by Ed Gorman
There's an especially moving scene where the great Gleason sits at the shabby table in the shabby little apartment and tries to make sense of the things that composed his life. And can't.
I thought of Phil Warren and what he was doing and how wrong it was yet how right it was, too.
Some things you can't make sense of, I guess; some things you just can't.
BLESS US O LORD
I usually think of Midwestern Thanksgivings as cold, snowy days. But as we gathered around the table this afternoon, my parents and my wife, Laura, and our two children, Rob and Kate, I noticed that the blue sky and sunlight in the window looked more like an April day than one in late November.
"Would you like to say grace today?" my mother said to four-year-old Kate.
Kate of the coppery hair and slow secretive smile nodded and started in immediately. She got the usual number of words wrong and everybody smiled the usual number of times and then the meal began.
Dad is a retired steelworker. I remember, as a boy, watching fascinated as he'd quickly work his way through a plate heaped with turkey, sweet potatoes, dressing, cranberry sauce and two big chunks of the honey wheat bread Mom always makes for Thanksgiving and Christmas. And then go right back for seconds of everything and eat all that up right away, too.
He's sixty-seven now and probably thirty pounds over what he should be and his eyesight is fading and the only exercise he gets is taking out the garbage once a day—but he hasn't, unfortunately, lost that steelworker's appetite.
Mom on the other hand, thin as she was in her wedding pictures, eats a small helping of everything and then announces, in a sort of official way, "I'm stuffed."
"So how goes the lawyer business?" Dad asked after everybody had finished passing everything around.
Dad never tires of reminding everybody that his youngest son did something very few young men in our working-class neighborhood did—went on to become a lawyer, and a reasonably successful one, too, with downtown quarters in one of the shiny new office buildings right on the river, and two BMWs in the family, even if one of them is fourteen years old.
"Pretty well, I guess," I said.
Laura smiled and laid her fingers gently on my wrist. "Someday this son of yours has to start speaking up for himself. He's doing very well. In fact, Bill Grier—one of the three partners—told your son here that within two years he'll be asked to be a partner, too."
"Did you hear that, Margaret?" Dad said to Mom.
"I heard," she said, grinning because Dad was grinning.
Dad's folks were Czechs. His father and mother landed in a ship in Galveston and trekked all the way up to Michigan on the whispered rumor of steel mill work. Dad was the first one in his family to learn English well. So I understood his pride in me.
Laura patted me again and went back to her food. I felt one of those odd gleeful moments that married people get when they realize, every once in a while, that they're more in love with their mates now than they were even back when things were all backseat passion and spring flowers.
Of course, back then, I'd been a little nervous about bringing Laura around the house. Mom and Dad are very nice people, you understand, but Laura's father is a very wealthy investment banker and I wasn't sure how she'd respond to the icons and mores of the working class—you know, the lurid and oversweet paintings of Jesus in the living room and the big booming excitement Dad brings to his pro wrestling matches on the tube.
But she did just fine. She fell in love with my mom right away and if she was at first a little intimidated by the hard Slav passions of my father, she was still able to see the decent and gentle man abiding in his heart.
As I thought of all this, I looked around the table and felt almost tearful. God, I loved these people, they gave my life meaning and worth and dignity, every single one of them.
And then Mom said it, as I knew she inevitably would. "It's a little funny without Davey here, isn't it?"
Laura glanced across the table at me then quickly went back to her cranberry sauce.
Dad touched Mom's hand right away and said, "Now, Mom, Davey would want us to enjoy ourselves and you know it."
Mom was already starting to cry. She got up from the table and whispered, "Excuse me," and left the dining room for the tiny bathroom off the kitchen.
Dad put his fork down and said, "She'll be all right in a minute or two."
"I know," I said.
My six-year-old son, Rob, said, "Is Gramma sad about Uncle Davey, Grandpa?"
And Dad, looking pretty sad himself, nodded and said, "Yes, she is, honey. Now you go ahead and finish your meal."
Rob didn't need much urging to do that.
A minute later, Mom was back at the table. "Sony," she said. Laura leaned over and kissed Mom on the cheek.
We went back to eating our Thanksgiving meal.
Davey was my younger brother. Five years younger. He was everything I was not—socially poised, talented in the arts, a heartbreaker with the ladies. I was plodding, unimaginative and no Robert Redford, believe me.
I had only one advantage over Davey. I never became a heroin addict. This happened sometime during his twenty-first year, back at the time the last strident chords of all those sixties protest guitars could be heard fading into the dusk.
He never recovered from this addiction. I don't know if you've ever known any family that's gone through addiction but in some ways the person who suffers least is the person who is addicted. He or she can hide behind the drugs or the alcohol. He doesn't have to watch himself slowly die, nor watch his loved ones die right along with him, or watch them go through their meager life savings trying to help him.
Davey was a heroin addict for fourteen years. During that time he was arrested a total of sixteen times, served three long stretches in county jail (he avoided prison only because I called in a few favors), went through six different drug rehab programs, got into two car accidents—one that nearly killed him, one that nearly killed a six-year-old girl—and went through two marriages and countless clamorous relationships, usually with women who were also heroin addicts (a certain primness keeps me from calling my brother a "junkie," I suppose).
And most of the time, despite the marriages, despite the relationships, despite the occasional rehab programs, he stayed at home with my folks.
Those happy retirement years they'd long dreamed of never came because Davey gave them no rest. One night a strange and exotic creature came to the front door and informed Dad that if Davey didn't pay him the drug money he owed him in the next twenty-four hours, Davey would be a dead man. Another night Davey pounded another man nearly to death on the front lawn.
Too many times, Dad had to go down to the city jail late at night to bail Davey out. Too many times, Mom had to go to the doctor to get increased dosages of tranquilizers and sleeping pills.
Davey was six months shy of age forty and it appeared that given his steely Czech constitution, he was going to live a lot longer—not forgo the heroin, you understand—live maybe another full decade, a full decade of watching him grind Mom and Dad down with all his hopeless grief.
Then a few months ago, early September, a hotel clerk found him in this shabby room frequently used as a "shooting gallery." He was dead. He'd overdosed.
Mom and Dad were still working through the shock.
"Is there pink ice cream, Grandma?" Kate asked.
Grandma smiled at me. Baskin-Robbins has a bubble-gum-flavored ice cream and Mom has made it Kate's special treat whenever she visits.
"There's plenty of pink ice cream," Grandma said. "Especially for good girls like you."
And right then, seeing Kate and my mother beaming at each other, I knew I'd done the right thing sneaking up to the hotel room where Davey sometimes went with other junkies, and then giving him another shot when he was still in delirium and blind ecstasy from the first. He was still my brother, lying there dying before me, but I was doing my whole family a favor. I wanted Mom and Dad to have a few good years anyway
.
"Hey, Mr. Counselor," Dad said, getting my attention again. "Looks like you could use some more turkey."
I laughed and patted my burgeoning little middle-class belly. "Correction," I said. "I could use a lot more turkey."
STALKER
i
Eleven years, two months, and five days later, we caught him. In an apartment house on the west edge of Des Moines. The man who had raped and murdered my daughter.
Inside the rental Pontiac, Slocum said, "I can fix it so we have to kill him." The dramatic effect of his words was lost somewhat when he waggled a bag of Dunkin' Donuts at me.
I shook my head. "No."
"No to the doughnuts. Or no to killing him?"
"Both."
"You're the boss."
I suppose I should tell you about Slocum. At least two hundred pounds overweight, given to western clothes too large for even his bulk (trying to hide that slope of belly, I suppose), Slocum is thirty-nine, wears a beard the angriest of Old Testament prophets would have envied, and carries at all times in his shoulder holster a Colt King Cobra, one of the most repellent-looking weapons I've ever seen. I don't suppose someone like me—former economics professor at the state university and antigun activist of the first form—ever quite gets used to the look and feel and smell of such weapons. Never quite.
I had been riding shotgun in an endless caravan of rented cars, charter airplanes, Greyhound buses, Amtrak passenger cars and even a few motorboats for the past seven months, ever since that day in Chicago when I turned my life over to Slocum the way others turned their lives over to Jesus or Republicanism.
I entered his office, put twenty-five thousand dollars in cash on his desk, and said, "Everybody tells me you're the best. I hope that's true, Mr. Slocum."
He grinned at me with teeth that Red Man had turned the color of peach wine. "Fortunately for you, it is true. Now, what is it you'd like me to do?" He turned down the Hank Williams Jr. tape he'd been listening to and waved to me, with a massive beefy hand bearing two faded blue tattoos, to start talking.
I had worked with innumerable police departments, innumerable private investigators, two soldiers of fortune, and a psychic over the past eleven years in an effort to find the man who killed my daughter.
That cold, bright January day seven months ago, and as something of a last resort, I had turned to a man whose occupation sounded far too romantic to be any good to me: Slocum was a bounty hunter.
"Maybe you should wait here."
"Why?" I said.
"You know why."
"Because I don't like guns? Because I don't want to arrange it so we have to kill him?"
"It could be dangerous."
"You really think I care about that?"
He studied my face. "No, I guess you don't."
"I just want to see him when he gets caught. I just want to see his expression when he realizes he's going to go to prison for the rest of his life."
He grinned at me with his stained teeth. "I'd rather see him when he's been gut-shot. Still afraid to die but at the same time wanting to. You know? I gut-shot a gook in Nam once and watched him the whole time. It took him an hour. It was one long hour, believe me."
Staring at the three-story apartment house, I sighed. "Eleven years."
"I'm sorry for all you've gone through."
"I know you are, Slocum. That's one of the things a good liberal like me can't figure out about a man like you."
"What's that?"
"How you can enjoy killing people and still feel so much compassion for the human race in general."
He shrugged. "I'm not killing humanity in general, Robert. I'm killing animals." He took out the Cobra, grim gray metal almost glowing in the late June sunlight, checked it, and put it back. His eyes scanned the upper part of the redbrick apartment house. Many of the screens were torn and a few shattered windows had been taped up. The lawn needed mowing and a tiny black baby walked around wearing a filthy too-small T-shirt and nothing else. Twenty years ago this had probably been a very nice middle-class place. Now it had the feel of an inner-city housing project.
"One thing," he said, as I started to open the door. He put a meaty hand on my shoulder for emphasis.
"Yes?"
"When this is all over—however it turns out—you're going to feel let down."
"You maybe; not me. All I've wanted for the past eleven years was finding Dexter. Now we have found him. Now I can start my life again."
"That's the thing," he said. "That's what you don't understand."
"What don't I understand?"
"This has changed you, Robert. You start hunting people—even when you've got a personal stake in it—and it changes you."
I laughed. "Right. I think this afternoon I'll go down to my friendly neighborhood recruiting office and sign up for Green Beret school."
Occasionally, he got irritated with me. Now seemed to be one of those times. "I'm just some big dumb redneck, right, Robert? What would I know about the subtleties of human psychology, right?"
"Look, Slocum, I'm sorry if—"
He patted his Cobra. "Let's go."
ii
They found her in a grave that was really more of a wide hole up in High Ridge forest where the scrub pines run heavy down to the river. My daughter, Debbie. The coroner estimated she had been there at least thirty days. At the time of her death she'd been seventeen.
This is the way the official version ran: Debbie, leaving her job at the Baskin-Robbins, was dragged into a car, taken into the forest, raped, and killed. Only when I pressed him on the subject did the coroner tell me the extent to which she had been mutilated, the mutilation coming, so far as could be determined, after she had died. At the funeral the coffin was closed.
At the time I had a wife—small, tanned, intelligent in a hard sensible way I often envied, quick to laugh, equally quick to cry—and a son. Jeff was twelve the year his sister died. He was seventeen when he died five years later.
When you're sitting home watching the sullen parade of faceless murders flicker and die on your screen—the weeping mother of the victim, the carefully spoken detective in charge, the sexless doll-like face of the reporter signing off on the story—you don't take into account the impact that the violent death of a loved one has on a family. I do; after Debbie's death, I made a study of the subject. Like so many things I've studied in my life, I ended up with facts that neither enlightened nor comforted. They were just facts.
My family's loss was measured in two ways—my wife's depression (she came from a family that suffered mental illness the way some families suffered freckles) and my son's wildness.
Not that I was aware of either of these problems as they began to play out. When it became apparent to me that the local police were never going to solve the murder—their entire investigation centered on an elusive 1986 red Chevrolet—I virtually left home. Using a generous inheritance left to me by an uncle, I began—in tandem with the private eyes and soldiers of fortune and psychics I've already mentioned—to pursue my daughter's killer. I have no doubt that my pursuit was obsessive, and clinically so. Nights I would lie on the strange, cold, lonely bed of a strange, cold, lonely motel room thinking of tomorrow, always tomorrow, and how we were only hours away from a man we now knew to be one William K. Dexter, age thirty-seven, twice incarcerated for violent crimes, unduly attached to a very aged mother, perhaps guilty of two similar killings in two other Midwestern states. I thought of nothing else—so much so that sometimes, lying there in the motel room, I wanted to take a butcher knife and cut into my brain until I found the place where memory dwelt—and cut it away. William K. Dexter was my only thought.
During this time, me gone, my wife began a series of affairs (I learned all this later), that only served to increase the senseless rage she felt (she seemed to resent the men because they could not give her peace)—she still woke up screaming Debbie's name. Her drinking increased also and she began shopping around for new shrinks the wa
y you might shop around for a new car. A few times during her last two months we made love when I came home on the weekend from pursuing Dexter in one fashion or another—but afterward it was always the same. "You weren't a good father to her, Robert."
"I know."
"And I wasn't a good mother. We're such goddamned selfish people." And then the sobbing, sobbing to the point of passing out (always drunk of course) in a little-girl pile in the bathroom or the center of the hardwood bedroom floor.
Jeff found her. Just home from school, calling her name, not really expecting her to be there, he went upstairs to the TV room for the afternoon ritual of a dance show and there he found her. The last images of a soap opera flickering on the screen. A drink of bourbon in the Smurf glass she always found so inexplicably amusing. A cigarette guttering out in the ashtray. Dressed in one of Jeff's T-shirts with the rock-and-roll slogan on its front and a pair of designer jeans that pointed up the teenage sleekness of her body. Dead. Heart attack.
On the day of her funeral, up in the TV room where she'd died, I was having drinks of my own, wishing I had some facts to tell me what I should be feeling now . . . when Jeff came in and sat down next to me and put his arm around my neck the way he used to when he was three or four. "You can't cry, can you, Dad?" All I could do was sigh. He'd been watching me. "You should cry, Dad. You really should. You didn't even cry when Debbie was killed. Mom told me." He said all this in the young man's voice I still couldn't quite get used to—the voice he used so successfully with ninth-grade girls on the phone. He wasn't quite a man yet but he wasn't a kid, either. In a moment of panic I felt he was an imposter, that this was a joke; where was my little boy? "That's all I do, Dad. Is cry, I mean. I think it helps me. I really do."
So I'd tried, first there with Jeff in the TV room, later alone in my bedroom. But there were just dry choking sounds and no tears at all. At all. I would think of Debbie, her sweet soft radiance; and of my wife, the years when it had been good for us, her so tender and kind in the shadows of our hours together; and I wanted to cry for the loss I felt. But all I could see was the face of William K. Dexter. In some way, he had become more important to me even than the two people he'd taken from me.
