Very Bad Deaths Page 4

  If I’ve given the impression that Smelly himself never spoke, that’s not strictly true. He did say things occasionally. Just seldom, and as economically as possible.

  I once saw him stop a riot with a two-sentence telephone call, for instance. No shit.

  It was the year when, all across North America, young men with long hair, beards, and no girlfriend somehow simultaneously decided, like scattered lemmings marching to separate seas, to band together and take over their campus’s library building. It was generally agreed that this would shorten the Vietnam War. Also, it was as much fun as a panty raid, but you didn’t have to feel like a total jackass.

  There was nothing like an official SDS chapter at Saint Billy Joe; the administration would never have permitted anything so radical. But that year our campus longhair supply finally reached critical mass—fifty or so. And so one sunny fall day, the same sort of migratory instinct that brings rural young men with mullet-head haircuts into 7-Elevens with cut-rate pistols led those fifty urban young men with Buffalo Bill haircuts, and two or three of the more adventurous girls, to march on the Chaminade Memorial Library together with guitars and antiwar banners and a pound of purported Acapulco Gold. They tried to set an American flag on fire in front of the main doors, and though they failed, they did manage to literally raise a stink, and the word spread round campus like fire. A crowd materialized in time to see the intrepid demonstrators announce that they were Liberating the Library, then disappear inside the building. Everyone backed off about half a football field, in case of gunplay or an air strike, and began taking sides.

  I was one of them. The spectators, not the demonstrators. I was as opposed to the war as anyone my age—even though I knew for certain the draft would never get me. But in the first place I had never voluntarily joined anything in my life. And in the second place I could not for the life of me imagine what good it would do to capture books.

  Still, I was definitely in the half of the crowd that was applauding the demonstrators. Over the next ten minutes or so the building slowly emptied of non-demonstrators—students, faculty and staff—adding to the crowd. Those who chose to stick around and watch events unfold also seemed to split about evenly between pro and anti. Arguments began. Volumes were raised. Immoderate language was heard. Campus Security showed up, raising the crowd’s density and lowering its average intelligence; the arguments became less intellectual in character. I remained an observer, present but passive, uninvolved.

  Suddenly I remembered that Smelly usually spent time in the library at this time of day, when it was least populated. I had not seen him come out. By now the library windows were mostly either broken or full of gleeful freaks hanging banners with defiant slogans on them. I scanned them anyway.

  And saw him. At a window on the second of three floors. He was in some office, talking on the phone, and looking intently out the window at us all.

  No. Past us.

  I glanced behind me and saw nothing remarkable, at least in that context. But Smelly was still staring out at the campus and frowning as ferociously as if something were there.

  Then something was, and suddenly I wasn’t having fun anymore. A group of guys came into view from behind the chem building, heading our way, and I knew at first glance it was Easy Company.

  It is a clue to their intelligence and their philosophical orientation that they chose to name themselves after a comic book, about a combat unit. (Sgt. Rock of Easy Company, a DC comic written by Robert Kanigher and drawn by the great Joe Kubert.) They were a pack of thugs, archconservative upperclassmen, most of them either engineering majors or jocks. They fervently supported the Vietnam War, almost enough to enlist, and found everything about the Age of Aquarius offensive, and liked to express their displeasure by beating the mortal shit out of any longhair they could manage to corner alone in a dark corner of the campus. Good Americans.

  This was the first time they were coming out in the open, in broad daylight, where they could be identified. But I knew it was them the moment I saw them. There were something like twenty of them. They looked like I’d pictured Easy Company: big, fit, smug, arrogant, and mean. I knew a couple by name, and wasn’t surprised to see them there. Since they did not have their prey outnumbered twenty to one, this time, they had brought utensils to help shape the flow of discourse. Axe handle. Tire iron. Brass knuckles. Louisville Slugger. Crowbar. Car antenna. Like that.

  I glanced back at the library and noticed Smelly still in that upstairs window, just hanging up the phone. I waved to get his attention, but couldn’t seem to catch his eye.

  I turned back to Easy Company. Even Campus Security had noticed the approach of a heavily armed mob looking for trouble. But unlike the shouted arguments they’d been having with other bystanders, the discussion they were now having with Easy Company was muted, damn near chummy.

  With a sinking feeling I looked back at the library again. Except for Smelly upstairs, the demonstrators seemed oblivious to their doom—to everything but how much fun they were having. Several were leaning out of various first floor windows, hanging banners, bellowing unintelligible things through a bullhorn, throwing Frisbees and leaflets to girls, having a swell time. Nobody was guarding the entrance. They’d settled for chaining the two big glass doors shut, overlooking the existence of things like crowbars and baseball bats and people disposed to use them in defense of the sacred honor of a library. I looked for Smelly, was relieved to see he was gone from the window. I hoped he was smart enough to be looking for a good place to hide.

  A few minutes later, Easy Company finished their palaver with the authorities and walked past me on either side, on their way to the library a few hundred yards distant. I looked hastily around. Not one Campus Security officer in sight. Maybe they’d all been beamed up to the mothership.

  I felt a powerful impulse to yell, “Hey! Assholes!” at the backs of Easy Company, as loud and challengingly as I could. They would stop their advance at least briefly and turn around to look at me. The goofballs in the library would hear, look, and be warned. Then they’d have a minute or two to prepare themselves, or flee out the back way, while Easy Company were busy kicking the mortal shit out of me. I thought of a very persuasive reason not to call out, which I can’t seem to call to mind just now. The goon squad was a hundred yards from the building. Fifty—

  Five men came walking around the corner of the building. They didn’t seem to be in any hurry, but they covered ground fast. They stopped in front of the library doors, spaced themselves a few feet apart, and folded their arms across their chests.

  All five of St. William Joseph’s black students.

  Easy Company, startled and nonplused, milled to a stop.

  The man in the middle of the five, a giant named Charlie Sanders, shook his Afro from side to side slowly, so that he met each pair of vigilante eyes at least briefly. In a voice that was gentle and surprisingly high pitched, yet carried clearly, he said, “No you don’t, either.”

  Easy Company looked at one another. They had the black guys outnumbered four to one, with hundreds more white people watching. They were nearly all heavily armed, and the black guys were showing only hands. On the other hand, you could see rednecks deciding, that didn’t mean they were unarmed. All Negros carried knives, right?

  Wheels turned. You could almost smell the smoke of thought. At least one of the five black students was known to be a goddam ballet dancer, for Chrissake. Then again, the son of a bitch did have thighs like Captain America. Arms too. Another was a nerd…but nerds could sometimes be tricky little bastards. All five appeared to be carved from blocks of obsidian.

  One of the most overlooked and underappreciated details of the Sixties, I believe, is that a baseball bat or tire iron is vastly less effective against a man with an Afro.

  A few of the goon squad tried to open a dialog, but were all unsuccessful. Charlie and his friends didn’t seem aware of their existence any more. Or inclined to move away from the doorway anytime today.
>
  Demonstrators had finally noticed the storm gathering at the portal, and began to shout various helpful things down from nearby windows. The thugs began to realize they were vulnerable to attack from overhead as long as they stood there.

  It didn’t happen all at once, but over the next little while, each of the members of Easy Company recalled pressing business in another part of the forest, and within a minute or two there didn’t seem to be any of them left.

  Nobody ever did find out how the ’Fro Five, as Bill Doane named them, had heard of the incipient massacre. Nor did anyone have a clue, or even a plausible theory, about why they decided to put themselves on the line to prevent it. Nobody white had the stones to ask, and nobody black was talking.

  I asked. For all the good it did me.

  That night, when Smelly got back to the room, I said, “You phoned Charlie, didn’t you?”

  He sat down at his desk and bent to get a Coke. He drank the stuff literally by the crate, at room temperature. He got a bottle, used a drawer handle to pop the cap off, and took a long gulp. I figured he was stalling. But after the belch, he said, “Yes.”

  His admission took me slightly aback. I’d expected him to lie, or at least duck and weave a little first. I wanted to ask why he’d done it, but the question suddenly seemed silly. He’d done it because it was the right thing to do. What I really wanted to know was—

  Because I was hastily thumbing through the script trying to catch up, what I blurted out was, “How?”

  As the word left my mouth I knew he would now say How what? and I would say How did you know? and he would say How did I know what? and I would say How did you know Easy Company were coming? and he would say I saw them, and I would say How did you see them through a solid building? and he would—

  “I just knew,” he said.

  “You smelled them coming,” I said, and then wished I could cut out my tongue. “I’m sorry, man, I didn’t mean that the way it sounds.” Yeah, and my vocal cords, too.

  “If you’re Serbian, and you were born in Croatia, you learn to smell violence coming, yes.” This was so long ago, I had no idea what he was talking about—but I got the gist, and it did seem to explain things, sort of. He turned away, set the Coke down on his desk, sat down, opened a text and began studying. It was the first time I could ever recall him voluntarily coming any closer than ten feet from the nearest person.

  So I did the same. Sat right beside him at my own desk, and opened a textbook. It was a kind of penance. Through some yoga technique I invented on the spot out of sheer necessity, I was able to make the eye on the side away from him do all the watering. After a few silent minutes, he made a long arm and opened the window a little more, and it helped. I think we kept it up for over an hour.

  The next time I spoke was just before we turned the lights out for the night. “How did you know Charlie Sanders’ phone number?”

  “There was a campus directory in that office.”

  “Ah.” We clicked our bed lights out.

  Odd, I thought. Each floor in every dorm had a single payphone, hanging on the wall just outside the RA’s room. There was indeed a college-published directory of all of them widely available. But to use it, Smelly would have had to know just what floor of which dorm Charlie lived on. “Hey, Zandor?”

  His answer was a snore. I gave up and went to sleep and it wasn’t until I was alone in the john brushing my teeth the next morning that I thought, Smelly doesn’t snore.

  The second question, why Charlie and his friends had done what they did in response to Smelly’s call, I asked Charlie the next day, when I found him alone in the cafeteria. He looked at me in silence for ten or fifteen seconds, and then changed the subject.

  That happened to me a lot when I tried to talk with black people in those days. Come to think, it still does, sometimes.

  That very evening, however, the whole subject was driven right out of my head for good, along with any other thoughts that might have been lurking in there. An incalculable number of thoughts deserted nearly a thousand heads in Olympia that night. Every thought but one, really.

  For that was the night the Bunny walked into Wanda’s Rest, and into legend.

  4.

  Wanda’s Rest had been, by all accounts, one of the best bordellos in the state of New York—a remarkable boast—when the Society of Mary of Geneva got a terrific deal on the hundred acre parcel just up the hill and built a large Catholic college on it, back in the late ’40s.

  Wanda was a realist, and had many powerful friends, including more than one whose collar was worn backwards. Negotiations were undertaken; conditions were sworn to; an accommodation was reached. The upstairs business was shut down forever. The bar downstairs became the whole business. It was the only bar remotely within walking distance of the college, and it was agreed that no other bar would ever be granted a license near there.

  The change suited nearly everybody, really. A monopoly bar just down the hill from a large college is, oddly enough, more lucrative than a good brothel, so Wanda was content. Her girls were much happier selling beer than themselves. And the powerful people who now would have to stop coming to Wanda’s were, if the truth be known, getting just a bit long in the tooth to keep up a reputation in a whorehouse anyway.

  By 1967, just about the only lingering clue as to the previous nature of Wanda’s Rest was that every one of Wanda’s employees and staff was a hard-boiled softhearted woman in her fifties, who took drunken college boys absolutely in stride. Contrary to what a cynic might expect, not once was it ever even rumored that one of Wanda’s gals had reverted to her former ways, even for a night. I’m sure it would have been hugely lucrative, and now that I’m in my fifties myself I begin to see how appealing some of us brash cute shit-faced randy boys could have been. But Wanda had given the bishop and the mayor her word, and Wanda could make a cage full of lions leave a fresh steak alone if she wanted to.

  So for the hundreds of desperate lonely yearning bursting young testosterone slaves who passed through Wanda’s door every Friday and Saturday night, their only faint hope of sexual relief—dream more than hope, really—was virgin Catholic girls. Classmates, who already knew exactly what jerks they were, and furthermore were being looked out for by uncannily wise barmaids and waitresses. Hope springs eternal within the human pants, of course. But I’d have to say that the underlying mood in Wanda’s on any given weekend evening was a blend of manic optimism and maudlin despair, and the sexual tension was always thick enough to sink pitons into.

  A lineup of the most desperate guys would hover along the bar just inside the door. (Bill Doane called the process by which this line sorted itself out “peckering order.”) It was exactly like a line of taxis waiting outside the terminal door at the airport. Climb aboard, dear lady, I will be giving you a most particularly enjoyable ride. Each time a girl came in the door, whoever was first in line would leave the bar and go hit on her. “My name’s Jack, and you’re the prettiest girl to come through that door all night—can I buy you a drink?” Something over ninety-five percent of the time, he would be shot down, and would slink to the tail of the line, while the girl went on to join her girlfriends in the back room. Once in a long while she would nod, and they would stop briefly to collect drinks and then head for the back room together.

  It could have been any one of us. A junior named Fred Speciale happened to be the guy Fate selected to be on deck at Wanda’s Rest, the November night the Bunny walked in for the first time.

  She was unremarkable in Fred’s opinion. Average height and weight. Her body looked okay, though it was hard to be sure with a winter coat over it. Blonde hair, long and straight, caught back in a ponytail. Her face was quite nice, beautiful in a way, and missed being pretty only because of the strange expression on it. She looked like somebody brave reporting for her mammography. She stood just inside the door and scoped the room, dubiously.

  As long as they weren’t actively vomiting or brandishing a knife, it was al
l the same to Fred. Baring his teeth, hoping against hope as always, he approached her. Guys just after him in line monitored his progress with a mild professional interest. “Hi. I’m Ace Speciale, and you’re the best-looking woman to come in that door all night. May I buy you a drink?”

  She looked him square in the eye, unsmiling. “No,” she said, in a voice that carried to the end of the bar, “but you can fuck me.”

  And before he knew it she was leading him by his necktie out to the parking lot, and directly into the back seat of a car, where without preamble or foreplay of any kind she pulled down both their pants and fucked him three times in a row without giving him a chance to lose his erection in between.

  At some point he found himself lying on gravel with his pants down. She had pushed him off her and out of the car. He saw her get out, pull up her pants, and zip them up. “Jesus,” he croaked, “that was incredible.” She tossed a large sodden wad of kleenex to the ground beside him, stepped over him without a glance, and walked back into the bar on unshaky legs.

  Fred gave thought to lying there until he died, but his ass was cold. He managed to climb up the open car door until he was on his feet, pulled his own pants up, and set off for Wanda’s front door, tacking a little against a sudden wind. By the time he got there, the girl—it suddenly came to him that he did not have even a first name for her—was already coming back out again, leading Tommy Flaherty by his necktie this time. She ignored Fred as she passed him.

  She fucked twenty-three guys that night.

  At some point after the first dozen or so, old Wanda herself, a slim redhead pushing seventy, came out to talk to her. They walked off to a corner of the parking lot together and spoke in low voices for maybe five minutes. Then Wanda went back inside, and the guy whose turn it was went back inside, and the marathon resumed.