by J. A. Kerley
“Ob-what?” Ben Timmons said.
“Ob-strep-er-ous, you illiterate slut. Buy a dictionary. So finally the bartender gets fed up and says he’ll settle the argument once and for all and to drop their pants and slap their dicks on the bar …”
Bobby Fenton grinned and fanned at his crotch. “You mean put them on the bar and really slap them?”
“Shut up, bitch, I’m telling the joke. The bartender tells the boys to drop trou and set their penises on the bar. So one by one the boys slide their jeans to their knees, scrunch up to the bar, and lay their doodles across it, pulling them out as far as they can. Just then, a guy walks in the door, glances down the bar, and yells, ‘I’ll have the buffet!’”
Moans and groans. Fenton said, “I’m gone. Some of us have to work in the morning.” Timmons said the same and he and Holcomb filed from the booth to back pats and air kisses until it was just Billy and Patrick standing outside the booth. Billy put his arm around Patrick’s shoulder and pulled him close. His breath was dense with tequila from a half-dozen margaritas.
“So there’s this guy comes out of a bar after drinking beer for three hours …”
“I heard it, Billy.”
“Shush! Not tonight you haven’t. The drunk staggers to an intersection, unzips his fly and yanks out his wand. Just then a cop runs up and says, ‘Hold on, mister, you can’t piss here.’”
Patrick crossed his arms and waited. Billy affected a drunken voice and pretended to aim a penis at the far horizon. “‘I ain’t gonna pissh here, occifer,’ the drunk says. ‘I’m gonna pissh way … over … there.’”
“It was funny the first three times,” Patrick yawned. “Four, maybe.”
“Gawd, Patrick,” Prestwick moaned. “Lighten up while I go way … over … there and take a piss.”
Prestwick started toward the bathroom, stopped when Patrick grabbed his arm and pointed at Prestwick’s half-filled glass, sitting on the edge of the table.
“You left your drink, Billy. What have I been telling everyone?”
Prestwick affected ignorance. “Don’t lay your doodle on bars?”
“I’m not laughing.”
“Uh, lemme see … Don’t leave drinkies unattended?”
“I mean it, Billy. Never let your glass out of your sight.”
Prestwick picked up the remainder of his drink, drained it away in a single chug, set it back on the table upside-down. He shot Patrick a wink, mouthed, “Thanks, mummy,” and ambled toward the bathroom tapping at his phone to check the barrage of tweets and Instagrams and Facebook updates. He walked into a barstool, corrected, re-aimed for the dark hall holding the bathrooms.
Patrick sighed, used to Billy’s hip-swinging sashays down a sidewalk, the vocal trills for emphasis, the bottomless supply of jokes. Patrick knew that somewhere in the twelve years since they’d met in high school, he had become an adult. He wondered if Billy ever would.
At times Billy showed flashes of adulthood, of introspection, moments in which he realized that his youth and looks were a finite commodity, and though they carried him now, the passage was growing briefer. But such moments were always transient, the span of a meteor across the night sky, as minutes later Billy was ordering another round, or leaving to “comfort” an older man who would repay Billy with one or another generosity, or sometimes just a fistful of cash.
“Come on, buddy,” Patrick whispered to Billy’s retreating back. “Grow up.”
Prestwick entered the bathroom and relieved himself from two feet away, allowing him to splash his initials on the rear of the urinal. He zipped up and turned to the mirror to check the magic.
A face appeared over his shoulder.
“Hello, Billy,” the face said.
Billy spun. “Uh, do I know you, dear?”
“It’s been a long time. You are Billy Prestwick, right?”
“Now you don’t know?” Billy said.
The face didn’t reply. It just stared, as if amused.
“Yes,” Billy said. What did this thing want? “I’m me.”
“And the man you’re sitting across from …” the face continued, like filling in a space on a crossword. “The fellow with the brown hair. That’s uh … lemme see if I can remember …”
Billy hated memory games. “Patrick, Patrick White. You know him, too?”
“Just briefly.”
Billy frowned. “When did we meet?”
“You really don’t remember me?”
“Of course I do, dear, I’m just so poor at names.” Billy also hated guess-where-we-met games. He reached out to touch the man’s shoulder but something made him stop short of contact. “Listen, dearie, great to see you again and all, but I’ve got a par-tay I’ve got to get to.”
The man nodded and smiled like he knew something Billy didn’t.
“Yes … there’s a party waiting for you, Billy.”
The man turned toward a urinal, unzipped as he walked. Billy started to wash his hands but suddenly realized he didn’t want to be in the bathroom any longer and stepped toward the door.
Patrick watched Billy exit the restroom and walk quickly to the table, his pale face frowning he glanced backward toward the dark hall that led to the bathroom.
“You look strange,” Patrick said. “You OK, Billy?”
“It’s nothing. I just saw a guy who knew me. He kinda looked familiar, but …”
Patrick looked toward the bathroom. The guy was either burrowing in for the long haul or had booked out the back door. “Probably someone you met at a party when you were drunk. How often does that happen, Billy?”
Prestwick grabbed at his bag, missed the strap, got it on the second try and slid it over a boney shoulder poking from a purple tank-top with a sequined target centering the chest. “Don’t be a nag, Nurse White.”
“Where you going?” Patrick asked.
Rolled eyes. “My gawd, Patrick … between you and the thing in the pisser I’m playing Twenty Questions tonight.”
“Someone’s gotta worry about you, Billy. Tell me where you’re headed.”
A flash of guilt was quickly replaced by a lopsided grin.
“I gotta date, sweetums. Kind of.”
Patrick frowned. “Someone you know, right? Someone safe?”
Billy shuffled through his bag, arranging phone and iPad, make-up and spare underwear. Patrick knew it as Billy’s avoidance move, and pressed forward.
“Come on, Billy. It’s someone you know, right? Not a stranger?”
“Oh, almost. He’s like a friend of a friend, just some old bear who likes to sit on his Miami Beach veranda and tell tales about the old days, Stonewall and the Castro and whatever. I’ve heard that he’s sweet and harmless and …”
“And might give you a loan you don’t have to repay?”
“I make sweet old men feel young for a few hours. I think of it as charity work. You flying back to Kansas?”
Patrick nodded to the half-mug of ale. “Two sips and I’m outta here.”
Prestwick affected a thousand-watt grin, teetering slightly in his burgundy loafers. “You’ll be running that place, one day. Head Nurse Patrick White, Queen of All the Bedpans.”
Patrick sighed. “You’re taking a cab, right, Billy?”
“My white knight.” Prestwick kissed Patrick’s temple. “Yes, girlfriend. I’m cabbing. Buh-byee!” He started for the door, but was stopped by an invisible force. Turning back to Patrick, without a word he wrapped him in a hug so tight Patrick imagined he felt the beating of Billy’s heart.
“Thank you, dear,” Billy whispered. “Thank you for caring.”
“Some of us do, Billy. We get worried about … about where you’re going. Where you’ll be five years from now.”
Billy stood back with a quiet smile verging on sadness. He flicked a comma of hair from Patrick’s forehead.
“Goodness, Patrick, so existential all of a sudden.”
“You’re smart and talented, Billy. Stop wasting it and use it to do so
mething, go somewhere.”
Billy blew out a breath. His eyes went to the floor and when they rose to meet Patrick’s eyes, were clouded with guilt. But then, like a bright mask clasped to a penitent visage, Billy Prestwick’s face lit in mischief. He winked.
“I am going somewhere, dear Patrick. I’m going to Miami Beach.”
And like smoke in the wind, Billy Prestwick was gone. Patrick righted Prestwick’s glass, wiping spilled margarita with a napkin, putting the napkin in the glass and putting it aside. He walked to the window to see Billy gathered into a swooping flash of yellow taxi, heading to his next destination, never quite knowing whether it would hold danger or sanctuary.
Patrick shook his head. Had he ever been so self-consumed and moment-driven?
Once upon a time. And not all that long ago.
15
Debro sat in his car across the street from D’Artagnan’s and watched Patrick White through the window. He’d slipped out the back after his conversation with Billy Prestwick. An eight-year-old movie began playing in Debro’s head. The pictures still hurt. Sometimes they stung like hornets.
The movie montage comes from a trendy gay hangout long closed by the cops for underage drinking. The bar, owned by two old queens nicknamed Harold and Maudlin, kitsch collectors, was the place to be that spring, festooned with comic excess on the walls and ceiling: a moose head wearing sunglasses, a bent trombone, a blow-up doll dressed in a tie-dye miniskirt, posters from fifties sci-fi movies, funky birdhouses, a sagging accordion, a stuffed raccoon wearing Mardi Gras beads. The setting evoked fun and laughter.
Having spent days steeling his courage to step inside the bar, a younger Debro orders a gin-gin at the bar. The skinny, arrogant barkeep gives him a sneering once-over and brings the drink five minutes later, retreating to the far end of the bar to talk with a handsome boy in a Panama hat.
Debro is about to retreat to the safety of the street when he notices four young men clustered in a corner, one holding court as the others listen.
“… so I said, bitch, you are not coming with me dressed like that. It’s too trashy and I will not be seen in trashy company. If you’re coming with me, you have to be elegant, it’s like, my gawwwwd, who wears suede any more?”
The storyteller has silver hair à la Andy Warhol and black jeans and long-sleeve black T-shirt so tight that he resembles a cartoon spider, happy and sweet, his web spun from cotton candy. The others are tittering like magpies.
“So the slut puts on a pout like I’ve just strangled his goddamn canary or whatever and he goes, ‘But I spent eight hundred dollars on my clothes, Billy, the shirt alone was almost three hundred dollars.’”
Debro inches closer to the edge of the semicircle, pushing a frozen smile to his terrified face as the storyteller continues:
“So I said, girl, if that’s a three-hundred-dollar shirt, I’ll trade you for two pairs of my hundred-fifty-dollar BVD’s.”
The tale-teller stops in mid sentence and looks at Debro, who suddenly feels naked, the other heads turning his way.
“Well, hello there,” the silver-haired boy chirps, “Can I help you?”
“I … was just listening to your story. You’re funny.”
The silver-haired boy’s eyes light up. “I’m funny? Me?”
“Y-yes. You know how to tell a story.”
The storyteller puts his arm around Debro, moving him into the circle and introducing him around – “Pedro Cardinale, Randy Wilks, Patrick White” – before leaning close in the confidence of old friends. “Have you ever been in here before?”
“No. I’d just heard about it.”
“It’s so wonderfully tacky. You like it?”
Debro’s head is bobbing, needing to please. “I love the weird stuff everywhere. It’s a hoot.”
The silver-haired boy nods approvingly. He turns to Debro with a conspiratorial grin and leans close, his fingers falling over Debro’s forearm. “Want to want to see something funny?” the boy says into Debro’s ear. It tickles.
Debro nodded toward the goofy moose head in dark aviators. “Funnier than that?”
“It’s the funniest thing in this place. I’m talking fall down laughing.”
“Cool. Sure.”
The silver-haired boy pivots smoothly on his heels and points toward a back room, another section of the bar. “Go down that hall and turn left. It’s on the wall, the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. You’ll howl, I promise.”
Debro makes the trip, turns and looks at the wall. It’s a full-length mirror. He’s staring back at himself. He tries to find a back door but can’t, so he slinks past the group and rushes for the front door, his face hot and red as he tries to make his bulk invisible in the tight confines of the cluttered bar.
“What did I tell you, hon?” the silver-haired boy calls to Debro’s back. “A scream, right?”
Debro can’t keep his head from turning to them: the faces alight with humor, the storyteller with his hands on the shoulders of a handsome green-eyed boy who’s smirking into Debro’s eyes.
Until five minutes ago he’d had just the unpleasant, stinging pictures. But now he had names: Billy Prestwick and Patrick White. He looked up and saw White heading for the door of the bar and turned the ignition key. As he pulled away he looked in his rear-view, seeing White appear on the street.
Two in one night. He wished they could all be so easy.
16
The next day we flew to Houston and caught a twin-prop to Rio Grande City, Texas. I was met by the County Sheriff, Martin Dooley, a large and mustachioed man who topped his uniform with a brown Stetson.
“I checked with the hospital across the border in Cuidad Camargo,” Dooley told us in his office, knotty-pine with a set of longhorns on the wall and a rattling window air conditioner. “They didn’t record a birth, bolstering the story of a home delivery. There is a death certificate for a boy, Donald Ocampo. It’s signed by a Dr Raoul Pariella. I barely recall old Pariella, musta been eighty when the birth occurred. Then there’s some paperwork indicating the body was delivered to the US.”
“Would it have been seen?” I asked. “The child’s body?”
“You got a box going by with papers saying there’s a dead baby inside. Someone would prob’ly open it today, the drugs and all. Back then I expect they just waved it past.”
“What do you remember of Pariella?” Gershwin asked.
Dooley frowned. “Mostly Mexicans in his practice and he was as likely to try and cure you with herbs as with medicine. An’ he had a sideline in chiropractic. But then, it wouldn’t been like he come outta UT with his medical degree. I doubt any American woulda gone to Pariella unless it was a pure emergency.”
“Can we see the child’s gravesite?” I said.
He stood and pulled his hat from the rack. “It’s a bit of a drive because it’s in a town that ain’t there no more.”
The drive was twenty-five minutes in the hot Texas sun, the land baked dry by drought, more brown than green, the highway an asphalt strip linking clusters of homes and strip centers broken by wire-fenced pastures of dark and heavy-shouldered cattle.
In the precise center of nothing, we skidded on to a road crumbling at the edges, winding toward a copse of trees. A cemetery lay in the distance, a hillside studded with markers, a couple hundred of them, most small and unassuming. Dooley looked at marking numbers at the edge of the lane.
“Eighty-five, eighty-six, eighty … Here we go.”
We exited and looked down on a marker of cheap stone, the incised letters saying Donald Ocampo. Below that the dates framed a life spanning less than two hundred hours. Below that read, Rest in Peace Tiny Angel.
“How hard will it be to get an exhumation release?” I asked the Sheriff.
“Easy, since no one’s gonna challenge it.”
We were back by mid-afternoon as a small backhoe dug away a few feet of the cover. The operator finished the exhumation with the shovel. “Easier digging than I figured. Prob
ably spring flooding from the creek kept it softer.”
We looked down to see a small coffin. The worker cleared enough dirt to free the box and lifted it high. Gershwin and I set it on the ground, then gave the guy a hand up. He bent over the simple casket with a foot-long pry-bar.
“Hold your noses,” the Sheriff advised.
“Ain’t gonna be a stink, Sheriff,” the worker said, slipping the bar under the lid. “Just a little mummy in baby clothes.”
He pushed the bar under the lid and popped it open. The sunlight shone down as we all leaned close to peer inside.
No little mummy. No clothes.
The casket was empty.
17
“You’re thinking this Ocampo woman …’ Dooley glanced at the sheet on his desk, “Myrtle. You’re thinking she kept one kid an’ sold the other?”
“Maybe she doesn’t even want a kid and suddenly she’d got two. Maybe the doctor’s got his eyes out for such things.”
I made the money-whisk, knowing how easy it could be to game the system if you either had insider knowledge, like a doctor, or wanted it bad enough. Like Jeremy, my original surname was Ridgecliff. When he’d been accused of the murders, shame made me run from my past and I disappeared from college. Over a period of months and with advice from a canny old sailor who’d escaped two previous lifetimes (and wives), I continued at another university as Carson Ryder, a test of my false structure. Six years later, although my lies were legion, the Police Academy background check found nothing amiss.
Dooley nodded. “Got reports on the Ocampo woman from those days. Four DUIs, three drunk and disorderlies. On the DUIs she was drivin’ a twenny-year-old Bonneville, worth about a hunnert bucks. So she was fer-sure poor. Plus she lived out on Rock Springs Road, a poor-folks neighborhood.”
“Anyone still out there?” I asked. “From back in the day?”
Dooley fixed a cigarette in his lips. “What’s left is just a couple shacks, but there’s a house that someone’s been in for years, name’s Wilkens. Woman in her late seventies, mebbe.”
Miz Wilkens’ house smelled of lilacs and liniment. I could see into two rooms, crucifixes on two walls. Above the couch was a rendition of the Last Supper, garish, like the replicator had added neon to the ink. Across the room a large Jesus looked heavenward, a ghastly crown of thorns dripping blood down his forehead. I took it that Miz Wilkens was devout.
