Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (always you kirsty moseley .txt) 📗

wolfs it down in two bites. He chases it with a handful of Tylenol PM caplets. He has purposely forgotten how many people he has killed. That’s how all good hit men stay in the game—they forget.

“How? How you gonna figure it out?” She stares at the Tylenol PM bottle. “What the hell are you doing?”

He looks up at her. “What do you mean?”

She indicates the room, which looks as though it has been cleared for a sock hop, then she indicates the table full of crap. “All this—whattya doing? What’s the deal?”

“I’m knocking myself out,” he says, going back to his junk food. He tips the bottle of cheap whiskey back, downing half its contents.

“You’re what?”

He lets out a belch, then opens a Twinkie. “It’s how I’m gonna find out how many people I’ve whacked.” He stuffs the Twinkie down his gullet, then speaks around a mouthful of creamy lard sticking to his teeth. “Get outta here, Gerbil.” He lies back on the bed, the springs complaining loudly. He closes his eyes. “I got some hallucinating to do.”

It doesn’t take long. Sometime after midnight, after Gerbil has retired to her side of the suite, Oswald snorts and shudders out of a deep, nauseating sleep to the sound of throats clearing all around him.

He sits up blinking, scanning the darkness of the motel room.

Or maybe he’s still dreaming. He often dreams of the people he has killed. In this dishwater darkness it is impossible to tell whether he’s dreaming, hallucinating, or being visited by real ghosts.

A thin tendril of neon light spills through the cracks in the blinds, faintly illuminating the furniture pushed against a far wall, which is adorned with cheap seascape paintings and fake rubber plants.

A shadowy figure lurks off to the left. A couple others huddle behind the dresser off to the right. They appear to be waiting for something.

Oswald rubs his eyes, stretching his stiff, creaking neck and letting out a wet burp.

“Very classy,” the Head-Wound Kiddie-Porn Guy remarks from over by the shaded window, the top of his ruined scalp haloed by a faint, silver crown of moonlight seeping through the shuttered Venetian blinds. It’s a waxing moonlight, the lunar cycle is relentlessly moving through its gibbous phase toward its inevitable fullness.

“Hey, everybody, welcome!” Oswald climbs out of bed with the artificial perkiness of Jillian Michaels after six espressos. His head spins. His gorge rises as he struggles to keep his balance.

“What’s the deal, man?” comes a voice in the shadows by the dresser, a voice belonging to the Dreadlock-Wearing Drug Dealer.

“Gather around, everybody!” Oswald waves them all out onto the dance floor. His gestures—exaggerated and broad—are reminiscent of a camp counselor trying to round up a bunch of preschoolers for a sack race. “C’mon, c’mon... I need to take a head count!”

“Sorry about the wife,” says the silhouette of the Accountant with the Broken Eyeglasses.

“Thank you, I appreciate that,” Oswald says, waving him over. “C’mon, c’mon... don’t be shy!”

One by one they come forward, sheepishly glancing around the shadowy space.

“Plenty of room for everybody!” Oswald waves them over with a big, fake grin.

Gathering in the center of the room, their faces undulating like fizzy cathode dots on an old UHF television, they look suspicious, wary. Details sharpen: a crusted entry wound behind the accountant’s cracked eyeglass lens, a dull white knuckle of a bone showing through a mangled scalp.

“Sit down, sit down—take a load off,” Oswald urges, gesturing at the worn carpet.

“Dude, we’re dead,” the Drug Dealer informs him, hands on the hips of his bleached cut-off shorts. “There’s no load to take off.”

“Oh yeah, sorry. Why don’t you move over there and give the folks in back some room.”

“What do you want from us?” Head-Wound Guy looks like he’s not in the mood.

“Okay, let’s see, I’ll start over here.” Oswald points at the fatal head-injury on the far left, and begins counting clockwise, across the motley crew of broken eyeglasses, ligature-torn throats, bullet-riddled napes. “There’s one... two... and let’s see... you’re three... and you make four... and that’s five... and over there... you’re six. Is that it? Six? Only six? That’s not bad.”

Oswald stares at the semi-circle of dead folks staring back at him, some of them looking bored, some looking incredulous and indignant, their arms crossed defiantly across their sunken chests. Here they are, the faceless, anonymous souls Oswald has ushered, like Charon, across the river to the Other Side—their names long ago slipping his mind, their identities fading into visual caricature:

The Head-Wound Kiddie-Porn Guy

The Dreadlock-Wearing Drug Dealer

The Accountant with the Broken Eyeglasses

The Crooked Politician with the Neck Scars

The Sucking Chest-Wound Gangbanger Dude

The Bloated Gambling-Addict Corpse

All at once, Oswald sees a straggler. “Oh... and behind the lamp, there’s Number Seven—don’t be shy, come on out.”

Out from behind a lampshade steps a wiry, middle-aged man with a Fu-Manchu mustache and hair pomaded back so slickly it looks like a coat of Rustoleum.

Oswald stares at the ghost. “The fuck are you doing here?”

“Yer shittin’ me,” the specter marvels, standing there with his sinewy, tattooed arms crossed against his chest. “Yer tellin’ me you don’t remember?” His ill-fitting sport coat is soaked with deep-black bloodstains from large-caliber exit wounds riddling his midsection. The injuries are the result of an untrained trigger finger, an early attempt at vengeance-killing.

Oswald goes cold. “You’re not part of—”

“Allow me to introduce myself.” Fu-Manchu makes his announcement with exaggerated elocution, his ghostly wheeze dripping with sarcasm and derision. He takes a step forward, his leathery skin shimmering in the gloomy motel room. “I’m the poor son of a bitch he popped his cherry on.”

“I didn’t—” Oswald feels himself shrinking in the dark room, shivering in the sudden chill.

“I was numero uno.” The ghost shakes his head with contempt, letting out a flinty chuckle. “The kid always was a flake, even when he was a little squirt on the reservation.”

Oswald remembers now in one great paroxysm of unresolved guilt. He remembers sneaking up on his stepfather out behind the Tilt-A-Whirl, after hours,