The Heavenly Table(102)

Jasper folded the poster carefully and put it in his pocket. He watched a small flock of geese glide in and land on the water with a flapping of wings. Before you knew it, the snow would be falling, and another year would have passed without him having his own indoor facilities. But then he thought about what had been on his mind when he opened his eyes this morning. Not the usual, not porcelain commodes or claw-foot bathtubs or running Sandy Saunders out of town or the mass of hair between Mrs. Arnold’s legs. No, he had been thinking about meeting up with Junior, having him to talk to while he did his job. Bagshaw, the dump keeper, as nutty as he might be with his doll baby and rotten produce, was right. Jasper was looking forward to it, to seeing his friend. His friend. He said it aloud. “He’s my friend.” Except for Itchy, he had never had anyone he could call that, unless you counted his uncle the broom maker, and he wasn’t all that sure a blood relative counted. True, a man could have a mighty fine water closet with $5,500—Christ Almighty, he could have one in every room of the house and still have money left over—but how much was a friend worth? You couldn’t put a price on that, no matter how hard people tried. He got up and started out of the park, his measuring wand balanced on his shoulder. Sure, lots of people would give up a buddy for a lot less than indoor plumbing, or the chance to run a comb through Mrs. Arnold’s pubic hair. Sure, they would. But Jasper wasn’t one of them. No, sir, he wasn’t. He stopped and took the poster out of his pocket, looked at it one more time. Then he balled it up and threw it in the pond, watched two of the geese start swimming toward it.





60


BOVARD WOKE UP to find himself lying flat on his back in a dark room with a rag stuffed in his mouth. No matter how hard he tried, all he could move was his head, and he finally realized that he was chained to a floor. He was confused. The last thing he could recall was listening to a couple of drunks bickering in the Blind Owl. The man kept telling the woman she had the face of a bulldog, and she kept comparing his cock to a green bean. Then they’d give each other a big, sloppy kiss—he could still almost hear their puckered lips smacking—before starting their vile insults all over again. But that was all he remembered.

He pushed his tongue around in his mouth under the rag, and discovered, to his shock, that some of his bottom teeth were missing. He twisted his head from side to side. Had he been in a fight? Was he in a hospital? Was this one of Lucas and Caldwell’s crazy games? No, that couldn’t be it. They’d never go this far, no matter how doped up they got. Nothing made any sense, but then slowly, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he became aware that someone else was in the room, sitting on a cot not more than a couple of feet away from him. Jesus Christ, it was that f*cking barkeep, holding a jar in his lap. Then he vaguely recalled picking up a beer and seeing him in the mirror. He heard the man cough, then spit, felt a slimy gob of phlegm splat on his forehead. He struggled against the chains, but they were so tight he couldn’t even make them rattle. He tried to force the rag out of his mouth with his tongue, but it was useless. Making an angry moaning sound in his throat, he banged the back of his head against the floor, tried to make the bastard understand he better turn him loose right now.

Pollard smiled at his efforts. It was nothing new; they all acted the same, at least at first. Some of them gave up quite easily, others hung on hoping for a way out almost until the end, dreaming of escape: the law rescuing them perhaps, or the man who was doing this to them experiencing a change of heart, and so on and so forth, a hundred different scenarios playing out in their terrified heads. He had wondered about that a lot, why would one man surrender his life so quickly and another never admit defeat, even when he had to know he was beaten? Did it have something to do with the way they’d been raised, or if they believed in God, or if they had a family depending on them? There was really no way of telling, but he had a feeling this one was a fighter, which was the type he preferred. The last one, the carpenter, he was ready to cash in his chips before the first night was over with, and it had been hard to keep things exciting with someone so weak and worthless.

“Do you know what I’m going to do to ye?” he asked the lieutenant. “No, probably not. I doubt if you’ve ever been in any kind of fix like this before. Well, for starters, I’m gonna pull all your teeth out. Don’t worry, I won’t break ’em, I promise. I’ve done it plenty of times before. See, I got quite the collection here.” He held up the jar and shook it. “After that, I usually do something special with the tongue. And, no, no, don’t ask me why I do it. Hell, I don’t know myself really. I think it’s just because I can. Let’s see…Shit, I forgot where I was. Oh, yeah. Then I’ll whittle on ye for a day or two, maybe take your guts out while ye watch. From what I’ve seen in the past, you won’t be in too good a shape by then. And then the last thing I do, I mean after your heart quits beatin’ and all that shit, is saw you into little pieces. Not to eat or anything like that. I tried that once, and I have to say I didn’t care for the taste of it, though I have been thinkin’ lately that maybe I didn’t fix him right. No, just makes you easier to carry when I take ye over to the creek. Won’t nobody know what happened to ye except me. I’ll dump you in the water like fish bait, and you’ll just disappear. But we’ll save all that for later. Right now I hear some customers knockin’ on the door.” Then he set the jar of fangs and grinders down just a couple of inches from Bovard’s head, and left him alone in the dark room, rank with the smell of dead men’s body fluids soaked into the wood floor, to dwell on what he’d said.