By Gaslight Chapter 7 Gunshots

 

Thursday, November 5, 2020, 7:10 pm,
Holgate and Foster

 

A

 slow rain failed to keep the fog at bay, a mist which seeped to the lungs and the hands, the soggy shoes too.  They stood in the grassy, muddy alley behind the Northwest IPA Bottle Shop, where those hipster faggots drank their fancy beer.  They had run the trash to the dumpster in the rain for the Cherokee owner.  So he gave them a Pabst tall boy to split.  Tones was feeling kind of bad drinking near all of it.  But Dox would not stop digging, just shoveling like a maniac.  He was digging a deep hole behind the abandoned furniture in the ally, six feet long, two feet wide and about four feet deep at this point, even getting down in the hole and digging.  This was uncharacteristic of him.  He was such a clean freak most of his effort as a homeless guy was spent keeping clean, which in and of itself was no mean feat.  He was doing this in a driven frenzy, not getting tired despite his age.

Tones finished the beer and tossed it on the couch as Dox stopped digging, got up out of the slot ditch against the concrete foundation of the brick building, and leaned on the shovel they had stolen out of a backyard a block to the west.

“What is it Dox?” Tones asked, for he could see the empty, receiving light in those small grey eyes.

“Tri-colored lights, crossroad, the crackle of highway musketry—two heads are better than one, the Grey Norn on Her remorseless Loom has so spun.”

The beating of wings overhead and the crackle of crow feet landing on grating shingles seeped down to them in the fog-choked alley.

A block away, on Foster, sounded like at the intersection, they heard five rounds from a handgun, in two controlled bursts.  Then came the dull report of three, three-round bursts from another handgun, followed by squealing tires and a continuous stream of semi-auto handgun fire that came to about ten rounds.  There was more tire squealing, sounding like from a different car, and then two more shots and the gunning of engines.

There was a crash, a dull crash, like a car hitting a curb and pole at low speed.  This was followed by the sound of another car tearing off northward and two car doors slamming shut near the mouth of the alley.

“Here they come, Dox.”

What the hell—this is all wrong.

Dox ducked down behind the couch and chair and Tones simply laid on the couch, holding his hammer close.

Within seconds two thin black guys in hooded sweat shirts, one with a spent Glock in his hand, came running down the alley.

As they passed Tones he grabbed the rear one around the waist, and did a roll-off-the-couch tackle and Dox, rising from his wolfish crouch, damn near cut the other guy’s head off with the shovel.  Tones crawled into a back mount and pinned the guy below him, not having the heart to hammer him.  These guys had done nothing to him.

Then the little skinny under him snarled, “Nigga, you dead—I’ll come back with—”

And just like that he was silent and dead, a hole knocked in the back of his head.

Dox was cutting off the head of the other gangbanger as the neck spurted warm steamy blood everywhere, then, in an amount of time that seemed too brief to dispose of a human life, the old guy neatly rolled the body into the trench.  He placed the head in his backpack—Tones now understanding why the fellow had left his spare clothes behind the makeshift plywood shelter they had slept in last night.

People were yelling worriedly out on the street.

Tones stood up and turned around and then he heard a sickening slice and saw that Dox had chopped off the dude’s head and was rolling the corpse into the trench.  As the little guy placed the second head in his rucksack and picked up the shovel and began to shovel the muddy topsoil into that grave, Tones had an idea.

“Dox, throw in half the dirt, just level.  Don’t mound it up. Scatter the rest over the blood and marks.  I’ll move the couch over the grave.”

Dox nodded his head “Yes,” and that sentiment was ostentatiously echoed within Tones’ bewildered mind, “Yaas!”

Get out of my head, asshole.

They were soon marching down Foster in the driving rain, sirens sounding in the distance behind them.

When they got to the train platform, Dox went up.

This is weird, where I came into town.

In the mist and rain above the singing splash of the highway they stood before the fence that kept fools from getting run over on the rails and Dox looked up at the top, where the wigged-out baby doll head Tones had taken from C-Three the Guru the other night was hanging just out of reach.

Dox shucked his pack, and took out both heads and held them up towards the baby doll head and stood like a maniac, like some Aztec priest who had just ripped out a heart.

Oh, this does not look good.

Tones turned and faced down at Foster.  If a train came by they would be made.  But at least his big frame would blot out sight of Dox having gone insane and holding up those heads.

I killed a man.

…He threatened you.

Yeah, because I tackled him!

…He was a scumbag out there gang-banging, just like those savages that did you wrong up in Seattle.

“Yaas,” came the echo in is head.  And before he could think a negative about the creeping ego edging into his mind, four crows swooped down out of the misty night and he heard them fluttering and cawing and pecking and ripping behind him.

“Yaas… a thinker next, a revel maker, an ethereal baker,” echoed in his head.

The crows flew off in a wicked fury of wet wings, eyes dangling from their beaks, circling out over Foster and then back northeast in the direction of Mount Tabor.

He turned around and saw Dox placing the heads reverentially, one in each of his old T-shirts, swaddling them and sliding them one at a time down into the bottom of his rucksack. 

Dox also shouldered the shovel, which they should have thrown on the roof of the buildings over the alley, looked up at Tones with a weary, ashen cast to his pinched face and asked, “What’s a revel?”

“It’s a party, like a drinking party, I guess in olden times.”

Dox blinked, “What would that have to do with an ethereal baker?”

“My guess is brewing, beer-making, the brewer uses yeast to make the booze.”

“What is Domingo?”

“Fuck, you’re a radar dish.  You got more than me. Domingo is Sunday, the Lord’s day, if you believe in that shit.”

“The Master believes.”

I feel bad for this guy.  He’s worse off than me by a long shot.

“I’m tired, Tones, so tired.”

“Come on, pal, let’s find someplace dry.  There is a dry doorway near the 7-Eleven. We need to get a tent.  Tent living is the way to go.”

Off into the misty night they walked, the black hole in Tones’ chest not aching for the first time since he came to Portland.