“Fine,” said Abraham. “I was waiting for that damn kid to get out of here.”
“You were up the whole time?”
“No. Not the whole time. Just … some of it.” He smiled. “Cold motherfucker,” I said.
After the church crowd filtered in for lunch and ice cream, I sat down in the kitchen and went to work on this story about the missing girl.
Her name was Judith Myers. She was seventeen years old, blond, blue-eyed, and pretty as all sin. I knew that by the picture above the caption that read, “If you have seen this person …”
She was last seen the previous night. She left her home around seven to go to her girlfriend’s house. The girlfriend stated that Judith left to go back home sometime in the neighborhood of nine-fifteen. The walk between their houses was five blocks of beautiful, upscale suburban houses. No suspicious characters were seen by anyone living in between the two residences, and no other suspicious activity was recorded that night, save the fruitless intrusion at the church. The two incidents seemed entirely unrelated.
Yes, I thought, this could definitely be something.
When Mandy and Carlos showed up in the afternoon to take the place over, Abraham and I skipped out. Mandy was twice divorced, like Abraham, but with a girl from each marriage, and it was by that deep and blazing fire that rages in every woman that she was able to raise a family on her own with such a meager income.
Carlos was a Mexican in his early twenties. His arms were emblazoned with tattoos, none of which, he said, meant a damn thing. Most he’d done himself with a hot needle and the ink from a ballpoint pen. If you looked closely, you could see the rows of carefully placed blue-black dots that formed these rich tapestries of fire, dragons, and wizards. He and I were talking once and he told me that he had killed a guy. I asked him why, and he said the guy had messed with his little sister. He didn’t say how, but he didn’t have to. He didn’t want to go to jail, so he ran, and Evelyn was where he ended up.
Ever since that day, I liked him. He was also a very good cook.
Abraham climbed into his Buick and turned on the radio. Marvin Gaye was playing, as he was apt to do in Abraham’s car.
“Are you going to go home and take it easy tonight?” I asked.
“I can’t,” Abe said. “I’m supposed to meet some of my people for dinner tonight.”
“But it’s Sunday, man. Don’t you give it a rest?”
“I don’t got time for rest. I’m a firm believer in spreading my seed, man.”
“You’re gonna end up in a fuckin’ wheelchair,” I said. “Only if I do it right.”
“How do you do it?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine living the way he did at his age if I had to deal with the consequences.
“I do it like I do it,” he said. “The key is not to save anything for tomorrow. Tomorrow may never come, Marley. Every night may be your last, know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I hear you,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, brother.”
I got in my beat-up, piece-of-shit truck and went grocery shopping.
I drove over to the big Elroy’s supermarket down on Grove Street. I quickly loaded up the cart with the essentials—coffee, hot dogs, tuna, and milk. I kept my diet very basic because it was cheap to do so.
I found myself in the bread aisle with the purpose of buying some hot-dog buns, but before I even knew what was going on, I saw that my hand had grabbed a loaf of rye bread off the shelf and was about to drop it in my shopping cart. It wasn’t me loading up on rye bread; it was one of the dead ones.
I broke the spell that my hand was under and dropped the loaf of bread on the floor. As I bent down to pick it up I noticed that there was a little Asian girl with her mother a little farther down the aisle. The little girl was looking at me like I was crazy. There was some fucked-up part of my mind that immediately thought that she and her mother were VC. It scared the shit out of me, so I turned the cart around without getting any bread at all and flew down the next aisle.
I soon found myself in the produce section, and it was there that I saw Alice. She was wearing a pair of blue jeans and some beat-up sneakers. A thin, formfitting sweater showed off her natural curves, and her silky blond hair was hidden under a baseball cap. There were earplugs in her ears, attached to a Walkman on her belt. I wondered what she was listening to.
She had a cart full of fruits and vegetables. Near the bottom was a container of orange juice and a steak, or maybe a piece of fish, I couldn’t tell. I was always curious about what she ate at home. I wondered if she was good in the kitchen.
I wanted to come up behind her and put my arms around her. I wanted to say, “Guess who,” and upon hearing my voice, I wanted her to smile. I wanted her to like it. I wanted her to be happy running into me in the supermarket of all places, and then maybe we could go cook something together, some family recipe that only she knew. But that’s not the way it was. It wasn’t the time, and it certainly wasn’t the place.
I knew she wouldn’t appreciate my going up to her, maybe even if it was just to say hello, so I got on line without having picked something out for dinner, paid, and went out to the parking lot.
I saw her Honda, almost as certainly as she would’ve noticed my truck. I thought about putting a note under the windshield wiper, but decided against it. It wouldn’t be right. That’s what she’d say. And I would rather have lived with the fantasy than the reality of hearing her upset, or … I don’t know. Embarrassed. So I got in the truck and went home.
It had been a long time coming at that point, but as I drove, I felt so low that I thought about drinking. I felt very low indeed.
That night I called Pearce.
I sat down in my living room, which was still furnished with all of the dead lady’s stuff. I took a seat in the dead lady’s recliner, which was crinkled and cracked with age. Still, it was comfortable enough to fall asleep in, even if it smelled like a hundred mating cats.
I finished with my cigarette, that way he wouldn’t have to hear me smoking on the phone, and put it out in my naked-lady ashtray, which was in the shape of a swimming pool and had a topless broad sprawled out at the rim. Only a sick man would put a cigarette out on the actual porcelain girl.
Anyway, his wife picked up the phone and said, “Pearce residence.”
“Hey, Martha, what’s shaking?” I said kindly.
Martha was seven months’ pregnant and wasn’t a big fan of mine. She didn’t like it that her upstanding citizen of a husband associated with a wretch like me.
“I’ll get Danny,” she said, and she slammed the phone down hard enough to make it sound like a gunshot. A second later, he got on the line.
“Pearce.”
“Danny, how are you?”
“Christ,” he said, “I’m freaking out, Marley. I need a cigarette.”
“No you don’t. You can’t be smokin’ around the, uh, embryo and all that, you know what I mean?”
“It’s not an embryo, Marley. She is a fucking baby.”
“Sorry.”
“Is this why you called? To torture me?”
“I just wanted to say hi.”
“Hi.”
“There’s a girl that disappeared in Edenburgh the other night.”
“Do you want to confess?”
“It was in the papers today. Did you hear about it?”
“No. You got a funny feeling about it?”
“Yeah.”
“Your funny feelings scare me, Marley.”
“On that note, I was also thinking about the Bill Parker thing. How are you feeling about the Bill Parker thing?”
“How am I feeling about the Bill Parker thing? I don’t know how I’m feeling about the Bill Parker thing. It pisses me off that things have to be so damn complicated sometimes.”
“I know. It makes your head hurt, doesn’t it?”
“Maybe yours, but not mine.”
“Well, I was just thinking that you shouldn’t be making a mountain out of a molehil
l. I mean, let’s say he hit a coyote, or a bear, or some fucking thing, and he shot it. Let’s say he was in shock and unknowingly wandered into the woods where he died. Maybe he was eaten, I don’t know. But that sounds good, doesn’t
it?”
“Yeah, Marley. It sounds like Beethoven.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know what you’re saying. I’m not worried about it. We’ll see what the lab comes up with, if anything. If we were in a big city we’d have the money to play with all kinds of equipment, but we got jack. Regardless, there was no damage to the front of the car. He didn’t hit a damn thing that night.”
“I hear you,” I said. Then: “I was also thinking about something else.”
“And what would that be?”
“You remember that old lady that got run over a little while back?”
“Yeah,” Pearce said hesitantly.
“Well, I remember you telling me she was hit by a white car. You could tell because of the paint chips on her … whatever you call it. A muumuu …”
“Housedress, Marley. Normal people call it a housedress.”
“Bill Parker had a white car. Since you have his car, you ought to test it, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah, Marley, I’ll do that first thing in the morning.”
“C’mon, man …”
“This isn’t some sprawling metropolis we’re living in here. We don’t have the money to have every little thing tested and analyzed because we feel like it. Listen, I gotta go. I’ll see you at the diner.”
“It’s not a …”
He had already hung up.
I put the phone back in its cradle and lit another cigarette now that I was off the phone. I had at least tried to tie the old lady’s death to the man who had killed her, but I wasn’t about to ruffle any feathers about it.
I did have a funny feeling about the missing girl over in Edenburgh, and it wasn’t just because I hadn’t come up with a target for the wolf to go after the next time the full moon came around. I still had time.
I cut the article about her out of the paper and taped it up on the wall in my bedroom. Doing this with certain articles was not unusual. It didn’t bother me, because I knew no one would ever see it. I never invited anyone into the house, and anyone who tried to gain entry would be met with certain resistance.
FIVE
I went over to Mama Snow’s place on Carpenter Street the following night. Ever since I had run into Alice at the supermarket the previous day, I couldn’t get her out of my head. While she would have said it was inappropriate to approach her at the store, seeing her at Mama Snow’s was always fine. It was where she worked.
She was a prostitute. And she meant a lot to me.
I was not a man who had ever frequented prostitutes, that is, until I met Alice. A lot of men enjoyed the company of prostitutes back in Vietnam, but I didn’t. In a way, I was too scared to, but more than that was the fact that I couldn’t possibly betray Doris. Doris was my great love, my soul mate, and she was back Stateside waiting for me to come home in one piece so we could live the rest of our lives together. I didn’t want to pick up the clap and bring that back to Doris as some kind of fucked-up gift.
The men in my company used to make fun of me for remaining celibate while we were in Vietnam, but joking around too much meant you weren’t paying attention, and if you weren’t paying attention, you died, just like that cat Krueger did.
It was my introduction to bloodshed, two weeks into my tour. This was in 1971. We were going north along this lightly worn path, and the tall trees were forming a double canopy. This blocked a lot of sunlight from hitting the path, but it also obscured the vision of our lieutenant colonel, who was monitoring us from the C&C ship. Slimy water was dripping from the leaves onto all of us, and this foreign liquid coating just made things worse—it was like it did the job of trapping all the heat in our bodies, like it wasn’t hot enough in that fucking country without getting rained on during a hot, cloudless day. Sometimes the humidity was all you could think about.
Some guys were strung-out. I came to understand that the number of addicted soldiers had grown exponentially since the late sixties. I couldn’t blame them—they called that place “the green hell” for a reason. Some guys were doing the dozens and talking shit in hushed tones, snickering about whores and children and knives, about blowing up livestock for no good reason, about getting action from each other’s mothers. Some guys were making fun of me for being what they called a “boy scout.”
Some guys—just a few—wore armbands and spoke out against what we were doing over there every step of the way. It was commonplace. More so than you would ever read about in the history books. But not a lot of guys were happy to be there, that much is fact, and there was only so much the sergeant could say about this thing with the armbands, and the “passive resistance” that some guys would offer up when they were asked to do something just a little bit above and beyond walking, and hell, there was maybe only so much he would’ve wanted to say as well.
We all kind of knew that if the shit hit the fan we’d protect each other, we’d be there. Just because some guys didn’t go along with things as much as other guys did didn’t mean they harbored hopes of seeing their brothers die. That’s what the fear of war did for most of us—it forged a bond between some of the men that can only be described as brotherhood.
Some guys were too wide-eyed and scared to join in on the verbal jab-fights, like me. What I was doing was watching the guys who didn’t say shit, the ones who just kept their eyes open and walked methodically, as if they’d dreamed about walking through that green nightmare all their lives, preparing for it, and they wanted to do it right. I figured if I kept my eyes on them, I’d have a warning a split second before danger reared its ugly head in the form of a half-buried claymore, a poorly disguised tripwire, a trapdoor. These careful men would at least see it coming, not like the lunatics who couldn’t shut up. Krueger was one of those lunatics.
Krueger seemed like the kind of guy who was born for combat, the kind of guy who was no doubt a bully from his first day of school on, and now that he was older and had an M16 (and an AK-47 strapped to his shoulder, taken from the burnt, dead hands of an NLF guerrilla), he had a whole nation of mostly unarmed people to fuck with. He was buff, and he shaved his head more often than his face. He had a big, white circle painted on the front of his helmet, and in the middle of that white circle was a red dot about the size of a quarter. He put that red dot there by rubbing in the blood of a farmer he’d killed just days before I met him. It was like he was asking for it.
Before long, that red spot turned brown, but the discoloration, the spot of human rust that decorated his head, just served to announce more clearly what it was, and what kind of man he was.
A scar decorated the left side of his neck, but it wasn’t from a firefight. The story he told was that a shoe-shine boy had set off a bomb in a nightclub one night during his first tour and killed a bunch of people. He was the only one to walk away, his only injury being a scrape from a piece of flying shrapnel that just missed his carotid artery.
“That’s the closest this goddamn yellow country ever got to me, and that’s only cuz I was drunk and getting handwork under my table.”
The whore had died, he said, her last act on this earth being the performance of a handjob on this lunatic Krueger. If you got him in the mood, he’d talk about the quality of it—the handjob—and how when he realized what had happened, that half his mates were dead and the little girl next to him was dead, he’d tried to loosen her grip on him but couldn’t.
He’d say, “I couldn’t get her to let go, but it didn’t bother me none. It was like even in death, she couldn’t get enough of me. To this day, her ghost goes crazy down there. And that, comrades, is why I’m always in such a pleasant goddamn mood,” and he’d laugh that crazy laugh of his.
Krueger was always on point. He had good ears, so if he heard someone talking smack behind
his back, he’d turn around and give everyone shit.
I was a few heads back behind the crazy bastard, sandwiched between two of the quiet guys. One of them was our sergeant—Hooper was his name—and I just kept one eye on the sergeant and one on my feet.
Hooper was always deadpan. He never smiled, and even when the sun was at its most devastating, he’d never wrinkle his brow. He’d just squint like he was John Wayne. His movements were slow, deliberate, and his orders were quick and precise. He was able to tell who you were by the sound of your footsteps. I trusted him with my life.
I saw him flinch, like a cat hearing some noise you didn’t even know had happened, and I froze. Up ahead, a Bouncing Betty went off. Krueger’s upper half somersaulted through the air and came to rest in the mud. His legs and some of his torso all stayed attached, and it all got blown back a couple of feet. When that huge part of him came down it was feet-first, as if he had jumped backward, but then it crumpled down lifelessly, shattering any of the illusions we might have had that it was still possessed of spirit. We were covered in red like someone had set off a paint bomb. Two other men had been peppered with shrapnel—screws, bolts, bits of aluminum cans—and were groaning in the dirt.
Four men got mad and started firing into the green. The sergeant ordered a stop to that. Some guys didn’t do shit, just looked. Some guys cried. The sergeant walked up to a tree, crouched, and peered out into the jungle like he was a hawk. If anyone was out there, he would’ve seen them. He didn’t say a word.
I watched the sergeant and I cried. And I thought of Doris.
She and I were the big item in high school. I remember I would fidget to a higher and higher degree until three o’clock, when I finally got to see her. Doris and I always met out front of the school, and it was the same every day, the explosion of an almost spiritual happiness when her warm face would press up to mine, and we kissed. In my old age, I can see that the wait for her, that daily anticipation for the quitting bell, was almost as pleasurable as finally holding her, because it was the expectation of seeing her that always made for such a glorious payoff. We were going to get married when I came back. But that’s not a story I talk about.
The Wolfman Page 6
