He was about to cross out the questions when he stopped, lifted his pen off the paper, looked at the questions once more, then let them stand.
Had the writer become the character? Had the murder and suicide of Huston’s parents loosed something in him, spawned a rage he struggled with but, eventually, failed to contain? DeMarco understood repressed rage. He understood how a single event could shred a privileged life, leave it tattered and flapping in the black gales of night.
But DeMarco was having a hard time keeping things straight now. Was the Annabel of these passages real? What about the strip club Annabel? Or were both a fabrication? Where did Huston end and the author of those dark passages begin? Huston’s writing had never before been so sanguinary, so grim. Where was the hopeful story Nathan had said Huston was writing? Or was it far too early for the end?
This was a whole different writer at work than the one DeMarco thought he knew. How much of the voice was artifice and how much a reflection of the man?
DeMarco leaned back in his chair. He looked at his white-gloved hands. How much of you is artifice? he asked himself.
“We are all made up,” he answered aloud. “We are only real at night.”
Thirty-One
Huston retraced his steps through the woods, back toward Bradley, deep enough behind the trees that his chances of being spotted were small, but close enough to the cluster of buildings that he could scan for a good place to emerge. A place where, if spotted from a distance, he would provoke no suspicion, a day hiker out for a stroll, just another yuppie pantheist who didn’t have sense enough to wear sturdy shoes.
You have to anticipate the reader’s questions, then address those questions, he always told his students. Questions about motivation. Intent. Nothing in fiction can be aimless. Anticipate and address.
From the woods, he could see the backs of a vinyl-sided two-story and a small clapboard cottage, and between them a garage with a gravel driveway that ran out to the highway. Huston angled toward the garage, and then, maybe twenty feet inside the woods on the far side of the garage, he came upon a ring of stones, charred logs inside the ring. An old kitchen chair, half-rotted seat on a rusty metal frame. Cigarette butts that had been tossed toward the fire ring but fell short.
Somebody’s quiet place, he told himself. He studied the two houses. The cottage looked dark, the windows curtained. The backyard was empty but for a bare wooden picnic table and two benches. The grass was thick and heavy with dead leaves blown in from the woods. Summer home. Maybe a hunting camp.
An elaborate swing set sat behind the two-story. The aluminum crossbar was bowed, the red paint dull. He guessed that the child or children who had played on those swings, who had slid down that now-canted slide, were too big for it now. Teenagers maybe. In any case, that house too was still and dark. Parents at work, he told himself, kids at school. And that glint of sunlight on glass, the garage’s side entrance, wooden door with a window chest high.
The door might be locked or it might not.
You’re not going to find a better place than this.
He knew how to do it. A couple of his characters had done it; he had written them, had watched them. He had already thought it through. Stride purposefully to the garage’s side door, quick test of the knob, if it’s unlocked you’re inside. If it’s locked, no hesitation, crisp elbow jab to the corner of the glass, reach inside even as the glass is still skidding over the concrete floor, find the lock, turn it, open the door, and step inside. The sound of breaking glass might catch somebody’s attention a house or two away, and they would stop what they were doing, listen, wonder where the sound had come from. But by then, he would be inside, searching for a tool. Getting away unseen would be more problematic than getting in.
You know all this, he told himself. Just do it.
He pulled the sunglasses from his pocket, fitted them on. Pulled the bill of the cap low over his eyes. Gathered his energy and made himself ready.
But the swing set undid him. It sucked his energy dry.
The children come home from school. They run to the backyard. They climb onto the swings. They talk about their days; they laugh. Alyssa puts her feet to the ground, pushes the swing back as far as she can, lifts her feet, and glides forward. Tommy swings more gently, holds little Davy securely on his lap.
The sound of breaking glass, all movement stops, feet flat on the ground. Alyssa says, Who’s that man over there? And Tommy tells her, Run inside and get Dad.
He staggered back to the fire ring, clutched the top of the old kitchen chair to keep himself from falling. Stared into the ashes. Felt the pulse of bruising sobs building in his chest again, wanting out, banging inside him, choking off his air until he could resist them no longer. He went down on his knees then, toppled the chair, and fell onto it. And sobbed, wanting to die, Please let me die. His fists squeezing ashes. Please, God, let me die.
Thirty-Two
DeMarco made three wrong turns before finding the place. “You go about ten miles, maybe a little less, north on 58,” he had been instructed by one of the troopers. “After you pass the country club on your right, it’s only another mile or so. There’ll be the Vita-Style beauty shop on your left—fancy name for a beauty shop in a converted garage, isn’t it? Then a couple of houses. Then start watching for a dirt road on the same side. It’s about a mile and a half down that road. It’s called Whispers.”
But there was no sign along the highway, no billboard advising him where to turn, and in the moonless dark of early night, intersections with unmarked, unpaved roads were not easy to distinguish until he was upon or past them. His first dirt road led him to a Baptist church in a yellow, steel building. The parking lot was empty and the building empty. A lighted sign in the small strip of lawn advised: In the dark? Follow the Son.
The second wrong turn dead-ended at a farmhouse, from whose driveway DeMarco could see into the dining room. The room was well lighted and clearly illuminated four individuals seated around the table. Nearest the window sat a man who appeared to be in his seventies, then, clockwise around the table, another man maybe thirty years younger, then a middle-aged woman with short, brown hair, and finally a boy wearing a red baseball cap. When the headlights from DeMarco’s car swept across the dining room window, all four individuals looked his way. “Sorry,” he said aloud and quickly swung the car to the left so that he could back up. But none of the faces watching him showed any surprise or concern, and he knew he was not the first driver to take this lane by mistake. It probably happened several times every weekend night, half-drunken men in search of nude women, their attention, their touch, the illusion of desire.
The family watched DeMarco’s car for five seconds or so, then the white-haired man turned his gaze back toward the table and raised his hand, and DeMarco saw that they were playing cards at the table. He smiled to himself but also felt a twinge of jealousy. He was the end of a generation himself and unless a miracle of God or chance intervened, he would never play cards or any other game with one of his grandchildren.
He put the car into reverse, then pulled away quickly. Out of nowhere, four dogs suddenly appeared at his bumper, yapping mongrels of varying breeds and sizes but all uniformly loud, all apparently hungry for the taste of metal or rubber. When he reached the highway, the dogs turned as if by signal and trotted home again. In the end, he was as inconsequential to the dogs as he had been to the family in the farmhouse, a fleeting distraction.
The third dirt road, narrow and potholed, rounded a sharp turn after a mile and seven-tenths, and there, behind a row of tulip poplars denuded by the winds of autumn, was a two-acre parking lot of packed dirt in front of a long, low wooden building. The boards were weathered and unpainted except for a white door on which someone had brushed Whispers in sloppy, red letters. The tin roof nearly blended into the blackness of the sky, and the whole building looked as if it had once been an equipment shed of
some kind, or maybe an old sawmill. Maybe the white-haired man in the dining room had once owned this land and farmed it, had built his house from timber harvested off his property. Now the family grew a few acres of soybeans and lived off government subsidies while the owner of Whispers harvested a steady crop of dollars from the fertile soil of fantasy.
From inside the building came the muted screech of guitars, the kind of screaming rock music that always set DeMarco’s teeth on edge. He preferred the more soothing tones of Norah Jones, Rickie Lee Jones, Corinne Bailey Rae, and even, when the mood seized him and the back of his throat had been warmed and numbed by ample Jack, Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington, the amazing Etta James. But he had not come here for the music.
The white door opened onto a small anteroom emblazoned by floodlights. The sudden brightness and blast of music hit DeMarco like a punch and made his bad eye water. He stood there blinking, staring at the yellow wall in front of him. From his left came a man’s voice, sounding like rocks falling through a pipe. “Fifteen dollars, please.”
The man was seated on a low chair behind dirty glass, a thin, smallish man with a thin smile on a pale, thin mouth. Somewhere between fifty and sixty-five, half mummified by alcohol and smoke. A stray-dog kind of look in his eyes, wizened and tough, alert and wary.
DeMarco pushed a twenty through the opening in the glass. He was handed five ones in return. “I need your left hand, sir,” the man said and showed him the rubber stamp he held.
DeMarco stuck his hand through the opening, then pulled it back and squinted at the blotch of black ink. “What is this, a squirrel?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” the man said. Then, “Enjoy.”
When DeMarco faced the yellow wall again, he could make out a yellow knob and the seam of a door. The door rattled with the boom of music from the other side. He steeled himself for the punch of even louder music, then pulled the door open.
Again, he squinted and blinked. This room was as dark as the one at his back was bright. He kept his hand on the yellow door, held it open by a few inches until he had surveyed the room and allowed his eyes to readjust.
On the wall directly opposite him, across a plank floor maybe thirty feet wide, a dim red Exit sign hung above a closed door. To its left was a Coke machine and beside it a large trash barrel, then another doorway, this one open, with a sign above it that read Restroom. Most of the illumination in the room came from the two signs and the vending machine and from the light in two doorways on the wall to his left, one open doorway at each end of the wall. Both doors led, he surmised, to the stage area where the young girls danced.
Two of the five tables were occupied, one by three dancers in skimpy costumes, the other by a small, bald, and bespectacled man who sat staring at his can of Diet Coke while a dark-haired woman in leopard panties and a matching halter top rubbed his leg.
This woman and the three others all turned to regard DeMarco when he stepped inside. Everybody smiled at him. They sized him up as if they could see straight through to his bank account, could see how high his twenties were stacked. He had dressed for the evening in khaki slacks and brown loafers and a white poplin jacket over a black knit shirt—his idea of casual. He hoped that, tonight at least, he looked like a businessman of some kind, maybe a sales rep. The dancers kept smiling at him, and he interpreted this as a good sign. His face, he knew, might give him away. People sometimes told him he looked like Tommy Lee Jones, but he considered this an insult to a good actor.
Then one of the dancers stood and came toward him, and for a moment, he felt again like a sixteen-year-old at his first high school dance, like he wanted to bolt for the door before he could make a fool of himself. His stomach fluttered.
In her high heels she was maybe five foot eight. She had long red hair that looked chestnut brown in the dimness, and a nose like Julia Roberts’s, one that widened with her smile. But he doubted that her face garnered much attention from the customers. Her only clothing was a short, white coat held together by one button and trimmed in rabbit fur at the neck and hips. A quick glance informed him that there was no other fur in the vicinity. He felt his body warm, felt the heat and movement of blood.
She took hold of his arm and leaned close so as to be heard above the music, spoke into his ear so that her hair fell across his arm, so that her scent washed over him. His stomach quivered at her touch.
“You look like a virgin,” she said.
He said nothing in reply, only raised his eyebrows a little when he looked at her.
“Your first time here,” she said.
“It is,” he told her.
“Don’t worry. Virgins are my specialty.”
She led him to a table. After he sat, she put her hands on his knees and swung his legs around, away from the table, then sat sidesaddle atop them. Now her coat fell open below the waist and he could clearly see the smooth paleness of skin from her knees to her belly button. “So what’s your name, sweetie?” she asked.
“Thomas,” he told her, the first name to come to mind.
“We get a lot of Thomases in here,” she teased.
He smiled. Her hair smelled like Obsession, the scent his wife used to prefer. “And what’s your name?” he asked.
“I’m Ariel. Like in The Little Mermaid. You know, the Disney movie?” She put her mouth against his ear now and made a sound that both startled and disarmed him, drained him of all awareness for a moment. It was a low purring sound made by simultaneously moaning and rolling her tongue, and the warmth of her breath in his ear dizzied him.
Now she slid a hand along the inside of his thigh. Things were happening to him over which he had no control. His bodily response to her touch frightened and enlivened him.
She asked, “So what brings you here tonight? Looking for some fun? Or some good fun? Or some really good fun?”
The current song blasting from the speakers came to an end with her question, leaving him to sit there with the silence and dimness and an agitated crotch. Before he could formulate his reply, another song erupted, this one a hard-driving country song. “If it don’t come easy,” sang Tanya Tucker, “you better let it go…”
“I came to watch you dance,” he said.
“We don’t start dancing for another hour, sweetie. What are we going to do in the meantime?”
“I guess I don’t know,” he said. “How about I buy you a drink and we discuss the possibilities?”
Ariel lifted a hand in the air and waggled her fingers. DeMarco followed her gaze to a woman behind a short bar near the stage entrance. The woman soon approached his table. She set a split of champagne and a fluted glass in front of Ariel. “And you, sir?”
He thought he had seen something in her eyes when she looked at him, a shadow of disapproval. She appeared to be in her late thirties, with a long-legged body and ample breasts slowly succumbing to gravity, a face still fighting entropy.
“Double Jack,” he told her. “Straight up.”
The bartender turned and walked away.
Ariel laid a hand on his cheek and turned his face toward hers again. “We could do a couple private dances,” she told him. “That would pass some time.”
“I’m afraid I’m not a very good dancer.”
She giggled softly. “It’s twenty dollars a song for a room dance,” she said. “But for fifty dollars you can have a twenty-minute couch dance.” She spoke with her mouth against his ear again. “And there’s a curtain across the door in the couch room.”
He nodded.
“Sound good?”
“Sounds very good.” He poured some champagne into her glass. She lifted the glass and took a sip. Then she placed her lips against his and forced a trickle of mouth-warmed champagne over his tongue. He tasted its wetness and the sweetness of her lips, and when the dizziness passed, he thought, That’s a good way to get hepatitis.
&n
bsp; The bartender returned then and set his glass in front of him. “Thank you,” he said. She smiled tightly. As she walked away, she gave Ariel’s shoulder a quick tap.
Ariel’s eyes widened at the touch. She cut a glance at DeMarco’s face, then quickly looked away. “I’ll be right back,” she told him. She reached for her glass and the small bottle of champagne, slid off DeMarco’s lap, and walked away briskly. The fur trim on her white coat tried to cover her backside but fell short. He watched her go and knew that she would not be coming back. He wished he had stroked that fur when he’d had the chance.
DeMarco sipped his drink for a while. Finally he stood, glass in hand, and crossed to the bar. He smiled at the bartender, whose eyes held a dull sheen of resignation. “We know each other?” he asked.
“Don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” she said.
“You made me for a cop. I saw you tap her shoulder.”
“I guess you look the type,” she said.
“My guess is we’ve met before.”
She shrugged. “In a previous lifetime maybe.”
“When I was working vice, no doubt.”
“No doubt,” she said.
He sipped his drink. She brought out a bottle from behind the bar and poured another inch into his glass.
“I’m not here to make trouble,” he told her.
“Neither am I.”
“I’m just looking for some answers.”
She stared at him hard for a few seconds. Then looked away. Then looked at him again. “If it’s about that professor, there’s not much I can tell you.”
“Good guess,” he told her.
Two Days Gone Page 14
