John Connolly - The Unquiet

There were male residents at the Pines too, but they were mostly like Ricky had once been: wasted men regretting wasted lives, some on welfare and some with jobs, although what work they had seemed mostly to involve gutting or cutting, and the smell of rotting fish and chicken skins acted as a kind of universal identifier for the park’s residents.

Ricky used to have one of those jobs. His left arm was shriveled and useless, the fingers unable to grip or move, the result of some mishap in the womb, but Ricky had learned how to cope with the damaged limb, mainly by hiding it and forgetting about it for a time, until that moment in each day that life threw a curveball at him and reminded him of how much easier things would be if he had two hands to make the catch. It didn’t help Ricky’s employment prospects much either, although, even if he had boasted two functioning arms, his lack of, in no particular order, education, ambition, energy, resourcefulness, sociability, honesty, reliability, and general humanity would probably have ruled him out of any labor that didn’t involve, well, gutting or cutting. So Ricky started on the bottom rung at a chicken-processing plant that supplied meat for fast-food joints, using a hose to spray blood, feathers, and chicken crap from the floors, his days filled with the sound of panicked clucking; with the casual cruelty of the men operating the line who took pleasure in tormenting the birds, adding extra agony to their final moments by breaking wings and legs; with the fizz of the current as the chickens, dangling upside down on a conveyor belt, were briefly immersed in electrified water, the action sometimes successfully stunning them but often failing, since the birds were so busy squawking and squirming that their heads frequently missed the water entirely, and they were still conscious when the multibladed slaughtering machines slit their throats, their bodies jerking as superheated water defeathered them, leaving their steaming carcasses ready to be chopped into bitesized pieces of flesh that, raw or cooked, tasted of next to nothing.

The funny thing was, Ricky still ate chicken, even chicken from the plant in which he had once worked. The whole affair hadn’t bothered him unduly: not the cruelty, not the casual attitude to safety, not even the foul stink as, truth be told, Ricky’s own personal hygiene was unlikely to win him any prizes, and it was only a matter of getting used to a whole new array of odors. Still, Ricky recognized that being a chicken mopper was somewhat less than the mark of a successful, fulfilled life, and so he went looking for a less ignominious way to make a living. He discovered it in computers, for Ricky had a natural aptitude for the machines, a talent that, had it been recognized and cultivated at an earlier age, might well have made him a very wealthy man indeed, or so he liked to tell himself, disregarding the many personal failings that had led to his current, modest status amid the pine-free and untranquil surroundings of his trailer park. It began with Ricky’s acquisition of an old Macintosh, then progressed through night school and computer books stolen from chain stores, until eventually he was downloading technical manuals and devouring them in single sittings, the disorder surrounding him in his daily life standing in stark contrast to the clean lines and ordered diagrams taking form in his mind.

Unbeknownst to most of his neighbors, Ricky Demarcian was probably the wealthiest resident in the park, to the extent that he could easily have afforded to move to a more pleasant home. Ricky’s relative wealth was due in no small part to his facility with promoting the kinds of services that the Internet seemed ready-made to handle, namely those involving the exchange of various sexual services, and, as Tranquility Pines had inadvertently given him his start in the business, gratitude had imbued in him an attachment to the place that prevented him from leaving.

There was a woman, Lila Mae, who entertained men for money in her trailer. She advertised in one of the local pick ’n’ throws, but despite her cunning efforts to throw the vice cops off the scent by not using her own name and not giving out her location until the john had made his way to her general vicinity, she got busted and fined repeatedly. Her name ended up in the newspapers, and it was all kind of embarrassing for her, because in places like Tranquility Pines, perhaps more so than in considerably more exalted surroundings, everyone needed someone else on whom to look down, and a whore in a trailer happily filled the bill for most of Lila Mae’s neighbors.

She was a good-looking woman, at least by the standards of the park, and she had no desire to give up her reasonably lucrative profession to join Ricky Demarcian in hosing down a chicken slaughterhouse. So Ricky, who was familiar with Lila Mae’s situation, and who enjoyed surfing the Net for sexual material of various stripes, and who had, in addition, an enviable grasp of the mysteries of Web sites and their design, suggested to her over a beer one night that maybe she might like to look at an alternative means of advertising her services. They went back to Ricky’s trailer, where Ricky showed her precisely what he meant, once Lila Mae had opened all of the windows and soaked a handkerchief in perfume so that she could hold it discreetly under her nose. She was so impressed with what she saw that she instantly agreed to allow Ricky to design something similar for her, and promised vaguely that, should he ever decide to take a proper bath, she might see fit to service him at a discount on his next birthday.

So Lila Mae was the first, but pretty soon other women began contacting Ricky through her, and he placed them all on one Web site, with details of services offered, cost, and even portfolios of the women in question in the case of those who were agreeable and, more important, who were presentable enough not to frighten away the customers if the mysteries of their female forms were revealed. Unfortunately, Ricky became so successful at this that his endeavors attracted the attention of a number of very unhappy men who discovered that their status as minor pimps was being undermined by Ricky, since women who might otherwise have availed themselves of the protection offered by such individuals were instead operating as free agents.

For a time, it looked like Ricky might begin losing the use of other limbs, but then some gentlemen of Eastern European origin with connections in Boston contacted him and suggested a compromise. These gentlemen were mildly curious about the entrepreneurial nature of Ricky, and the women whose interests he looked after. Two of them traveled to Maine to talk to him, and an agreement was quickly reached that led to a change in Ricky’s business practices in exchange for leaving him with the continued use of his single, unwithered arm, and guaranteed protection from those who might otherwise have taken issue with him in a physical way. Subsequently, the gentlemen returned, this time with a request that Ricky design a similar site for the women in their charge, as well as some more, um, “specialized” options that they were in a position to offer. Suddenly Ricky found himself very busy indeed, and he was dealing with material upon which the law enforcement community was unlikely to look kindly, since some of it clearly involved children.

Finally, Ricky became a go-between, and crossed the line from dealing with pictures of women and, in some cases, children, to facilitating those who were interested in a more active engagement with the objects of their fascination. Ricky never saw the women or children involved. He was merely the first point of contact. What happened after that was none of his business. A lesser man might have been worried, might even have suffered qualms of conscience, but Ricky Demarcian only had to think of dying chickens in order to banish any such doubts from his mind.