“All the fours!” cried Daniel suddenly, causing Rodney to jump. “44 is the first number! N 44!” And with that the final game began.
Margaret started to whither, but regained her resolve when Eunice placed a hand on her forearm. “You were always one for dramatics, Tulip,” said Eunice. She popped the top off her dabber with a practiced motion and blotted the number 44 on her card.
Margaret and Griselda didn’t have the number. Myrtle looked at the cards that had been left behind but didn’t have it either. There was a card in front of Tulip. She didn’t look at it. Rodney did. There was no 44. Switch was digging underneath one of his fingernails with the pointy end of his half-chewed toothpick. Two more numbers followed quickly on the heels of the first. Margaret had both. No one else at the table marked a card. Daniel paused now to let the geriatric players catch up.
Tulip took a deep breath. It sounded like dirty dish water struggling down a half-clogged drain. “No dramatics, Eunice. Not this time. Truth is what I bring to you today.”
“You want truths,” barked Margret, “here’s a truth for you. Your days are coming to end, Tulip. Griselda had a vision.”
“Lucky seven,” announced Daniel. “B 7.” Eunice and Margaret marked their card.
“Griselda had a stroke,” shot Myrtle.
Eunice shook her head. “Not just her. Morag too. Same day. I was with her when it happened. We were having lunch—sandwiches, egg salad, I think—she went stiff, and started speaking. She said change was needed. That change was coming—“
“Dark times on the horizon,” interrupted Griselda. Her flesh was pale. She was sensitive to sunlight. “The end times are coming. We must be strong.” Her voice was flat, hollow, speaking from memory the words she had uttered when she had her stroke. She had been at aquacise. Damn near drowned.
“We are strong!” Tulip’s voice got shrill when it got loud.
“Bah,” snorted Eunice. “If that were true then this wouldn’t be happening.” She waved her hand over the cards in front of her, Margaret and Griselda.
Myrtle sucked air between her teeth as if she had been kicked in the stomach. “What is the meaning of this? How is this possible?” Tulip demanded, her white eyes spinning in their sockets.
Rodney was a bright boy. He wasn’t the smartest kid in class, but he wasn’t the paste eater either. He had identified eight ways fractions could be useful in the ‘real world’. He knew thirty-six important historical dates. His poetry assignments didn’t rhyme. But he was a simple boy. A naïve boy. When he looked at those five elderly ladies he saw only sweet, feeble grannies, and he wanted to assist them—offer a steady arm, pull out a chair, get something off the top shelf. Even something as simple as a few words of kindness would comfort them in their golden years. That’s what he believed; but, what he saw was the façade. He wasn’t the only one. These women and their ilk, though aged on the outside, possessed at their core a loathing of everything, hatred hardened by their own bodies’ betrayals and having to watch undeserving youth take what they believed was still rightfully theirs— life and all its pleasures and pains. And so this brood preyed upon the sympathy of others, these youth they scorned, and their enmity increased even as they feasted, and though Rodney was oblivious to this reality, as were so many others, some part of him registered the wrongness of what was occurring that day at Bingo Palace. He started to sweat. He suddenly felt uncomfortable in his own clothes, the Wombat garb that defined him. He tugged at the short beak of his hat. He shifted his considerable weight from foot to foot.
Dickie looked up. He felt that something was not right. He lacked formal education. He had learned alone, and much of what he had learned had been how to survive. As such, much of his brain still worked on a primitive level. He could sense danger like a deer catching the scent of a wolf on the wind. Something was going on at that table in front of the stage. That fat kid was there—Rodney—dancing from foot to foot, plucking at his hat and tugging on his sweater. The old crones around the table were in the midst of an argument— those three against the other two that had the greaser at their beck and call. Dickie started forward, still toying with the lengthy key chain attached to his pants.
“This is not possible!” shrieked Tulip. Daniel faltered, the next ball clutched in his hand.
“But it is happening,” goaded Margaret.
“How?” Myrtle’s voice was very close to pleading.
With a nod from Eunice, Griselda and Margaret bent over and reached into their handbags. They straightened and with thumps placed items on the table. Margaret had a small army of short plastic dolls. Each was naked with peach colored ‘flesh’. The noses were bulbous, the eyes lidless. The only distinguishing characteristic was the hair. Each doll had unique, brightly colored hair that stood on end as if the tension between the women was producing an electrical charge. In front of Griselda now sat a half dozen small beanbag animals.
Myrtle recoiled as if slapped. Tulip jerked upright. She clutched the arms of her wheelchair. Her knuckles cracked. She started to laugh. The sound was that of bones rattling in a rotten coffin.
“You abandoned your Sisters for this? For luck?” Tulip laughed again, shaking her head. “Stupid bitches. Luck is a crutch for the weak, like hope. What I possess is stronger than luck.” And with that, she rose. Her thin legs shook as she did so.
“New caller!” she yelled.
Daniel realized he still had a ball in his hand. He looked at it. “Two little fleas,” he announced. “N 33.”
Margaret, Eunice and Griselda dabbed their card.
“New caller!” Tulip’s white eyes were bugging. Rodney covered his ears. Dickie had used the stairs to get off the stage and was now making his way toward the table.
Daniel plucked another ball from the tube. “O 66. Clickety click.”
Three dabbers left three wet circles on three cards.
“You’re finished,” sneered Margaret.
“NEW CALLER!”
Griselda went stiff. “She’s coming.” It was little more than a whisper.
Myrtle leaned across the table, looking at Griselda. “What was that?”
“NEEEEWWW CAAALLLLLER!”
Rodney closed his eyes. A tear squirted out. No one in the room was playing now, no one except the five women at the table directly in front of the stage. Dickie was close, his approach causing Switch to stop picking his fingernails. His chair toppled with a clatter as he rose.
Griselda jerked forward violently. Her hand started to spasm. It rose and fell, rose and fell. The dabber clutched tightly in her fist struck her bingo card so forcefully that it cracked. Blue ink splashed with each successive pump like arterial spray.
“She’s coming!” moaned Griselda. “You might prevail here but your time is coming!”
“Who?” demanded Myrtle, desperate.
“NEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWW CALLLLLLLLLLLLLER!”
Rodney sobbed and wished he was at home, safe and comfortable.
Griselda went rigid. All motion stopped. “Grandma,” she croaked, literally, dead from a hemorrhagic stroke.
Daniel dropped the next ball.
Dickie stepped in front of Rodney. “What the fuck is the problem here—“.
Switch made his move. His hand shot under his leather jacket. A flick of the wrist, a click and a blade was in his hand. Dickie saw it. Switch slashed at Dickie. Dickie took an instinctual step back. The blade cut only air, but Dickie bumped into Rodney. There would be no where to go this time. Switch drew back his arm, the beginning of a low stab intended for Dickie’s guts. Dickie whipped his chain, striking Switch across the hand. The stab stopped. Dickie yanked the chain to its full length, spinning it as he did so. The key at the end hummed during its flight. A flick of Dickie’s wrist and the key tore a bloody strip across Switch’s face. The greaser howled and spun into the side of Tulip’s wheelchair. He toppled. One hand tried to hold the flesh of his face together. The other grabbed blindly and found the oxygen tanks. The wheelchair slid. Switch slid too, falling. His hand gripped plastic tubing. His weight was too much. The tubes tore away from the oxygen tanks. There was a hiss of escaping gas, and the blade Switch had dropped struck one of the tanks. Metal on metal caused a spark.
There was a great whoosh and a hot slap in the face that knocked Dickie and Rodney off their feet. Dickie fell onto the younger, heavier boy. Dickie watched in absolute disbelief as Tulip was propelled across the table by the blast of the exploding oxygen tanks. She went quilt and all, her legs in the air, blown clear out of her sneakers. The back of her dress was ablaze. As she sailed over the head of a wide-eyed Eunice, Tulip reached down with hands like claws and took hold of the woman’s hair. Eunice’s neck snapped like a twig as Tulip’s flight continued, fire tongues and smoke trailing her like a cape.
Dickie rolled off Rodney, and in doing so exposed the younger boy to the horrible sights that now filled the room. There was a mass of flame stumbling around, knocking over seniors trying to flee or too stunned to move. It was Switch, lit up in the explosion, dying horribly, spreading the fire. Daniel was on his knees, clutching his throat, red flowing between his fingers. A piece of flying metal had sliced his neck, plucking his jugular like a pick on a guitar string.
And Tulip–
Tulip skipped across a table on her belly like a flat stone on water. The oxygen mask was still attached to her face, remnants of the plastic tubing streaming behind her like pigtails. She hit a stack of chairs at the far side of the room. The clatter could be heard even over the screams of the terrified and the dying.
Dickie’s instincts had saved him from Switch. His instincts were sharp and even now were telling him to run. He knew Bingo Palace better than anyone. He could find a way out. He had to hurry. It was time to go. The flames were spreading. And that crippled, half-burned crone was unbelievably rising. Her hands came first, emerging out of the jumble of chairs, tight fists filled with clumps of Eunice’s gray-white hair. Then the arms, and then the head with its hair melted by the heat of the flame that had licked her back right down to the bone, and as she rose she laughed her awful laugh.
Dickie scrambled to his feet. This was a hundred times worse than the most horrible shit he had ever experienced. He spared a glance to where Rodney lay on the floor. He wasn’t going to take the boy with him. That thought never crossed his mind. Instincts wouldn’t allow such altruistic action. And yet he spared a glance, and what he saw brought him to a sliding halt.
Until a few moments ago, Rodney had known nothing but good. He was a true innocent, and so the onslaught of horror he witnessed and could not escape had not only instantly turned his hair completely white but had also aged him physically by sixty years, a transformation that was particularly hard on his heart, thus provoking a massive heart attack that struck him dead.
Rodney was heavy but Dickie was strong, wiry muscle stretched over a thin frame. He grabbed Rodney under the arms and hauled him through Bingo Palace, eventually dragging him clear of the burning building. He had been ready to abandon Rodney when he thought the boy was alive, but when he saw the boy laying dead Dickie remembered Rodney talking about the mother and father he had, and Dickie thought that man and woman should have their son returned to them. Letting Rodney’s remains burn up in the fire would have been cruel. Dickie was many things, but he wasn’t cruel. Dickie left Rodney in an alley across the street. A crowd started to gather. Fearing discovery, Dickie slinked deeper into the shadows of the alley and was gone.
No fire trucks came. There were no fire stations, firefighters or fire trucks in the Tax Free Zone. It did have media though—radio stations and newspapers that had reporters, though they were as crooked as anything in that sprawling urban nightmare. The fire had turned into an inferno by the time the television folk arrived with their video cameras. The sky opened up soon after. The downpour eventually doused the flames, but not before the whole city block had been consumed. Footage of the fire played on a loop for days.
On the other side of the tunnel where the sun shone and children visited their great-grandmothers in care homes, there was no news of the fire. Most of these people would live the full duration of their lives without sparing a thought for the Tax Free Zone, but one family would think about it for the remainder of their days—the Wimpy family.
When Rodney didn’t come home for lunch, his mother called her neighborhood police station. She explained that her son had never been late, for anything, ever. The constable on the other end of the phone listened and said things meant to calm down over-reacting mothers. Later that evening, right at the end of his shift, Rodney’s mom stormed into the station and demanded a search be started. She wouldn’t leave until he consented.
It took time and considerable effort—the full details of which were never disclosed to the family—but the constable located the boy. Rodney’s mother wept uncontrollably when she was taken into the quiet, dimly lit room to identify the body. The face looking up at her was her son’s, though much older, an old man, a mirror image of her departed grandfather, but the body was that of a boy, her boy, her Rodney. She tried with her hands to smooth the wrinkles in his Wombat sweater.
Rodney Wimpy was laid to rest two days later. There was a large turnout. The baffling circumstances of his death had generated a lot of gossip in the neighborhood. The curious turned out in droves, crowding the cemetery. They stood elbow to elbow, talking in whispers before and after the service but respectfully silent throughout.
Breaking form, it didn’t rain that day, but the weather wasn’t the only non-traditional element of Rodney’s service. At the family’s request, the chaplain explained in a loud, clear voice how Rodney had been a good and true Wombat, and how leaders of the Den to which Rodney had belonged had decided to posthumously award him the Community Service Merit Badge.
The chaplain concluded the service with a reading of the Wombat Code of Conduct.
[the end]
