“Yeah, since you went to see that chick in the shack in New Bedford.”
“Thought you wanted out.”
“I do.”
“Then why are you following me?”
“Somebody’s got to watch out for your stupid ass. Besides, I can’t let you do this shit by yourself while I hang on the sidelines, ain’t my style.” Rick’s gaze alternated between the house and me. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Don’t know who to trust?”
“Do you?”
“Not anymore than you do. But I’m hoping.”
“Well that’s not exactly the same thing, is it?”
Above us, the sky was turning bleak and gray. Storm clouds were creeping in off the ocean, promising much needed rain and a respite from the heat wave.
Rick sighed. “I figure it’s like shooting craps, you know? Even if it’s not your turn to throw, you take a long hard look at the guy rolling the dice, at his history and your history with him, then you decide. You place your bet and you watch him throw, and in a way, you’re throwing too. You think you know, you even go so far as to bet on it, but until the numbers come up all you really know for sure is that you hope you’re right.”
“Maybe it’s all in the history.”
“That and the throw.”
We were quiet a while, recognizing and remembering that history in each other’s eyes.
“We good then?” I asked.
“You tell me.”
I held my fist out to him, and after a moment he tapped it with his own.
I motioned to the house. “Have you been in there too?”
He nodded slowly, as if not certain he should, and from the look on his face I knew he had found the same things I had. Despite his efforts to mask it, the dread Rick was feeling was apparent. “Me and Donny checked it out. I was gonna tell you, man, but then when you headed here I knew you’d—”
“Tomorrow night,” I said. “That’s when we make our move.”
“Tomorrow’s the fourth.”
“Exactly, the whole town’s going to be distracted with the fireworks, parties and all that shit. The cops will be tied up with traffic and crowd control. Nobody’s gonna be watching the edge of town, and that’s where we’re going.”
“OK, I’ll grab Donny and—”
“No, leave him out of it.”
“Why?”
“Let him know what we’re doing, but he stays home. We need somebody on the outside of all this in case something goes wrong. In case—”
“I say we stick together and—”
“Rick,” I said, grasping his arm, “in case we don’t come back.”
He thought about what I’d said for a while before reluctantly agreeing. “OK.”
A moment later I said, “The old Buchanan mill.”
“You think that’s where Bernard is?”
“The evil he left behind.”
“What if it is there, what do we do then?”
I looked back at the house, at the past. “We end it.”
CHAPTER 30
The plan was set, but still twenty-four hours away. Rick went to work and I decided to kill some time at Harry’s, a quiet lounge I sometimes went to a few blocks from my apartment. I’d been drinking a lot more heavily than I normally did, but it took the edge off my constantly wired nerves, and although the results were only temporary, I needed the reprieve from anxiety liquor provided.
I recognized some regulars huddled at the bar, and since I wasn’t in the mood for conversation, I ordered a drink and sat instead at one of the tables along the opposite wall. The bartender was a summer-hire I didn’t recognize. He brought my drink along with a little white napkin, placed it before me and hung his hands on his fleshy waist. “Hot enough for ya?”
I was certain if one more person asked me that I’d snap. “Rain’s coming.”
“Yeah, any minute. About time, huh?” He scratched at the stubble along his chin. “You believe the shit going on?” He lowered his voice. “Scary, huh?”
I nodded, sipped my whiskey. “Sure is.”
“You hear the shit he did to them poor girls? Christ. Sick mental fucking bastard.”
I gave an obligatory smile and wondered if this was the way Bernard had felt when he was alive, knowing something no one else did, carrying around knowledge of things others could only speculate about and all the while pretending he was as clueless as the next guy.
“Anyway,” he said, motioning to my drink, “you need another one gimme a holler.”
I thanked him and he went back behind the bar. I sipped my drink and tried to clear my mind, but everything was piling up, streaming through me as if a floodgate had burst. Even stronger than what had happened in the house were the things Claudia had told me. I could hear her voice in my head. I could see her face, her body, her feline-like movements and dark eyes. We could not have been more different as people, and yet, I felt an undeniable bond between us. We were both isolated, in pain and afraid in our own ways. Truth was, I hadn’t stopped thinking about her and all she’d said since we’d met, and wasn’t certain I ever would.
A thunderclap shook the bar.
The rain had finally arrived, but all I could think about was Claudia, and whether she’d left town yet.
I finished my drink and signaled the bartender for another.
* * *
By the time I reached my car I was soaked to the bone.
The rain was falling in torrents, bringing with it the darkness of night and pouring from the heavens with a steady ferocity that made driving more of a challenge than it should have been. The downpour had begun to cool things down almost immediately, but the heat was still high.
With three whiskey and sodas under my belt, I took the highway to New Bedford.
Visibility was low, and by the time I reached the city limits the rain had become even heavier. Occasional forks of lightning split the black horizon, and thunder exploded every few seconds, as if in timed intervals. No one was on the street, and even the normally busy interstate was eerily empty.
I pulled onto Milner Avenue, which was deserted as ever, and followed it to Claudia’s cottage. The entire area was pitch black. I remembered there had been a light bulb above the front door, but it too was dark. Between the rain and darkness I couldn’t even make out the building until I turned toward it and crept closer with my headlights on high beam. The dirt lot was flooded, a mass of puddles and rivers as the rain continued its assault. I checked my watch, holding the face close to the lighted dash. It was only a little after nine. Claudia was a night person, so it seemed doubtful she’d be in bed at this hour. Odds were she had already left town.
Still unsure of exactly what the hell I was doing there, I wiped some rainwater from my face and neck and sat watching the cottage, as if for some sudden revelation.
It came to me in the form of a slight flicker of light.
I sat forward and squinted through the rain and swing of the windshield wipers. A tiny patch of light wavered in the darkness.
I dropped the headlights down to low beam and waited. After a moment the front door opened a few inches. I leaned out of the car, into the rain. “Claudia?”
“Who’s there?” she called from behind the door, her voice barely audible above the storm.
“It’s Alan.”
“Who?”
I shut the car off but left the headlights on. “Plato,” I said. “It’s Plato.”
The door opened a bit wider, and I could see her eyes reflecting the light. “What are you doing here?”
I stepped out of the car. Thick raindrops pelted me like water-bullets. “I was hoping maybe we could talk.”
“Didn’t we already do this?” She raised a hand to shield her eyes from the headlights, so I reached in and shut them off. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that Claudia was holding a candle. She opened the door wider still, but I couldn’t see much of anything beyond her face. “What do you want?” she asked.
“Get
ting out of the rain would be nice.”
“So go home, you got a roof there, right?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Again?”
“Yes, for Christ’s sake—obviously.”
She may have smiled a bit, but I couldn’t tell for sure. She watched me a few seconds then motioned with her head for me to come inside. I tramped through puddles and mud to her front door. Rain dripped from my hair to my eyes and across my face. My clothes were drenched and pasted to me like a second skin. Claudia held the candle higher for a better look at me.
“I wasn’t sure I’d still find you here,” I said.
“Well I wasn’t sure I’d still be here.” She swung the door enough for me to pass and stepped back out of the way. Once I was through the threshold the door closed behind me and she was at my side, the candle providing enough light to reveal pieces of the front room and bits of us. Claudia was wrapped in a large white towel and nothing else. Her hair was nearly as wet as mine. “What do you want? What are you doing back here?”
I stood dripping on her floor. Rain spattered against the windows and gushed from gutters along the roof, splashing into puddles in the mud. “I just—I was hoping maybe we could talk for a while.”
“You’ve been drinking, I can smell it on you.”
“Yeah, a little.”
“You one of those guys who grows a set once he’s had a few?”
“I’m not sure what kind of guy I am right at the moment.”
She shook her head, both annoyed and amused from the looks. “Look, I thought I made this clear before. I’m not in the business anymore.”
“I understand that.”
She spun away, walked over to a battered couch and sat down. Darkness closed around me, the light encircling her as she placed the candle on a rickety coffee table in front of her. “I was soaking in the tub, chilling out and trying to groove with the rain, and I’d like to get back to it if you don’t mind. In case you haven’t fucking noticed, it’s nighttime, this is my place and you’re here uninvited again. So I’ll ask one more time. What do you want?”
I moved closer to her, closer to the flame. “Why don’t you have any lights on?”
“They turned the electric off. I’m leaving tomorrow, so who cares?”
Lightning blinked, washing the room in blue for an instant.
“We’re going in different directions,” she said. “You’re running into the dark and I’m running away from it. I tried to be cool with you before, I was honest, I told you what you wanted to know, so why are you fucking with me now?”
“I’m not fucking with you, Claudia. I…”
She glanced at my wedding ring. “Go home to your wife, Plato.”
“My wife’s not at home.”
Her dark eyes blinked at me through the candlelight. “What do you think I’m running here, a lonely hearts club?”
“I’m sorry to just show up like this,” I said. “I just…”
“You just what? Jesus H., you got any complete sentences going on tonight?” Claudia stood up, holding the towel tight against her chest. “You think you can just come strolling in here like Joe Stud and fuck me, is that it? Or you just slumming tonight, out for some cheap thrills? Wife’s gone and you’re all fucked up, so what the hell, me being a used up old junkie whore and all I’d have nothing better to do than to put my legs in the air for you, right? Man, what a lifesaver, thanks for coming by.”
“It’s not like that, I—”
“Get out.” She moved out from behind the coffee table. “Just get out.”
“I only want to talk.”
“No you don’t.”
I stood staring at her, still dripping like some pitiful lost puppy wandered in from the storm. I had never felt so ridiculous, and never quite so alone. “Did Bernard ever come here?” I asked.
She left the candle behind on the coffee table and joined me outside the light. “Yeah, a few times. So what? Why?”
We were standing so close I could hear her breathing. “Do you ever still feel him?”
She closed her eyes as if hopeful that not seeing me might mean I was really no longer there. “I don’t feel much of anything anymore.”
“Claudia—”
“Just get out and leave me alone.”
“Drop that wall a minute and let me talk to—”
“It’s a good wall, a sturdy wall. Been building it for years. It keeps me safe.”
“It keeps you numb,” I told her. “I know because I’ve been behind one for years too.”
“Better to be numb than in pain.”
“At least if you’re in pain you know you’re alive.”
“You don’t have to be alive to feel pain.” Her eyes glistened. “The dead feel it too.” She walked away and mumbled, “Get out.” But as she slipped into the hallway she allowed her towel to loosen, and it fell open to reveal her bare back and the curve of her buttocks in the faint candlelight.
I followed her. The hallway was short and narrow and led first to a bathroom that was filled with lit candles placed around the tub and on the sink and counter. I hesitated in the doorway, but she was not there, so I continued on to the bedroom at the end of the hall. A handful of candles burned here as well but did little to combat the darkness. The only furniture was a bureau and an old unmade bed, the sheets in a heap near the foot. Over the bed was a framed but faded black and white poster of Billie Holiday. The floor was bare. I stood just inside the room, watching the flames play in the night, illuminating what they chose to show me, including Claudia, standing beside the bed and still holding the towel in place in front of her.
Our eyes locked for what felt like hours, and though neither of us made a sound, countless words passed between us.
The towel fell to the floor in a twisting motion and lay at her feet.
An enormous black tattoo began at her left calf, wound upward, wrapped along her thigh and encircled her waist. It ended just below her navel, where it split in two. The forked tongue of a serpent, coiled around her, marking her.
Her pale skin contrasted with the dark hair on her head and between her legs, but the tattoo was so dominant it was difficult to look at anything else. She seemed smaller out of clothes, more petite and delicate, at ease and not nearly so tough. But the essence of her—the physically weathered essence—remained even in candlelight. The majority of scars Claudia had collected over the years were internal, but a handful lived in plain sight, material evidence of a brutal past sprinkled across her body.
She radiated a primordial animalism in her movements and stances, and even in her nakedness she possessed a raw and dangerous edge, a kind of unpredictability one might encounter in a tiger just released from its cage. I imagined her as sexually aggressive and wild, if not outright violent. Heart thudding, my eyes skulked across her body. When my eyes finally returned to hers, her face bore a look as alluring as it was defiant. “This is what you came here for, isn’t it?” she asked quietly.
I nodded.
“Do you even know why?”
“No,” I said.
“I can feel what you think.”
As could I, and it sickened me. I wanted to take her, to fuck her. Hard. I wanted to hurt and abuse her in every way the darkest corridors of my mind could conjure. I wanted to hear her scream. And I didn’t know why. My anger and fear was frothing, bubbling to the surface, and I wanted to take it out on her. Maybe because others had, maybe because I could, maybe because I imagined it was all she knew.
“I’ve never had thoughts like this,” I stammered.
“Yes you have. You just keep them bound like all good devils.”
“They’re not me. They’re not who I want to be.”
“They’re not who any of us wants to be.”
There is instinct, and there is judgment.
I crossed the room in two long strides. My hands were suddenly in her hair, pulling her into me. Our lips met, and as I held her against me our tongues entangl
ed and her hands slid up my chest and onto my shoulders, grasping me there with surprising strength before she broke the kiss and pushed me away. Nearly out of breath, I kissed her again. She tasted of cigarettes and rainwater. She cupped my face and looked up at me in a manner I had not until then thought her capable of. Deep inside her shreds of innocence still remained, vulnerability and need. “Not so rough,” she whispered. “Slower…gently. Like this, it’s better like this.” Her lips brushed mine, and her tongue softly traced my bottom lip before slipping into my mouth.
Still locked in our embrace, I lifted her from the floor, and the violence and madness left me like blood flowing from a fresh wound. In its wake lay the simple beauty of passion, of two scared and lonely people pooling their sorrow, trading it in for tenderness, for a chance to be safe and wanted and loved and needed unconditionally and totally, even if only for a short while.
At that very moment, I thought of Toni. But as Claudia wrapped her legs and arms around me, the thought retreated, leaving us alone.
There, in the dark.
CHAPTER 31
I met Toni in high school and immediately thought she was the sweetest, most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Cynical even for a teen, the instant and often overwhelming love we felt for each other surprised me, but like most couples that meet and commit in high school, our relationship was very intense. The highs were amazingly high, the lows amazingly low—a typical stormy romance—and not long after graduation we were forced to make a decision. Either we stayed together and got married, or went our separate ways as a test of our relationship, and ultimately, ourselves. If our love was real and meant to be, our theory concluded, then we’d end up together eventually anyway. Although it was painful for us, we decided the best move was to split up and see other people for a while. Little did we realize three years later we’d be back together and engaged, and that a year after that we’d be married. In the time we were apart both of us dated and slept with other people, but since our engagement I hadn’t been with anyone other than Toni.
When I found Claudia I had no idea we would eventually wind up in bed together. It hadn’t been something I’d thought about or even wanted until that night, and I was certain she had felt the same. But here we were. And while I struggled with feelings of guilt and regret, there was also exquisiteness to it, a raw sensuality and honest affection existing for a time amidst a dreamscape of devils and nightmares, an oasis in a desert of shadow.
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