by Alan Lee
Elton hit me in such a way. It wasn’t good. He wanted to rattle me, impress me with his willingness to inflict damage. But the blow was glancing and there was no shoulder behind it and he was already gathering for another punch, even worse than the first. My lip might bruise a little, that was it. After Italy, this felt like a game.
“Elton, be serious. Let’s talk instead. I promise not to diagnose the infelicities of your technique.”
He came again, trying to go up and over my shoulder. Some neglectful combination of a jab and cross. Cursing too.
I hit him in the stomach as it should be done. Not the first in a series of wild strikes but one concentrated blast. I hit him with everything I had, down to my heels, up to my shoulder, driving my fist almost to his spine via his navel.
He went onto his knees and he made a few gagging noises and then vomited.
I winced. “You ate Oreos for breakfast?”
A couple walking by on the far sidewalk saw us. They paused, compelled on a subterranean level to do something. Intervene? Call the police? Separate us?
The woman asked the man, “Should we…?”
The man glared. He wasn’t a violent man, he wore loafers through puddles for goodness sake, and he didn’t want to bother, and so he glared.
“C’mon,” he told her. “Let the riffraff kill each other.”
I waved and smiled.
They kept walking, assuring themselves it was for the greater good.
And it was.
I crouched beside Elton and said, “Were they double stuffed? The Oreos?”
He wiped his mouth.
“Fucking kill you…” Turned suddenly on his knees, pivoting at the waist, and tried to hit me again.
I pushed his hand aside, balled a fist, and hit him on the nose. Hard enough to crunch cartilage, hard enough to hurt, and not break bone.
The woman kept watching us over her shoulder as they marched quickly up the sidewalk. The man scolded her to stop peeking.
I said, “I only want to talk, Elton. Try again, I’ll bop your nose harder.
He said something unintelligible into the hand holding his nose. He needed a shave and a shower and a stick of deodorant. Needed to wash his clothes. Needed to eat some fruit and vegetables and scrub his face at night with soap and a washcloth. He needed to take better care of his teeth and stop smoking. He needed a mother.
“I got a feeling you’re gonna try again, Elton the felon. The way you grew up, that’s all you got. The only thing that works. But it won’t right now. You’re violent but not good at it. Your violence is only effective against people smaller or tamer than you. I’m neither. And I’ve been trained. I’ll smack you around all day and not breathe heavy. Police show up? I’ll tell them what you do for a living. Fighting is lose-lose for you. So let’s talk, huh?”
I saw the rage and fear shrink a little as he listened. Maybe I wouldn’t hurt him anymore. Maybe he didn’t have to act tough for a few minutes.
“Here’s what it is. You’re a pimp. You arrange meetings between girls and the local cooks at the restaurants downtown, and the guys working at nearby garages, and the custodians coming off shift, and the night guards, and the construction crews, maybe some of the hospital staff, and others I haven’t thought of. Quick encounters, nothing fancy; many days your job is easy. Probably a handful of others like you around because seventy-thousand people work in and around downtown, and they have sexual needs like everyone else and they choose this particular path. For the moment, let’s not moralize. Let’s deal with what is. If you quit, they go to the next guy. It’s gonna happen and I’m not here to make you stop. We doing okay so far?”
Elton remained cagey and aloof.
“So why am I here? To help you see reason. The job you’re in is hard enough without being mean. Being mean hurts you and it hurts the girls. You need to learn that your girls are prettier when you don’t hit them. That their lives will have more meaning if they feel valued. That business will be better if everyone is happy. That this world is a big cruel vacuum sometimes and we got to fight against it, and one way to do that is to reduce the suffering of others whenever possible.”
He did a scoffing sound and blood spattered from his nose onto his shirt. “Man, I don’t know who the fuck you are.” With his clogging nose, it sounded like Bad, I don know who da fug you dar. “But you sound like a bad after school special. And you don’t know nothing about me or about whores.”
“I know more than you think I do.”
He did the scoffing sound again.
I said, “I know you can’t admit it now. Tough guys like you don’t have that button. But you need to become more. More than you are now, for the sake of the girls you watch. And for your sake. Because the real reason I’m here? Is to manipulate your behavior, Elton the felon. I’m not going anywhere. And I’ll come back to visit you soon if you keep hitting people. I like this city and I don’t like it when guys hit girls who live here. And I’ll make you stop, Elton. I promise.”
As I stood he made an awkward kicking motion at me, like a petulant child. I dropped the phone into his lap.
“Next time I break your nose and the hand you used to hit the girl,” I said and I walked down Church, hung a left on 4th, and got into the driver’s seat of my car.
Ronnie sat in the passenger. She wore a grim expression.
“He’s not done being mean. We’ll have to visit him again, my guess. You watched?”
She nodded.
I said, “Because you want to know what’ll be required to affect change in the prostitution industry.”
She nodded again. She rested her right elbow on the car door’s window ledge and leaned against her knuckles. Stared through the windshield into nothing. She filled the car with the aroma of shampoo and Burberry perfume.
Ronnie was in her mid-thirties. She looked late-twenties, but sometimes her soul groaned if you listened close enough and you realized she felt ancient some days.
After a period of silence, she said, “This is why marriage vows are important.”
Caught off guard. Wasn’t expecting that. “Yeah?”
“Because if you’re married to me, Mackenzie, you know I might ask you to do things like this now and then. To stop someone, or to hurt someone, and it’s a risk. And if we’re bound together then you’ll feel obligated. So you’ve got to be asking yourself…do you want to be bound to me? You never got to make the decision. I made it for you.”
Do you want to be bound to me? I did want to—that was never the question. Better phrased as, should you? Should I be bound to her?
I started the car and drove to her office, where she’d left her red Mercedes. I parked behind it and she placed her right hand on my passenger car door’s interior handle and paused.
She said, “I’m in my head about this, I know.”
“You’re taking us seriously. It’s better for both of us that way, I think.”
“I have counseling later. I need her advice. About the cash in the briefcases. And our potential annulment.” The word annulment didn’t make it out in one piece. She took a shuddering breath and looked away.
“Ronnie.”
“Yes Mackenzie.”
I took her hand and squeezed. “We never decided to annul.”
“But we should.”
“If we do, an annulment doesn’t mean we break up. It means we plan to do things right.”
“It feels like you’re drifting away from me.”
“But am I?”
“It’s just the years of loneliness and fear and insecurities talking. I know it is. But that doesn’t make it stop.”
“Years of abuse aren’t conquered in mere weeks. Rome wasn’t built in a December.”
She was crying now. “Don’t break up with me, Mackenzie, not yet. Kay? I’m trying to be good. It’s just…harder than I thought.”
“I’m not breaking up with you.”
“But you should. Don’t you get that?”
“Yo
u think I’m sitting here weighing you on a scale. Creating lists of pros and cons and judging you. But I’m not.”
“I’m judging myself.”
“Then go easy. Make sure you lump all the crap you’ve conquered into the pros and forgive yourself the rest.”
She squeezed my hand. Released and wiped her eyes. “I’m a fucking lunatic.”
She opened the car door and stood. Smoothed her clothes, closed the door, took her bag from her car, and walked toward her office.
A few other women arrived and walked the short sidewalk with her. Veronica Summers looked like a different species. Tall, strong, graceful. She shined on a cloudy day. She walked better in heels than the other women did in rain boots, and they knew it, and they watched her the way cubs would observe the tigress. She laughed and tossed her hair and went in, master of the universe.
I’m trying to be good.
A fool’s errand. A destination constantly retreating and beyond reach.
What fools we mortals be.
What broken insecure messes in need of redemptive love. And I wasn’t talking about her.
Chapter 24
I left my office at eleven.
Hiking boots? On.
Windbreaker? Zipped.
Phone? Charged.
Jaw? Prominent and fixed in determination.
Clues? None.
But I was about to change that.
I hadn’t made it three blocks before I saw Gordon Gibbs tailing me. Did he think he could hide in a Hummer the size and color of a small school bus?
Poor guy. He was trying his darndest.
In my Honda I turned right on Jefferson, then right on Salem, right on Market, and another right on Campbell, going in a full circle. He did his best, running stoplights, cutting off pedestrians, trying to stay inconspicuous three cars back. I executed the same routine again and this time he failed. His enormous tank got blocked by a party of hipsters moving slow and on their phones, allowing two additional cars to pull out, allowing a third to try and parallel park, and by the time he got free I was long gone.
Turns out, Gordon was a lot closer to the truth than I expected him to be. He thought Georgina Princess held keys to some secret. Lo and behold, she did. Gordon’s gut had proved correct. Even a blind squirrel driving a Hummer, I supposed, finds an acorn now and then.
GPS was with Kix and Roxanne, and Roxanne had firm directions to call me and the police if she saw a big yellow Hummer at her door. Gordon would have to find some other acorn—he couldn’t have mine.
I roared west into the county, got on 221, and left the hubbub behind. Instead of stores, there were homes. Instead of stoplights, hills. Out here lived accountants and doctors and lawyers and business owners who preferred land to social ascension. They wanted a view, not another invite to a swanky cocktail party.
Not judging city folk. I didn’t want land either.
I passed the site of Ulysses’s crash—debated stopping but nothing useful could be learned after three years of Mother Nature eroding evidence—and went up Bent Mountain. The road switched back again and again, carving up the side and offering views for twenty miles. Ulysses was lucky to be alive, piloting down this treacherous incline with hairpin turns while drunk. I turned off 221, now on small country roads, watching the map on my phone, taking wrong turns, and inching closer to my destination—a forest stretching for miles.
Soon I’d gone as far as I could. I parked off Bottom Creek Lane in a clearing of bare oak and poplar. Killed the engine and listened. I knew a couple farmhouses were nearby but I felt entirely alone. Just me and the trees.
I retrieved a backpack from the trunk, tightened it across my shoulders, locked the car, and set off. I followed Big Laurel Creek into the wilderness, steadily marching upwards. The undergrowth squished wetly, threatening to soak my boots and socks before long, but I stumbled across a bare path running parallel to the creek. Squirrels watched curiously and deer fled before me, the big stupid human stomping through Eden.
I hiked for an hour, eventually leaving the trail to cut a more direct route to the GPS coordinates. I ate a granola bar and consumed a bottle of water and wondered if the deepening cold was imagination or the result of my higher altitude. Trees were fallen and the ground sank in spots and I doubled back and to circumvent a small gorge, moving north and west.
I prided myself that all I needed were four dependent Hobbits and I’d be Aragorn.
Except after another thirty minutes I was lost. I got turned around, unsure which way to face. The sun directly overhead and providing no help, the rascal. I walked in one direction long enough for the change to register on my iPhone and I altered course, heading back on track. Just like warriors in Middle Earth did.
Tired and getting angry, but nearing the destination, I found a recently used path—two wheel ruts in the dirt. Looked as though trafficked by ATVs. I used my phone to zoom in and around, looking for the path’s origin. Might come in from the…west? Used for hunting.
I followed it, enjoying the rocks and hard dirt under my feet instead of wet leaves. The path ran up and around a knoll and there I came to…
37.1612
-80.1716
No wonder Ulysses had marked this place with GPS coordinates. It was nowhere.
Another couple minutes of walking and I saw through the trees…something. Signs of ancient civilization? I approached and listened and detected no life.
It was a Jeep and the remains of an old wooden building, so hidden they didn’t appear on Google Earth. Probably a hunting shed. A fire had eaten most and only one wall still stood. The floors were rotten and yielding to the earth. It’d been erected in a clearing with no foundation other than cinderblocks. No generator, no power lines.
The Jeep Wrangler looked like a model only five years old, but now beyond repair. Animals had burrowed in and torn up the seats and built nests. I opened the driver door and things rustled in the back. The hinges complained. No keys in sight. The glove compartment was open, and resting on top of the user manual I found the faded registration.
This vehicle was registered to…Ulysses Steinbeck.
Zounds.
Eureka.
Elementary.
The inspection ran out three years ago. It’d been sitting here ever since the time of his accident, I bet.
Okay, Ulysses. This place would be hard to find, even following that old ATV trail. But you didn’t want to forget it, thus the GPS numbers. You planned on returning. Why?
In the back seat I saw a fiberglass handle. I grabbed and lifted and was holding a shovel in decent shape. I used it to scrape out the car of debris and nests, sending small rodents scampering and releasing a rich odor of life and animal waste. The Jeep was essentially empty.
I kicked around the ruined shed and scrapped soggy boards aside. The wooden fibers parted and fell. Buried underneath old shingles I found a bizarre contraption connected to a battery coated with acid. I sat in a dry spot and poked through the mess of wires and saw…needles? I picked up metal parts and discarded them. What were these, maybe bottles of…ink, maybe? All the labels were gone. Needles and ink and this powered contraption…
I felt confident I’d discovered a tattoo kit. A do-it-yourself machine. I’d bet five bucks a forensic technician could look through this quagmire and locate the remnants of animal tranquilizer. And probably a razor to shave a dog, and some disinfectant.
Ulysses had brought GPS here, knocked her out, shaved her, and tattooed her with the coordinates. That would be a doozy of a journal entry.
I poked through the rest of the remains. Found an old cast-iron pan and a stainless steel mug. Some other stuff I couldn’t identify. I walked the perimeter of the ruins and saw nothing. I circled it again looked and thought.
What had I learned?
Ulysses Steinbeck had a secret shed.
But it was nearly impossible to get here. In fact, I bet he’d gotten lost a few times finding it. So he’d come up here with a puppy in the J
eep and a tattoo kit. Once here, he used a GPS device to determine the latitude and longitude and he’d tattooed it onto the side of a dog. Much easier to find now. And he returned home without the Jeep.
To a well-trained and keen eye like mine, it all made sense.
Except not really, no it didn’t.
What on earth, Ulysses.
I got lost getting back to my car. Took an hour longer than it should.
This is why Gandalf never asked me to help.
Chapter 25
Kix and I played with Georgina Princess at the park off Grandin until dusk. GPS reacted with dignity and polite interest at the sight of other dogs, but she much preferred the company of my son and me. We threw a ball and pushed on the swing and slid down slides until we couldn’t see one another, and decided hours spent thusly were the reason we existed.
Timothy August made chicken soup with cauliflower instead of noodles. Manny and I ate with him and Stackhouse until he claimed he could do more pushups than me, and we had to quit to determine supremacy. I collapsed at fifty. He stopped at fifty-five, though he could’ve kept going. I laid on the floor gasping. He hopped up and kept eating.
“It’s because,” I said. I sounded like someone with a cervix dilated to ten centimeters and pushing. “It’s because you’re skin and bones. While I’m hauling a lot more muscle around.”
Manny ate soup and watched me on the floor. “Hey muscles, you need CPR?”
“I might.”
Kix laughed and pointed.
Georgina Princess nuzzled my ear.
That evening I sat on the couch with my laptop and I surfed to Roanoke County’s online recorder of deeds, and I zoomed in on the map to Ulysses’s GPS coordinates.
One guy owned all that land. Hundreds of acres. Larry Alexander. I Googled him and discovered a Larry Alexander living in Roanoke, using the white pages. The white pages! Online phonebooks still had use, who knew. Glanced at my watch; it was too late to call.
