by Dan Flanigan
There were just some things that life did not prepare an Irish Catholic boy to hear. Such a thing was incomprehensible to him.
“I don’t believe it. The little insurance man with the American flag in his lapel?”
“What’s the matter, O’Keefe? Don’t you believe a girl can tell when her dad has the hots for her? Well, believe me, it must have taken every bit of strength and Christian fortitude he had to restrain himself sometimes. I’d be in the kitchen, or my bedroom, or in the backyard. Dressed, half-dressed, undressed. And all of a sudden I’d turn around and he’d be watching me.”
He wondered if she wasn’t a little crazy.
“Did he ever try to do anything?”
Inappropriate question. He thought for a moment she might cry, but she covered it with the tough pose. Just like Harrigan so often did.
“He came into my room one night when I was in the 8th grade. I had this terrible earache, and they’d given me some kind of drug, and I didn’t really know what was going on.”
She inhaled deeply.
“He ‘comforted’ me,” she said, husky-voiced now, quavering, using her voice to stifle the cry flowing into her throat and the tears welling into her eyes. “Stroking me and rubbing me in places that didn’t hurt.”
With great difficulty she had managed not to cry. O’Keefe was overcome with pity and desire.
“The next day I kept trying to convince myself I’d dreamed it or hallucinated it. But I didn’t. It happened.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“My mother.” She spat out the words.
“And?”
“She slapped my face. I never mentioned it again.”
“It is hard to believe.”
“It’s always hard to believe. I didn’t believe it myself for a long time after my mother slapped me. For a long time I thought I was crazy. For a long time I did whatever they wanted me to so I could make it up to them. But I knew deep down. I knew by the way he looked at me after that night. He wanted it. He wanted it all. I didn’t let that sink in until a few years ago. It couldn’t sink in until I got away from them for a while.”
“Your mother did nothing?”
“No. Because there’s nothing there. The bastard ground her to dust a long time ago.”
“How’d you get hooked up with Lenny Parker?”
“I can thank dear old Dad for that too. He sent me to this little, church-affiliated college close to home. At that place Lenny was the cream of the crop. And what did I know? All I was ever raised with was God and country and making money and him watching me. I didn’t know any better. Lenny looked like a guy who was ‘going places,’ as my father used to say. Lenny and my dad became like father and son. From the day I introduced him to Lenny, he had me married to him. And that was a way to get away from him looking at me all the time. So one day I looked around, and that’s what I was. Married to Lenny Parker, the mink-farm tycoon.”
She drained her glass. The gold bracelet on her wrist slid down onto her forearm as she drank. She quickly poured herself another.
“Like I told you, I don’t think I ever made a decision of my own in my life until now. I let other people make my decisions for me.”
“So it was somebody else that decided on the big palace on the hill and the Jag and the trips and all the other little things it seems to take to keep you going?”
“I’ll tell you what. If you don’t have anything else, you’d better have all the ‘little things’ you can get your hands on.” She smiled. “And what are you, a socialist, or just jealous?”
He smiled back. “Probably some of both.”
Now he drained his glass.
“Jane said Lenny changed this last year.”
“Like Jekyll and Hyde.”
“That’s what she said. Her very words.”
“One day he’d be strutting around like he was king of the world; the next day he thinks he’s the scum of the earth. He’d disappear for two or three days, then he’d come home and wouldn’t go out of the house for a week. It got so he wouldn’t even answer the telephone or go near a window.”
“Jane said it didn’t make any sense that he’d take off without you. She said he worshipped you too much for that.”
He had hit a nerve. Was it hurt in her eyes? Sadness?
“Will you quit the interrogation bit? Give it a rest. You’ve nabbed me. I’m caught. Now how about giving me a little relief for just awhile, before my life becomes hell on earth.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and he meant it.
She held up her glass for a mock toast.
“To what might have been,” she said. “A clean escape. A girl in her Jaguar touring the country.”
“Roll me away,” he said.
“Yeah. Roll me away.”
She took a long drink of her wine as O’Keefe remembered some more of the lyrics to the song:
“I too am lost, I feel double-crossed
I’m sick of what’s wrong and what’s right”
The song ended with Bob on his motorcycle speeding alone across the high country at sunset:
“Gotta keep rollin’
Gotta keep ridin’
Keep searchin’ ’till I find what’s right
And as the sunset faded
I spoke to the faintest first starlight
And I said,
‘Next time . . . We’ll get it right’”
She was calling him out of his reverie. “Hey, Pete. Where are you?”
He came out of it and gestured with an upward lift of his head that he was paying attention to her.
“I know you saved my life today. Don’t think I’m not grateful for that.”
CHAPTER 13
OTTO ORDERED HIS second vodka tonic. The beer just didn’t hit the spot. Party time.
“Hey,” he barked at the bartender. “Can I get some food up here?”
Some places wouldn’t serve you at the bar.
“Sure.”
“How ’bout some lobster?”
“Sure thing. Want a salad with it?”
“Nah. Save that shit for the rabbits, huh?”
The bartender grinned.
“Potato?”
“Yeah. Baked. Lots of butter and sour cream.”
“How ’bout some broccoli?”
“You gotta be shittin’.”
The bartender grinned again. He was a good guy.
“Now don’t be stickin’ that lobster in no fryin’ pan. I want it boiled like it’s supposed to be.”
“You really oughtta try the pan fried. You’ll never be the same.”
Well, not true. He’d always be the same. But shit, I might as well try it. I don’t know nobody here. Nobody’ll be the wiser. Like they say, when in Rome, do as the Italians do.
“Tell you what,” said the bartender. “If you don’t like it, I’ll take it back and trade it for some boiled.”
Nothing wrong with that deal.
“How ’bout some wine with your dinner?”
“Sounds good. You got half bottles?”
“’Fraid not.”
“Gimme a whole one then. Chablis. You got Chablis down here?”
The grin seemed to mock him this time.
“Sure do.”
“Okay. And another vodka tonic while I’m waitin’ for dinner, huh?”
Party time. It didn’t look like the big guy and the honey pot would be going anywhere for a while. They seemed to be getting along awfully well. He wondered if Lenny Parker knew that his wife was diddling with this big guy on the side. Then Otto had a good idea. If he got the chance, he’d tell Lenny Parker all about it just before he put him out of his misery.
I’ll be a sonuvabitch if this isn’t the best lobster I ever tasted. The hicks really stumbled onto something here. Well, what do they say, even a pig finds a walnut once in a while.
All of a sudden the lovebirds were leaving the booth. “I’ll be right back,” he yelled to his friend, the bartender, but he lef
t a fifty-dollar bill on the bar just in case. No use having the cops after him because they thought he had walked out on the check.
It turned out the lovebirds were just heading for the john. Otto weaved as he walked back to the bar to reclaim his stool and the plate of lobster. He blamed the cowboy boots, not the vodka.
THE RESORT’S OWNERS had hung a pay telephone in the men’s bathroom, and O’Keefe wondered how many lies had been told in that room. And he thought about Jane and Roy. And the cops. It had been more than the couple of hours he’d promised her. There were corpses out there. But she was here. Magic. Perhaps a compromise. A telephone call.
“Sheriff’s office.”
The dispatcher slurred his words, and O’Keefe wondered if everyone in the county was as drunk as he was.
“There’s a place out on State Road 6 called Prosperity Farms.”
The dispatcher said nothing.
“You know where I’m talking about?”
“Yep.”
“There’s two dead people out there. They’ve been murdered.”
“D’you do it, buddy?”
“No sir, I didn’t.”
“Sure. What’s your name?”
He wondered if he should tell.
“Peter O’Keefe. I’m a private investigator.”
“Where are you?”
No answer.
“I said, ‘Where are you’?” But the guy who said his name was O’Keefe had hung up the phone.
SHE WAS STANDING outside the bathroom waiting for him as if he were in her custody and not the other way around. She smiled. She moved closer to him, a rather tall girl but small compared to him.
“You know,” he said, “we ought to go to the cops right now.”
She laid her hands flat against his chest. “What difference does a few more hours make? I don’t know what’s going to happen to me now. I’m not wanting to rush to face that.”
THEY’RE GETTIN’ AWFUL chummy, Otto thought. Back from the john, they sat on the same side of the booth, facing him. She was on the inside, leaning back against the wall, smiling. The guy was doing most of the talking. After a while the lovebirds got up and ducked out a side door onto a patio. “Gotta get a little fresh air,” he told the bartender and, affecting casual, sauntered after them. Whoa! He was a little woozy. He grabbed the top of a chair to steady himself. Fuckin’ cowboy boots. All the same, better go easy the rest of the way. Try some coffee. Maybe have the bartender put some brandy in it.
The part of the patio close to the door was crowded with people having a good time. The lovebirds sat off by themselves on a bench at the empty end of the patio next to the lawn.
“AND THAT’S HOW I ended up chasing deadbeats and con men,” O’Keefe said, finishing his story. “See, I’m no different than you. Just drifting. Letting things happen to me.”
She leaned back against the wall and looked up at the sky for a while. “Look out there,” she said. He followed her gaze up into the sky. Stars everywhere. He couldn’t tell one from another. “Out there’s Andromeda,” she went on, “the Chained Princess. And Perseus, the Champion. Maybe that’s us? And will Pegasus, the Flying Horse, come to our rescue? If there’s any hope left anyway.”
He had thought she might be too tough for crying, but she was crying right now. He reached for her, but she shook her head, telling him “No.” She hunched up her shoulders and bowed her head and cried on her breasts, attaining a kind of privacy despite him sitting there next to her.
The band played Harlem Nocturne. The wail of the saxophone, the soul’s yearning lament.
“I love that song,” she said.
“So do I.”
She seemed to be drunk. So was he. He didn’t care.
“Let’s have a dance.”
Her palm sweated a little. He rubbed his thumb across the top of her hand, which he held just below his chin as they danced. At least pretended to dance. Her body accommodated him when he pressed against her, molded itself to him.
She pushed back from him so she could see his face when she said, “I bet you believe in love at first sight.”
“It’s the only kind.”
She was smiling again. “Well, maybe it was second or third sight—after that subtle come-on of yours, pinning my arms to the floor like that.”
She took in his tongue. The fingers of her right hand pressed on his lower back, bringing him in to her. She rocked back and forth, moving slowly up and down, massaging them both. The hunger in her pulled at him like a whirlpool, and he gladly let it take him down because he sensed how deep her hunger was, as deep as his own, and what it was, the same as his own, a hunger beyond any momentary desperate thrusting of sex into sex, a hunger for some other kind of incarnation, some other word made flesh.
Despite her protests, he made her let him carry the backpack to the check-in desk.
“No. 424,” the desk clerk said, handing him the key. “It’s one of the cabins.”
He pointed out the front window to his right.
“Down at the end of the drive. Down the hill. Very private. And be careful. There’s fog in the valley.”
Back at the van she couldn’t seem to wait. She moved quickly into him, finding his mouth, pressing him back against the van, bringing his hand to her breast. A little shock wave jolted him. A revelation. “Let’s go,” she said, opened the van door, and jumped in.
FROM THE DARKENED interior of a black car across the road Karl saw O’Keefe and Tag emerge from the front door of the resort, followed shortly after by Fatso, wobbling on his cowboy boots. Jesus, is he waving at me? He is, the dumb fuck. Waving eagerly, like he’s attending his high school reunion or something. Ignore him.
Karl drove out of the parking lot fast and turned onto the highway like he was heading home, leaving Fatso gaping in his wake.
The sonuvabitch is leaving me here, Otto thought. Nah. Can’t happen. He needed somewhere to go. His worldview had narrowed considerably. It was dark out, but Otto moved through a special darkness of his own, a darkness painted over with a neon-yellow haze. He considered walking to the other side of the parking lot and sitting down under some trees just beyond the lot, but he could muster no confidence that he would make it that far. The main reality for him right now was that he had to puke. This very second he had to puke. Right inside this old white Caddy convertible here. He leaned into the driver’s side and learned once again why they called it “urping.”
When he finished, the inside of the Caddy looked a lot worse, but he felt a lot better. He snorted, thinking about the guy coming out of the nightclub with his date and finding his ghetto cruiser had turned into a barf-wagon. A breeze sent his own sour breath wafting back in his face. Karl would really be pissed now. No drinking, he had said. Well, fuck him if he can’t take a joke.
He needed to move along, so he staggered toward the highway. Karl came back from wherever he had gone, pulled into the far side of the parking lot, and continued slowly on into the interior of the resort. The barf session had cleared Otto’s head a little. Not knowing what else to do, he trotted after the car, hoping nobody would see him or bother with him if they did.
THE ROAD TO the cabin dipped down into a valley carved by a creek that meandered through the resort. The temperature had dropped, and the warmer air rising from the creek had mixed with the cooler air in the night wind to steam up a cauldron of fog in the valley. The headlights of the van hardly penetrated the foggy blackness. Fallen leaves swirled in slow motion in front of the van like ghosts searching for a final resting place.
“Remember,” O’Keefe said, “the first time’s always the worst time.”
“No second chances,” she teased.
But he was serious. You were always too excited, or too drunk, or didn’t know each other well enough, the orifices and crevices, the wants and the needs. One-night stands did not interest him at all.
“That’s it,” she said, looking back out the window at a small wooden sign in the shape of an arrow that poin
ted to 424. O’Keefe skidded the van to a halt.
“Geez,” she said, “you can’t see your hand in front of your face out there.”
She jumped out with her pack. O’Keefe walked around to the passenger side, opened the sliding door, and climbed into the back of the van.
“Got to get your little toothbrush?” she joked.
“Not quite.”
He carefully replaced the M-16 in its holder and grabbed the shoulder holster that contained his .38 pistol.
“You really think you need that now?”
“I doubt it. But I haven’t been ready for one damn thing that’s happened on this trip, and I’d like to reverse the trend.”
When he climbed out of the van, she pulled him to her and kissed him, opening her mouth wide, inviting him all the way in.
“It’s been so long,” she said.
They felt their way through the fog down a narrow, concrete path. The desk clerk had described the cabin as “very private,” and in the all-enveloping darkness they wouldn’t have known it if there had been another cabin sitting right next to them and they failed even to see their own cabin until O’Keefe almost tripped over the stoop at the front door.
He had trouble persuading the key to open the lock. The key fit but would not turn. He twisted it back and forth. “Careful,” she said, “you’ll break it off,” and laughed. She put her arms around him from behind, molding herself to him again, tucked her hands underneath his sweater, pulled the tail of his shirt out from his pants and began undoing its buttons. He did not know that all the buttons of her jumpsuit were already undone.
CHAPTER 14
OTTO DID NOT stop running until he reached the top of the steep hill that dropped from the parking lot down into the little valley. Sonic booms exploded in his chest, and he thought he might puke again. He surveyed the world of fog below him. For the first time he could remember, he was scared—scared because he thought he might be suffering a heart attack. But nothing to do now but go on. Karl could not have gone anywhere else except into that world of fog down the hill.
