Only Begotten Daughter (33 page)

“Sheila of the
Moon,
” said Peter.

“Sheila of the
Moon,
” said Nick Shiner.

Spontaneously Billy unleashed a dual stare—real eye, phantom eye—upon his visitor.
“Her?”

“Her.”

“In Camden?”

“She was kissing this fat man, and he pointed to her and shouted, ‘Sheila of the
Moon
!” Then the two of them escaped to Philadelphia in a garbage scow.”

“Garbage scow?”

“I figured there’s a kind of message in that.”

“And he really called her ‘Sheila of the
Moon’
?”

“Right to her face.”

Fire. Billy saw fire. He rubbed his eyepatch. Not the Circus’s flames, not the inferno below, but a holy conflagration raging within his own skull, a psychic burning bush, its hot roots probing the soft meat of his brain. In the center: a face, her face, Sheila of the
Moon,
abomination-666; her gross and voluptuous limbs emerged, her breasts with eyeballs for nipples. All was clear now. The Antichrist ruled. Maybe she’d quit the earth as her followers believed, but today she was back, preventing the Parousia, blocking Jesus’ return.

“Go to our
Midnight Moon
files,” said Billy as he guided Peter Scortia to the balcony. Below: Act Three. The stake. “Clip her photo, brother. Before your brigade slips across the Delaware, make sure each man knows her face as well as he knows the Lord’s Prayer.”

“We’ll find her, Reverend,” Peter promised.

As the sinners smoldered on their stakes, applause swept through the arena, thousands of hands waving like summer wheat. An intense gladness swelled the grandpastor’s heart. Sheila was in Philadelphia now, but soon she’d be back in Jersey—soon she’d be right here. Billy’s inner vision showed all, the flames peeling away her flesh, revealing the worms beneath, and now the worms disintegrated, yielding to the thousand locusts clustered on her bones, beyond which, as the fire continued to undress her, he saw wasps, scorpions, and the foul, stinking ordure at her core.

“Give that man Shiner a lifetime pass to the Circus,” Billy instructed his commandant.

P
HOEBE SPARKS SLAMMED HER
plastic Pluto the Dog cup onto the Formica tabletop and told the bartender to fill it up again. Reverse
God
and you got
Dog,
she thought; you got Pluto, Lord of the Underworld. What a surreal place hell must be if indeed ruled by a cartoon dog who was once the pet of a mouse.

For a six-foot-tall gorilla with garter snakes slithering from his eyes, the bartender operated most efficiently, filling half of Phoebe’s cup with Bacardi rum, half with Diet Coke, using his hairy thumb as a swizzle stick. She tilted Pluto toward her lips and swallowed. Ah, blessed ichor, blood of the worst gods. As always, the stuff did wonders. Her kitchen walls stopped moving like windblown sheets on a clothesline. The gorilla, cunning shapeshifter, changed back into her refrigerator. The tombstones commemorating her abortions became what they were, red and green boxes of Girl Scout cookies.

Self-destruction had its etiquette. Emily Postmortem. No, forget it, she decided. What, exactly, could her suicide note say? ‘To Whom It May Concern: My life has never concerned anyone, therefore you aren’t even reading this. My mother’s disappeared. My father will never find me. Everybody in New York City hated me, so I came here, where everybody hates me too.”

The pistol had turned up during a routine frisking. First rule of the hooker biz: never admit a customer until you’ve disarmed him. Take away his snubnose, blackjack, stiletto, hand grenade. Leonard, he’d called himself, barely seventeen. He had a skin disease. While Leonard sat on the bed drinking her rum, Phoebe slipped the Smith & Wesson into her panty-hose drawer. Maybe it was the rum, maybe the lack of proximity to his revolver, but the poor leper couldn’t get it hard. He hurried off in a fog of shame laced with Bacardi, leaving behind the Smith & Wesson and a thousand discs of dried flesh, pennies from hell.

Lepers. Christ. Still, freelancing was better than franchising. Over the phone, Phoebe could usually screen legitimate customers from pimps, though occasionally one snuck past her guard, in which case she got out her Deauville Hotel dynamite. One glance at Phoebe holding a match in her hand and a nitroglycerin stick between her teeth—for the sake of effect, she’d replaced the electric detonators with gunpowder fuses—and the pimp knew here was a woman to avoid, a woman who, when you least expected it, might nuke your cock.

She fixed herself another diet rum and, taking a swallow, patted her stuffed friend, H. Rap Brown Bear. She ate a Do-si-do. Finished the rum. Scratched her left temple with the Smith & Wesson. Such an exquisite gun, she thought. Its muzzle smelled like Robbie the Robot’s asshole.

Act, girl. Do it. Die. She coiled her tingling finger around the trigger. Each chamber was full, Atlantic City Roulette. Her hand vibrated as if she were operating a chain saw. Slowly she flexed her finger, tighter, still tighter: she might leave a note behind after all, written on the wall in blood and rubbery loops of brain.

A small, sharp explosion.

The bullet grazed her scalp and burrowed into her refrigerator.

Missed? Missed? How could anyone miss? The blood felt thick and warm, like a glob of egg fresh from a hen’s toasty womb. No time to waste. This time the muzzle would go elsewhere, past the lips and across the teeth. For blowjobs, Phoebe always insisted on a condom, but this case was exceptional.

Finger on trigger. Gun in mouth, the oily metal teasing her taste buds. Flexing …

The phone rang.

Ah, the wondrous, beyond-the-grave powers of Alexander Graham Bell. The phone could interrupt intimate conversations, screws, shits, suicides, anything. Phoebe lifted the receiver. “We’re out of business. Try humping your hand.”

“Phoebe?” A woman’s voice.

“Take two aspirin and call me in the afterlife.”

“Is that you?”

“I can’t come to the phone right now. I’m shooting myself. If that fails, there’s always the dynamite.”

“Phoebe, it’s me! Julie!”

“Katz?” Phoebe wrapped the phone cord around her arm like a tourniquet. “Julie Katz?”

“Don’t do anything! Don’t hurt yourself!”

“Katz? Fifteen years? Katz?”

“Right.”

“Fifteen goddamn years?”

“Fifteen. Give me your address. Where are you?”

“Simple funeral, please. No flowers. Only one band.”

“You’re in West Philly, right?”

“A rock band, not a brass band.”

“West Philly, Phoebe?”

“South Forty-third Street.”

“Where on South Forty-third Street? What number?”

“You really in town?”

“Yeah. What number?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your street number!”

“Forty-third Street.”

“No, the
number
!”

“Five twenty-two. Why? You want to get laid?”

“Listen, I’m sending Bix over. We’re married. Stay on the line. You can live with us. Let’s sing a song, Phoebe. ‘On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, we will walk in a dream.’ Stay on the line, honey. Don’t do anything.”

“I’m going to pull the trigger, but I won’t do anything else.”

“‘On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, life will be peaches and—’”

“See you in hell.”

Phoebe pumped two slugs into the phone, sending a spray of plastic and metal against the refrigerator, and lovingly licked the hot smoking muzzle.

522 South 43rd Street. A converted row house, one apartment per floor. On the mailboxes, faded illegible pencil scrawls adorned semidetached labels, as if the tenants had no ultimate interest in receiving their mail.
No.
3—
P. Sparks.
Julie grabbed the knob, a bulb of engraved brass worn smooth by a century of flesh. Why had the idiot hung up? Just once in her life, couldn’t Phoebe do what she was told? The door opened. Julie charged up the steps, swerving past the second-floor banister, Bix puffing behind her.

But for Julie’s flesh, but for her bladder, she would never have discovered the fateful phone number. The search for Phoebe, a frantic three-day marathon conducted out of a Kensington hotel, had taken them through every human catalogue in the Delaware Valley, through police files, coroner’s reports, taxpayer lists, welfare rolls. They placed an ad in the
Philadelphia Daily News:
Phoebe, Get in Touch—Queen Zenobia, Box 356. Then, ten minutes after the Upper Darby Township Justice of the Peace pronounced her Bix’s wife, Julie went to the ladies’ room and saw, scratched in the gray paint, “For Professional Sex, Contact the Green Enchantress, 886-1064. All Genders Welcome.”

Apartment 3 was locked. Julie pounded, no answer. But now came Bix, Father Paradox to the rescue, hurling his two hundred and twenty pounds against the door.

A tornado’s wake: clothes in ragged heaps, newspapers and Bacardi bottles strewn about, a decrepit, unraveling teddy bear surrounded by Tastykake wrappers and boxes of Girl Scout cookies. Beyond, in the sallow kitchen, a figure in a mint bathrobe slouched at the table, crusted blood clinging to her forehead like a snail.

Julie charged. Oh, let me be divine again, Mother, I won’t lose heart, I’ll fix every neuron …

“Hi,” slurred Phoebe, waving a revolver over her head. “You’re gonna pay for that door, fatty.” She gulped down the contents of a plastic Pluto cup.

“Jeeessus,” wheezed Bix, snatching the gun away.

Alive. A mess, a sunken-eyed drunk, a whore, her hair a nest built by psychotic sparrows. But alive.

Julie reached out. The hug cure. Phoebe hiccupped. Food cascaded from her mouth, the steamy stinking remains of a thousand cakes and cookies, splashing into Julie’s shocked palms, rolling through her startled fingers.

“Wasn’t a nice greeting for my old buddy, was it? Shitty greeting. Remember when we dropped those dead fish on that Fourth of July parade?”

“We’re bringing you home with us.” Gritting her teeth, Julie marched to the kitchen sink, jammed with oily frying pans and scabby dishes. The slime in her hands was heavy and warm. “We’ve got a house on Baring,” she explained, washing.

“You think I want to live with deities and pigs?” sneered Phoebe, stuffing cookies into her mouth. Trefoils, Do-si-dos, Thin Mints, Samoas. “Whatever else they say about me, I supported the Girl Scouts.”

They pulled off her bathrobe and stuck her in the shower, holding her upright like two people trying to erect a Christmas tree. “Get him out of here,” she moaned, flailing at Bix. “He wants to see me naked, he pays.” The water grew pink as it hit her bleeding head. Her thinness frightened Julie; she had a ballet dancer’s chest. “Better not mess with my metabolism, Katz. You mess with my metabolism, I’ll punch you out.”

“I’m not divine anymore. I’m just another
geshmatte
Jew.”

“I’ll bet.”

After stuffing Phoebe in the only clean clothes they could find—black bicycle pants, a man’s Hawaiian shirt—they flagged down a taxi and took her to the detox center at Madison Memorial, where a bony young paramedic named Gary, tall as a basketball center, sonogrammed her liver, pumped her full of vitamins, and locked her up in a ten-by-ten lucite chamber equipped with a closed-circuit television camera.

“She tried to shoot herself,” Julie explained as Gary ushered them into the observation room. On the monitor, Phoebe punched and kicked the air like Saint Anthony beating back temptation.

“That’s often the point when we see them,” said the paramedic with a knowing nod. For all his height, he did not inspire Julie’s confidence. The world was not set up to save its Phoebes.

“Get me out of here!” Phoebe’s voice zagged out of the speaker.

“You find the gun?” asked Gary.

Julie nodded. “I think she’s got dynamite hidden away somewhere.”

“Dynamite? That’s a new one.”

“Bastards!” wailed Phoebe. “Gestapo fascists!”

“I want to
help
you!” Julie screamed into the microphone.

“You never helped anybody in your life!”

At last an M.D. appeared, a Dr. Rushforth, a tall, pompous Englishman with enormous hands, strutting into the observation room on a cloud of noblesse oblige.

“Get your friend to stop drinking, and there’s a fifty-fifty chance her liver’ll bounce back,” he prophesied, unfurling the sonogram printout.

Phoebe screamed, “Storm troopers!”

“Stop?
How
?” moaned Julie.

“Nazis!”

Rushforth knotted his sausagelike fingers. “She seeing a psychiatrist? We use Dr. Brophy. And encourage her to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. In this town you can find one every day.”

“Fuckers!”

“You’re not going to discharge her,” Bix protested.

“We haven’t
admitted
her, sir.”

“Cocksuckers!”

“Admit her,” Julie pleaded.

“We’re not a treatment facility, Mrs. Constantine,” said Rushforth. “Call Brophy tomorrow. And get her to A.A.”

Julie winced, recalling Marcus Bass’s opinion that sending an alcoholic to a shrink made about as much sense as sending a heart patient to a poet.

And so Phoebe was on their backs again, the addict as addiction. They carried her out of Madison Memorial and maneuvered her onto the Market Street subway.

“Dear Sheila, I’m a lousy whore!” she screamed over and over above the screeching and clacking of the train. Like Judeans avoiding a leper, the passengers moved as far away as possible. “I’m hungry! I just puked my guts out! Get me some fucking food!”

They took her to the Golden Wok in Chinatown, where, by threatening to rip off all her clothes, by threatening to “make a scene,” she cowed them into buying her a bottle of plum wine. She drank it in ten minutes and, seizing a moo-shu-pork pancake, filled it with the contents of the nearest ash tray.

“Phoebe, no!”

But already she was stuffing the befouled pancake into her mouth. “Yum,” she said, choking it down. Charred tobacco flecked her lips; her tongue curled around an orphan Marlboro filter. Phoebe the agnostic ash eater, the false penitent, going through the motions of contrition. “Yum, yum,” she said, and promptly passed out.

Everyone was watching. A scene after all.