The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII

I. Epileptic Lines

I remember my father staring up at the ceiling. A young man back then, for I was in my single-digit years, he was lean and admirable in his policeman’s uniform. The shirt was almost the exact color as the blueberry Ice Pops we’d get at Buhler’s on the way back from the clinic. The ceiling was as white as the buttons on the shirt, buttoned with a strength I still do not have. The image comes back to me often, as sad a memory as words better left unsaid to a past lover, particularly when I see the weariness in his sixty-year-old eyes. Next March, he will be a police officer for thirty years. The longest job I have held, besides my writing, has been five years. The city-issued shirts for the department are still the same shade of young hope and blueberry Ice Pops.

I had assumed that I would one day visit the clinic, that I returned on an October Saturday two years ago was purely spur-of-the-moment. Like when I recalled my father staring at the ceiling simply because I was feeling guilty about having a good day with no stress.

There were black-and-white television shows on back then. We would sit in the waiting room and watch a man chasing another man with one arm. My mother often said that it was the saddest show on television. Outside the glass door, boys and girls were wheeled to the burn ward or the place where, to my young mind, blind people were kept. I had never seen a blind person on Crystal or on Washtenaw, the only world I was aware of outside of my father’s Chevrolet Biscayne and the trips to the Cook County Clinics.

The black-and-white television screen would be reflected in the glass window, the sad man with black hair like my father’s running toward the boys and girls in wheelchairs, intangible, looking back over his shoulder at me.

This is where I spent much of my first thirteen years. Illinois Research is how I recall its name. Division of Services for Crippled Children. Polk and Wood Streets. A building of rust-colored walls and epileptic lines on the floors directing visitors and patients where to go to look for hope. Thirteen years. I shut my eyes to avoid thinking about how many years it must have seemed for my father.

The lines I am referring to were as easy to recall as the lines marking the elevated tracks on a Chicago Transit Authority map. Yellow, red, blue, black. Running along the black margin of floor next to the right wall of each corridor. An ongoing YOU ARE HERE type of thing, I suppose it gave parents a sense of reassurance. Some paths were discernible, after all. I am certain my father had no idea whatsoever how I would turn out, what paths I might be pushed down or wander along of my own volition, and I have never asked him

It was a warm Saturday, comfortable enough that I was willing to take the elevated train to the Loop. This far west, the Douglas line is in Vice Lords territory, and if it were any colder, I would have felt completely disadvantaged in the face of a confrontation. I knew an elderly man, once he was attacked on the way home from the Jewel store on Lawrence and Avers. He swung his bag of potatoes and scared the thugs off. If he had had nothing in his arms, he felt certain that they would have killed him.

So on this particular day in mid-October, I found myself again mesmerized by the elevated tracks passing within a baby’s breath of broken homes and failing businesses. As the train slowed before each station, there was time to make out the faded patterns on hanging laundry on the three-flats back porches. It was faded clothing, still considered usable after years of wear, that made me think of the Cook County Clinics. The place I used to call Illinois Research.

I vacated the train at 18th and Paulina, the Sears Tower visible in the distance like a birthmark on the sky. To my dismay, the building housing the clinics was closed on weekends. I was not content simply seeing the rusty walls and chrome doors. It was like watching a potential subplot dissolve in a film. There’s just not a hell of a lot you can do about it.

A security guard came to the glass door and let me enter. My backpack probably made me look like a grad student. We exchanged talk about the weather and my eyes found the lines on the floor. I had an idea of where I was going. The yellow line shot off to the right at the Diagnostic Center in a way that reminded me of the Voyager craft arcing out of the solar system after passing Saturn.

The red line dead-ended at the Pharmacy and another doorway that led to some mysterious place. It was a toss up between the royal blue and the black. I realized that the lines only seemed to jump around if you stared at them without blinking. When I saw the lines as a boy of seven, I was still having neck spasms and could not hold my head straight up like an alert puppet. Sometimes, my father would carry me as if out of a burning building. Released from detailed pain, I would stare intently at the lines from past my father’s beat-patrolman stride.

I was wearing gym shoes, again, my concerns of a confrontation with gang members, and so I did not even have the clocking of heels to mark my passage through the halls.

The room I wanted was numbered 18. Black numerals on an orange door. Fitting Halloween colors. Wooden frame chairs with blue cushions faced the doorway. Overhead lights were arranged in odd molecular patterns. It was the blue line that led to the doorway numbered 18. My father would sit just inside that doorway as the therapist led me further down another hallway.

I peered through the door’s window as if it were a peephole. A new generation of crippled children’s drawings covered a bulletin board, tacked up with white pins. Current role models from television and music. I recall drawing a scene of Martian tripods standing guard over a city in flames.

I have always been secretive of the things I had to do for those thirteen years. I vaguely refer to picking up maroon colored pills that were flat on one side and putting them into a tiny-necked bottle. Doing “airplanes,” that is, balancing my arms and legs in the air while my torso lay on the floor mat. Climbing steps. Descending the steps I had climbed.

I thought again of my father staring at the ceiling. He would invariable be doing this when the therapist brought me back out, and we would surprise him because I was never as loud as some of the other children. My father stared at the ceiling because he was praying. My father stared at the ceiling because he did not care to watch the show about the fugitive pursuing a one-armed man.

A one-armed man seen fleeing the scene of the crime. My father had his pursuits. I had the scene of the crime in front of me. The crime was never knowing what to say.

I did not look at my watch. I saw track lighting and knew that no one could stare at the ceiling for long anymore.

I had a full day ahead of me and went back to the remaining black line, assuming it would take me to a place that I could actually exit from.

II. Shots Downed, Officer Fired

The call came in the middle of his second hour of delirium, on his first night of furlough.

Cruising down the Federal Street corridor in complete silence; no partner, no drug-sniffing canines, no cop show theme song with a frenetic beat.

The squad ran beautifully, a new ’92 Chevy Caprice. Not one gang banger, not a single hustling meth jimmie to eyeball him. When the Lake-Dan Ryan elevated coasted two blocks down and three stories into the night sky, it was like a new-fangled fancy painting, squares of hospital glare; white against the lakefront’s summer turquoise.

Not one soul on board the four cars of the “B” train. Again, he was alone.

The city: his.

He pulled the squad over. Climbed out, stretched in the night air. He heard distant shots fired, felt them like pulses in his forehead when the nights were more humid, also feeling as if the gunfire did not concern him. Moved away from the car in a sliding motion.

Embarrassed; his starched shirttail flapping in the wind like ghetto laundry, his bony knees pale in the summer moonlight. The wind stank of whiskey. His police-issued black socks were soaked when he walked through a puddle near the corner of Thirty-Ninth.

His size-ten feet left wet, sloppy prints in the shag carpeting.

Fumbled with the buttons, trying to put the shirttails back into his blue and white striped jockey shorts. Flaccid head of his dick bent and caught to the right side of the flap. He would not be reprimanded for this apparent lapse in the dress code.

This was Chicago, and he was a twenty-seven-year veteran. When they know you’ve seen enough—the ’72 Midway crash, the ’68 Democratic Convention, the body bags in the crawlspace on Summerdale—then the others cover for you. Police take care of their own, he thought. Weaving proudly. Thinking of a face melted into the springs of the airline seat in front of him, the plane missing the airport by fourteen city blocks. Back then, he drank Drewrey’s.

Again, shots. He did not hear them as they were being fired, but he heard the breaking of glass. Sounding like a bulb that had been dropped, rather than exploded.

The street slid open next to him. His hand gripped the nozzle in his holster. The gun weighed more than he had thought and he could not pull it free.

The streetlights flickered. Briefly, he saw his own reflection. Then he was face-to-face with his son. He must have come down here to buy his own drugs. Not enough to tough it out like The Old Man. Always talking like he had a candy asshole.

“Dad, c’mon.” Maybe a bit of a slur in the son’s voice, as well. “Let’s lay back down, okay?” What the hell was he talking about? He was out here in the streets every damn night while his son stayed home and wrote stories and slept until noon.

“C’mon, Dad. You can vacuum in the morning.” The closed door slid wider and he saw the rest of the bedroom. He tried to balance himself, standing on a pile of his wife’s old shoes and forgotten clothing, garments that had fallen from the hangers.

“Let go of the vacuum.”

Stern voice with The Old Man. Takes enough shit from Division. Don’t need it from the candy-ass.

He put up resistance, the way the academy taught him a stripped-away lifetime ago. The department drove Mercurys back then, it had been three years before he had to answer a call for Shots fired, officer down, all units in the vicinity respond. Knocked his son back, the candy-ass falling flat on his bony butt in the middle of the beige street.

“Damn you,” his only son said. “Back into bed, before Mom gets home. You stink worse than those damn black socks.” The younger man stood up and brushed dog hairs from his jeans.

He still had the keys to the front door in one hand, along with his balled-up tie. “I knew you were drunk when I saw you with your socks on. Every fucking time, man. Socks, shorts, and shirt.”

The man who was a twenty-seven-year beat copper dropped the gun to the ground. The hose sucked up part of his lime-green sport jacket, the one he wore for St. Patrick’s Day parties.

“Fuck you swear me.” He thumped his chest like a cave man.

“Snap out of it,” his son said, pulling off dog hairs. “Shit, I don’t want to start counting your phenobarbs every night again.”

Sounding like his mother, the candy-ass. He tried to say, Go take one of your mother’s Valiums, that’s okay, but I can’t have one lousy beer. What came out of his mouth was something like a voice box dropped into a well of baby shit.

“Gwa ma can lib.”

Wobbled, weaved, kept himself in control.

It was okay for his son to take drugs because it hurt his arms and his head to write the stories, but it was wrong for him to drink in order to face his own job. Working the projects since ’86, thirty murders a month in his district alone. His wife hiding all the beer in the cabinet with the window cleaner, he had to go out and drink quickie shots that no one could enjoy when he went to buy his lottery tickets.

Let’s see Mr. Candy-ass live through a stroke.

“Dad. C’mon.” Minimalist as possible.

He pushed his son down again, the glare from the overhead light hurting his head.

He swatted the maggot-shaped bulb away.

Stumbled from the closet, tripped over his son and back to the real oblivion. No more Federal Street, no dreams or nightmares or sweaty pillows.

Nothing.

He had started to snap out of it, the scene swimming into focus, when the paramedics were standing over him in the dining room. Overhead candelabra-style lights on at three in the morning. Like a sunburst.

“Tom. Tom.” They said it over and over, litanizing his name. By the time they had bundled him against the late October cold and bumped the stretcher down the front steps, one solitary neighbor watching because it was something to see, the policeman were aware.

His eyes were scared and knowing.

Later that night, the policeman’s son sat in the waiting room of Mercy Hospital. His wadded-up tie was still in his possession, a lucky charm of sorts, stuffed into a pocket. Which one, exactly, he wasn’t even sure.

He watched “Zombies on Broadway” on the overhead Zenith television. WLS; Channel Seven’s Insomniac Theater. Couple of second string Abbot and Costello types bringing back one of Boris Karloff’s zuvembis to do a lounge act in Sheldon Leonard’s nightclub.

He was there alone, would be alone until the doctors came in with news good or bad. He had lied to his dad about mother coming home; she had left her husband, as promised, after his second alcoholic relapse in 1988. It had been springtime then. His mother lived on the northside now.

A full-time writer, the cop’s son had traveled around until his money ran low; his dad was more than willing to let him come back home. It was good to have somebody to clean up and cook.

The movie would play for about eight minutes, cut away to a trailer card of spotlights over a pale blue Chicago skyline. Then he would endure three minutes of ads for G-rated phone sex—“Hi! I’m bored! Call me now at 1-900-Hot-Love”—and bankruptcy lawyers.

Nobody ever seemed to proofread the trailers: once, at a friend’s place up north, he was watching “The Saint in New York.” The trailer card had eliminated the first word, making the movie sound like bastard Injun talk. Saint in New York. Ugh! He had pulled out his notepad then, adding apostrophes, and writing S’AINT IN NEW YORK, S’IN CHICAGO. Never wrote a story with that title yet, but maybe one day.

The movie came back on, always with the volume lower than that of the commercials. A family of blacks entered the room, an entire entourage. Sons, daughters, aunts. From what he could pick up, they were waiting to hear if their male relative had survived three bullets in a gang drive-by shooting.

Or ten bullets as an innocent bystander, the cops shooting him as he lay there on the corner of 42nd and Drexel, depending on one family member’s point of view.

The son waited for the neurologist to come tell him whatever he had to tell about his father.

He waited again, six months; another lapse of judgment, this one compounded by a pin stroke and dementia. Subtle signs of Parkinson’s Disease in a man not even sixty.

He didn’t make his pension because of the new mayoral administration’s campaign promises.

The writer and his ex-policeman father in Midland Nursing Home, Christmas Eve 1991. A woman in the room telling him, telling the writer, that she recognized his uniform. Taken aback momentarily, then realizing he was wearing a Bears jacket. Orange and blue. His father’s mouth gaped like a fish.

Wanting water.

The woman then told him that she was thirty-nine and her mother was forty-one. Another woman in the room kept up a chant in Polish, most likely swear words.

The writer’s father wore a Posey gait belt now, so that the attendants could lift the bloated body from wheelchair to bed.

He let his father look out the window, at suburban Fallon Ridge. An ozone horizon lit by used car lots and bars with Old Style signs swinging in the winter wind above their doorways, advertising carry-outs in bottles and cans.

His father saw himself reflected in the window.

Reflected in a bar window. Green and red Christmas lights, deck the halls. Division had transferred him to an easier district; the 8th, at 63rd and St. Louis. He was off-duty, at the bar down by the GTW tracks.

And his candy-ass son was tending bar.

“Here, pop. It’s on the house.” The writer, lighthearted. The woman whose mother was two years older than her again commented that she recognized the writer’s uniform. The other woman said dupa yash nothing head and blew an angry spit bubble.

The water cups at the nursing home were a cross between jigger glasses and urine specimen cups; ridged plastic and opaque. The writer steadied his father’s hand by wrapping the Posey belt around his wrist, like a slice of gauze. By pulling on the belt, his father’s hand was raised to his mouth.

“Okay, pop. Good job.”

His father thinking on how he had always expected his son to end up doing something like this, working at a gas station or tending bar like he was now.

Working at places where he could tell his stories.

Stories that only drunk people would believe to be true.