by Joe Clifford
“Almost noon,” Jenny snapped. “What the hell have you been up to that you’re still in bed at twelve o’clock in the afternoon?”
I didn’t have much in this life, no fancy sound systems or nice cookware, practically every possession lifted from homes I’d cleaned for Tom, or bartered in trade at swap shops. My apartment was decorated primarily with dead people’s trash, and now, spread across the tattered old carpets and stained, cracked linoleum, I saw it for what it truly was: the crap nobody else wanted.
“Are you going to answer me?” Jenny demanded. “Do you have any idea how pissed Brody was to be woken by the police? To learn I was over at your house at eleven o’clock at night when I should’ve been working? When I’d only gone there in the first place because I was so worried about—”
“I was attacked,” I said, inhaling.
“What do you mean, you were ‘attacked’?”
I tried to find an ashtray. The whole place was nothing but. I grabbed one of the dozen empty beer cans on the floor. “Somebody was waiting in my apartment when I got home from meeting Charlie last night. They hit me with something, knocked me out.”
“Oh my God, Jay, are you all right?”
“I got a goose egg on the back of my head. But, yeah, I’m fine.”
“Did you call the cops?”
“They’re the ones who found me.”
“Did they catch whoever it was?”
“I don’t know. I mean, they hadn’t when I went to bed last night.”
“Who’d want to rob you?”
She didn’t bring up Chris, at least not right away, even though I knew that’s what she must’ve been thinking.
“Sorry about Brody,” I said. “I told the cops to call and make sure you were all right. I didn’t know if you were still here when whoever broke in. I guess I should’ve called myself.”
“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have jumped down your throat like that. I’m just glad you’re all right.” I heard the strained exhale. “You don’t think—”
“I don’t think so,” I said, cutting her off. “I know it sounds crazy, but I would’ve been able to tell if had it been my brother. For as much shit as he’s pinched from me over the years, and as much grief as he’s caused, clubbing me unconscious in the dark takes it to a whole new level of scumbag.”
“Maybe he’s getting desperate since they found his friend dead and all.”
“Listen, it wasn’t him. Trust me. Probably just a couple punk, high school kids. But this is only going to make the cops look harder for Chris. There’s some big-shot detective up from Concord investigating.” Outside, I heard an alarm that sounded like my truck. “Can you call me back in two minutes?”
“Um, sure.”
I rushed to the window that overlooked the lot below, and pulled back the curtain in time to catch Hank Miller switching off an alarm to another truck in his garage. He caught a glimpse of me and sheepishly waved. I waved back.
Fuck, I was on edge.
I walked over to the TV facedown on the carpet and lifted it back on its stand, clicking the remote to see if it still worked, certain the old tubes inside had been shattered. Surprisingly, Channel 3’s News at Noon switched on. Another report about the ski industry up here, footage of folks hitting the slopes, some perky blonde reporter in a neon-pink parka, flashing a blinding megawatt smile. Skiing was a lucrative business in New Hampshire, attracting the vacationing jet set across New England. Though the nearest resort was an hour away, Ashton was in the heart of the mountains, and you’d see packed minivans with glistening racks on the highway and Turnpike all season long. Must be nice. You bust your ass to stay up on child support payments, scraping by to keep food on your plate and a goddamn roof over your head, and you don’t have much time leftover for playing in the snow. The perky blonde cut to a clip featuring Ashton’s favorite son, Adam Lombardi, in a hard hat. I went to turn up the sound when the phone rang.
“Everything okay?” Jenny asked.
“It’s nice that you’re so worried about me.”
On the TV, they were back on the slopes, where an all-American family in coordinated outfits was being interviewed. I switched it off. No wonder I rarely watched the goddamn thing. If it wasn’t sports or a movie, television only made me mad.
“Of course, I worry,” Jenny said. “I told you that last night.”
“When you were at my apartment. At almost midnight.” I laughed. “Brody must’ve loved that.”
“You have no idea,” she said, laughing back.
“I think I do. If you were my girl over some other guy’s house—”
“That’s the thing, Jay. You’re not just ‘some other guy.’ You know how hard that is for Brody?”
I wanted to say, “You know how little I give a fuck?” But I didn’t. “How’s our son?”
“He’s with my mom. She’s taking him to her sewing group.”
“Poor guy.”
“You kidding me? All those old ladies pinching his cheeks and giving him treats? I know you don’t like her much, but I’m glad he has at least one grandparent in his life. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”
“I like your mom just fine,” I said. “She doesn’t like me. Listen, I’m not working right now. I mean, I still have a job, but Tom is laying low for a while. I can help out watching Aiden more during the day, if you need me to.”
“He’s your son. You can see him anytime you’d like. But my mom has the time and, frankly, I’m not sure I’d feel good with Aiden over at your place with what’s been going on. After what you just told me, I don’t feel too good with you being at your place.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m a big boy. I’m sorry for any headache with Brody last night. Blame it all on me if you need to.”
Jenny giggled. “What do you think I did?”
CHAPTER TEN
I called Charlie to see if he had time for lunch at the Olympic Diner. As luck would have it, he said, he was wrapping up a service call down the road and would meet me there.
The Olympic was on the south end of the Desmond Turnpike, which connected bigger counties like Colebrook and Pittsfield, so it attracted more foot traffic than the rest of town. We’d practically lived at the twenty-four-hour diner in high school, every party eventually finding its way there come dawn.
Sitting in the parking lot, I drank the coffee I’d picked up across the street at the Shell station, smoking from a fresh pack of cigarettes, waiting for Charlie. The streets were paved, but you couldn’t scrape up all the snow and ice, each passing storm only adding a layer to the asphalt permafrost.
A slick sheen glistened off everything, long icicles dripping from electrical lines, Ashton consumed by deep, dark gray. Tall weeds and bramble reeds poked through the hard snow, creeping and cracking around streetlamps, bumpers and barriers, like crippled beanstalks.
This section of the Turnpike seemed more respectable, with businesses and restaurants like Best Buy, Jiffy Lube, Friendly’s—there was even a duckpin bowling alley where I attended birthday parties as a kid—but in between all the department outlets and national chains were still the places no one really wanted to be: cheap motels, dollar stores, military surplus shacks, knickknack and consignment shops, The Salvation Army, fast food drive-throughs, all-night gas stations.
I watched the stragglers. Not bums, exactly. That wouldn’t be fair to say. But hardly upstanding citizens. It was pushing one o’clock on a weekday afternoon, and the boulevard bustled with activity. Didn’t anybody work? Almost always in pairs, they seemed to wander without direction. They were vagrants, welfare recipients who lived in one of the countless dumpy hotels that populated this stretch, waiting for their next public handout to get high and fuck away the pain, the lost kids, the alcoholic men and broken-down women, the easily forgotten and the quickly replaced.
I remembered buying pot years ago off a guy who lived in one of these motels. He couldn’t have been much older than I am now, but he seem
ed incomprehensibly old at the time. I could still picture the inside of that hellhole as he weighed the bud on an old-fashioned, balance-beam scale—warbling game show on a tiny black and white TV with rabbit ears; the near-naked, emaciated woman laying on the unmade bed; the ribbons of blue smoke that floated like cirrus clouds in a lazy summer sky—thinking I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
For as much time as I’d spent on the Turnpike and in the diner when I was younger, these sights and sounds never before completely registered. I didn’t understand how someone could tolerate a single day of it, let alone years. And that’s how my brother had lived most of his life.
A knock on my passenger-side window startled me, and I looked up to see Charlie mugging against the glass.
“You were kind of a dick last night,” Charlie said inside the diner. We sat in a booth against the long pane window, overlooking the Turnpike. Each booth came with its own miniature jukebox. We were about the only ones in there, having missed the lunch crowd.
“Fisher hates my guts.” I flipped through the selections on the jukebox, nothing more recent than the 1980s, and not the good shit, either. The best you could hope for was maybe Hall & Oates, a “Little Red Corvette,” a Michael Jackson song before his face turned entirely plastic. The diner did its best to maintain the illusion of nostalgia, which was its primary appeal. That and the waitresses. Certainly wasn’t the food.
“You shouldn’t have felt up his girlfriend,” said Charlie.
“A, she wasn’t his girlfriend, and B, that was fifteen years ago. How long does someone hold onto a grudge?”
“You tell me. Guy’s trying to do you a favor. You might be a little more appreciative.”
“Someone broke into my place last night.”
The waitress, a beautiful, young Greek girl with long, straight black hair and the type of face they write poetry about, came to take our order. Her family had owned the restaurant since I was a kid, and it seemed they never ran out of beautiful, young waitresses. An endless parade. Every time you stepped into the Olympic, there was another gorgeous Greek girl in a tight blue skirt, ready to offer service with a smile.
“Who?” Charlie asked, after he’d ordered a burger with the works and she’d strutted away.
“Huh?”
“Stop ogling the help. Who broke into your apartment?”
I hadn’t ordered anything, just coffee, my gut acting up, which didn’t make coffee the smartest bet, I knew, but I was dragging ass and needed to get it in gear.
“Beats me,” I said, grabbing a fistful of sugar packets and emptying them in the faded brown mug. “I walked in on them. Cracked me good on the back of the head. Cops found me out cold. And don’t ask if it was my brother. I’m sick of the question. Chris couldn’t drop me with a hockey stick and a running start.”
“Actually, I was thinking it was those guys from the computer shop.”
“Possible,” I said. “Didn’t take anything, whoever it was. Tore the place to hell looking for something, though.”
The waitress returned with the pot and filled me up, smiling awkwardly when our conversation halted as soon as she came near.
“That hard drive,” whispered Charlie after she’d left. “I told you.” He stabbed his finger at me. “That’s the key to this whole thing.”
“I’m not ready to go all in on that yet. We’re basing everything we know on the ramblings of a drug addict—a drug addict who believes, among other things, that our country was founded by aliens and that the government poisons our drinking water. My brother is a lunatic. And a liar. When Chris speaks, you have to divide by four.”
“Pete Naginis is dead. Murdered. Or have you forgotten that?”
“They live a rough life, stealing, shooting drugs, getting in debt to the wrong people.”
Charlie held up a hand and started ticking off items, using each finger to illustrate his point. “Your brother’s missing. That detective’s up from Concord. The phone call? Those gangbangers at the shop? And now somebody breaks into your apartment? That’s gotta add up to something, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know what to think, Charlie.” I peered out through the cold glass, at the cars and trucks zooming along the wet road. “That detective’s name’s McGreevy. He was at my place with Turley and Pat last night. Tell you one thing. I don’t like the guy. He’s playing some angle.”
“You want to crash at my place for a few? Maybe whoever it was will come back. I wouldn’t want those biker methheads catching me at home alone.” I could see by the sudden change in expression that he’d just made the connection. “Shit, I was with you.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it. If someone is looking for that hard drive, my apartment makes sense, yours doesn’t. Plus, I’m not totally convinced it was those guys from the shop.”
“Who, then?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But if my brother wasn’t blowing smoke and this isn’t all a bizarre coincidence, there has to be something pretty damning in those files.”
“Did he have the hard drive with him at your place?”
“Not unless it fit inside his filthy brown backpack.”
“So, Pete had it?”
“My guess.”
“And now Pete’s dead.”
The pretty Greek waitress brought Charlie’s burger, which he immediately began doctoring—salting, peppering, slathering in sauce.
I watched the waitress wriggle away in her tight blue skirt. Nineteen, twenty. Man, I was only ten years removed from that age and I might as well have been a hundred years old.
“Maybe Fisher will turn up something,” Charlie said, chomping down on his burger, gobs of mustard, mayo, and ketchup squirting out the sides and dribbling over his fingers.
“If you talk to him, tell him sorry. I was a little high-strung last night.”
“No worries,” said Charlie, through the wad of masticated hamburger mash. “So, what’s the plan now? Head back to that computer shop?” He snorted at his own joke.
“Maybe later.” I gazed at the roaming nomads schlepping through the roadside slush. “My brother has to be around here somewhere.”
Charlie sucked the meat juices off his thumb.
“We don’t have any soup kitchens or shelters in town,” I said. “Maybe he’s over in Pittsfield. But that’s a long haul just for a place to sleep. I know he crashes at some of these motels on the Turnpike when he gets enough money.” I gestured out the window. “There is this one girl he used to hang around with, Kitty something.”
“Kitty?”
“That’s how he introduced her to me. Kitty. Used to bring her around a lot. Shit, this was, like, a couple years ago. I normally don’t pay attention to any of his friends, they come and go so fast, but she seemed to mean more to him than most of the ones he runs around with.”
“Girlfriend?”
“I’m not sure guys like my brother have girlfriends. Anyway, she stopped coming by. Hardly a prize, as strung-out as him. She had a room in a boarding house over in Middlebury. Middle of fucksake nowhere. Had me drop her off there once.”
“Who lives in a boarding house? What is this? The 1940s?”
I shrugged.
“Why haven’t you checked there before now?”
“Because it was three fucking years ago,” I said. “I doubt she even still lives there.”
“I thought you said it was two years.”
“I don’t know, Charlie. Maybe it was two. Maybe it was a year. It’s been a while, though. I haven’t given it much thought until now. Why would I? I have my own fucking life, y’know?” Out the window, a bum struggled to keep from slipping as he pushed a shopping cart across the icy parking lot. “You don’t understand what’s it’s been like dealing with my brother.”
“I think I have a good idea.”
“He’s like a child. You can’t take his plans or his friends seriously. Everyone he hangs around with is like that. They all live in a fantasy world, as whacked out as he
is.”
Charlie’s phone on the table started to vibrate. He checked it, glumly muttering, then hopped up and extracted a wad of bills from his hip pocket. “Gotta run. Call me this afternoon. Let me know what you find.” He left a ten-spot, slipped on his work coat, then shoved the last bite of bacon and burger down his gullet. “And I mean it, if you want to crash at my place, got an extra bed and everything.”
I nodded my appreciation. He double knocked on the table and hurried out the door.
Buried deep in the valley cuts, Middlebury oozed so much backwoods’ backwater it made Ashton seem like a bustling metropolis. Small, spread-out dairy farms and gummed-up slaughterhouses, broken-down harvesters rusting in untended fields, distant houses where the top floor lights never went out. Murders of big black crows perched high in treetops, suspiciously eyeing strangers. They’d wait for the shotgun blasts to echo in the distance, before scattering in fifteen different directions.
At the end of a tortuously long, one-lane road that carved through granite gullies and dense thicket in the rugged northern outback, Middlebury’s town center comprised a tiny grocery market, a gas station with one pump, and a restaurant that closed at two in the afternoon. That was it. Even by rural standards, Middlebury was Hicksville.
The people who lived in Middlebury fell into one of two camps: radical militia types who didn’t like the government telling them what to do, so they stockpiled firearms and refurbished land mines, collected canned goods by the crate-load, burrowing deep underground, prepping for doomsday. You’d spot them on patrol, making rounds, trolling compound perimeters in camouflage fatigues, sporting subterranean tans like extras from The Hills Have Eyes, hoping for some poor bastard to mistakenly wander onto their property.
Then there were the rehabilitated.
I knew of at least two halfway houses and one transitional living facility. I guess they thought by sticking addicts in the middle of nowhere it would be harder for them to score dope or get drunk. But if my brother had taught me one thing about addiction, it was that when an addict wants to get high, ain’t hell or high water going to stop him.
