Briessen said, “I’m sure the novel in progress exists.”
DeMarco cocked his head, thought for a second. “I say manuscript, you say novel in progress. Is there a difference?”
“I guess it all depends on how you’re conceiving of a manuscript.”
“Well, you said he does his first draft in longhand. So I’m thinking a tablet of some kind? A legal pad? A notebook?”
“He used a bound journal. A lot easier to carry around.”
“Like a diary, you mean?”
“Bigger,” said Briessen. “Maybe nine by twelve. It would look just like a hardcover book. Like a smallish coffee table book, you know? It has a dark maroon cloth binding.”
“Like a book without a jacket,” DeMarco said. “I don’t recall seeing anything like that. And he’s written four books so far.”
“You wouldn’t find any of the older journals. Once he’s put the second draft on his hard drive, he stores that journal in a safe-deposit box at the bank.”
“Could the novel in progress be there too?”
“It’s probably right under your nose. And I just now realized why.”
“I do wish you would share that information with me.”
“You get to be famous,” Briessen said, “and people start stealing little pieces of you. I once stole a shot glass out of the Hemingway house in Key West.”
“If the journal’s been stolen, how could it be right under my nose?”
“That’s not what I meant. Tom was wary of the possibility that somebody might try to steal it. Now that he’d become a kind of celebrity. I mean if you’re nineteen or twenty years old and all you want is to be a writer, and one day you happen to be in a famous writer’s house or office and you see his journal lying there on his desk or sticking out of his briefcase—”
“And students came to his house?”
“Frequently. Three or four times a semester he’d have gumbo night for a small group of students. He makes a mean pot of gumbo.”
“Always the same students? During any particular semester?”
“There was some overlap, but he tried to include everybody at least once. Everybody from his advanced fiction workshop.”
DeMarco made a mental note to get the class roster from the department secretary. “So if one of those students happens to see his idol’s journal, he just might grab it if the opportunity presents itself?”
“That’s how I got my favorite shot glass.”
“So then, to prevent that possibility, the thing to do would be to conceal the journal somehow. So that it doesn’t look like a journal.”
“Right. It looks just like a big book, so you put a book jacket on it.”
DeMarco stepped up close to the metal bookshelf. With his free hand, he pulled the first book of appropriate size off the top shelf, laid it open on the desk, and unfolded the jacket. “I don’t suppose you would know what the jacket looks like.”
“Civilization,” Briessen said.
“Excuse me?”
“Last time I saw it, he was using the book jacket from Kenneth Clark’s Civilization. Tom figured that most people would be intimidated or bored by such a book. Especially students. Therefore, not tempted to steal it.”
Quickly DeMarco ran a hand across the titles. “Not on the top shelf. Not on the second…not the third…and not the bottom. Might he have changed the jacket?”
“Might have but I doubt it. I mean, why bother if it was doing what he wanted it to do?”
“So if it’s not here, it must be at the house.”
“I’d bet money on it.”
After satisfying himself that none of the books in the office was the journal in disguise, DeMarco drove to Huston’s house. From his trunk, he took a pair of gloves and booties and put these on just inside the foyer. Then he went to Huston’s spacious den.
And there it was, square in the middle of the second shelf from the top in the wall-length mahogany bookshelf. “Son of a gun,” DeMarco said. His hands shook as he used a pen to lay the book open, then to lift away the jacket. A journal with a plain cloth cover the color of burgundy wine. From the looks of it, not many pages held Huston’s tight but neat handwriting. Maybe twenty in all. “Not much,” DeMarco said aloud. But maybe it would be enough.
He replaced the cover, then wrapped the book in a dish towel from the kitchen drawer. At the barracks, he logged both items in at the evidence room, then immediately logged out the journal, minus the jacket. Before returning to his office, he washed his hands with plenty of hot water, but they were still shaking when he pulled on a pair of thin white gloves.
Twenty-Nine
Huston decided on the smaller of the two equipment sheds. The larger one, the one with the wide barnlike door, probably held a mower or two, maybe even a lawn tractor, the drag-along for raking and smoothing the fields, bags of lime and quick-dry for the infield, grass seed, shovels, probably a pitching machine plus miscellaneous tools. The floor would be wheel dirtied and probably crowded. The other shed would have the bats and balls and helmets, catcher’s equipment, and extra bases. These, he guessed, considering the orderliness of the complex, would all hang out of the way on the inside walls. There would probably be plenty of room on the floor for him to stretch out. Maybe rain ponchos to wrap around himself for warmth. The catcher’s chest protector to use as a pillow.
The parking lot was empty except for a few pieces of windblown litter. From forty yards away, it looked to Huston as if the place had been battened down for the winter. If he could get inside the shed without being seen, he could hole up there with his remaining groceries. Then make his way to Annabel. He tried to remember the probable distance. Tried to see the topless club on a map in his mind’s eye, the squiggling two-laner heading north-northwest, snaking toward the Ohio border. “Slouching towards Bethlehem.”
Why did you think of that? he wondered. Yeats and his mystical anarchy. His spiritus mundi, his hell-raising Sphinx. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned…”
For just a moment, he imagined himself at the front of the classroom again, reciting to his students, trying to tap into Yeats’s mad vision. How he loved those moments when he lost himself in words. Stirred himself and others with the music and the power.
Focus! he told himself now. He squeezed his eyes shut, then with one quick jerk, shook his head like a drunk trying to stay awake. Thomas Huston is dead, he told himself. The teacher is dead. The writer is dead. Words and music and stories are all dead now. Now only power remains. The power of the dead.
He stared hard at the equipment shed. “It will be locked.” Yes, but all the buildings will be locked. Nothing will be easy now, nor should it be. Everything will hurt. Everything does.
He needed a tool. Metal. Strong enough to force a padlock or to splinter the wood around a dead bolt. He was too far away to be able to see how the door was secured, so he would just have to assume the worst. He needed a pry bar of some kind. Couldn’t bang or pound or hammer, not even at night. The sounds would echo like a jungle drum.
To his left lay the town of Bradley, a quarter mile south. He had skirted it by hiking through the trees. Could he risk going back now to assess the possibilities? “You have to,” he told himself. “You have no choice.” He would stay off the main drag. Keep to the backstreets. Maybe somebody’s garage door would be standing open. Somebody’s garden shed. People are trusting out here, he thought. People don’t know.
He stood up. Brushed the leaf litter off his knees. Left his groceries nestled in the thorns.
“You don’t look that bad,” he reassured himself, though he did not believe it.
“What choice do you have?”
“Okay. Try to look normal.”
Thirty
To DeMarco’s eyes, the first several pages of Huston’s journal appeared to co
ntain nothing but random, spontaneous notes. Ideas for scenes, characters’ names, a tentative plotline, passages quoted from Nabokov’s novel.
“When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.” (Lolita)
main character named Howard (means noble watchman) Humphreys? Harold? Houston? (means hill town; might be fun to pique readers’ curiosity)
main character needs a nemesis to parallel Nabokov’s Quilty. Denton as physical model: smooth, charming, designer clothes, lots of styled hair. He should be younger than main character, more attractive to women/girls. Somewhat predatory. Doesn’t love women the way main character does. Loves their attention, their idolatry. Narcissistic.
contemporize Lolita, but how? College freshman—too easy?
nemesis gets jealous when the narrator gets more attention than he does from the sexy new student. But why does she prefer narrator? She’s intellectual? Disdains her beauty?
Maybe as story progresses, Lolita character gets more and more aggressive in trying to ruin her beauty. Hacks off her hair. Starts cutting herself. This makes narrator only want her more. Aches to heal her. So that his empathy overrides his common sense?
Nabokov’s narrator on “nymphets”: “Good looks are not any criterion; and vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering insidious charm. I was consumed by a hell furnace of localized lust for every passing nymphet whom as a law-abiding poltroon I never dared approach. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did.”
These entries were followed by more of the same, plus occasional allusions to some of the strip clubs Huston had visited.
McKeesport place: Smoky, noisy, big bouncer. All in all a bit frightening. Men at horseshoe-shaped bar mostly older, middle-aged or more, mostly blue collar but a couple in suits. Watered-down draft beer is free with $20 cover charge. Most of the girls look stoned. Only one of them looked me in the eye. Afterward came to my chair, sat on my lap, made me squirm. She looked fourteen but surely must have been older. Are there age limits for strippers in this state? In the booth later, she told me her real name is Joyce. Pretty but not up close. Christ she was hungry for something, not just my money. I kept thinking about Alyssa. Went home so fucking sad.
His visits to clubs in Titusville, Wheeling, Beaver Falls, Ambridge, New Castle, and one along Exit 7 of Interstate 80 left him similarly depressed, not only for the way the dancers must have felt, how they viewed themselves, but also for the way he felt when they thrust their shaved pussies at his face.
Is it even going to be possible to make the Lolita character sympathetic?
How can men enjoy this kind of thing? I feel like scum.
DeMarco found the entries interesting, but not until the ninth page did he come to one that he thought might be useful. Opening scene! he read. The entry was dated only four weeks earlier.
If you get up early enough, or better yet fail to close your eyes at all the night before, a morning in gray can lay all the night’s detritus before you, all the night’s litter emptied now of its noise and bluff and whiskey-ed bravado, leaving nothing but the sticky, squeezed-out wrapper of a self licked clean of its truculence. In that last misted hour before sunrise, all of your shrieking spirits will have lapsed into a muted misery, their throbbing hearts squeezed into something akin to reconciliation but not quite, a weary truce perhaps, not yet surrender.
It was in this frame of mind that I first encountered Annabel. After a long night with my heart pressed against the dented metal edge of the bar at the old Claireborn Hotel, recently renamed the Erie Downtowner but still as shabby as ever, still dark with old, scarred tables and chairs with stained cushions, the carpet still stained and threadbare, the air, though now “smoke free” still stale with the ghosts of cigars and sixty years of filterless griefs, yet “fragrant with gin” as Twain might have said—after such another long night, I had staggered to the sidewalk and then down State to the docks, there to fill my lungs with lake oxygen seasoned with the diesel fumes of barges and freighters, spiced with whatever gases of hospital waste the ships had dredged up. There I stood against the rail and let the night lap against me. From time to time I heard footsteps in the dark but never once looked up. I smiled at the water I could hear but not see, smiled at the thought of black unconsciousness, and only hoped it would come quickly if it came, no mere mugger’s threats and demands, no bargaining for my life, which I was not inclined to do. Unfortunately I was not interfered with. In time, I made my way back up State to Perry Square and there claimed a bench as my own chair of forgetfulness. But the power of the chair had apparently leaked away, or been diluted by dog piss, or rattled away by all the blows of all the blow jobs and anal fucks and fingerings and baby puke and ice cream drips and farts and soiled diapers of all its days and nights because I could forget nothing, not a single blow of my own.
Another hour passed. And then…and then the sound of pain at a gallop. I did not recognize it as such at the time and can hear it so only now in retrospect, but that is surely what it was, more pain than I had ever known, more wrenching of a soul I thought already wrenched apart. It came in the guise of a young girl jogging, only a slim figure of gray at first, a girl made of mist who emerged from the mist, then bare legs and bare arms as she trotted down the path toward my bench, a slender loop of wire hanging from each ear, swinging as she ran. I heard the music as she approached and wondered how her ears could tolerate such noise, the thump of heavy drums and screaming chant. Stride by stride, she closed the distance, oblivious to me. I was a charcoal lump on an otherwise empty park bench. She had no doubt passed this bench a hundred times before at this hour, always empty then, so, therefore, she must have assumed without even thinking about it, empty now. She was nearly upon me when I registered on her consciousness. She gasped, stopped short, and jerked to the side, stumbled off the edge of the path, twisted an ankle, and fell, and too aghast to speak, only huddled there and stared.
I raised both hands. “I’m not moving,” I said.
She fumbled at a little bag attached around her waist. “I have pepper spray!”
“You won’t need it. I swear. I’m not moving an inch.” I must have bitten my lip, for I tasted blood and whiskey in my mouth. It both chilled and intoxicated me.
“Jesus,” DeMarco said. “Is this supposed to be funny?”
Below the entry, Huston had written Strive for Nabokovian prose? Maybe similar but contemporary, less self-conscious, more like Bukowski?
DeMarco pulled a tablet close and on the first page wrote Who is Bukowski?
Huston’s next entry was dated one day later:
There is to her eyes a nakedness that denudes me. Her nakedness is an innocence more than primal. I imagine she could lay with me, let me do all manner of dark things, every base act I have ever conceived, yet her eyes would shine with purity. They are greener than polished jade and brighter than jade in full sun. In them I see myself more than bare: transparent. With every stain and cancer streak of sordid self etched out like oil spilled on snow.
DeMarco flipped to a clean page in his tablet, and at the top of it in large letters, he wrote Annabel. Below the name he wrote appears innocent and, below that, green eyes.
The next two entries were undated. They were separated by several lines and were the only writing on that page:
I have fallen in love with a dying girl. Anyway, she says she is dying, though she looks as healthy and sensuous as a Triple Crown winner.
When she sleeps, I want to ravish her. I want to devou
r her, swallow her down as a boa constrictor would a fawn. Then I would lick her taste off my lips and lie in the sun with her inside me, and I would sleep until her every cell has been absorbed into mine.
A troubling thought kept apace with DeMarco’s reading: Who is this character? Is this Huston imagining how a sick, deranged man thinks?
Then came an even more troubling thought: What if this isn’t Huston’s character speaking? What if this is Huston himself?
“Jesus fucking Christ,” DeMarco said.
A minute later, he reached for his calendar. The opening scene entry had been written on a Sunday, the next on Monday, the others undated. DeMarco asked himself why every entry wasn’t dated. Was Huston in a rush sometimes? Or were all entries from one day given just the one date? Did it even matter?
Nathan Briessen had said that Huston thought he had finally discovered his Annabel at a strip club, maybe six weeks before his disappearance. But what if he had met her prior to that? Something about the woman had resonated with him, stuck to his consciousness. Maybe he was smitten, maybe not. Next day, he was still thinking about her. Maybe Thursday night he went to her club for the first time. Would she have told him, when they first met, that she was a topless dancer? She must have. Maybe he had told her about the book he was writing. Maybe she had recognized him—maybe she was the smitten one! In any case, Huston had made the last entry, the one about eating her alive, on an undesignated date.
On his notepad DeMarco wrote:
Did he become obsessed with Annabel and end up killing her?
Did Annabel help to kill his family?
Possible others with motivation? A crazed fan? A crazed associate of the junkie who’d killed Huston’s mother? Maybe Annabel has a boyfriend who found out she was doing Huston. Or maybe the motive was professional jealousy. Denton? Conescu? Somebody else?
He stared at those questions for a while, tried to think each one through. But why would Huston kill Annabel? When? No missing strippers reported. No extra bodies. He drew a line through the first question, looked at the others. An accomplice would explain the two methods of killing—stabbing for the baby, slit throats for everybody else. Then he told himself, Hold on, wait. You’re confusing the writer with the character. This is fiction, it’s just a story. This isn’t Huston at all.
Two Days Gone Page 13
