Second Skin

by Michael Wiley

  ‘Put the bastard through,’ I said.

  Voice shaking, he told me about the visit. First the husband, now the wife. I knew what to do with a wife. Kitchen counter, bed, or hood of her car. I could take care of that. But the husband? A war vet? Probably armed and, if Alex Greene knew what he was talking about, definitely crazy. Hard to persuade such a man.

  ‘What did you tell her?’ I asked Alex.

  ‘Nothing. I had nothing to say.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I don’t like this.’

  ‘Who asked you to?’

  ‘I don’t like—’

  ‘Your voice is shaking, Alex.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do now?’

  ‘You’re a good kid,’ I said. ‘Don’t mess it up.’

  ‘I’m not a kid.’ As if I’d called him boy.

  ‘Don’t mess it up.’

  He breathed heavily. He could become a problem. He said, ‘She gave me a poem for Sheneel.’

  ‘Cheaper than flowers.’

  ‘A love poem. I think she was in love with her.’

  ‘Did she say so?’

  ‘The poem did. I could see it in her.’

  ‘You’re smart, Alex. Smarter than her. Smarter than her husband. Stay calm. Stay cool.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  ‘You will.’ I said it neither reassuringly nor threateningly and let him make of it what he would.

  ELEVEN

  Johnny

  I waited in my room in the Behavioral Health ward as Lillian filled my prescriptions from the hospital pharmacy. The doctors wouldn’t discharge me until I rattled the pill bottles under their noses. Without medication, I would be a danger to myself and others, they said. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Fill ’er up,’ and they stared at me with worried eyes.

  I’d told them I had no wish to kill myself.

  I’d told them I had no wish to harm others.

  On the tests they’d given me, I’d done the psychological equivalent of walking the dotted line, heel-to-toe, and touching my finger to my nose, and they had no reason to hold me beyond a twenty-four-hour evaluation.

  When the first doctor asked me what happened with the knife and my hands, I said, ‘The world’s rotten. We kill each other. Even if we don’t, we’ll all die anyway. The world is bloody and nothing turns out well.’

  We were sitting in his office, him at a desk, me on an overstuffed chair big enough to swallow a man. The doctor chewed the end of his pen. ‘What about all the good things people do? What about people who love each other? What about your wife?’

  ‘They’ll die too.’

  ‘You must be a hell of a lot of fun at a party.’

  I laughed, and the doctor said laughing was healthy.

  I did better with the second doctor. ‘I took an Ambien before bed,’ I said. ‘I got up – half awake, half asleep, whatever you call it when you’re drugged and you’re only partly aware of what you’re doing – and I must have been hungry, because I went to the fridge – or I think I did. I don’t know what happened with the knife. Maybe I thought I was making a sandwich.’

  The doctor nodded, scribbled notes on his pad, and said, ‘What about all you said to Dr Patel?’

  ‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘We die. Sooner or later. And I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff. But it’s no reason to cut myself.’

  That evening, they fed us at six, lights went out at nine, and during the night my roommate, a big man with tiny ears, howled until two nurses came with a syringe. There was music in the sounds the man made, the music of the world before we started fooling ourselves into believing in happy endings – paradise, heaven, glory, whatever religious or secular peace we imagine for ourselves at the end. I wanted to howl too, but I clutched my belly and held the roaring in.

  In the morning, a third doctor said the hospital would release me if I filled my prescriptions and scheduled a follow-up appointment. ‘Show me where to sign,’ I said.

  When they let Lillian into the room, the bag of meds in one of her hands and a folder of release papers in the other, she hung close to the door.

  ‘Hey,’ I said.

  ‘Hey. Are you mad at me?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Putting you here.’

  ‘I would have done the same if it had been you. Not that it would’ve been.’

  ‘I was scared,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  I tried cheery. ‘Ready to go.’

  The nurses insisted on wheeling me to the exit in a wheelchair, and Lillian brought around the car. Overnight, the weather had cooled, and thin clouds lined the horizon. I breathed deep.

  As we drove from the hospital, I unwrapped the gauze from my right hand. Lillian glanced at me. ‘What are you doing?’

  I stuffed the blood-caked cotton into the pocket on the side of the door. ‘I’ll leave the bandage on my left hand, but this one is overkill.’ I took a Kleenex from the glove compartment and wiped the brown ointment from the cut. The skin had pinked and swelled, but I’d gone through only a few layers and the bleeding had stopped.

  Lillian turned toward the highway and, as if to avoid talking about what worried her most, told me about a call from her brother, a visit she’d made to Fernandina, records she’d looked at in the museum, and a talk she’d had with Alex Greene. But she sounded uninterested in her own stories, and finally she asked the same question she’d asked when I’d come into the sunroom in the middle of the night and that the doctors had asked after her. ‘Why did you do this to yourself?’

  ‘Do you really want to know?’

  She kept the car in the slow lane. ‘I think so.’

  ‘I woke up,’ I said, ‘and I felt as if I was crawling inside my skin. My body felt like a strange casing, something an insect or a snake would grow and then shed, and if I didn’t escape it, it would poison and suffocate me. It was terrible. I needed out.’

  Then we rode in silence. The traffic had thickened as we’d come into the city and approached the bridge, but outbound we ran free.

  She put her hand on my knee and drove, but when we left the highway and stopped at a red light, I rooted through the pharmacy bag to see what was inside. There were three vials. I pulled out the Xanax, unscrewed the lid, rolled down the window, and poured the pills on to the pavement. Lillian grabbed the bag with the other vials and stuffed it between the driver’s seat and her door. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘I hate this stuff.’

  ‘You need to take it. It’ll keep you sane.’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘I’m going to take you back to the hospital.’

  ‘I wouldn’t forgive you for that.’

  ‘Christ, Johnny. You can’t do this.’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s the only way I can do it.’

  She dropped me off at home. She’d canceled her first class so that she could pick me up, and she was running late for the second. I let Percy in from the yard, and he sniffed at me as if I carried a new scent of danger. So I showered and changed, ate breakfast, put him back in the yard, and went out to my car.

  When I pulled into the parking lot outside my office, a woman was sleeping against the glass door. She wore a short red skirt, a black sweatshirt, and yellow high heels. Felicity, the old prostitute. Since I’d last seen her, she’d dyed her hair a shade between pink and henna, a dirty color that made her black face look gray in the morning light.

  I went to her and prodded a bare thigh with my shoe.

  She grunted.

  I prodded again. ‘Get up. You’re blocking my door.’

  She opened her eyes, seemed to bring me into focus, and gave me what might have passed for a sexy smile a generation ago. ‘Give me a cigarette,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t smoke,’ I said.

  ‘The hell you don’t.’

  ‘Come on, get up. I’ll buy you breakfast.’

  ‘I want a smoke.’

  ‘You�
�ve got to eat.’

  ‘Don’t see why.’ But she pushed herself to her feet.

  I walked her down to the Sahara Sandwiches Shop and asked Farouk to make her an egg and sausage wrap. When Farouk set the plate on the counter and filled her cup with hot coffee, I paid the bill and left them there, though she called after me as I went out the door, ‘Next time, I want a cigarette.’

  I unlocked the door to my rental and let myself in. Whenever I returned to the office after being away for a couple of days, the air inside smelled as skunky as new rubber, though the tire store that once occupied the building had moved out long before I moved in. I went to my desk. The answering machine said I’d received two calls the previous afternoon, both from the same number, but the caller had left no messages. I turned on my computer and, while it was booting up, phoned the number. After two rings, a recorded message answered. A girl’s voice said she wasn’t there, but if I would leave a message she would call back. I hung up, typed the number into the reverse number database, and hit search. The record that popped on to the screen said the phone was owned by Sprint Spectrum and registered to a Sheneel Greene of Fernandina Beach, Florida.

  ‘What the hell?’ I said to the computer.

  Then I figured Alex Greene must have the phone. If the police had it, why would they call me? If the person who killed and dismembered Sheneel had it, why call me?

  But why would Alex Greene call me on his dead sister’s phone? I had nothing better to do than to go ask him. Besides, fresh off a suicide watch, I knew that sitting alone all day at my desk might tip me in directions I needed to avoid.

  Still, before I left, it couldn’t hurt to peek.

  I slid open the top drawer, and my stomach dropped. Except for a green oilcloth rag, it was empty. I grabbed the phone and dialed.

  I caught Lillian between classes. ‘My gun,’ I said when she picked up.

  Her voice was calm. ‘I took it.’

  Hot anger filled me. ‘Don’t do this,’ I said.

  Lillian asked, ‘What do you need it for?’

  ‘My job.’

  ‘What job?’ She said it gently. ‘You don’t have a job. What have you done?’

  I hung up, shoved back from the desk, and left my office.

  The road north to Fernandina, with the white concrete reflecting the sunlight, burned in my burning eyes. My right hand gripped the steering wheel. My left hand, swollen and bandaged, throbbed in my lap. The bank of clouds that had hung at the horizon when I’d left the hospital had crept toward the sun, but I would have bet my life, whatever it was worth, on the sun annihilating the clouds before they could bring shade. So I held tight, accelerated, and a half-hour later stopped in front of the yellow house on Gum Street.

  As I stepped into the front porch, Alex Greene opened the front door. ‘What?’ he said. His eyes were hard, angry.

  ‘You don’t work?’

  ‘Not right now. They don’t lock you up in the hospital?’

  ‘Who said I was in the hospital?’

  He nodded at my bandaged hand and said, ‘Your wife told me.’

  ‘She shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘She shouldn’t have come here. You either.’ He stood in the open doorway, filling as much of it as he could with his skinny body, as though worried that I would push past him into the living room.

  I said, ‘Why did you call me yesterday?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘On Sheneel’s phone. Twice. Once around three. Again a little before five.’

  ‘I didn’t call, and I don’t have Sheneel’s phone.’

  I looked at him close. ‘Who does?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen it.’

  ‘Why would someone use it to call me?’

  He looked at me as if he was trying to figure me out. ‘You know, your wife gave me a love poem for Sheneel.’

  I shrugged. ‘My wife likes poetry.’

  ‘It said something like I have no eyes for anyone else. I gave it to the police.’

  ‘I’m sure the police will like it, those that like poetry.’ He smirked, so I asked, ‘Who told you to pretend your sister killed herself?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who told you to use the old suicide note? It’s got to be someone who already knew you had it, someone you trusted enough to tell.’

  I’d surprised him. He said, ‘No one told me anything. I found it on her bed, like I told you before.’

  ‘Right. Why do you cover your windows with newspapers? What are you keeping out?’

  Again, he looked surprised, though I couldn’t have been the first to ask him about the papers. ‘I’m keeping out people like you,’ he said. ‘You’ve got craziness all over you. I don’t want it in the house.’ He stepped back and slammed the door.

  I moved close and spoke through the wood. ‘It’ll take something thicker than paper and words to keep out the craziness. Sheneel knew that. I know it. You do too.’

  I drove back toward the highway. As I’d expected, the clouds were gone from the sky, and the sunlight glinted off the back of an empty Phelps Paper Company log truck that I followed out Buccaneer Trail. The truck belched black diesel smoke as the driver shifted gears – something thicker than paper and words. According to Lillian, Sheneel and Alex Greene were members of the Phelps family, though their little, half-furnished house suggested they had no access to the paper company bank accounts. Now, if Alex Greene was telling the truth, Lillian had given Sheneel the words to a love poem. What the hell was that? But even if Lillian had given her a whole book, Sheneel had no words anymore. She was silent and would remain forever silent. Her own words on the suicide note were nonsense, describing a different reality from the one that her cut flesh described.

  What about the snake hieroglyph inked on to the skin of her arm? It kept talking even though Sheneel’s killer had cut it from the rest of her body. But it spoke in a language I didn’t understand.

  The log truck shifted gears again and belched more smoke. Splinters of slash pine clung to the metal fittings on the truck bed. Behind us in Fernandina, the Phelps Paper mill fed sweet-filtered fumes into the sky, and they settled to the ground like dew in the morning or hung in the air all day.

  I dropped back from the truck, pulled into a Shell station, and bought a tourist map of Fernandina Beach and Amelia Island. I spread the map on the hood of the car, and, as I traced its streets and businesses, I called Lillian and left a message on her answering machine. ‘I have three questions,’ I said. ‘First, why are you giving love poems to Sheneel Greene? Second, why did you tell Alex Greene I was in the hospital? You’re starting to worry me, Lillian.’

  Instead of continuing, I hung up, but as I got into the car, she called back. ‘That was two questions,’ she said. ‘What was the third?’

  ‘This morning you started telling me about a connection between Sheneel Greene and the Phelps Paper Company. What was that about?’

  She told me again about Viola Greene marrying Jonathan Phelps in the 1930s, the Phelps land grab in South Georgia, and Sheneel’s mother being part of the Phelps family – the granddaughter of Viola and Jonathan – though she’d changed her name back to Greene.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘You want to answer the other questions?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not right now.’

  ‘Be careful,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean there are a lot of different kinds of edges to fall over. Some are more visible than others. But you get hurt just as bad with the invisible ones.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  I drove back into Fernandina and followed the map to the north side of downtown. The Phelps Paper Company headquarters stood on a heavily fenced tract of shoreline, the kind of property usually staked out for million-dollar vacation houses. Two factory buildings, painted bright white, stood between a collection of white silos and elevated conveyor belts that were supported by white derrick
frames. A single smokestack piped white smoke into the blue sky. A line of railroad tracks cut into the southern end of the compound, a string of empty hopper cars standing idle in the sun.

  I pulled my car up to the booth at the gate and talked with a Hispanic woman wearing a blue blazer over a yellow blouse. Yes, she said, the Phelpses had offices at the site – both Edward Phelps, who owned the company, and his son Stephen, who handled Southeastern regional timber acquisitions. No, I couldn’t talk with either of them without an appointment.

  ‘Would you call their offices and tell them this is a family matter?’

  ‘You’re family?’

  ‘I have concerns they’ll want to know about.’

  ‘Concerns, huh?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not going to make a fool of myself telling them a stranger out here has concerns.’

  ‘You hear about the death of this girl, Sheneel Greene?’

  ‘Sure, it’s the talk of the town.’

  ‘That’s the concern,’ I said.

  ‘What do the Phelpses have to do with her?’

  ‘Would you make the call?’

  She gave me a long look. ‘Which one do you want to talk to?’

  ‘Try the son.’

  She slid a glass window shut on the booth so I couldn’t hear what she was saying. After a couple of minutes of talking, getting put on hold, and talking again, she hung up a phone and slid the window open. ‘You must be bringing either very good news or very bad,’ she said.

  ‘He’ll talk to me?’

  She handed me a pass to put on the dashboard. ‘Take this road a quarter-mile, turn at the second right, and park as close as you can to the glass doors on the two-story building. A man named Bob Peterson will meet you there.’

  A minute later, Peterson, dressed in khakis and a blue blazer, waved me into a handicap parking spot. The inside of the building was cool and clean, and the air smelled like fresh-cut pine instead of the pulp and chemical stew outside. We walked past a reception desk, through a maze of hallways, to Stephen Phelps’s office.