Читать книгу Drag Thing; or, The Strange Case of Jackle and Hyde: A Novel of Horror - Victor J. Banis - Страница 5

CHAPTER TWO

It was 3:00 a.m. in the hood, and the Moes were in their domain.

In the wee hours like this, you could almost smell the fog and taste the sea tang in it. Somewhere in the far distance a mournful foghorn lowed. Hector kicked an empty Pepsi can out of his way, and it rolled into the gutter. Clackety-clackety-clack. The racket shattered the stillness of the night. A loose sheet of newspaper sailed by on the wind and draped itself briefly around a telephone pole before billowing on its way.

Hector pulled the hood of his parka up. The pair walking alongside him followed suit. Not that it was cold, it wasn’t. It was a warm San Francisco night, late October, when the city got its real summer after the “June gloom” that generally lasted through September. The hoods were more a matter of style than comfort. Gangbangers all wore hoods.

“Getting late,” Archie said.

“You got that right,” Hector agreed.

“We did good, didn’t we?” Tom said.

“For sure,” Archie said. “We did real great.”

The three Moes honestly considered themselves good guys. Super heroes, sort of, like the guys in the comic books: Batman, for instance, who was their favorite, who prowled the streets at night and sorted things out. Which was kind of what they had been doing, as they saw it: sorting things out.

Of course, they didn’t wear Batman’s mask and cape, or tights like Spiderman. They were in their usual outfits: black bandanas around their heads—black was their color—and drooping black pants that clung perilously to scrawny hips and looked in danger of falling around their ankles at any moment. The extra large tee shirts they sported hung over their pants and halfway down their thighs and so spared anyone who saw them the glimpses of butt cracks that would otherwise have been revealed by the low-riding pants. Customarily, the gangbanger costume included boxer shorts under the low riders, to cover butt cracks, and the Moes would certainly have worn the prescribed boxers too, if Tom had not been caught trying to shoplift that package of them from Macy’s. As it was, he had barely gotten away from the security guards without getting busted, but he had gotten away empty-handed, the result of which was butt cleavage instead of boxers and overly large tee shirts to cover the cleavage—not to mention sparing their half-bare bottoms the chill of the night air.

They did not exactly fight crime, either, not the way Batman did, say, but, like, they did do their share to keep the streets safe from ragheads and slanty-eyes and “Meskins,” which, as they saw it, counted as doing good. Never mind that Hector’s father was from Tijuana. His mother was white and he had been born in the U.S. of A., so he considered himself totally American, and more than one guy who had suggested he was a beaner had ended up eating his teeth.

Unlike the guy they had left behind in the alley, who had beaner written all over him, whereas the chick had been a total Anglo. Meaning they had felt it their Moe duty to straighten the dude out. As for her, they figured they were doing her a favor by educating her. Plus, they figured they had made her happy whether she liked it or not. Getting porked by the Moes ought to be considered an honor in any chick’s book, the way they saw it, even if the chick sometimes didn’t appreciate it. They were convinced Batman would have done the same and, hey, what chick wouldn’t be proud to be porked by Batman?

Besides, they had let both of them live, hadn’t they? Which a lot of gangbangers wouldn’t have done, since they might possibly finger you later, but hell, the Moes didn’t mind that exactly. It just made their reputation that much tougher, which was how they liked it. When people knew you were badass, it kept them out of your hair.

Yeah, sure, they had broken the guy’s knee with a lead pipe, but just the one knee, and that had been to keep him off their case while they took care of his girlfriend. Archie had been all for just tying the guy up, but there was one flaw in that idea, as Hector had pointed out: “We got no rope.”

The way Hector explained it, breaking the guy’s knee was a lot simpler, and better for him, too. Better than, say, killing him.

As for the bitch, she would have gotten off with nothing but a good time if she hadn’t spit in Hector’s face. She did it for no good reason, too. All he had said while he was humping her was, “Now, ain’t this better than doing it with that pansy boyfriend of yours?” and she had hauled off and thwacked him with a big gob, splat, right in his face, so, sure he had busted her jaw. Which was strictly her own fault, anybody could see that. Some people just had no frigging gratitude, that was for sure.

It had totally pissed him off, though, because he had been having a hard time getting his rocks off and had just figured he would go for some head instead, and even he knew she couldn’t do that with a busted jaw, so he had ended up whacking off on her belly instead and hoping the guys didn’t notice, all of which left him really super pissed.

Still, from their point of view, it had been a successful night. They had taken good care of the chick and they had left both of them alive. They had gotten themselves some strange pussy, plus they had scored some crack out of the dude’s pocket, and some cash. All in all, they considered it a good night’s work. Batman would be proud of them, they were convinced of it.

“Four, five, six.” Hector counted out the money. He palmed the seventh buck for himself and gave the others two bucks each. “Jesus, six bucks is all the cheapskate had on him. What a bummer,” he said.

“The guy was a fucking loser,” Archie said. It still bothered him a little about busting the guy’s knee, but he knew better than to hassle Hector about that. Anyway, Hector was probably right. He usually was. That was why he was the brains of their group. Plus, Hector could be a totally mean dude when he was crossed.

“I love this town.” Tom said with sudden enthusiasm. He pocketed his two dollars and flashed a big grin at his bros. He had a satisfied ache in his balls and a couple of bucks. It felt good. He felt on top of the world. They were the Moes, and fuck anyone who forgot it.

“You got that right,” Archie said.

“Yeah.” Hector gave them a baleful look. He could still hear the crunch as the guy’s knee had shattered. Personally, he liked the sound. Only, “I should have fucked her again,” he said.

The town that the Moes loved was San Francisco. They were only a geographical mile or so away from Union Square and the San Francisco of high-end stores and cable cars and sidewalk cafes, but culturally it was more like a million light years. The stores here were the “nothing-over-a-dollar” variety, cars were where you shopped for a tape deck or some hubcaps, and rats scooted across sidewalks reeking of piss and garbage. All of which was to say, this was their San Francisco. They were, if not the kings, at least the princes of the city. Or at least, of a few streets. For sure, they ruled this couple of blocks in the Mission, anyway.

“What a night.” Tom smacked his lips with satisfaction.

“Should have fucked her again,” Hector said.

“She sure loved it, didn’t she? I’ll bet that pansy couldn’t even do it,” Archie said. He thought for a moment. “I’m still kind of horny, though. Maybe we can find something else to jump.”

“Not much out on the street this late,” Hector said.

They hadn’t seen anybody since they had left the couple back in that alley a few blocks away. The streets were quiet. A lone taxi cruised through a nearby intersection, headlights slicing the night. Somewhere in the distance an F car rattled noisily on its tracks, preternaturally loud in the pre-dawn stillness. Faint snippets of a Beastie Boys number faded in and out on the wisps of fog. The city curled up to sleep for the night.

“You guys smell that dog poop right alongside her?” Tom asked, grinning. “I almost sat in it.” He had actually put his hand right in it but he didn’t tell them that. Remembering, he brought his hand up to his nose to sniff at it.

Jeez. He could still smell the dog poop. He wiped the hand surreptitiously down the leg of his jeans. People are such shits, he thought, disgusted. There oughta be a law.

“I thought that was her perfume,” Archie said.

“Hyuk, hyuk, hyuk.” When he laughed, Tom sounded like he was gagging, in Hector’s opinion. Worse, like he was gagging in falsetto, which Hector personally thought was disgusting. Totally girlie man, he thought, and said aloud, “I love this town.”

“You got that right,” Archie said.

They stopped in a doorway to smoke the crack. Archie took it out of his pocket and carefully unwrapped the paper it was in. “What the fuck?” he swore.

“What?” Hector leaned close to look over his shoulder. “What?” he asked again.

“This ain’t no crack. It’s—it’s—”

Hector reached over his shoulder and poked at it with one finger. “Fuck! It’s bubble gum,” he said.

Archie brought it up to his nose and sniffed. Peppermint. “Shit. Why the fuck would a guy carry chewed up bubble gum around in his pocket?” he asked. Disgusted, he flung the gum into the street.

“I oughta go back there and bust his other knee cap for him, the dumb fuck,” Hector said.

“Dudes...,” Tom said.

“Plus, I should have fucked her again.”

“Dudes,” Tom said again. He pointed down the street, to where a woman a block and a half away walked in their direction. Except for hookers, you didn’t often see a lone woman on the streets of the Mission and for sure not at this hour of the night. “Check it out.”

“Jesus, what is that?” Hector asked, squinting.

“Looks like some kind of freak,” Archie said.

The Moes stared as she strolled nearer. The woman—if she was a woman—was like no woman they had ever seen before. She was tall, for starters, very tall—at least a foot taller than Archie, maybe even two feet taller, and at six foot two inches he was the tallest of the bunch. Her legs beneath her skirt looked like tree trunks and her arms were massive. Everything about her, in fact, was grotesquely outsized, like some comic book mutant.

Tom was the first to realize what they were seeing: “It’s a drag queen,” he said, astonished. Drag queens were even rarer on these streets, at this time of night, than real women. A drag queen strolling the Mission in the wee hours was practically begging for trouble.

“No shit. It’s the ugliest fucking drag queen in the world,” Archie said.

“Jesus, it’s that Hulk guy in a dress,” Tom said.

“Hulk Hogan?” Archie said, puzzled.

“The green one,” Tom explained.

“Oh, I get it,” Archie said, nodding sagely. “The Green Hornet dude.”

“Sweet,” Hector said, grinning. “Dudes, this is gonna be fun. Come on.”

He stepped from the doorway and began to saunter up the sidewalk in her direction, the other two trailing in his wake. Still unaware of the Moes, the approaching dragster smiled up at an almost full moon as it drifted in and out of the clouds and hummed tunelessly to herself. She had the look of a woman with nothing more on her mind than an ordinary late-night saunter to enjoy the lovely evening.

She was not, however, an ordinary woman. Not even, Hector thought as they got nearer, an ordinary drag queen. Up close, she appeared even more bizarre than she had at a distance. Her dress, a flowery print wrapped around her sarong fashion, looked as if it had recently hung at someone’s window. She wore a fanny pack on one immense hip and on her head a sort of turban fashioned from a towel, the kind found on rollers in restrooms. A makeshift, an adlib kind of drag, then, but the Moes were no specialists in fashion, drag or otherwise. All they knew was that she looked weird, really weird.

They were no more than eight or ten feet from her when she finally looked in their direction and caught sight of them. She stopped in her tracks and peered nearsightedly down her nose at the threesome.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” she addressed them. She did not sound worried. Which, Hector thought, was pretty dense of her, considering.

“Hey, you know, we need to talk to you,” Hector said.

“Yes?” She smiled politely.

“Well, see, like, we’re The Moes, the three of us, you dig, and this is our turf,” he said.

She gave him a cautious nod. “I am so pleased to meet you, Mister Moe. And Mister Moe, and Mister Moe,” she said, nodding to Archie and Tom in turn, and turned back to Hector. “Now, then, how can I help you, gentlemen?”

Hector gave his crotch a meaningful grab and made smoochey-smoochey noises with his lips. “To tell you the truth,” he said, grinning, “we was thinking we could help you, Momma.”

Her smile vanished and she planted her ham-sized hands on her hips. “Don’t call me Momma, Mister Moe,” she said in a firm baritone. “I’m quite sure I am no relation of yours.”

Hector was not at all intimidated by her considerable size. It was his opinion that all queers were sissies. Even the gym bunnies with the pumped up arms and the massive chests could be counted on to turn into weeping Jell-O when confronted by a real man and he was sure this freaky looking drag queen would be no different. Besides, he was emboldened to see that while he was chatting with her, his two companions had slunk into positions on either side of her.

The drag queen saw them too, and turned toward Tom. “Go away,” she said in an imperious voice. “I command you to vanish.”

“Now, Momma, that’s no way to talk to a man.” Hector took advantage of her distraction to give the vast acreage of her fanny a pat.

Kapow! The next second he was in the air. He flew like a rocket and landed on a nearby garbage can with a bang. A foot-long rat that had been enjoying its supper in the can squealed an indignant protest and darted for an alley.

It happened so suddenly that Hector couldn’t quite grasp how he had one minute been patting her fanny and the next he was sitting on the sidewalk in a mess of stinking coffee grounds and banana peels. He shook his head, dazed and temporarily at a loss for breath.

“I said, don’t call me Momma!” she said emphatically. “And keep your filthy hands to yourself, creep.”

Stunned, Tom and Archie froze in place. In the slow-working machinery of his mind, Tom had just decided that it might be prudent to back away a bit, but he was too laggardly in getting the message to his feet. A hand the size of a catcher’s mitt grabbed the front of his jacket and another one started slapping his head from one side to the other. Whack! Whack! Whack!

“Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!” he cried.

To his credit, Archie moved as if to come to his friend’s aid with one of the karate kicks that had served him well in any number of street brawls, a kick aimed straight for the dragster’s crotch.

The kick never reached its target, unfortunately. In something less than the blink of an eye, the drag had let go of Tom’s jacket and instead seized Archie’s foot in midair. Like Hector before him, Archie found himself suddenly aloft, soaring in an orbit about the head of their would-be prey, while his leg felt as if it were being ripped out of its socket.

“Hey, ow, wait,” he squealed, “Let me go, let go.”

She did. He sailed through space, emitting a high-pitched series of squeaks and squeals until he landed atop Hector with a loud Kerplunk!

Hector gave a howl of agony and cried, “Shit. Get off, me, you fuck.” He scrambled to get out from under his sudden burden.

Tom made no pretense of heroics. He was not much of a thinker, but in a situation like this, he thought very clearly that it was every man for himself. He turned and ran without a backward glance.

Archie and Hector, seeing her attention momentarily fixed on Tom’s fleeing back, scrambled to their feet and tried to run in the other direction. Hector’s left arm hung down limply while Archie dragged one leg and hopped frantically on the other, which made for a slow shuffling process. Hector easily outdistanced him, bad arm and all, and disappeared around the nearest corner, but Archie paused to look back, scared that she might be after them. If she was, he had decided his only hope would be to drop to his knees and plead for mercy. He thought that this was no time for pride. He knew he didn’t have a chance of outrunning her with his leg hurting the way it was and, strong as she was, he was certain now that he couldn’t outfight her.

He was relieved to see that she was still where she had been, though, hands on hips, looking after them with a big grin on her face.

“Hey,” Archie shouted, leaning against a brick wall and trying to ignore the pain in his leg. “Who the hell are you?”

“Me?” For the first time since they had met her, she looked unsure of herself, as if she didn’t know the answer to that question either. “I’m—er....” She hesitated, her face screwed up in a thoughtful expression.

“Come on, you gotta have a name,” Archie said. “Everybody’s got a name, don’t they?”

From around the corner, Hector said, “Forget it, man, let’s go,” but Archie stood—or rather, leaned—his ground.

“I do have a name, of course I do. My name is....” Again she hesitated. Then she threw her head back and gave a loud guffaw. “It’s Thing,” she said.

“Thing?” Archie said in confusion. What kind of fucking name was that?

“My name is Thing,” she repeated, sounding altogether pleased with the revelation. “Drag Thing, to be exact.” With that she turned and sauntered away, still chortling to herself.

Archie followed Hector around the corner and found him backed into a darkened doorway, his eyes wide.

“Jesus, what happened there?” Archie asked.

“I think we just had a nightmare,” Hector said, anger taking over for his fear. “That fag, Tom, did you see him just take off running like that, the chicken shit, I thought we was Moes, we’re supposed to help one another out, ain’t we? Come on.”

Personally, Archie thought Tom had shown rare good judgment in running. In retrospect, he wished he had thought of it sooner himself, while he still had two good legs. But he didn’t think it wise to say that to Hector when he was sore. “What are we doing, bro?” he asked instead.

Hector, who felt that his role as captain of the Moes had been compromised by the events that had just occurred, thought it essential now to reestablish his leadership. “Just come on,” he said. For the first time in his life instead of dodging cops, he was looking for one to flag down. “And hope and pray we don’t run into that Drag Thing again.”

* * * *

By the time Drag Thing had gone two blocks, however, she had all but forgotten the Moes in the thrill of her new discovery: a shop called For The Girls. At first glance it might have been taken for just another woman’s store, but it took no more than a second glance to see that the clothes and accessories in the window were actually meant for men who wanted to dress as women. For one thing, most of them were huge. Even the wigs in the far corner, cascading down Styrofoam heads, were overlarge.

In her opinion, the dresses were tacky, though. She had an idea that she knew someone who could do much better for her than these, although at the moment she could not quite get that information to come into focus. Someone...she was sure of it. It would come to her in due time. Her memory was oddly fuzzy.

But the wigs, now...her eyes fell on a platinum blonde creation, in a Farrah Fawcett style. Twenty-nine ninety-eight, the tag said. Cheap, she thought, for such a beautiful head of hair.

“Hair,” she said aloud. “That’s what I need. Hair. Turbans are so out.” She whipped the makeshift turban from her head and tossed it into the street.

Of course the store’s entrance door was locked at this time of night, and, for some reason that she did not examine, she felt certain she was not likely to get back to shop in the morning, during normal business hours. She looked around and her glance fell on a broken piece of brick lying in the gutter. She picked it up and hefted it in her hand.

“We oughtn’t to be naughty,” she said aloud. “We really oughtn’t.” After only a moment’s hesitation, she lobbed the brick through the plate glass window. Crash! A shower of glass crystals rained down upon the sidewalk.

An alarm went off inside. Pooh, now the police will be on their way, she thought. Well, she consoled herself, her shopping would not take more than a minute, surely. She grabbed the blonde wig and plopped it on her head, unmindful of the fact that it was askew. She found a wallet in her fanny pack and took out a wad of cash, fingering through it. She slapped bills down in the window in quick succession. A five. Slap. Two more fives and a ten. How much was that? She counted out five ones and tossed them down beside the naked Styrofoam head. That was thirty, wasn’t it?

She was about to go when she noticed the make-up display. Yes, of course, she thought, I must have makeup too. And perfumes, you had to have perfume to be a real woman. There were bottles and bottles of perfumes here, and lipsticks. She grabbed a handful of the lipsticks and checked them for color. Too red. Too orange. Ugh. It was certainly evident that some people had no sense of style.

Inside the store, the alarm continued to ring ceaselessly. Clearly this was taking far too long. The police would be coming any minute now, wouldn’t they?

The police—something about the police teased her mind; but there wasn’t time now for her to think about that. She must away. She snatched up a huge purse from the window display and raked the entire array of makeup into it: lipsticks and rouges, mascara and scents, a full arsenal of quasi-feminine pulchritude.

Oh, dear, she thought, looking at the cash she had left. She really did not have time to add up her “purchases” and the money she had didn’t look like enough anyway. On the other hand, she truly did not want to cheat anyone either. She was not a dishonest person, after all. She had a great respect for the law. She was sure of it.

She fumbled one of the lipsticks out of the purse and used it to write on the broken glass: “I.O.U. for all these goodies. I promise to come back and pay.” She signed it Drag Thing and as an afterthought added a final, “I truly do promise.”

A wail in the distance warned of the approach of a police car. She started to go, and saw an enormous pair of shoes on a platform at the rear of the window, wonderful strapped things with towering heels and all aglitter with sequins that blinked an invitation at her.

How on earth had she missed those? She grabbed them as well before she turned and ran, her long, powerful legs eating up the distance in a flash, so that she had already vanished into the foggy night by the time the police car roared to the curb outside For The Girls.

As she ran, Drag Thing sang under her breath, and unfailingly out of tune, that song about how hard it was to be a woman.