small scrap of paper wedged behind a gas pipe. I didn’t expect to see it, and I didn’t want to see it.

            They were starting to vacuum up the gore with a blue and white Zamboni. The machine sucked and slurped its way through the room brushing a dull pink sheen across the floor. The man riding it looked like a corrugated pig. His hair was bunched up by the elastic strap. He had little, zonked out eyes. Riding around the room, he barely looked at the walls or corners. Orange rubber headphones plugged up his ears and I saw the holographic prism embedded in his glasses, which projected talk shows and soaps till the five o’clock agitprop and it was time to punch out.

            That scrap of paper was like a bug up my nose. The little Zamboni guy was closing in on it. If I didn’t act I’d never know. Some god awful instinct for self-destruction kicked in and compelled me to reach down and grab the smudged note, hastily folded as if to stuff in a shirt pocket. Maybe it fell out when someone bent over to tie her shoe. Maybe a fan blew it off the counter. I palmed it and slipped it into my jacket pocket and the bored, corrugated man hummed past.

            At the other end of the room workers wrapped in latex scrubbed the ceiling with brushes screwed into plastic broom handles. Bloody suds dripped onto the smooth pink sheen of the Zambonied floor, which didn’t seem to faze the pigman at all. So long as he got to ride around on a padded seat watching hysterical insurance salesmen spit out the names of mothballed submarines and slamming buzzers, he’d be happy.    

            The air in the tubing had become truly foul. I didn’t look at the paper before slipping it into my pocket. I didn’t want Laraby or the little pigman to see. The mask fogged up and the machine started to grind and splutter. A huge gust of acrid steam surged against my lips and shot like ammonia fumes up my nose. All at once, everyone ripped their gear off.

           

            Laraby and I rode the elevator up to the tenth floor. He’d done nothing but narrowly avoid getting his toes squashed by the Zamboni. At least I checked the cabinets for smudges before the women in latex came to wipe them down with SheenAll. I even looked for footprints and signs of a struggle.

            Laraby leaned back in his chair. He placed his fake alligator loafers up on the desk. Laraby’s desk was always spotlessly clean. There was nothing on it but blobs of light. “Whuddya think Jack?” he asked. The man did his best to look a certain way but it just didn’t work. It wasn’t that he was ugly, which of course he was. Corporate security does that. It was that he only bought clothes off the rack. His little purple head emerged from one of those sawdust necks that looks like it’d been busted up in a car wreck that should have left him road kill but didn’t. Maybe he could have been a CEO, but without the jug ears and cauliflower nose he’d never make pure heat. He’d always look like a car boosting prick.

            What did I think. I looked at the black windows of the buildings and bent street signs. Swarms of flies lifting and landing on flooded piles of garbage. The whole city looked like low tide, the puke of Leviathan.

            Finally I said nothing.

            “Do I need to say this stinks?” he asked.

            “I’ll keep it in mind.”

            He laughed and made a temple of his fingers, shifting in the chair. Laraby was an asshole all right but he liked to pretend he wasn’t.

            Then I told him what I thought. “I don’t know what happened in there,” I said. “Did ten people die? Twenty? How did blood get on the ceiling? Why did they take everything with them, every piece of equipment, every spigot hose, every test tube and light bulb and pencil?”

            He smiled a perfunctory smile and said, “Is that all?”

            “Who was in Lab 7 and why?”

            He sizzled in his chair a bit before handing me the folder with the 8×10 glossy of a guy with one long eyebrow and the rest of his face buried in beard. “Dr. Bromion St. Claude. Maybe you’ve seen him around.”

            I shook my head. “Who is he?”

            “He’s big Jack.”

            “Ho ho ho.”

            “I mean he’s worth money. “

            “You don’t say?”  

            “Take the rest of the day. I’ll see you in the morning. Stronghole’s your partner on the case.”

            I had to swallow my vomit. “Stronghole? Why him?”

            “He’s a good man for this sort of thing. I trust him.”

            “I like to work alone.”

            “Yeah, I know you like to work alone Jack. But this is not the usual kind of accident. This is bad for everybody, even us.” He took his feet off the table and pressed his hands on the blobs of light which had started to look like bloated corpses. He dug his fingers into their eyes.

            “Sure,” I said. “Sure it was something bad. The blood Laraby. It was on the ceiling.”

            “Get a good night’s sleep. Stronghole was a grunt like you.”

            “I wasn’t a grunt.”

            “You know what I mean,” he said. “Now calm down.” Laraby stood. It was time to leave.

            I said, still seated, “You don’t trust me. That’s how come Stronghole.”

            “The kid Jack, he’s young.” His fingers were starting to discolor. He wanted me out in a big way.

            “Not if he was a grunt.”

            “I mean in looks, he has heart,” he said, starting to hesitate, starting to ease his ass back down into the chair. If I could make him sit, then this was worth it.

            I said, “If the man has heart, this place will fuck him face down for it.”

            “I’ll have the lab report on my desk by tonight. Meet me for breakfast. Eight o’clock sharp. Then, you go over it with the kid.”

            “All right,” I said, and left.