by Tom Kakonis
He continued down the hall. Entered the bedroom. Got out of his clothes and slipped into bed, quietly as he could. Lori didn’t stir. And lying there beside her, this stranger who was his wife, lost in a narcotized sleep, dreaming her anguished dreams, it occurred to Marshall that the past, which had always seemed so immutable, so real in the living and remembering it, seemed now like a possession—the antique typewriter, say—lifted furtively from another man’s life.
PART THREE
A group of Norse Aluminum employees, Buck, Waz, and Lester among them, was gathered near an entrance to the cast house at the south end of the plant, finishing off their lunches. From where they sat, lined up like a file of frazzled ducks against a soot-blackened wall, they could look down a wide rolling belt, wide enough to accommodate fourteen-ton ingots of raw aluminum and reaching deep into the plant’s interior. A funnel of pale light cut through a window on the roof fifty feet above them and pierced a haze of rising dust thick as fog. In a pit some thirty yards off to their left, an enormous furnace belched flames and puffs of black smoke like some squat, swollen smudge pot. Still, it was a little cooler here by the doorway, relatively speaking, and somewhat removed from the echoing screech and boom of the machines, and so in the worst of the summer heat this is where they habitually chose to eat.
Lester was winding down a tale of sexual conquest grown large in the telling, though wholly fabricated simply as prelude to a punch line he’d heard somewhere: “So I got her all steamed up and moanin’ now, way they do, and she goes, ‘Gimme ten and make it hurt.’ ”
“Mighty tall order for you, ten,” said the man seated next to him, one Albert Buttrum, commonly addressed as Butt, for obvious reasons, though just as frequently as Beans, for his unvarying lunch fare—a can of cold My-T-Fine pork and beans—and for the malodorous and often explosive results it inevitably produced.
“Hey, don’t I know it,” Lester agreed, tittering in advance of the line he’d been waiting to deliver, a spasm of childish delight.
“So what’d ya do?”
“What I done is bang her five times and kick her in the ass on my way out the door.”
Everybody guffawed, but listlessly and without much mirth. The plant’s ferocious inferno of noise and heat had wrung the sweat and the spirit out of them, staining their blue twill uniforms and reducing them to limp, sullen shells of themselves. All but Lester, sprightly as ever, for reasons everyone understood and tolerated, more or less, the way a hapless, worthless lovable hound is sometimes tolerated. Waz swallowed the last of a dried-out bologna sandwich, what he referred to as Della’s horsecock special, washed it down with Mountain Dew, and said sourly, “You ever go five times one night, they be fittin’ you out for a wheelchair.”
“Might not be so bad,” Lester said. “I hear your crips do real good, boinkin’-wise. Real ass bandits.”
“How they gonna do that? Can’t even get it up, most of ’em, is how I hear it.”
“That’s the point right there. Twats think they give good head ’cuz a that. So they always sniffin’ around ’em.”
Waz looked at him skeptically. “That’s about the dumbest theory you come up with yet.”
“Listen, ain’t so dumb. I know a fella tested it once. Wanna hear how?”
“Yeah, how? Throw himself in front of a truck so’s he’d be a crip, check out your dipshit theory?”
“Sounds like somethin’ Cock here’d do,” Beans put in, alluding to Lester by his plant tag.
“You guys wanta hear this story or not?”
“Tell the fuckin’ story,” Waz grouched. Five minutes left on lunch break, nothing better to do.
“Okay,” Lester commenced, “what he done, this fella, is rent himself a wheelchair, one a them places got all your crip gear, drugstore, I think it was. Or maybe was a, like, hospital supply. Forget. Anyway, once he got it, got use to zippin’ around in it, he wheels into a bar—this was over to Lyons, I remember correct—and orders up a beer and waits. Now, what you got to picture in your mind here is a guy ain’t exactly no looker. Matter a fact, way I remember—been, oh, five years or better since I seen him, least—it’s like somebody beat on him with the ugly stick. We’re talkin’ big-time ugly here, downtown.”
“Awright,” Waz broke in irritably, “we got the picture. Get to the story part.”
Lester looked at him, puzzled and just a little hurt. “Jesus, you in a foul mood today, Wazzer.”
“You gonna tell it?”
“I’m tellin’ it,” he said and resumed the story. “So anyway, he’s pretty quick got a gang a fluff around him, this fella. Part of it’s the pity thing, ’course, but other part’s them thinkin’ they maybe got a world-class carpet muncher here. Don’t matter which to him, he got the pick a the litter. He takes the one he wants back to his place and gets her all positioned on the kitchen table and wheels right up and goes divin’. Gives her a real mustache ride.”
“So what’s that prove?” Beans wanted to know. “ ’Less you get your jollies off goin’ down. Which I ain’t never heard of. Not for no real man.”
“See, that was his trouble,” Lester said. “That’s where it all gone wrong for him. He’s sportin’ a steeler ’bout to split his zipper, gets so jazzed he forgets he’s suppose to be a gimp and hops up outta his chair and tries to climb her.”
“What’d she do?”
“Well, now she just lookin’ at another poor lumper tryin’ to hose her, piss ugly one at that, so it ain’t no big surprise she’s pretty hacked off, particular him not bein’ a genuine crip like he made out to be. So she shags her ass outta there, leaves him with a serious case a the granite nuts.”
“Which kinda sinks your theory, don’t it?” Waz said.
“How you figure that?”
“Said it yourself, dickweed. Guy goes to all that work, comes up stoners.”
“Got her on the table there, didn’t he?” Lester said heatedly, defending his proposition. “Got her stoked and spread. A Mr. Fugly like that, never gets no tail, nobody even give him a mercy fuck.”
“Didn’t that time neither, way you told it. Don’t you ever listen to your own stories?”
“Still got himself that close,” Lester insisted, the that indicated by a tiny space between extended thumb and forefinger.
“Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades,” Beans remarked dryly.
“His prol’um was he just got too excited. Too, y’know, eager, is all. Couldn’t wait it out till she got herself a wide-on won’t quit, take any kind a meat, crip or not. That don’t mean the theory don’t hold up.”
Nobody had the energy to argue, and so as a kind of dissonant coda to the issue Beans lifted a fat cheek and corked a thunderous tooter.
“Holy Christ, Beans,” Waz groaned as its bouquet wafted his way, “you got to poison the air any worse’n it already is?”
“In here that ain’t poison. It’s perfume.”
Lester took a small, clear plastic bag of colored capsules from his shirt pocket, shook two into the palm of a hand, and gulped them down on a wash of Dr Pepper. Everybody watched him, nobody commented.
Buck, who had been listening quietly, contributing nothing to the discursive noontime conversation, now shook his head slowly and allowed, “Y’know, it’s real educational, eatin’ lunch with you boys. Just like bein’ back in school again.” He glanced at his watch, hauled himself to his feet, and stretched like a man rousing himself from a deep sleep. “Too bad time’s up.”
Following his lead, the rest of them stood, and in a group they started down the walkway along one side of the rolling belt. Waz fell in beside him, said, “How ’bout we scoot over the Greek’s after shift, throw back a couple pops?”
“I don’t think so,” Buck said. “I gotta get home.”
“C’mon. Friday night, you can do one.”
“Nope, can’t. I’m takin’ Norma and the boy out to supper.”
Waz thrust his face up close, whispered urgently, “See, that
’s the thing. We gotta talk.”
“About what?”
“ ’Bout your boy there.”
Buck looked at him narrowly. “What about him?”
“Oh, nothin’ heavy, nothin’ get stressed over. Just, well, this thing come up, other day, wanna run it by you.”
“What thing’s that?”
They were approaching the wing of the plant that housed the machine shop and tool crib, Waz’s assigned work station. “Tell ya ’bout it over a beer,” he said. “Okay?”
Buck thought about it, but not long. He was more curious than worried, even though he didn’t much like the evasive glide in his friend’s eyes. He held up an index finger. “One.”
“Terrific. Where you gonna be?”
“Workin’ the hot mill.”
“Meetcha there.”
Lester, trudging along behind the others, evidently still intrigued by the aphrodisiac possibilities of paraplegia, called after them, “Think maybe I’ll rent me a wheelchair myself, try it out on the lady at the license plate office, gimme all that grief that time. I ever tell you guys that one? It’s real comical, what happened.”
But with the remainder of the shift ahead of them, nobody was interested anymore, and nobody bothered to reply.
Marshall was gaping, chute-jawed, at a thick and very formidable-looking sheaf of papers, a computer printout, its pages linked fanfold fashion. The expression on his face was a compound of disbelief and sinking woe; Wilcox’s, across the table from him, one of sympathy shot through with little lines of annoyance. “But couldn’t your officers go through it?” Marshall said. “Weed out some of the…” His voice trailed into silence, empty of inspiration.
“What?” Wilcox asked, clearly rhetorically. “Weed out what?” He elevated the top sheet, opening the printout like some fragile accordion. Making a visual point. The unheard music of futility. “You got maybe thirty-four hundred vehicles here got AZ in the plates and come anywhere close, your description. What there was of it. Same numbers with the AS. Where they gonna start? You got any idea the man hours we’d be lookin’ at? That’s if we had ’em available. Which we don’t.”
Marshall stared at his hands. No disputing that.
“Only reason I got this, first place,” Wilcox explained, “is because I tapped a favor. Wanted you to see it. See what we’re up against. Also see there’s people workin’ on your case, ’spite a what you think.”
“I appreciate that,” Marshall said, and he did too, but not enough to restrain himself from adding, “Especially since Thornton’s decided to go off on vacation.”
Wilcox gave him a sideways glance, more of the annoyance in it now than the sympathy. “Even cops got a right to some time off.”
No arguing that either, he supposed, though that didn’t make it go down any easier. Following Wilcox’s advice of last Sunday, he’d waited till yesterday to contact Thornton’s office, got the stupefying news the man charged with finding his son was on vacation, for God’s sake, be gone another ten days, and the even more deflating word that nobody had ever heard of his license plate lead, never mind taken any action on it. He’d slammed down the phone and, choking with rage, called Wilcox, who waited out the stormy tirade, then calmly instructed him to come in the next afternoon. “Got something here to show you.” Fortunately for Marshall, Lori had an appointment with her doctor today—burden enough just finding his way through the maze of city streets without her to attend to as well. When he’d arrived at the precinct station, Wilcox, spotting him in the door, shambled out from behind the counter and led him down the hall to the now familiar cubicle. Offered him a chair. Remarked on the heat. Asked how he was doing. Inquired after his wife. And then laid on the bad news.
Now he felt not quite shattered, but not quite whole either. His face seemed to twitch with desperation and strain. He said, “Give it to me, then, your list. I’ll do it.”
“You’ll do it?”
“Yes. Me. Or I’ll hire someone to help me,” he added, recognizing the absurdity of this bold declaration even as he spoke it, given a checkbook already dipping perilously close to empty.
Wilcox sighed. He was an accomplished sigher, Wilcox was, investing those expirations with an assortment of dramatic pitches and tones more expressive than words. This one carried the weight of official responsibility in it, preface to a pronouncement, and he drew himself up and said in flat officialese, “I’m not authorized to release that kind of data.”
“So what are you telling me, Sergeant? About the incident on the highway, I mean. I didn’t just imagine it, you know.”
“Not sayin’ you did”—thin wheeze of regret now—“sayin’ there’s not enough to go on here. You got to face it, Mr. Quinn. It’s a dead end. Was pro’ly somebody all twisted anyhow.”
“So what do you suggest I do?”
The sigh took on a note of immense fatigue, and all its attendant vexation pooled in his eyes. “Look, your boy’s been missing—what?—three months now?”
“Eleven weeks today.”
“Okay, eleven weeks. All your flyers, posters, scoutin’ the neighborhoods, conductin’ your own investigation, all that done what? Turned up what?”
The length of his pause seemed to suggest a demand for answer, so Marshall said that which was undeniably true: “Nothing.”
“There you are. Zip. Nada. You askin’ me what to do? Tell you what to do. Stay off these streets, you and Mrs. Quinn both. ’Specially her. You got gangs out there, four-corner hustlers, dealers, boosters—any one of ’em open you up for the loose change in your pocket. This is a world you don’t know nothin’ about. Trust me on that. Let us handle it. We got our procedures. Got our ways.”
The baggy face went slack, as though the prolonged caution had drained all that was left of a scanty vitality out of it. Marshall considered everything he’d heard. Ways. Procedures. What had begun as a small misgiving eleven weeks ago, faint doubt over the arcane skills and brisk efficiency—the commitment—of these guardians of the public weal, had become now a bitter conviction. He was alone in this, and for all the ersatz pity (or was it a veiled contempt?) in that jaded face staring him down, waiting for an assentive reply, there was nowhere to turn, no resource apart from himself. He came up out of his chair and said bravely, “I’m going to find him, Sergeant. Whatever it takes, however it has to be done, I’ll find him.”
Wilcox responded only with a stoic shrug and downward cast of his remote, weary eyes.
Later, Marshall sat in the sun-yellowed grass outside the planetarium, drawn there as though by some irresistible psychic tug. Locus of his private calamity, eleven weeks past. Like the burned-out cop, he was thoroughly depleted, emptied of fortitude and will. During those long weeks whatever remained of the already fractured rhythms of sleep had been periodically (as recent as last night) broken by a bizarre recurring dream. Transparent to interpretation, it confined him to a square box of an elevator in some gigantic, multi-storied tower, trying frantically and without success to get off at his appointed floor, the number of which was unclear to his dreaming self. If it was nine, the box glided smoothly to fourteen; if sixty-three, it descended effortlessly to forty-four, stopping there to take on processions of ebullient faceless passengers who entered and exited freely, at the confident touch of a numeral, insensible to his plight, deaf to his petitions.
Reconstructing that decidedly unambiguous dream, he was reminded of the low theatrics of his stalked and quite unrestrained exit from the station, and of all the sustaining delusions he’d clung to, slick mutations in the relentless progress of tumorous growth and change transforming him slowly but inexorably into the man he had become, diseased by frustration and impotence, cancered by self-loathing. He had been innocent then, eleven weeks back, and innocence, he recognized now, was at bottom its own kind of theatrics, of pretension, feeble stab at absolution. Innocence excused nothing.
The sun, in this waking life, was dipping off to the west, a blaze of white, and the sky was whit
e, and the lake stretched out like a coil of polished sheet metal, hard and glittery, reaching to the end of the world. His brave resolve came back to him, a stubborn rebuke, but with a hollow echo to it, and he wondered if he believed it anymore himself. Or if he ever had.
The five-stand hot mill was situated almost dead center along the rolling belt. It looked curiously like five locomotives stood on end, like a child’s playful conception of train engines poised for flight. True to its name, each stand emitted blasts of visible heat in the form of dense, whirling clouds of steam. When a slab of aluminum came down the belt a spray of oil and water drenched it as it passed under the mill’s blades, the contact producing a grinding screak of metal and an acrid stench that hung heavily in the air. A much smaller conveyer belt angled off laterally, firing a stream of jagged metal scraps into a Dumpster set on the walkway. Between slabs the mill by itself generated a deafening roar. Because the plant’s only windows were on the ceiling high above, and its only other source of illumination artificial, hard angles of light fell across the mill and cast long shadows over the grainy brick floor.
