The Face

puckered just ’cause someone looks at him wrong? I wasn’t traumatized, I was hexed .”
        “Hexed?”
        “Hexed, cursed, hoodooed, diabolized, spellcast by the evil eye-whatever you want to call it. Ming du Lac, he’s got hell power in him, the creepy runt, and he ruined me forever in that rose garden. I’ve been slidin’ downhill ever since.”
        “He sounds like the usual Hollywood fraud to me.”
        “I’m tellin’ you, that little weasel’s the real juju, and I been spell-struck.”
        Corky held out the package of cash, but then pulled it back as the hexed wreckage of a man reached for it. “One more thing.”
        “Don’t screw with me,” Hokenberry said, hulking over Corky and [355] glowering as if he’d come down a beanstalk, angry and looking for whoever had stolen his hen’s eggs.
        “You’ll get your money,” Corky assured him. “I’d just like to hear how you acquired your third eye.”
        Hokenberry had-only two eyes of his own, but around his neck, on a pendant, hung the eye of a stranger.
        “I already told you twice how I got it.”
        “I just like to hear it,” Corky said. “You tell it so well. It tickles me.”
        Scrunching his face until he resembled a Shar-Pei, Hokenberry considered the concept of himself as a raconteur, and he seemed to like it. “Twenty-five years ago, I started doin’ road security for rock groups, tour security. I don’t mean I planned it or managed it. That’s not my zone.”
        “You’ve always been just beef,” Corky said, anticipating him.
        “Yeah, I’ve always been just beef, been out front to intimidate the crazier fans, the totally wired meth freaks and PCP spongebrains. Been beef for Rollin’ Stones tours, Megadeth, Metallica, Van Halen, Alice Cooper, Meat Loaf, Pink Floyd-”
        “Queen, Kiss,” Corky added, “even for Michael Jackson when he still was Michael Jackson.”
        “-Michael Jackson back when he still was Michael Jackson if he ever really was,” Hokenberry agreed. “Anyway I had this three-week gig with… My memory’s fuzzy about this. I think it was either the Eagles or could’ve been Peaches and Herb.”
        “Or it could’ve been the Captain and Tennille.”
        “Yeah, it could’ve been. One of them three acts. This crowd gets all jammed up, gonads gone nuclear, too much of some bad juice bein’ toked and poked that night.”
        “You could feel they might rush the stage.”
        “I could feel they might rush the stage. All you need is one idiot punk with spunk for brains, he decides to bolt for the band, and he starts a riot.”
        “You’ve got to anticipate him,” Corky encouraged.
        [356] “Anticipate him, put him down like the instant he makes his move, or another two hundred headcases will follow him.”
        “So this punk with blue hair-”
        “Who’s tellin’ this story?” Hokenberry grumbled. “Me or you?”
        “You are. It’s your story. I love this story.”
        To express his disgust with these interruptions, Hokenberry spat on the carpet. “So this punk with blue hair tenses to make his move, gonna climb the stage, try to get to Peaches and Herb-”
        “Or the Captain.”
        “Or Tennille. So I call him out, move in on him fast, and the little butthead flips me the finger, which gives me absolute license to pop him.” Hokenberry raised one fist the size of a ham. “I planted Bullwinkle as deep in his face as it would go.”
        “You call your right fist Bullwinkle.”
        “Yeah, and my left is Rocky. Didn’t even need Rocky. Bullwinkled him so hard one of his eyes popped out. Startled me, but I caught it in midair. Glass eye. The punk went down cold, and I kept the eye, had it made into this pendant.”
        “It’s a terrific pendant.”
        “Glass eyes aren’t really glass, you know. They’re thin plastic shells, and the iris is hand-painted on the inside. Way cool.”
        “Way, “Corky agreed.
        “Had an artist friend make this little glass sphere to hold the eye, stop it deteriorating. That’s the story, gimme my twenty grand.”
        Corky passed to him the plastic-wrapped packet of cash.
        As he had done with his initial twenty thousand on the first of their three previous meetings, Hokenberry turned away from Corky and took the bundle to the table in the adjacent dinette area to count every crisp hundred-dollar bill.
        Corky shot him three