“You think?”
“Yeah.”
“Look,” he said. “Can we just forget all that? The stuff on Friday? I was just under some stress, you know. This job starting…”
“Uh-huh.”
“And now, with the plane, it all seems so…”
“I know.”
They sat in silence for a few seconds. Anita sipped her coffee. “I just don’t want to think about it right now, is that okay? I just want to go to work like usual, and not think about it.” She waited. He didn’t know what to say, so he just nodded. She pointed to the empty bowl. “What did you have there?”
“Raisin Bran.”
“Hmm.” She got up and poured herself a bowl, carried it gingerly to the table. Paul watched. She would drink about a dozen spoonfuls of milk before she ate any cereal. And when she finished the cereal, she would spoon up the extra milk. His heart swelled until he thought it would burst. How could I have been so rotten to her? he thought. How could I have let her down?
When she was ready, they drove through town in silence. He dropped her off at the bank, and from force of habit they kissed. It surprised them both.
He drove across town and parked in front of the popcorn shop. Inside, someone was pouring popcorn from a metal tray into a large plastic bin, one of half a dozen lined up under the counter. He looked up and smiled at Paul, and Paul waved.
There didn’t appear to be anyone inside Ponty’s office. He walked in and stood at the front of the room, tapping his fingers on the desk.
“Mr. Ponty?”
From the back, he heard water running, then a door opened and Ponty stepped out, wedging the tail of his shirt into his pants.
“Hi,” Paul said. Ponty nearly hit the ceiling.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Sorry.”
Ponty looked at his watch. “What are you, early?”
“It’s my first day.”
“Well, okay, eager beaver.” He looked Paul up and down. “What’s this getup?”
Paul spread his arms. “What?” He was wearing a T-shirt tucked into a pair of chinos, and his hair was tied back in a ponytail.
“Here.” He reached for Paul’s shirt and pulled it out of his pants. “Slouch,” he said. Paul slouched. “Now take the hair out of the ponytail. Mess it up a little. You don’t want to look like a fourth-grade teacher.” Ponty sat down, and so did Paul.
“What have you got for me?”
“Okay. You gotta go watch this guy Wozack. He’s got a little shop out on the Cherry Street exit, next to the laundromat. It’s a joke shop. You know where I’m talking about?”
“Sure. Montana Gag.”
“Right. Go watch him all day. The place opens at ten, closes at five. Keep an eye on him, then follow him when he leaves. Write down where he goes. Do it for three days. Got that?”
“Got it.”
He opened a desk drawer. “Here. I’m gonna give you a camera. If he looks like he’s doing anything other than running a joke shop, shoot him. And please be careful.”
“The guy’s dangerous?” Paul said.
“No, the camera. I’ve only got the one.”
“Right.”
“The whole point is to disappear. There’s a Kwik Stop right across the street there. You might want to sit and have a couple cups of coffee, or read the paper or something, watch him through the window. Or maybe find some weeds to sit in.” Ponty handed him a notebook and two ballpoint pens, and a typed sheet that listed Wozack’s particulars: his truck, his address, a physical description. “I’ll be here all day pushing pencils. Gimme a ring if things go haywire, okay?”
“Got it.”
* * *
Paul knew the spot well. He had occasionally done laundry at the laundromat, when the place he usually went to was closed, and he had eaten at an ice cream parlor in the same building. It was all part of a little cinder-block mini-mall. He parked a couple of blocks away, behind some houses, pleased with himself for thinking to do so.
From the café in the Kwik Stop, he could see clearly through the window of Montana Gag. It was only nine-thirty, and everything inside was still dark, so he helped himself to a cup of coffee, a doughnut, and a newspaper and sat at a table near the window. He opened the notebook, uncapped the pen, and wrote: 9:32. Shop empty. Then he turned to the paper.
The crash was still front-page news. “31 Marshall Residents Dead in Air Crash,” read a headline. “Five Still Unidentified, Three Unaccounted For.” The byline was preceded by a little graphic of a plane, with the words “Flight 114” printed above it. He scanned the list of Marshall residents, not expecting to find any familiar names, but one was Pamela Kinyon, the woman whose purse he found. He remembered the film he’d taken and got a chill. They’d found someone, a body, and those pictures were hers. Next to the article was a photograph of their yard; in it two paramedics loaded a sheet-covered body into the ambulance. Paul wondered idly if it was her, and automatically leaned close, as though this would help him.
When he next looked up, a pickup was pulling into the lot in front of Montana Gag. Paul fumbled for the camera, almost knocking it off the table, before he realized there was no need yet. He watched Greg Wozack—average height, thin hair, worn jeans and cowboy boots—step out, fuss with his keys, and open the door to the shop. He locked it behind him and disappeared into the darkness.
Ten minutes later, the lights came on. Wozack walked out from behind a shelf, did something at the counter, and opened and closed the register drawer. He went to the door and flipped the Closed sign to Open. Paul leaned over the notebook and wrote it down, referring to Wozack as “subject”: 10:02. Subject opened magazine, read.
For an hour, nobody came to the store. Wozack flipped the pages of the magazine. At eleven, he picked up the telephone and spoke a few words into it. Finally, at 11:15, an old gray Cadillac pulled up, and a short, chubby man wearing a baseball cap got out. Wozack met him at the door, and after a minute the man walked around to the back of the building.
Paul stood up, excited. He hurried to the other end of the store, where shelves of boxed doughnuts partially blocked a window. Peeking between them, he could see a gravel lot, and the back door of the shop. The short man stood near it, his hands in his pockets.
Suddenly Paul remembered the camera. He ran back to his table and grabbed it. When he got back to the window, the short man was walking to his car, shoving a folded paper bag into the pocket of his shorts. “Shit,” Paul said, “shit.” He groped at the lens cap, but the Caddy was already gone. He smiled at the counter clerk as he returned to his table, but she was engrossed in a tiny black-and-white television and didn’t look up. He sat down, defeated and irritated with himself, and smoothed out the paper.
Not much else happened. A few people went in and bought things—fake handcuffs, a rubber chicken—which they carried out in plastic bags. Paul dutifully wrote it all down. He bought lunch from a nearby Chinese place and read most of a magazine he didn’t bother to buy. At five, Wozack turned over the sign on the door, disappeared into the back for a few minutes, then came out.
Paul grabbed his things, then sprinted out the door and down an alley to his car. As he pulled out, he saw Wozack’s truck pass on Cherry Street. He signaled and maneuvered himself into traffic behind it.
Wozack was a terrible driver. He switched lanes indiscriminately, without signaling, and entered intersections at the worst possible moment, cutting other drivers off. Paul followed him with difficulty through the West Side, a hastily built community of one-story houses, and into Bear Lodge, a shabby residential area behind a bend in the river. Paul lost the truck on the grid of streets, fearful of giving himself away, but caught up with it again on Brainerd Avenue, which to his alarm ended a few blocks ahead. He pulled to the curb and slumped in his seat.
Wozack parked in a driveway on the street’s last block, got out of his truck and entered the house. Paul started his car and drove one block south to Beadle, where he peered between
houses at the one Wozack had gone into. The number above the door was 2011. He was about to write this down when he thought to check the fact sheet Ponty had given him, and he found that 2011 Brainerd was on it. Wozack had simply gone home.
* * *
That night, after they’d eaten dinner, he sat with Anita on the couch, reading. She had that day’s paper and was spending a long time looking at the plane crash article. Above them, the plastic bags he’d taped to the hole flapped in a breeze from outside. She sighed finally and put the paper down, but didn’t say anything.
“What?” Paul said. He had been trying to read a book, but was thinking mostly about his day, what Ponty would say about his missing the photo.
Anita shook her head. “Nothing, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“You’ve been quiet.”
“Because you’ve been.” Was this strictly true? He wasn’t sure anymore. Their silence had become, it seemed, a matter of mutual consent, and he’d forgotten who had begun it.
She nodded slowly. “I feel so distant,” she said, looking at something across the room. “I feel like you’re distant.”
“I’m right here.”
“You know what I mean.”
They sat, not speaking or moving, for some time, and then she reached out and put her hand on his hand. She did this quickly, as if she were in danger of falling off the couch, and he had to restrain himself from recoiling: the gesture reminded him of the way his mother clutched his arm a few days before she finally died, desperate enough to hold on to this child she didn’t even like, to keep herself from sliding into oblivion. Anita kept the hand there, and he felt the sweat squeezing from her palm and seeping into the dry cracks of his knuckles. She kept her head turned half away, toward the ruined corner of the room, and he knew this hand on his really had nothing to do with him, that she was losing her grip on something and he was nearest, the most convenient handhold. He reached out and pulled her to him, and she leaned back reluctantly into his arms.
“You’re so tense,” he said.
“Work,” she told him.
“Do you want me to rub your back?”
“Would you?”
He did for a time, though her shoulders refused to yield and she made no sound. Finally she disengaged herself, turned, and, her face creased in concentration, kissed him. He kissed back.
“What is this?”
“I don’t know, Paul.”
They kissed some more, and he moved his hands across her back, over the familiar landscape of bones and muscles. She leaned her head into his neck. “Make love to me?”
“You want that?” he said.
“We need it.”
“But you want it?”
“Yes,” she said. “I want it.”
And they did, but they moved with the tentativeness not of unfamiliarity but fear. When it was over, they held one another, each unwilling to be the one to let go, and neither moved until they grew cold.
* * *
Paul couldn’t sleep and got up in the night for a beer. While he sat at the kitchen table drinking it, a car started up outside, and he went to the window.
It was a police car. The interior was illuminated, and the cop was talking on her radio. When she hung it up, the headlights came on and cleaved the clearing, and in the bright light Paul saw movement just beyond the first trees. It was a man, backing away. The man was a bit chubby, dressed in a white shirt, though his face was obscured by branches, and as Paul watched he turned around and ran off.
The cop stepped out of her car and into the glare of the headlights, and peered into the woods. But the man was gone. When she got back into the cruiser she sat there a moment, as if deciding whether or not to act on what she’d seen, then leaned over the wheel. The car pulled away, its red taillights disappearing around a bend in the drive.
* * *
He waited across the street from Montana Gag for most of Tuesday morning, but Wozack never showed up. Instead, there was a skinny kid wearing a T-shirt. His hair was cut short and uncombed, and he moved slowly. Sometimes he just collapsed on the counter and leaned there with his head down. At other times he disappeared into the back for as long as fifteen minutes. Paul scurried to the doughnut shelves a few times, but nothing was going on at the back door. Nobody showed up. At around twelve-thirty, the kid picked up the phone and dialed, but no one seemed to answer, and he didn’t speak.
Finally, somebody did come: a young girl wearing a black beret and black stockings under her cutoffs. She had come in a pickup truck, a blue Ford, and there was another person, a boy it looked like, waiting for her behind the wheel. She walked in and spoke to the kid for a few seconds. He shook his head. She spoke again, and again he shook his head no. The girl shrugged and came out. For the first time, Paul saw her face, and he immediately recognized her: it was Ponty’s daughter, Alyssa.
Alyssa jumped back into the cab of the truck, and talked for a moment with her friend. Then the truck pulled out of the lot and drove away.
The kid in the shop had vanished again. Paul sat with his pen poised above his notebook. Should he write it down or not? Was he obliged to tell Ponty his daughter had shown up? In the end he just gathered his things, and walked out.
At first he’d only thought to get a breath of air and clear his head. But by the time he reached the street, he knew he had every intention of going into Montana Gag and talking to the kid there. Why not? He only had one more day to go on this job, and if he kept his cool the kid wouldn’t know he was spying. He crossed Cherry Street in what he hoped was a casual jog, walked across the mini-mall parking lot, and pushed open the door of Montana Gag.
The air in the shop was musty and dry, and the kid had disappeared. From somewhere came a low hum. Two bare bulbs lit the front of the store, but the shelves, cluttered with merchandise, stretched back into relative darkness. Paul heard some shuffling in the back.
“Hello?” he said.
“Oh,” a voice came, barely audible. “Be right out.”
Paul began to walk around, making a show of looking at the shelves. He heard footsteps, and behind him the kid’s voice: “Can I help you with anything?” He sounded like he would rather have been anywhere than here.
Paul came to the front. “Oh, I was just wondering if Greg’s around.” He peered over the kid’s shoulder, trying to get a look in the back, but there was nothing really to see there: a tiny refrigerator, seemingly the source of the hum he’d heard, some cardboard boxes, a calendar on the wall, covered with marks.
“Nope. Everybody wants him today.”
“Yeah?” Paul said. “What for?”
“I dunno.” The kid was staring out the window at the highway above. Paul followed his gaze and saw only the tops of trucks passing above the guardrail. “None of my business.”
“Sure, sure,” Paul said. “You know when he’ll be back?”
“No. Not today.”
“Oh, all right.” The kid’s eyes were ringed with shadows and his mouth was sour and slack. It was clear he wasn’t simply bored, but stoned maybe, or sad.
“I guess I’ll come tomorrow, then.”
“Yeah.”
He gave the kid a quick smile, then left. Walking back, he thought about whether the trip was a good idea and decided that though he hadn’t learned anything, it had been worth the risk. When he got back to the Kwik Stop, he documented the trip in the notebook, filling the space he would have used to tell Ponty about his daughter.
He looked up to find the kid’s face pressed up against the window of Montana Gag, staring directly at him across Cherry Street. Paul backed away from the window, but it was obviously too late. He’d been seen. The kid watched for another few seconds, then walked out the door of the shop and crossed the parking lot toward the Kwik Stop.
Paul panicked, and hid the notebook and pen and camera on the seat beside him just as the kid was pushing open the door. He and the cashier nodded at each other as if they were acquainted, and he ca
me and stood over Paul.
“Hey,” Paul said.
“Are you spying on me or something?”
“Spying?”
“I saw you this morning, reading the paper, and saw you looking up at the store and everything, but I thought you were just killing time. But then when you came in…”
“Oh, God.”
“So you are spying,” the kid said. He sat down across the table.
“Not on you.”
“Not on me?”
“Wozack.”
“My boss.” He nodded, as if this made sense to him. “What, are you a friend of his? Or the police? Is he up to something?”
“I’m just a detective. An assistant detective, actually. I don’t know why I’m spying, I just am.” Paul shook his head. “It’s my first week on the job. I can’t believe this.”
“I won’t tell him or anything,” the kid said. “I can’t say I actually like him.” He tapped his fingers on the table. “So what have you got on him?”
Paul shrugged. “I think he’s selling pot or something.” He thought of Alyssa Ponty and her friend.
He nodded. “Probably.”
They both looked out the window at the empty shop. The kid’s face was reflected in the glass, pale and overcast, like a cloud.
“I’m Paul Beveridge.” He stuck out his hand.
The kid took it and shook. “Lars. Sorry I can’t help you much. I barely see the guy.”
“That’s okay.”
Paul had run out of things to say, but the kid still sat there, gazing blankly out the window. One of his hands stroked the other. This gesture was, to Paul, uncomfortably intimate, and he said, “Hey, are you all right?”
“What? Oh.”
“I mean, I’ve been watching you. You seem…low.”
“Yeah.” He rubbed his face. “Yeah, I, uh, lost somebody.”
“Like they died?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was my girlfriend,” he said. “She died in the plane crash. I just got back from the funeral this morning.” He went back to rubbing his hand. “It’s unreal. I just can’t believe it. It’s all happened so fast.”
Light of Falling Stars Page 10
