It happened late one night right after my friends left my room at the Vagabond Hotel. I had just gone down for a nap. I was almost falling asleep actually, when someone knocked on the door. Someone knocked three times. I thought, whoever it is, they’re going to have to knock six times so I can get up from this cozy bed and answer that door. And while this person knocked the three knocks repeatedly, the more I tried to guess who was behind that door.
I had no clue.
Finally the six knocks were about to cue my answering. I took a deep breath and screamed from my Cadillac bed, “WHO IS IT?”
Then I heard a woman’s voice. “Open the fucking door, Oscar!”
I couldn’t recognize the voice. I got worried. I got off the bed immediately, put my ear against the door, and I was able to hear another voice whispering. That’s when the door exploded and knocked me down to the floor. I hit my head so hard against the wooden floor that my nap must have been about an hour long. When I woke up, I had a pounding pain on the back of my head. I tried to get up from the floor, but someone had nailed my pants and my shirt onto the Vagabond’s Florida pine wood floor. I couldn’t move at all. My vision was blurry, I couldn’t see the faces that surrounded me clearly.
Then I heard the voice of a man. “Do you want me to chop him up into little pieces, Chacha? huh? huh?”
“Beads, calm the fuck down, we just want to scare him, not kill him! Give me the knife and the gun,” said Chacha.
“What are you gonna do to him Chacha? Are you gonna chop him up into little pieces? Huh? Huh?” said Beads.
“Beads! You’re annoying the fuck out of me! Get the fuck out of here and go wait for me in the car!”
Somehow I felt safer without that guy named Beads around. With his exit, the woman closed the door of my apartment and locked it. She walked over to me, bent over to face me and said, “I know you’re wondering about who we are and why we are doing this to you. It’s all very simple, Oscar. We just want you to hand over the Mayan artifact your grandfather gave you. Just give me the artifact and we’ll be gone before you know it.”
I was so confused. I wondered how did they know I carried the artifact my grandfather had given me. How did they even know about it?
Then Beads came back into the room.
“Is he talking yet? Did you search the room?”
“Not yet. He’s all yours,” she said pointing at me, as if giving him permission for something. She went to the closet, and started looking and searching through my clothes and dresser drawers. He was a short bald muscular man with no teeth. His mouth was always opened, wrinkled lips hanging, big jaws and tattoos covering his arms. His face was covered in pimples and small blisters. He had a Russian accent. He stood over me looking deep in my eyes. I looked at him back and said,
“You’re a strange looking dude…”
“What did you say mudderfukker?”
“That you’re a strange looking fellow, you fuck head!” I responded with an anger that came from a disarming fear of dying without fighting for my life. He threw himself at me and hit my face with his forehead. My nose was bloody and broken.
“I’m a strange looking dude huh?” he asked while slapping my face hard, but I couldn’t feel anything. My face was numb with a constant shock of pain. He kept on asking and repeating, “I’m a strange looking dude? I’m a strange looking dude? I’m a strange looking dude? I’m a strange looking dude? Huh? Huh?”
He took hold of the hammer and started removing the nails from the wooden floor. I could feel my shirt and pants loosening from the floor. He kept on repeating the question. I could feel the blood from my nose running down the back of my throat. I was breathing through my mouth. I didn’t say anything else to him, because I wanted to make sure I was completely loose.
He was fast with the hammer, and while he continued to concentrate on his morbid mantra, I searched the room with my blurry eyes and spotted Chacha sitting on my bed. She had found my Mayan artifact. She held it with her right hand and dialed a number using my cellphone with her left. Then she turned to him and said, “Take him to the bathtub and take off his clothes.”
Beads, the mutant, got quiet, grabbed my arms, dragged me all the way to the bathtub, and threw me in there. I could hear Chacha talking with someone on the phone, but couldn’t make out what she was saying. He turned on the hot water and forgot to turn on the cold. I didn’t even have the strength to open my eyes. I could feel the hot water burning my skin, and I started waking up slowly from the pain on my face. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. Chacha came over and started unbuttoning my bloody shirt and pants. I laid there in my boxers, burning under the steamy hot water, and feeling more awake. They both just stood there watching me. I noticed she pulled out my artifact from her right pant pocket and gave it to Beads.
“Take this to Tony G, he‘s waiting for you at Van Orsdel.” She said to him. He turned to go, but she grabbed him from his elbow and pulled him in close, “If you lose this, Tony will incinerate us both.”
He looked at her with his frozen, crazy eyes and said, “I won’t fucking lose it. Now let go of my fucking arm.”
Beads exited the bathroom, and then the room. Chacha leaned toward me to turn off the hot water. That’s when I grabbed her fast from her shoulders and pulled her hard toward me as I rammed my bloody forehead against her face. Then blackout. Next thing I remember is waking up with her limp body over me. I had knocked us both out. I was able to push her off of me with the little strength I had left. I could feel my face pulsating. I crawled out of the bloody tub and pulled my weak body up with the bathroom sink counter.
I looked at myself in the mirror, and my nose looked five times larger with the swelling. I picked up the hammer and the knife from the floor, grabbed my car keys, cell phone, and left the Vagabond peeling my 74 Dodge Dart South on Biscayne towards the crematorium.
I could feel my face pulsating. The adrenaline from my anger was blocking the pain. It all made perfect sense. Tony G was a hired Mayan artifact pirate. These had to be the same guys that attacked my grandfather in Honduras. The thought of avenging my grandfather’s death made me push the pedal to the metal, and the slant six engine roared past 36th Street and Biscayne at 90mph. I made a sharp right on 34th Street and pulled up on the side of the building with the black smoke chimney.
I got out of the car and realized I was still in my bloody boxers. I went around the back of the crematorium with the hammer on my right and the knife on my left. I slowly turned the door knob and it was unlocked. I went in slowly bending my knees and my back, reaching my head quickly up and down to see if I saw something. And there they were. Beads and another guy wearing a metal helmet. To my surprise, I noticed my artifact on a small coffee table next to a couple of car keys, right by the back exit door. I quietly grabbed my artifact and the keys. Beads was sitting on a bench, watching that other man with the helmet push a metal stick into a noisy body furnace with a beer in his hand.
I was about to turn away when I noticed a wrinkled, bony hand sticking out from under a white blanket, belonging to a body laying on a stainless steel bed on wheels. I immediately recognized the hand. It belonged to Vivian, my 83 year old neighbor, the stripper. Vivian and I were the insomniacs of the rundown apartment building next to the crematorium. We would sit on my window sill and stare at the black smoke chimney while we sipped on her beer, smoked and imagined the kind of life the person burning had. She was actually the one that informed me a few months after I moved into that building, that the BBQ smell I was smelling everyday, was no BBQ. And now the poor thing was laid out on that stretcher.
My anger and sadness made me wish I had a pair of bullets and a gun, but I kept my head low. I needed to crawl all the way to the stretcher and see if it was really Vivian under the blanket. Suddenly Beads stood up and said, “I’m gonna go take a shit, these burning bodies are making me feel sick and hungry at the same fucking time.” He walked over to a bathroom door at the opposite end of the furnace area and locked it. The man with the helmet kept pushing and pulling the metal stick into the loud furnace as if in a trance. I stood up slowly and walked over to the body in the blanket, pulled the sheet off the face to see if it was her, and it was her, but to my surprise, she was breathing softly. I could see she had been hit hard on the side of her forehead with something, she wasn’t bleeding, but her whole right side of her upper face was purplish red and swollen. I took a deep sigh and squeezed the knife and the hammer with my sweaty hands, turned to look at the man by the furnace, and right when I was about to move, I felt Vivian’s cold soft and weak hand grab my left forearm.
I looked at her, and she signaled with her finger on her lips to be quiet. Then we both heard the toilet flush inside the bathroom. She quickly grabbed the knife from my hand and covered herself with the blanket. I got back on my hands and knees and like a bloody zombie with fearful eyes, I snuck up behind the man with the metal stick and swung the hammer hard onto the soft back part of his helmet, and his body immediately collapsed. That’s when Beads opened the bathroom door and saw me standing over the man’s body.
“Tony!!! What did you do to Tony? Oh I’m gonna fucking kill you!!!”Beads screamed, walking towards me fast. As he passed Vivian, she stood up fast with the knife in hand and right before Beads reached me unfolding his arm to punch me, he stopped with his eyes wide open, taking a deep breath. I could see the pointy part of the knife sticking out of the front of his stomach, staining a scarlet red on his shit and pants. He slowly bent his knees closing his eyes, and collapsed on top of his buddy, Tony G.
Emotionally defeated and horrified, I put on Tony’s helmet, picked up the metal stick, turned off the furnace gas, and in silence Vivian and I spent the rest of the night feeding the two bodies into the furnace, poking and breaking the ash. We smoked Tony’s cigarettes and drank Beads’ beers without saying a word.
