Short Story

The Man With The Blue Throat

by

Gary Cadwallader
 

My name is Cheal. I cull the herd.

Ravi Jodphur stares out the bus window every morning looking for me as I appear to him, and only him. I dress well, but the skin at my throat is blue. Sometimes he thinks he should buy a gun, sometimes he thinks that it is no use, sometimes he believes he is insane.

Today I hide from him and he gets off the bus in front of his building where he takes the elevator to the twelfth floor and sets his briefcase down on the large table beside his computer. He makes a circle on the wall calendar. Circles are good. Circles are clear days. X's mean he's seen the man with the blue throat. Last week there were two X's. This week there are four.

At lunch, he takes the sack his wife packed lovingly and the Pepsi he buys from the machine and goes down to the sidewalk. When he's finished, he walks into the alley beside his building and pitches his trash in the green dumpster. He leaves five dollars for the man living in the alley.

Such a good man - Ravi Jodphur. Such a pity.

An old man lives in the alley. He has a box with his name on it. The old man wrote "Hoagie Joagie" all over the big cardboard box that used to say "Kenmore Refrigerator". And then he wrote, "Feed me." The box is behind the dumpster and a pile of garbage bags. On one side of the alley there is an empty pool hall reminding Ravi of a painting he once saw of gaunt people sitting in puddles of lamplight.

The old man wears all his clothes in layers. His shoes have cardboard on the inside. Hoagie Joagie carries a snow shovel in the summer and walks in the street yelling at cars. "Damn you, get out of my way." And he shovels trash up on the sidewalk so that the curb is always clean.

When he's tired, Hoagie Joagie drags the shovel behind him. It is deadly looking -- sharp and jagged on the end -- and makes strange scraping sounds as he walks. You can hear him coming for blocks.

Ravi speaks to him. "How's it going?" Hoagie Joagie fixes a dead looking eye on Ravi and points to his shoes. "The cardboard keeps out the slithery snakes that live under the earth writhing in sexual frenzy."

"There are no snakes," Ravi says, looking at the solid concrete of the alley.

"At night teenagers shine flashlights in my box and kick the sides."

"I believe you," Ravi says and reachs out to touch the man.

Hoagie Joagie flinchs away.

*

Going home Ravi gets off the 63rd St. bus and sees me sitting quietly in a red swing, with my Pierre Cardin suit and wrinkly blue neck . Ravi stumbles down the steps and drops his black leather briefcase. The bus -- it's sides covered with zebras and the words, VISIT THE ZOO - squashes the work he's brought home with a crack and a puff of white papers.

Ravi pulls up the sleeve of his pure wool suit and with shaking hands, fishes for his briefcase in a curbside puddle. Six feet behind him is a wire fence, beyond that, a childless playground. Ravi feels me watching, but when he turns around the playground is deserted.

He slips off the curb and slices his knee. He walks home with torn pant legs and wet shoes.

In India his parents still worship many gods and bathe ecstatically in a greasy brown river. As a child, Ravi most feared Shiva, the god of destruction. Seeing a blue throated man, one of Shiva's incarnations, means drastic change, and he longs to make a quick sacrifice to the old gods.

Instead he crosses himself as the missionaries have taught him and counts his blessings. He has a beautiful blonde wife and a new brick home. He has a job in America that pays more than his father will earn this decade. He has two bright children that are the loves of his life.

And, as he thinks of them, panic forces him into a sloppy, foot slapping run.

Lights flash through the iron gate as he turns the last corner. There is his house, towering like an English castle. There is his driveway, bent in a semi-circle and coming back to the street, there the young trees he's planted by hand, all bathed in an eerie wash of red and blue.

Lights flash across the green yard, then across his face, as he wanders towards the house. A sudden wind makes his hair stand up and he smells blood.

Men in black uniforms with shiny badges block him with their arms. "Stay back. You don't want to see what she did," they say as more men, this time in white, begin to wheel out the small bodies.

He catches a glimpse of his wife chained like an animal. She is nude. She is covered with blood. Inhuman eyes stare at him. The eyes say it is his fault and he thinks of a tiger that he'd once seen eating a boy.

A policeman wraps a blue blanket around her as she howls, trying to clutch it to her throat.

They will not let him speak to her. He follows the ambulance as the reality of death sets in. Tears well up, slide down his cheeks and wet his suit. He cannot stand the silence and reaches for the radio. He hesitates. What might they play that could break his heart? He drives over a curb. The walk into the emergency room is like a swim upstream.

He signs papers in a shaky hand and nurses nod in speechless sympathy.

When all is done, he walks away ignoring the policeman who offers to drive him home. He ignores his own car, not caring if he ever sees it again. It is after midnight. The air is humid and he wanders in the darkness with a vision of his wife gone insane. There is no difference between the darkness here and the darkness of the jungle.

He passes the alley by his work and hears the old man gibbering to himself. "I'm the Hoagie Joagie," the man says in a watery, rattling voice. "I'm the Hoagie Joagie and you can't get away."

Ravi walks into the alley. A green dumpster is to his left, piles of garbage bags to his right, carrying the smell of rotted meat and slippery cabbage. Behind them is a refrigerator box lying on its side. He hears muffled sounds from inside. Ravi speaks to the box. "My wife killed our children tonight."

The box goes quiet.

"Did you hear what I said? She killed them." Ravi kicks the box and a ragged man squirms free and stares at him with red frightened eyes. "Shiva?"

The old man humps away like a gorilla, huffing and drooling. His smell, worse then the garbage, reaches Ravi and makes him gag. The man of rags disappears around a corner leaving one shoe behind.

"I'm going crazy," Ravi says and leaves twenty dollars on the cardboard box.

Ravi turns away from the alley and into the brightly-lit street. He walks past a Catholic church and spits on the door. "What god are you," he says, "who would let this happen?" He beats on the door but no one answers.

He is nearly home. It is two in the morning. The wind stops and the only sounds are made by his own shuffling feet. As he nears the bus stop where he's stood every morning he hears the squeak-squawk of the chains holding up the child's red swing.

He stares straight ahead. Beads of sweat slide down his collar. Then it occurs to him that there is nothing left to lose.

He turns around very afraid, but standing straight.

"Shall I do more?" I ask in a whisper. My voice is soft and clear, but I know it feels like cold sweat down his back. Ravi watches me twist in the swing like a child.

"Isn't this enough?" Ravi stammers.

I have to laugh at his innocence.

"What do you want from me?"

I sit quietly for a moment, staring at Ravi and pausing so when he finally hears me he'll be devastated. "Kill the Hoagie Joagie."

"That old bum?" Ravi's eyes widen. "What has he to do with me?"

"Kill the Hoagie Joagie and I will give everything back. Your wife's sanity. Your children safe in their beds."

"No. You're not Shiva. I don't know what you are. Nothing I've ever heard of, but you're no god."

I nod. He's close. "Maybe not, but I can give you what you want."

Ravi hesitates. "Bring them back first."

I have him now. Bargaining with me rarely works out.

I give him a dazzling smile, white teeth gleaming, prepping him like a nurse shaving his genitals and then I let his wife appear in the playground in a long blood red dress. His children are with her laughing and holding her hands.

"Do it for us," she says. "Bring us back safe."

I make them disappear.

Ravi doesn't speak. He walks back the way he's come, finding his own footsteps like a tiger follows a well-worn trail. He shakes his head, "No, no, no." Then he cries, "But I must."

He argues with himself like a madman until he finds the alley. Mumbles and curses come from behind the pile of garbage like the rhythmic beating of drums.

Hoagie Joagie. Hoagie Joagie! HOAGIE JOAGIE!!

Ravi enters the shadows of the alley.

*

As dawn breaks, Ravi walks past his car in the driveway and opens his front door. He can hear his wife in the kitchen. She sings quietly and her voice is sweet. He can hear water being poured into the coffee maker.

There is a muffled scraping sound as his feet sink into the carpet. He looks into the children's room and sees them sleeping. Their breath moves the blankets up and down and he sighs.

Ravi leaves bloody footprints as he walks to the kitchen. Just before his wife turns around and starts screaming at the sprays of blood across his face, Ravi says, "I chopped off his head."

As his wife screams, her throat turns blue. Ravi's hefts Hoagie Joagie's shovel and swings it in a bright silver arc.


§ § §

Gary Cadwallader lives with his beautiful wife in Kansas City, Missouri, where they raise horses. His short stories and flash fiction have appeared in Literary Potpourri, Flashquake, InterText, The Palace of Reason, Insolent Rudder, and the Phone-Book. He has a new flash coming to Canter Magazine.

Given a chance, he'd catch unicorns for a living, paint tuxedos on penguins, or, he could write…. Just in case, he keeps his day job.

You can reach him at: rmcheal2@aol.com .

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