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HAIL OF DIAMONDS
DR. GREG LESAR
Nobody chooses a life like this. There are so many reasons why I do what I do. Desperate fear is a tremendous motivator. For me, down in the hole, it is a fear of being insignificant. I fear a boring, sanitized life. There has to be so much more. I have to believe it. I guess I thought my purpose here was about something else more powerful, more robust. Yet, I live in a world of wealth and pride that slips on by. It’s my time now.
Waiting in the rain, I keep the motor running. Trash billows down a bustling street in front of Shapiro’s Jewelers. Beggars and street people mope around soaked and starving. They city’s din drowns the alarm bells in wetness. They try to exit like they are cool, but she’s laughing and it’s contagious. I don’t think anybody has ever carried giant sacks of beans the way they are humping those diamonds toward my getaway car. They have another woman with them.
He’s got enough of her hair in his free hand to put her dumb head anywhere he wants. He knocks it into the trunk a few times, it opens, and he dumps her into it. They pile into the backseat and I gun the engine before the doors even close. Her deadly leering eyes burn at me through inky black hair in my rearview mirror. She doesn’t love me, it’s obvious now. They laugh together in the back seat with bulging sacks on their laps. The world behind them becomes a motion blur of flashing police lights.
I can speed down these old streets without even looking. From the trunk a muffled set of screams begins to unhinge me. “Why is there a moaning girl in my trunk?” Their laughing ceases. He tells me, “It’s not your trunk. It’s not even your car.” At breakneck speed along a maze of city streets, a well-rehearsed getaway- cops or not- I turn around to face them both, “If I’m driving it, then it’s my car Barry.” She looks at me with mounting scorn, “Things got a little…complicated. Barry thought we needed a hostage after um…” “After what?” They snicker. “Nobody cares how you sleep at night, honey.” I turn back to the road, the helpless girl left confined to her dark prison. “Just lose those pigs, Gordon.”
I speed up and swerve, missing a couple of young girls by inches. The tailing police cruiser plows through them effortlessly, splattering their bodies into thick lasagna. “This was never part of the plan,” I shout as pink mist erupts in my rearview. They laugh in the backseat like stoned teenagers.
Everybody is born with a talent. Something they take to naturally, something they embrace to love and hate. My whole life, I was never good at nothing, until I stole my first car. Right outside of Kreskies Food & Drug in the lot behind some slimy law firm, this jet-black convertible called to me like a Greek siren. The top was down and my stride toward it never broke. It’s only wrong if you get caught.
I’m tired of waiting around for my turn. I shout to the heavens daily, my arms raised overhead, “My life didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to.” Everybody has something to strive for and also something to hide. Time moves by and we try and try. The internal truth always gets further away. Long ago, we hid from our nakedness, our shame. We clothed our bodies as a con. We are animals, simple monkeys. We are all just animals in underpants. It’s a jungle out there. We crawl around. We fight to survive. We eat, we fuck, we die. But, we trick each other into agreeing on the rules of being civilized. We want to believe that we aren’t primates because we shop, we worship, and we celebrate. The truth is that when reduced down to the basic ape, and once the shroud is abandoned, we just do whatever we can to get what we need.
I feel the cold circle of a revolver against the back of my neck. I thought I would see this coming, but I didn’t. Everybody thinks they are smarter than they really are. Snakes eat snakes.
His instructions are simple, go through with the plan, do the carwash. “The carwash was the back up to the back up,” I protest with no real measure. “Just kill him, Barry, kill him,” she excitedly squeals. He pushes hard with the gun, punching my head with hardened steel. There was an auto wash that I spoke of, the car goes right through on a conveyor. It was never really an option, because the water doesn’t really get hot enough to remove the paint, just a suggestion, nothing on the other side.
Ideally, my black car would emerge from the auto wash as a pristine white devil, sans girl in the trunk and not with the cops and transients watching. It will never work, I keep thinking, as I pull quickly into the mouth. The evil on my shoulder keeps tapping as I close my eyes.
Cops are dumb, but they aren’t that dumb. As they converge on the carwash, they exit their vehicles with guns drawn and startle immediately as shots inside the establishment ring out. They center on the slow hollow opening at the end of the run. As my dripping grey-streaked sedan appears, they begin shooting in a vicious duck hunt. Bullets shatter glass and tear auto body metal to shreds. Fragments and splinters explode from the car in an outward blossom of fireworks and sparks. A moment of silence, that will never be this way ever again, is interrupted by the screams of affected onlookers innocently observing the carnage, now riddled with ricochets and shreds of hot metal. The trunk of the car is hit with so much ordinance that thick purple fluid oozes through gaping holes delivered by the girl who never had a chance. When the driver’s side door is wrenched open, Barry’s Swiss cheese corpse rolls out, some point blank headshots emit faint grey smoke as his chocking, dying words are exhaled, “I let it happen again.”
A cop holds up a soggy black wig with the end of his gun like it’s a dead dog. He looks at it like an idiot.
An explosion of fire, of red, of orange. The wind blasts her hair in a fury from the little gunmetal convertible we lifted behind the carwash. Old car in, our car out. The ole switcheroo. I remember the first time I ever saw that shock of hair, like lava from her scalp. To this day, I’ve never seen anything like it.
City to city, job to job, I floated from one misery to another, slipping and sliding through a promised utopia that never came. I kept on getting sick of it, breaking things. My life in flux.
You need big wheels in the Florida swamps. I had my eye on this cherry of a 4WD hunk of a truck. I’d get that badass hotwired up and find my way upstate. The only problem , I thought, was that it belonged to a cop. I had a daytime house painting racket with this old man PT Bernum. We called him the ‘circus man’ because he had these great tricks that the rubes always fell for. He would sign us onto these big ole jobs that would take months and required payment up front. We spent a ton of Saturday mornings opening cans of cold beers instead of paint cans. “The best things come to those who wait,” he would say, but we all knew better.
Light on the horizon, we met up on a Sunday morning. I cracked a cold one and knew if I didn’t do it then, I never would. I’d spend a lifetime as a nobody. I told Pete I’d be back in a sec and walked on down to that cop’s house. The cresting sun made that truck shine like a precious jewel. Without hesitation, a butter slime, I was in and gone. I was dumb then as I am now. I was heading north fast and there it was, that magic touch. A hand from oblivion reached out and this time it was real, she was real. My foot was heavy lead on the gas and I felt it, I felt her. A hand on my straining calf, my vehicle was a molten rocket, (look ma, watch me crash.) Careening through the invisible, I began to lessen speed, to gradually slow right through a speed trap, the officer barely glancing from the Sunday morning color funnies.
John’s Revelation couldn’t predict her. Faulkner’s description a joke. She was a desolate angel, arm extended, firecracker eyes sad behind melting tears and a bloody mop of hair. I saw those eyes. I saw her there. Those eyes felt what I felt. “You want out, don’t ya?” It was the only thing I could say that made any sense as she cowered into the wheel well. We cleared a major obstacle, that pig back there would have ruined the whole game. I was at a point of no return and she began to make my candle burn. A lot of people believe in aliens, that’s what she was to me. She had a fire that fueled me.
Her name was Lil, but I called her Honey Pie. Her daddy was a cop allright, he was the county sheriff. We found some sandy roads on a reservation to peel down. That truck was a monster. She sat up in the seat next to me. We shared the secret bond of the lost. She told me all about him. Her daddy was one of the liars, the money scum. He threw his badge down on people like us. He used power to do whatever he wanted. He was like everybody else’s daddy at the time. He’d come home drunk and beat her silly. She made it very clear, he hung over her head and he wouldn’t stop at getting her back. She looked into me like a helpless little kitten. I knew what she wanted. I pulled right under an old oak tree and made love to that sweet girl right there in her daddy’s truck. She writhed beneath me, her red hair tight in my hands. At that moment I embarked upon a treacherous course from which there was no escape. Clear as day, I could see my fate. It’s the same old story. Desire fills the lonely craving. She made me somebody. If anything made sense to me it was that everybody is their own worst enemy. I looked into the void and I climbed through. She said he’d touch her the way just I did, but with fury, with malice. I knew I’d be the one who’d end him, my naïve resolve cemented.
Sheriff Harland never met anybody that convinced him he was wrong. A slug of the jukebox shine jumpstarted his bag of bones on his final day. His absent truck wasn’t a first in his line. Probably left it up at the Maybell’s like last New Year’s. As he hoofed it up the road, a pre-programmed route he’s done a few times before, he thought of how he could blame that old bartender, blame anybody else for his foul behavior. “What’d I do to deserve it this time?” He asked the dust on the road. His dizzy trek sweated yesterday’s booze through him by the mounting sun.
The sheriff’s truck pounded down the road. We were both pretty riled up from our sweaty morning activities. She got a little more sinister, telling me stories that made corpses slither in the darkness of my mind. She saw something in the distance that perked her up. An old bum moped down the road. “There he is, watch this.” She pulled a police issue shotgun from behind the seat and rolled her window down. Instinctively, I slowed down, figured she’d just scare him. Before then, I never knew that a shotgun could decapitate a man, but I know that now. He probably saw something coming, but there wasn’t much he could do. His whole neck became pudding. His head actually rolled. She hollered out orgasmically. She was a good shot. I was amped. “Was that him? Was that your daddy?” She looked directly at me and smiled, “nope.” I was lost.
“I told ya sheriff, we don’t have no radio here,” Barry reminded Harland for the millionth time. That old bar was so broke down it didn’t even have a lock on the door, it was open 24/7. The old lady would show up round dark, but Barry was always there waiting with his rot-gut slugs. No truck out back only meant that he’d have to start calling around. A phone call to dispatch this early in the morning put a look out for it. He could wait around a while to quench his thirst. If Maybell’s bar was a black hole, then the woman herself was the event horizon. Darkness falls when you rot in that bar. She smashes out an old butt among the empty shot glasses, dime cigars, and his sidearm atop the bar. “Sheriff Harland, you’re gonna have to go home or I’ll have to start charging you rent.” “Waiting to hear bout my truck, they’ll call any minute. Gimmie another one wouldja?” He glances around at the empty, dark bar. She stands over him. “Your truck’s out back. But there aint no way Barry’s gonna let you drive in your state. Hit the road Jack.” Harland stiffened, grabbed his sidearm from the bar top and lumbered out the back door to behold what he considered to be a confusing magic, there it was, his truck. He approached it quizzically, asking it questions.
I hear stories all the time about how resilient the human body is, but it is not. I caught that old sheriff right in the hollow of his cheek with the business end of a dirty shovel I found in his truck bed. It sheared the entire lower half of his head off. He squealed out of a jawless gape, eyes bugged and disbelieving. One more shovelful of his head did the trick, but dang it if he didn’t squeeze one off from his revolver when he hit the ground. Right up my leg and stuck in my hip, it was awful dumb luck. Next thing I knew, Maybell’s out there screaming and cussing at me, right there in the back lot. Honey Pie was on her back like bees. She rode on top of that hag until she was down for the count, a count lost on me in how many times Maybell’s skull was banged into the gravel and cracked like a sour melon. She came over and saw I was shot after she spit and kicked at her dear old daddy’s gruesome remains.
Barry stood there at the back door and watched the whole escapade. “Well, you finally did him in, didn’t ya?” We both turned cold at the realization. “Take him and that old truck down to Raven Lake and I’ll get them pigs going the other way.” He picked up the greasy shovel and threw it in the back as she loaded me up. She side-eyed him with suspicion and scorn from behind the wheel and drove us away. The waiting drove me mad, it was pretty far off and I was bleeding pretty heavy. Once we got close, the rain came down. She hauled me through the mud into a dingy mosquito shack sinking into the lake. I couldn’t find any other way. I held the light out as she dug the bullet from my raised skin with a butter knife. With no tin cup to plink the slug into like an old western, she swallowed it, our little secret. She don’t like the way she smiles, she couldn’t help it. She poured rotten shine down my gut and watched me drift away.
One thought banged away in my simple dream. I was lost and I had to find a way to find her. Barry stood over me like a human stain. His smell awakened all the pain. Bleary, I looked up and all he said was, “I gotta job for you two.” She laughed in the distance.
City cops are serious about their car chases. They already blocked and barricaded every place they could. We are cop killers after all. They know the score. The car wash gave me some time to remap our frantic escape, but they are soon onto us. The little coupe convertible has some real speed and handles like a champ, but our options are dissolving quickly. The diamond bags are so stuffed, she has one on her lap and the other bloating on the dash. My route keeps changing. I know what they are doing. The rat maze is starting to strangle. Behind us the pressing lights and sirens become less threatening and more musical. I have the feeling again of peering into the well, the void below vast and endless.
We get diverted onto what can only be our doom. The city’s elevated highways are a hopeless getaway. The fat cats ride up on them so they don’t have to look at the miserable faces down on the streets. I look over to her before taking the onramp. “If we only had more time,” she laments, kissing my lips hard one last time. We launch onto the highroad to find nowhere left to go but down. We thrust through a ramp of cruisers and plummet over the edge. Along with burning steel and the blood and flesh of our lost lives, what matters most is our parting gift to the ravenous, huddled masses to the city below that comes pouring down in a hail of diamonds.