Rovers

by RICHARD LANGE

  I called Howard and let him know I was in town. It seemed only right. As he did last time I passed through, he invited me to stay with him and Mary, and as I did last time, I said I was fine sleeping in the Econoline.

  “That’s hurtful,” he said. “You’re my brother-in-law. Wanda’ll never forgive me for not talking you into bedding down at our house.”

  “She’ll forgive you,” I said. “She knows better than anyone I’m not fit company these days.”

  “At least meet me for lunch,” he said.

  I felt I could handle that. He’s family, after all.

  He chose the place, the Gold ’N Silver Inn, a greasy spoon near the freeway. He was already sitting with a glass of ice tea in front of him when I got there. He had a badge pinned to his chest with his name and the title Supervisor, Physical Plant on it, so he must have come directly from work.

  You know I’ve always liked Howard. He’ll talk your ear off, but he also listens, and you can see he’s thinking about what you’re telling him rather than just waiting to go on about himself. You once told me he never got to be a kid because he had to step up when your father died and take care of the younger children while your mother worked. Cook for them, bathe them, see they got off to school. That stuck with me, because I was a hellion as a boy, a heedless fool who didn’t give a damn about anybody but myself. While Howard was changing diapers and washing dishes, I was swiping cigarettes and chasing tail, and I’ll bet he’s probably still a better person than me.

  He waved me to his table when he saw me come in, ignored the hand I stuck out and gave me a hug instead.

  “Look at that scruff,” he said.

  I tugged at my beard. “It’s easier just to let the damn thing grow when you’re always on the move,” I said.

  “It’s cool,” he said. “You got kind of a Moses thing going on or, hey, Marvin Gaye.”

  “I’d rather be Marvin than Moses,” I said. “Moses had God’s ear, but Marvin, he’s got all the money.”

  Howard gave the joke a heartier laugh than it deserved. I could tell he was uncomfortable behind his smile. We sat and fumbled with our napkins and silverware.

  “How you been?” he said.

  There was no sense in lying. “It’s been rough,” I told him. “Lonely days and lonelier nights.”

  He nodded like he understood and said, “How long do you think you can keep it up?”

  “As long as it takes to find out who killed Benny,” I said. “Nobody’s gonna do this if I don’t.”

  “The police—” he began.

  “The police have given up,” I said. “They gave up a long time ago. ‘Do you know how many murders go unsolved every year?’ one of the detectives had the gall to ask me. ‘That’s the way it is sometimes,’ he said.”

  The waitress brought me a cup of coffee. Howard waited in silence while I stirred in cream and sugar. Someone was playing a slot machine in the bar. I heard the lever being pulled and the reels spinning and clicking.

  “Listen,” Howard said. “I’m not gonna pretend I know what it’s like to lose a child, and I admire your dedication, but maybe there comes a point where you have to accept the tragedies life throws at you.”

  I took out my wallet and opened it to a photo of Benny. “You remember this kid, don’t you?” I said. “That laugh he had that made everybody else laugh? At what point am I supposed to forget that?”

  “I’m not saying you have to forget him,” Howard replied.

  “He hid a stray dog in his room for a month,” I said. “Wanda hates dogs, but he convinced her to let him keep it. He was tenderhearted, couldn’t stand to see anything suffer. I took that for weakness and was hard on him when I shouldn’t have been. I said things to him that haunt me, things that made him leave home.”

  Howard reached across the table and laid a hand on my arm. “Charles,” he said. “Charles, listen to me. Benny was a drug addict. He was a prostitute. He got into a car with the wrong person. That’s the truth of it. The ugly truth. You feel guilty about what you said to him, and maybe you should. But you also gotta know that whenever someone dies, someone else always wishes they’d set things right with them before.”

  I felt my anger building. It doesn’t take much to set me off these days. All of a sudden it was all I could do to keep from pounding my fist on the table.

  “So you’re another one like that detective,” I said. “Gonna tell me how it is.”

  “I’m here for the sake of my sister,” Howard said. “You feel bad about Benny, but what about Wanda? You cleaned out the bank accounts when you left, and while you’ve been running around conducting your investigation, she’s been working sixty hours a week to keep up the mortgage on your house. She’s been busting her ass to pay bills and buy groceries. She’s been going to bed every night not knowing where you are and wondering if you’re ever coming back. When’s the last time you even called her?”

  “To say what?” I asked him. “I’m failing out here? I’m chasing my own tail?”

  “What you need to do,” he said, “and I’m telling you this with nothing but love, is get your ass home and take care of the living instead of obsessing over the dead.”

  What he said made sense, but sense has no place in the new world I woke into the day I got the call about Benny’s murder. For a year afterward I pretended things were the same as they’d been before, that I was the same. I went to work every day, I came home and sat down to dinner with you, and I went to bed at nine every evening. Most nights, though, I lay wide awake, begging God to let me sleep.

  I tried hard, baby, but I realized I was fooling myself. I realized the old world I’d been living in died along with Benny, and I’d been stranded in a new one where madness and cruelty were the norm. How to explain this to a good woman like you, though? All you’d have heard would’ve been the raving of a lunatic. So I didn’t try. I snuck off instead, set out on this mission of mine.

  And it would have been just as impossible to explain myself to Howard. I finished my coffee, stood slowly so as not to explode, and spoke softly lest I shatter every window in the place.

  “Good to see you,” I said.

  “Hold on, now, goddammit, hold on,” Howard said.

  “Give my love to Mary and the boys.”

  I tottered out of the diner, feeling like I was carrying a thousand extra pounds. I started breathing easier when I reached the Econoline, but fresh air wasn’t enough. I needed something more to keep me going. I needed a sign I was on the right path.

  Be careful what you wish for, they say.

  As I fumbled for my key, desperate to escape before Howard got it into his head to follow me out and press his case, I noticed an old white man standing nearby. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he regarded me through one squinted eye, the other hidden behind a black patch.

  “You all right?” he said. His voice sounded like gravel in a garbage disposal.

  “I’m fine,” I replied.

  He jerked his chin at the shoe polish pleas scrawled on the van. “Your son was murdered?”

  “He was.”

  “How?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Throat cut? Bled out? Killed one place, dumped another?”

  I examined the man more closely. He wore blue coveralls and had the steel-gray flattop haircut and broomstick-up-the-ass posture of an ex-soldier.

  “They found him in a trash bin in Los Angeles,” I said. “Two years ago.”

  “My wife was buried in the desert outside Tonopah,” he said. “Coyotes dug up her remains, and a crew of linemen happened upon them.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

  Hot wind blasted across the parking lot, scattering trash and rocking the Econoline. The sky was the color of dirt, the sun missing in action.

  “Let’s go to my house and talk,” the man said.

  “I don’t think so,” I replied. “You can say what you have to say here.”

  “I could,�
�� the man said. “But I won’t. And besides, it’s not so much what I’ve got to say as what I’ve got to show you.”

  In my search for Benny’s murderer, I’ve wasted time on mad scientists, fallen under the spell of false prophets, and been led to lots of dead ends by conspiracy theorists of every stripe. This one-eyed man was different, I could tell. Those of us in pain are sensitive to pain in others. We’re tuned to the distinctive frequencies of grief.

  “How far?” I said.

  “Twenty miles,” the man said. “My name’s Czarnecki. Follow me in your van.”

  He walked to an old green Ford pickup crowned with a camper, got in, and pulled out of the lot. We headed up into the hills south of town. He drove fifty miles an hour whether he was on the freeway or on a twisty two-lane mountain road. We turned off onto a dirt track somewhere near Truckee. The road ended a few miles and a couple of creek crossings later at a cabin and some outbuildings spread over an acre of sagebrush and Ponderosa pines.

  Czarnecki parked in front of the cabin. A blue jay harangued me from the top of a tree as I joined him. The cabin was old but solid. A rocking chair waited on the porch next to a coffee can full of sand and cigarette butts. An American flag hung next to the front door.

  Czarnecki led me into the one-room structure. A sofa, a TV, a bed in one corner with a sleeping bag on it instead of sheets. A sink, a refrigerator, a stove, a table with two chairs. There was some clutter—antique bottles lined up on the mantel above the stone fireplace, rusty branding irons, taxidermied animals—but everything looked to have been arranged, not strewn haphazardly.

  “Want a beer?” Czarnecki said, going to the refrigerator.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  He tore the tab off a can of Budweiser and took a seat at the table. “I don’t suppose you’ll sit, either,” he said.

  “I’m fine where I am,” I said. I wanted to be ready to make a quick getaway if necessary.

  Czarnecki lit a cigarette and contemplated the match after he’d blown it out. “How long have you been looking for your boy’s killer?” he said.

  “It’s been a year now,” I said.

  “Got any suspects?”

  “No, but I have some theories.”

  “The circumstances do make a man ponder,” Czarnecki said. “Abducted somewhere. Killed and drained of blood somewhere else. Body left somewhere else. That’s not a robbery, that’s a ritual. I like to drove myself nuts ruminating over it.”

  He paused to take a hit off his cigarette, a long, deep drag he released with a hiss.

  “Then I found Mr. Otto,” he said. “Or, rather, Mr. Otto found me. He turned up one day at my old place in Carson City, the house I shared with Marjorie, my wife. This was a couple years after her murder, a couple years where I hadn’t been doing much but drinking. Drinking and pondering. ‘I’d like to talk to you about your wife,’ Mr. Otto said. ‘What about her?’ I said, skeptical, like you.”

  He paused again, and I realized he was fighting tears. “Everything changed for me that day,” he said. “And everything’s gonna change for you today.” He finished his beer in a gulp. “Come with me.”

  I followed him outside. The jay was still squawking. A warning, I now realize. Nature raising an alarm. I should have heeded it. I should have gotten into the Econoline and driven away as fast as I could. But Czarnecki had hooked me, piqued my curiosity. We went to a concrete-block shed with a thick wooden door. Czarnecki opened a padlock and folded back a steel hasp. The door creaked when he pushed it. Blood was racing through my veins. I could feel it in my wrists, in my throat.

  The big, orange afternoon sun shot fire into the windowless shed. In the middle of the tomblike space was a cot; on the cot, a blanket; under the blanket, what?

  Czarnecki stepped into the shed and yanked off the cover. The sun shone on a figure lying on the cot. A white man—a kid, really—naked except for underwear. He was in handcuffs, and his feet were shackled, too, at the ankles. The restraints were attached by a chain to an eyebolt embedded in the concrete floor.

  When the sunlight hit him, he screamed like a wounded animal and writhed in agony. “What the fuck?” he wailed. “What the fuck?” He threw his arms up to protect his face from the glare, and his flesh started to smoke.

  Czarnecki pulled me into the shed and slammed the door shut, plunging the room into darkness. He yanked a string to turn on a bare bulb dangling from the ceiling. The kid quieted. He was twenty or so, with blond hair and blue eyes. The skin on his forehead, his arms, his legs—wherever the sun’s rays had touched him—was black and blistered. The stench of it made me retch, and I retreated in horror until my back was against the door.

  Before my eyes, the wounds began to heal. The charred areas flattened and softened, and new flesh spread like melting wax to cover the lesions.

  “Isn’t that something?” Czarnecki said.

  I had no response.

  “You can shoot them, stab them, run over them with your car, and they’ll come right back from it.”

  Pretty soon it was as if the boy had never been burned at all. As his pain eased, he regarded me with a disdainful sneer that revealed a gold tooth up front. He was so thin, his elbows and knees were swollen knobs, and you could count his ribs. There was a tattoo of a butterfly on his chest.

  Enough for now.

  My fingers are too weak to hold this pen, my mind too tired to remember clearly. I’ll get some sleep and set the rest down later. Unless I wake and find this has all been a bad dream. Please let that be so.

  TODAY’S PASSAGE: Everyone that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.

  —John 3:20

  8

  THE FIENDS MAKE THE RIDE TO PHOENIX OVER TWO NIGHTS, with a stop in Alpine to wait out the sun. They keep to deserted back roads, hogging both lanes and rocketing through sleeping one-horse towns.

  At one point they come upon a pickup truck rattling home from some late-night mischief and speed up to overtake and surround it. Eight black Harleys ridden by eight leather-clad devils materialize out of the darkness, and the truck’s driver is buffeted by the bone-jarring rumble and soul-deep throb of the bike’s engines. The Fiends laugh at the yokel’s jaw dropping beneath his cowboy hat and roar off—disappearing, the driver swears later, in a cloud of smoke and swirling sparks.

  They get to Phoenix just before dawn and check into the Apache Motel. That evening Antonia calls George Moore’s man. The guy is some kind of hawkshaw, some kind of bounty hunter. He doesn’t offer his name.

  “McMullin is flopping at the Sandman on Van Buren,” he says. “But he’s at a ball game tonight, at the stadium.”

  Antonia hangs up and joins the rest of the Fiends by the motel’s swimming pool, drops onto a chaise next to Elijah. Real Deal, Bob 1, and Johnny Kickapoo are roughhousing in the water like unruly children. The rest of the gang slam dominoes on a round metal table with a metal umbrella hovering above it. A transistor radio blares a rock ’n’ roll station. The motel’s owner has asked them twice to turn the music down, but they crank it back up as soon as he returns to the office. Nobody’s worried about him calling the cops. The motel is lousy with hookers, thieves, and dopers.

  Johnny Kickapoo climbs out of the pool. He got his nickname because he hung around the Kickapoo reservation while growing up in Oklahoma. He doesn’t have a drop of Native blood in him—his black hair and eyes come from his Italian mother, his prominent nose from his German father—but he pretends he’s part Indian, even wears a feather in his hair. He bares his ass at the other swimmers and jumps back in with his knees pulled to his chest. The resulting explosion sends the pool’s pale blue light skittering over the dying palms drooping overhead. Above them the stars, unmoved, as Antonia and Elijah discuss the hit.

  Normally, the next team up in the rotation, in this case Real Deal and Yuma, would do the job and split half the payment—minus ten percent to Monsieur Beaumont—and the rest of the gang would di
vide the remaining half equally. The baby Moore has promised throws a wrench into the works. An infant is special for a rover. Feed on one and instead of having to feed again the next month, you can go a whole year. Something about the blood.

  You’d think, then, it would be open season on babies, but in the same way that con men are known to be as gullible as their marks, rovers are a superstitious lot, and a venerable bit of lore keeps most of them away from infants: Steal a child, the warning goes, and you’ll wind up dusted soon after.

  Antonia scoffs at this fear. She understands that it’s simply the childish spookifying of the real danger connected to snatching babies: The disappearance of an infant upsets the public much more than if a vagrant or a whore suddenly drops off the face of the earth. It makes people much more likely to form posses, mount searches, and scrutinize strangers, all of which could mean disaster for a rover.

  But since the Fiends didn’t grab the baby in question—and in fact have no idea how Moore got it—they’d all be comfortable feeding on the child. Even if it’s shared with a partner, that’s still six months of not having to hunt, not having to wonder where your next get-right is coming from, and not having to worry about being caught draining some rummy. Six months when you could get off the road and relax if you wanted to.

  That’s why Antonia tells Elijah it’s only fair they make an exception to the rotation this time and allow everyone a chance at the jackpot.

  “That won’t go over well,” Elijah says.

  And he’s right.

  “You can’t be changing how we do things whenever you want,” Real Deal says when Antonia has gathered everyone around the umbrella table. “It’s me and Yuma’s turn. We do the job, and the baby’s ours.”

  “Right,” Yuma says. “Luck of the draw. It could’ve been any of us.”

  “If you two weren’t up, you’d be begging for a chance at the brat,” Pedro says.

  “But we don’t have to beg,” Yuma says. “Because the rules are the rules.”

  Bob 2 tosses a beer can. Pedro shakes a finger in Yuma’s face. War’s about to break out. Antonia raps her knuckles on the table to quiet the shouting.