Skinflick

by Joseph Hansen

  “Yes,” he said, consideringly. “I saw a truck like that. Those big wheels that set it up high. Four-wheel drive, I expect. It rumbled. A lot of power.”

  “Machinery in the back?” Dave asked.

  “Oh, yes.” The old man nodded. He reached across to a glove compartment held shut by an arrangement of thick rubber bands. He worked these with arthritic fingers. “I have some cups in here.” The metal door of the glove compartment fell open. “Perhaps you’ll share a little coffee? Tastes good first thing in the morning.” He pulled a cup out of a nest of six and carefully filled it from the Thermos. His motions were slow and tidy. He handed the cup through the window to Dave. “It was posthole-drilling equipment.” The old man recapped the Thermos. He put the cups back into the glove compartment and fixed it shut again with the rubber bands. “And on the front, there was an arrangement to attach something, probably a grader for laying down roads, you know?”

  “The coffee’s good,” Dave said. “Thank you. When did you see the truck?”

  “It was parked back up there.” The old man raised a slow hand to point with a thumb over his shoulder. “I drive up there to turn around and come back down here to park in this space. This is a good old machine but it doesn’t have much left in reverse. Two weeks ago?” He wrinkled an already deeply wrinkled forehead. “Not quite.”

  “It was here when you arrived?” Dave said. “That would be what—seven o’clock in the evening?”

  “Right about then,” the old man said. He drank coffee and stared thoughtfully through the windshield. He shook his head. “No, that wasn’t the first time. First time was Sunday, the day before. Early. I was fixing to leave. Boy with a black beard got out of it. He couldn’t get in the building. They have to know you are coming so they can come unlock the lobby door for you.”

  “Who came?” Dave asked. “Who let him in?”

  “Maybe he never got in,” the old man said. “He was still standing there when I left. He had on a cowboy hat.” Now he looked hard at Dave. “Do you know,” he asked, “the Monday when I saw the truck up there—that was the one they been asking me about. The police. The sheriff. Who came and went that night? Yes, sir! They been asking me about that night.” A little weary smile twitched his mouth. “But they never asked me one time about that truck. You the first one, the only one.”

  “But the boy with the beard wasn’t in it when you saw it?” Dave asked.

  “Nobody was in it. But later on there was. Must’ve been getting on for midnight by then. He come out and tramped up right here past me, so close I could have stretched out my hand and touched him. He unlocked the truck and climbed in and slammed the door and drove it right on up the street to the top, like you did just now.”

  “Alone,” Dave said. “No skinny little blond teenage girl with him?”

  “Alone,” the old man said. He sipped coffee and thought again for a minute. “You want to know why I remember that? Why I paid special attention? Him getting in that truck and driving off?”

  “Why was that?” Dave said.

  “Because he didn’t look the same without the beard.”

  “I’d bet on possibly a wallet,” Dave said. “Almost certainly a duffel bag, maybe even Marine or Army issue. And clothes—work clothes, Levi’s, chinos, work shoes, maybe cowboy boots. Underwear, probably dirty since he didn’t know his way around.”

  The dark kid in uniform kept pulling cartons and parcels off steel shelving in the big room full of steel shelving. He and Dave looked into the cartons and parcels. When Dave shook his head, the kid pushed the cartons and parcels back in place. “You know,” he said, “once I make detective, I’m going to quit and get into your line.”

  “I won’t tell them you said that,” Dave said. “You need time to think it over.” He reckoned the child’s age at about twenty. He was dark, with a rosy flush under smooth skin. “When you’ve had time, you’ll change your mind.” A date scrawled on a carton in felt pen made him stop. “Let’s look in this one.”

  “I won’t change my mind.” The kid pulled the box off the shelf and held it for Dave. “I’ve read about you in the magazines. I saw you on the ‘Tomorrow’ show. What you do is what I want to do.”

  “Be in the magazines, you mean?” Dave said. “Be on television? It was twenty years before that happened to me. You know what it’s a sign of?” He poked among soiled, crumpled T-shirts and boxer shorts in the carton. White boot socks stiff with sweat. There were no boots, no shoes. But there was a wallet, stitched with thongs around the edges, and tooled with a cross entwined by lilies. The wallet was empty. Dirt-crusty work pants had been folded to lie flat. He lifted them. “It’s a sign your best days are behind you.” Crushed khaki canvas. A knapsack, US ARMY. He lifted it out, laid back the flap. The book was there. He removed it “Like the worn-out comedians on game shows.”

  “You don’t look worn out,” the kid said. “Is that what you wanted?”

  Dave nodded. The kid put the box back on the shelf. Dave said, “Before you get into the magazines and on TV, most of what’s cluttered up your life has been boring.”

  “You didn’t make it sound like that,” the kid said.

  “The boring part you don’t talk about,” Dave said. The book was eight by ten, not thick but heavy. The cover was sleek stamped fabricoid, blue and gold, the gold partly rubbed off. ESTACA HIGH SCHOOL 1977. “Naturally,” Dave said. “People watching the ‘Tomorrow’ show are sleepy. They only want to hear the exciting parts. Same for the magazine readers.” He leafed over pages heavy with glossy coating. A girl’s volleyball team under eucalyptus trees, mountains towering in the background. A football team, massive shoulder pads, gangly wrists. The a capella choir in pleated robes. Rows of little square photographs of faces, smiles, no smiles, impudence, dread, determination, defeat, dental braces, acne, eyeglasses, perfect beauty. FROSH. SOPH. JUNIORS. Charleen Sims looked at him. He checked inside the front cover. Charleen Sims in pale blue ballpoint, then Charleen Tackaberry in dark blue ballpoint, then Mrs. Billy Jim Tackaberry, 456 Fourth St., Estaca, CA. She dotted her i’s with circles. Dave handed back the book. “Ever hear of Estaca? Know where it is?”

  “It means ‘stake’ in Spanish.” The kid pulled the carton out, dropped the book into it, pushed the carton back on the shelf. “So maybe it has something to do with vineyards, right? Wine country? San Joaquin Valley?”

  “They should make you a detective pretty fast,” Dave said.

  “I might be wrong,” the kid said.

  22

  HE WASN’T WRONG. AND THAT put it a long way off. It was nightfall by the time Dave found it, a wide main street with high curbs, most of the windows black in stores of cement block or gaunt old brick. Here and there a neon sign said HARDWARE in blue or JOHN DEERE in yellow or DRESSES in pink. There were three or four spaced-out streetlights on tall new silvery standards. A lone traffic light swung high in a wind that blew hot and probably would blow hot all night. The signal switched from red to green to amber and back to red again but there was no one to pay it any mind. Estaca, or most of it, was home for supper and television.

  A young woman with lumpy hips stuffed into blue jeans and with a scarf tied over her hair came out the glass door of a store with bright windows. She opened the cab of a pickup truck, put into it a brown paper sack whose squared-off shape said it held a sixpack, and climbed in after it. PACKAGE STORE, the sign said, which meant that in Estaca you couldn’t sit in a barroom and drink. If you wanted alcohol you bought it here and drank it where you could. The pickup rattled off up the block. Dave put the Triumph where it had been, on the bias, nosing the curb, struggled out of it stiffly, and stretched. It was no car to travel far in.

  “Brand new, ain’t she?” the man inside the liquor store said. He was fat. The T-shirt stretched over his immense belly was printed with a purple bunch of grapes and circling the grapes the fancily lettered words CALIFORNIA WINES. His hair was shaved halfway up the sides and crewcut on top. “Lots of pep, I
guess.”

  “It’s funny in wine-growing country,” Dave said, “not to be able to go into a saloon.” He eyed the bottles on the shelf back of the fat man. He wasn’t going to find Glenlivet here. “What about restaurants? Are they exempt?”

  “Wine only,” the fat man said. “What kind is it? German? Italian? Japanese? No, it ain’t Japanese. Funny, you think back. I was a kid, you couldn’t kill enough of them. Now everybody buys their cars. People forget.”

  “Those that can,” Dave said. “No—it’s English.”

  “Guess you didn’t forget,” the man said. “They was our allies. You get there in the war?” He grinned lecherously with tobacco-stained teeth. “Boy, them blackouts was something. Anything could happen to you in them blackouts. Girls in every doorway, down every little alley. You didn’t have to know where you was; wherever you was, all they had to hear was you talk American and they was unbuttoning your fly. You didn’t get there, huh?”

  There was a round wire rack of bottled cocktails. He took down two that alleged they were martinis. They were dusty. The line hadn’t made the fat man any money in Estaca. “Just passing through,” Dave said. “On the way to Germany.” Beyond shelves of bread, crackers, potato chips, tall glass-doored refrigerators held cans and bottles of beer, waxed-paper cartons of milk, wrapped blocks of cheese. Ice cream and yogurt lurked in a frost-lined box with sliding glass tops. He located a plastic sack of ice cubes. “Now I’ll be all set if you’ve got cups.” He set the little bottles on the counter by the cash register and the wire rack of jerky beef and jolly, half-empty little yellow plastic packets of cheese sticks, corn chips, nuts. “Paper cups, plastic?”

  “You figuring to have a party?” the fat man asked.

  “All by myself,” Dave said, and watched the fat man waddle off for a long transparent plastic sleeve of cups. “Do I have to take them all?”

  “I guess not.” The man untwisted the lashing on the end of the tube and took out half a dozen. “That okay? I want the count to come out.” Dave nodded. The man began pushing buttons on a cash register. “Army, was it?”

  “Intelligence,” Dave said.

  “Marines, myself,” the fat man said. He named off the total and Dave paid him. The man laid the bills in gray metal trays. He handed Dave coins. “Maybe in thirty years they’ll be buying Vietnam cars.”

  “Many boys around here fight there?” Dave pocketed the change and picked up the sack the man had put the ice and cups and bottles into.

  “This isn’t college-kid country,” the man said.

  “You know one by the name of Tackaberry, Billy Jim?”

  “He wouldn’t come in here,” the fat man said. “Church would be where you’d find him.” Little fat-pouched eyes of no special color looked Dave up and down. “He ain’t done nothing, has he?”

  “It’s an insurance matter,” Dave said. “Which way is Fourth Street?”

  “I ain’t seen him for a while,” the fat man said. “Big black beard. Crazy eyes. Used to work for Lembke, farm machinery.”

  “Married, was he?” Dave said.

  “Hell, I don’t know. I just know Tackaberry’s his name and what he looks like. You couldn’t forget either one, could you? Fourth’s the next after the traffic light.”

  “Thanks,” Dave said and pushed out the glass door.

  “Have a nice party,” the fat man said.

  The house sat back on a quarter-acre with four fruit trees in front of it. A five-foot-high chain-link fence closed the yard off. The windows of the house were alight. It might have started out clapboard or even stucco. What sided it now were asbestos shingles in a silvery green. A double gate opened to a driveway where a camper was mounted on a pickup-truck bed. There was a smaller gate for beings on foot to go through. He parked on the packed dirt in front of that, poked a hole in the bag of ice cubes, put cubes into one of the plastic glasses, and emptied half the contents of the martini jug over it. He set the glass on the dash and smoked a cigarette. He swallowed the martini, poured the rest of what was in the little jug over the ice, and set the glass on the dash again. He got out of the car, worked the latch on the gate, and went up a path of cement squares set in grass to a little plywood front stoop. He rapped on an aluminum screen door. A light went on over it. The inner door opened. A gnarled little man in his fifties squinted at him, didn’t like what he saw, started to shut the door.

  “Mr. Sims?” Dave said.

  “I’m eating and I don’t buy anything at the door.”

  “I don’t sell anything,” Dave said. “Your daughter, Charleen. Is she here?”

  The man narrowed his eyes. “Who wants to know?”

  Dave showed him the card in the wallet. “I’m investigating the death of a man whose life was insured by Sequoia. In Los Angeles. A man called Dawson. Your daughter knew him. I think she might be able to shed some light on what happened to him.”

  “In trouble,” the man said. “In trouble, isn’t she?” He unlatched the screen, pushed it for Dave to come in. The furniture was cheap and not new but it was clean. Everything stood on a floor of spotless vinyl tile exactly at right angles to everything else. There was fresh wallpaper printed with little pink rosebuds, but nothing hung on the walls. “How the hell did she get to Los Angeles?”

  “I thought you could tell me,” Dave said.

  “Billy Jim sure as hell wouldn’t take her there.” Sims went into a kitchen where order books and catalogues with shiny color covers were stacked on the table. Also glittering bottles of cosmetics. There was exactly enough space to put a plate so the man could eat. A plate was there and he sat down to it. “I’m the Avon lady,” he said without smiling.

  “Why wouldn’t he take her there?” Dave said.

  Mouth full of mashed potato, Sims said, “Sit down if you want. Because he thinks it’s wicked. Any big city. I warned her not to marry him. She wouldn’t listen.” He gulped down the food, Adam’s apple moving in his scrawny throat He nodded at the other straight wooden chair, and filled his mouth again. He talked with his mouth full. “He was all right before he went to Vietnam but he was crazy afterwards. She had her eye on him since she was twelve. He was older, of course. Guess all the girls thought he was something extra. Big and strong, and still he had a smooth way of talking, brighter than your average farm-town kid.” Sims stopped, started to push back his chair. “Say, you hungry? You want to eat?”

  But Dave had seen the dried-potato-flake box on the spotless kitchen counter, and the open can of Dinty Moore beef stew on the stove. “No, thanks,” he said. “The US pulled out of Vietnam in 1973. What kept him?”

  “Army hospital. Mental ward. Three years, that’s right And when he come back with that beard and that crazy look in his eyes, I said to her, ‘Forget him. Pick somebody else. He’s off his head.’ But it had been ‘Billy Jim’ this and ‘Billy Jim’ that all the while he was gone. She wrote to him damn near every day. He wrote to her too. Years, I’m talking about you understand.” Sims took his empty plate to a chipped sink with unplated steel faucets. He opened the door of a very old refrigerator. Notes on three-by-five cards were stuck to the door with transparent tape. They fluttered a little when he shut the door. “Ice cream?” he asked.

  “No, thanks,” Dave said again. He wanted to get back to the martini chilling in the car. Martinis, plural. He was liking the sound of Billy Jim less and less. “I hoped she might be here.”

  “Hasn’t set foot here since she married him,” Sims said. He sat down and ate ice cream directly out of the carton with a spoon whose silver plating was almost gone. “No, that’s not true. Jesus Christ!” He got up suddenly and turned away. He did something with his mouth. A glint of pink and white and gold wire rattled on the counter. “That ice cream hits that bridgework, makes you want to scream,” Sims said, sat down again, took up the carton and spoon. “No, they lived here a little while. In her mother’s old room and mine. Her mother’s dead, you understand.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dave said.<
br />
  “She could handle Charleen. I never could,” Sims said.

  “Where did they go? Where do they live now?”

  “Up the river valley back of nowhere. Had a baby.” Sims licked the spoon. “Don’t know why he picked her. He could have had his choice of girls.” He sighed, closed the ice-cream carton, rose, and shut the carton up in the refrigerator. The spoon rattled in the sink. “Then again, maybe they saw he was mental, the war unhinged him. She didn’t care. She was born without caution.” He eyed Dave. “You’re in a hurry, aren’t you? I talk too much. Course, folks around here kind of like that. Nothing much to do. Passes the time. All right, let’s see—they lived here till Billy Jim got some money from some aunt of his who died. He didn’t like Lembke because Lembke uses foul language and doesn’t go to church, and he didn’t like me for the same reason. So he quit his job at the farm-machinery place and he quit this house, and I don’t see them and I don’t hear from them.”

  “Not even about the baby?” Dave said.

  “Oh, about that, yes,” Sims said. “What Billy Jim did was buy a mobile home and truck it up there and set it down in the middle of his ten acres of nowhere. He had it worked out in his head how it’s developing up there, and maybe it is. And he put the money in machinery to dig postholes and dig wells and lay out roads and that kind of thing. Enough work to keep body and soul together. And he wanted to be away from people. He was forever over at the church before that money came, but after that he didn’t seem to mind turning his back on the church folks like on everybody else. Just him and Charleen, that was how it was going to be.”

  “And the baby,” Dave reminded him.

  “No. Baby was killed. Windstorm, rain, all of that. Knocked that mobile home flat. He wasn’t there, couldn’t get there. Charleen was alone. Baby was dead in her arms when he came back and lifted the junk off her.