ARCHIVES
(c) Copyrighted 1997 by Franchot Lewis
Vampires came to Grant Street.
Mr. Galton heard them, saw them, at one and at three o'clock in the morning, -- out in the street and directly outside his apartment window. Them who he called the night vamps and scamps. They made noise -- Laughing, cursing, fussing, breaking bottles, fighting throughout the night, the whole night ... until the day broke. Occasionally, he heard the sound of gun fire: the rapid and loud Bang! Bang!, of a nine millimeter pistol, or worse --Then, the sound of people running. Then, the sounds of sirens, ambulances, and police walkie-talkies. These were terrible times. Heaven brought him through.
People came to Grant Street from all parts of the city and region. These people came to stand around, and to look, and to wait, and to buy, or to sell, or to trade drugs. They gathered on Grant Street at one o'clock in the morning, and stood by the dozens on the sidewalk, waiting, looking. Mr. Galton thought of them as stalkers of the night, rodents, like rats and vermin, waiting, looking. Their noise often woke him from his sleep. He became particularly angry on the nights when their noise interrupted a pleasant dream of his late wife and him --playing, dancing, singing, or just being quiet together. Many times he woke to the sound of the police rousting people on the street outside of his window. The noise of the police radios, with the volume turned up high, barking; the noise of cops gruff voices, shooing away night people like dogs, not, but like people trying to shoo away stubborn flies, provoked him to want to scream, "Chase their A's away, if you will, fine, but with what you do, why must you make so much noise! Heaven help us!"
Mr. Galton didn't scream. He cursed into his pillow, a plea to Heaven.
Often, the cops tried several times a night to rid the block of the scamps. Four or five squad cars came, stopped, flashed very powerful beams of light into the faces of these crawlers. And like the rodents, like the rats and the roaches that they were, the night crawlers dispersed, only to return as soon as the cops left.
This night that Mr. Galton got so ticked by the night people's noise that he called the police himself, it seemed as though the police weren't going to come. Mr. Galton thought that maybe the cops were tired of wrestling with the vermin on Grant Street. He thought that maybe the cops thought they had done their bit for the week and did not have to come to Grant Street until the following week, and maybe the cops were sick and tired of hearing from him. He called the cops five times in a single hour complaining about the noise on the street.
"Damn the cops!' he cursed to himself, to his wall, a cry to Heaven. "What? Are they too tired to do their jobs?"
He just knew the cops were teed-off with people like him whom complained and griped loudly of how unresponsive the cops were to the problems of Grant Street.
He often yelled into the phone, at 911, "You people tell us to call when we see drug activity --"
"Yes, we do, sir," the dispatcher replied.
Mr. Galton wondered out loud into that phone whether or not on the other end of the line a human being existed. He asked if he was talking to a machine. "A computer? Talking to a computer?" he mumbled.
"No, sir," came the reply. "I have recorded your complaint. We will send a squad car."
But, the dispatcher didn't send a car.
Two o'clock, and no police car had put in an appearance, and the drug crowd outside of Mr. Galton building had grown. Mr. Galton could see the gaunt and hollow faces of the crowd in the glare of well-lit street lamps.
"Thank God for the street light," he mumbled often.
Only on rare occasions, and only if necessity so dictated did Mr. Galton venture outside after dark. On those occasions he felt grateful to God and to the city for providing bright street lamps. The lamps gave off light not bright enough to keep the druggers away, but bright enough for Mr. Galton to see the druggies's faces, their eyes. To him the druggies had the empty eyes of smothering coals, the vacant eyes of stupid people. Their eyes seemed to have no outward vision. It was as though the druggies had eyes of glass. Their glassy eyes stared intensely at the apartment building directly across the street from where Mr. Galton lived. It seemed to Mr. Galton that the bodies of the druggies had other occupants, vile demons. To him the druggies behaved like animated corpses, like vampire lackeys waiting for animal blood to suck. Drugs, not the vampiric curse had them enslaved, made their eyes vacant, filled their minds with so much mush that they could not think. Their vacant, unthinking heads, on zombie bodies, made Mr. Galton's life, and the lives of the people who lived in neighborhood, miserable.
"Monsters, monsters . . . The cops have no clue how to drive these ghouls off. Someone needs to drive a stake through their damned hearts." Mr. Galton mumbled.
Just then, a burly man drew Mr. Galton's attention. Two other men held and kept the burly man from falling to the street.
"Here yet? The stuff, here yet?" the burly man whined, snot ran down his nose. His body trembled. His eyes puffed out wide. The whining man said to one of the men holding him, "You said the stuff here."
"You, wait," the other man said. "It will come."
"You said the stuff here."
"They have to go get it."
Mr. Galton knew the name of Grant Street's drug dealer. The whole street knew. The police had to know. The creep had at least a dozen people working for him, guarding his drug houses, and watching after his stash. The drug dealer's name, Tom Slick. He was a regular drug capitalist. He had girls working in the apartments, young girls who turned tricks to pay for their own habits and to make some side money for themselves. He had boys selling the stuff on the street and in back lots. He rented guns and loaned money. Tom Slick seldom came on Grant Street. His aide, a woman who people called Rebuck, was in charge of his business on Mr. Galton's street. She did business out of an apartment in the building across the street from Mr. Galton. Mr. Galton stared into the street. The weather said, November. The people huddled in coats against the chill. All month he had stared into his television set, as the local stations grind out their bull stuff that they called "news" for the ratings sweep. The local news shows competed brazenly, dishing out their stuff on drugs, violence and crime. All the local stations, including the local public broadcasting station, ran stories on the local drug scene, and on the police department's apparent ineffectual approach to stemming the drug epidemic. The police department responded with massive drug sweeps, timed for inclusion on the ten o'clock newscasts. These show-raids took manpower from the precincts and did inconvenience dealers like Tom Slick. Slick had to keep having his stash moved to different locations. He felt very inconvenienced when told that the apartment on Grant Street had not received its regular supply, and that he had better make the delivery or lose customers. And so, Tom Slick decided to personally make a delivery to Grant Street.
Tom Slick pulled up in a beat-up old Volvo. He drove a cheap looking car, lived modestly. He believed that large living and flashy things only drew costly attention to one's self and business, from the undesirable eyes of reporters, policemen, prosecutors, and the tax man. So, dressing to look like a blue-collar mechanic who wore jeans to work, Tom Slick wore cheap jeans as he went about taking care of his business. The rumor vine said that he planned to live in grand style only after retirement from the business.
When Tom Slick stepped onto the pavement, Mr. Galton saw the relief on the druggies' faces. Heads nodded, smiles went all around as Tom Slick went straight into the apartment building where he kept an illicit drug shop. A few minutes later Tom Slick came out of the building, got into his car and drove away. A few minutes after that the druggies began going into the building. They went in for their fix. By three-thirty the drug shop had served the crowd. Every few minutes during the rest of the night until six-thirty, two to three persons stopped by, entered the building and spent a few minutes inside before leaving with drugs.
The next night, Mr. Galton was again awakened.
A young boy had broken into Mr. Galton's apartment and now stood ready to bash Mr. Galton in the head with a wooden stick.
"Who? You? Who?" Mr. Galton screeched. "Heaven help me!"
"Shut up!" the boy raised the stick he carried. "You dead, old man."
"Why?"
"Shut up," the boy gestured, threatening to strike. "Where you got the money?"
"Don't have no money! Don't!" Mr. Galton said.
"Why you shouting for? Lower your voice."
"Don't have any money."
"Can you hear? Keep your voice low."
"Broke, no dough . . ." Mr. Galton pleaded, "Leave me alone."
The boy lowered the stick. "See this a gun too, it will smoke you, if you make any noise."
"I don't have any money. Do you think I would stay here?" Mr. Galton asked in a trembling voice.
"Who do you think you talking to? A fool?"
"No."
"You pay rent, don't you?" the boy hissed. "You buy groceries? You get social security or retirement? Don't you? Where you hide the money?"
Mr. Galton shook his head, stuttered, "I ...I ...I ... broke ..."
"Do believe me a fool?" the boy barked. "Do you think a dumb fool holds this gun on you? Know you've got money. Know you gotta give it up. Give it up. Gotta give it up, pops."
"Look around," Mr. Galton said. "Whatever money you find you can keep."
"You bet whatever money you got belongs to me, you, old geezer."
The boy looked around the bedroom. A subdued Mr. Galton watched him, quietly. The boy stopped, saw Mr. Galton staring and returned the stare.
"What got you? What you looking at?" he shook the gun as he spoke. "Trying to remember my face for the police?"
Mr. Galton did not say anything.
The boy got hot.
"Yeah, should have bashed you before you woke up," the boy said. He drew the gun from his coat pocket.
"No!" Mr. Galton plead.
The boy said, "Gotta bust, you, Pops. Good night, Pops."
Pop! pop! pop! went the sound of the boy's gun.
"Heaven save me," mumbled Mr. Galton, a prayer to Heaven. He woke up in Veterans' Hospital, where the city's General Hospital had transferred him, after three weeks in the intensive care ward. Mr. Galton's neighbor across the hall heard the shots, heard the boy running out. The neighbor told the police that she didn't see the boy's face, couldn't identify him, only heard him run. She told the cops that the boy tore out of Mr. Galton's apartment, banging, kicking open the door and stomping down the hall and steps, and slamming the building's outside door. She said the boy had "junkie" written all over him.
"The boy acted like an animal," Mr. Galton said, when he was able to give a statement to the police. "The boy acted like a rabid animal and rabid things need an exterminator."
Months passed before Mr. Galton returned to his apartment. The police and others suggested to him that he should not return. He told them he had no place to go other than to his subsidized, rent controlled apartment. He said he would buy a heavier door, more locks, window bars and a small dog that he could handle, a dog with a bark big enough to scare off intruders. He said that Heaven would help him. His landlord gave him a heavier door and installed window bars. Mr. Galton installed the extra locks, but he couldn't find a dog small enough that he could afford to feed and that barked loud enough to scare off unwanted intruders.
Mr. Galton brought from a pawn shop a rather expensive camera to take pictures of the going-ons outside his window at night. The camera's low-light lens took clear and sharp pictures. Mr. Galton soon had hundreds of good quality photographs of the regular druggies who went to the drug apartment. Of the ones who came by car, he had photographs of their automobiles, with close-ups of the license plates. The good cars they drove amazed him. Good solid cars, not flashy street hustlers cars. Many of the drug patrons wore solid citizen clothes, not the flashy clothes of people caught up in the hustling life. These people's clothes spoke of jobs, jobs! Good solid jobs. They were still drug heads, to Mr. Galton, still druggies. The people who drove those cars, who wore those clothes had one label that fit, druggies. To Mr. Galton, wickedness had taken over their bodies, the same wickedness that possessed the boy who had almost killed him.
Mr. Galton knew what he had to do. "I must do something to stop this before the whole world get consumed by this wickedness," he said aloud talking to himself, still, talking to the wall, begging Heaven to affirm his answers.
Since returning from the hospital, people had often seen him speaking out loud to himself. The people on the street who knew him would shake their heads with gentle understanding.
The woman who ran the drug apartment on Mr. Galton's street stood in the first position on Mr. Galton's list of persons to whom he would attempt to redress the problem of the wickedness in the community. He planned to talked to them, to petition them to stop their wickedness, and at the same time, he planned to do whatever it took to put a stop to their personal wickedness. He planned to do this without drawing himself into a discussion with wicked people.
He thought the most effective petition would be to deliver a hard kick to some bad people's behinds. He planned to exterminate and to liberate, to stop and to save, to communicate, to talk, -- to talk, not.
Mr. Galton found the drug apartment that this Rebuck woman ran for Tom Slick's organization deserted. At mid-day, few people entered or left Grant Street. Drug activity on Grant Street began about four o'clock in the afternoon, heated up after nine at night and continued until about six in the morning. Mr. Galton called on the woman at one o'clock. At that hour in the afternoon the street stayed almost empty. The schools had the children of the better families locked in classroom. Truant children stayed off the streets. The employers had the people with jobs working across town, or downtown, or out in the suburbs. The street hustlers laid low, many in their own beds asleep, waiting for the sun to recede.
Mr. Galton found that Rebuck woman in her bed asleep and he left her there in eternal sleep, with a wooden stake in her heart. He found her snoring. He thought: What can I say to her? What does she know about anything? Anything other than wickedness? He asked the sleeping woman, "Can you feel?"
After Mr Galton started his work, the Rebuck woman gagged, moaned and choked, and fought in her sleep, and lost the battle, gave in to the rattle of death.
The brutality of the woman's death didn't shock anybody. The police said that her murder looked like an execution, that the woman was a victim in a war among the drug gangs over drug turf. The death of Rebuck did not slow Tom Slick's drug distribution business on Grant Street. He simply moved his operation to the apartment of another woman in the same building. And, of course, Mr. Galton added this woman's name to his execution list. But, she had to wait her turn. He felt that many more scum deserving death stood ahead of her.
A frequent night crawler to Grant Street struck Mr. Galton as odd. The man was always well dressed, wore pressed clothes, with no wrinkles, and had perfect posture. He carried himself as a man with some authority. Only by chance did Mr. Galton discover the identity of this man.
Mr. Galton had taken the subway in route to the hospital for another routine follow-up examination. He took a seat, and only by chance did he pick up the copy of one of the suburban weekly newspapers that someone had left on the seat across from him. To pass the time he thumbed through the paper and was drawn to a photograph and a featured article on the paper's education page. He couldn't believe what he saw. He stared again, in the photo he saw a Grant Street night crawler. The newspaper caption said the face in photo belonged to the vice principal of Snow Hill High School. The school board had just promoted the creep to principal.
Yes, Mr. Galton thought: The night crawler with good posture, a high school principal, one and the same.
"Gad damn!" Mr. Galton cursed.
He knew the name of his second executionee.
A week later, Mr. Galton sat on another subway train, returning from his visit to the high school and his trip into the new principal's office. He picked up a copy of another paper left on a seat. He scanned the paper, a copy of The National Expressed News. He read a story about a local boy who said that demons chased him.
"By god, " Mr. Galton mumbled, "that boy goes to that school where that fellow, that principal . . . -- that guy had to have been selling drugs to the school children . . . darn . . ."
Mr. Galton felt good about what he had just done.
He'd been lucky. He'd planned to do it in the now late principal's office. In every high school he'd been in, there had always been a school secretary at her desk outside the principal's office. If he struck the devil down in his office, the secretary would have been able to ID him, but God was with him. Mr. Galton believed that if he had slain the principal there, God would have shut the secretary's eyes or confused her head. But Heaven blessed, he was. After he entered the high school, unchallenged, he saw the principal enter a rest room on the first floor marked, BOYS. The halls were empty. The children were in their classes; the teachers were in their classrooms. God had cleared the way for him. The principal was alone.
Mr. Galton's heart skipped as he hurried into the rest room to do God's work. He had with him, inside a black laundry bag, a sharp wooden stake. He'd stayed up all night, the night before, praying over this weapon, like a knight of old prayed over his armor and sword, asking God to grant them and himself special powers to vanished all devils and the enemy.
Mr. Galton smiled now. He had driven a wooden stake through a second monster's heart. He read further into the newspaper article about the school boy. The boy mentioned witnessing drug activity on Grant Street.
"Grant Street? The boy's knows about Grant Street . . ." Mr. Galton put the paper down. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.
He'd slain the beast on the toilet bowl while it was in the midst of taking a crap, spreading its feces and diseases into the city sewers. He didn't give the monster a moment to speak or repent. That devil's time was up. Mr. Galton kicked open the stall and drove the stake clean through. The principal was in shock. He had no time to scream, or to move. In his toilet, justice was done.
Mr. Galton re-read the newspaper article. "We've got to
save the children," he mumbled. "God, we've got to save
the
children . . ."
Then he considered who on his list would be the third monster he would stake.
END
