The Punishment
by
Paris Portingale
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © Paris Portingale 2011
MoshPit Publishing
Hazelbrook
an imprint of Mosher’s Business Support Pty Ltd
Shop 1, 197 Great Western Highway, Hazelbrook NSW 2779
Website: http://www.moshpitpublishing.com.au/
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Cover design and layout by Ally Mosher
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The Punishment
Manny had been sitting on the floor for two hours, his back against the wall, his head dropped down onto his chest, in a heroin half sleep. The room was bare except for a pile of old newspapers and a chair that had once had a back. It was one of eight similarly bare rooms in the abandoned building that was now a flop.
The place was a shoot-up hole for street junkies—a kind of halfway-house, half way between their last slightly more permanent flop and their next. No flop was really permanent because periodically, at times like elections or during ‘Clean Up The City’ campaigns, the police would come and, with crowbars for the boarded entrances and batons for the inhabitants, there would be evictions. If there were other flops in the street, some osmotic process would diffuse word through the walls, house by house, and by the time the forces of civil order reached the last flop it would be empty. Then the buildings would be sealed again by contractors, and though the official work order would carry the term, ‘more securely,’ bold and underlined, simple economics usually prescribed this be overlooked.
Manny had a seaman’s tote bag that kept together all his things. From the top down it had his shoot-up gear, clothes, towel, an index book with mainly out of date phone numbers, and, right at the bottom, his gun, a Glock semi-automatic taken from a policeman Manny found shot dead in the street. Manny had liberated the gun, a spare clip, a nightstick, torch, radio, badge and wallet containing a small amount of money. The money had been spent and everything else except the gun and clip had been bartered or sold. When times were rough and pickings were slim, Manny used the gun to hold up small supermarkets, service stations, chemist shops, and, once, an automotive tyre store. In the course of these robberies he’d shot dead one Asian man and one Caucasian woman, and wounded five others, all in separate incidents. All moneys went through various dealers to come out as heroin. And Manny never shared. He would explain to desperate beggars and police alike that anything he was carrying was for his own personal use. His eyes were close together in the way of a weasel or a stoat, giving him a mean look that rather mirrored his soul. One shoulder hung lower than another and he looked malnourished. He was below average height, had a small, pinched mouth and a weak chin, so that if you found yourself being shot by him, it usually came as a surprise. He would often use his gun to roll other junkies if he knew they’d made a recent purchase. It went against the junkie code of, ‘Don’t roll other junkies,’ but it was a code to which he’d never subscribed. If he subscribed to any code at all it would be ‘Survival of the fastest.’
When he came out of the more physically enfeebling period of his current high, Manny packed his shoot-up paraphernalia into his tote and rummaged through to the bottom to get his gun. He tied the bag shut and stuck it up the room’s chimney, then he left the house, pushing through the flap of plywood that covered the front door.
It was evening. Manny had no money at all, not even a coin, and he wanted a drink. It would give a little kick to the heroin, while providing a side benefit of calories, a necessity rarely considered by junkies who more often than not found the scales of HIV and hepatitis tipped by a dose of malnutrition. He also wanted money though, above anything else. To the boys that worked the corners the word ‘credit’ fell somewhere between a joke and a shooting offence and Manny had once seen with his own eyes the results of an inexperienced youth in his father’s BMW trying to pay for a gram of coke with a Visa card.
So it was with those needs in the forefront of his mind, Manny walked seven blocks south. The direction was south as north, east and west, along with the four additional subdivisions, had been recently hustled out.
Seven blocks south had a large pharmacy, still open in the evenings. There was one customer in the shop, at the counter, an elderly lady with a two-wheeled shopping cart. As Manny approached he pulled his gun from his belt and, aiming it in a back and forth movement between the two female pharmacists behind the counter and the old lady, said, ‘Everyone down on the floor.’ The pharmacists put their hands up but remained standing and the old lady just looked confused.
‘On the floor, now,’ Manny said in a kind of a shout and the two behind the counter got down on their knees and the old woman said, ‘What?’
Manny said, ‘Get down on the floor,’ and the woman, trembling now, said, ‘Why? I can’t,’ and Manny put the gun to her head and said, ‘Get on the floor you stupid old bitch,’ and the woman started to whimper and said, ‘I’ll never get back up again,’ and began calling out for someone named Pauly.
Manny pushed her down onto her knees then kicked her in the back so she fell forward onto her face where she stayed, breathing shallowly. He turned to the pharmacists and, waving his pistol said, ‘You two, get back up again. Money, money, quick.’
Both stayed on their knees, looking frightened, and Manny pulled off a round into the wall behind them and shouted, ‘Money! Now!’
At that point another idea came to him and, leaning over the counter, he pointed his gun at the pharmacist with ‘Evelyn’ stitched onto the pocket of her white coat and said, ‘You, up and get the money,’ then pointing at the one with ‘Lilly’ on her pocket, said, ‘You, get the good prescription stuff.’
Somewhere in the distance a siren wailed and the noise agitated Manny. It made him nervous and anxious, causing him to shout, ‘Quickly, quickly,’ and he banged the butt of the gun on the counter to emphasise his impatience.
‘Up, up, up,’ he chanted and the pair slowly started to get to their feet.
The siren was sounding closer now and a second had joined in, approaching from the opposite direction and to Manny the destination was obvious so in a panic he waved the gun crazily and shouted, ‘Down, down,’ to the pair with the thought that they could possibly hide and the police would go away.
The pharmacists began getting onto their knees again and when they were down, Manny, panting now as though he’d been running for two blocks, experienced a small rush of clarity which illuminated the stupidity of the hiding plan.
‘Up, up,’ he shouted at the pair. ‘Just get me the money,’ and when, confused, they didn’t move, he began banging the counter again, the bangs stressing each syllable as he shouted, ‘Quick-ly, quick-ly, quick-ly.’ On the sixth bang the gun discharged and the bullet took Evelyn through the left eye socket, continuing through the back of her head and into the back wall, close to Manny’s earlier shot.
The woman crumpled and blood began pooling on the white tiled floor and Manny said, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,’ and threw himself across the counter, trying to reach the cash register. He squirmed until he could touch it with an outstretched hand but it was a mass of incomprehensible buttons. In a mist of fear and urgency he jabbed at the thing but it wouldn’t open and he switched to bashing it with the butt of his gun until it made a falling-pitched whining sound and the light on the screen went out.
The sirens were very close now and Manny said, ‘Fuck,’ one last time and slid himself back off the counter then turned and bolted for the door. In the street he walked off briskly, a short, thin moving shadow in the dim street lighting, and as he reached the next corner a police car sped by, to stop with a squeal in front of the pharmacy. Doors were opened and, looking back over his shoulder, some odd corner of Manny’s mind noted they weren’t closed again as the officers drew their guns and approached the shop in a crouch. And then he was gone.
Manny hid for about an hour at the back of an alley, squirming himself behind a pile of plastic garbage bags. His gun caught on one, ripping it, and when he’d settled himself and calmed slightly and his breathing had returned to something approaching normal, he found one half of his body smeared with liquefied poultry fat that smelled rank and pungent. He tried to scrape it off but the effort only succeeded in smearing it more.
It was after 10.00 pm when he crawled out. His plan now was to get to the nearest underground and spend the night on a train, away from the streets and his flop, and on his way he stole a bottle of whisky from an all-night liquor store where the cashier was dozing in a buzzy cloud of vodka and barbiturates. He looked at the cash register on the way out but it was just another jumble of buttons and so he left it.
He drank half the whisky on the way to the station and it did in fact re-spark his fading high. During the initial alcohol euphoria he sang to himself, two verses of Camptown Races, but by half the bottle he couldn’t concentrate any more and entered the staggery stage, walking with shoulders dropped and the bottle swinging on the end of a dangling arm.
At the station there was a ticket vending machine but no-one in attendance and both platforms were empty. He was on the north-bound side because it was the most convenient and he didn’t have to cross the line and anyway it didn’t matter as the train was just going to be a hide-out. Just for the night. He might have a sleep.
Quite wobbly now, he grabbed the rim of a garbage receptacle to steady himself and, after a few moments, out of habit, he started poking through it until he felt a push of air from the southern end of the platform and the train rattled past with the brakes squealing. It stopped and hissed and the doors slid back and he got in the last carriage, out of habit and because, even through the haze of alcohol and heroin, he knew it to be safest in an accident.
And as he did, in the same odd corner of his mind that registered the police car doors remaining open, the fact that there was no guard blipped a little beacon, but like the car doors, the fact sank into the nether region between his short and long term memory, to perhaps bubble its way back up into consciousness some time in the future.
He sat in the very back seat and, as the train started up again, he pulled the cork from the scotch and took a long drink. They entered the tunnel and it became black outside, causing the window to become a mirror, and he stared at himself for a while, occasionally poking a face, before curling up on his side on the seat and falling asleep.
It was still dark outside when he woke up. He didn’t have a watch so it could have been any time. The whisky and the motion of the train had combined into a nausea that overcame him and he threw up from his reclining position, onto the floor. Some hit the side of his seat but he couldn’t be bothered wiping it off, instead turning onto his other side and going back to sleep.
When he woke again it was just starting to get light. The sun was to his right, a small quadrant just beginning to show behind some distant hills. Everything outside the window was flat and featureless, like a vast field, turned and ploughed and left to fallow for the next season. Manny didn’t think the city lines went this far out, but it was an idle thought and it dropped away as he got up to change seats to avoid the smell of his own vomit. He took the whisky with him and took a swig to rinse his mouth of the after-sleep sour bitterness that had fermented during the night. He swished it, gargled and swallowed, then took another nip and replaced the cork. The vomit smell was still there and he moved down two more seats to sit and wait for the next station, to get his bearings.
The sun was high in the sky when he started to feel anxious. There had been no station, no change in the flat scenery, just the constant, steady rocking and clatter of the wheels. Something clearly wasn’t right and it made his nerves tingle. He got up and swayed to the guard’s door at the end of the carriage and, finding it locked, banged with the heel of his hand until he was forced to accept no-one would be coming. Keeping himself steady with the hand-holds on the corners of the seat-backs, he headed back down to the other end and through the two doors into the next carriage. It was empty and he continued on through the next four, also empty, to the front of the first car and the door leading to the driver’s cabin. It too was locked and once again he banged without getting an answer. He knew there must be a driver so, with his mouth almost touching the door he shouted, ‘Hey, in there. What the fuck’s going on?’ Still getting no reply he banged harder and shouted, ‘Where the fuck are we? When’s the next station?’ and when there was still nothing he kicked the door and shouted, ‘Cunt,’ and swayed his way back to the last carriage which, in his mind, had now become home base.
Sometime during the afternoon, after the whisky bottle had been emptied, it came to him that there was an emergency cord. The cord was actually a chain, running through a pipe that was exposed every two metres with a sign underneath saying ‘EMERGENCY ONLY.’ Manny smiled the smile of the man who has suddenly come upon the obvious answer, there all the time, and he stood and reached out and grabbed and pulled down and, offering no resistance, the chain came down with his hand, running from the pipe ends like a clattering metal stream, to form a silver pile on the floor.
‘Fuck!’ he shouted to the empty carriage. ‘This is a fucking emergency!’ And he sat down and his face became distorted and he cried in the way you do when you’re sure you’ve escaped, but then discover in that stomach-dropping way that you haven’t actually escaped at all.
Eventually the sun went down and the carriage windows became mirrors again and Manny’s anxiety about his position started to be pushed into a corner as his need for heroin began to resurface. It had been over 24 hours since his last hit. At first he worried he didn’t have his shooting kit. He worried he’d come out totally unprepared for this. He worried about his kit, stuffed inside his duffle bag, itself stuffed up the chimney in his squat and the more he thought about it the more vulnerable it became until in his mind, armies of addicts were fighting each other, clawing at the chimney, trying to get at it. Clearly the chimney would be the first place anyone would look and he cursed himself for the idiot he’d been, so confidently stuffing it up there. He beat his fists against his knees, saying, ‘Idiot, idiot, idiot,’ and he felt his face contort again as tears fought their way through his squeezed-shut eyes.
And then there was a change in the rhythm of the train. Manny felt himself pushed forward in his seat and the sound of the engine was slowly winding down in pitch. Then there was the metal shrieking as the brakes were applied and he was jerked forward again. He stood, holding onto the seat back, then moved down to stand himself in front of the sliding double doors. He cupped his hands on the glass and looked out to see the train was pulling into a platform. A ticket office slid past, and lights on poles and bench seats and flower planters and a porter’s trolley, but no people that he could see. Manny swayed forward then back as the train hissed and came to a stop and when the doors slid apart he jumped from the carriage. He turned, looking back inside, and he said, ‘Fuck you,’ but with a smile as he felt the train’s stopping was a victory for him and a solid defeat for the train as a whole. And then he stepped forward and kicked the side of the carriage saying, ‘Fuck you,’ then added ‘Cunt,’ and he kicked it again. Then the doors slid shut and the brakes hissed and were released and the train started to move, slowly gathering speed, and Manny watched as the red light on the back got smaller and smaller until it was a tiny, winking ruby dot in the black distance.
Manny looked around the station. There was no one else there. There were lights on in the ticket office, but it was unoccupied. He called out, but there was no reply. He walked the length of the platform and back. The usual signs bearing the station name were absent and the bench-backs were bare.
And he looked out into the dark for any signs of a town or a house but there was nothing beyond the pool of light of the station. Just blackness.
Manny found the toilets and relieved himself in the Men’s section, in its single cubicle beside the urinal. He bolted the door after first deciding not to, because the idea of the undone bolt jangled in his brain, combining itself with his heroin constipation making it impossible to even think about shitting. So he bolted the door and he sat and strained, and the stained white tiles brought up memories of past toilet shooting-galleries. And then the drug’s call began its tugging and pinching and nagging, and he found himself suffused with the familiar ache of the addict caught short.
Then, in the distance, he heard a train horn and he hastily cleaned himself up and took himself back onto the platform. There was a light approaching from the north, heading back towards the city, and the horn sounded again, and as the train rolled into the station, clearly preparing to stop, Manny leaned out, waving his arms.
As the lead car rolled towards the end of the platform he trotted down beside it, trying to see inside the driver’s cabin, but the glass was tinted. He was puffed and agitated when it stopped and, finding the driver’s door locked, he called, ‘Hello,’ but received no answer. ‘Another cunt,’ he said out loud and banged on the door, calling out, ‘Open up. Where the fuck are we? What’s going on?’ When he still received no reply he pulled his gun from his belt and banged on the window with the barrel. ‘I’ve got a gun, you cunt,’ he shouted but there was still no answer and then the train’s horn made a short wail and the carriage doors began closing and Manny jumped back and threw himself inside before they hissed shut. He tried the driver’s door but it was locked and, in a sudden red rush of anger he shouted, ‘Open the fucking door or I swear to God I’ll blow your fucking head off!’ and he pounded the door with the gun butt. The train lurched and he staggered back and for a moment he entertained the satisfying thought of emptying his gun into the driver’s compartment and the only thing that stopped him was the niggling idea that a train without a driver, in his current situation, would not really be a positive step.
He chose a middle carriage for the return trip as, although he still embraced the idea of the safety of a last carriage, there was a bad association now and the position held a lingering distaste for him. So he travelled in car number three, sleeping until the sun was well up, and waking to the beginnings of a cramp that was starting in his stomach.
At midday he walked up and down the carriages, more for something to do than anything else. The train was deserted and he didn’t even try the guard’s compartment, just kicked the door and called it a cunt and turned and walked back out of the carriage.
And as evening came and the sun dropped behind a distant, flat horizon, he curled himself on his side into a tight ball and drifted into that state somewhere between sleep and awareness.
It was black again outside when he roused himself. He was crampy and achy and to distract himself he sat, looking out into the darkness for any sign of life. And an hour later it appeared. A light from a window of a house, close to the line, and as it skimmed by it was replaced by another, then another. Then there was a street of lights, and the street expanded into two streets, and there were rows of street lights and a shop with a neon sign and a back yard lit with coloured party bulbs. And a station slipped by and there were more houses, then more, and they stretched back and back to form a new horizon, beyond which were ever-expanding fields of houses and shops and malls and traffic lights and buildings raising up flashing rooftop beacons into the black night sky.
Manny, apart from his growing illness, was feeling more confident now. He was returning to a world he knew, a world where a fix could be got on any number of street corners. A world where he knew all the rules. It was a warmer world to him now and, where before he’d never had any real sense of home, his return had the feel of a kind of homecoming.
And when the train began to slow Manny hurried to the doors, keen to be part again of what he knew. And as the train slid into the station he saw people, men and women, porters and station workers and as instinct unconsciously took over, he found himself checking for marks. He swept for an easy target, someone to hit for a wallet or a bag, for money he could exchange with a street-corner boy for a gram bag of ‘H.’
When the doors opened he stepped out and looked around. There were people scattered up and down the station, but nobody seemed to be moving. They looked poised, waiting for something. Not quite like statues, like people caught and frozen in a moment of time, and as he looked more closely, moving down the platform, he saw that each and every one of them were fixed at the feet to a circular disk, the way children’s toy figures were held. With a feeling of rising alarm he pushed one of them and the figure rocked on its base in a back and forth swing that made a clicking noise against the concrete platform as it settled. Manny ran the length of the station, pushing figures, whimpering a little, then he ran to the exit and up the stairs, into the street, and the street was deserted except for a couple of frozen figures on circular bases and he ran two blocks but it was all the same.
He stopped, double up, gasping for air, but before he could breathe properly he was overcome by a terrible rush of panic that cried and pulled at the nerve endings in his stomach and without thinking he started running again, back towards the station he’d just left, down the stairs, back onto the platform. And his train was still there, on the south-bound platform where he’d left it and he saw a light turn green and the train’s horn sounded and the brakes hissed and were released and as Manny saw the doors begin to slide closed he ran and threw himself into the nearest carriage and the doors shut behind him. He grasped a pole and held on, supporting himself, and painfully drew air through his burning lungs as the carriage lurched and the train started off.
As it entered the tunnel, Manny saw himself reflected in the door windows. Broken, dirty, afraid; body sweating and harshly insisting on a drug now so frighteningly out of reach. He saw an anxious, frightened figure, heading out into a world he no longer understood. A world he now feared rather than embraced. A special world, specially tailored for Manny, spinning in a universe turned by some odd confluence of fates into a strangely cruel and unusual personal punishment, just for him.
For more about Paris and his works visit
http://www.parisportingale.com/
http://www.artandthedrugaddictsdog.com/
http://www.narratormagazine.com.au/
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