“So I rolled over to her. We had this signal. I put my hand on her hip and shook her back and forth. But her skin was cold and she moved away from me. Not sleepyish, but like she’s totally pissed off. Like I did something wrong. It made me…” He paused, let them wonder. “It made me crazy.
“I kicked her out of bed and she landed, bang, flat on her back, and when she tries to get up I push her down again, but this time her head cracks against the floor and she’s wild. Cindy had real spirit, I’ll give her that. She was not someone you could just push around. She’s cussing me out, calling me a little faggot. Real sweet stuff. She could really be a little darling. ‘Thank you so much,’ I said to her. ‘That does wonders for my self-esteem.’ And bang, I push her down again. But this time she doesn’t go down so easily, so I just sweep her legs out from under her. So now she falls like a ton of bricks.”
Michael took a quick inward breath. He felt Carmen looking at him. What was he supposed to show here? Interest? Fear? Revulsion?
“Now she’s not acting so angry. Her expression is kind of blank, and it’s like her eyes are suddenly filled with milk. Oh Jesus, kids, I shouldn’t even be telling you this. But you have to know. What we’re doing out there…. going into houses, taking what we need…living the life…we just all have to be real straight with each other. In truth we find our strength.” He gestured with his hands, like a priest patting the heads of adoring little children.
“She made a sound.” Fraleigh expelled his breath, tried it again, shrugged: he wasn’t doing it justice, that last sound Cindy made. “I knew right away she was in trouble. Her brother is an epileptic; I guess she was wired up crazy, too, without anyone knowing about it. But a couple cracks on the head and she’s dead? Come on. That don’t figure.” He rubbed the back of his neck.
“I just left her there, right in the bedroom, in the dark. I went into the living room and watched TV. Isn’t that just like me?” He laughed and talked through his laughter. “I mean, they were selling food dryers, hits of the sixties, Dial a Psychic, and there’s me kicking back in my La-Z-Boy, with Cindy dead in the next room.
“Next morning, I wrapped her in a shower curtain and shoved her into the trunk of my Celica. Cindy in the Celica.” He rocked his head back and forth, as if it were a song. “It was hard getting her in. The Japs design those Toyotas for killing a very different-sized woman. But I managed. Gently. Then I called these people who I was supposed to be cleaning their pool—that was how bad business was, because I promised myself I’d never clean a fucking pool, but now I was and glad for the work.”
“Wait a minute,” said Johnnie. “You killed your wife?” His voice was stunned, but that wasn’t so unusual.
“Shut up, Johnnie,” said Carmen.
“I was just asking,” said Johnnie, looking down at his hands, which were laced in his lap, the fingers rising up and down like the undulations of sea plants.
“Isn’t he a fucking trip?” Fraleigh asked, jerking his thumb at Johnnie but grinning at Michael.
“Tell us what happened to Cindy,” said Carmen. Her voice was deep, shredded, as if she were always on the mend from laryngitis.
“Worried?” Fraleigh asked her.
“Should I be?”
“I drove her out to Pennsylvania, filled her up with stones, and dumped her in a river.”
“Yeah, right,” said Johnnie.
“I was going to take her apart with my chainsaw. I laid her out in the woods. Took off all her clothes. It was cold out. Her pussy hair puffed up and turned like silver from the frost, and there I was with my Stihl saw smoking in my hands and the chain going around and around. But forget it, I couldn’t do it. I got my limits. So I just put her in in one piece. Why? Do you think that was a mistake?”
“Are you shitting us?” said Johnnie.
“Now that was the middle of nowhere. A forest preserve. There were picnic tables, but even the squirrels were asleep. Lucky for me, the river was still moving. There was a corny little bridge, one of those fairy-tale jobbies, you know, ‘Let’s tiptoe through the tulips, la-la-la, everything is beautiful.’ I dragged Cindy to the middle of the bridge and gave her a sailor’s burial. Her father was in the Navy, in World War II. And what a sonofabitch piece of shit he is! Boils on his back and so much hair on his big fat paws it looks like he’s wearing gloves. You know the type?”
“You actually killed her?” said Johnnie.
“What if I did? You’re a thief.”
“That’s different.”
“Is it? ‘Thou shalt not steal.’”
“It’s different. And you know it.”
Fraleigh took a long swallow of vodka, closed his eyes as it warmed him, dried the corners of his mouth with his knuckle.
“The Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ It doesn’t say, ‘Thou shalt really really not kill because killing is worse than stealing.’ It’s all on the same level—same thing. Same fucking thing, Johnnie boy. And you know it.”
Fear entered Michael’s skull, just the way he entered that flimsily locked river house the night before, and now fear pushed Michael’s mind around as if his brain were a thing on wheels. He could not complete a thought. Knowing Fraleigh’s crime made them all a part of it, unless they now were to turn him in, which was out of the question.
“If this is bullshit, Walter…” said Carmen. She stretched her legs before her with deliberate languor, then poked a finger under the elastic cuff of the black leggings she wore beneath her girlish skirt.
It was what she was wearing two days later when she stood with Michael on a rocky rise in the woods, overlooking an old, well-cared-for farmhouse. There was a smell of rain in the air. A couple, a man and woman in their forties, were loading up their Lexus with a few things they wanted to bring back to the city. They were vibrant, fit; they had, like some childless couples, managed to avoid growing old.
“Who are they?” Michael asked.
“The Caldwells. They own these woods. They got about two or three hundred acres, but they just stay in the little grassy mowed part.” Carmen carried a thick white bath towel, stolen from the Martin house a couple days ago. It was rolled tightly and she tucked it under her arm.
“What are we doing?”
“Waiting for them to leave. What’s today?”
“I think Monday.”
“Yeah. They should be gone. Is it a holiday?”
“I don’t think so.”
“When they leave for the city we can go into their house. I want to take a real shower, and we can watch TV. What shows do you like?”
“I don’t know. Whatever.”
He looked at his watch. It was nearly noon. The news would be on and maybe they’d be on it. The last house they robbed, it went sort of crazy. Michael put himself in charge, telling Fraleigh what was worth real money. No one wanted silverware anymore, silver wasn’t worth shit, and it weighed a ton. Textiles, take the hooked rugs, the faded- aqua needlepoint samplers; take the paintings. Fraleigh didn’t mind a kid telling him what to steal, that didn’t bother him at all; but it made Johnnie jealous, and when Johnnie got jealous Johnnie got rough. There was considerable breakage. Glass figurines—ballerinas, puppies—then a painted glass lampshade, a huge smoky mirror that hung over the white marble mantelpiece. Scuff marks on the woodwork. Fraleigh just let him. He understood. It was either this or something worse. They’re only things, was how Fraleigh saw it. Funny philosophy for a thief.
Down below, the Caldwells were kissing. It was a very big deal of a kiss, as if they knew they were being watched, or had always hoped to be. Everybody wanted to be a star, even a childless banker weekending in the boonies with his childless photographer wife. Sam used to say that publicity has taken the place of grace. Now His eye wasn’t on the sparrow, but a camcorder lens was.
Fuck you, Sam, get out of my head.
Carmen pointed at the Caldwells as Mr. pressed Mrs. down onto the hood of their black car. She threw her arms b
ack, offered herself up.
The rain was starting to come in big, fat, lazy drops. It stirred the trees around them, made Michael look up.
“They better not start having sex,” said Carmen.
“But I like to watch,” said Michael, in a deliberately drooly, creepy voice, but when he heard it he wondered all of a sudden if maybe this was his real voice, at last.
“I want them to go back to New York so I can go into their house and take my shower.” She was always at one with her feelings. She wanted this, she wanted that; there was never any maybe about her.
The phone rang within the Caldwell house. The sound carried up, light, tinkling, cheerful birdsong. Mr. Caldwell abandoned the project of romancing his wife and ran back to the house to answer the phone. She remained there on the car, lifted her feet off the ground, raised her legs. She was doing exercises while she waited for another take of their love scene. Too rich to worry about the rain. He came out a minute later, full of gestures. She slid off the car while he locked the back door to the house and put the key in an empty planter, and a few moments later they were gone.
Michael and Carmen waited for the Caldwells to be safely gone, assumed they would not double back for some forgotten item.
“Let’s go,” Carmen said. She was in charge. She reached out for him, and Michael took her hand. He had a momentary impulse to pull her close. What would that feel like? he wondered. His lust was monstrous. Would his erection be sheer blue steel, a special-effects hard-on, fabulous and humiliating?
“Kiss me, you fool,” she said, clasping her hands, batting her lashes. Carmen waited for a moment to see if Michael’s face contorted in a confession of desire, and then stepped back, laughed. In the past couple days, there had been more and more jokes between them, all of them having to do with what it would be like to sleep in the same bed, to kiss, to have sex.
At first these jokes shocked Michael, but the tension they released was a relief, and soon he could not stop himself from making them. Last night he sneezed, and when Carmen said “God bless you” he grabbed his crotch and said “Bless this.” Part of the rules of this ritual was that they would both have to laugh, no matter how bad the joke was.
Yet even the jokes could not stave off the intimacy growing between them. Carmen told Michael she was starting to hurt between her legs and then further amazed him by telling him the source of her discomfort was a recurring yeast infection and then, seeing the confusion on his face, explained what that meant in calm, semimedical terms. She breathed directly into his face and asked him if her breath smelled okay.
For the first time ever, Michael felt a countervailing weight to his desire—a sense of his own desirability. Routinely, almost compulsively, visions of his ungainliness and flat-out ugliness were the inevitable Pong off the Ping of yearning. He had a dim memory, fished from the murk of psychotherapy, that once Olivia subtly moved away from him when he prolonged a certain kiss on a certain night (bedtime, thunder), a memory of her fingers pressing firmly against his chest and her face receding from that part of the darkness tinged by streetlights and into that part of the room where the existence of anything at all was a matter of faith. For most of childhood and all of adolescence he had felt as if he were repulsive, and so he could not take jokes; the rough-and-tumble of life with other kids made him ache with unhappiness. He had developed habits of the heart that were fruitless, destructive: he perfected poetic fixations that would implode from lack of air, passions that went unnoticed by others, unacted upon by himself, and he was used to gnawing through these secret connections to rid himself of them, like a fox chewing off its own leg to spring free of a trap.
On the way down to the house, staggering through the brambles that became thicker and greener day by day, both Michael and Carmen had a sense that Fraleigh was somewhere close behind them. Neither mentioned anything, but from time to time they stopped and looked back. Trees, mist, the smell of the wet earth, the sound of raindrops hitting against the leaves.
The Caldwell house was only a couple of hundred feet off the dirt road that wound through their property. It was like those old white houses with black shutters that Olivia picked on when she went hunting for antiques.
Next to the house was a small garage where they had left their Saab. There were new garden tools; cross-country skis rested across the beams. Thick spider webs trembled in the corners of the shed’s greenish windows. The car was old, with nearly one hundred thousand miles on it. The Caldwells kept the key under the mat around the clutch and the brake.
Michael and Carmen went inside the house, through the kitchen door in the back. They took off their shoes; Carmen’s red socks were torn at the toe.
It no longer felt particularly strange to Michael to be sneaking around someone else’s house. Short on friends and shorter still on that outgoing quality that allowed one to make friends, Michael had always been curious about how other people lived, and now he was finding out. The things people kept in their pantry—the red-and-gold can of Portuguese olives, the tin of sugar cookies with ice skaters on the lid, the chutney, the bitters, the honey mustard, cookbooks, manila folders crammed with recipes clipped from The New York Times, even a breast pump—were now a matter of experience rather than conjecture. He had helped to rob only three houses, but his mind was already full of new knowledge of refrigerators, Jenn-Air ranges, hooked rugs, magazine racks holding medical journals, family albums embossed with elaborate coats of arms, sconces and portraits on the walls, human smells, perfume, rot, dead flowers, squirrel shit, the contents of bedside tables (bifocals, lubricants, sleep mask).
Walking with Carmen through the Caldwells’ kitchen, thinking of the bedroom upstairs, and for some reason not only noticing but staring at a solitary pale-green coffee cup on the wooden counter, Michael was suddenly beset by the impulse to call home and reassure his parents that he was still okay. He hadn’t contacted them in a while, and it seemed somehow smart to remind them (in case he ever wanted to move back) that he was only missing, not dead. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life hearing how they didn’t know if he was dead or alive.
“What are you thinking about?” Carmen asked. “You look scared.”
“I’m not scared at all. I was just—” He stopped for a moment, hoping to think of something to say.
“Did you hear him last night?”
“Fraleigh? No.”
“He was saying things in his sleep. I wanted to get close so I could hear, but maybe he’d wake up and grab me.”
They wandered through the dining room, with its long cherry table and lyre-backed chairs, its salmon-colored walls, brilliant white woodwork, and worn carpeting. Next, they came to the library, where the television set was. Carmen knew exactly where they kept the remote control.
They sat on the sofa and Carmen raced through the stations, past a soap opera, “The Price Is Right,” a household- hints show. She stopped at a talk show with a panel of very thin men sitting with their heavy wives and talking about the love they have for each other and the trouble they have in the world because people cannot accept a thin person loving a fat one. First to speak was an immense woman with short curly red hair and the face of someone who used to laugh a lot but no longer does. “Look, I’ve got health problems, financial, employment, you name it….”
“Can you imagine even kissing her?” said Michael, without really giving the matter much thought. He just wanted Carmen to listen to him and not the set.
“When you love someone you just love them.”
“I guess.”
“It doesn’t matter what. Maybe they have a great job and lots of money or maybe they don’t. Maybe they’re Catholic and you’re not. Maybe they live out in the woods and rob houses at night.”
Michael laughed. A feeling of warmth spread through him, as if something hot had spilled inside him.
“I’m serious. When you fall in love with someone, all that stuff is just little stuff. You hold on with both hands, until they saw off
your arms. And then you hope someone comes along who’ll fall in love with a girl who’s got no arms.”
The show broke for a commercial. An ocean liner cut its way through glassy, sun-struck waters while a woman sang about the pleasures of being on a cruise, and how your friends will envy your freedom and all the fancy foods you’ll be eating.
“Is that how you were when you were in love?” Michael asked.
He could actually feel himself moving toward her, inwardly. It was as if every stray feeling, every romantic and erotic impulse, every dream, every thought of being with a woman—all his disparate moments of desire, beginning with the smell of his mother’s skin and going forward in time to include the first girl he had held hands with, the first girl he had ever kissed, the strangers in skin magazines whose wide-openness he had studied beneath the tent of his blankets—all of those moments and images of love were suddenly airborne and in formation.
Carmen shrugged. “Almost.”
“Who did you love like that?”
“My first boyfriend.”
“Your first boyfriend?” He forced a laugh. “How many have you had?”
“Two. But Thomas was just to get back at my mother because she made me break up with Julius.” As she spoke, she took Michael’s hand and pretended to count his fingers.
Michael’s heart was a maniac in a locked room. He looked at their hands together, the difference in their colors. He had a moment of absolute certainty that their lives were joined and would remain so. His heart, his imagination, were taking possession of her. He could see them in a restaurant together, wearing beautiful clothes and eating by candlelight.
“I have to tell you something,” he said.
“What?” She furrowed her brow, withdrew her hand, as if expecting him to say something critical of her.
With a casualness that surprised him, he took her hand again. It was a gesture more unmistakable than a kiss. It said: You are mine.
Men in Black Page 16
