by W. T. Tyler
“Until the beltway ramp.”
“You lose me on the beltway but I catch up again, coming off the ramp. Then I get fishtailed by these fucking cops and I’m climbing your bumper. I’d blown it and a couple of cop cars are stopped down there, just waiting to bust me. I can’t find my goddamned wallet, I’ve got a headful of shit, and then you stick this goddamned card through the window—”
“Where was your wallet?”
“I couldn’t find it. I thought maybe I’d dropped it back on the hill when I was farting around with the ignition. It’s under the seat, I find out later. All I can turn up in my pockets is this goddamn Valium, the front seat smells like a bartender’s rag, and these cops are getting nervous. I get the cops up there, they’ll bust me. Man, I wanna do the right thing, just get the shit out of there, so I grab up this goddamn card off the dash—”
“A Caltronics card,” Wilson said. “Why Caltronics?”
“I cleaned out a car, two of them. Leases they turned in the day before. They left their shit all over and when I delivered this car, I cleaned ’em out, dumped it in the Alfa. A whole box of cards I was gonna turn in, cards they never used. I figure it doesn’t matter. Then when I get my head together down the road, this coffee shop, I start getting worried—I’d fucked up and maybe Morris is going to know. I figured if I dropped this three hundred on you, telling you I was leaving town, that’d cool you off, but I was chasing a headful by then. I can’t even go in to work.”
“You didn’t think I was government, then,” Wilson said.
“I didn’t care, man. Why should I care? You’re selling real estate if anyone asks. You’re gonna take the money and forget it. I got two hundred out of it. I don’t have any problems with the government, only the VA. I didn’t want any of Morris’s trouble, not with the Hefty bag crowd, not with anyone else—not when they told me he’d blown town with all this money in his briefcase.”
“After you were fired for missing three days’ work, did the police ever talk to you?” Wilson asked.
“No way,” Cronin said softly, shaking his head, “no fucking way. Eighty percent wacko, the VA says. ‘A fucking animal runnin’ loose, that’s what you are, Cronin.’”
“Who told you that? Not the police.”
“The screw at this nut ward—oh, yeah. I get into a fight over on Sixteenth Street, this bar over there, and I get the shit pounded out of me—not by the bartender, either; the fucking cops. Then up in New York, the Flushing cops, twice. This last time over on Sixteenth Street, they book me after they find this Valium on me and I don’t have the VA prescription. They’re going to take me out to St. Elizabeths in the morning. At three in the A.M. they bring this other guy in, this guy the D.C. cops pick up just coming off Memorial Bridge. He’s living out of a locker down at Union Station. He can’t get his VA records straightened out, like me, so he comes up here from down in West Virginia and flips out. He gets all his shit together and he’s gonna bury it this time, dump it in a body bag and bury it, man, every fucking thing they gave him—Purple Heart, Silver Star, all of it—so he takes it out of this locker, dumps it in this waterproof bag, and that’s what he does—”
“What?”
“Buries it. He buries it over at Arlington, just inside the stone fence halfway up the hill, he tells me. He’s coming back now, just come off the bridge in a pair of GI fatigues and an Army jacket, only he’s got this trenching tool stuck in the back of his belt and the D.C. cops stop him. It’s two o’clock in the A.M. He’s a jogger, he tells them, just jogging, but they flash him over and then see this dirt on his knees and elbows, then they turn him around and spot this blood dripping down his pants from this goddamn trenching tool and one of ’em says, ‘What the hell have you been doing, sojur, where you been digging at?’ ‘My grave, fucker,’ he tells them, ‘right across the river over on the hill,’ and this other cop says, ‘Oh, shit, man, another of them Vietnam weirdos, a VA whiner,’ and the guy tries to deck him, and the next thing he’s lying in the road, bleeding like crazy, and they’ve got two more cars there, a couple of riot guns, and three or four cops are spread out along the road near the Lincoln Memorial like a goddamned SWAT team, looking for where his buddies are at, only there aren’t any buddies, just him. Just him, just me, like I’m sitting here now—”
“When was this?” Wilson asked.
“Last year. So the D.C. cops got us both booked that night and they think they’ve got a couple of animals just escaped from the zoo. They dump us in this meat wagon the next morning and take us out to the funny farm. Straitjackets, man, like we’re gonna trash the place. I’m three weeks out there. The girl I was going with quits on me.”
He lit his last cigarette, the package from which it had been drawn in ribbons now, scraps of paper torn in an odd design.
“This guy from West Virginia, from outside Beckley, West Virginia, this big hillbilly that’s buried his shit in this body bag over at Arlington …” His voice seemed tremulous for a moment, as if he were about to lose it, but the quaver passed. “The last time I see him he’s like a vegetable, like a fucking two-hundred-pound turnip. He turned himself in, they were cleaning him up. That’s what they wanted me to do, sign myself in. Me, no way. ‘You want the fucking cops to do it, Cronin,’ this goddamn runt orderly tells me when I’m checking out, ‘like an animal, Cronin, because that’s what you are.’ The shrink is standing there too, so is this nurse. So I tell them, tell all of them, this little sawed-off midget first of all, ‘Yeah, man, because I want it that way, just the way I am. I don’t want to turn myself in, I don’t want little squirts like you in their rubber boots and their rubber aprons hosing out my mind like it was some fucking GI latrine; I wanna remember things just like they are, including assholes like you just the way they are, just the way I am, because that’s all I’ve got.’ So that’s on my record too, how they had to cut back on the disability. So what do you think I’m gonna do—start looking for the cops to talk to because maybe I’m the last one to see him before he blew town that night with a hundred grand he swiped from Caltronics? No way. I’m just gonna fade away like I did, real easy like. I got no problems, I don’t want any. All I wanna know is what’s going on, why all this shit about this goddamn card? What the hell’s the government after him for, anyway?”
Cronin couldn’t remember the names of the people he’d met at the occasional Saturday night party at Morris’s garden apartment at Potomac Towers. Some were Caltronics business associates, others local contacts, a few girls he’d met in singles bars. Cronin had a poor memory for names and the hour was late.
“Try thinking about faces, then,” Wilson suggested. “Faces, voices, how he handled them. Think of it that way and then think about the call Morris made in the car rental office. Maybe that will tell you something.”
“I didn’t know any of them,” he mumbled.
“How about the way he talked to this man he telephoned? Maybe that’ll tell you something.”
“Like what?”
“How well he knew him, whether he was a friend or a business partner. Someone close or not so close.”
“Like he was a buddy,” Cronin said mechanically. “Someone he could walk all over and he wouldn’t get pissed.”
“A friend, then.”
“A friend and maybe not a friend. Hot and cold.”
“Mixed feelings,” Wilson suggested.
“Yeah, like that,” Cronin said carelessly, sitting up again, fighting drowsiness. His concentration was drifting.
“Hot and cold. Someone he could kick around and would come back for more,” Wilson continued.
“Yeah, like that.”
“Someone he didn’t respect, but maybe someone he had to put up with.”
Cronin’s head had begun to slump again. “Yeah, like he could wipe his feet on him and the jerk would just roll over.”
“Who did you meet at his apartment that would meet that description?”
“I dunno,” he said wearily. “Some guys f
rom Caltronics, but I don’t know their names. When he gave a blast at his apartment, he treated everybody like a buddy, like a good host, but he didn’t have any close friends. He made sure everybody was having a good time. I dunno their names.”
“Hot and cold, you said. Think of it that way,” Wilson proposed. “A Saturday night at Morris’s apartment. Someone he can kick around and watch him roll over, then hand him a drink and pat him on the back.”
Cronin’s eyes swam away.
“Strykker,” Wilson suggested.”
Cronin thought for a moment, but shook his head. “What’s his first name?”
“Nat Strykker. Sixty maybe, gray hair.”
“Naw, never heard of him. Too old, anyway.”
Wilson waited. “Someone he can kick around and then watch roll over.” He paused. “Then he picks him up and dusts him off.”
Cronin seemed to be remembering something, head turned away, as if listening. “Yeah,” he said finally, “there was this one guy. Morris was real tough on him, like he didn’t want him hanging around, not with this singles crowd. Like he embarrassed him or something.” He paused in recollection, more alert now. “He was that kind of guy, an asshole, a jerk you pitied the way he was.”
“You remember his name?”
“No, I only saw him twice, I think it was. I remember this one night he shows up with this twenty-year-old chick who looked like she just stepped off a topless bar down on Fourteenth Street. It was real late, the guy’s bombed, and Morris isn’t going to let him in. There were just four of us and we’re sitting around chewing the fat, me, Morris and these two chicks, listening to some music, and this clown shows up with this hooker. So Morris finally lets him in, this asshole, only he dumps this dumb broad with these two secretaries and me and yanks Morris out to the kitchen to talk. Morris really let him have it that time, right out in front of everyone, and we all felt pretty goddamned stupid, everyone except this clown and this cheap hooker. But Morris finally goes out to the kitchen to listen to this big deal this guy came to tell him about. That was the second time I’d seen him. The first time was this real live party Morris has going and this same clown shows up, not invited. He’s alone this time and he’s trying to get laid, but none of these girls there even look at him. So he ends up on the couch with me, telling me how he used to work with the SFers in ’Nam, ripping off all these Vietnamese names—Lang Vei and Ap Tan Hoi—how he nearly got his balls taken off by this Bouncing Better over near the Cambodian border. Then Morris tells him he’s fulla shit and to stop screwing up his party. Yeah, he was the kind of guy Morris treated hot and cold, a big-deal expert like the guy on the phone. But you had to feel sorry for him, a fifty-year-old dude with this meat wagon face and those tight collars, hustling those twenty-year-old hostesses.…”
“You say you don’t remember his name,” Wilson asked, putting down his glass for the final time. He had had three bottles of beer on an empty stomach. The lights had now blinked off and on three times and he was grateful he wouldn’t have to drink another.
“No, shit, I don’t remember. I’d forgotten all about him. Ex-Navy, I think. I think that’s what he told me. A health nut. He said he worked out every day in this gym in his office building. Said he’d been in Special Forces, detached duty, but he smelled like Saigon.”
“How about Larabee?” Wilson suggested. “That ring a bell?”
“No, nothing. I didn’t know his last name.”
“Chuck, maybe?”
Cronin smiled sleepily, red-eyed. “Oh, yeah,” he said softly. “‘Chuckwagon Chuck,’ that hamburger face he had. That’s what Morris called him, a real creep. Maybe it was him. Oh, sure, man. That’s maybe who it was.”
Wilson was at home, half-asleep in his chair, when Buster Foreman finally called. He’d followed the old Ford Falcon to an all-night pizza parlor on Telegraph Road. They’d left the car in the rear parking lot and the dark-haired girl had gone inside for a few minutes. The young man in the field jacket had waited for her in a new Toyota parked nearby. She’d come out, gotten behind the wheel, and driven out the beltway to a town house complex near Rockville, Maryland. An expensive town house, fairly new, at the end of a cul-de-sac. The Toyota with Maryland plates was parked in the drive.
Part Five
1.
It was after midnight. Cora Pepper lay awake on the bed in the small cottage behind the truck stop, watching the passing lights slide across the low ceiling overhead as the tractor-trailers climbed the grade outside in low gear, bound for North Carolina, or came highballing down the hill, eighteen or twenty-two wheels whining, each to a different chorus, carrying her mind with them as they rolled away. Eyes closed now, she saw the dark hills beyond Knoxville, felt the embrace of the warm cab about her, as comforting as the flannel blankets which covered her, and sleepily followed the headlight beams rolling west along the interstate. Nashville and Memphis would slip by, and then the Mississippi. Ships they were, crossing the continent by night; the dark landscape that engulfed them stretched away like the sea. Dawn would lift like the discovery of landfall. The time Tom Pepper had driven a tractor-trailer from Greenville to Muskogee, Oklahoma, and had taken her with him, she’d gone to sleep on the bunk behind the cab, bathed in greenish-blue light, a sea voyager, a child again, flushed with the excitement of a long-awaited holiday arriving with the morning, and had awakened at dawn among the gray hills of Arkansas. As the miles had sped past that sunny morning, she’d known that this was the kind of life they should have found for themselves while it had still been possible, leaving far behind the ramshackle gas stations and the hole-in-the-wall restaurants that had become their livelihood, their life together.
Her eyes still closed, her mind carried her now beyond Arkansas and Oklahoma to Arizona and California. This was where they should have gone, years earlier, fled in a rig of their own to find some rural community in California or Oregon where they could have begun a truck garden or managed an orange grove, but now the dream dissolved and the sunlight faded. She was once more conscious of her tired body, her aching feet, and the suffocating despondency of her physical and mental exhaustion: Where would they go now?
The bed beside her was empty. She opened her eyes to watch again the lights from the trucks sliding across the ceiling. As the high-pitched whine trailed off, she could hear the low sound of the radio in the front room and then, much more sharply, the dry click of bones and her husband’s heel and toe taps.
She’d first discovered his eccentric talent years ago when he was living alone in a weed-grown trailer halfway between her lunch counter and Frogtown, but he’d told her to hush up about it. The first time he’d tap-danced for her, they were drinking whiskey alone in his trailer. It was late at night, he had his arm around her, and they were listening to a country music station on the radio. When the disc jockey announced that the next record would be Hank Snow’s “Golden Rocket,” Tom Pepper had jumped up as if stung by a bee. “You like that record?” he’d asked. “I sure do,” she’d told him, and before she knew what was happening, he’d changed his shoes, rolled up his cuffs, and grabbed up a pair of polished spare-rib bones from the shelf behind the radio. The next thing she knew, he was tap-dancing, toes and heels flashing away on the linoleum floor in front of her, dry bones clacking between his fingers at the same time. She’d never seen anything like it. There he was, Tom Pepper, a one-man jamboree, road and minstrel show all rolled into one, dancing away like a madman to Hank Snow’s “Golden Rocket.”
What’d you think of that?” he’d asked her afterward, red-faced and out of breath, but grinning like a fool.
“I never seen anything like it. I never did. Who learned you all that?”
He’d learned it from a colored man over at the workhouse in Nashville—a check kiter from New Orleans. Tom Pepper was doing ninety days, the colored man six months. Time was heavy on their hands in the evening. “Sixty-five years old, that old man was,” Tom Pepper had told her. “Lordy, he could move them feet,
faster’n anything I ever saw. His daddy died at a hun’ert an’ two, like his daddy before him. You know how come?”
“How come.”
“Tap dancing. Keeps you spry, keeps the blood moving, the joints oiled up. Don’t give old age a chance to come creeping in. Ain’t nowhere for him to go, that’s what he told me. You think that’s something, wait’ll Homer an’ Jethro come on. You’ll see some sparks a-flying.”
“What was you a-doing in the workhouse over in Nashville?” she’d asked suspiciously.
“Ninety days, like I said.”
“I’m not talking about that, dummy. How come you was there?”
“Had a fight, busted out a police car winder. Some honky-tonk next door was playing music too loud all night long an’ didn’t even have no liquor license.”
“It’s nothing to be proud of,” she’d told him. “I don’t want to get myself mixed up with any jailbird; any musician, either.”
“Hell, I ain’t no musician. I ain’t no jailbird, neither, not no more. Tap dancing keeps you young, keeps you frisky, draws all the meanness out.…”
He’d been right about that. He’d had no more problems with the law. He had no public ambitions; he never danced in front of an audience and had no desire to, although after their marriage and his two bankruptcies, she would sometimes say, “One of these days it’ll sure enough come tap-dancing time. You and them skinny legs of yours will be the only thing between us and the poorhouse. And it’ll be me a-holding the tin cup.…”
She told him the same thing just a week earlier, after the independent gas and diesel fuel distributor had given them notice that he would be reducing his operations and closing down the marginal outlets, like the pumps out front. They’d been expecting the notice for some time. Without the diesel fuel and gasoline, the truck stop would become just another abandoned building at the side of the road, like their other restaurants back in South Carolina and the roadside stand up near Gatlinburg.
