Deadeyes

By Paul Kilbourne

Arthur Kneely, also known as Deadeyes, is a brain damaged former boxer, collegiate wrestler and debt collector in his early forties who lives in the town of River Ridge, New Jersey in 1973. He survives on disability, money he makes from bareknuckle fights, and a stipend from the local Catholic diocese. Because of his head injury, and the lack of control it has left him with, Arthur has killed several men. He is protected though by the local mob and police mainly because he has relatives in both organizations. Arthur lives on one side of a house that he shares with a mentally ill cannibalistic former nun named Marie. His Uncle Kevin is a New York City police captain, and he enlists Arthur's aid in solving the brutal murder of one of Arthur's associates from years ago. Although Arthur's injury has left him with a speech impediment and cognitive difficulties, his intuition proves invaluable in locating the murderer. When the two meet, all Hell breaks loose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645843474

Book preview

cover.jpg

Deadeyes

Paul Kilbourne

Copyright © 2020 Paul Kilbourne

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2020

ISBN 978-1-64584-346-7 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-66241-752-8 (hc)

ISBN 978-1-64584-347-4 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Angel

Limb from Limb

Archangels

Samson

Cain

Money Changers

King

The Beast

An Eye for an Eye

They Shall Take Up Serpents

My Brother’s Keeper

Vengeance Is Mine

Resurrection

Trial and Tribulation

Revelations

The Last Supper

Armageddon

End of Days

For Jennifer

Deadeyes

There were giants on the earth in those days, and later, too, when the sons of God used to cohabit with the daughters of men, who bore them children, those mighty men of old who made a name. God saw that human wickedness was growing out of bounds on earth; that the intention of all human thinking produced nothing but evil all day.

—Genesis 6:3

Chapter I

Angel

Ilook into the mirror, and a monster looks back at me. His right eye is half shut and always looks in that direction. A shallow but discernable dent runs down his face from the left side of his too-large brow, over the steel brace that was once his left cheekbone to the base of his large nose, then up again to the center of his forehead. His gray beard and mustache don’t cover any of it. A titanium ridge in his upper left jaw reflects whatever light is present when he opens his mouth or tries to smile.

The monster’s stiff gray-brown hair starts thinly above, then thickens on the way down to the tops of his heavy shoulders, shoulders that slope down from the middle of his neck, then spread outward forever. His back is broad too, and when he looks at me sideways, I can see that it’s also bowed. This monster has looked at me every time I’ve shaved for the last fifteen years.

I look from the open door of my bathroom to the clock radio in the living room from which The Fifth Dimension appropriately does Last Night I Didn’t Get to Sleep at All. I see that it’s a little after 6:00 a.m. It’s been raining all night, so I’ve been awake. I don’t sleep well at night and never when it rains.

The sound of water dripping from the gutter of my roof onto the shell of the useless air conditioner in my front room pounds on my skull like a jackhammer, but for some reason, I’m drawn to the noise; it turns my attention away from the mirror. I walk over to the window and look out across the river to Manhattan.

It’s still a little before sunrise, but the horizon behind the New York skyline is already becoming a light gray. This view, especially at dusk or dawn, always stirs things inside me, like memories of the rainy September morning, not unlike this one, that I came home from the hospital fifteen years ago.

A knock on the wall tears my attention away from the view outside. It’s Sister Marie who lives next door on the other side of the house. Marie’s a former nun who stands six feet, five inches tall in her stockinged feet. She usually wears a black dress with her long, even blacker hair tied in a bun. Around her neck is a large, oddly shaped silver locket that she never takes off.

Although Marie’s movements are usually slow and deliberate, she’s predisposed to an odd tick: sometimes she’ll suddenly bolt her head around to one side or the other, with her huge eyeballs bulging out of their sockets. This movement can occur spontaneously, but usually it’s elicited by some kind of a distraction, and it contributes to the overall picture she presents, which is unnerving to say the least.

I walk out my front door to the other side of the shotgun house we live in and knock on Marie’s heavy oak door. Following a series of snaps, crackles, and pops from the several locks inside, it creaks open and her huge ghostly eyes peer down into mine.

Hello, Arthur, she croaks. Her voice is low, especially in the morning.

What do you need? I snarl, cringing inside because I wanted to sound nice.

It’s your uncle on the phone, she moans sadly as she lets me in. Her bulbous gray eyes seem to sink into their orbits as she looks down at me. Physically, she’s as freakish as I am—six foot five, with pitch-black hair and skin that appears to be dark and pale at the same time, one might call it ashen. Her features are large and she has a slight amount of hair on her upper lip and chin. A slightly crooked neck that keeps her head tilted a little to the left is somewhat swollen at the right side of its base and may suggest the beginning of a goiter.

As I walk over to the phone, the only one in the house, I realize it has to be my uncle Kevin, a New York cop, because she always refers to my other uncle, Jerry, as Fr. Jerald.

Yeahr, Uncle Kevin?

Sorry about the hour, Arthur, but I knew you wouldn’t be asleep. How you getting along?

Okay.

I spoke to Sergeant Taglia the other day, he feels some reason to say.

Oh yeah? I say, wincing as I wait to hear what’s up.

He says you’re doin’ a great job teaching those boys at the precinct how to take care of themselves better. They respect you, Arthur. They’re not just afraid of ya. Jerry and your brother and I are real proud, so he says.

I say, It’s just a few basic moves, Uncle Kev. Common sense stuff.

Don’t sell yourself short, Arthur, He’s buttering me up for something. Say listen, I need you to come over to my precinct this afternoon.

What the hell for? I ask.

It’s just a little somethin’ I want to talk to you about. Not a big deal.

I don’t like this. I don’t like cops. I don’t like to go into the city unless it’s night. But I don’t know what to say to him.

When?

It’s gotta be this afternoon. It can’t wait till tomorrow and I’ve got a meeting at lunch. Come by at three.

Okay.

See you then, Arthur. Take care.

Yeah, see you then. And I hang up.

I turn to Sister Marie and notice that she’s staring at me. What did he want, Arthur? she asks.

I don’t know. Listen, I gotta go out this afternoon. Do you need any food or painkillers or anything?

No, she says. Just some brandy, Arthur. Please get me some brandy.

Yeah, sure, I mumble. I’ll be back at dinnertime. Don’t let anybody in.

I hear the bolts lock behind me as I leave Marie’s place and head back to my side. I know she’ll be sitting by the window all morning as she always does. Although some passersby are a little unsettled by her specter like visage peering out at them, most of the locals are used to it by now.

Marie and I are both on disability. The Diocese of Paterson has put us up in this house for the last fourteen years. This is thanks to my uncle Jerry, who’s my late father’s brother and also the bishop. Lately, however, he and the church seem to be having second thoughts about the arrangement. It’s not only because of my behavior but also Marie’s.

I reenter my front room and turn on the TV to the right of the door. I sit down on the sofa directly across from it. Some cartoon is on, but I’m not paying attention to it. Instead, I reach over to the little table to my left, open its only drawer, and pull out a bottle of morphine tablets. I pour the last five of them into my hand—I still have one script left though—and put them in my mouth. Then I pick up the fifth of Old Granddad that’s sitting on the footlocker in front of the couch—I call it my coffee table even though I never drink coffee because stimulants turn me into a liability—and I gulp down about four ounces of bourbon. After that, I reach into the drawer again and pull out a joint. I light it and watch the end of Eighth Man.

As I sit here, I reflect on how different my side of the house looks from Marie’s. Religious art and tasteful, if inexpensive, ornamentation decorate her immaculately kept home. It has the pungent, perfumey scent of a spinster’s apartment.

My side is fairly spartan. It’s fairly clean but untidy. The only ornaments, apart from a few sticks of furniture, are some of my old paintings and a few of my recent sculptures. The latter, in various stages of completion, stand in the room behind the living room, which is at the front of the house. This back room would be my dining room if I didn’t always eat off the footlocker.

On the gray plaster of Paris walls of the dining room hangs one of my paintings—a scene of some tugboats on the Hudson on a late summer afternoon—and a few photographs from my days in the Golden Gloves and one of me in the finals of the 1952 District Wrestling Championships. A small daybed that I usually sleep on lies in the back right corner of this room, and a few of my boxing and wrestling trophies occupy a small oak table in the front left corner, by the wide, heavy wooden archway that separates it from the living room.

The walls of my living room are wood paneled, and they’re decorated with two woodland scenes that I painted in the Ramapo Mountains. An old twenty-one-inch zenith black-and-white TV and an even older RCA clock radio are my only visible luxuries. A couple of large aquariums and a chicken wire cage behind the TV house the few snakes and the monitor lizard that I own, and the picture is more or less completed by my pet wolverine, Anubis, and a leopard tortoise named Mugsy, who roam free.

The dripping on the air conditioner behind my TV has tapered off. It’s stopped raining, and I remember that there are errands I need to do today. Since I can’t do them this afternoon, I have to do them now. So I put out the roach, take another hit of Old Granddad, and brace myself to get up again. When I do, I put on my broad-brimmed leather hat and my leather overcoat. I don’t usually bother with things like shirts, socks, or underwear. Blue jeans and shoes are my only other garments, so I’m ready to head out the door.

I think about Sister Marie as I hit the sidewalk and start down Oak Street. The only child of a sailor and the native of a South Pacific island, she had been a star center on the girls’ basketball team in high school. She was pretty enough to have been a cheerleader, but too tall. After graduation, she attended junior college briefly, but for some reason—opinions vary on what it was—she dropped out to join a convent. I always had a tremendous crush on her even after she became a nun.

About a year before she graduated high school, something strange started to happen to Marie. She continued to grow, and by 1952, she topped the charts at six feet, five inches. But it’s been twenty-one years since then and she hasn’t gotten any taller, so I assume she’s finished. A matter of greater concern to Marie and her family than her height, however, was the fact that, around this same time, her features began to change. Her eyeballs began to protrude, and she started to grow a slight amount of facial hair. The hair on her forearms also thickened, her hands got larger, and her vision started to go. By now, she is almost blind.

Although no one of Marie’s physical characteristics, taken by itself, is very distressing—her eyebrows are a little too thick, her features a little too coarse—her countenance, as a whole, is very frightening. What’s even more disturbing about her, though, is the fact that she’s gone nuts. This started at about the same time that her physical transformation did, but it’s gotten steadily worse over the years.

When I was at Columbia Med School, I thought I knew what was going on with Marie. My first cousin, Wally Lupo, is a pituitary giant. His mother is a first cousin of Marie’s father, Paul Caglione, who was a merchant marine. I thought that, through some sort of hereditary link, Marie was also hyperpituitary. In other words, that she had the disease known as acromegaly, which is caused by tumor on the anterior lobe of the pituitary gland and causes excessive secretion of growth hormone. Although this disease isn’t supposed to be hereditary—and medical testing determined that Marie’s growth hormone levels were within normal rangeher doctors did discover a benign brain tumor near her pituitary that might be exerting pressure on it. This may or may not be the cause of Marie’s other mental and physical problems, but it’s certainly the cause of her loss of vision. Because of the tumor’s proximity to the optic nerve, it wasn’t surgically removed. Instead, she gets radiation treatments.

It might just be a coincidence that Marie’s distantly related to Wally and that they both have tumors in the same region of the brain, and Marie’s physical issues may have nothing to do with her brain tumor. The reason I suspect that this might be the case is that Marie’s mother, a Pacific islander whom her father met when he was in the merchant marines, had a lot of the same characteristics.

We called her Chee Chee because that was as close as we could get to the pronunciation of her real name. She came from an island off the coast of New Guinea where the natives supposedly practiced head hunting—even though the missionaries had converted most of them to Catholicism—up to the time when Marie’s father met her. Although she didn’t have any problems with her vision and she was a lot darker and not quite as tall as her daughter, she looked like a frizzy-haired version of Marie.

But Chee Chee didn’t always look that way. My parents said that when Paul brought her to the neighborhood, as a sixteen-year-old in the early thirties, she was a beautiful and delicate little thing. But within a year, she started to change. Chee Chee, who referred to her condition as the ugliness, told us that it happened to a lot of the women on her island in late adolescence to early adulthood.

But if Marie does have acromegaly, it’s a hell of a coincidence because, since my accident, I’ve also developed a lot of the symptoms. In fact, an ax blade hitting me in the skull seems to have knocked many of my hormones outside the normal range—activated my pituitary the neurologists and endocrinologists used to say. But what’s affected my life the most is what it’s done to my brain. I supposedly have damage to the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes of the left hemisphere of my brain, and the constant headaches I have to live with are, at times, almost unbearable. It’s as if the same demon is attacking both Marie and me.

I can’t remember a lot of medical terminology anymore. In fact, I have a hard time finding the right word for anything. Wernicke’s aphasia, they call it. It seems as though I still retain most of the knowledge I had before my accident, but I can’t always think of the right words to use to express it.

Although I’ve always had a fairly heavy New Jersey accent, I was very articulate before my accident. But for several months afterward, I could hardly speak at all. Now the fluency of my speech has pretty much returned, but it’s content has regressed to the gutter Jersey morphemes and idioms of my childhood, and I often get those wrong. I have a lot of trouble reading now too, but I always understand what’s being said to me.

Apparently, the damage to left parietal lobe of my brain, the part that produces speech, is a lot less severe than that of the frontal and temporal lobes, which are responsible for processing situations and controlling behavior.

Another of my difficulties is an inability, at times, to access the knowledge that remains to me. Although I can’t consciously recollect many of the events I’ve experienced, facts that I’ve learned, or skills that I acquired in my premorbid state; my actions indicate that most of that knowledge is still there. After fifteen years, the state of affairs hasn’t gotten much better, but after fifteen years of booze and painkillers, it hasn’t gotten any worse either.

As I mentioned before, one of the biggest problems I have from the neck up is that of self-control. Although my outward demeanor is calm and relaxed, the potential for destructive action always lurks close to the surface. I often misread cues and act violently for apparently no reason, and when I’m provoked to aggression, I have trouble turning it off. Unfortunately, I often carry my actions through to fatal consequence.

After traveling a few more blocks, I start to think back to my days in the Golden Gloves. Along with painting, boxing and wrestling made up most of my world back then. I began competing in both sports when I was fourteen.

My uncles, Kevin Kneely and Henry Lupo, were both involved in amateur boxing in their younger days, and when roughhousing with me as a child, they discovered that I had a lot of potential for the sport. On my thirteenth birthday, Uncle Kevin and Uncle Henry presented me with a pair of fourteen-ounce Everlast boxing gloves and a mouthpiece and took me to the local boxing gym to teach me how to spar. After that, I was there almost every day after school, trying to learn whatever I could from whomever would teach me.

In my freshman year of high school, I took up wrestling because I knew I’d be good at it and because I wanted to be all-around tough. By the time I was eighteen, I had not only taken third place in the light heavyweight division of the New Jersey Golden Gloves Championships but also placed second in the 170-pound class at the NNJIL District Wrestling tournament as well. I also wrestled in the AAU, and I had a better than .500 record my first year at Columbia. But I had more of a talent for boxing.

My older brother, Mike, excelled at football, basketball, and baseball, so I had a lot to live up to; and though I was never terribly agile, even as a kid, I never wanted for strength or killer instinct. On several occasions, my bad temper even caused my disqualification in boxing and wrestling matches. One time my bad attitude took over was at the finals of the 1951 district wrestling championship.

The kid who beat me was a real prick. He tried to get cute every chance he got. A hard crossface into my upper jaw loosened two of my front teeth in the first period, and by the time the second period began, I didn’t care if I won or lost. I just wanted to hurt him.

I started on top at the beginning of the second period. Just as I threw in a half nelson to try to turn him, the kid sat out. Seizing this opportunity, I spun behind him and threw in the other arm for an illegal full nelson. Instead of stopping when the referee tried to break us, I bore down hard with both hands, tearing the muscles of his neck and upper back. Even though he won the match by a disqualification, he was crying like a baby when his hand was raised.

Another consequence of my lack of self-control came the summer after my senior year of high school. I occasionally used to collect debts for my uncle Henry, who was a small-time moneylender. One day, somebody took a swing at me, and I beat him up so badly that the guy suffered permanent brain damage. I served six months in Rahway for that, and everybody thought I was done. But my grades were good in high school, my father knew people at Columbia; and with my uncle Kevin, then an up and coming detective in the New York Police Department, to vouch for my rehabilitation, I was admitted to Columbia a year later. Then I gradually, very gradually, began to turn my life around.

As I continue my trek down Oak Street, I notice an angry-looking black guy walking toward me. He’s almost as big as I am, about six feet and over two hundred pounds. At first, he keeps to his right side like I do. Then in what’s likely a gesture of racial hostility, he crosses to my side. As he gets closer to me, I see that his brow is heavy and scarred, but I never sidestep. When he gets close enough to see what’s lacking in my eyes, he realizes he’s made a mistake and veers back to his side. Black people are often very intuitive—intuitive like women are intuitive, intuitive like animals are intuitive, intuitive like I’m intuitive.

I notice the sidewalk brighten, and I look up to see the sun peeking out from behind the clouds. Looking to my right, I marvel at how deceptively the sunlight makes the polluted waters of the Hudson River sparkle as the tugs and pleasure boats cut through it. It reminds me of the scene that hangs in the room with my sculptures, which I painted in my first year of med school.

I found that I could no longer paint after my accident. What I can do, however, is sculpt. My preferred media are scrap metal and bone, which I fashion into spectacularly monstrous anthropomorphic shapes. With the help of Sister Marie, I use a knife to trim and shape the fresh bones, then we bleach them, and I use wire and glue to fasten them together. My old paintings had a brooding and surrealistic quality to them, but my sculptures are just plain scary. If I weren’t who I am, they’d scare even me.

My hands have gotten stronger, even bigger, since I’ve been sculpting. I don’t know if it’s because of the sculpting, my accident, or both. But my body has also changed in other ways since 1958. I used to be five feet ten inches tall with my shoes on. Now I’m six foot one without them. My weight has gone from one hundred ninety to two hundred thirty-five pounds. That’s a lot to grow after your twenty-fourth birthday.

Like Sister Marie, I get headaches all the time and I have problems with my vision. Sometimes it goes completely. But unlike Marie, when my eyes work, they work pretty well, accepting the fact that I always have a double vision. It’s like the old joke about the drunk whose buddy tells him to aim for the one in the middle, except I always aim for the one on the outside.

My shoulders are also heavier now than they used to be; my spine is more curved, and I’ve gotten really strong.

I continue down the street and breathe in the wet, warm September air. The sun has burned off most of the fog by now, and I’m high on the smell of honeysuckle and diesel fuel.

The scents in the air complement my visual tour of the dilapidated old shops and turn-of-the-century apartment houses that line both sides of the street. This is my neighborhood. A little town called River Ridge, New Jersey. It rests along the Hudson River, between the George Washington Bridge and the Palisades, and it exemplifies the same contrast of permanence and decay that my life does. I feel like I couldn’t exist anywhere but here, and the farther I travel from my home, the less real my existence seems.

I come to the railroad tracks that lie between Jamaica Avenue and Jones Street. As I cross the tracks and turn onto Jones Street, I’m reminded of the stories about the underground walkway that connect the two streets about ten blocks ahead toward the river. When I was a kid, two people were found dead there in the space of a couple of years. The first, a vagrant, was brutally murdered, his throat ripped out. The second was a businessman who apparently died of natural causes.

These events were particularly disturbing to the locals because, for as long as I can remember, there were stories, at least among the local kids, of ghouls and monsters and generally creepy-looking people emerging from the River Ridge Underpass. These sightings were said to be most common on Halloween or in the wee hours of the morning.

Naturally, we kids attributed the discoveries of the dead bodies to these creepy or even supernatural entities. The first guy who was killed, we assumed, had been murdered by the ghouls; the second of course had died of fright.

In my adulthood, these legends only add to the charm my hometown holds for me.

Soon I come to Warren Kepler’s Exceptional Exotics pet store. He’s not always open this early, but I try the door and find it unlocked. Inside I find Warren and his two sons, Joey and Danny. They seem happy to see me.

Warren is the closest thing I have to a best friend. We’ve known each other since high school when he came over as an exchange student from England. He’s one of the few people who wasn’t frightened away from me after my accident.

Unfortunately, Warren lost his wife, Elizabeth, to leukemia five years ago. She was a good woman, very devoted to Warren and the two boys, and since she’s been gone, Warren has had a tough row to hoe raising the kids by himself. They’re both difficult in different ways.

The older boy, Danny, is seventeen and has Down syndrome. His brother, Joey, is two years younger and very surly. These two kids couldn’t differ more in their temperament or their appearance. Joey is tall, thin, and fair like his mother was while Danny is short, squat, and dark.

As I enter the shop, Danny runs up and gives me a big hug. Lurch! Lurch! he hollers.

How ya doin’, buddy boy? I inquire.

Before Danny can answer me, his father steps out from behind the counter. Warren is a large bespectacled man with a round face and curly brown hair. He has sad eyes that are contradicted by his usually jovial demeanor. He bears a striking resemblance to Tiny Tim, the falsetto-voiced ukulele-playing frequent guest on the Tonight Show, and my friend Gus Anzalone never lets him forget it. As he approaches me, shuffling his usual shuffle like that of an interrogating cop, he points what looks like an accusatory finger at my chest.

Arthur! he bellows. Just the man we’re looking for!

What do you guys need me for? I ask.

Warren says, I’ve leased Shivitz, referring to the building next door, which used to be a hardware store but has been empty for the last year. Come with me, he says, and I follow him into the back room. The boys trail behind us.

I say, Hello, Joey as he shuts the door behind us, but he’s stuck for a comeback.

The back room is dimly lit and smells of pet shop. Shelves with cages of rodents and sick animals and boxes of pet supplies