The Holy Terror by Wayne Allen Sallee Read Free Book Online Page B

again. The machine failed and suddenly Haid smelled charred flesh and burnt chest hairs. He screamed silently into his face of the reflection in the window. He pounds his fists into the concrete sill again and again.
    The hustler’s face whispers to him, coming close over the treetops. The false twinkle has become a conspiratorial wink. The hustler told him that with healing must first come pain... Haid understood. He did.
    He understands after he has broken his second finger and has felt the pain, the wondrous, joyous pain and he knew then that yes, his Father, his god, will live. Because of him, He will live.
    But he wanted to be certain. He broke his other hand and scrapes his nails hard against the tiled wall until it chips and splinters are driven through his fingernails and into the hand’s top-most knuckle joints.
    When he begins an undulating scraping of his skull on the sill, the cement surface bloodied and pocked, a nurse comes forward, and grabs him, holding his palsied hands to his side.
    Haid screams along with Del Shannon: Some live and others die, well I wonder. Haid screams I can hear the television bleeding -- Why Why Why Why Why... Puking up bits of his rib cage and crying through the rapture of it all, he saw two nurses giving the high five, one holding a soiled Fleet enema bag, laughing as she inadvertently smeared the shit of the still living man on the other’s palm and Del Shannon stops singing so a Maybelline commercial can be told, both nurses laughed and the doctors clapped each other on the back.
    Haid looked up at the television and saw the healthy spikes of the EKG machine.
    Beyond that, the night winked at him.

    * * *

    Levelle Thigpen was overweight, sure. He weighed in at fifteen pounds twenty-six years ago and never stopped gaining. Only, everyone called him Chubby Love because of his taste in women. He’d spot a big-boned gal and nudge Mike Surfer or Glowworm Willie, tell them hey, I’s goin’ to get me some chubby lovin’ tonight. Like that.
    Chubby also scavenged for things, when he wasn’t clowning for the crowd. After the McDonald’s on Randolph closed down at eight, Chubby Love had all of three dollars and twelve cents, all in change, jangling at the bottom of his 7-11 Big Gulp go-cup. He figured on a little scavenger hunting on his way back to the St. Benedictine Flats.
    Entering the cobblestone walkway of Couch Street, flanked on either side by green and grey garbage cans, he started his scavenging at the first can in sight. He saw a black briefcase propped against one of the smaller bins. Bending towards it, a mean feat in itself, as Thigpen’s lower abdomen looked as if Chubby was hiding an inner tube under his shorts, he saw a three-piece urinating against the wail, both hands pasted to the wall. Chubby thought that the guy looked as if he was being frisked by The Invisible Man.
    “Thought they had port-a-pots in the limosines that be taking you threads home.” He couldn’t pass up commenting on the one thing he rarely did in public.
    “Get away from that,” the threads talking about his case.
    “Just walkin’ by, is all. Take a chill pill, brother mine.”
    “I’m not your brother.” But Chubby was no longer listening, because his attention was diverted towards the deserted wheelchair farther down the alley.
    For a street person, a wheelchair was almost as good as a shopping cart when it came to carrying one’s life belongings.
    Chubby heard the guy zipping up behind him; he was more concerned with that beautiful looking chair. He could set his go-cup between his legs when he sat in it, and keep his Woolworth’s bags on the seat when he was walking.
    The Lake Street El roared by, always louder and more mournful in the winter months. The wheelchair was damn near spotless. A Chicago Cubs backpack was slung over the back of the handlebars. An index card, covered by clear plastic, the kind you buy in dime stores, read THIS CHAIR IS REGGIE GIVENS. Chubby knew that