• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“You makin’ fun a me? I’ll whup yo white ass, dass fo sho.”

“I’m not making fun of you.”

He squinted suspiciously at me. “Ain’t got no friends.” He pursed his lips, looking from me to Mike and back again. “I be da Tazzman on accounta my hair.” He lifted one hand to touch it; it didn’t seem to give an inch. “Kids say it make me look like a Tazzmanian Devil, sumpin lak dat.” That’s how Tasmanian came out in his odd accent. He gestured at Mike with the machine pistol. “He really gone make me a bugga?”

“Sure,” I said, giving Mike the high sign.

As Mike unwrapped a patty and slapped it on the griddle, I took a step toward the Tazzman. His nostrils flared as he smelled the frying beef and I took another step toward him. He didn’t like that.

“Hey, muthafucka,” he said, beginning to swing that damn weapon in my direction.

Mike yelled: “Bill, for Chrissake!”

And I threw Ms. M into the Tazzman’s face. I don’t know whether you know it or not but she gets into your eyes and she’s one mean momma.

“Muthafucka!” the Tazzman said, with a thorough lack of originality.

He squeezed the trigger just as I slammed my left arm against the barrel of the machine pistol. A sound blast seemed to open a hole in my head, boring straight through to my brain. I trod hard on the Tazzman’s instep, and he howled like a banshee. But I had underestimated the beanpole, just as I had misjudged the entire situation.

He got off a second squeeze. A hail of bullets stitched a lethal line across the mirrors. Mike tried to duck but he got in the way and was blasted back into the triple tier of liquor bottles behind him. Liquor and blood combined in one god-awful spew.

“Ah, hell,” I said. As the machine pistol swung toward me, I kicked over a table, ducked behind it, then screamed as the high-velocity bullets shredded the solid oak tabletop as if it were paperboard.

I lurched drunkenly into the shadows at the rear of the bar, but the Tazzman was in full bore and he followed me. The machine pistol quit erupting long enough for him to slam home another magazine. How many did he have? I wondered as I ran.

I bypassed the doors to the rest rooms knowing that there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The bullets were chattering into the old plaster as I hit the rear door. It wouldn’t open! I fumbled with the deadbolt, then frantically pulled it open as constellations of lathe and wood flew past my head and struck me on the shoulder.

I hurtled into the stinking back alley where Mike dumped his garbage and his hamburger meat when it started to turn into a laboratory experiment.

And silence …

Silence?

Where was the unholy racket of the Tazzman’s machine pistol? you might ask. But that was the least of it, because I wasn’t in any stinking back alley. Turning around in a complete circle I could see that, well, let me put it this way, if I’d had a tiny terrier at my side I would no doubt have blurted out: “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

I finally returned to the direction from which I’d come, but there was no filthy facade, no door back into Helicon; there was only air and space and light—glorious, luminous light. I was in a high-ceilinged room, looking out a tall window at a curiously familiar structure with a rounded dome that looked almost Middle Eastern. Lower down, a large city fanned away in the blue-and-gold dusk. But it had been morning just moments ago, and this place was definitely not Manhattan. The plethora of chimneys and mansard roofs made me think immediately of Europe.

Around me, the pale stucco walls were hung with paintings. These huge Impressionist canvasses were dense with color, vibrant with protean movement. They swirled about me like eddies in a stream.

“Do you like them?”

The voice was melodious, rich as Devonshire cream.

I turned around to see a woman with a long face whose determination made handsome features that were at best plain. She had a stem countenance eerily like the cursed headmistress of the Adirondack prep school I’d escaped to at the age of fourteen (even that had been better than my intolerable home life), then