by Ronald Malfi
“Who’s the broad?” he asked the bartender, a guy named Steve who occasionally had to call the cops when shit got too rowdy in the place.
Steve appraised the woman. “Beats me. Never seen her before.”
“What’s she drinking?”
“Merlot.”
“Is it expensive?”
“Six bucks a glass.”
A bit pricier than his rail drinks, but he said, “What the hell, send her one over on me.”
“A regular Don Juan,” Steve said, and poured a glass.
When the drink was sent over to the woman’s table, Jimmy, grinning like someone who’d just cashed out at Caesar’s, raised his own glass in acknowledgement. The woman’s face, tucked behind that wave of dark hair, seemed to gleam at him, as if she was powered by some otherworldly illumination at the core of her body. He knew he was drunk, but he also knew that he could feel no pain—and feel no rejection—when he was drunk. Shoot at enough rabbits, you’ll eventually hit one.
Shoving himself off his stool, he staggered to the restroom, fired a laser-beam of electric-yellow urine into the commode, then studied his glazed and sallow reflection in the mirror. He then hocked an oyster-sized gobbet of phlegm into the sink before stepping back out into the barroom.
The woman, much to his chagrin, had vanished.
“That ladies’ room is a curse,” he complained to Steve as he settled his tab. Damp, crinkly bills appeared on the bar top. “Someday, NASA’s gonna find a bunch of Jersey broads circling the Milky Way like satellites. Mark my words.”
“Marked,” Steve agreed, not bothering to give Jimmy back his change.
It was a weeknight and the parking lot was only mildly populated. The surrounding businesses—an auto-body shop and a bank—were all dark. Directly overhead, the moon was a fat pearl wreathed in smoky black clouds.
A figure was approaching him at a rapid pace from the far end of the parking lot. Had he not had so much to drink, he might have noticed the person right away, might have even avoided the whole ordeal entirely, but that was not the case. As it was, he was all-consumed by the Herculean task of fishing his car keys from the pocket of his coveralls. An impossibility, it seemed that the keys had somehow enlarged and were no longer able to be extracted through the too-small opening of his pocket.
It wasn’t until the person was less than three feet away that Jimmy de Campo looked up. Bleary-eyed and confused, the figure appeared as nothing more than a shadow that had detached itself from the night and come to life.
“Who the—”
His words were silenced as the figure struck him across his left kneecap with something long, solid and unforgiving. A strobe of blinding light flashed before his eyes. The pain that followed was like nothing he had ever felt before—a hammer-strike to the core of his marrow. He collapsed to the pavement just as the figure—dressed all in black and with a balaclava over their head, like a cat burglar in an old movie—swung the unforgiving staff again, this time connecting with his right shin.
Jimmy heard the bone break. It was a sound that echoed out over the otherwise silent parking lot like a firework, and it was a sound he would hear night after night while doped to the gills on pain meds in the weeks to follow.
The figure stood directly above him, the fat, round moon silhouetted behind the figure’s masked face. Like a halo. Indeed, he was briefly accosted by the certainty that this figure was some sort of celestial or spiritual being, albeit one here for revenge for every misdeed he’d ever managed to perpetrate throughout the course of his drunk and miserable life.
He was struck several more times, his consciousness wavering as his legs were pulverized. At one point, when he rolled over on his back and ceased holding up his hands in useless defense, it felt as if his legs had been reduced to bits of broken glass and gravel in his jumpsuit. The back of his head resting on the cold, damp pavement of the parking lot, he watched as the figure raised the instrument once more. Even in his fading consciousness, he saw that it was a crowbar. He saw, too, that his attacker was not a man but a woman: he could see it in the stance of the masked figure, but also in the ringlet of black hair that had shaken loose from the balaclava and curled down his attacker’s shoulder.
The woman raised the crowbar above her head, its silhouette bisecting the face of the moon. He knew in that instant that she was going to smash his skull to rubble. And in truth, he welcomed it. The pain in his legs was so great that, strangely, it had rendered him mostly numb. With some detachment, he wondered if this mad woman had busted something vital in his spine, severing the nerves.
But then she lowered the crowbar. It was a chilly night, and he could see plumes of vapor issuing from the facemask of his attacker. The woman’s chest rose and fell, rose and fell, the undeniable accentuation of breasts beneath the ribbed black sweater, rose and fell, the steaming of her hot breath in the cold night, rose and fell, rose and fell…
And then she was gone.
4
It was other-Aaron whom I had to temporarily employ in order for me to listen to James de Campo’s story. A stand-in for sanity’s sake. I had detached from myself, had fitfully withdrawn into the vast and anonymous caverns of my mind where reality was like a fuzzy and unfocused movie projected on a rippling screen. And even within these protective confines, I couldn’t fully escape it. I saw you there, doing these things. I heard the scrape of the crowbar as it connected with the asphalt, saw the explosive sparks it elicited each time its curved head scoured across the ground. A miner’s pickaxe sparking off stone.
James de Campo continued his story in the calm, dilatory tones of someone under mild sedation. Perhaps this was a tale he’d told many times before, maybe even in one of his AA meetings. There was the drunk couple who stumbled upon his shattered and quaking body sometime later that night, half conscious and hallucinating in the parking lot of the Cougar’s Den. The wail of an ambulance and the blessed black shroud that fell over him the moment he was jostled off the ground by paramedics. A prolonged hospital stay, and the jangly, aching discord in his lower extremities that he still felt, all these years later, every single day. The pain in that hospital bed had been so great and terrible that it had felt otherworldly. The only thing greater was his need for a drink. But after just a few days in the hospital, and as he slipped in and out of consciousness, he received a visitor who seemed to rob him of his addiction all in one fell swoop. Like a snap of fingers.
“A vision,” he said, and it was only here, in this moment, that a fire gleamed behind those sly fox’s eyes. “I knew she wasn’t real, but she had come back. The vengeful angel. Only this time all in white, burning like a forest fire, and instead of a face she wore the moon.”
As he said this, my own gaze shifted toward the paint-by-numbers Jesus on the wall above the TV. Those feral wolf’s eyes raged like twin suns.
“Had a stroke while I was laid up in the hospital, too. It made me useless on one side as well as my legs. Never felt so helpless. Went through a year of rehab, on the stroke and on the legs. Christ, the legs. My body ached so bad I wanted to die. But I sobered up, because there wasn’t any way I could do both. And anyway, every time I felt the urge to drink, I’d just sit there and close my eyes for a spell. And every time I closed my eyes, I kept seeing her shining moon-face right there above me, staring down, that crowbar poised to whack my head apart like some Halloween pumpkin.”
With some difficulty, he bent over and hooked a set of fingers underneath the left-leg cuff of his sweatpants. Grunting, he hoisted the pant leg to mid-shin. That was far enough: I saw the lumpy, alien terrain of his lower leg, the Frankenstein stitching and tender bolt holes that, all these years later, still looked disconcertingly fresh. Apparently satisfied by the look on my face, he let the pant leg drop back down then eased himself back in his chair.
“By the time I’d completed a year of rehabilitation, I was stone sober, and my mind had cleared. It was like a storm blowing through a town, leaving bits of debris ever
ywhere, but also clearing the skies at the same time. And it was in that clarity—the calm after the storm, I guess you’d call it—that I realized who that woman had been. God almighty, but it took me a year to put a name to that face.”
“You’re wrong,” I told him. “It wasn’t her.”
Those sly fox’s eyes widened in mock surprise. “Oh, no? Because you knew her so well? Listen, bud, I’m sure I’ve pissed off enough women in my lifetime that any number of ’em might want to bash my face in, Lynn Thompson included, but I only know one gal who’d actually try to do it.”
I let this sink in. My immediate reaction was to not believe him—it just couldn’t be true. It wasn’t you, Allison. Moreover, in 2013, we were already together, living in the apartment in Eastport. I wanted so badly to think it was bullshit, and that this man was a drunk and an abuser and possibly even a murderer… but I couldn’t. I couldn’t believe these things because in my heart I knew they weren’t true. My mind slid back to that time you returned from what you’d said was a media bazaar in New Jersey, only to return shaken up, discordant, and with blisters along your palms like you’d been swinging a—
(crowbar)
—baseball bat. The only truth in all of this, Allison, was that you had been a stranger to me. An absolute stranger—this other-Allison operating under a cloak of deceit throughout the duration of our marriage. It took your death and the insight of strangers to get me to realize this.
“To be clear,” James de Campo went on, his voice a touch weaker now. “I didn’t get sober because your wife came to me like some kind of angel. I didn’t see what she did to me that night as some divine intervention that I gotta change my ways. I’m not that far gone, pal.”
“Then why’d you get sober?”
“So I could fucking kill her.” And he grinned, revealing teeth like peanuts behind his silver goatee. “She came for me once, tried to open up my belly, got my arm instead. Came for me again, years later, and made it so I’m a cripple. Not just that, though. It was the way she hesitated near the end.” That horrible grin stretched across his sallow face. “That crowbar ready to bash my skull. One whack and it’s lights out, boys, and for good. But she didn’t do it. She bashed my legs to shit in the heat of the moment but she lost her nerve to finish the job in the end. That’s what I remember most from that night, other than the pain. The way she stood there, catching herself in that last moment. Stopping like that. Thinking it through, maybe.”
“Enough,” I said.
“And so I thought, shit, what if she finds the nerve some day? What if five, ten, fifteen years from now I’m stumbling out of another shithole like the Cougar’s Den, and there she is, dressed all in black except for a big shiny moon where her face should be. That crowbar resting on her shoulder like she’s Cal fucking Ripken up at the plate. Who knows? Maybe this time she won’t hesitate. Maybe this time she’ll finish the job. So what do I do? Well, fuck, buddy—I get straight. I get sober. And I bust my ass through a year of rehab so that I’m strong again, or at least as strong as I’m gonna get. And then I waited for her to come around again. I was ready, and I was waiting. But I was getting anxious, too. Riled up, I guess. I called up her momma—‘Where’s your girl, Lynn?’—but she said she ain’t seen that old Allie-Cat since she was a teenager.”
The sting of your nickname on his lips forced my heart into my throat. I opened my mouth to challenge him but nothing came out.
“Whether she lied or not, who knows?” de Campo went on. “Allison never had much regard for her momma, neither.”
“You’re lying. Her mother’s dead.” It was my voice, sure, but issuing from some distant plateau.
De Campo laughed. “Dead? That’s news to me.”
“Allison said—” But the words hooked in my throat.
“Don’t you have no clue who you been playing with, buddy?”
Jesus Christ, Allison.
“So what then?” de Campo continued, his voice cracking in the process. “I’ll tell you what then, pal. I waited for her to show herself. All these years, I sat and I waited for her to show herself. I swore it would happen. I swore it. But now here you are telling me that ain’t gonna happen. Is that what I’m to understand? That the little Allie-Cat bought the fucking farm and here I am busted to shit for it?”
There was nothing I could say to that. In the cage, the cockatiels began to squawk.
“Was a good run,” de Campo said. He reached into the stretched-out collar of his sweatshirt and yanked the sobriety medallion from his neck. The chain snapped soundlessly. He set the medallion trailing its broken chain on the table beside the television remote. “I think you better show yourself out, good buddy,” de Campo said as he shifted, wincing, in his recliner. “I’d get up, but, well…” His words concluded in a gruff chortle that segued into a coughing fit.
I rose from the couch and went to the front door as de Campo clicked the TV back on. He cranked up the volume, the televangelist’s voice crackling through the speakers. In the cage, the birds became frenzied, nipping at the bars with their knobby gray beaks. Feathers spiraled about the room.
“I bet I’ll see her moon-face again tonight,” de Campo called back at me. He did not look in my direction, only stared at the television. “It’s been years since I last saw it, but I’ll bet she makes an encore performance tonight.”
I tugged on the doorknob but the door didn’t budge. A momentary pang of irrational terror caused me to think that I’d never get the door open and I’d die here in this house, while the plastic-faced man on TV howled about damnation and the birds in the bell-shaped cage chittered and squawked and squirted greenish globs of shit onto their flooring of newspaper. But then I realized the deadbolt had been turned, so I cranked it, yanked the door open, and hurried out into the rain just as a peal of thunder, loud as Armageddon, clashed across the sky.
“We’re doomed, brothers and sisters!” I heard the televangelist chide a second before I slammed the door shut.
I took off down the porch and slid through a puddle at the end of the concrete walkway. I fell on my ass, my teeth rattling in my skull. Scrambling around the car toward the driver’s side, I dug my keys out of my pocket just as a second clang of thunder cracked the sky in half. I jumped in the car, cranked the ignition, and your sappy music erupted from the speakers. Pausing to catch my breath, I glanced back up at James de Campo’s house and saw a face in one of the windows at the far end of the house. Brenda. As I stared at her, she retreated back into the gloom, a section of curtain replacing her scowling visage.
Don’t you have no clue who you been playing with, buddy?
That I should believe James de Campo over you, Allison, was troubling. I felt foolish, tricked. I struggled not to believe him, but the night in the bathroom with those blisters on your palms kept rerunning through my mind as a rebuttal to any argument I tried to brook. What had you said to me that night? I’ve spent a lot of time in darkness, Aaron, so much so that I’ve churned it up and stirred it to the surface and made it this real, tangible thing. It lives alongside me. It moves when I move. Had I mistakenly thought you had been speaking of your sister when, in fact, you had been confessing to what you had done in Jersey? What you had done with a crowbar?
I steered the Sube away from the curb, my entire body suddenly cold and wet and shivering.
5
I drove around for a while before stopping at a family-style Italian restaurant to force some food down my gullet. Yet I could only choke down half a breadstick and a rather soggy meatball before throwing in the towel. My stomach wasn’t up to the challenge. It seemed my investigative priorities had changed over the past hour, Allison. No longer was I hunting your sister’s murderer and the murderer of all those other teenage girls—the monster I had come to think of as the Woodvine Killer; now I was hunting you, or so it felt like, desperate to unlock whatever secrets remained hidden in your underground chamber. A mother, for one thing. Still alive.
—Perhaps, suggest
ed other-Aaron, who was now seated opposite me at the two-person table in the restaurant, searching for the killer and searching for the real Allison are the same thing.
I drank my entire glass of water in several thirsty gulps. Irked by his constant pragmatism, I didn’t want to hear from other-Aaron at the moment.
I managed to force down the other half of my breadstick before paying the bill and slinking back out into the rainy night. In the car, I dialed the cell number Peter Sloane had given me. I expected to get his voicemail, so I was surprised when he answered after the first ring.
“Aaron,” he said. “Did you go? What happened?”
“It’s not de Campo,” I told him. “He’s a piece of work, all right, but his legs are beat to shit. He couldn’t kill a squirrel.”
Sloane made a contemplative humming sound on the other end of the line.
“Allison’s mother is still alive,” I said. “At least, she was a few years ago, according to de Campo.”
“All right,” Sloane said, not comprehending.
“Allison told me her mother had died before we met. When she was still living in Woodvine.”
“Well, I can confirm that Lynn Thompson was still alive when I left Woodvine in 2006. As for what’s happened to her since, I can’t really—”
“She’s alive,” I said, cutting him off. “I know she is. Allison had been lying to me. Just like she lied about what happened to her sister, she lied about her mother.” I shook my head, the early twinges of a migraine sparking to life behind my eye sockets. “I just don’t know why.”
“Some people just want to forget,” Sloane said. “They want to start over fresh.”
“Peter, what the hell’s going on?”
“You mean rhetorically, or are you actually expecting an answer from me?”
“I don’t know what I’m expecting. I don’t know what to do.” I paused. “That’s not true. I know what I’m going to do.”
“What’s that?”
