Incredibly... Arnold Russell doesn’t exist.
At least, not as far as the computer is concerned. I tried birth announcements, church groups, charity functions, and obituaries – even the police blotter; and there are authors and doctors and car mechanics but no Arnold Russell who delivers food products and probably is a stone-cold killer.
No matter. He’ll come to me.
*
It turns out that Blanco County firemen work two days on, two days off, but Charlie Simmons had arranged a deal with his fellow firemen to swap shifts so that Charlie always had Saturdays available to grill in the park and try to keep peace in the household. If only that scheduling had worked in mine.
I lugged a small cooler of beer three long blocks in ninety-degree heat to the entrance of Kennelly Park but the Simmonses had the larger commitment so Charlie drove the filled-up bed of the Tacoma through the parking, right up to a picnic bench and unloaded there. By the time I jostled the cooler into a crook of the table my arms felt like overused rubber-bands and my neck was soaked with sweat. With a beer for the pain and a quick dunk under the water fountain to cool off, I settled back and watched the Simmons clan go to work.
“You’re really going to love Karen’s potato salad – it’s the finest in three counties,” Charlie said.
“Four.” Karen shot back.
Charlie is a true Texan: born near Dallas, two years at College Station, and several years as he put it – in the “school of hard knocks”, before he settled into a job he really likes because “your ass is always warm... and your meat is always well done.” Charlie is a red-neck philosopher. Kyle preoccupied himself trying unsuccessfully to get the squirrels to eat from his hand (I could have told him you have to be crocked to accomplish that), allowing the Simmonses to share their story and me to tell my made-up one. I went easy on the family history and tried to downplay my literary aspirations and after an hour I was already feeling comfortable with the two. The only hesitancy on my part was it was impossible to look at Kyle without seeing the face of my young son and recalling similar moments that his mother and I used to share.
Gone. All gone.
Kennelly Park is a lush oval of green split by a small creek with an abundance of shade trees, squirrels, and a few ducks alternately swimming in the water or hovering near people waiting for pieces of bread or a stray potato chip. Maybe because of the heat, the park was barely occupied this Saturday and we were joined by only one other family and one couple sitting on a blanket, holding hands, and occasionally sipping from something in the female’s purse. The combination of the heat, the food, and the Lone Stars put the three of us into a unenergetic mood and I was in danger of drifting off when suddenly something shifted in my peripheral vision. Coming down the slight incline of the paved entrance to the park was something big. Something big and... white.
The Bono’s van.
Spiders of ice crawled up my back. My sunglasses hid my eyes but I’m sure my mouth hung open. Suddenly there was no sound, no focus. The trees had disappeared, the ducks disappeared, and all I saw was a narrow beam of vision filled with white. Only white.
“Ben!”
I jumped at the sound and almost fell off my bench. “Wha... what?”
Charlie was standing over me, a huge grin on his face. “I said ‘do you want another one?’” He pointed to the grill, “Got to eat these last icky-bits up. Either that or it’s fajitas night tomorrow.”
His smile turned into a mock frown. “Jesus! Earth to Ben... Earth to Ben... buddy, you need another beer.”
“Huh? Oh... no more for me, thanks.” Behind my sunglasses, my eyes followed a white-clad form exit the step-van. I shook my head. “Sorry, must be the heat.”
Karen said, “I thought all authors could really drink. Ben, you might have to practise a bit more. The drinking, I mean.” Again, that confident smile.
Recovering, I mustered a laugh I didn’t feel. “Beer’s not my strong suit. Now if we’re talking scotch or tequila, you’re looking at Olympics potential here.”
Karen said, “Tequila? God, Charlie took me to New Orleans before Kyle was born and I think I puked up my spleen.” She made the sign-of-the-cross. “Never again!”
Bastard! Arnie was sitting down at a picnic table no more than forty yards away, a sack and a bottle of root beer in his hands.
“Ben? You sure about that beer?” Charlie asked.
I’m sure my voice was steady but I hid my hands to hide their shaking. I softly said, “Maybe one more…”
Charlie exclaimed, “There’s my man!” Arnie had taken out a sandwich and through the filtered black of my sunglasses I could see his eyes notice Kyle. Kyle had thrown off his sneakers and was standing ankle-deep in the water, streaks of mud up to his thighs, trying to discern the minnows swimming in the green liquid. Arnie wasn’t just looking at Kyle; he was staring... no, his eyes were glaring at the boy, as if Kyle had committed some terrible sin and the whole world should shun him, should stone him.
God give me strength! My legs felt like stone. I wanted to leap off the bench and run with all my might till I could wrap my fingers around the bastard’s throat and then squeeze…
And then what? Charlie snapped the cap off of a bottle of beer right in my face and the crack broke me out of my daze.
Charlie and Karen settled on their bench, the couple on the blanket exchanged a kiss, and Kyle began skipping small stones across the creek. Arnie stared, transfixed at the little boy and I watched behind my Ray-Bans, drinking and scheming and thinking to myself: Go ahead. Look. Okay... now you’ve seen him. Now you’ve seen him, but I’ve seen you and there’s no doubt in my mind that I have what it takes to kill you. I calculated in my mind how long it would take to dash the few blocks to my new house and dig the “Judge” out of the flour container.
Soon the waiting will be over. I could not let the tension go, just as I could not jump to my feet and kill a man in cold blood right in front of everybody. I felt just as I had when I first saw the Keeley’s wrapper in the grass at Fowler Park in Smithville. There! Right there! Right in front of you! My God, can’t you see?
Charlie and Karen prattled on about some past vacation and I contributed some “ohs” and some “oh reallys?” but my mind was a million miles away. Without taking his eyes off Kyle, Arnie finished his sandwich and root beer, washed his hands in a drinking fountain, and went back to the Bono’s van. Over the sound of Kyle’s rock splashes I heard the ignition, saw the van back up, and watched it drive away. Everything in me said to go now. Go now and confront him, squash him, but I didn’t. I would have to be patient, cool.
“Are you feeling alright? You look a little pale,” asked Karen.
“Yes,” I replied. “I’m just a little overheated.”
Charlie said, “Well, we’re just about done here for today. I’m going to pack up the leftovers and head on back.” He looked to the creek. “Kyle! C’mon... we’re going back! Vamanos!”
He gave me a good natured pat on the back. “Karen’s right. You look whipped. How’s about a ride back? You can ride in the back... three blocks. What do you say?”
I looked at the parking space vacated by the step-van and tried to put back some life in my voice. “Nah, I need three blocks to work off some of this beer... thanks for the offer, though.”
I helped the three pack up the remains of our picnic and watched them drive from the picnic area, rejoin the parking lot, and navigate the small inclined road out of Kennelly Park. Once I was sure they were out of sight I went to the table where Arnie had sat. He hadn’t left anything behind – and yet he had. I felt evil. I felt evil as sure as I felt the light, hot summer wind blowing across my face.
Do you feel? Do you love? Do you have a wife, children – do you worry at night that they are alright?
I slowly walked out of the park and made my way to my new home, feeling such a mixture of feelings that I spent the rest of the night in front of my laptop, staring out my window at the Simmons’ front
yard, until I dragged myself to my only sofa and fell asleep.
Chapter Nineteen
Something is different. Yes! I see the van but it’s no longer black... it’s white. As I turn the corner, wet grass tugging at my shoes, I see the van but I see more. The whirling tornado of candy wrappers engulfs the road behind the van, but now I can clearly see windows. I can see windows on the back of the white van and centered in one is a thin, pale arm; the hand striking the plate glass over and over in a desperate attempt to shatter it. There is no sound except the rush of the swirling wrappers. The last thing I see is that desperate arm before the van rounds the corner and is gone.
My natural alarm clock woke me faithfully at 6:00am and I stumbled to unpack the one bag that held my instant coffee. My head ached and something had crawled inside my mouth and died during the night but I immediately felt a nervous energy. It is Sunday, and Sunday for most meant church. Once I had a cup inside me, I prepared a cup-to-go, got a claw hammer, flat-headed screwdriver, and a thin piece of plastic that used to be the blade of a window blind. With these things in my hand, I locked the door of the Prospect house, cast a quick eye to my neighbor’s house next door, and headed for Austin.
I waited patiently, the caffeine only clearing my head and not adding to any nerves I felt at the moment, and was rewarded when Arnie, in dark suit and tie, and family came out their front door and climbed into the Jeep Cherokee. My conscience didn’t feel a twinge of concern as I watched a demure, small stature woman with brunette hair and a full, old-fashioned dress prod her two young daughters into the back seat of the car. One daughter was clearly the elder: possibly nine, short for her age, and mirroring her mother with a gingham dress and Buster-Brown shoes, a blue ribbon in her long brown hair. The younger girl, looking a year below her sister, wore a matching outfit and clutched a small book, a Bible in white. Arnie was the only fair-headed one of them all.
I took in the other houses in the block. They all looked dead to the world and I imagined a neighborhood of hard-partying weekenders returning from boating, water-skiing, and maybe dancing drawing into their driveways last night thanking God that tomorrow was Sunday and they could sleep in. I hoped so.
I followed the Jeep, keeping three car lengths between us as Arnie turned left on Elm and then left again on Mapplethorpe. After a total distance of two miles, I watched the vehicle park in front of the Holy Communion of the Spirit Church, a vast chamber painted white with two spires on top. I waited till all four had entered the church and then sped as fast as the law will allow back to 1505 Decatur.
Parking three doors down, I lit a cigarette to calm my nerves and studied the homes in front of me; no stirrings, no dogs, not even a stray grackle croaking in the morning air. Exactly what I had hoped for.
I grabbed my tools from the back seat, locked the Volvo, and walked nonchalantly towards Arnie’s, mentally wishing myself invisible. I needn’t have worried – the neighborhood was a morgue. Once again pretending to tie my shoe in front of the mailbox, I scanned the area one more time and then walked quickly to the rear of the Russell house.
As I’d hoped, the house was like the majority of the ones I’d seen that had this construction. There was a fair-sized two-part window, slightly higher than my waist, that I associated with a back bathroom, the window being secured with a half-moon turning latch, the bottom pane claw descending vertically into the wood of the frame. I had a moment of anxiety, fearing that the bottom pane would be painted shut, but this was a bathroom window and it saw constant use, no matter the season. I came in wrinkled Chinos, sneakers and denim shirt and nobody was going to confuse me with an industrious Arnie, up early to work on the house, but I swallowed my beating heart back into my chest and placed the claw hammer in the crack at the bottom of the pane. The trick was to raise the window just enough to allow the thin blade to enter without raising the claw beyond a point where it would clear and it took me two tries before the claw moved free and I drove the bottom pane upward. I looked and I hadn’t disturbed the wood at all except for some very faint tooth marks in the paint.
Awkwardly, I half tumbled into the Russell’s bathroom.
Panting, I left the window ajar and withdrew rubber gloves from my pants pocket. While I was shopping at Bob’s Market I had seen some gloves like the ones Jeanie had used to clean our oven and had bought a pair, thinking that there might come a time when I would have to face Fulton or Perez and I didn’t want to give them any more ammunition than what they already had. The gloves were yellow and fitted awkwardly. My nostrils sensed a light potpourri as I left the bathroom and went down a short hallway to a... doll house. It seemed unreal but everything in sight was perfectly in its place and unnervingly symmetrical. Sofa and chairs, table and lamps, everything resembled a life-sized version of the doll houses that I’d seen in friend’s daughter’s homes – only this was no vision of Malibu Barbie’s home, no, this was more like a replica of some turn-of-the-century doll house and one more thing assaulted my senses: everything was pristine. Everything was clean beyond a germophobe’s dream and my eye couldn’t detect a scratch anywhere. No scuff mark, no dusty fingerprint, not even a stray ash from the alabaster fireplace. There was a small kitchen attached to the living room and I examined every wall and doorway beam looking for pencil marks measuring two girls progress in growing. Not one. How could someone raise two daughters and keep a house laboratory-clean?
I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes had elapsed since I saw Arnie and his family enter the church. I knew by my own experiences that I had at least an hour before I was in danger of them coming home. I hurried through the house and took a quick inventory: master bedroom with a second that was clearly for the girls but eerily devoid of any toys or pictures or any Disney boy-band posters like you’d find in any young girl’s room. There was a smaller room dedicated to a sewing machine (when was the last time I’d seen one of those?) and a plastic rack of bins containing yarn, fabric, and an assortment of needles, buttons and pins; all neatly placed in defined lines and order and all without a stray thread out of place.
There had been a small desk in the corner of the living room and I hurried to it now. I was looking for information. As soon as I looked at the desk I was struck not by what was there – but by what wasn’t. No computer. I rustled through the desk and found the everyday detritus of life: phone bills, electricity, water – a bank statement revealed that the Russells had a little over two-thousand in savings and four-hundred in checking. No credit card statement. Odd... there wasn’t a single letter from a relative, not a single photo, not a single scratch-piece of paper with the week’s grocery list on it. Realizing the lack of photos, I went back to the fireplace mantle and saw the only picture in the whole house.
Centered on the wall was the classic print of the bleeding heart of Jesus and cross, enwrapped by a chain of thorns with drops of blood dripping down upon four small doves. I looked at the refrigerator. There wasn’t any school schedule pinned to the door, no coupons or advertisements, no magnets cheerily reminding anyone to “have a nice day!” or “hang in there baby!” – only one magnet whose picture depicted the rising sun that I recognized from the postage stamp and this picture bore the same phrase: May the Grace of the Lord go with You.
There was not a single personal photo in the whole house.
In my haste and excitement of entering the house I hadn’t noticed that it was just as hot inside as it was outside and a trickle of sweat ran down my face. Jesus! I thought. Nothing at all to prove that a family named Russell actually lived here! Out of the blue I remembered Ma Cain and her bookkeeping system that she kept before her passing. She always handled the family books and my father followed her financial commandments religiously. Disdainful of computers, Ma always kept a large accordion file…
I ran to the master bedroom, careful not to knock anything out-of-order, and threw open the closet doors. There at the bottom, tucked up against a wall, was a thick manilla expander-file sealed with a waxed string and gro
mmet.
I opened it, thankful for the rubber gloves and my mother’s influence. Inside was a wedding photo; an accompanying napkin announcing it was the merging of Arnold Russell and Launi Kristopher in Fredericksburg, Texas, a few odds-and-ends of legal papers: car title, a repair invoice, Launi’s high school diploma. In the final fold of the file I found the reason why Arnold Russell didn’t show up on the computer.
I unfolded a piece of paper and stared at the birth certificate for Arnold Mueller, born at 12:14 am on April 10, 1977 in Dusseldorf, Germany to Albrecht and Gerda Mueller.
The sick bastard had been born at six pounds, seven ounces.
I heard a thin, rasping sound.
Christ! The door! I broke out in a cold sweat as I stuffed the birth certificate back into the file and replaced the file in the closet. As quickly and as quietly as I could I closed up the closet and crept to the bedroom door. The bedroom door wasn’t visible from the front door but did I leave anything noticeable in the front room? No time. I eased open the door and cat walked to the bathroom door, waiting for a scream behind me or a hand on my shoulder. As I urged the bathroom door open I heard the voice of Arnie say, “I smell smoke! Who’s been smoking in my house?”
Oh my God. My god-damn shirt! My hands. I cursed myself for ever restarting that awful habit. My heart was pounding so loudly that I was sure that they could hear it and would any second run in here. Christ! Why didn’t I bring the gun?
Candy from a Stranger Page 13
