A Day in the Junkyard

It was a very ugly cat, and knew it.

Both of its ears were gone, torn away in some long ago struggle for dominance in the junk yard. One eye was puffed shut from a more recent squabble and the other gleamed like bright gold from a beneath a permanently drooping lid. A short tail jutted like a broken finger from its rump, the rest of its length lost long ago to some laughing half-wit who thought garden shears were wonderful fun. The cat had escaped losing anything else to the half-wit by ripping his palm open down to the bone and by biting off part of his nose. Then it had scrambled away into the shadows of the car piles while the idiot lay screaming on the ground, still clutching the cat's bloody tail in one grimy hand.

The cat was grooming now, on the hood of an ancient Buick. Licking the junk yard dust off once again before it settled down for its nap. Most of the cats in the dump, especially the abused ones, never came out during the day, and if they did, they kept far away from the main paths where the customers walked. These paths that meandered back and forth aimlessly through the junk yard. They looped and swirled in pointless cacophony through the hungry chaos of the place. Some of them actually went somewhere, and the occasional badly painted and misspelled sign would direct the eager traveler to "Meckanical Parts" or "Compewter Hardware". Most just dead-ended, though. Leading into shadowy little corners up against the high wooden fence, or up to some pile of stacked and crushed vehicles.

But this cat did not mind the traversed paths at all, and the crumpled hood of the Buick, in the partial shade of a precariously leaning tower of cars, was its favorite place for a nap. Partially because the way this particular part of the junk yard always seemed to catch whatever breeze there was on muggy days, but mainly because it liked to scare people. It would wait there on the hood feigning complete disinterest, biding its time until just the right kind of person came by. The kind of persons that the cat instinctively knew would start and stare when it hissed at them, staring hard with gleaming gold from its shadowy perch. And then, before they could grab some handy object to throw, the cat would leap down from its perch in a snarling frenzy and wildly run at them. If they fled, as most did, it would rip at the back of their clothes with bony claws, shredding their jeans and dresses as it did so. And all the better if they were wearing shorts. The can would then chase them for nearly a hundred feet through the twisting piles of junk. If they stood their ground the cat would leap up at them and rip and tear at their shirts, howling like the damned as it clawed at its prey. They would usually start to run at this point and the game could proceed as usual. The cat would then disappear back into the yard for awhile, while the owner prowled up and down the aisles with a shotgun, cursing under his breath all the time and stinking of cheap wine. He never even came close to "Whitey", though he did bag the other cats in the yard on occasion.

But the cat was feeling mellow today. Its belly was full of a kitten he had stolen from its mother's litter while she was out hunting, and the sky was bright and warm. Perfect for sleeping. The cat stretched itself languorously on the hood, and went to sleep.

Several long and somnolent hours later, the cat was awakened by the sounds of someone coming down one of the nearby aisles. It opened its eyes just wide enough to watch, it was feeling entirely too mellow today to chase people around. It would just lie in the shade and stretch. Such a good day!

But as the man in the bright white suit came striding jauntily around the corner of a block of rusted out washing machines, the cats eye suddenly went wide, and it quickly rolled itself to a sitting position to watch the man more closely......

The man moved jauntily along, his suit shining bright in the reflected rays of the fierce spring sun. His head was held high in a posture of perfect confidence, if he was in any way daunted by the shabbiness of his surroundings it was not discernible by looking at him. His smile was wide and full of cheer; indeed, he could be heard to occasionally chuckle to himself, his eyes squeezing shut in suppressed merriment. Short cropped black hair framed an ordinary face, the ruddy face of a content farmer came to mind, for it was well tanned and rough from the erosions of a vigorous outdoor life. It was a face rarely found at the top of such an immaculately bedecked frame and this paradox would have drawn attention if there had anybody present to witness it. The hands too could be seen to be those of a working man, they were gnarled with callus and muscle, though the arms they were attached too were attired in fine silk.

The man moved quickly, despite his idle happiness, and with purpose. His stride was deliberate, with the occasional slight sidestep in order to avoid a stain of oil upon the cracked and dusty pavement of the junk yard's narrow alleys. He wore a white suit of an expensive executive stripe, and the shoes he so carefully shielded from random stain were of fine leather and elegant polish. In his left hand he carried a briefcase of small but distinguished dimensions. It swung in small arcs at his side in wide, carefree swings that were another telegraph of his fine humor on this bright and sunny day.

He moved deeper and deeper into the depths of the junk yard. The main office was located next to the Main Gate back in the front of the place, but that was not what the man in the white suit was interested in. He had, in fact, entered by a side gate in order to avoid the attention that entering by the front entrance would bring. What interested him lay in the very back of the place, in a shabby little shack of corrugated tin. It was nestled up against a peeling flat board fence as if for shelter, and its front door was nothing more than a tattered car blanket taken from some wreck. There were no windows in the walls of the little shack so it would be pretty warm in there. In Texas summertime it would be an oven capable of nicely cooking anyone who was inside.

The man in the white suit, made his way up to the piece of quilt which hung over the door, and began to push his way through it into the room beyond. But as he was doing so, his hand happened upon a reddish splotch about halfway up the quilt on the right side.

And he was gone......

In agony and pain the woman lay, her body horribly twisted into the savage new shape the car had taken. The impact had twisted the little Yugo into a bulk of torn metal and shattered glass, and Gladys Bouldin was in the middle of it.

She couldn't see the lower half of her body, it was buried beneath the engine block which now protruded from what remained of the dashboard. Her left arm was pinned beneath the steering column, but she did not look at it, the one time she had looked at it she had seen the dull gleam of bone in the mangled mess of blood and metal.

She couldn't see out of her right eye and blood continually dripped down into the other, making it difficult to see. She could dimly hear the sounds of shouts and cries as people raced around the car. She also heard the honks of distant horns as the commuters, halted in the middle of the afternoon by a mysterious traffic jam, became irritated with the delay and used their braying horns to voice their displeasure. Somewhere nearby, someone was frantically yanking at the sides of her twisted coffin with a tire iron, but to no avail, the frame of what had once been her family's errand car had been crushed into a solid mass by the collision.

She was dying, and knew it. The blood was pouring out of her and pooling in the cracked and shattered dials of the dashboard, which now lay beneath her. As her mind dimmed and the tiny dips and hollows of the dashboard filled and overran with her pooling blood, she thought of her family.

Steve would just die if he lost her, she knew. She had been the first woman he had ever slept with, and would likely be the last. He was a timid programmer of computer games for Fun Fare, and had committed himself to a life of lonely celibacy until he had met Sarah Funez at a party he had reluctantly attended at the strong persuasion of friends. She had just finished with the latest of a number of brief relationships with men she had met in a variety of singles bars, and had been feeling lower down than she had since her mother had died. Steve's timidity and almost childish politeness, had amused her at first, but as they had conversed she saw something in his eyes that all of the various artists on the make had never been able to show her. It took her two years to find out what that something was: it was love. Steve had later told her that it was on that very night he had fallen in love with her, though it took Sarah two years of casual acquaintance to see it. Little Anne, was born in the second year of their marriage, a beautiful little girl with the electric blue-black hair of her mother and the gentle gray eyes of her father. She was an irritating child, often screaming long into the night and early in the morning. But she was the first child of two people who had both wanted children more than they had either ever realized, and every cry and belch of the tiny infant was recorded for posterity by Sarah, a camera nut if there ever was one.

She had been on her way to buy more VHS cassettes when the semi jerked out in front of her. Apparently tired of waiting in the access ramp for an open spot, the driver had jerked forward on to the freeway in a burst of speed to take advantage of the slight distance between Sarah's Yugo and the car ahead of her. She had hit the brakes, and skidded left into the main lanes of faster traffic, and her car was immediately pulverized by the hurtling masses of sixty mile-an-hour steel boxes.

She began to cry as she laid there, her tears mixing with the blood on her face to make a greasy mask of death and sorrow. She cried, in part over the miserable pain coursing through her, but mainly she cried for her family, the family she had waited so long for. It was for Steve and Anne that she cried in those final moments of her life. As her mind faded into the darkness and her body spasmed in its final agonizing moments of tortured life, her final thought was of Anne crying at the side of her mother's small grave.....

The man clutched at the fabric, stunned by the sudden onrush of desperate emotion and memory which had been imposed into the bloody spot by the final moments of a young woman's life. He felt her terrible pain and sorrow course through him like a flood of some befouled river where the fish have all long since died and rotted to skeletons. He stood there silent for several moments, feeling every drop of the emotional stew the woman had left behind her, her second child, a dark malignancy born of the hideous pain and misery of her final living moments.

And he smiled, his blue eyes glittering with barely suppressed mirth.

One never knew where one was going to find these little treasures. It was surely a proof of the existence of a Higher Power directing all that he should find such a delightful morsel as this in such an ordinary setting.

He held the quilt for a few moments more, relishing the pain of the dead woman. Finally, however, with a slight sigh of regret passing through his lips, he released the car blanket and stepped through into the room beyond. There was a time for business and a time for fun, after all. And this was a time for business.

The room beyond was as hot as the man had thought it might be, he could almost see the waves of heat rising from the piled heaps of metal. All around him were stacks of old car parts, heaped haphazardly on old wooden tables. There were air pumps and water pumps, oil filters and gas filters, carburetors and distributors, all covered with the grease and grime of usage far beyond the official lifetime of such automotive gadgetry. The areas beneath the tables were crammed with the larger and heavier automotive parts, the weight of which the ancient tables could never have accepted. These shadowed masses, due to the uncertain light and their own twisted shapes, made it look as if a horde of twisted monstrosities lurked beneath the creaking tables, standing stock still to put off the apprehension of any prey that might inadvertently enter their lair. As the man walked past, a protruding rod of metal snagged his pants and left a long greasy stain on the lower leg. He barely noticed, for his attention was wholly upon what lay at the back of the room.

There, the hoods of three cars had been made into a small, three walled cubicle, held up by the mounds of junk around it. Atop one of the 'walls' an old and bent desk lamp had been fastened in place with a rusty clamp, providing the only illumination in the place. It shone brightly down inside the cubicle. As the man approached, he could hear a light rustling from inside the cubicle, like the sounds of cockroaches skittering away from the kitchen light which has suddenly revealed them during the dark hours of the night. He smiled to himself at the aptness of the analogy and stepped to where he could view the interior of the cubicle. And stopped short in astonishment.

The pictures!

The three walls of the cubicle were covered in drawings. They were simply made; black felt marker on pieces of white poster board, the edges ragged from where they had been ripped from a larger sheet of the stuff. But it was not the medium of the pictures (paintings!) that had stopped him in his tracks, but what lay upon them.

It was liking looking into all the depths of hell.

All around him the twisted faces of men in agony resounded with the terror and pain of a thousand separate tortures. There was something of a similarity to Picasso in the drawings, the forms of the people within the paintings were twisted and broken, in imaginative representation of their interior states. But the lines were softer, giving a more realistic edge to them. Eyes, drawn long with sorrow, peered to unseen heavens above, twisted arms thrust out in mute appeal for sanctuary as all the evils of the world piled down upon them. In most of the pictures a twisted individual was being crushed by great weights of regret and sorrow. These weights were great twisted mass of evil, in which all manner of things identifiable and not were twisted together in a great screaming mass that pushed down upon the sinner below. Mocking eyes, screaming mouths, black tentacles of shattered glass, bodies twisted by pestilence and filth, were some of the more identifiable parts, the rest was just twisted lines that preyed on the eye, suggesting worse terrors yet. An observer could spend a lifetime trying to deduce what secret horrors were layered into those twisted shapes.

The man stood stock still for several moments, looking at them, taking them in, trying in a brief spasm of moments to look at every bit and piece of them. They were so beautiful! As he watched in mute fascination, one tiny tear appeared at the corner of his left eye and ran quickly down his cheek, and it was the sudden wetness of this tear that brought him back to himself. A trifle irritated at his lack of control he quickly pulled at the base of his jacket to straighten any wrinkles that may have appeared, a bit of fussy industry to bring him solidly back to reality. Quickly wiping the blood from his cheek he stepped forward, placing his hand on the back of the huddled shape that sat on a rusty stool in the center of the beautiful chaos.

The tiny man whirled around, a black felt marker clutched in one fat and grimy hand. He had been so caught up in his work that he had never noticed the arrival of a stranger into his universe. He stared up at the man in white with clouded brown eyes, blinking as the sweat on his brow continually dripped down into them.

He was tiny little man, this artist, and as he had no neck, his large square head resting directly on his shoulders, he looked quite odd as he peered up at his visitor, as a dog standing too close to its master, peering up for a treat. His frame was heavy with fat, a result of which was that any gesture he made was slow and clumsy, like the arm motions of a newborn baby, weak and impotent.

"Quien es?", the artist muttered, his words a guttural murmur, barely escaping from the heavy jowls of fat that surrounded his mouth.

"Senor Funez?", the man in white politely inquired, his manner completely polite and urbane, his narrow head slightly cocked in polite deference.

The artist seemed startled, as if he thought the man in white had just told him the he had the same name as the artist himself. He made no reply for several moments, collecting himself. As he did so, the man in white noticed in distracted amusement at how the confused look of surprise gave way to a brief expression of calculating intelligence, which, just as suddenly, was clouded over by a gaze of ignorance and stupidity. When the artist spoke again, the man in white noticed that a bulging front tooth was now visible, where none had been in evidence before.

"Si. Que es?", he finally said.

" I am here to make you an offer", the man in white said cordially, " My name is Alister Jamieson, and I believe it is in my power to make you a very happy man."

"No comprendo. No hablo ingles, senor. El jefe es en la casa en el...."

"No. No. No," said the man, laughing as he said it, his eyes disappearing into wrinkles of merriment. "This will never do. Mr. Funez, I am perfectly aware you speak English very well, and I have no business at all with that lumbering piece of walking snot who happens to be your boss. Being in the presence of such an individual, I assure you, would be more than enough to make me violently ill."

At this point, Jamieson turned around in idle puzzlement, peering at his surroundings questioningly. Seeing nothing readily available, he sat himself down with prim efficiency up a large and thoroughly greasy engine block that held up the eastern wall of the tiny cubicle, which placed him at an even height with Funez.

"Now," the man easily continued, "Let's talk turkey Mr. Funez, or can I call you Eduardo? I've never been one to stand on formalities. I'm here to make you an offer, and I'm prepared to tell you in advance, I'm not willing to take no for an answer."

Eduardo made no reply to this, for he was still looking at where his visitor's posterior rested on the engine block, where Jamiesons movements were already causing midnight black stains to edge up around his sides.

"Mr. Funez?" Jamieson questioned politely.

"Um, er, yes?" Funez said, tearing his attention away from the ruination of Jamiesons suit. He still clutched the uncapped felt marker in his hand and looked very confused.

"Now that I have your full attention, please allow me to give you something," saying this Jamieson put the briefcase upon his lap, twirled the combination lock into the place with good humored efficiency, and popped open the locks with a sharp clack that sounded unpleasantly loud in dark quiet of the shack. He reached in and withdrew a small sheet of paper. He then closed the briefcase back up, and rested it at his feet. He then extended the sheet forward to Funez and then just held it lightly out in the dusty air when Funez did not immediately take it.

Funez peered at it for several seconds, he had immediately recognized it of course. There were at least a hundred sheets just like it in the wastebasket beneath his desk. He just couldn't understand what this white man was doing in his shack, sitting on a filthy engine, and handing him a lottery ticket. Then his eyes trickled down to the lines of numbers on the ticket, (there were three of them, for it was three dollar ticket), and he registered on the center line. His eyes went wide and his mouth dropped open. He weakly reached forward, took the ticket with all the tenderness of a father taking his child for the first time in a maternity ward, and brought it closer to his face. His mouth hung open as he stared at the numbers, his mind racing back and forth as he read them again and again. He slowly half turned away from his guest and looked at pad of dirty notebook paper that sat to one side of the desk. Several lines of numbers were written there, all but one of them savagely crossed out with a black felt marker. The numbers on this last line exactly matched, (In the same order, some part of his mind shouted, in exactly the same order!).

He then turned back to his guest, his wide brown eyes completely cleared of the cloud of pretended stupidity which had earlier obscured them. The tooth which had protruded had disappeared back into the folds of his face.

"Wh-wh-why?", he finally managed to stammer out.

"Because we like you, Mr. Funez" Jamieson said brightly. And with that statement he rose up from his uncomfortable seat, pinched Eduardo on the cheek, and turned away, moving back into the darkness which surrounded the cubicle. As he left, Eduardo was only dimly aware of the large circle of grime and dirt which completely covered the man's backside. Then he was lost to much more pleasant ruminations. Later, of course, it would occur to him that life did not give such presents to such as he, and he would curse himself for being so completely fooled by such a pendejo mother-fucker as this who had nothing better to do with his time than to fuck with the likes of Eduardo Funez. But after a long and tortured night spent combating demons the like of which graced his paintings, he would finally call the lottery commission. And three days after that, he would join the tiny ranks of Texas millionaires, and live happily ever after.

And he would never draw another picture...

Jamieson, stepped out into the warm air of a beautiful Texas spring with a smile on his lips and bright and cheery smile on his face. "What a truly wonderful day!" he thought to himself as he perched on the threshold for a moment, enjoying the light taste of spring that had somehow managed to work its way through the piled and cluttered junk. He rarely had such good days. He hummed a bright little ditty he half remembered from one of his favorite musicals as he drew a pocket knife and gently cut the little patch of blood away from the quilt which covered the door. When he had finished he looked fondly down at the little patch before tucking it away in his coat pocket. He then turned and busily made his way back the way he had come, still humming a happy little tune.

As he moved out into a small clearing in the piles of junk, he noticed an ugly white alley cat peering at him with evil intent from the rusty hood of a shattered Buick, its one good eye peering balefully at him from a heavily scarred face. He stopped up short, for he had been so caught up in the good humor of the day, he had nearly forgotten he had not finished. He muttered disapprovingly to himself, for one should never let emotions get in the way of business! With a quick about face he turned from the direction he had been heading, and moved quickly to the Buick.

The cat, who had been expecting nothing of the sort, looked up in surprise as the man in white bore down on him. It then leaped up and turned away, feet desperately scrabbling for purchase on the slick surface of the hood as it tried to run away to the dim tunnels of rubbish which lay beyond the Buick. The man leaped forward as it did so, his right hand grasping at the stubby tail of the cat, barely making it. With a ferocious snarl the cat turned itself around with savage speed, burying its fangs in claws into his hand, ripping the flesh open in quick ripping motions. Its rear feet tore at his wrist, ripping open the tender flesh there and digging into the muscle and nerve beneath. Jamieson's bright smile was a bit more strained now and he dropped his briefcase to the hood of the car, brought his other hand around, and seized the cat by the back of the neck, ripping it free of his other hand. The cat did not let go easily, and as the man ripped the cats' claws free from their moorings, a long strip of bloody flesh was torn away also.

To the man's left, the briefcase sitting discarded on the hood of the car clacked as its locks snapped open, and the mouth of the little briefcase suddenly yawned wide, revealing a small notebook and a few pens within.

With a great effort, the man smashed the cat down inside the briefcase. The impact was so great the cat was momentarily stunned, which gave the man more than enough time to release his grip and slam the lid down in place. The cat was really a little too large for the briefcase though. One squirming paw and the bit of tail protruded from either side and Jamieson really had to push to get the lid closed enough that he could engage the locks. From inside the briefcase it sounded as if he had caged a demon, long piercing screams and shrieks of rage and pain echoed from its interior, and the case shook with the efforts of the creature to escape and kill its tormentor.

"Nice kitty," the man in white said through clenched teeth, (the smile was very strained now), "What a nice kitty," He took a handkerchief from his pocket, (not noticing that one of his cards fell out with it) and wound it tightly around his gushing wrist, pulling the knot taunt with his teeth. He observed the results critically. Still bleeding, but it should last long enough for him to get out of here.

The card lay in the dirt where it had fallen, with tiny blots of blood along on side and partially obscuring the words printed there in purposeful bold text:

Alfred Jamison: Texas State Lottery Commission.