Just After Sunset(114)

"Mostly these portable toilets are just thin molded plastic-you know, the ones you see at truck stops or turnpike rest areas-and you could punch right through the walls or the roof, if you were dedicated. But at construction sites, we sheet-metal the sides. Cladding, it's called. Otherwise, people come along and punch holes through them. Vandals, just for fun, or g*yboys like you. To make what they call 'glory holes.' Oh yes, I know about those things. I have all the information, neighbor. Or kids will come along and huck rocks through the roofs, just to hear the sound it makes. It's a popping sound, like popping a great big paper bag. So we sheet those, too. Of course it makes it hotter, but that's actually an efficiency thing. Nobody wants to spend fifteen minutes reading a magazine in a shithouse as hot as a Turkish prison cell."

Curtis turned over. He was lying in a brackish, smelly puddle. There was a piece of toilet paper wrapped around his wrist, and he stripped it away. He saw a brown smear-some long-since-laid-off construction worker's leavings-on the paper and began to cry. He was lying in shit and toilet paper, more water was bubbling in through the door, and it wasn't a dream. Somewhere not too far distant his Macintosh was scrolling up numbers from Wall Street, and here he lay in a puddle of pisswater with an old black turd curled in the corner and a gaping toilet seat not far above his heels, and it wasn't a dream. He would have sold his soul to wake up in his own bed, clean and cool.

"Let me out! GRUNWALD, PLEASE!"

Epilogue

"Can't. It's all arranged," The Motherf*cker said in a businesslike voice. "You came out here to do a little sightseeing-a little gloating. You felt a call of nature, and there were the porta-potties. You stepped into the one on the end and it fell over. End of story. When you're found-when you're finally found-the cops will see they're all leaning, because the afternoon rains have undercut them. They'll have no way of knowing your current abode was leaning a little more than the others. Or that I took your cell phone. They'll just assume you left it at home, you silly sissy. The situation will look very clear to them. The evidence, you know-it always comes back to the evidence."

He laughed. No coughing this time, just the warm, self-satisfied laugh of a man who has covered all the bases. Curtis lay in filthy water that was now two inches deep, felt it soaking through his shirt and pants to his skin, and wished The Motherf*cker would die of a sudden stroke or heart attack. Fuck the cancer; let him drop right out there on the unpaved street of his stupid bankrupt development. Preferably on his back, so the birds could peck out his eyes.

If that happened, I'd die in here.

True, but that was what Grunwald had planned from the first, so what difference?

"They'll see there was no robbery; your money is still in your pocket. So's the key to your motor scooter. Those things are very unsafe, by the way; almost as bad as ATVs. And without a helmet! Shame on you, neighbor. I noticed you set the alarm, though, and that's fine. A nice touch, in fact. You don't even have a pen to write a note on the wall with. If you'd had one, I would have taken that, too, but you don't. It's going to look like a tragic accident."

He paused. Curtis could picture him out there with hellish clarity. Standing there in his too-big clothes with his hands stuffed in his pockets and his unwashed hair clumping over his ears. Ruminating. Talking to Curtis but also talking to himself, looking for loopholes even now, even after what must have been weeks of sleepless nights spent planning this.

"Of course, a person can't plan for everything. There are always wild cards in the deck. Deuces and jacks, man with the axe, natural sevens take all. That kind of thing. And chances of anyone coming out here and finding you? While you're still alive, that is? Low, I'd say. Very low. And what have I got to lose?" He laughed, sounding delighted with himself. "Are you lying in the shit, Johnson? I hope so."

Curtis looked at the coil of excrement he had shoved off his pants, but said nothing. There was a low buzzing. Flies. Only a few, but even a few was too many, in his opinion. They were escaping from the gaping toilet seat. They must have been trapped in the collection tank that should have been below him instead of lying at his feet.

"I'm going now, neighbor, but consider this: you are suffering a true, you know, witchly fate. And like the man said: in the shithouse, no one can hear you scream."

Grunwald started away. Curtis could track him by the diminishing sound of his coughing laughter.

"Grunwald! Grunwald, come back!"

Grunwald called: "Now you're the one in a tight place. A very tight place indeed."

Then-he should have expected it, did expect it, but it was still unbelievable-he heard the company car with the palm tree on the side starting up.

"Come back, you Motherf*cker!"

But now it was the sound of the car that was diminishing, as Grunwald drove first up the unpaved street (Curtis could hear the wheels splashing through the puddles), then up the hill, past where a very different Curtis Johnson had parked his Vespa. The Motherf*cker gave a single blip of his horn-cruel and cheery-and then the sound of the engine merged with the sound of the day, which was nothing but the buzz of the insects in the grass and the hum of the flies that had escaped from the waste tank and the drone of a far-off plane where the people in first class might be eating Brie on crackers.

A fly lit on Curtis's arm. He brushed it away. It landed on the coil of turd and commenced its lunch. Suddenly the stench of the disturbed waste tank seemed like a living thing, like a brown-black hand crawling down Curtis's throat. But the smell of old decaying crap wasn't the worst; the worst was the smell of the disinfectant. It was the blue stuff. He knew it was the blue stuff.