She stepped into the restaurant and I saw the whole porno.
Her name was Molly, Molly Modano, and she did not belong. California girl-immediately and obviously, even in an age when geographical identity claims have been pretty much scrambled into white noise. I would have bet my Volkswagen on it.
It was early evening, and I had risked the roaring four-lane traffic to try out the small diner across from my motel. Hard to look cool scrambling across a busy road-almost as hard as looking tough queued up for airport security. The diner sported the name Odd-Jobs in lightless neon tubing across the front, but it was the Day-Glo quip on the port- a-sign that caught my attention: Eat or be eaten. I was just sitting at a booth, pretending to study the menu, swirling my coffee with a clinking spoon, and then there she was, tits on a stick.
Just so you know, there’s always a girl with me. You could say I’m like Hollywood that way. Always hunting for a fresher face.
I didn’t waste time-I never do. I was standing up just as she was sitting down. The key, I’ve found, is to beat the waitress to the punch… Or maybe that’s just a superstition of mine.
“Mind if I join you?”
She looked up as if startled and simply said, “Eew. “
“Eew?” I exclaimed. “I haven’t even unbuttoned my trenchcoat yet!”
All hotties have routines specifically designed for contingencies like me. Some just tell you to go fuck yourself, literally. Others, the ones who are genuinely evil or who just desperately want to be nice, find more creative ways to tell you to go fuck yourself. I actually had one chick offer me change like I was a bum or something!
Molly desperately wanted to be nice. “Sorry, but… I don’t even know you.”
“Apparently you know me well enough to be grossed out.”
“I just got this thing about first impressions.”
I certainly wasn’t complaining from my end: narrow hips and a flat abdomen. High breasts beneath a largely ceremonial bra. A boyish athleticism rounded into feminine allure, like a red-headed Mia Farrow or Gwyneth Paltrow-which simply made it seem all the more appropriate, given that I was a combination of Brad Pitt and the Devil.
“Here I thought first impressions were the only thing I was good at.”
Believe me when I tell you that I have a winning grin, the kind that can shrug away even the most determined ill-willing. She looked at me as though assessing my planetary credentials, then laughed a girlish in-spite-of-her-better-judgment laugh…
“A martyr, huh?”
“Depends on the cause,” I said, sliding into the seat opposite. Just so you know, I’ve been called a sexist pig exactly sixty-nine times. Coincidence? I think not.
The fact is, I am a sexist, in the sense that someone who plays cello all the time is called a cellist. I. Love. Sex. All things being equal, I will choose getting laid pretty much every time. And just so you know, when I say “love,” I don’t mean the snuggle-with-your-wife-on-the-couch variety but the real deal-you know, the kind only crackheads and junkies can know.
The love that keeps you coming back.
An old girlfriend of mine laid it all out for me once. She was a systems analyst named Joyce Pennington, but everyone used to call her Jimmy for some reason. No fewer than 7 of those 69 accusations belong to her-a whopping 11 percent. (She’s also responsible for 9 out of the 19 times I’ve been called a narcissist, but that’s another story.) The first four times she called me a sexist I just shrugged it off-prick a guy with the same insult long enough and he becomes numb. But the fifth time I blew my stack for some reason. So in the calm voice I use to package all my outrage, I gave her the little spiel I gave you above. It was fucking biology, for chrissakes. Was hunger a sin? How about shitting? Was voiding my bowel yet another fascistic exercise?
“And murder isn’t biological?” she replied. I swear her laugh lopped two inches off my dick. You know, that cruel feminine chuckle you hear so often on Sex and the City, the one that says (with pious charity) that, sure, men are all half retarded, but we love them anyway, don’t we? The kind of laugh that men reserve for Labrador retrievers. Bad boy. Bad.
“Oh, Diss,” she continued. “How can you treat women equally if you see them as accessories to your dick?”
I stared at her wordlessly.
“Well?”
So I told her my dick was the only thing I was proud of… that for as long as I could remember I used my sexual prowess as a crutch, a way to limp around the fact that I was too much of a loser for anyone to love. Nobody lubs me. Boo-hoo.
Whatever it takes to get laid.
She figured it out eventually, of course. 2002. On the fourth of July, no less. Jimmy was one smart chick.
Patriotic too.
See, the thing is, I score large. Since I was fourteen, I have slept with at least 558 different women, probably more if you count the nights I’ve blacked out from drinking. I think this is pretty impressive, given that I’m not a rock star. So this is my dilemma: how can I stop seeing women as accessories to my dick when so many of them so obviously want to be?
Seriously.
Look, I know it’s a problem, a vice even. I know it shuts down the possibility of a mature relationship with a certain percentage of the world’s population: the hottie demographic. I know the older I get, the more debauched and pathetic I become. If I were completely honest, I would admit that when the Bonjours handed me that photo of Dead Jennifer, my first thoughts were almost entirely carnal-that when I trolled her Facebook page on the Web afterward, I secretly hoped to find photos of some drunken lingerie party.
But I can’t help myself. Even my second therapist said I have bigger fish to fry.
Like the fact that I think nobody loves me. So we talked, Molly and me.
She had this narrow, birdlike intensity, with a look that avoided yours with push-pin concentration, as though you were part of her game world but perpetually fixed just to the right of the cursor. It was a strange tick, one of those little wrinkles that never gets ironed out of a personality, like hiding your teeth when you smile.
I found it intensely erotic.
She was a journalist with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, or the “PG” as she continually referred to it. Well, she was actually more of a stringer than a real journalist, and she was hoping to break into the biz by writing an in-depth story on-you guessed it-the disappearance of Jennifer Bonjour.
Score. So much meaningless shit happens that coincidences are bound to abound. Sometimes the world is so small it can only be grand.
“Opportunity of a lifetime,” I said.
She made a pained face. “It’s horrible, I know. But I figure it can’t be all that bad if I help… you know, find her…” She trailed as though unconvinced.
“The dead don’t sweat,” I said, grinning. “Neither should you.”
There’s such mystery in meeting a woman for the first time. I knew she had a life, that behind her scenes there were scads of people-friends, family, lovers-and to be honest, I didn’t really give a fuck. I know that sounds bad, like banging her was all I cared about. But the fact of the matter is probably worse.
Remember, I don’t forget. This makes me pretty much impossible to get along with, simply because the longer I know a person, the less they seem a person. Remember, I see all the ways you people repeat.
This makes falling in love pretty much radioactive. The pain is stacked high enough as it is, and with me it never, ever goes away. So the way I see it, this means either I become celibate like a priest or I womanize like a hound dog. What would you choose?
“And you?” Molly asked. “What brings you to the booming metropolis of Ruddick?”
I shot her my best whisky-ad grin: rueful, infinitely assured. The kind that says, Oh, yes, I will be laid tonight. Teeth are a window on our genes, and my pearly-whites positively gleamed.
“An opportunity of a lifetime.”
If my ragged good looks were the hook, then Dead Jennifer was the bait. I knew it the instant I finished describing the Bonjours and their piteous request: I was Molly Modano’s first break. Her initial Oh-no-not-another-one wariness dissolved into avid interest. After about five minutes of relentless questioning I began to wonder who was catching whom. I also realized that I almost certainly wasn’t going to score that night. In Molly’s eyes I had made the miraculous transition from being another asshole to being a possible night of fun in the sack to being a resource, something that required cultivation and rationing. I cursed myself for not lying at the outset, certain that somewhere in some journalism textbook stuffed in the back of her closet there was a rule that said, “Do not, under any circumstances, bang your sources.”
Codes of professional conduct. Fawk.
I felt my eyes glazing. “Woo,” I said, expelling a lungful of specious air. “I. Am. Bagged.”
“What time you think you’ll be up for breakfast?” she asked. Knocks on my motel room door always unnerve me. The great thing about motel versus hotel rooms is the way they open up onto the world-like home. But this also means they’re exposed-like home. Hotels give you a controlled environment within a controlled environment. The really good ones make you feel like you’re in a Faberge egg or something. The world is reduced to soundless motion behind tinted glass.
Just one more gorilla exhibit.
I thought about grabbing my gun from my overnight bag, but decided against it. I knew who it was.
“Hi, Molly,” I said, pulling open the door. The light across the motel frontage was haphazard at best, so that my room light provided her only illumination. Her face stared up at me, bright and warm. My shadow fell across her body. Then I noticed…
There were tears in her eyes.
Fawk.
“Look,” she said hesitantly. “I know… I know how this works…”
“How what works?” The lack of interest in my voice shocked me.
She swallowed and blinked. She wiped the tear that fell from her left eye so fast that it almost seemed like a magic trick. Sean O’May, my old hand-to-hand trainer, among other things, would have been impressed.
“I mean, I know… know what you were… expecting, and um…” Her eyes were bouncing all over the place, but I could tell they had glimpsed my bed.
“What’s wrong, Molly?”
She tilted her head to the weight of her hair, flashed the kind of embarrassed smile that had duped me into thinking I was in love more than once.
“The funny thing is that I probably would have, you know? I mean, you’re…” She swallowed once again. “… handsome enough. And it’s been… well… a long time, you know? And I-”
“Molly,” I said on the edge of forceful and gentle. Kind of like the way I am in the sack.
“So now,” she continued babbling, “now I’m like… like-”
“Molly.”
“What?”
“Would you like to, ah, accompany me tomorrow?”
Any deal you strike with the media is going to be Faustian through and through-something I learned during the war. Good in the short term, disastrous in the long run. You see, if you’re successful, you get the whole circus except the ringmaster, hundreds of very clever and generally unscrupulous (because let’s face it, nothing justifies fucking people over quite so conveniently as the truth) journalists all feverishly working their own manic angles. It’ll tear you apart, even if you don’t give a rat’s ass about things like honour and reputation or have a career that’s remotely political. Media attention incites mobs, and mobs have the bad habit of looking for goats.
And the sad fact is, just about anyone will do.
Molly made a show of scrutinizing me-as if any con man worth fearing had ever been sussed out in a single glance. Finally she gave me one of those phony shrugs and said, “Sure,” in a little sister’s voice.
I began closing the door, leaning forward so that my face remained squarely in the gap. “I’ll meet you for breakfast at ten…”
I never was a morning person. That night I dreamed. Generally I smoke too much dope to dream: though the Lord’s Leaf is in no way neurotoxic, it does change the way blood flows through your bean, and this, apparently, affects a chronic user’s sleep patterns. A welcome side effect, in my case.
What made this dream positively kooky was that I woke up convinced I was as awake and as alert as a goaltender in overtime. I bolted from my pillow and there he was, watching me through a haze of cigarette smoke, my old war buddy, my mentor in all things violent: Sean O’May.
I’ll save his story for another therapy session.
He sat in the chair next to my room’s small table, slumped back, with his snakeskin boots kicked out, one to either side of a black hockey bag. His hair was dyed orange and slicked back like the old days. His eyes were sharp as always, so small they glittered perpetual black. His trademark cigarette hung from his trademark Mickey Rourke grin. For as long as I knew him, he was loath to reveal his teeth-probably because they were so freakishly small, like baby teeth.
“Soooo…” he drawled. “What are you saying, there, Disciple?”
I sat blinking at the sheer impossibility of him.
“You’re dead,” I finally managed to cough.
He snorted through his nose, sucked his cigarette bright. “Yah,” he rasped, raising two fingers to pull his smoke from his mouth. “Well, you know how it is… “
“How what is?”
That was when I noticed his cigarette was glowing from both ends. I watched with a kind of blank wonder as he closed his lips about the burning inner tip. It seemed I could smell his lips sizzle.
“There’s dead for me,” he said, “and then there’s dead for you.” I sat paralyzed while he watched me with those fucking he-he eyes of his.
“What’s that?” I finally asked, looking down at the hockey bag.
“Good question.” He leaned forward, smiling at me, squinting against the smoke of his cigarette as he grabbed the zipper and tore it open. He peered into the dark maw, shook his head with a Southerner’s slow- motion disgust. Sean had grown up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he had started drinking Jack Daniel’s (where his father worked) at the age of nine.
“Aw, hell,” he said, shaking his head in a blue-stringed haze of smoke. “She’s all busted up.”
“She…” I repeated in horror.
“Shiyit. What a nasty piece of work.”
“Who?” I cried.
He had this way of frowning, as if wincing at a pain that was all yours.
“Yah, you know. Dead Jennifer.”
Her name still comes up in my dreams, rare as they are. Dreams of doom-as bad as anything from the war. Without exception I bolt from my blankets, grope the night table to palm my Zippo and cigarettes. I smoke in the dark, watching that orange jewel hover above the shadow of my hand.
And I wonder what it would be like, burning the world from both ends. Wednesday… Pretty much everyone loves spring, except those winter-loving mutants who are generally too cheerful not to die of cancer at some point. I love spring as well, but for reasons peculiar to me. Most people love the retreat of the snow and cold, the dawning of things green and alive. Me, I love the way the thaw exposes all the hidden garbage, from soggy coffee cups to pockets of dog shit.
Winter is a season of forgetfulness. Spring is a kind of remembering, in all its splendid ugliness.
And so spring reminds me of me-the one thing guaranteed to bring a smile to my face.
What does this have to do with Ruddick in the dry height of summer? Because for me, anyway, the town was locked in wintry silence. It needed to be thawed.
My breakfast with Molly was uneventful. She tried to strike up conversation, but I’m too much of a prick in the mornings to trust myself with small talk. Coffee-coffee-coffee-need I say more?
I didn’t so much explain my MO to Molly as demonstrate it. I had her feed me directions from my town map as I rattled around in my Vee-Dub diesel. Once I got a feel for the communities adjacent to the Framer Compound, I began canvassing. I grabbed the flyers that Kimberley had printed for me using the photo of Dead Jennifer that the Bonjours had provided. I parked on a strategic corner, then, with the quizzical redhead in tow, began going door to door with an official-looking clipboard and envelope held like an accountant’s ledger in my arms.
“Hi, ma’am. Sorry to trouble you. I’m going round town to take up a collection for the Bonjour family, to help pay for a private investigator to look into their daughter’s disappearance.”
“Oh. Oh my. Yes, I saw that on the news… Horrible.”
And then I did what I always did: I struck up conversations.
My version of a spring thaw. “What are you doing?” Molly finally cried in a shrill Enough-is-fucking- enough voice.
She had seemed placid enough sitting there in the passenger seat, watching me empty the cash from the envelope and load up my otherwise lean wallet.
“Read between the lines,” I said, enumerating my take: 174 bucks. Not bad for a morning’s work. “You’ve heard that before, haven’t you?”
“What?What? That doesn’t even make fucking sense!”
“Not to you, obviously.”
She made this face.
Because I have this problem when it comes to forgetting, I carve the world along different joints. I literally see things you would call ephemera as objects unto themselves, so to speak. So passing expressions that you simply notice then forget have an existence all of their own for me-to the point where it sometimes seems like it’s the person who’s ephemeral.
In Molly’s case it was Classic Feminine Disgust: a subtle yet heady blend of exasperation, frustration, and a kind of why-me outrage, as if the problem wasn’t so much men as the fact that they couldn’t stop loving them-us. As it so happened, Classic Feminine Disgust was an old friend of mine, so much so I caught myself saying, “How you doing?”
But she was gone, replaced with Atypical Bewildered Fury-another old friend. She almost rolled her eyes back into her head, made a mouth that said Hide the knives, honey.
“How am I doing?” she cried. “How am I doing? I’m stranded with a psychopath who’s conned me into being an accessory to fraud. How the fuck do you think I’m doing?”
Redheads. Sheesh.
“Fraud? This is how I work all my missing persons.”
“I suppose you call this ‘fact-finding.’ Is that it?” The sarcasm she poured into her air quotes stung for some reason. I’m never surprised when I’m misunderstood-Christ, I’m rarely surprised period. But the resentment never seems to go away.
“Fact-finding. Sure. Good a name as any.”
“So where’s your tape recorder? Huh? Where are your notes?”
I shot her a nose-crinkling look, pointed to my bean.
“Please,” she said. She had the air of someone realizing they’ve been conned after signing the papers.
“Seriously. I remember things.”
“Oh yah,” she said in that Whatever-you-lying-son-of-a-bitch voice.
I shook my head, reached back to pull a joint from my rucksack. With so many old friends dropping by, I figured we should turn it into a party. I sparked the thing while she watched in horror, took a deep and most gratifying haul.
“You don’t believe me,” I said in that voice tokers use to keep their cough pinned to the mat. I offered her the joint, but her look was a lethal Get-that-shit-out-of-my-face. Up. Tight. Oh well, more for me. I really needed to be stoned at that instant. I mean really really…
“No, Disciple. I do not believe you.”
And so, my brain soaking in sweet-leaf lubricant, I showed her. It’s remarkable when you think about it. I mean, if people can recognize a thing like a conversation, it means it has to be a// in there somewhere, doesn’t it? Which begs the question: where does it all go, our intelligence? I gave her names and addresses, then a verbatim recital of what was said. I even mimicked the way old Mrs. Toews raised a self-conscious finger to cover her old-maid-stache, or how Big John Recchi always wagged his head no as he was agreeing with you.
I’m not sure dumbfounded is a heavy enough word to describe the expression on her face.
I grinned my best Ubermensch grin, tapped my temple with a witty-witty finger. “Wait till you see my dick,” I told her. I wasn’t kidding.
But she laughed anyway-laughed hard.. She kind of sounded like a horse, but it was intoxicating all the same. I decided that I liked Molly Modano.
She had good taste in men.
Molly had a million questions. They always do. She had this way of rolling her head as she talked, kind of like an animated holding pattern, neither a nod nor a shake, but endless prepping in the in-between. Her eyes flashed green and blue.
There were several You-mean-absolutely-everything?s. A couple of God- my-brain-is-such-a-sieves. And of course the inevitable Too-cools.
To which I eventually replied, “Not really.”
Then suddenly she said, “Ohmigod. You’ve heard all this shit before, haven’t you? Like a million times-only you don’t forget, do you? It must sound so… so stale…”
And there it was, another old friend staring out from her face, just as female as all the others: Pure Feminine Compassion.
“No wonder,” she said, turning to gaze out the passenger window. “No fucking wonder.”
I simply stared at the street, signalled and turned, signalled and turned.
Some friends demand silence. I always expect most of the doors to be dead when I do this on a weekday. But the fact is, a tremendous number of people actually stay at home all day long. How they make their living is a mystery to me- one of the government’s infinite entitlements, I suppose. Disability. Unemployment. Social Security. Alimony. Cyber-crime. You would expect them to be rude, treat door-to-door cold-callers with the contempt they deserve, but a substantial proportion of them actually seem to be pleased. It gets pretty lonely scratching your balls on the couch all day, I guess.
They all squint: this is universal. Almost all of them clear their throats-the sludge of not talking. Most are wearing something comfy and informal, though you would be surprised how many people get dolled up to do nothing. Lots of stubble on lots of chins. A couple of hairy female armpits. The odd whiff of reefer. The glimpse of Nintendo on pause in the living room. Some are pleasant. Some are gruff. Some are indifferent, while others are actively hostile. One guy actually had his rifle hugged to his chest, which was alarming in its own right. When combined with his Are-you-an-earthling? peer, it was nothing short of terrifying.
The next time you drive through your neighbourhood, take a look around, remind yourself of all the fucking lunatics living in your midst. Seriously. Unlike that cocksucker Baars, I have no clue whatsoever what we humans are up to as a species. I only know what we aren’t.
Like healthy, for instance.
Molly was particularly surprised by how many people had heard nothing whatsoever about Jennifer Bonjour. I had expected it. I’d learned from earlier expeditions-different people missing in different ways- that a good proportion of the population pay no attention whatsoever to what happens locally. If they crawl out of their video-game-soap-opera- horror-movie world at all, they typically sit vegging to Fox or CNN, soaking up abstract enormities to the exclusion of the struggles next door.
Same as me, actually.
She seemed scandalized, whereas I was torn-well, not torn (I would have to give a shit for that), but “of two minds,” let’s say. Speaking to them was a waste of time, of course, but they did tend to make larger than average “contributions,” and I had expenses to cover, like the ten skins I had lost in Atlantic City a couple of weeks previously, not to mention my long-standing massage parlour addiction. Fucking vampires.
Tragic news is kind of like Twinkies that way: better fresh.
I imagine someone like Molly would say that you “meet all types” or some such after doing this for a while. Not me. The thing that always strikes me is just how alike people are-variations on a theme, no different than their yards and their houses. I know there seems to be an enormous difference between a morbidly obese housewife, her jowls caked with cover-up, and a string-bean teenager with a fading hard-on, but only if you can conveniently forget all the transitional species in between-which I cannot. I tend to see people with the eye I imagine a dog breeder must take to canines: sharp enough to discriminate the fine- grain differences, broad enough to see them as expressions of the same basic set of genes.
Humans. Fawk. Whether it’s the environment or a hand-washing OCD, their concerns pretty much all amount to the same thing: saving their asses.
The only people I spent any length of time talking to were those who claimed to have seen Dead Jennifer before she went missing. There was this cashier at the local Kroger who checked her groceries several times when the Framers came in for their once-a-week communal shop. “To be honest, I always thought she had, you know, airs about her.” There was the rickety old Jehovah’s Witness who had tried to save her soul one morning at the Waffle House. “You know what she told me?” the stingy old bitch said, handing me a quarter that gleamed a sinister digestive-tract green. “She told me man had outgrown salvation. OutgrownP There was the war vet who used to ogle her at the wheelchair-accessible library. “I like to think if I had a daughter…” Several of them in all, and no matter how much they tsk-tsked, you couldn’t shake the feeling that they were secretly thrilled to have landed a glancing blow on a real honest-to-God mystery.
Small towns. You gotta love them.
Just about everyone asked me about the investigation. I uniformly lied through my teeth, told them I knew next to nothing except that everyone seemed to suspect the Framers. The responses were predictable, ranging from “Yeah… What is it they believe again?” indifference to bald-faced declarations of bigotry. This one guy, Phil “the Pill” Conroy of 93 Inkerman Street, asked me if I had heard of pogroms before. “I tell ya,” he pronounced in a liquored grunt, “that’s what we need-what this country needs. Some kinda reckoning.”
The prick didn’t give me a dime, of course.
The consensus seemed to be that the Framers were a symptom of things gone wrong, a disease of the body social, as if America had rolled out of bed one morning to find boils marring its clear white skin. Where was the ideological Clearasil? Fawk. There was also the implication that we had lost our nerve more than our way. Of course, not one of them could tell me what the Framers actually believed-only that they believed wrong. And even though I knew that these kinds of judgments were simply the brain’s version of the gag reflex, something compulsive and inevitable, I found myself nodding and then nodding some more.
Siding with the simple and the confused.
Suddenly I understood why Baars had taken me to see old Agatha. He knew full well what he was up against. He knew he would be swimming against the tribal tide.
Heretics are doomed to be burned. In the fires of the imagination, if not otherwise. Molly fairly radiated disapproval: she was put off by all fraud, apparently, even when as petty and as ingenious as mine. But I could tell she had been chastised by my earlier demonstration. There was more to me than could be easily scavenged by her journalistic eye. I could even glimpse it every once in a while, shining in her wayward looks…
Respect.
We discussed our day at the diner that evening, weary and footsore. Exhaustion tends to clear the workbench of communication, at least when it doesn’t clear everything away altogether. You can sit and talk like Vulcans, always on topic, always moving forward, without the baggage of lust and hurt. We had our pious moments, sure, where we congratulated ourselves for being thin or urban or intelligent-but then that’s simply par for the human course, being better than everybody else.
“So what do you think?” I asked while still blinking at the fluorescent lighting.
“Creepy.”
“Creepy? How so?”
“I kept pricking my ears at, like, every house we went to, thinking I would hear a moan or a… a cry or something. I kept telling myself that she had to be in someone’s basement somewhere. Every place. It was like a compulsion or something. I just couldn’t stop.”
What she described sounded like a typical reaction, a natural way for an average imagination to screw with a normal head. Since insults were the rule when I encountered natural, average, normal things, I kept my mouth shut.
“What about that Phil the Pill guy?” she asked after an awkward moment. “What did you think of him?”
“Besides the pictures of Rush Limbaugh taped to his underwear?”
She graced me with a weary grin. “You know what I mean. Pogroms? Please. A guy who believes in rounding up whole populations is certainly capable of rounding up a lone woman, especially one, you know…”
I knew what she was talking about. I had a couple of memories from the Gulf War that I would pay good money to scrub if I could. This one guy in our crew-Wendeez we called him, because he always smelled like hamburger-took the “forces” in Special Forces a little too literally, way back when. Funny how the young and the pretty so often find themselves singled out for punishment.
“Naw,” I said, doing my best to blink the memories away. “I don’t think Phil’s a concern. Any time a dude tells you his nickname, you can be pretty certain he’s insecure. Whoever grabbed Jennifer-if that’s what in fact happened-you can be reasonably certain he has some kind of ice in his veins. Goofballs like him just don’t have what it takes.”
“Some do, Disciple. Trust me.”
This had the smell of a college sob story.
“Besides,” I said, “you’re looking at this the wrong way…”
“How so?”
“The point of canvassing, at least the way I do it, isn’t to find your suspects, Molls. Suspects are rare creatures, not easily found. All we’re trying to do is get a sense of his natural habitat.”
That earned me a long, appreciative look, but little else.
We parted ways with the awkward sense of unresolved matters. I caught a glimpse of pale abdomen as she raised her arms in a faux yawn, noted the twining of green rising from the rim of her blue jeans: barbed wire.
I thought about the way tattoos seem to peek from every feminine hemline: the plunging decolletage, the sagging sock, the T-shirt tag, and of course the hip-riding orbit of their pants and shorts. Little mementoes to mysteries unseen. Bruises to a glimpse. Invitations to a gaze.
If men were going to stare-and let’s face it, they were going to stare-then you might as well give them something to read. The best candy comes with labels-all the rest is bulk.
“Good night, Molly.”
“Night.” I’ve heard people say their brains are stuck between radio stations enough to know that it’s a popular metaphor for the kind of mental static the Forgetful are prone to when they’re stressed or burned out. The feeling I get-or I should say, the feeling I live with-is nowhere near as linear. It’s more like being stuck between a// channels simultaneously, cable and satellite, military and commercial. I’ve been asked by friends and researchers whether it gets worse as I get older and the reel of my memory gets fatter and fatter, and I want to say, “Yes, definitely,” but the fact is, I really don’t know. It’s kind of like treading water in the middle of the ocean that keeps getting deeper and deeper-more and more abyssal. You have this sense of drowning depths yawning ever more profoundly below you, but still, there you are, bobbing like a cork, peering this way and that, trying not to hum the theme to Jaws.
Anyway, one of the things I love about my post-conversation reveries is the way they silence the multi-dimensional rumble. In my case, the best way to avoid drowning is to flee the dappled surface and swim down, down into the cerulean dark.
Follow the sparks of the past as they dwell within me.
I was never meant for the Now-I know that much. I sometimes think I’m a creature of the Ages, shoehorned into the slot you call waking life. As mangled and twisted as oversized mail.
Amazing, really, the way they’re all still in there, in me, the voices and the people. More than a little spooky, the way they never stop talking, saying what they said over and over and over and over and over… Makes me feel like a cannibal, sometimes, the eater of momentary souls.
Lying on my bed, I sorted through channels looking for a baseball game. Baseball, I find, is far and away the best sport to not watch on TV. Since pretty much nothing happens outside what you see on SportsCenter, you can be an expert without seeing a single game. The ability to pass judgment without work or research has got to be the coolest consumer good since the invention of philosophy.
I closed my eyes while a vacuum-tube voice recited statistics-when everything’s slo-mo, you have plenty of time to measure and tally. The world somehow faded away without really going anywhere. I was stretched out, my clothes soaking up the air-conditioned cool, and I was standing on yet another porch in Legoland, raising an arm to wipe the sweat from my cheek and brow…
“Yeah-yeah. We heard about that. We’re brand spanking new. ”
This was Jill Morrow speaking at around 2:38 EM. She was an attractive-ish woman in her mid-thirties who lived at 371 Edgeware Street-a white-brick bungalow with a real estate sign swaying in the hot-sun breeze. I really wasn’t surprised that she had found her way to the front of the queue. I had already decided I would call Nolen later that night, suggest he drive out to interview her.
She and her husband Eddie had moved to Ruddick just a couple of weeks previously, something which, what with the empty boxes, the bare walls, and my estimable powers of deduction, I had failed to realize until she told me. The thing was, when I handed her the flyer with Dead Jennifer’s image in the top left corner, she recognized her.
This marked Molly’s one and only verbal intervention. “Really? From where?”
This was when it dawned on me how much it had helped having her tag along. I don’t sleep well, so I generally have this perpetual brooding, strung-out look. And even when I dress like a prep, there’s something about me that just doesn’t wear Christian clothes well. If I were a television show, I would sport a transparent box in the corner containing L N V D. Language, Nudity, Violence, Disturbing content-you name it.
Molly, on the other hand, was pure PG.
Not only had Jill and Eddie seen Dead Jennifer before, they had seen her the night she disappeared, walking down Highway 3, the road that led out of Ruddick proper, through the industrial park, toward the Framer Compound-sometime around twelve, she thought. Apparently they were coming back from seeing old work friends in Pittsburgh: Eddie Morrow was a former program component designer-which meant he got paid to jerk off to internet porn, or so I assumed. Jill had taken a job as a high school administrator in Ruddick, which was why they had moved.
She became progressively more anxious the longer we talked, especially after I told her that she needed to talk to the Chief. The time had come to go.
“Whatdid you do after?” I asked her on a whim as Molly and I retreated from her foyer.
“My husband dropped me off. ”
“Ah, where did he go? ”
A momentary hesitation, pretty much inexplicable when you considered how forthcoming Jill had been otherwise.
“He’s at a conference in Pitt. Software design thing. ”
“No, I mean after he dropped you off.”
Blank look.
“To grab some cigarettes from the Kwik-Pik.” A nervous shrug. “Smoker… You know. ”
I could tell I had pushed too far with my questions. The last thing you want to do, I’ve learned, is ask people questions they themselves have buried. No one likes the living dead. Wives especially. There’s a reason they always decide to go to bed when the zombie movie starts.
“Sorry,” I said. “I can be a nosy prick sometimes. ”
Then I was back in my room, blinking to the noise of the baseball game. Crowds roaring. Some guy with a massive ass had just belted a home run. With thighs that thick, I imagined his dick must look small.
Eddie, I thought. I needed to dust the snow off Eddie Morrow. If I were to be terribly honest, which I rarely am, I would have to say that I prefer talking to people this way-after the fact, in the humid terrarium of my mind. There’s a power to it that sometimes strikes me as almost authorial, the way I can freeze-frame and fast-forward, pause and replay things like the juicy bits of a porno. It’s a kind of TiVo, only without the monthly fees. TV you can really crawl into.
Of course, I can’t change anything that gets said, but I can lance it with angle after interpretative angle, squeeze it until it gets inflamed with multiple meanings or dries up and heals.
And then there’s those 558 women… All beautiful, even the ugly ones.
The harem that is my soul. Every curse has its upside, I suppose. The second person in the memory queue was Tim Dutchysen. He was the kind of kid I had seen in the mirror a thousand times before the army muscled me up and straightened me out. Twenty-two or so. Skinny, possessed of a kind of bodily insecurity, limbs devoid of a resting position. Eyes that bounced like India rubber, especially when he was agreeing with something. Good teeth. A grin too clownish not to be 110 percent sincere. Even when he stood absolutely still, he seemed to be moving-as if he were too thin not to be running from fat all the time.
And he was a real talker, the kind of guy who was always more honest than he planned, especially when he was full of shit.
“The guys all call me Dutchie. ”
“Dutchie it is then, Tim. ”
He worked at the local Kwik-Pik-an assistant manager, no less. Not only had he been at Legends the night of Jennifer’s disappearance, he openly admitted to watching her with his friends…
“Oh, man, you have no idea how hot she was. The way she danced with that black guy. And the way she dressed… Jeezus! I mean, no offence, but I bet you there’s a bunch ofus who only went to Legends because ofher. I mean, when she went missing and all, don’t get me wrong, I actually volunteered to go searchingfor her, and not just because everybody in our church did. I had, like, the biggest crush on her. I mean, you should have seen her. But I always thought she needed to be, you know, more… more, like, careful. I mean, I appreciated the way she did herself up and all, but the way it got everyone talking. What with, you know, all the orgies and shit they get up to at their Compound. That’s just a rumour, I know, and I’m not someone who goes spreadingrumours, but the others, even guys from my church, they kindofget carried away sometimes, you know? In what they say, I mean. There’s no one I know who would actually do anything-I mean, we all stared at our beers whenever she looked in our direction! Jeezus, I think I forgot how to walk a couple times when she passed me!”
Molly shot me a covert ding-a-ling-a-ling look at the height of this monologue. I imagine she understood that men are pigs in a general sense, most women do, but thanks to the daily subterfuge that polite society forces upon the homelier sex, she lacked the ability to discriminate between men who truly are sexually troubled and kids like Tim, whose horndoggery plum got the best of his manners now and again.
“What’syour church, Tim?”
This was actually a significant question. Because rape had always been the unspoken assumption, and because Ruddick seemed peculiarly devoid of known sex offenders, I had hoped to find someone like Tim all along, someone who could steer me toward the local pervs and abusers- many of whom like to hide in the shadow of Jesus.
“Church ofthe Third Resurrection. ”
“Oh ya. I remember passing it. The white fame place, right?”
“We’re having a pig roast this Saturday aft, if you’re interested. Everyone’s welcome!”
This was the conversation that marked Molly’s conversion, the moment when she finally grasped the genius behind my kooky MO. Striking up relationships with people is as easy as can be, especially people who harbour a secret loneliness, like Tim or Jill. All you really need is a pretext. Once you’re attached, it’s simply a matter of creeping out along their six degrees of separation.
Like selling life insurance.
Friends, as Sean would say, beget enemies. And that’s what every good case needs.
A bad guy.
“Oh… One last thing, Tim-er, Dutchie. What time does the Kwik-Pik close on Saturdays?”
“Midnight… Why?”
I tapped the pack of Winstons in my cargo pants. “Smoker… You know.”
“Nasty habit,” he said, raising two nicotine-stained fingers in a peace symbol. I called Nolen shortly afterward, around 9 EM.
“Whatare you doing?”he asked after our mutual hellos. He was chewing something, and I could hear a television droning in the background. I saw this image of him and his family hunkered down in their living room, their faces blank and blue, their eyes reflecting some televised atrocity.
“I’m at the library, going through microfilm,” I lied.
“Library? What time is it?”
“I’m in Pittsburgh. Researching the Framers.”
“Oh,” he replied with a shamefaced laugh. “No rest for the wicked, huh? ”
I snuggled back into my pillow, blew a stream of pungent smoke at the idle ceiling fan. “No rest for the wicked.”
I told him about the Morrows’ encounter with Jennifer the night of her disappearance. “My gut tells me there’s probably nothing to worry about, but I got the sense that you were a man who minded his Ps and Qs.”
“That I am,” he said with daft pride. “Thanks for this, Disciple. “
More crunching on his end-chewing. Some people, I’ve noticed, keep their eyes glued on the screen while watching the tube and talking on the phone. Others look down and out, to better concentrate on what is being said. Nolen was obviously the former.
“Not a problem.”
A crunching, crackling pause while he chewed. The bugger had used my reply to sneak another chip into his yap.
“We’re going to do this, aren’t we?” He swallowed, then added, “We’re going to save this girl. ” Sure, I thought. One potato chip at a time. Track Seven