Rovers

by RICHARD LANGE

  Jesse sits on the bed with her in his lap. Get over here, he says, don’t let it go to waste. I fasten my lips to the hole in Candy’s throat. Hot blood fills my mouth. I suck and swallow suck and swallow. You got to work fast to drink as much as you can before the heart gives out. Abby feeds too. She comes out from under the bed and licks up the blood on the floor. Candy was a bad girl. Her blood tastes like dirty water. The Little Devil don’t care. He gets his fill and settles and I’m not hungry anymore neither not hurting.

  Sometimes Jesse lets me play the radio when we’re driving sometimes he don’t. Tonight he wants quiet. Won’t even let me tap my fingers. There’s no other cars on the road. It’s dark and dark and darker. Nothing to look at but the dotted line. I pretend it’s ears of corn and the Ford’s a hog gobbling them up. I pretend it’s rabbits and the car’s a hound.

  How far are we from Hollywood? I ask Jesse so bored I don’t care if he gets mad at me for talking. We ain’t going to Hollywood, he says. I want to see Daniel Boone and Mingo, I say. Daniel Boone died a hundred years ago, Jesse says. That’s an actor on TV pretending to be him. I know that, I say. No you don’t, Jesse says. You think he’s real.

  Jesse says there can only be one boss and it’s him. Says he makes the rules and I’m to follow them. Like a dog. If he’s so smart how come he don’t know you can only kick a dog so long before he turns and bites?

  We swerve onto a rough dirt road. I hang on so I don’t bang my head. Jesse drives deeper into the dark and pulls over and shuts off the engine. An itty-bitty moon silvers the rocky hills the sand and the trees that look like badmen surrendering. Jesse opens his door and gets out. A coyote yips close by. Abby’s ears is back and her tail’s aswishing. She’d whup a coyote’s ass.

  What’re you waiting on? Jesse says. Drag your lazy butt out here.

  I’ll do anything to get out of shoveling. I’ve played sick. I’ve lied about a bum leg. It don’t sound like Jesse’s in the mood for foolishness tonight though. I climb out and meet him at the trunk. Miss Candy’s in there with a bedsheet for a shroud. Jesse hands me a shovel.

  We walk out a ways and commence to digging. Six foot is Christian but we never go that deep. Ain’t no preacher looking. You got to bury your bodies or burn them. Make them disappear. That’s a rule for all rovers: cover your tracks. Otherwise folks’ll put two and two together and that’d be the death of us all. That’s what happened in Europe in the old days, Jesse told me. Rovers there got sloppy and people caught on and hunted most of them down or run them off. That’s when the first ones come here to the United States of America.

  I say I wish we was rich so we could hire a man to dig for us. Jesse says to wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which fills faster. Or we could turn someone and make him dig, I say. We ain’t turning nobody, Jesse says. There’s too many of us as it is. I ask when he’s gonna take me to Disneyland like he promised. Why? he says. You want to visit Mickey Mouse? You think he’s real too? Mickey Mouse is a cartoon, I say, and a cartoon ain’t real. If you can’t talk and dig at the same time don’t talk, Jesse says.

  After we lay Miss Candy to rest I say a prayer over her. Jesse tells me to hurry it up we got to steal a new car before we hit the road. 10-4 good buddy, I say, I’m about to put the hammer down. I know he won’t let me drive tonight so I don’t ask.

  3

  June 24, 1976, Portland, Oregon

  COFFEE AND DOUGHNUTS FOR BREAKFAST. I PICKED UP NEW enlargements of the photos of Benny to replace the ones ruined by the rain and took them to a place to be laminated. The man there recommended a print shop that could run off more copies of the flyer.

  The guy at the print shop looked at the flyer, then at me.

  “Who was this boy to you, the one who was murdered?” he asked.

  “He was my son,” I replied.

  The man’s eyes flickered like candles about to go out.

  “I lost a son too,” he said. He gestured at a photo hanging on the wall, a kid in a Boy Scout uniform, giving the peace sign.

  “Vietnam,” the guy said. “Eighteen years old.”

  So much grief. So many people in mourning. Souls everywhere bent double under the weight.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.

  “And I hope you find who killed your boy,” the guy said. He wouldn’t let me pay for the flyers.

  I drove the Econoline to a park on the Willamette River and ate a can of deviled ham and a sleeve of Ritz crackers for lunch. The sun sparkled where it hit the water, and Mt. Hood floated on a layer of haze. A bunch of hippies sprawled on a patch of grass nearby, white boys with long hair and beards, white girls in Indian-print skirts and headbands. Someone had a guitar, someone else a Frisbee. A couple of the girls got up to dance. A big, yellow dog joined them, barking excitedly. One of the girls took hold of the animal’s front paws and waltzed it in a circle.

  I went over with some flyers and handed them around, asked if anyone had seen Benny.

  “This says he was killed in L.A.,” one of the boys said. “Shouldn’t you be looking there?”

  “He hung out here too,” I said. I have the postcard he sent, the one with the river and the mountain on the front and Doing fine, don’t worry on the back. Like all the rest of the cards, it’s addressed only to you, his mother.

  “I bet the fuzz are useless,” the boy said. “I bet they could give two shits about a dead black kid.”

  What the hell do you know about anything? I wanted to reply, but I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut. “There’s a telephone number there for an answering service,” I said. “I’m offering a reward for information.”

  “Money makes the world go round,” the boy said. He tapped another kid with the Frisbee and told him to go long. Even with the hair, the beads, and the beard, he dreamed of being a quarterback, an all-American hero. The other kid sprinted across the grass. The quarterback sailed the Frisbee to him and whooped and clapped when he made a diving catch. The girls went back to dancing with the dog.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon in the park. I wiped down the side of the van and used shoe polish to reapply the messages: SON MURDERED, REWARD FOR INFO, PLEASE HELP. I put up the photos of Benny and the poster I made that lays out everything I know about his death. A path ran right past the Econoline, and everyone who used it, the bicyclists, the joggers, the dog-walkers, could see the display.

  Then I lay down on my cot in the back of the van and went through the local newspapers. An alcoholic living in a boardinghouse had gone missing. I scissored out the story and pasted it in my scrapbook. The corpse of a young woman had been fished from the river, the body too decomposed to determine the cause of death. I saved that one too.

  And then I came upon one about a little girl murdered a month ago. Suzy Byrd, age ten, left home to walk to school. Her body was found a week later in a junkyard. Her throat had been cut. James and Molly, her grieving parents, were begging for the public’s help in finding the killer. Anyone who knew anything about the crime was asked to call a police tip line.

  Another atrocity for the book. After only a year, it’s almost full. Every city I pass through has had a mysterious death or disappearance, and I still believe that if I gather enough of these stories and peruse them closely enough they’ll lead me like a trail of blood to whoever killed Benny.

  I ate a peanut-butter sandwich for dinner and drove to the Memorial Coliseum, where a rock band was playing a concert. I parked out front but a cop made me move, said I was blocking a fire lane. I found another spot and walked back to pass out flyers to the kids when the show ended.

  They were an unruly bunch, mostly white, mostly high. The majority of them dropped the flyer without looking at it, and those who did take the time to read it were no help. One girl cried and hugged me and wouldn’t let go. “It’s so sad,” she kept wailing. Her boyfriend finally dragged her off, saying, “Sorry, man. She’s tripping.” Another kid raved about satanic cults. He was stoned on something too. His eyeballs
wheeled, and he fidgeted like a horse tormented by flies.

  “Did you know Satan was an angel?” he said. “A fallen angel. Can you dig it?”

  When the crowd thinned, I drove to a quiet neighborhood, parked the van, and crawled into my cot. I write this by flashlight after 373 days in the wilderness, feeling farther than ever from the truth. I don’t know if you’ll ever read this, but it does me good to keep a record, helps me organize my thoughts, helps me remember where I’ve been, and gives me someone to talk to. Good night, Wanda. I miss you. Good night, Benny. I miss you too.

  TODAY’S PASSAGE: I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of His wrath. He hath led me and brought me into darkness, but not into light.

  —Lamentations 3:1–2

  June 25, 1976, Weed, California

  Coffee was all I could handle this morning. My stomach was as tight as a clenched fist. After calling the service from a pay phone in the library to see if anyone had responded to yesterday’s flyers, I dialed the tip line from the story about the little girl who’d been murdered. The cop who answered was suspicious when I said I wanted to talk to the girl’s parents.

  “Do you have information about the crime?” he said.

  “Not specifically,” I said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I’m conducting an investigation.”

  “Into what?”

  “That’s classified.”

  “Classified?” the cop said. “Are you with law enforcement?”

  “It’s an independent investigation.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “I’ll tell that to the parents.”

  “You’re not gonna talk to the parents if you don’t give me your name and tell me where you’re calling from,” the cop said.

  I hung up and quickly left the library in case they were running a trace. After what happened last time, I should know better than to go through official channels. You remember that, in Seattle, when I first tried to contact the family of someone murdered in a way similar to Benny. It was a teenage boy there, and I stupidly agreed to meet his mother at the police station after phoning the tip line. When I showed up the cops took me into custody and interrogated me for forty-eight hours before escorting me to the city limits. I never got to talk to the mother, but I read later that the father ended up confessing to the killing.

  This time I drove to another phone booth, at a gas station on the other side of town, and looked in the directory hanging there. I quickly found the address for Mr. and Mrs. James Byrd. Rather than calling, I’d visit in person.

  I cruised past the house, checking for police. The small wooden bungalow looked as if it was about to be set upon by the hulking, ivy-covered trees surrounding it. It hadn’t been painted in who knows how long, and the yard was strewn with junk—a rusted washing machine, a crumpled fender, milk crates full of empty beer bottles. The place fit right into the neighborhood, a poor-white ghetto made up of houses that had seen better days and known better residents. Even on a serene sunny morning, the street oozed melancholy and regret. Satisfied the coast was clear, I parked down the block.

  The pink kiddie bicycle lying on the porch brought tears to my eyes. I picked it up and propped it on its kickstand before knocking at the door. When I heard the lock click, I stepped back, giving whoever was about to answer plenty of space. It was a woman, or rather what was left of a woman whose heart had been torn out and whose brain had been scrambled by loss. I could have put my finger right through her.

  “Yes?” she said in the softest of voices.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am, but are you Suzy Byrd’s mother?” I asked.

  “I am,” the woman replied. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Charles Sanders, and I wondered if I might talk to you about what happened to your daughter.”

  “She was murdered,” the woman said.

  “I know that, ma’am,” I said. “My son was murdered, too, in the same way, two years ago, in Los Angeles. The police gave up trying to find the killer, but I’ve been working on my own, retracing my son’s path in the last year of his life, gathering information and searching for anyone who might know something about what happened to him.”

  Confusion clouded the woman’s face. “Why would you think I’d know anything?” she said.

  “No, no,” I said. “Excuse me for not making myself clear. The reason I’m here is, as part of my investigation, I’m talking to people whose loved ones died under similar circumstances on the chance there might be a connection the police aren’t seeing.”

  “What connection?” the woman said.

  “One theory I have is that the same person might be committing a lot of these murders,” I said. “They’re identical in many ways. I’ve got some clippings I could show you.”

  “I don’t…I don’t—” the woman said. She raised a trembling hand to her mouth.

  “Your daughter’s throat was cut, right?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Was her body drained of blood?”

  “Oh, my God,” the woman said. “How could you?”

  A man appeared behind her, a big man with three days’ stubble and red eyes.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “He asked if Suzy’s blood was drained,” the woman said.

  “How do you know that?” the man said.

  “As I was telling your wife, the same thing happened to my son,” I said. “A small incision over the jugular vein. Very neat. Very precise.”

  “Stop,” the woman wailed.

  “Call Sergeant Emory,” the man said to her and stepped onto the porch. He reached for me, but I slapped his hand away and backed down the stairs.

  “I want to help you,” I said.

  He kept coming. I grabbed his arm, turned, and flipped him over my shoulder with a throw I learned in the Army. He landed hard, air whooshing out of him in a beery gust. I ran to the Econoline, climbed in, and sped away.

  Figuring the police would be looking for me, I got on Interstate 5 headed south. This was my second visit to Portland in the past year, and I think it’s time to admit it’s a dead end. I’m not even sure how much time Benny spent there. It could have been a month, it could have been a quick layover on a bus on his way to somewhere else. The next postcard he sent you after Portland came from Reno. I’ve been there three times already, but I’ll go back and poke around again before working my way down to L.A.

  I pulled into this truck stop shortly after crossing into California, parked between two big rigs, took a shower, and had chicken fried steak for dinner. Afterward I sat in the restaurant and read the local paper but found nothing new to add to the scrapbook.

  I know what you’re thinking, baby: I need to work on my approach if I’m going to continue talking to folks who’ve been through what we have—and I am going to continue talking to them, because that might be the key to finding Benny’s killer. My desperation got the better of me today, and I came on too strong. I’ll ease into the subject next time, use more tact. I bought a book in the store here, one of those self-improvement guides. Maybe that’ll help.

  TODAY’S PASSAGE: Always lead with a smile. A smile will open more doors (and hearts!) than the slickest patter.

  —Listen, Respond, Win: A New Path to Success

  by Dr. Christine Pellegrino

  4

  THE FIENDS ORDER BEER AND WHISKEY: SEVEN LONE STARS, seven shots. The old man behind the bar pours the Jack with a shaky hand.

  “He scared or just decrepit?” Real Deal jokes with Yuma.

  Yuma twists a lock of her long red hair around a finger and smiles at the bartender. “Kinda dead in here tonight, ain’t it?” she says.

  There’s only one other customer besides the Fiends, another old man, this one in an Astros ball cap. He’s trying hard not to stare at the seven leather-jacketed savages who burst through the door of this nowheresville roadhouse and charged the air with evil electricity.

  “Yu
p,” the bartender says. “I was about to close before you all rolled in.”

  “We won’t keep you too late,” Yuma says. “Promise.”

  Bob 1 and Bob 2 are getting ready to shoot pool, lagging for the break. Johnny Kickapoo studies the jukebox. Antonia and Elijah, the leaders of the gang, sit head-to-head at a small round table, apart from and somehow above everybody else. Antonia is tall and thin, with icy blue eyes that tell you nothing unless you know her and blond hair she keeps cut short. Elijah is the biggest, burliest dude in the gang, but also the most graceful. Behind his unruly black beard is the face of a king or a prince from a 500-year-old painting.

  Pedro, keeping watch out front, opens the door and pokes his head in. “He’s here,” he says, and steps aside to let George Moore’s man pass. George Moore’s man is a Mexican cowboy in a big straw hat. Everybody watches him walk to Antonia and Elijah’s table.

  “You’re to come with me,” he says.

  Antonia looks at Elijah, and Elijah looks at Antonia. They’ve been together so long, they don’t need words to make a decision. They stand at the same time.

  “Hold down the fort,” Antonia says as she and Elijah follow the man out the door. Johnny drops a dime into the juke and punches a couple of buttons. Bob Wills’s “Take Me Back to Tulsa” comes blaring out so loud, everybody jumps.

  Out in the parking lot Antonia and Elijah put on their helmets, climb onto their Harleys, and kick them to life. The rumble of the engines shakes the ground and agitates the very atmosphere, waking every slumbering critter for miles around. Neon ricochets off chrome as the Fiends follow the Mexican’s pickup out of the lot and on down the road. It’s so dark out here in the wilds between San Antonio and Laredo, so desolate, they might as well be racing through a black tunnel.

  Ten minutes later the truck’s brake lights flare. There’s no sign for Moore’s ranch. Antonia and Elijah would have zoomed right past the turnoff if the Mexican wasn’t with them. He unlocks a gate and waves the bikes through, then drives through himself and gets out to lock the gate before taking the lead again.