The Erection Set

“You own all of Barrin, my dick-happy neighbor. My fucking almost-shareholder. I give you a worthless pile of brick, a damn pack of old men trying to extrude aluminum, a house full of horse’s ass relatives, some contracts already assigned to my other companies, a dead city ... and your life.”

I threw my cigarette away and put the folder in my pocket. “Maybe I will bust your balls, friend.”

“Don’t try.” Cross said. “You’re in the shadows, but there are two of mine out there waiting too. They’ll kill you before or after. Your choice.”

Hell, I wasn’t even worried about them. I let my hand fall away from my jacket. It was starting to get dark.

Cross McMillan stepped back into the light and looked at the big old-fashioned clock in the tower above him, then glanced back to me and smiled. I owned the biggest pile of garbage in the world because he owned all the access roads and the garbage pile could produce nothing. They were in Grand Sita drunk and hurting, but tomorrow they’d be sober and reconstructed while the living things came out of the garbage pile to devour me for having resurrected it to start with and the worst thing of all would be having to face the faces, the sad, deadened faces that had all the hope in the world there just a few days ago.

The voice behind me said, “You see, Dog, it doesn’t always work out, does it?”

I looked at Sharon, but she still had those deadly eyes that said if she couldn’t kill me, she’d be glad when somebody else did and I automatically reached out my hand and automatically she took it. My fingers ran around hers. She had taken off the ring that used to turn her finger green.

“He’s dead,” she said.

“Aren’t we all?”

“Yes, we are, Dog.”

The guy who walked in the light kept waving for those behind him to step on up and when I saw his face I said,

“Hello, Stanley.”

Stanley Cramer. From way back. There were four more with him.

“Mr. Kelly.” He nodded toward Sharon. “Ma’am.”

“Who’s going to tell them, Stanley?” I asked him.

“Mr. Kelly ... we all know. Sort of .. well, hell, kid, we’ve been back and forth before you was born, y’know?”

“Sure.”

One by one they all stepped into the light so I could see their faces. Old men, but grinning old men and there was still youth there that read like the old motto, DON’T TREAD ON ME!, youth that wasn’t fighting youth, but the youth of knowledge written into the crazy warped smiles and Stanley Cramer, elected the spokesman, said, “We kind of figured what you were looking for. Your cousins couldn’t find it, but they weren’t even sure it ever existed. We thought that package Jason gave old Pat was just a gag until you started the shakedown and we started thinking.”

He held out a box big enough to put a pair of shoes in. “The papers are all in there. They’ll tell you how it works. It ought to keep Barrin going a long, long time.”

“What will, Stanley?”

There was a quiet murmur of laughter and he held out a shiny little ball about an inch around. It gleamed metallically in the dull light, a bluish silver with little rays of refracted yellow bouncing from it. Cramer laughed again and took his hand away.

The ball stayed right there.

He barely tipped it with his fingers and it came drifting toward me.

“The antigravity device,” he explained. “Now we’re in clover.”

Someone farted.

It was Cross McMillan.

And then the old cypress pillar chipped right out between my head and Sharon’s, leaving a tiny .22-sized hole in the wood so close it could have gotten either one of us an inch in either direction and nobody noticed but Sharon and me and I pulled her back inside leaving the chuckles of all the winners standing there in the rain and all I could think of was that word to say again.

XXV

“Dog.”

She wasn’t asking my name. She wasn’t asking an explanation. She was just saying it. I pulled the overhead lights out and pushed her into the office where I could see the small crowd milling in the rain, still laughing, going toward their cars.

That shot didn’t miss. That shot was as deliberate as hell.