American Nightmare

By George Cotronis, Max Booth III, Tim Marquitz and 12 more

It's the 1950s. There's always something good on the radio, cherry red Cadillacs cruise the streets and everything is always perfect. Marilyn is still alive and the War is over. America goes to bed, nuclear annihilation postponed another day.

Welcome to the American Nightmare.

Nuclear families dabbling in the occult. Little League games in the summer, old blood spilled in the dust. Unspeakable things hiss and crawl, unseen along the 38th parallel, camouflaged under muzzle flashes. This is what happens behind the white picket fences and waving flags.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kraken Press
• Release date: Mar 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9789197972505

Book preview

CHIAROSCURO

DINO PARENTI

I

Spring, 1945

The howl echoes. 

I tell myself it’s a wolf, but there’s too much human in the ache of it, and at the gates of the camp near Hanover, the atoll of pale, wrenched corpses scattered across the sodden black loam engraves the certainty that no animals dwell anywhere near here.

Past the downed coils of barbed wire braided with branches as concealment from outside eyes, me and my squad enter the camp. The air is rank with silence and smoke. Squat sheds on raised foundations bleed through the pall as woodcuts on foxed pages, the blotching more pewter than rust.

Another howl, louder this time as we round a wall of scorched slump-stone, and through retreating bands of fog and smoke, what appear at first to be doll parts strewn haphazardly about get swept aside by GI feet until at last I signal a full stop. I don’t bend down to pick up the tiny bare foot by the mud-caked toe of my own boot, but rather flip it over with the barrel of my M1 so that the severed flesh, rolled back in fresh, birthing-rose layers, is evident for all to see.

Several privates dry-heave or retch fully at the sight, but I ease it out of the way and keep moving. More fragments of bodies continue to grope through the mist until, at the base of the wall, their broken owners materialize in a collapsed, domino-line heap beneath a continuous crimson suture of machine gun holes.

The howls from earlier have diminished to hitching breaths, though closer now, and I keep forging ahead while others drop off one-by-one to linger.

Beyond the mound of fledgling bodies, I come upon a woman sitting flat against the wall. Her hair has been shorn roughly away. Ribs strain against the vacuum seal of grey skin. Skeletal arms stippled with sores dangle uselessly at her sides. Her eyes are all shock, heaving from their sockets to the point of spilling.

Lips are leaden threads that pull into the hollows of cheeks so depressed that her mouth can no longer close fully.

If Alfred Kubin had painted The Egg and The Epidemic as a single piece, it might approach the portrait this poor wretch paints.

An empty .50 caliber bandolier has been sashed across her shoulders, either by herself or another. To keep the infant pinned and suckling to a deflated breast. 

The corpsman—the only one who has dared follow deeper into the haze with me—finally sees the oozing hole in the infant’s head, and plops hard on the ground, his knees unable to keep their spring.

Neither of us make a move towards this apparition that expels constant shallow breaths without seemingly drawing any back in. To do so means validating a thing that should not be in the world.

Only when the bullet screams past my ear, splintering the stillness along with the stone in the wall behind me, do I jump.

Sniper. Somewhere from the eastern hill, and the men scatter for cover...

~ ~ ~

Winter, 1958

It’s been over a month since your wife, Lacy, had finally succumbed from the cancer, and you’re still on administrative leave.

Up to then, you’ve been the lead detective on the Doll case. Now, you just keep tabs, loitering about the station, playing solitaire, doodling on the backs of requisition forms, until one day the radio report you’ve been waiting for finally crackles in: Mass shooting, local campaign office.

Your veins simmer and bloat, and you’re out the door before the report ends.

Pulling into the crime scene twenty minutes later, you spot Hiram’s black ‘58 Plymouth parked at the edge of the police perimeter. Hiram, your partner and proxy, and whose face—as you’ve heard others remark—evokes dozer tracks in mud, emerges from the office, wiping his hands on threadbare slacks.

Ain’t supposed to let you in, Tom, he tells you from a distance, but the usual gruffness has been wilted by whatever he’d just seen inside.

Take a load off, you say in passing him by. Have yourself a smoke. That’s all the time I’m asking for.

You march up to the door with the taped sign that says MAYORAL CAMPAIGN HEADQUARTERS, and push right through...

~ ~ ~

Get down! the corpsman yells to no one in particular. Only I narrow my eyes towards the naked wood rising up the hillock to the east and hold fast, waiting for the second shot—it zings wide to the left—that allows me to zero in on the shooter.

I take off for the point in a coppice of alder from which the muzzle flash bloomed. Halfway up the knoll, the shooter squeezes off another round that explodes into a tree inches from my head. Hot splinters stake into my flesh, but my legs keep pumping.

A dozen yards ahead, and through the spindle of foliage I spot him. A young German soldier fumbling for the ammunition in his belt pouch. My mounting, primal growls actually cause him to scrabble even harder, and upon seeing me, he fumbles his rifle into the mud and immediately throws up his hands in surrender.

Icy plumes ejecting from my nostrils, M1 gripped knuckle-white in my hands, I step up to the trembling soldier...

~ ~ ~

No one’s at the reception desk, but why would there be? The police would’ve cleared the building already.

From a nearby office streams Ike’s familiar tenor on a radio news spot before the music starts again. The Crickets. That’ll be the Day.

Unlike most of your colleagues who still yearn for the big-bands of the previous decade, you like the rock-and-roll. Like so many veterans who’ve witnessed the worst of Europe and the Pacific, all the big has been sloughed from your heart long ago.

Further into the community center where the Friday night sock-hops take place, and you finally see policemen. They pass you coming down a long corridor to the assembly hall, but they’re all a blur to you, their only unifying factor being their shared silence.

Another cop with his back to you blocks the doorway ahead, though you can tell from the obscene level of cologne that it’s one of the recent greenhorn transfers, McCormick. 

You tap his shoulder, and without a word, McCormick hands over his notepad before retreating back down the hallway. You scan down his neat, bulleted observations before looking into the space yourself.

If Picasso had done Guernica in mauves, maroons, and scarlets, this is what the scene would almost approach.

A single victim survived this, a slaughter that screams to a higher cruelty than you’d prepared yourself for. Corpses and pieces of corpses blasted beyond recognition litter the space. Viscera drenches the walls in colors and textures you’d only seen vented from other human bodies while overseas.

You palm the door jamb, and reinforce to yourself: details, details, details.

Shotgun shells dot the floor. Ten-gauge. Multiple reloads of them.

Better.

And then the calling card of sorts: morphine syrettes sprinkled throughout. Tiny ampules, like the kind battlefield medics popped into wounded troops to keep them from thrashing while they try to somewhat competently patch you back up.

It’s the Dolls’ doing, no doubt about it. The rampaging thrill-kill duo—or a trio, depending on which of the surviving eye-witnesses are to be believed. They’ve been silent for a while now. Until this morning, they hadn’t strolled into a store or post office dressed as Raggedy Ann and Andy in months to spray the occupants with unholy loads of buckshot before making off with any minors present.

Twelve children still missing to date.

Number thirteen is Casey, according to McCormick’s notes, the Mayoral candidate’s daughter who’d been interning there for school credit in civics. No sign of her body, though they’re pretty certain she was here...

~ ~ ~

I bore into the sniper’s panicked eyes and wonder what they’ve witnessed in their nineteen or so years; what vistas, works of art, cities he’s absorbed through them. Maybe even a girl with butter-cream skin and eyes that see the things in you that no one else will bother to.

Then I bring down the butt of my M1 carbine straight onto his crown.

The report stumbles down the hill, and the sniper crumples at once. My second strike stoves in his head, and every ensuing wallop reverberates less and less until the repeated butter-churn action causes the rifle to slip out from under me, and exhaustion sends me to my knees...

~ ~ ~

Skimming over the butchery, you realize that you haven’t stepped an inch past the threshold of the doorway into the assembly hall, and that you’ve been investigating the Dolls’ carnage from between the fingers grabbing your face.

Casey had been here. The certainty roils your belly with the unease of lost hope and ill-gotten gain.

~ ~ ~

Upon shambling down the hill in a daze, the corpsman sticks a syrette into my thigh.

What the...? I start to protest.

Even as my vision blurs, I can make out the poor job the corpsman’s doing of masking concern.

Just a precaution. There’s something you should...

But I keep focusing up the hill, past the newly arrived caravan of British vehicles to the camp, searching out the place where I’d left the body of the young German whose noodle I’d ground into the earth.

You know, doc? I say. I’d sure be nice to close my eyes for a bit.

The corpsman fishes from his satchel a fresh roll of gauze and starts to unspool a segment around his fist.

You took one in the head, Tommy.

I reach up to dab at my right temple—It’s uh, it’s just bark from a tree that...— and feel my finger sink where it has no business sinking.

The corpsman gently withdraws my finger and starts wrapping my head with the gauze.

Ricochet, he says. Slug must’ve glanced off a tree.

But how did I...keep going?

The toggling eyes suggest a cluelessness I can sympathize with.

Adrenaline’s my guess. But hey, I ain’t done with medical school yet. Do me a solid and don’t tell anyone, huh, buddy?

However much I keep blinking, the corpsman’s face keeps flattening out, and a minute later, it’s as if I’m looking up at it from under billowing water. Only after I return home weeks later does it hit me that just a few hundred yards outside Bergen-Belsen in northwest Germany, April 14, 1945, a young German soldier’s face was the last I would ever recall every detail of, but that’s only during the day. At night, when all else slithers in through the cracks, it’s an ashen specter, elongated to Giacometti proportions, that I behold, her lifeless face more intricate than any living soul’s, and the baby is still attached to her.

~ ~ ~

II

Summer, 1958

The lone survivor of the campaign headquarters shooting had apparently told paramedics in the ambulance that he saw a two-tone sedan, possibly a Crown Vic, leaving the scene. And that it had a bumper sticker.

Don’t even ask, Tom, says Hiram. He can’t be questioned for another forty-eight hours at least.

You roll your eyes some before stepping into the office to sit at your desk. Twice a day now since the shooting you’ve been dropping in, hoping for some break that hasn’t come, and you’re running out of paper to doodle on. For a while you watch Hiram, hunkered over his paperwork, hands cradling his face, neck vanishing between pachyderm shoulders raised as if to fence off some perversion going down.

If Munch had dressed the subject of The Scream in off-the-rack cheap twill, this would be Hiram at the moment.

And like that oblong face, Hiram’s remains an ever elusive mystery, as much as everyone else’s for the last fourteen years. Often you wonder what Hiram would say if you were to tell him the truth. Would he even believe you? After all, who could survive as a cop for seven years with such an impairment?

Yet there are ways, you’d tell him. The human body and spirit are adaptable far beyond what you ever could’ve known before the war. So long as you avoided mug-books, you were pretty much okay.

A Crown Vic, huh? you say after a while. Yes, you despise small-talk, but you despise what someone may be thinking about you whilst in the same room even more.

Yes indeed, Hiram says.

Two-tone?

Correct.

Which it’s got a bumper sticker?

"Uh huh. Something quaint according to the witness. Like a Norman Rockwell painting. You like Rockwell, Tom?"

You think of Lacy. Lacy who, to your disappointment, revered Rockwell. But after foundering with repeated attempts at conception, those Rockwell coffee-table books worked wonders on her mood. Would do so again later, even as the cancer ate her away.

Doesn’t everybody? you tell Hiram. So when can we see our witness?

Hiram’s fleshy shoulders hitch up and down. When the doctors tell us he ain’t gonna die anymore.

~ ~ ~

Fall, 1958

You walk into a place, and you’re unsure of things. Basic deductive reasoning and some gut sizzle has ultimately led you here, so now what?

What you know is, you’re looking for someone. A pair, or a trio. A car. A two-tone car with a sticker. That’s what you’ve got. That, and a looming sandstorm from the southeast.

Celine’s, the place is called. A diner and curio shop. You’ve eaten here once or twice as a uniform between your longer patrol shifts. Food’s fine if you’re just looking for fuel. The rest is eye-candy or distraction, depending on your disposition, especially once inside: knickknacks and collectibles, photos and chapbooks. Kitsch galore.

If Hopper had done Nighthawks in monochromes of hickory and mesquite, this is what Celine’s would look like.

Into this world you step, forearming the sweat from your brow. You cast eyeballs on every face, but you don’t recognize a one, and they don’t seem to recognize you.

The only familiar individual is the eponymous owner herself. Celine’s poodle-cut do can be seen from Mars. A can-do lady who worked on the production lines during the war. A widow. A voice ten miles-of-skid-marks long.

She says hello to you from across the room, and you see that those smears have gotten longer.

The sun carves you across the linoleum and up the opposite wall. Panning the room, you make sure to mark the framed lithographs on the pastel-peachy wallpaper. Rockwell’s for the most part. You gust the air from your nose before stepping up to the counter to take a stool.

It’s between lunch and breakfast, so the place is only half full. And yeah, there are couples, along with some trios, though most are families and not likely to be homicidal maniacs. And if you think that excludes them from depravity, you haven’t set foot in Poland and Germany between ‘42 and ‘45.

More people start rolling in, likely seeking shelter as well as a malt or a sundae. When they open the door, the growing wind outside almost yanks it out of their hands. It’s also darkening. A premature dusk at ten-thirty in the AM.

Meanwhile, you sit. Eventually Celine trundles over and you order coffee, then you sit some more, listening to the Wurlitzer spin the latest Columbia 45s at a respectable volume.

After a while, someone new opens the door. An elderly pair, though you wouldn’t know it by the way they chatter. Teenagers swapping gossip in a school bathroom.

She holds the door ajar so her male half can wedge through the jamb the large dollhouse he’s lugging in, ever-so-mindful of the slightest bump. When he places it on the countertop, it’s done with equal delicacy.

The woman’s a spinster in a way unseen for generations, and she plops her canvass bag onto the barstool a few over from you as if it were a load of laundry, never mind the angry tinkling of glass within.

Celine’s now leaning over the counter at the other elbow, swapping goo-goo eyes with a truck-driver type sporting a Rowdy Yates hat, and when she looks up she waves friendly at the old couple, and they wave friendly back, and the familiarity seems genuine.

As soon as Celine looks away, the old woman mocks her gravelly voice into the old man’s ear, to which he sighs boredom.

For a while you watch this pair trade daffy, fussy affections, albeit tenderly exchanged because of a mutual rheumatism. Eventually the woman excuses herself to the bathroom. The man shrugs the inevitability of this, and once alone, looks fondly upon the dollhouse. Maybe he’s selling it. Maybe a trade for sundries or LPs. Soon a ropey, shaky finger is caressing the glossy blue door which is proportionately too large compared to the rest of it, and only the jingle of the diner door’s bell halts these ministrations.

Two flat tops walk in. Youngish from what you can tell of them. Based on their stiff bearing and small olive duffels on their shoulders, they’ve likely seen and done war. They’re filmed in dust and sand, which they take great pains to slough away carefully so as not to disturb the diners.

If you just doubled Duchamp’s Sad Young Man in a Train, you wouldn’t have to do much else to depict these two.

You notice Celine eyeing them, and you wonder if she wonders if they’re homeless, or simply looking to escape the sandstorm, but you can’t tell. You can’t tell a damn thing.

~ ~ ~

Peter LaSalle’s just a kid. Seventeen. A couple of years ahead of Casey at the same school.

You stand off to the side as Hiram flips through one of Lacy’s old Rockwell books for Peter, occasionally bumping the metal stand by the bed with a thick elbow, and causing the IV bottles to clink a toast of the worst taste. 

Doctors and candy-stripers mill about, but they’re a conveyor of undistinguishable figurines to you. The former puff away on the same Chesterfields that you’d quit after the war, but which you now crave again with the lust of vampires.

Towards the end of the second book, Peter finally stirs and tries to point at an image with the bandaged stump of his right hand before saying too loudly, That’s it!

Peter LaSalle, who is now partially deaf from the close-range shotgun blast that vaporized the hand he’d held up to shield his face, still smiles as if none of this will ever be a hindrance.

In Hiram’s Plymouth twenty minutes later, and the Rockwell book sits open on your lap to a painting called Boy and Girl Gazing at the Moon, 1926. The alleged sticker on the back of the witnessed light-blue-and-white Crown Victoria.

You don’t know it, this painting. Rockwell never struck you as being much, even during the war when he was booming. At the time, composing your own stark but layered compositions while painting portraits on the side to make the money your deeper art wasn’t providing didn’t require the influence of adept, albeit superficial illustrators. It was only after coming home that the impossibility of ever doing portraiture again quickly became apparent. When you have Prosopagnosia, humanity’s collective face is a legion of mannequins. Individual features become unrecognizable. And while you could still illustrate bodies and settings at a high level of competence and grace, the faces were a mess—unremarkable, lifeless caricatures. How an alien might