The Winner: Part Twenty-Four

“Poooopy,” Apple is cooing from the bedroom. “Pooopy. Where are youuu?”

I’m in my trashheap of a living room trying to get some sleep. I’ve cleared out a space amongst the garbage where I can lay out a blanket and use one of the shredded up couch cushions as pillow. A fucking homeless squatter lives better than I do.

“Poopy…it’s time. Are you there, Poopy?”

Yes I’m here. I’ve been listening to her call for me for the last hour or so. The heroin must be wearing off, again. It sucks how quickly she’s developed a tolerance for the stuff. When I started, one shot would keep her knocked out for the whole day. Now, I have to inject her with twice as much to get her half as knocked out and I have to do it every six hours or else she starts going into withdrawal.

“Please…please someone help me here! Poopy! Anyone! I need help! My bones are cold!”

Dammit. I get up and gingerly step through the heaps on the floor, trying my best not to impale my foot on a splinter like I’ve been doing almost daily. I only have enough heroin to last for the rest of the week at the rate I’m giving it to her. She starts begging after about five hours. At six, she’s screaming and I have to give it to her or else she’ll wake up the neighbors.

When I appear in the doorway, she gasps. “Oh thank god! Where have you been?”

“I had to go out for a bit,” I say. “You know I’ve got things I have to do.”

Apple gives me a relieved smile as I come up to the bed, exposing a mouth filled with yellow, broken teeth. I replaced the sheets I used to tie her hands to the bedposts with plastic zipties I got from the hardware store. I should probably replace them with new ones since her wrists are chafed, rubbed raw through the skin. White pus dribbles down her arm from where it collects in sores around her wrists.

“So, are you gonna give me my shot now?” Apple asks anxiously. “Please, I need it. I’m getting really cold here. I could really use a shot.”

“Hold your horses,” I say, as I pull out the needle and get to work. The smell in here is atrocious. Apple has been pissing in the bed since, of course, I can’t risk taking her to the bathroom to do her business. I got a bedpan from a medical supply store to take care of this, I’ve just been too distracted to let her use it on a regular basis. Thankfully, heroin makes you constipated, so I haven’t had to deal with too much shit.

Probably the other reason I’ve been avoiding using the bedpan too much is that Apple is getting some serious bedsores from being tied down to the bed for weeks, and I’d have to lift her up to scoot the pan under her. The festering smell of infection and rot in this room would choke me up if I wasn’t so used to it.

Anyway, I cook her up a huge shot of heroin, then I kneel by the end of the bed and inject it in the web of skin between her big and middle toe. I can’t risk moving her, but the least I can do is rotate the places where I inject her so she doesn’t get too many track marks. I’ve already flubbed up injecting her enough to leave dark veins showing through the skin of both of her arms.

I push the plunger home and a couple seconds later, Apple gasps as it hits her bloodstream.

“Is that better?” I ask, pulling the needle carefully from her foot.

“It’s perrrrfect,” she says, melting into the bed. “It feels like heaven.”

I look at the rotted state she’s in. Apple looks emaciated and must have dropped fifteen pounds off her already very skinny frame. Not that I’ve been trying to starve her, but the only food she seems able to keep down is cold chicken broth.

If this feels like heaven, then I’d hate to know what hell is like. Thank god I don’t believe in that religious voodoo.

I ask Apple, “Is there anything else you need?” but she’s already too far gone in a heroin daze to even respond. I put the needle and the heroin away, stash it back under the bed and leave the room. I can’t stand to be in here for too long. The whole scene looks like some serious, serial killer shit is going down. I guess it’s appropriate since I’m going to be the man who murders the president.

I feel sorry for Apple. I wish I could let her go and I wish I could afford to pay for the rehab clinic she’s going to eventually need to go to, as well as years worth of therapy. But I have to keep telling myself, this is the best thing for her. If I wasn’t doing this, Apple would probably be running around, asking questions, and likely be killed by Van Hertzwelder. This all looks cruel, but I’m doing it so that eventually she can be reunited with her children, maimed though one of them may be.

There’s a buzzing noise somewhere in living room. It’s coming from my pants, which are laying in a heap in the little nest I’ve cleared out. It’s the phone Burke left for me. I put it onto silent alarm. I must have not heard it for awhile, since there’s a text message on it saying simply: ANSWER YOUR FUCKING PHONE PEANUTZ.

I click the SEND button and grunt, “What?”

“Why haven’t you answered your phone?” the voice on the other end is electronically masked, but I can still tell from the clipped, wanting-so-hard-to-be-white diction that it’s Burke.

“I slept through it.”

A disappointed sigh on the other end. “It is important that you answer your phone whenever we page you. Especially today since we have something for you to do.”

“Well, quit whining and spit it out, jigaboo.”

Another sigh on the other end. “Peanutz, I realize you’re under a great deal of stress because of our arrangement, and not inclined to like me whatever my race may be. But if you refer to me as a jigaboo, nigger, spearchucker, jungle bunny, or any offensive slang term for an African-American again—even colored—I’ll have another arm cut off of one of Apple’s poor, helpless children,” Burke says. “Do you understand me you fucking whitebread, peckerwood, honky piece of shit?”

“How do I know they’re even still alive?” I ask. “You can’t even shake a baby without killing it. Chopping off their arm has got to be even worse.”

“It was done surgically,” Burke says. “The baby was unconscious the whole time. We did it to the younger of the two, figuring he would have more time to adjust his new disability, therefore making it slightly less traumatic. After all, we are not complete sociopaths.”

I guess I’ll have to take his word for it. “Okay, then what do you want me to do now, you fucking queer.”

Burke growls on the other end. “Be careful, you’re treading a fine line Poopy. I need you to go to the Brown Palace downtown, room 413. The room is in your name, so just present your ID to the desk to get a keycard for the room. You have to be there in an hour…”

“I can’t be there in an hour,” I say. “I have to go see my mother in an hour. I have to change her bandages.” Well, I didn’t have to be there in exactly an hour, I just had to go over to the motel and help her change them once a day. Thankfully, the inflammation along her sutures was going down, and she says she will only have to do it for a few more days. Compared to the monster I’ve been slathering up in medical jelly for the past week, I have to say she is starting to look normal again. Or at least, not nearly as disgusting as she had been. Good, after paying a quarter of a million dollars in surgery, she better have not come out looking like Frankenstein.

“Seeing as we’ll kill her if you don’t do as we say, in a sense you are helping her.”

I could continue to protest and be a pain in the ass, but we both know that in the end, I’m gonna do exactly what he says. “Continue.”

“The Secret Service advance team needs to do a face to face interview with you before you can meet the president. We chose that hotel because, frankly, your apartment is a wreck and will throw up a huge red flag for them should they see it. There will also be a change of clothes and some time to take a shower before they come. Please take one since you tend to smell pretty bad from what I gather.”

“Fuck you, nig…” I catch myself. “…fucker.”

Burke chuckles. “There will also be instructions for exactly what to say to the Secret Service agent who will come to interview you. Do not deviate from them for any reason. We have gone through great trouble to clean up your record enough so that the Secret Service would even consider letting you within twenty feet of the President. If you spook them in any way, or god forbid, try to tip the agent off to the plot, we will know even faster than when you tried that stunt with the FBI. Remember, we have a highly placed mole in the Service.”

“So you keep telling me. Is there anything else?”

“No. That’s all for now,” Burke says. “Cheer up. This will all be over about a week. You can take comfort in knowing you will die one of the most notorious men of the twenty-first century. Some misguided communist types may even consider you a hero.”

“Fuck you,” I hang up the phone, drop it on the ground and then start screaming at it. “YOU FUCKING NIGGER! FUCK YOU AND FUCK THAT NAZI FUCK VAN HERTZWELDER AND HIS FAGGOT KID TOO!”

I punch the wall, but I’m such a pussy I barely dent the plaster and just scrape all the skin off my knuckles. I scream, “FUUUCK!” for about a minute, holding my bleeding hand. Once I get it out of my system, I pull some pants on and head downtown towards the hotel.