By Gaslight Chapter 5 Moon Crow

Foster-Powell Community, Halloween

Saturday, October 31, 2020, 4:00 pm

 

B

ig Tones was shitting his guts out on the toilet—at least he had a toilet.  And the process seemed to interrupt his hallucination about Harry fucking Houdini inhabiting his abdomen.

Shit, no toilet paper.

You are two feet from the shower.

He heard the front door open.

You have to be kidding me!

Who shows a house on Halloween, on a Saturday?

For a moment he wondered if perhaps he was losing his mind.  His hearing is usually great for cars and car doors.  That audio imprints very strongly the first time the cops come to beat your ass for sleeping in the bushes.

He tip-toed, as easily as a 270-pound dude can, out of the bathroom, holding his clothes, and slid into the closet and curled up.

The realtor was about to open the closet for this lisping hipster faggot and his prissy-sounding bitch when the woman said, “What is that smell?  Is there a sewer line broken here?”

“Oh, oh, let me check said the realtor,” as her hand pulled away from the slide knob and Tones heard her walking into the bathroom with the couple and then the man started gushing, “Oh My God! Oh—I have to leave—Linda, we’ are goiiiing!” and this faggot starts running out of the bedroom and down the stairs and his girl is saying to the realtor, “Eduardo has a fecal phobia—we have to go…”  

The woman realtor was on the phone with some other realtor as she left, so he figured his spot had been made and he’d pack up and leave the mess for them as well—fuck them, these rich people.  In the meantime he laughed his ass off.  He must have laughed for a half hour.

But first he needed a good shower, not in the bathroom he had blown up, but in the main bathroom with that nice custom stainless steel nozzle with all of the settings that housewives use for masturbation.

Hell yeah that felt good.  Shit, these fools had the water tank stoked too.  He was running this bitch dry!  Damn this felt good.  They even had soap in the form of the bullshit flower-shaped scented decorations in this porcelain cornucopia.  He hated hipsters and all their bullshit.  But they did serve the purpose giving him food, and a place to sleep and shit and shower, before he continued down his own personalized stairway to hell.

He got out of that steaming stall, dried off with the towel, got dressed, brushed his teeth and then had to pee.  One good thing about being over six foot tall, is that you can piss in the sink.  There he stood, everything but his jacket and backpack on, pissing in the sink, holding his dick in his hand, when two rednecks, muscular, bearded, MAGA-fucking Trumptards busted through the bathroom door and screamed, “Freeze motherfucker!”

One was holding an aluminum bat and the other a big fucking nickel-plated revolver.  Everything but his pisser froze and he was embarrassed to hear the sink, where some rich bitch would one day be brushing her teeth, gurgling with his piss.

“Oh, you dirty motherfucker,” snarled the big one with the gun—shit, these dudes were both bigger than him and looked like they banged steroids.

To that the even bigger one rumbled, “Oh, I see, we got us a Goldilocks wannabe shittin’ up this house that we scarped and saved and busted our asses to build and—you know what…we gonna take you out in the woods and make you dig your own grave!”

He had finally gotten his dick back in his pants and said, kind of deadpan he thought for a dude who always tried so hard not to get killed, “Please don’t kill me.”

Wow, does that dude even want to live?  Life must have screwed him good.

Tones spent about two hours scrubbing the bathrooms while those goddamned rednecks took turns bitching him out and kicking him in the ass with their steel toe boots.  By the time he was done he didn’t even like them anymore.  Then, just as he was thinking he was free and clear, the asshole with the gun slapped a pair of handcuffs on him, “To the woods, Goldilocks.  We got the shovel in the truck.”

It would figure that of all the houses in Portland to crash at this one would be owned by two lumberjack-steroid-bangers and one of them a cop.

Oh, God does hate you, Tones.

Off to his doom he went with head down and hopes gone, shoved into the black pickup truck in the front passenger seat with a muzzle of a 357 pressed behind his ear.

As he sat in the truck and the sun dipped down below the tree tops, streaking the world with bright diffused light, a big crow cawed at him from across the street, where it was perched on the hood of an Audi, which he thought was pretty damned strange, especially since that was his totem, his tattoo fetish anyhow.  Tones had seven different raven tattoos on his body.  The raven and the crow were just always a kind of bird he admired and he did not know why, but he’d had an affinity for them since boyhood.  This thing was looking right at him like it had something to say and his chest tingled like he had just snorted a huge line of coke through his navel and was drawing the powder up through his guts to his nose.

Portland, Oregon, Halloween,

October 31, 2020, 7:57 pm, 72^nd and Holgate

 

“This homeless piece-of-shit is going to pay.  The cops are all getting their asses kicked downtown—nobody to save his worthless ass!”

So snarled the big boy with the gun as the bigger boy with the bat drove the big black 4x4 Dodge ram down Powell and agreed, “Shoot, shovel and shut-up, I say, Brother!”

Fuck, I’m really dead.  We’re headed out towards Gresham.  These hicks are going to murder me out in the sticks.  They will chuck me in a hole that they are going to make me dig.

“Fuck that, you sell-out bitches, working your ass off to provide housing for cross-dressing hipsters who would never buy it if they saw your bearded pie-holes.  I can’t keep you fucking inbred assholes from killing me, but the hell if I’m going to dig my own grave.”

“You’ll be singing a different song—what the hell?!” exclaimed the Bigger Boy behind the wheel as a crow, Tones had to think it was the same crow that was looking at him before, came down on the windshield, grabbed the wiper in front of the driver and started flapping its wings and obstructing his vision.  These guys may have wanted to be killers but they were still knee jerk rules followers and the big monstrosity stopped the pickup right at 72^nd where the 7-Eleven was on the left.  He grabbed his bat and got out of the truck to shoo the crow off of the windshield.

This could be my—

“Don’t even think about it, motherfucker,” snarled the big boy behind him as he pressed the muzzle behind his ear.

Then, as the bigger redneck tried getting rid of the crow, they all heard something, a human war cry, like out of Last of the Mohicans and this little dude, an old dude with a pinched face and a 5 o’clock shadow, looking on the clean side of homeless, came running down the side walk on 72^nd and leaped out into Powell with both hands on an aluminum baseball bat that smacked the side of the big, bearded head with a ringing ping and that giant redneck’s bloody face smashed into the window frame and—horror to behold—the crow started poking its beak into the big man’s eye, ripping that thing out!

“Billy!” yelled the big boy as he jerked open the back right passenger seat and stood on the seat and tried to aim his pistol down over the roof at the twerpish tweaker who was now running back down 72^nd—but not for long.

Tones had pulled his ass and cuffed hands up, opened the door with one big thumb and slid out instinctively.  Tones managed to land on his feet, and rammed his left shoulder into the open rear door and pinched that uninjured brother, spilling him hip over doorframe back on his shoulders on the street, where he could hear an audible crack, like bones breaking in a chain and the pistol discharge, ripping through his pants leg, burning his shin and blowing a hole in the front tire with a gout of flame.  Tones was off down Powell, running after his little savage savior, the crow, its beak occupied by a dangling eye, flying above him framed in the dull light of the just risen moon.

He could hear the two big monsters moaning and groaning at one another and asking after each other as he chased the little man down 72^nd towards Mount Tabor, his hands cuffed behind his back.

“Hey, wait man, I can’t keep up.  My hands are cuffed.”

The little man stopped next to a car, reached behind it, and shucked on a ruck sack, placing the bat in the top with his left hand and standing there looking up at him as if dumb.  Tones could tell that the little guy was scared.  And as he got close he could see he wasn’t a tweaker, actually looked recently homeless.  

“Hey man, let’s cut north down the side street and cross Powell a ways up.  I got a place we can regroup.”

The little, older man, like sixty it looked, nodded “Yes,” and they walked along side-by-side, the crow with the eye in its beak keeping pace with them flying out in the street, waiting on a car roof, and then hopping alongside them as they slid like shadows through shade.

Three blocks back, before they turned to re-cross Powell, he stopped and looked down at the little man, “Hey man, thanks.  My name is Tones and you saved my ass.  We might get pinched crossing the road.  I gotta know.  Why’d you save me?”

The little man nodded at the crow, the eye dangling from its beak, standing imperiously on the roof of an old Bronco, “The man in my head said so, said the crow would help.”

“The man in your head?”

“A voice—I thought I was losing it.  But the man was right and he seems to know me somehow in a way I don’t know myself.  Anyways, I can’t stand him.  He is so bossy.  So I just do as he says so he’ll go away.”

Is that like the man in the mirror in my belly?

They darted across the street, no traffic in sight, and over the grassy median and across the other side, and Tones was feeling creepy about the little guy when they got to the service road where the homeless camp was.  So, among the blue tarp-covered tents and the eerie fires, one in a hubcap, one on the asphalt and another in a legless dish grill, he stepped in front of the man and said, “What’s your name?”

“Dox.”

“Why are you hurrying ahead?  I know the way, not you.”

“The bathroom light is on, a side light, second story, behind a frosted window over a rose bush next to a house with three black-spotted, white dog statues on the lawn.  The crow will be on the porch eave.”

A chill emanated from the black mirror to hell in his chest.

“Yes, that’s the house.”

The little man continued, “There is a little red shed in the yard with tools.  I can cut off your cuffs,” and on past him he walked, as if obedient to some other will than his own, but not in a daze.  This guy was keen beyond cagey, like a coyote trotting down the street, moving better than a guy his age with that size pack should be able to.

Tones followed him as the crow beat wing softly above them, framed in the dull street light and something, a keenly observed thought, echoed ominously and with supreme confidence in his head, “Yaas!”

Oh, this is fucking bad.

“Yaas!”