Hearts In the Gutter

By Lamont A. Turner

   Virgil stumbled out of the bar and into the gutter, helped along by a shove from the stout man with the tattooed arms who’d warned him several times to leave his girlfriend alone. The forearm he was just sober enough to get up over his face before he hit saved his teeth, but the cracking sound was nonetheless alarming. The pain followed a few seconds later.

    Knowing better than to turn to anyone in the bar for help, he pulled himself up on a mailbox with the arm that still bent in the right direction and staggered across the street to collapse in another gutter, this time hitting his head on the curb. He laid there until the sky splashed water in his face to rouse him. His first impression upon waking was that someone was urinating on him.

    “No! Leave me alone!” he shouted, trying to cover his face with an arm he couldn’t move. He emptied his own bladder before he realized he was alone and it was raining. It had been bright out when he’d hit the pavement. Now the only light was the dirty yellow glow seeping through the glass of the barroom window across the street. Virgil grunted as he rolled up into the empty parking lot of an abandoned strip mall. Finally getting to his feet after several tries that left fresh scrapes on his knees and palm, he made for the cover of the awning of what had once been a thrift store.

    “It’s not fair,” he whispered, his back against the plate glass window. “I was just trying to be friendly. I didn’t deserve this.”  Something tapped on the glass behind him causing him to lurch forward, nearly wetting himself again. “What the hell?”

    There was a face grinning at him, a black streak carved through the dust above it where it had hit the glass and slid down. It was a mannequin. Behind it, the cardboard boxes upon which it had stood melted under a leaky roof. She stared at Virgil with painted blue eyes, inviting him to come inside and warm himself next to her naked plastic body. It didn’t matter that she had no hands. She was beautiful. None of the few girls he’d been with had been that pretty, not even the ones he’d paid. He might have been able to get by with his lanky ill-proportioned frame and long greasy black hair if he’d had some other attributes to compensate for the deficiencies. If he’d just been able to hold a job long enough to buy a car and some decent clothes, or if he’d been able to summon the vocabulary to dazzle them with his wit, he might have been able to compete for their affections. As it was, he had nothing to offer anyone. He traced the outline of the mannequin’s face with a quivering finger then leaned down to press his lips against the glass.

     “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” asked a voice riding in on a peal of thunder. Virgil didn’t move. Reflected in the glass, the policeman standing behind him seemed to be standing next to his new love, claiming her for his own. It was always that way. Stronger men took it all, leaving him nothing but loneliness and bruises.

    “Got caught in the rain,” Virgil muttered without turning around. “Just trying to get dry.”

    “Come here,” the policeman ordered. Seemingly impervious to the weather, the policeman was standing just beyond the edge of the awning, his face veiled by the rain flowing off the brim of his hat. Virgil cursed himself under his breath. He should have been paying attention. He hadn’t even heard the cop pull up.

     As soon as Virgil was close enough, the policeman grabbed a handful of Virgil’s shirt and jerked him out into the rain. In one quick motion, he spun him around and pulled his arms up behind his back. Virgil screamed and slipped out of the policeman’s grasp; his legs unable to support him as the pain shot up his arm and into his chest. His knees collided with the pavement, taking his breath away as he fell forward.  Not realizing, or not caring, that Virgil’s arm was broken, the policeman grabbed Virgil just above the elbow and tried to stand him up. Virgil screamed again, louder this time, and again melted through the policeman’s fingers, his weight no longer supported by muscles that had gone numb. He landed face down in a pothole, the edges tearing into his cheeks but sparing the nose that didn’t quite reach the bottom. The pothole was full of water, and Virgil, unable to lift his head, turned it to the side to keep from drowning.

   “Please!” he shouted. “I think my arm is broken!”

   The policeman didn’t answer. Virgil waited with balled up fists and clenched teeth for the policeman to bring his nightstick down on the back of his head and yank his arm back to cuff him. Nothing happened. Minutes passed while the rain tapped steadily on the aluminum awning a few feet away. What was the cop doing?  Taking a deep breath, he used his good arm to roll himself over onto his back. He blinked away the rain in his eyes and looked around. He was alone. The squad car was still parked on the edge of the parking lot, but the policeman was nowhere to be seen. Something stank.

      Between him and the car, a large pile of what looked like rags heaved in the wind like a beating heart. Had that been there before? Even with being still half drunk and in pain he should have noticed a pile of garbage that large. He would have had to have walked around it on his way up to the thrift store. Where the hell had it come from? Raising himself up on his elbow, he stared at it. A faint mist drifted off of it, like the breath of some animal caught out in the cold. Suddenly, the center of the pile exploded upward, briefly taking the shape of a man before collapsing in on itself. Virgil thought of the jack-in-the-box his brother used to scare him with when they were children, only that box had ejected a clown. This thing had vomited up a ghost made of plastic and rags, and then sucked it back in again, smothering the ghost under a pile of garbage.

    The rain had faded to a drizzle, allowing Virgil to make the pile out more clearly. It wasn’t all rags, plastic bags and broken bottles, and it was moving.  Parts of it glistened in the light of the streetlamp that suddenly lit up as the thing flowed toward the pole. A tendril snaked out toward the police car and the headlights flashed on. It was as though it was turning on the lights to get a better look at him.

     The thing moved fast. It was on Virgil before he could get to his feet, flowing over his legs. It stopped when it reached his waist, and part of it stretched out, congealing into a pink knob about the size of Virgil’s head inches away from his face. It was like some kind of gelatin, gurgling as it shifted the chicken bones across its surface. It sucked the bones in and a pack of cigarettes poked through, only to be displaced by a beer can a second later. It was as though it was stirring itself, searching its bowels for something useful. Unable to move, Virgil whimpered and tried not to vomit as the head of the policeman shot up out of the undulating mass over his legs. A snake-like tentacle, about the circumference of a man’s finger, extended up to stab into the policeman’s ear. Virgil closed his eyes and began to pray.

     When nothing happened, Virgil cautiously opened one eye and saw his own face staring back at him. He was looking into a cracked rearview mirror protruding from the center of the knob. In what looked like blood, the thing had written “Who are you?” It was disconcerting, not only because the question had been poised by a monster, but because nobody had ever bothered to ask him it before. Nobody had ever cared who he was.

    “Virgil,” he stammered. “Virgil Lucas.”

     “Virgil Lucas,” said the head of the police officer. The head flapped its lips for a bit after making the pronouncement, but the motion was unaccompanied by any sound. Finally, it gurgled up a pink froth and hissed, “Better. Much better.”

     “What are you?” Virgil asked, trying not to look at the head.

      “I don’t know for sure,” it said, its volume and pitch rising and falling with each word as it became accustomed to speaking through the dead lips. “Maybe it was some accidental witchcraft that spawned me, all the ingredients coming together by chance. I know I am of the gutter. I am the child of a thousand tears, formed from the cells shed by scraped knees and bloody knuckles. The slaughterhouse down the street provided my blood. My skeleton came from dead dreams, the losing lottery tickets and bottles that never touched more than one set of lips, the wedding ring tossed out of a car window, and the tissue used to dab the eyes of orphans. My soul…” It paused, the head choking as its mouth filled with blood.

    “Your soul?” Virgil asked. “What about your soul?”

    “I remember a young girl, an ugly thing,” it said, “The shame of her mother and father, she had gone through life unnoticed and unloved. I remember a razorblade. I remember blood.”

    Virgil raised his good arm to stare at the white scars on his wrist. He remembered his father, his hand around a fifth of whiskey, shouting from the couch that he should try to cut deeper next time.

    “Tell me about the girl,” Virgil said. “What was she like?”

    “She liked to draw and to sing, but no one ever looked at her art, or listened long enough to tell her she had a nice voice. She died in a culvert not far from here,” the thing said. “Forgotten, her body turned to mush and ran out into the streets. I don’t think anyone ever looked for her.”

    “I would have looked for her!” Virgil said. “I woulda got her help and then taken her home to recover. I don’t care what she looked like. I woulda taken care of her and hung her pictures on the wall. I would have listened to her sing.”

    “It’s too late,” the thing lamented, suddenly going limp. The head lolled to the side and the knob of flesh dropped down onto Virgil’s chest. It felt warm against his skin, making him forget about the pain in his arm and the cold pavement under his back. There was a sense of belonging as his fingers sank into the gelatinous flesh. The creature cooed with the policeman’s mouth and squeezed tighter. Virgil felt his kneecap dislocate, but he didn’t care. He was afraid if he complained she would stop. She? Yes, no matter what it looked like, no matter how awful it smelled, this was a female who embraced him. She was more of a woman than any of the ones who’d turned their backs on him when he approached, or laughed at him when he’d offered to buy them a drink.

     As she pulled herself over his head like a blanket, shutting out the cold and the rain, Virgil saw the policeman’s head slide out of her and roll across the parking lot. She didn’t need it anymore. He could hear her thoughts as she flowed into his ears, telling him she loved him. He tried to tell her he loved her too, but she had already entered his mouth and nose, slithering into him, filling his lungs and stomach.

    “Its going to be alright,” she whispered. “We will always be together.”

    The wind blew rain into the face of the mannequin, still staring at them from the window, painting tears on its reflection in the dirty glass. No longer alone, they slithered off to the gutter and entered their new home through the grates of a storm drain.