The Brain Eaters

Chapter 1

It was a quiet Friday night at Vic’s Old Milwaukee Tavern. At the bar Vic Metzger was arbitrating an emotional discussion between two customers on the strategy employed the night before by the Brewers in losing to the Cleveland Indians. At the pool table two regulars from the garage down the street went through their tired routine of trying to psych each other out.

There were no video games in Vic’s. There was an old-fashioned pinball machine that had not been repaired since Karl Gotch kicked a leg off it. The jukebox was stocked with country-western records and some good oldies. The television set over the bar was tuned to the all-sports cable channel. A soccer game was in progress, which none of the customers bothered to watch.

On his usual stool Hank Stransky sat staring at the half-empty glass of beer and the uneaten bratwurst in front of him. By this time he had usually put away three of four sausages and as many bottles of Miller’s. Miller’s was all he drank since Schlitz moved out of town. The traitors.

That night Hank was having a tough time getting anything down. It was the damn headache. Hank had suffered his share of headaches before, usually in the morning after mixing too much bourbon and beer. Those were nothing compared to this. Little hair of the dog and they’d go away.

This headache was something else. It started the night before while he was watching “Hill Street Blues.” It wasn’t much at first, just a little buzz of pain in back of the eyes. Hank had swallowed some aspirin, had a bottle of Miller’s, and gone to bed. The damn headache stayed with him, and he didn’t sleep for shit. That morning it was worse. Breakfast didn’t help. Pauline’s hot cakes and sausages tasted like garbage. He yelled at her, even though it wasn’t her fault.

That day on the job it got steadily worse. His crew was ripping out a section of street in South Milwaukee. The jack-hammers had never bothered him before, but that day it felt as if they were digging right into his skull.

Hank tried a sip of the beer and almost retched.

“Hey, Vic,” he said, “what the fuck are you pourin’ here, horse piss?”

Vic eased himself out of the baseball debate and came up the bar.

“What’s the problem, Hank?”

“Your fuckin’ beer is the problem. It tastes like piss.”

“Okay,” Vic said, “but whose?”

“I ain’t in the mood for any of your stale jokes,” Hank said.

“Sorry.” Vic cocked his head, the better to see through the smoke of the Camel that grew in the corner of his mouth. “You know, you don’t look so good.”

“Last week I thought I was gettin’ the flu. Now this goddam headache is drivin’ me up the walls.”

“You want an aspirin?”

“I ate aspirin last night like they was peanuts. Didn’t do fuckall. Gimme a fresh beer.”

Vic cleared the bar and wiped it off with a damp towel. He opened a cold Miller’s, poured it into a fresh glass with a professional half-inch head of foam, and put glass and bottle in front of Hank Stransky. Hank kept staring down at the bar with one hand clamped to the back of his head.

“Maybe you ought to see a doctor,” Vic said.

“For a headache? Bullshit.”

Vic shrugged and edged away to rejoin the baseball discussion. He glanced back uneasily from time to time at Hank Stransky.

Hank had never been sick a day in his fucking life. Then last week he had that touch of flu, or whatever it was, but that sure as hell hadn’t kept him off the job. Hell, even when the grader ran over his foot, he didn’t lose any time. He was one tough Polack. Nothing could hurt him. He squeezed his hard, calloused hands together and stared at the scarred knuckles. He hurt, and he didn’t know what the fuck to do.

Vic turned away from the baseball fans and started back up the bar toward Hank Stransky. He didn’t like the kind of noises the guy was making. Vic opened his mouth to ask what was the matter, but then Hank raised his head and looked at him, and the words never got said.

There were plenty of fares out on the streets of Manhattan on Friday night, flapping their arms and whistling for cabs. DuBois Williamson would ordinarily have kept at it another couple of hours until the punks and muggers outnumbered the fares. Not that night. Not with this fucking headache. He slapped his Out of Service sign in the window and swung around to head for the Queensboro Bridge and home.

It hurt DuBois Williamson to pass up the forty or fifty bucks he could make by staying on the streets that night, but his head hurt him even more. He wondered if it could be a migraine. He’d never had one of them, but he heard they hurt like a son of a bitch. Could you get a migraine for the first time when you were over forty? Didn’t seem fair.

At the intersection of Fifty-ninth and Lexington he had to slam on the brakes and hit the horn when some fool of a Jersey driver in a Volkswagen Rabbit stopped ahead of him to let pedestrians cross the street. Shit, didn’t the fool know better than that? An instant later he was blasted from behind by the horn of some asshole in a delivery van.

Williamson leaned out of the window and glared back at the pimple-faced kid driving the van.

“Blow it out your ass, motherfucker!”

He was immediately ashamed of himself. What the hell was wrong with him? DuBois Williamson hadn’t talked that kind of shit since he was in high school back in Chicago. He sure as hell didn’t talk that way around Ruby. “I didn’t marry no dirt-mouth nigger,” she said. “I married me a grown-up man, and if you can’t talk like one, I’ll just start lookin’ around.”

In the rearview mirror DuBois saw the pimple-faced kid flip him the bone. Dumb little fuck. He probably had to count out loud to find the right finger.

The Jersey driver finally moved, and DuBois inched his cab forward with the traffic. Man, he had never had no headache like this. Not even the time the fourteen-year-old hype hit him from behind with the twelve-inch length of pipe. DuBois was doing the kid a favor. Taking him home. Now he had a bulletproof shield behind the driver’s seat. Cost him four hundred bucks, but the way the world was today, you needed it.

But the shield couldn’t do him any good now. He was stone hurtin’. All he wanted to do was get home to Ruby. He’d put his head down between those fine brown tits and let her say those special sweet things that always made him feel good. Man, he’d give a lot to feel good now.

Why didn’t these motherfuckers move faster? DuBois’s head like to explode while they crawled along Fifty-ninth.

He tried to think about something else until he could get home. Something sweet. He thought about the trip him and Ruby just took back to his old hometown. Drove all the way in their almost-new Chrysler LeBaron. Some vacation for a cabdriver. But it was good times. Oh my, yes.

Not the old Chicago neighborhood. That turned out to be full of jive-ass punks dealing dope on the streets and old people who were locked in their rooms, scared shitless. Things change. The neighborhood was tough when DuBois was growing up there. Tough but clean. Now it was plain ugly.

But the country, now, once you got away from all the people crowded together, that was something else. He drove Ruby all the way up through Wisconsin, right to where they ran into Lake Superior.

Ruby had lived all her life in Harlem and now Brooklyn, and the way her eyes got big looking at the neat little towns and the miles and miles of green pastures with cows and silos and water towers and all that country shit just made him feel fine. They didn’t stop too much, because DuBois didn’t want no hassle with prejudiced people, and there always were some, no matter how sweet a little town looked.

It turned out they didn’t have no trouble with people or anything else, unless you counted the bee that stung him on the neck while he was trying to pick some wild strawberries.

It wasn’t until they were heading back to New York that things turned sour. For a couple of days he thought he was coming down with something. Ruby wanted him to stay home and rest, but after what they’d spent on the vacation, he couldn’t afford to keep the cab off the streets. In a couple of days he felt all right again; then, yesterday, the headache started. Just a little one at first, but the fucker kept getting worse, until now DuBois had all he could do to keep from screaming.

Norman Hastings of Fort Worth figured he had the hang now of getting a taxi in New York. You just stepped out into the street and waved the sucker down. You wait on the curb for one to come over to you — a man could starve to death. When the cab stopped, you pushed your way in, and never mind who else was heading for it. Already he had lost a cab in front of Radio City Music Hall to a nicely dressed lady who had knocked him aside as if she were playing tight end for the Cowboys. Norman Hastings was not going to let that happen again.

He saw the empty cab moving slowly along in the traffic and gave him a wave and a fingers-in-the-mouth whistle at the same time. Well, the coon driving the cab just pointed a thumb at the Out of Service sign stuck in the window and looked away.

“Out of service, my ass,” Norman Hastings said under his breath. He started toward the stalled cab; then the driver turned to look at him, and he saw the expression on the broad black face. Norman Hastings forgot all about wanting a cab.

Andrea Keith sat across the table from her new husband and tried very hard to smile as the waiter poured champagne into their glasses. The smile did not come easy, because Andrea had a splitting, grinding headache. She would rather have died than admit it. What would Justin think if on their very wedding night his bride turned up with a headache? Very funny, ha-ha. No, she would tough it out before she let her wedding night become a smutty joke.

It couldn’t have been the champagne. She hadn’t drunk more than a sip or two. Besides, the headache had started the previous day. Tension, she had thought at the time. The excitement of getting married and all. It would go away. But it didn’t go away. It got worse.

Andrea peered over Justin’s shoulder and through the window at the lights of Seattle. The restaurant on top of the Space Needle was one of those revolving affairs. You couldn’t actually feel it turning, but every time you looked out, there was a different view of the city. That probably didn’t help the headache any.

She tried to concentrate on what Justin was saying. Something about his new job in the contracts department at Boeing. Why didn’t he shut his ugly mouth?

My God, where had that thought come from? This was the man she loved. The only man she had ever been to bed with. The man she intended to live with the rest of her life. Her husband.

“Here’s to my wife,” he said, raising his glass to her. “My wife. It still sounds funny, but I like it.”

Andrea grasped her own glass by the stem and tried very hard not to spill any.

“And how about you?” Justin said. “You’ve got a new name to get used to. We’ll have to practice together.”

Andrea made her mouth stretch into something like a smile. She touched her glass to Justin’s and put it down without drinking any. She wondered if they kept any aspirin in the ladies’ room.

“I think I’ll go powder my nose,” she said. To Andrea her voice sounded high and a touch hysterical. Justin did not seem to notice.

“Hurry back,” he said. “I’ll be lonely.”

She did the smile thing again, rose carefully from her chair, and walked between the small, intimate tables toward the rest rooms. It took a great effort to hold herself erect and walk in a slow, ladylike manner. She wanted to burst into a wild, screaming run.

Andrea Olson Keith’s whole life had been ladylike. They had some old yearbooks at the Kappa house, and sometimes she looked at the old pictures of students back in the sixties. Straight hair, patched-together clothes, bare feet. An unwashed, hippie look. Their fists raised for one silly cause or another. She was certainly glad she hadn’t gone to school in those days.

Not that there wasn’t a certain amount of cutting up on campus now. Her Kappa sisters knew how to have a good time. They smoked a little grass and messed around a little, but somehow it always remained ladylike.

Andrea’s parents would probably have preferred that she go on to graduate. But what would be the use? She was twenty, and she knew her own mind. She had never planned to make art her career. It was just a nice clean major. Justin had his degree; he was ambitious and would soon be making enough to support them comfortably.

Andrea could still paint when she felt like it and raise babies and do volunteer things with other well-dressed young wives. Phooey on being a liberated woman. This was exactly the kind of life Andrea wanted.

Grandma Olson had understood that. For some women, taking care of a man and a family was fulfillment enough. The poor old dear had been too crippled with arthritis to come out to the wedding, but Andrea had flown back to Wisconsin to see her.

She had spent a week there on the farm visiting with all the relatives and eating homemade biscuits and pies and heaps of mashed potatoes. She had laughingly said that her wedding dress might not fit when she got back to Seattle.

It had been a wonderful visit. She spent hours wandering over the pasture — the north forty — just as she had done when she was a little girl and her parents went back for vacations. She climbed the same tree, threw rocks in the same creek, and even scratched her knee the way she used to climbing through the same barbed-wire fence.

When it was time to come back, Grandpa Olson had insisted on driving her to Milwaukee to catch the plane, even though she would have willingly taken the bus. It turned out he wanted the chance to talk to her alone. He wasn’t sure his son had told her all the things a bride ought to know, the old man said, and he spoke awkwardly of the intimacies of married life while Andrea nodded gravely and suppressed a smile.

Now, stumbling across the crowded restaurant with her head about to explode, Andrea wished with all her heart that she could transport herself back to the cool, comfortable farmhouse where Grandma could make the pain go away.

Justin Keith swallowed the champagne that was left in his glass and refilled it. He felt wonderful. He was a little worried about Andrea, though. She had barely touched her champagne. Justin hoped there was nothing seriously wrong. Andrea had been acting strange all day. When she returned from the visit to her grandparents, he was afraid she was coming down with the flu. That passed, and she seemed all right until the previous day. When he called that night, Andrea’s mother told him she had a slight headache and was resting. The traditional nervousness of a bride, he supposed.

Well, a bridegroom could be a little nervous, too.

Justin allowed himself to wonder, just for a moment, in the secret part of his mind, if he was doing the right thing. Sure, he loved Andrea, and they were good together, and there wasn’t anybody else he’d rather marry. It was just that he wondered if he should be getting married at all. He was only twenty-two, just starting out in life. Might there not be some adventures ahead that he would have to pass up as a married man?

He pushed away the disloyal thought and tried to concentrate on how warm and snuggly Andrea felt in his arms. At five feet eight, he had always felt small and kind of inadequate among other men. Andrea, a perfectly built five feet one, made him feel like King Kong.

He saw her coming toward him across the large room. She walked with the careful posture and graceful step that made her look taller than she was. Andrea was always a lady, he thought. Justin smiled as he stood up to greet her. Then he saw the look on his bride’s face, and his smile froze.