Fourth Person No More

by John Gastineau

  I have an idea of what’s inside, some nearly palpable sight and sound. Glass shatter. The red howl of flesh mashed between fist and bone.

  Like biting a paperclip slowly into the gums, the pleasurable pain builds, and I sense if they reach the surface, yeah Jesus, oh yeah, my hair will explode. Were people watching, they would surely wonder why abruptly I blink, stand up.

  Since I have been sober, I am careful not to be too often or too long still and alone. Which is how I came to be at Janelle’s door the night after Lotty testified.

  It was she who had been drinking. That is, of course, what I noticed first. Over the arm she instinctively threw up on the door jam, high enough to clothesline an intruder, I could see on the nightstand a pint of bourbon and one of the motel’s plastic cups. The bottle, I’d say from experience, was 90 percent gone; the cup an amber, half-finger full.

  If ever I needed to confirm my problem, the fact that I noticed the booze first did it. When she opened the door, Janelle wore a thigh-length, yellow T-shirt sufficiently thin to allow low-cut panties to show through. That evening, she favored a pink heart on her left hip.

  We gave each other carpenter’s stares, measuring twice to cut once. I apologized. I said I didn’t know she was in bed, but I didn’t turn away. She cocked her head, shook it once, smiled, and looked away. Whatever irony occurred to her, I did not see. She stepped back, leaving the door open.

  She got back into bed demurely, in one fluid movement, turning away from me as she pulled the sheet up over her long legs and her long legs up, wrapping them in her arms under her chin, to sit with her back against some pillows and the headboard. She had the floor lamp in the corner on but dim. The clock radio played pop, tinny, incongruously bouncy, and low.

  All her clothes appeared to be folded in a suitcase on a stand near the sink. All her toiletries were arranged in one corner of the counter. The television was cold to the touch, and there was not a newspaper, magazine, or book in sight.

  I took one of the chairs on either side of a table between the bed and the window. Her laptop’s lid was up, and there were a couple of notepads and pens scattered around it on the table. It seemed to be the room’s only clutter.

  “Some fun this afternoon,” I said.

  Naomi had tried to gather the clans outside when court adjourned to denounce Lottie for forgetting about her old man’s gun. Her son would be alive today, Naomi said, if that “old woman” had just kept her head. It only went to show she was right about Lottie not being fit to care for children, Naomi said.

  Janelle and I had been the only ones to show up. The twinks were on deadline, and no one else wanted to spoil their story about Lottie with another one of Naomi’s self-absorbed rants.

  The sorry attendance put Naomi in a bad mood, and the tone of a couple of my questions may have inadvertently disclosed my opinion that she was a slobbering publicity hound. She left in a huff, dragging William along with her. He wore a face that was even more sad and sheepish than usual.

  I wrote it as a four-inch sidebar and ordered Marley to bury it inside. Marley reminded me that I was not the boss of him and suggested maybe I ought to find Lottie for her response. A half dozen calls later, I could only say Lottie remained unavailable for comment.

  “That’s about all I got,” Janelle said, when I told her what I had done.

  “Shit always leaves a bad taste,” I said, thinking not merely of Naomi. “You filed?”

  “Yeah. You? You need a computer?”

  She had her chin on her arms, and she talked to the foot of the bed. She spoke slowly and deliberately so she wouldn’t slur. Since she wouldn’t look at me, either as I had toured the room or now as I sat near her, I snickered to let her know I was benign.

  “Cold, Janelle. Very cold.”

  She shrugged. “Wasn’t meant to be.”

  “I know. Thanks anyway.”

  Perhaps she expected sarcasm. She looked at me finally.

  I said: “I don’t think I was ever this neat when I drank alone.”

  “I cleaned first,” she said. “Didn’t work. And anyway, who likes a sloppy drunk?”

  “Well,” said I, without considering what I meant by it or how she might take it, “maybe another sloppy drunk.”

  I sat slumped, with my legs crossed at the ankles and my hands folded on my gut. It was hard to hold such a casual position under her gaze, which turned searching and bare. To deflect it, I cocked my chin toward her bottle.

  “I would’ve picked you for a wine-cooler type.”

  Her expression hardened.

  “Maybe you noticed, asshole, it wasn’t a wine-cooler day.”

  She looked back toward the foot of the bed, her lips pursed.

  “Want some?” she said. “Or is it true what they say?”

  “What do they say, Janelle?”

  She had the sand to look at me.

  “That you’re one of a long line of washed-up drunks that the washed-up drunk who owns your paper hires under the guise of rehabilitation when he really does it just because he can get you cheap and there’s always more where you came from.”

  The echo of that ricocheted off the walls between my ears for a while. I was nevertheless impressed, given her condition, by the length and syntax of the sentence.

  It also occurred to me that while she might not be a sloppy drunk bourbon certainly made her a mean one. I pretty much wanted to rip her up, maybe slap her, but I was sober and she was not. Call it a black bubble caught on the fly and tamped back.

  The Program teaches there are always reasons people lay off their pain on others. She’d smeared the ink once that day. She’d decided she wasn’t going to do that again. A woman in our business could not risk being seen as emotionally weak or gullible. She was drinking alone in her room, trying to keep it to herself, but here I was intruding, getting in her way, maybe letting out her secret, which was, of course, that she was human.

  I sat up and leaned forward, propping my bulk on my thighs with my forearms.

  “Drunks is accurate enough,” I said, “but recovering, not washed up, is our adjective of choice. We like to be coldly realistic but hopeful.”

  I peered up under her bowed head and smirked to show her it was a joke. She shook her head, then she peeked out from behind her elbow and her cheek furrowed so I assume she smiled.

  “And although he didn’t find me there, there are those who say the big guy sees AA as an opportunity for recruitment.”

  She made a sound from deep in her throat. Maybe she stifled a laugh.

  “And the pay? Well. For small town work, the pay’s damn near union scale.”

  Her shoulders shook. She pulled her head back and laughed. The material was good, but not that good.

  “Janelle,” I said, “after a pint of bourbon, how’d you manage to say rehabilitation?”

  That did it. Her face fell back into her arms, and her shoulders shook again then heaved. She barked three, four sobs before the soft wail escaped through gritted teeth and ran up the scale.

  I went to the sink and pulled some tissue out of the slot in the wall. I handed them to her as I pulled my chair up close to the bed, sat, and reached over to pat her shoulder and massage her neck until she brought it back in hand.

  She pinched the tissue into her eyes for a long moment and discretely dabbed her nose. She dropped her legs splayed beneath the sheet and blew out her breath so that her bangs flew up.

  She looked around as though dazed, everywhere but at me. I thought maybe holding her against my chest would do both of us some good, but I had no reason to think she’d like that, so I took my hand away.

  “That was fucking embarrassing,” she said after a while.

  “Nice talk.”

  “Just words,” she said. She sniffed and wiped her nose. “They’re not enough.”

  “What�
��s not enough? Words?”

  “Words.”

  “Not enough? For what? For whom?”

  “To tell the story. To tell people what that woman went through.”

  “Lottie?”

  “Lottie. I don’t have the words to make people see how much she hurt or how evil that fucker is. Not in 15 inches of type.”

  “She made you cry, didn’t she?”

  Janelle looked at me curiously, waiting.

  “Use Lottie’s words.”

  She shook her head, unconvinced.

  “You don’t cry? Ever?”

  “No, no,” I said. “No Oprah for me.”

  “’You were at a Meeting, you’d talk.”

  She almost had me there. I’d talked about weeping over a story or two at Meetings a long, long time ago.

  “What would you know about Meetings?” I said as it crossed my mind she might find out if she let too many stories get to her like this.

  “I got to go,” I said and rose.

  “You’re here because?” she said.

  I shrugged.

  “Not a good time to be alone?”

  I turned.

  “See you in the morning.”

  Behind me, I heard her shift on the bed. She said my name. When I turned back, she was worrying the hem of that yellow T-shirt with her thumbs. Every other stitch of it she held crumpled in her lap.

  In the dim light, her Mediterranean skin looked smooth, warm, and caramel sweet right down to the circles around her nipples. From under her brow, she gave me a tight, crooked smile. One small breast rose when she held out her hand.

  The Program says size up and be honest: I am not particularly moral, and I am certainly not religious. I’m not even a nice guy.

  To the cynical, controlling alcoholic that is me, there were too many toos: too young, too sad, too Freudian, too bad. A kiss from her would be my first taste of alcohol in years; it was a trap. If she wanted me, she was going to have to want me sober. Otherwise, I’d have pride problems and who knew how many Meetings it’d take to talk that out. However flattered I might have been by her trust, the price she was willing to pay for comfort was too high, and, anyway, she didn’t need to do me any favors.

  Still, I went back to the bed, and for a long, self-indulgently sorrowful moment, I stood over Janelle, looking at her, enjoying her.

  “A moral choice?” said the oracle Dill once in an entirely different context. “Why, that’s just a handstand on a rusty razor, fat boy. The question is: You got the will to hold yourself upright?”

  I carefully drew the sheet up over her breasts and around her shoulders. I nudged her over with my hip, sat down, put my back against the headboard, and pulled her to me. Her hair smelled of the motel’s shampoo, enough nearly to mask the bourbon’s sweet scent.

  Her hand ran lazily down the length of my side as far as she could reach, but I caught it and put it to rest at my waist. When she raised her face to me for a kiss, I saw her confusion, and I indulged myself a little more. I passed my knuckles across the warmth of her cheek a couple of times before I drew her forehead to my lips, held it there probably longer than I should have, then nestled her head back up under my chin.

  In a few moments, I felt the knots of uncertainty melt from her back. After a while, she slept. A while later, I eased my dead arm out from under her and tucked her in.

  I stopped at the door for a last look. She lay with her back to me, both arms thrust over her bowed head and one leg thrown forward, a diver aimed deep at sleep’s coil.

  I considered what it would feel like to lie back down and spoon up beside her, to accept her warmth and slowly run my hand, cupped and light, from her hand to her hip. And if I were going to cry that day, that would’ve been the time.

  I had not put that much thought into whether to sleep with a woman since I was a mere lad in the Sixties and the murmured warnings of parents, preachers, and pols bound me to an overly long period of highly ambivalent abstinence. Standing in the cool night outside Janelle’s door, working a crick out of my neck and glaring at stars, it occurred to me then, as I believe now, I spend way too much time living in my head.

  It’s one of the Program’s nastier side effects, and I say truly there are times when I hate the fucking Program.

  A donut quest nearly always yields more than mere cake.

  I had not slept much thinking about what I could say to Janelle that would not embarrass us both. As a result, I arrived at the courthouse way earlier than usual the next day, and since I was there, since a shop on the square served a fine chocolate-glazed and decent coffee, and since fried dough and caffeine are conducive to thought, I figured I may as well eat as I took up the question once more.

  I had just left the shop with a bag and an extra-large cup, heading for the rustic tranquility of a bench on the square, when Moze passed by in his squad. He stopped on each side of the square, sprinkling from his car one cop per side. Each held a rifle at port arms and scanned his side of the block. Moze drove away toward the jail.

  The cop on my side of the square saw me, the only other person out

  at that time, and motioned with his weapon in a manner that made me think he wanted me to stay where I was. Fine by me. I’m good at standing and watching.

  After a few minutes, Moze drove around the square again. This time, he was followed by a state police car, Wood’s car, and another state police car.

  They pulled up to a side of the courthouse they had not stopped at before and four cops got out of each of the state cars. These cops, too, bristled with arms, shotguns and handguns.

  When they had looked around, one of them slapped the roof of Wood’s car. Wood and his local counterpart get out, opened the back door, and yanked the Defendant out. Today, he was swaddled in Kevlar. They put their hands firmly on his head, bent him as far over as the Kevlar would allow, and ran him into the courthouse in the middle of a bristling cop scrum.

  I waited until the cops on the square joined their colleagues inside the courthouse before I crossed over to Wood’s car and parked a well-padded cheek on its warm fender. I did not think it wise to enter a building where so many armed police officers would be milling around with their weapons drawn and anyway they’d have to move the cars sooner or later.

  Wood was hanging his cuffs back on his belt and talking urgently to his counterpart when they came out. They were only about ten feet away when the counterpart saw me and pulled Wood up short.

  I extended the donut bag of peace to them and said: “Lottie’s testimony must’ve been persuasive. Who threatened to kill him?”

  “What’s this son of bitch know about it?” the counterpart said to Wood.

  Wood sighed, waved off the donuts, and looked away.

  “Oh, I doubt he knows a god-damned thing,” Wood said. “But he guesses pretty good.”

  I called Janelle, woke her up, and filled her in. She started to say something about the night before, but I cut her off.

  “Do your job,” I said. “Let’s pretend we’re not kids at a summer camp.”

  Harsh, perhaps. It was the best I could come up with.

  The cops would say only that the caller had been male and said he would blow the Defendant’s fucking head clean off. He might’ve been drunk or high, they said, judging by the way he slurred his words. When I suggested to Wood that maybe whoever it was had been trying to disguise his voice, he rubbed his chin and allowed as how it was possible.

  From there, it was just a hop over a puddle for most of the clans to put it on Orlo or Bobby Russell, the father of two of the children. I didn’t think Bobby would’ve warned anybody. As taciturn as he was, Bobby would’ve just shot him and never said a word about it to anyone, including his wife. I couldn’t be sure about Orlo, but the cops said they had no evidence to put it on him, and there was the issue of whether he was sharp
enough to disguise his voice.

  Secrist offered to call off court that day while the cops investigated the threat, but Crandall, Reardon, and Reardon’s client wanted to get on with it. Indeed, on that morning, the Defendant seemed about as perky as he had been at any other point during the trial. His eyes fairly gleamed through the photograys. Whether he was getting off on the excitement of the threat or the prospect of serving up his defense, I will not venture to guess.

  Reardon’s basic strategy had not changed since he talked to us the day his client was arrested. A significant part of it was a simple, straightforward rope-a-dope. It went like this: “It couldn’t have been me. I wasn’t there. I was home asleep when these terrible things happened.”

  The strategy made sense from a legal standpoint. The instructions to the jury would be that the burden of proof was on the State and the defense did not have to prove anything.

  Assuming nobody said or did anything to suggest otherwise, what evidence could Crandall present now to dispute what the defense witnesses would say about where the Defendant was when the murders occurred? We had seen or heard it all, and the only evidence that put the Defendant at the scene came from a weird kid who had prostituted himself for a ticket to Disney World and an identification by jewelry. It was going to boil down to a matter of credibility: Whose witnesses would the jury choose to believe?

  It’s difficult to generalize about how juries decide who is credible and who is not, but as a rule, juries tend not to believe witnesses that creep them out. That theory explains why the Defendant didn’t tell us where he was when the murders occurred. His wife did.

  Connie was rolled-oats white and carrying thirty, maybe thirty-five, pounds more than she needed. Her brown hair was thick and course and hung down past her shoulders. She wore a long, green sweater over what could have been a man’s yellow dress shirt, tail out, and a pair of cheap, green leggings.