The Gun That Killed Superman

Probably not, but it would be better to have it and not need it...

Then he remembered the Luger.

He went and got it from under the rags in the back of his Beemer. There was no question he would take it. No question. Scare the screaming Jesus out of the fucker and Olivia too. Barry knew just what he looked like with a pistol in his hand and he looked scary as shit, with that black and gold pinky ring, he looked like a regular goodfella. He'd have this guy shitting square magnolia's. He'd pop a nine millimeter into the wall of the crummy motel and shower him with plaster dust and this guy would shit his dick out through his asshole.

"George," he said to the gun, "You're greatest role still lies before you, my friend."

He tucked the gun still in its chamois and blister wrap into his jacket and locked up. Then he drove home and turned around in the crossroads at McDougal and backed over the verge till he was parked under the big willow on the access road, so far back that the skinny leaves brushed the hood of the car and he could still keep a good eye on the house, and there he waited, carefully chewing gum and listening to talk radio (a dog had been trained to smell whether people would fall in love), idly tapping his gold and onyx ring against the fat, under-sized steering wheel of the old Vicky.

The wheel had a rich new cushy leather cover and it was a nice job, a beautiful job, tight as virgin pussy, and Barry looked and then ran his fingers along the inside and bottom of the wheel to feel for the seams as the willow leaves danced in the breeze and cast moon shadows on the inside of the car. He didn't feel a thing. That would Rubio's work, then. Rubio was a big Mexican who wore so much black hair dye he sweated it, with square hands and thick fingers and he'd been at the shop forever, since before Barry had taken over and moved it to the warehouse, and only Rubio could do a razor lap-cut like that, so the leather seemed to heal as it grew back together. The man never said a word but his work was always flawless, his seams invisible.

When things got dull, Barry played with George, the Luger. He loaded the clip, unloaded it, played with the curious firing mechanism. Barry had never seen Superman on television when it first ran during the fifties as a half-hour serial, but he knew the story well enough, about the actor George Reeves who was typecast in the role of Clark Kent/Superman in the cheesy, under- budgeted show and after that could never find serious work again and so, in June of 1959, had gone home and put a bullet through his brain with this very gun.

There were rumors that said that Reeves had actually gone crazy and come to believe that he was The Man of Steel and had thought that he was invincible, but those were only rumors. The rumors, like the legend, like the actor and like the show itself, never quite got off the ground. Barry's got the gun for less than they'd wanted for the gun that had killed Sal Mineo or even Robert Blake's wife. Rumurs also said the George Reeves was a homo.

Movement in the house caught his eye and he looked up. He stared until the edges of the windows blurred and the frames began to pulse with his heartbeat and then he saw what he'd been waiting for. The garage door opened and her Lexus pulled out. Somewhere in his mind he must have thought of the similarity to a penis sliding out of a box but he paid no conscious attention to it now as his hands fumbled on the dash, turning off the radio and searching for the unfamiliar switches and controls, his eyes low, careful to time things just right.

Olivia rolled past him totally oblivious as usual, and he gave her a good decent interval though the very metal of her car seemed to pull at him. He knew that car—tight, precise, built like her—and then she was gone, and Barry pulled out too, the big Vicky humping and wallowing in the turf.

She took back roads and he kept track of the turn-offs she could have taken but didn't, the ones that led to The Ledges Restaurant, to Tony Jackson's Steakhouse, the Quincy Mall. His radio was on and he snapped it off. Music while tailing his wife as she went to meet her lover was too incongruous. He drove in silence, well behind her. It was like looking up her ass. It was sick.

Slowly it dawned on him that she was going to his shop. That was the only place left, heading over the final causeway on Highway 108 then turning on Frontage Road on doubling back. No, not the shop—the warehouse. The big empty trucking warehouse behind. Darcy-Allen Freightways, around the big chain-link fence headed for the entrance—acres of empty asphalt surrounded by palmetto grass and switch weed.

I'll be fucked!

I'll be double fucked!

Barry kept going past the turn-off to the lot, drove up to his shop, killed the lights, turned in his seat and stared. At least he didn't need an alibi. He was right in front of his own place of business, exactly where he'd started out from ninety minutes ago.

Olivia drove across the vast, sea of asphalt headed for the loading dock. There was a main gate that would have gone right to the dock, but that was heavily padlocked and barred, so she had to drive all the way down to the far end, nearly a quarter of a mile away and then drive back.

The immense lot was empty but for half a dozen semi-trailers and a scattering of cars pulled up by the loading dock, nothing unusual. Darcy-Allen stored it's heap here, a little partying and rat-popping went on out here, and some kid had even tried building a half pipe in the huge abandoned warehouse DA'd built the place when everyone thought Hyundai was bringing a plant down here back in the 80's but that had fallen through and the place was just a big empty white elephant now, worth no one's trouble.

Barry got out of the car and walked over to the corner of the fence where he could see Olivia without being observed. She parked the car near the loading dock, got out and trotted up the stairs. She disappeared inside.

"Son of a bitch!"

He hopped back into the Vicky and drove around after her, down the access road, through the gate, cut the lights, and across the moonlit asphalt to the loading dark. He parked the car and listened, heard nothing.

He didn't like this warehouse business. It meant lots of people, not the fly-blown motel he'd been picturing. He took the gun out of his coat and put it under the front seat and locked the car, shoved the stretching iron into the waist band of his pants and caught it on his underpants, tearing them. He pushing it down, bruising his thigh and cutting himself, not bad, but it wasn't good. He got out and went up the stairs.

Up the stairs, across the loading dock and into the warehouse itself and nothingness—the warehouse was nothingness, just a huge, vast, empty darkness, big enough for a fleet of airplanes or something, now all empty, a feeling of facing the end of the world—a decaying catwalk barely visible hanging from the farther than you could throw a rock.

Over here, by the loading dock end, that' where there was anything, against the cinder block wall an iron staircase went up to a suite of shuttered offices Below it was a free-standing structure the size of a two large mobile homes welded together. New once, it was decrepit now, rusted, dented, a combination locker room-break room-bathroom-shower stalls intended for the sixty or so workers who would have manned the warehouse for a shift had the place ever opened, which of course it didn't. The "workers' quarters" were trussed up on some 8X8's and cinder blocks and didn't sit flush with the wall. It skewed at an angle to it. The whole place seemed to be skewed and cheap. depite the hugeness of its scale.

The electricity and plumbing worked, and the lights in the shower room and the locker room were on. Barry knew they worked because the Allen Brothers still used the place for dry-docking boats and other little jobs—tearing down trucks, gray salvage, little stuff like that.

A couple of old boats stood against the far wall even now, dusty and derelict: a fiberglass catamaran with a torn hull and a decrepit, rotted out Sea Island Mud Skipper, sitting on a slapdash mass of bolled timbers—saw-bucked tree trunks with the ends covered with masses of tarred rope. Some of the Lagooners dry-docked their boats here too, and the Island Preservation Society brought their old wrecks here to be pitched and payed—hard, dirty, mallet-and-tar work they left to the townies. The boats in the gloom were going nowhere, upended, tied and covered in tarps like mummies, like fish out of water.

The lights were on in the locker and shower rooms but there was no sign of anyone. No sounds.

He fought the urge to call out. He looked behind him, squatting down to see under the loading dock door. There were two cars parked there casually on the soft Carolina grass and chickweed, one a used pickup that looked familiar—a townie car—but he couldn't place it, the other a beaner ride.

The there was action: headlights cutting across the tarmac from the gates and voices from behind him, from inside the shower room, men's voices. The headlights were driving easy—nothing urgent, and the voices were relaxed. Whatever was happening wasn't urgent, wasn't dangerous. There were the sounds of things being dragged aroiund and arranged, easy laughter, things being set in place as for a party. It was coming from the shower roomand locker rooms, a yellow light spilling out and the sounds of things being dragged around, and low voices.

Barry stood in the door way against the wall and looked around. If anyone asked him, he could say he just wandered back from his shop out front, he had a perfect alibi, and meanwhile he tried to figure out just what kind of party was going on: strippers, maybe? It had that expectant, preparatory air of entertainment about to begin. No laughter, though, no sounds of drinks, no music. It sounded very much like men working, tired men working, finishing up after a long day, putting things back in order. And Olivia was down there somewhere—where?

Barry knew the building. The locker room and shower stall units didn't quite butt up against the cinderblock walls of the warehouse. He started walking crisply for the far side of the shower room, casually checking the girder supports overhead as if assuring himself that the old place sure looked the same, and he started seeing people—men in jeans and tees, moving things around in the shower room. Not work clothes—after work clothes: clean jeans, shirts pressed, fresh tees, dragging mats, setting up some sort of timber thing—a big 4 X 4 with rope bolling, huge and out of place in the shower room, wads of think hemp rope on the top. Men started coming out, walking by him.

And then as he walked by the door of the locker room her saw Olivia.

He saw Olivia, standing in her lime green summer dress, playing with the buttons on the bodice, talking to some one, some big man, smiling, friendly. More than friendly. Glad.

He kept walking, he couldn't stop, but as he walked he could see. She wasn't playing with the buttons. She was unbuttoning her dress, opening her dress.

Barry stopped. Backed up. Stared to make sure.

Olivia was listening to this big man as if he were giving her instructions on something, explaining something to her. He was using his body a lot. And she was nodding and listening and unbuttoning her dress so that her naked body was exposed. The man was a big man. Bigger than Barry

The big man was Rubio, the man who ran such perfect seams for Barry McWheeler. Barry's wife was undressing in front of Rubio.

It was a party, his head said,It was some sort of surprise party they were throwing for him, a gag, but adrenaline flooded his gut and his legs turned weak and he instinctively ran the last few steps to the dark fissure between the locker room and the cinderblock wall of the warehouse, a catchall space occupied with pipes and brooms, pieces of two-by-four and junk. He pushed his way in with mindless panic, pushing and stepping over the junk, his mouth open in a weird rictus of shock and horror, eye stuck wide open.

He scrambled tying t hide, trying to get away, hiding, hiding, pushing back till he was deep in by the locker room wall where the metal was peppered with poorly riveted joints and rust holes and patches, and he pushed through the sticking damp cobwebs until he found he had knowingly or not pushed himself back to the exact space where he'd have a perfect view of Olivia. He didn't mean to stop there. He hadn't meant to go where he could see her, but now that he was there here couldn't move, couldn't leave.

He could see her perfectly through the gaps in the wall, the top of her lime-green dress hanging in a graceful arc from her waist to her sleeves now, baring the naked roundness of her shoulders as Rubio finished taking to her and they laughed and she quickly passed her elegant hands around the big Mexican's back and kissed him, rushing lest this opportunity be lost—softly at first, and then with growing ardor, the muscles in her slim arms flexing as she gripped him, her passion showing, her need for him, her passion taking her, she kissed Rubio.

The big man did nothing for a while but seemed amused, then he put his hands around her and closed them around her ribs. He squeezed her as she kissed him, then passed his large hands up and down her slim and elegantly crafted back as you caress a pet, one you admire for its pelt or its ability to catch vermin.

Barry's mind screamed, refused to believe it. He felt as if his blood had backed up in his veins and wouldn't flow. This was wrong, this was no! this was them rehearsing for a play, a show, this was too impossible, the glow of lust on Olivia's face, her naked breasts hanging like pearls, Rubio's lazy, cruel, Mexican eyes already tasting her nipples, already spitting on them in contempt.

Barry looked again, opened his mouth as if there was something horrible on his tongue: it was the taste of what they were doing—close his mouth and he swallowed it, h swallowed Olivia's betrayal, Rubio's spittle-laced contempt.

But there was no doubt. Olivia had her hands around Rubio's broad back and it wasn't a pretty back—there were zits, boils, lardy man-tits hung from his pecs even from behind—holding him as if he were something precious and rare while the big Mexican loomed over her like a wall of sandstone. Her fine lips were pressed against that coarse mouth, his lips cunty pink beneath the rough spikes of his moustache, and her eyes were closed in that kind of bliss that suggested she was taking deep sensual nourishment from the big man's stolid impassiveness—she hung from him, ripening into sexual fullness. Soon her onw juice would be dripping down her thighs.

Barry made some involuntary sound of pain, it hurt him so much to see. She'd never kissedhim like that—never. Never sucked sexual heat from his mouth, sucked it in and inhaled it and let it make her body soft and ripe for fucking

It struck him now too for the first time that she was naked beneath her dress. Her finely formed breasts hung delicately upon her chest exactly like fruit, like vanilla pears, waiting to be taken. She never went without underwear—never!—but this was a new Olivia, this was Rubio's woman, Rubio's cunt. And Rubio was in no hurry.

The kiss ended and Olivia's arms slid reluctantly from his shoulders as she turned away. She went back again to her business of getting undressed. Barry pressed himself back against the damp wall as if to get as far from them as possible and yet he couldn't escape the feeling now that he was watching the preparation for something, some sort of show or demonstration. The men down by the shower room were arranging the stage, and here, in the dressing room Olivia the star was getting into her costume and make-up. Indeed, she turned from Rubio as if returning to the task of dressing and began unbuttoning the sleeves of the dress.

She unzipped it, stripped it off and threw it casually on the bench, leaving herself dressed only in her panties. Rubio picked up her dress and carefully hung it up on a wooden hangar, placed it in a locker, and closed the door. From the floor he picked up a large gym bag and set it on a table and began going through it, taking out items and placing them on the table as Olivia held onto the edge of the table for balance as she took off her panties.

The initial shock over, Barry watched raptly. No, he wasn't going to do anything—not now, not yet. This was more complicated, more involved than he'd thought. The woman was sick, diseased. He had to find out what was going on. Revenge could wait. He had to know. He had to know what was happening here.

The sight of Olivia's perfect shaved mons didn't surprise him. He had no idea what she kept down there anymore. It might have been a set of Wedgwood China and he wouldn't have been surprised. She'd long ago stopped having any sexual meaning to him, and in fact, it was difficult for him now to see her in any sexual context whatsoever. He was more interested in trying to figure out what was going to happen. A strip show? Some sort of Tijuana sex show? Would there be other girls involved?

From the other room, the sound of the activity was dying down, and the men seemed to be filling out. As the shower room door opened, he could hear other cars arriving outside by the loading dock, a gang was assembling.

He tried to see down the passage between the wall of the workers' complex and the cinderblock wall of the warehouse but that just left him a narrow arc. It was cramped in here and her surrounded by the smell of mildew and the stink of wet mop and old soap. He got himself tangled in the handle of a broom and a mop bucket and by the time he got himself free and looked back, Olivia was sitting on a bench wearing a pair of black panty hose and glossy black heels. She was just finishing painting her lips a thick, brilliant red-pink, leaning forward, looking into a mirror on the inside of a locker door, a shade she never would have used at home—slutty, neon and whorish.

Rubio was standing behind her, just finishing curling her hair up and pinning it into place with one hand. In his other hand he carefully held a small shiny black leather object that Barry immediately knew was a mask, and not just any mask. He could tell by the way Rubio held it that it was very special, made by Rubio's own hands.

Rubio waited till Olivia was done with her lipstick then he gripped the mask carefully and adjusted his stance behind her and began to slip it over her head. It was not an easy process. It was not just any mask. It went on like a second skin, like another identity, and the fitting looked painful, like being fitted for braces. Olivia cried out several times.

"Oh no!" Barry thought."Oh God, no!"

He's seen magazines. He'd seen masks like this before.

It was all handmade, in his shop he knew, and the workmanship was exquisite. Barry could see that even from where he was standing. The flemishing around the eye holes was invisible—there was no gap at the bridge of the nose and nose itself was perfectly formed to lay flat—always difficult in masks. Barry had watched these guys work and he knew something of their tricks. This nose would have been lined with thin strips of beeswax and mortician's gum to make it hold to her skin—the chin buttress was cut from celluloid softened in hot water. The mask was linked with red casket silk to absorb moisture of all kinds—not just sweat, but snot and phlegm, the kinds of things a body exudes as it decomposes, the kinds of things morticians know about. Olivia could wear it through all sorts of conditions. All sorts of things could be done to her.

"Oh, Go, fuck, no!"

It took Rubio almost five full minutes to get it seated and fitted just so, stopping sometimes to stretch or adjust certain contours or angles, but when it was done it was perfect, and when he was done, Olivia was no more. Her head was a slick, black, obsidian knob. She was a creature of stone, something eternal, a caricature of a woman, with great cat eyes and brilliant red lips, a shiny black skull. Rubio stood behind her and deftly laced up the back, drew the laces up tight, and pulled again, pulling then so tightly that Olivia's head jerked from side to side like a doll's and the overlapped and formed a solid ridge down the back of her head like a lizard's crest.