The House Read online

  And it might be added that Knuckles had then placed Leonard's ball in a Dow "gripperzipper" ZipLoc plastic bag, presumably to submit as proof to this Vinchetti person that the assigned task had been properly completed.

  (Later, for what it's worth, Leonard's ball would be thrown into the palatial back yard of Mr. Vinchetti's estate where a guard dog would swallow it whole.)

  Leonard lay in the back seat, clutching his groin. They're taking me someplace...to make movies? Very shortly he would find out what kind of movies, and why, and it is not necessary to expend wordage on the self-explanatory. Instead he contemplated his predicament in stopped degrees. He'd lost a testicle because he owed the Mob money. The Mob should have killed him but they didn't. Instead they were taking him to some arcane location to make movies. He was still alive and therefore still technically able to fulfill his dream of seeing The Confessor win Best New Picture at the Sundance Film Festival lock, stock, and barrel.

  Things, he supposed. could've been worse.

  "Um, excuse me, Mr. Rocco, but, um—"

  "Lemme guess, kid," Rocco drolled back. "Your bag hurts."

  Rocco and Knuckles busted out laughter.

  "I—I mean, I'm grateful to you for not killing me, and I'll gladly do whatever you want me to do in order to make recompense for my debt—"

  Rocco slapped Knuckles on the arm. "Ya hear that, Knuck? The kid's got smarts. Recompense. I like it."

  "But, uh," Leonard droned on from the back seat's black murk. "Did you say that I would be making movies for you?"

  "Yeah, kid. Now pipe down. I gotta nod."

  For the next five hours then, Leonard lay in the smothering, leather-scented dark of the Deville's back seat. It was dreamy. Charles Mingus and blue-note jazz drifted, barely audibly, from the radio, and Leonard kind of floated back there above the Cadillac's quality suspension. He dozed off intermittently, dreaming of sweet nothings. But sometime later the long car's shock absorbers began to squeak, and Leonard was jostled slightly awake.

  He could hear the rough and steady popping noise of the car's tires rolling up a winding gravel road. He could see the moon through the back window, the moon and the stars and the heavens above. It reminded him of a poem he'd read once: In the moon, in the stars, in the heavens above, even the angels are burning up with all my love...

  Then he wondered, What does heaven hold for me?

  The car stopped and he heard a sound. It was a sound that would symbolize a paramount aspect of his life over the coming year.

  The sound of a dog barking.

  ««—»»

  "Mostly dog flicks," Rocco informed when they entered the run-down little house on the hill. "That's what you'll be shooting. There's a pen out back we keep the mutts in. Plenty of dog food in the pantry. Make sure you feed 'em at least twice a day, or they'll try to eat the girls."

  Leonard followed them in, carrying as much of his gear as he could hold in his arms. The pain at his groin meshed with the sheer confusion of his soul bushwhacked him; he didn't really even comprehend what Rocco was saying. What they'd walked into was a dirty kitchen fitted with a lot of old appliances. An unpleasant, meaty odor hung in the air. "Christ, this fuckin' place stinks worse than the meat-packing district," Rocco complained, a wince in his eyes.

  "It's the whores," Knuckles elucidated in moron monotone. "They don't wash."

  "We oughta deep-six'm both in the Hudson, but it'd probably kill the fish."

  Rocco and Knuckles busted out laughter.

  "In here, kid."

  Leonard, still oblivious and heavy laden with his equipment, dumbly followed Rocco into a room off the kitchen. A light clicked on. "Is your shit better than this guy's?" Rocco asked.

  Leonard looked around. Clutter and film cans filled the cramped cubby. Strips of film lay on the floor. It was a make-shift cutting room, he could tell. A work bench housed a splicing tape dispenser, and a rinky-dinky RealView hand-crank editor with a 4-and-a-half-inch screen. Next to it lay a Bell & Howell Super 8. "Oh, yes," Leonard finally managed to respond with some pride. "This is all eight millimeter. I shoot in sixteen. Better grain, better resolution."

  "Good, kid. Darkroom's there. Some big fancy machine we hadda buy. Hope you know how to use it."

  Another door. Leonard entered to discover familiar chemical scents and a newer model Kodak ES Series film developer with a selectable feed-bridge that would accommodate film sizes from eight millimeter to thirty-five. "I can run all of this easily," Leonard said. "I was taking 300-level photography courses in college."

  "Good, kid. Now, see those cans?" Rocco pointed to shelves full of plastic and metal film cans, fifty to two hundred and fifty foot spools. "Watch some of them so you know exactly what kinda flicks you'll be making. The last guy was an asshole but he was pretty good so we need you to shoot good stuff. If you don't shoot good stuff, you go in the Hudson."

  It was hard to take all of this information in considering the circumstances: ripped from his home in the middle of the night, ripped from his life and his aspirations, not to mention his left testicle ripped from his groin.

  Rocco grinned. "It's nothing personal, kid, but that's life. We got orders and we ain't got time to fuck around. You fuck up out here, we get rid of you. You do us right, we do you right. Right?"

  Leonard nodded.

  From the corner of his eye, quite by chance, he noticed an opened cupboard. A sliver of a bolt shot through his heart momentarily—faces seemed to be staring at him from the cupboard, and they seemed...very recognizable. One step closer and he looked in. Jack Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Abraham Lincoln all stared back. So did Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Lyndon Johnson, and Mr. Spock. All the great presidents. They were masks, Leonard eventually realized, rubber Halloween masks that you pull over your head. Why, Leonard wondered, are there rubber president masks in the cupboard? He would find out later, because before he could make this question vocal—From another room came a thunking sound.

  "That's Knuckles, rousting the girls. Come on and meet 'em—if they ain't dead."

  Leonard shuffle-footed behind Rocco to some facsimile of a living room, though "living," in this instance, was a gross abuse of the term. Rotten carpet, a rotten couch. Rotten wallpaper on rotten walls. A crooked picture hung above the couch: a hillside scene. Quaint.

  A thin, naked girl lay either asleep or unconscious or dead on the floor. Skin the color of starch, and dirty, stringy blond hair. Another girl in a stained dress lay similarly on the couch. In their emaciation, they could've been twins, save that the girl on the couch had dirty, stringy brunette hair. Knuckles was thumping his size 13 foot against the floor right next to the blonde's head. The girl didn't move.

  "Shit, are these bitches dead?" Rocco asked.

  Knuckles kicked the girl in the head. Delayed reaction. In a moment she made sort of a whimper, then she stirred.

  Rocco pressed the bottom of his shoe against the face of the girl on the couch. He jostled her around some, then she too began to come awake.

  "Get up, ya stinky bitches!" Rocco yelled. "You were supposed to clean this joint up, and your dirty cunts too! This place smells worse than an ass-crack!"

  Now Rocco placed his shoe on the brunette's neck, pressed down. She gagged a little, began to flinch a little. "Can ya believe it? No respect at all from these bitches. Knuckles, give this one a pop."

  "Right, boss."

  Knuckles walked over, leaned down, rolled up his gargantuan fist, and socked the girl right in the stomach. She retched and her eyes shot open. When Rocco took his shoe off her adam's apple, she curled up into a ball. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she murmured. "We didn't know you were here."

  "What am I, an asshole?" Rocco railed at her. "When we walk in, you jump. Now you tell your junkie friend there on the floor if she doesn't wake her ass up right now, Knuckles is gonna cut her nose off."

  As frantically as possible from a semi-comatose heroin addict, the brunette prodded the naked blonde on the floor with her foot
. "Snowdrop! Snowdrop, get up! They're here!"

  Eventually the blonde dragged herself up off the floor, puff-eyed, and sat on the couch. Then Rocco made the introductions. "Kid, the stinky blond one is Snowdrop, the stinky brown-haired one is Sissy. They're busted junkie street whores from Vinchetti's east coast circuit. When they burn out, we bring 'em here. They're so skinny and ugly, a john won't pay more than five bucks for a trick. So we use 'em for the flicks."

  But Leonard was just staring at all this, wondering if it was a dream. Dreams didn't smell this bad, of course, but the whole thing seemed so absurd he couldn't believe it.

  "Girls," Rocco went on, "This here's Leonard. He's replacing that asshole fuckface we had up here before, and he'll be shooting the flicks from now on. You do what he says. Everything he says. If you don't, we'll fuck you up. Got it?"

  Both girls sat meekly on the couch, their hands in their laps. They both nodded.

  "Good. And if this place stinks this bad next time I walk in here, I'll kill ya both. Clean this shithole up and wash your dirty asses."

  Both girls nodded. But then Sissy, the one in the dress, peeped, "We need—we need some bad, Mr. Rocco."

  "Oh, you need some bad, huh? You know the score, you take care of me and Knuckles first, then you get your shit." Rocco and Knuckles summarily lowered their trousers, and Rocco shot a glance over his shoulder to Leonard. "Kid, get the rest of the shit out of the car, the food, the drop cloths, and the rest of your shit. Me and Knuckles are gonna grab ourselves a quick nut."

  Leonard dumbly nodded and went back outside. His state of shock seemed to walk in front of him like an ex-friend. He still didn't really know what the hell was going on. He only knew that he was here, and he was here to fulfill some ineffable purpose.

  Back outside, the warm night air felt plush. Crickets chirruped, oblivious to the macabre house, its macabre occupants, and Leonard's new employers. He got into the Caddy and popped the trunk button inside the glove compartment. It was too bad that he was still too stunned to think in any mode of relative coherence. Otherwise he would've noticed 1) a loaded snubnosed Colt Detective Special in the glove box, and 2) the keys in the ignition.

  Too bad.

  Two bags of groceries sat in the trunk next to a bag marked McINTIRE'S HARDWARE, THANK YOU FOR YOUR BUSINESS! that had some packaged plastic drop cloths in it. Drop cloths? he thought. They want me to paint?

  No, they didn't want him to paint.

  He took the bags into the kitchen. Both grocery bags were filled with fifteen-ounce cans of Giant brand spaghetti and meatballs. That was it.

  "Knuckles, are you nuts?" he heard from the living room.

  "Uh...huh?"

  Leonard wandered back, looked into the living room.

  Knuckles, with his gangster slacks down, knelt behind the naked blonde—Snowdrop—who was on her hands and knees. Rocco, his pants down too, stood with his groin in Sissy's face, who remained seated on the couch. She was fellating him.

  "These bitches got bad news pussies on 'em," Rocco was telling Knuckles. "Every clap in the book up that snatch, and now they got this new one everybody's talkin' about. Hercules, I think they call it. No cure for it, Knucks. Ain't you heard about hercules?"

  "Uh... No, Roc."

  "Yeah, new shit, they say it came from the hippies in the '60s, all that free-love fuckin' they did. It's nasty shit. Like you wake up the next day and you got a sore the size of a meatball on your dick. And it never goes away. Man, you don't want that shit."

  "Nuh-no, Roc, I sure don't want to catch any of that hercules."

  Hercules? Leonard thought. He remembered some Greek Myth classes, and a cartoon when he was a kid, but...

  "Ten to one, Knucks," Rocco warned. "These junkie bitches got pussies chock full of hercules. Stick it in her ass instead."

  "Uh... Yeah."

  Knuckles did as was suggested. His penis appeared oddly small for a man of his size—maybe five inches erected. He popped it into Snowdrop's flaccid anus without so much as a quiver from her. His hips thrust back and forth a few times, then he kind of shimmied, paused, and stopped. "Ooo," he remarked. "Yeah." Then he withdrew his penis, sort of wiped it off on her buttock, and pulled his pants back up.

  "Good nut, Knuckles?" Rocco asked.

  "Uh, yeah. Put one right in her shit."

  Rocco chuckled. "Christ, Knucks. These junkies don't eat. Ain't got no shit up their tails, either of 'em." Then he looked down and frowned. He withdrew his wet penis from Sissy's mouth. It hung half hard—long and thin, like a snake. "Ya stupid bitch, ya suck dick so bad I lost my woody." Then, quite suddenly, he—

  whack!

  —smacked her so hard on the side of the face he left a pink handprint on her cheek. Then—

  smack!

  —punched her in the eye, and then—

  crack!

  —drove the heel of his palm into her mouth. "Mmmmmmmmm!" Sissy moaned, bringing her hands to her face. She began to sidle over on the couch, blood running down her chin. Next, Rocco grabbed her by the hair with both hands—

  "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" she whined.

  —and slammed her down on the floor. "Yeah, there it is," he remarked, seeming pacified. A full erection stuck out now. "Don't know why, ya know?" he said casually to Leonard. "Only way I can keep a good stiffer is to rough 'em up a little."

  Sissy, bloody-mouthed, crawled forward, and resumed her fellatio. "Yeah, that's better, that's a good bitch," Rocco said. "Yeah, yeah—" He went up on his tiptoes... "Here comes lunch... Ahhhh..."

  He pulled out, then leaned forward and pinched Sissy's cheeks together into a fish face. "Eat that nut, go on, eat it."

  Sissy's throat clicked as she gulped.

  "Good little junkie. Can't think of a better place for my spunk to be than in your skinny junkie gut." Rocco raised his trousers and from a pocket withdrew two small glassine bags of white powder. "One for you—" he threw one down to Sissy, "—and one for you—" and the other to Snowdrop.

  Their dead eyes lit up as they fumbled for the diminutive packets. Then they literally crawled out of the room, down a dark hall, where they disappeared.

  Rocco slapped Leonard on the back. "Usually we fuck around with 'em a lot more—more fun that way—and sometimes we'll have ya film it for a comp."

  Leonard still was having trouble digesting all of this. Comp? "Uh, you mean a compilation?"

  "Yeah, that's right. Keep your second camera loaded up for it, just odds and ends to splice together later. You'll see what I mean when you watch the stuff that other asshole made." Then he slapped a big bag of more tiny bags of white powder into Leonard's hands. "Hide this, and don't let 'em sweet talk ya. It'll last till next time we're up. Only give 'em two bags each a day. Don't forget, or they'll die. And make 'em eat half a can of spaghetti a day too. They won't want to so you gotta make 'em. Do it in the middle of the day so they don't puke it up. We don't really give a shit if they die 'cos we can pinch more off the circuit anytime we want. It's just that it's a hassle sometimes 'cos during the week me and Knuckles are picking up markers from New York to Raleigh. Keep 'em alive as long as you can. Got it?"

  "Um, yes," Leonard said.

  "What we need from ya this week is a twenty-minute master. Straight dog stuff, and we need at least four wet shots. Yeah, I know it's hard to get a dog to come on a girl—just keep doing it till you get it. And when I say a master I mean a flick that's ready to dupe. It's gotta be edited, titled, the whole nine yards." Rocco cut a grin, pinched Leonard's cheek. "I like ya, kid. So don't fuck up."

  "Uh, right," Leonard said.

  He followed Rocco and Leonard back out to the car. Rocco stuck a Lucky in his mouth and went on, "It's different week to week. It all depends pretty much on the demand for what we got warehoused. Kiddie stuff's way too hot—we got guys in Washington who do that—so you'll never have to do any kiddie stuff. Just animals mostly."

  Just animals, Leonard thought.

  "We gotta stable out back next to t
he dog pen, but there ain't nothing in it right now. We make 'em as we need 'em. Vinch wants a goat flick, we bring up a goat. Vinch wants a donkey flick, we bring up a fuckin' donkey, like that. Vinch wants a horse flick...we bring up Knuckles' mother."

  Knuckles pouted. "Oh, real funny, Roc."

  Rocco hee-hawwed like a donkey. "And sometimes, kid, we do specials..."

  "Specials?" Leonard couldn't help but query.

  "Yeah. Scats, neks, wets, shit like that. Shit, I'm sorry, kid. You probably don't know what any of that is, huh?"

  "Well, no."

  "Just watch the shit in the cutting room, you'll see. Anyway, we gotta blow."

  Leonard raised a curious brow. "You, uh, you mean...you're leaving?"

  "That's right, kid." Rocco looked him dead in the eye. "I hope you're not stupid enough to be thinkin' what I think you're thinkin'. You might be thinkin' ‘Hey, these goombas are driving away. What's to keep me from high-tailing it out of here?' Is that what you're thinkin'?"