| Cornelius Vanvig literally sold the farm and moved to Arizona. When he isn't lounging by the pool contemplating the finer points of the universe with a good stogie, he is irritating people with his poems, stories and general bad behavior. |
Summer 2006 Table of Contents - Vol. II, No. 2 |
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Portrait of the Artist as an Assassin The Beginning In his dream he saw a moocow coming up the road. A big, dumb moocow chewing its cud, with a bell around its neck. It was white with black splotches where it looked like an ink pen had bled on it. It smelled like a barnyard, or rather like a cow that had been rolling in the barnyard muck. It walked up the dirt road by itself, no other cows in sight, which was strange. The whole vision was strange—heavy pine woods on the right, open fields on the left yellow with mustard weed flowers. No fences to be seen.The cow kept walking dumbly toward him where he sat akimbo between the limbs of the largest pine. He wished it would go away. In his mind he sent telepathic signals telling it to turn around and head the other direction. He spoke the words out loud: “Shoo, you big stupid cow. Get the hell out of here.” But the cow kept up its slow pace towards him, udders heavy and painfully full of milk. He heard its anguished moo drift toward him looking for an end to its misery. He wanted to claim its face transformed into his father’s face, or mother or brothers. But it was just a dumb moocow and stayed a dumb moo cow as it plodded towards him looking for relief. He had a gun in his hand, something that he was too young to own. Somehow it just appeared in his hands, and the next thing he knew he lifted it to his shoulder, took aim and pulled the trigger. The recoil from the butt bruised his shoulder, but had no effect on the cow. It kept marching forward, in even more pain than before. He reloaded, cocked, and fired. Same effect. Again and again and again. Until the finally the cow was so full of holes it disintegrated bloodlessly into thin air. Its pain had vanished, and from his lookout he peered over a landscape where once more all was quiet and harmonious. He continued to sleep and dream until his father woke him in the morning. He could recall every detail of this dream until his dying day. Sunset Filled with Green Bottles The gang was down at Spoon Lake, blazing day, late summer. It was him, Popeye, Johnny Wonderhorse, and Dickie. They swam hard all day long, and now as the evening was settling in explored the woods around the lake where houses had not been built yet. They traipsed deeper into the woods where the overhead canopy was thick enough to keep the undergrowth down. No sticker bushes snagged them, just small plants that barely came up to the ankles. They walked unimpeded through the older growths of oak, maple and poplar until a small clearing appeared bordered by a wooden fence. At the base of the fence a pile of green soda bottles gleamed in the sun. There must have been hundreds. No one asked how they got here, but it was Johnny who first balanced a couple of dirty bottles along the fence line. Johnny took out his slingshot, stepped off twenty paces, drew a line in the dirt and fired, missing repeatedly. Not even a bottle nicked. He picked up the slingshot, ran the table. Every bottle burst into a green supernova, shards flying through space. He was hooked. He reset the row, and ran the table again. No one else could get a chance. As his friends walked off into the sunset, he was still firing.Frogs as Numerous as Stars The campfire crackled beneath a blanket of stars. His friends huddled around it, but he walked by a lake that mirrored the heavens. The quarter moon shone casting enough light to make the woods around the lake visible. His eyes saw extraordinarily well in the darkness. While his friends smoked cigars and cigarettes they had stolen from their parents, he walked the shoreline. The noises of the night buzzed around his head like a frayed wire shooting out sparks that ignited the kindling of his hair. Crickets, cicadas, birds and bullfrogs. But the deep croak of the frogs disturbed him most, the guttural movement of air. Their eyes peered back reflecting the moonlight as if they too were stars in the night sky. But he jabbed with his gig, jabbed and jabbed, until the pond grew still and the night became quiet and harmonious. At peace with himself, he knelt marveling at this reflection that was now truly only stars and nothing else. The way it was meant to be.Disguises He started to shave when he was seventeen. He used an old fashion, hand-me-down single-blade razor. With the soap lather on his cheeks, he noticed something peculiar. As he contorted his face to give the blade a flatter surface for a closer shave, he hardly recognized himself in the mirror. His features became the features of another man, a stranger, someone he’d never seen before. It was magic. It was a Houdini-like trick. The muscle control required to perform such a feat was second nature to him. Natural as breathing. He had never noticed it before, never had any of his friends mention it. How many people could he become and how long could he hold each disguise? He would only know if he practiced.Anatomy Lessons He saw it in the pawn shop window as he roamed the streets of Newark, just another unemployed kid in summer looking to kill some time. The black snub-nose spoke to him. He went inside, got the man behind the counter to unlock the display case. It fit into his hand like the handshake of a friend, like an extension of himself, small and compact, easy to hide. The chamber spun smooth as a roulette wheel that landed on his lucky number. He made the shop owner an offer that could not be refused.Gym Class Thick brown ropes rose from the gym floor to the ceiling with knots tied ever two feet for leverage. Three of them dangled side by side. A greenish-grey mat lay beneath whose purpose, at least in theory, was to cushion the fall of a climber no longer able to hoist their own weigh.The goal for every student in the class was to climb the length of the rope and touch the ceiling twice during class. Coach Grantham barked orders like a Paris Island drill sergeant. The coach’s yelling was punctuated by short, shrill blows on a silver whistle. All but two students had been sent to the showers at the end of class. He stood with Tony Buttafuco, Jr. at the edge of the mats listening to the coach rave. “Now you pussies are going to make it up this rope a second time before class is over or you are going to be here after school until you do it. Do you understand me?” “Yes sir!” “Buttafuco, get your ass up there. You’re first.” Tony, who was a little on the heavy side, grabbed the rope and pulled himself up until his feet came together on the second knot. He tried to push himself up, but his feet slipped off of the knot and he fell back to the floor. “Goddamit, Buttafuco, it wasn’t that long ago your family was swinging from the trees. This should be an instinctive activity for you. Now get back up there and do it again.” But Tony fell again, after getting only a little closer to the top. Coach Grantham lit into him in a full scale tirade. Tony’s face began to turn crimson with rage, and his fists turned into two hammers ready to strike. “Climbing this rope is stupid and pointless,” Tony said. Before the coach could react, a thick rope wrapped around the his neck cutting off the air supply. His face grew ashen and he slumped to the floor. “What did you do that for?” Tony asked, half in disbelief of what just happened. “I was going to kick the coach’s ass myself.” “I’d seen enough. Wasn’t fair what that prick was doing to you. There was no reason for him to act like that.” “That was cool how you turned his lights out in no time flat. He wilted just like a flower. It was too funny.” “Yeah, it was funny and crazy. I can’t believe I did it.” “Perhaps I should introduce you to my father. He is always looking for good men. Why don’t you come by on Sunday.” When the paramedics arrived, they examined the coach from top to bottom. But he couldn’t remember anything that happened that morning after he ate his bowl of cereal. The Meeting “Dad, this is guy I was telling you about from school.” Tony grabbed his friend by the arm and pushed him forward into the solarium were Tony’s dad stood chewing on a toothpick.“I heard you did quite a number on that gym teacher. I couldn’t help but laugh about that stunt. That asshole deserved it, and then couldn’t even remember what happened to him. Too funny.” “I don’t know what came over me.” “Ah, but the secret is to learn how to control it, unleash it only sparingly and at the right times. Tony, would you mind leaving us alone for a few minutes. I have something very important I want to talk over with your friend.” “Sure, pop,” he said closing the doors of the solarium behind him. “I hear you might be interested in joining the business.” “Yes sir.” “Well, son, you have to understand something. This life is not for everyone, and we don’t let just anyone in the family. You have to prove yourself to be accepted. But once you are in there is no getting out. Are you still interested?” “Yes sir, I think I was born for this.” “This is the deal. You don’t question anything you’re told to do. You just do it and accept what you are given in exchange. And we’ll take care of you. We’ll always take care of you. Make sense?” “Yes.” “Now here’s you first assignment,” Tony’s dad said handing over a small slip of paper with a single name written on it. “Come back when you’ve finished the job. If we never see you again, I’ll understand what happened, and no hard feelings. Just remember, this conversation never took place.” Losing His Virginity Above the art-deco building, the name Sergio’s blinked in a rainbow of neon lights. He could see the rapid exhale of his breath in the winter night air. He wrapped the scarf a little tighter around his throat, pulled his cap lower over his eyes. Through the fog of the windows he could see the target sitting in a sparsely populated restaurant eating dinner alone just like every Wednesday night.The bell above the door tinkled as he stepped across the threshold and for a second all eyes turned towards him, then seeing someone so nondescript their attention fell back to what they were doing. The waiter walked over to him and said: “How many will be in your party tonight?” He did not reply. He walked straight ahead with his eyes low, hands stuffed in his pockets. Every nerve in his body, every muscle was focused on the target. The target didn’t notice his approach initially. And even when he stood before the table, the target was not alarmed by the presence of a teenage boy. “What can I help you with, son?” the target asked slurping the last strands of spaghetti from his fork. “It’s what I can help you with that counts old man.” His gun fired and the chair tipped backwards, crashed to the floor. The other patrons scrambled beneath their tables fearing they might be next. The waiter crawled back into the kitchen, ran through the backdoor, fumbled to get the keys in the ignition before driving safely away. He turned his back on everyone and slowly walked away, knowing no one would have the guts to come after him, knowing also there would be no one to brag to or slap his back. This secret like all those in future would lay buried inside him. Nomenclature Don’t call him a hit man. He’s not a hit man. There is no art to a hit. Hit men are sloppy, rushed, careless, leave a multitude of evidence behind, witnesses, exposure. Enough for even the morons at the police department to be able to identify patterns, establish profiles, determine modus operandi.An assassin is an artist who paints a different canvas each time, admires his work for awhile, then leisurely walks away from the crime, unnoticed, undetected, no evidence left behind. There’s no passion or excitement, just the satisfaction of constructing another unsolvable puzzle for the police. He spent days, weeks, months studying old cases to build his impossible mysteries, identified the models and methodologies that would pay homage to those who came before. The Typical Police Investigation No fingerprints. No epithelials. No hairs or foreign fibers. No traces of DNA. The police artist failed to develop a composite sketch based on the eyewitness descriptions. The accounts were too contradictory.Death of the Parents He slipped out of the house that night to do a job. He backed his motorcycled out onto the street and glided a short way down the road before he switched the ignition on. As he turned onto the highway, a black Cadillac passed him with tinted windows. The car stopped before his house and a man wearing a black ski mask tossed a large bundle through the picture window. There was an explosion and the house was quickly engulfed in flame. No one escaped. The house collapsed in a heap of smoldering coals before the fire trucks arrived. There were no remains to identify. The police assumed all three people who lived here perished.When he returned on his motorcycle to see the blue and red lights swirling around what of left of his house, he had the presence of mind to just kept going. He knew this was meant for him, and now that he was dead he wouldn’t do anything to reveal himself. The Setup Louie the Lip woke him with a large hand covering his mouth to muffled any sound. He had moved to a little rooming house downtown after his parent’s death. This was his temporary home until he figured out where to settle down.“We have to get you out of here now. They’re coming for you again. They know they missed the first time.” Louie was his one friend and confidant. He trusted him implicitly. “I know you’re sleepy, but we have to move— now.” He saw the flash of metal in Louie’s hand. He knew what was coming. His hand searched for the knife under his pillow and with a swipe Louie’s throat bloomed open. His corotid arteries gushed blood. Louie choked and sputtered, wheeled and fired a shot that grazed his ear, left a powder burn on his face. He plunged the knife in Louie’s chest, stared into in the eyes of his betrayer as the last bits of life drained away. Marriage He was casing a target in another city, standing behind the blinds in a little room above a coffee shop when he first saw her. She walked straight toward him wearing a peach dress, her blonde hair done up in a bun. He was stuck breathless and swore that their eyes met for a moment. He knew she had seen him with his binoculars draped around his neck peering into the office building across the street. He scrambled down the steps and entered the shop a few minutes behind her, stood beside her in line. Everything about her attracted him: her smell, her beauty, the sound of voice, her light and breezy way that made him feel buoyant and so unlike himself.He began to case her too, extended this job longer than was prudent, so he could turn up in places where he knew she would be. She was hesitant at first, but then things began to move fast: dinners, movies, concerts, meeting her parents and family. He would allowed himself this one indulgence. The Kids There were no kids. There could never be any kids produced from this marriage. While his heart was reptile-cold on the job, at home he was as soft as a feather pillow, easy going, malleable, the opposite of what he was at work. It was bad enough that if he slipped up and got caught his wife would find out what he was, but he couldn’t bear the thought of any children carrying the stigma of what he did to make a living with them for the rest of their lives. Shortly after the marriage, he had his tubes snipped, cut off the flow of sperm so that there would be no mistakes, no need for regret or guilt or shame.Continental Indemnity and Life His business card said: Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Continental Indemnity and Life Insurance. It came with a fancy, multicolored logo and a secretary who answered the phone. But the business was nothing more than an empty shell. His checks came every two weeks— a retainer for his services. He left the house each morning at 8 am and usually returned no later than 7pm. There were frequent overnight trips, sometimes for a week at a time, for sales meetings he told his wife.The Accident He didn’t know whose fault it was. The detective who knocked on his front door could not tell him much. But it didn’t really matter. Nothing could change the outcome. No amount of prayer or pleading would make this day begin over again. No amount of sorrow could turn back the clock, or change the traffic pattern.The corner of Klee Mill and Liberty at 2 in the afternoon was burned permanently into his mind. There’s only one way it could have happened. The delivery truck’s breaks failed at sixty miles an hour when the light turned red. His wife’s car had just started into the intersection when it was rammed. Her head shattered the window from the violence of the impact. The truck’s momentum pushed her car forty yards in the opposite direction. The rubber from her tires scared the road with two streaks of black that would remind everyone for months of what occurred here. On the gurney her face was a bruised and bloody pulp. It was a face he could not recognize, damaged beyond recognition, bloated, swollen, not something he would have ever loved. Not someone whose leaving could drive him to tears. A stranger lay on the table before him, no different than his targets. She was just like the people whose movements he studied and memorized, whose mannerisms he knew more better than his own, whose shadows he could walk in without being detected. He didn’t know the person he was saying goodbye to, but took a pair of scissors from his pocket, clipped a lock of her hair, wrapped a rubber band around it several times then slipped it into a wax paper bag. The Perfect Canvas He wasn’t Monet or Renoir, not Van Gogh or Picasso, not Dali or Pollock. There was nothing about him that leaned toward the abstract or surreal. He was stark and brutal. He was Goya painting immense landscapes surrounding small acts of cruelty. He was Hieronymus Bosch painting wild canvases of celebration while little tragedies took place in the background.The day he painted his masterpiece, the streets of New York were crowded. The target was taking his dog for the usual early morning walk. Everything unfolded like clockwork. He walk at a safe distance behind. When the target stopped at the intersection amid a crowd of people to wait for the light to change before crossing, he felt a slight pin-prick on his right calf like a mosquito or spider bite. By the time the poison kicked in, the target collapsed in the middle of the intersection, convulsed between the white lines like a fly dazed by the flyswatter. When the paramedics arrived, the target was already turning grey, growing cold as the air around him. The medical examiner pronounced it a death by natural causes, could find no sign of foul play. Retirement How does an assassin retire? Somewhere there’s always a bullet, a serrated knife, a piano wire, or a bomb waiting for a key to turn the ignition. Today, tomorrow, next year. There is no quiet retreat to Florida or the Bahamas to while away the senior years playing golf and pinnacle at the club. People don’t forget.For him, there would be no big retirement dinner hosted by the Buttafuco family, no reading of achievements, no roast by close friends and associates, no gold watch engraved with a message of appreciation, or a golden gun, no passing of the family occupation to the oldest son. One day he just disappeared, walked away from all the killing as though he had reached the limit that one person can stand. He blew like a tumbleweed across the Northwest and Northern Plains, moved from one town to the next, one cheap hotel after another, one name to the next, a different face for each place. The family came after him, followed false trails through New York, Philly, Baltimore, D.C. down to Miami. But he was no where to be found. No one knew his whereabouts. The usual informants and spies had no information bore no news on his whereabouts. He asked no one for help. He didn’t use credit cards or bank accounts, nothing that could be traced, carried only cash, stayed nowhere longer than a few days. He knew how to fly under the radar. Eventually the family would forget about him, move on to more important things, assuming he was another Jimmy Hoffa. All he had to do was remain anonymous. This was the key to his freedom. But it didn’t happen that way. His imagination played tricks on him, filled his head full of illusions as he planned his permanent escape. Thoughts of freedom took control of his mind, fooled him into overconfidence, momentarily erased the paranoia that kept him alive for so long. He was pumping gas at a self-service Shell station in broad daylight completely exposed when the bullet tumbled toward him, fired from an open window from across the street. It struck with the sound of a housewife thumping a watermelon or cantaloupe to gauge its ripeness, and he slumped still squeezing the gas nozzle in his hand, the liquid marking his position on the pavement line a chalk line. With his dying glance he saw the angels of all those he’d killed dancing around him, each ready to strike a match to light his funeral pyre. © Cornelius Vanvig |
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