by Ray Garton
As Falczek spoke, Renny seemed to melt. His face fell heavily but slowly as his shoulders gradually drooped. He stumbled backward away from Falczek and awkwardly lowered himself into his chair, all the while staring at him with wide, frightened eyes that glistened with welling tears. He muttered something too quietly for Falczek to make it out.
“So don’t expect that trick to work again, Renny,” Falczek said, surprised to feel himself getting angry, “because I’ve got a good memory, and I know you too well.”
“Why?” Renny said, merely breathing the word. Then again, in a hoarse croak, “Why?” But Falczek ignored him and continued.
“You’re not dying. You just want me to forget why I came here and get all gooey inside for poor old Renny. Not gonna happen.”
“Why?” Renny said, louder this time. Then his thin lips peeled back over his teeth and he shouted in a jagged, broken voice, “Why are you doing this to me?”
Falczek was startled by his loud voice and surprised by the anguish in it. He said nothing for a moment and sat back down in the loveseat.
“What’s going on in here?”
They both turned toward the open door of the library. Renny’s mother stood in the doorway, hands doubled into knobby fists at her sides.
“It’s nothing, Mother,” Renny said. He sounded exhausted, weak.
“You were shouting,” she said.
“Everything’s fine, Mother. Please, close the door.”
She stood there for awhile and glared at Falczek with her one squinting eye and her one wide, bulging eye, her gums working together behind rubbery, liver-colored lips. Finally, she pulled the door closed as she left. Falczek wondered if she were standing outside at the door with an ear cocked.
“What did I ever do to you, Falczek?” Renny said, his voice breathy and thin. “Why are you doing this after all these years?”
“Two reasons,” Falczek said. “I want to know what you’re not telling me. I’m a reporter, Renny, an old hand at it. I can smell a story. But there’s another reason that has nothing to do with the information I want.”
Falczek got up and went to the window, slipped his hands into his pants pocket.
“Just before she died,” he said, “Sally told me about you two. She told me everything. She felt so guilty. She couldn’t let her life end without getting it off her chest.” He turned to Renny. “I was partly at fault. We were having some problems and we were at each other’s throats, and I didn’t help things any. I had a little flirtation with a woman at work. Nothing serious, and I never did anything with her, but Sally found out about it and on top of everything else at the time, she was hurt. And then, while I was out of town, there you were, with a kind word and an amusing story and a soft shoulder.”
Renny sat slumped in the chair, staring up at Falczek with one eyebrow arched, lips parted, his tongue moving around in his mouth.
“All those years, I thought you were gay,” Falczek said. “I mean, we never discussed that sort of thing, you and I, but after knowing you for awhile—” He shrugged one shoulder. “—I just assumed. So I was surprised when Sally told me. I was hurt, too, but... I couldn’t hurt too much. She was so miserable, in so much pain. She weighed nothing by then. And she obviously felt so guilty. It had tormented her for so long. She just wanted my forgiveness, and I was happy to give it. But you... I haven’t forgiven you, Renny. So I’d be happy to tell what I saw. I should have back then. It’s bugged the hell out of me ever since. Sometimes, the picture of that boy who died, the photo we used in the paper, shows up in my dreams at night. But, hey... I was a selfish bastard. You were a valuable source, and with your connections, blowing the whistle could’ve backfired on me. I was in D.C., so... when in Rome. I said nothing. Did nothing. But that will change this afternoon if you don’t tell me what I want to know, Renny. I will go out to my car and make a phone call or two, and I will enjoy doing it. Within the hour, your phone will start to ring. So will your doorbell. Unless you tell me what I want to know.”
Falczek held Renny’s eyes for a long time. They looked... defeated. Neither spoke for almost a full minute.
“Come on, Renny,” Falczek said as he sat down in the loveseat again and leaned forward attentively. “Tell me.”
Renny told him.
When all the information had come out of Renny like the air from a balloon, Falczek left the library without saying another word to him. He pulled the door closed behind him, turned, and almost ran into Renny’s mother. She stood with her stick-like arms folded across her chest.
“Is he all right?” she said, her harsh voice quieter than before.
Falczek took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t know if he’s ever been all right.”
Frowning, she nodded slowly. As she spoke, she looked at the closed library door instead of at Falczek. “He’s dying, you know. That’s why he sent for me. Hadn’t heard from him in ages. I left when he was a boy ‘cause I was afraid his father was gonna kill me if I didn’t. He beat me terribly. I tried to take Renny with me, but he wouldn’t go. Wanted to stay with his daddy. Then a few months ago, outta the blue, he asks me to come take care of him ‘cause he’s dying. He has almost no friends anymore, and the few left won’t do anything for him. He’s all alone. So I came.” She looked at Falczek. “He’s very unhappy. Living or dying, he’s very unhappy.”
She dropped her arms to her sides, walked past Falczek, and went into the library.
As he left the house, Falczek thought about what she’d said and realized that everything Renny had told him about her had been a lie. He could not be believed. That made Falczek wonder how much of what Renny had told him about Paaxone was true, and that worried him. He reached into his pocket and turned off the digital recorder.
He got into his car and sat at the wheel for awhile with a slightly nauseated feeling of sadness in his gut. He felt sad because Renny really was dying, and because in the end, after all the amusing anecdotes and sparkling wit, after all the years of being in demand at every important party in town and being feared by everyone in town, he was just a miserable, bitter, lonely man with no one to see him out of this life but his estranged mother. Falczek felt sad ...
But it didn’t last very long.
4.
As Falczek drove back to the hotel, he thought of the night he’d walked in on Renny and those two boys.
He’d gone to Renny’s house unannounced that evening to ask him a couple of questions about a story he was writing that had a tight deadline. As he walked up the front steps, he heard a scream inside the house. The door had been unlocked, so he’d rushed in to see if he could help and found Renny standing naked with an erection in the middle of the living room, bent forward slightly toward the two naked adolescent boys on the floor. One boy—skinny and pale, with a mop of dark hair—lay sprawled on his back, perfectly still, with what looked like smears of vomit on his face and soaking into the rug beside his head. The other boy—stockier, with rusty hair and freckles—was on his knees hunkered over the first boy, screaming, “He’s dead! He’s dead! You killed him! He’s dead!”
Renny moved forward and dropped to one knee, leaning over the prone boy to put his hands on the freckled boy’s shoulders. Clenching his teeth, he shook the boy and said, “Calm down, now, calm—stop it, just stop it!” Falczek stood there a moment, frozen in shock, unnoticed by Renny or the boy. Then he snapped out of it and rushed forward to help.
Renny turned to him with a start, his eyes widened in surprise, and he shouted, “What are you doing here? What the hell are you doing here?” Falczek stammered for a moment, then Renny stood, spun him around, and began shoving him hard back toward the door. “Out, get out, Falczek, now, get out, everything’s fine, just fine, I’ll take care of this, don’t worry, everything’s fine.” Confused and off guard, Falczek allowed himself to be pushed out of the room as the boy in the living room continued to babble and cry. At the front door, Renny turned him around so they were facing each other. �
�There’s nothing to worry about, Falczek,” Renny said calmly. “Everything’s fine. I’ll take care of it.” Then he put a rigid forefinger in Falczek’s face and leaned very close, speaking in a low, menacing voice. “If you breathe a word of this to anyone—anyone at all—you will regret it in ways you can’t even begin to imagine. Now get out.”
A second later, Falczek was on the porch and the door slammed loudly, followed by the clicking of locks. It was all over in less than a minute, leaving Falczek stunned. Two days later, the dark-haired boy Falczek had seen on Renny’s living room floor had been fished out of the C & O canal, naked and dead and unidentified. Later that day, the boy’s father identified the body. The freckled boy had ended up in an emergency room the night of the incident. He claimed to have been assaulted by a stranger on the street, and never changed his story, even after the other boy’s body had been found. Falczek knew better. But he said nothing and did nothing. He could not bring that boy back or undo what had been done, he told himself. It ate at him, but he shoved it down deep into his guts and buried it. He hadn’t even told Sally. In the years since, he had always regretted his own cowardly silence. And he’d regretted not telling Sally, because maybe if he had, she never would have slept with Renny.
Back at the hotel, Falczek opened his case and took out his black book of phone numbers and addresses. He’d tried putting everything into a Blackberry, but he’d found the gadget annoying, and at times even infuriating. He was not yet ready to fully embrace the twenty-first century, and still carried the black book with him everywhere. He found Toby Im’s office number at the Pentagon.
Unlike Renny, Toby was a real friend, and they had stayed in touch over the years. They exchanged emails, Christmas and birthday cards, talked on the phone every few months. When Sally died, Toby had flown to California to attend the funeral. His wife Cherie, a pediatrician, had been unable rearrange her schedule. Falczek could not come to Washington without seeing Toby, and he hoped he’d be able to see Cherie as well while he was there. He also hoped that Toby might have some useful suggestions for him once he told his story.
He sat on the edge of the bed and keyed in the number of Toby’s cell phone. Toby answered on the third ring. After the initial greetings, Falczek said he was in Washington, and Toby said he was in Boston.
“Cherie’s mother passed away,” he said.
“Oh, god, Toby, I’m sorry to hear that. Was she ill?”
“She was perfectly healthy, but she had a stroke, and it was a bad one. The funeral was yesterday. We’re flying back tonight, but we won’t get in until late. Why don’t you come to the office tomorrow. We can have lunch together.”
“Sounds good.”
“And plan on coming to the house for dinner. I know Cherie will want to see you.”
After closing his cell phone, Falczek sighed and looked around his hotel room. He had the rest of the evening to kill, but he was too tired to kill anything. He napped for a couple of hours, then turned on the television, put his laptop on the desk, and went online. He spent the next hour reading everything he could find about Paaxone and Braxton-Carville, then went to dinner at a nearby Chinese restaurant. As he waited for his food, he called Everett.
“I don’t know anything for sure yet,” Falczek said, “but I’m hoping that will change tomorrow.”
“I can’t find out anything, either,” Everett said. “My friend in Los Angeles says it’s the same there—no Paaxone. And he doesn’t know why. But he agrees with me that the story about a manufacturing problem sounds like bullshit.”
“Well, that’s a given, it is bullshit,” Falczek said. “If what I’ve heard so far is true, not only is it not a manufacturing problem... it’s a big story.”
Chapter 8
A Different Kind of Strange
1.
Patty Anderson rummaged through her purse while Raymond drove their 20-year-old Ford F150 pickup truck through the parking lot of the Whiskey Lake Mall in Santa Vermelha looking for an empty slot. She found her shopping list, made sure her pen was in her checkbook, put some Carmex on her dry lips, then closed her purse and looked at Raymond.
He pulled the pickup truck into an empty parking spot in front of JC Penney, shifted to Park, and killed the engine. Then he stared straight ahead through the windshield, frowning as he fidgeted nervously in the seat. He wore his usual plaid long-sleeved flannel shirt, even on such a hot, muggy morning. This shirt was a red-and-blue plaid, but he had a wide assortment of colors in his closet, all plaid, flannel, with long sleeves, all the same brand. He also wore a dirty old blue cap he was fond of—it had the Peterbilt logo on the front, just above the bill, and had been given to him by his late brother, a truck driver. He would turn 70 in January and every year of it showed on his grizzled face. He was retired now, but working for a landscaping company most of his life had kept him in the sun, and it had turned his skin a leathery brown. He pulled his pack of Camels and a Bic from his shirt pocket and lit a cigarette, then fidgeted as he smoked. Patty hated that he’d started smoking again when he’d retired, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. Mentioning it just made him angry. But she was more worried about something else now.
“Sure you don’t want to come inside?” she said. “You could get a cold drink and sit in the food court. It’s awful hot out here, and this smoky air’s not fit to breathe.”
He exhaled smoke and continued to stare out the windshield as he squirmed. He said, “The air don’t bother me.”
He never went shopping with her. He never went anywhere with her anymore. Sometimes she felt so alone she wanted to cry. About three months ago, Dr. Winkler had said Raymond was suffering from depression, and that sounded right to Patty. He’d become increasingly quiet and morose since retiring, sometimes just sitting around the house staring blankly at the television, or slowly paging through old family albums looking at pictures of the kids when they were little. The doctor had prescribed an antidepressant, and Raymond had flatly refused to accept either the prescription or the diagnosis. To him, depression was something suffered by sissies and artists and women. But Dr. Winkler was a good talker. He’d spent some time explaining depression to Raymond and had finally convinced him it was a disease and not a character flaw.
“You have a chemical imbalance in your brain, that’s all,” Dr. Winkler had said to Raymond. “It’s not unlike having diabetes, when your blood sugar level gets out of control. Now, you don’t think someone who suffers from diabetes has a character flaw, do you? Of course not. Depression is very similar. Like diabetes, it can be treated with medication. All you have to do is take a pill that will correct that imbalance.”
Raymond had agreed to try the antidepressant for three months. There had been some change, it seemed, but it had been minimal at best and she couldn’t tell if it was the effect of the pill itself, or Raymond behaving differently simply because he was medicating his problem and wanted it to work. Patty had coaxed him to keep taking the pill every day, hoping it would kick in, make a difference. And then when she’d gone to the pharmacy to refill the prescription last Friday, the pharmacist had told her it was unavailable. No explanation, nothing—it just wasn’t available. She’d made an appointment for Raymond to see Dr. Winkler, but couldn’t get in any sooner than the next Friday. Raymond had taken his last pill two days ago. In the last day or so, he’d been behaving strangely. Behaving strangely wasn’t exactly out of the ordinary for Raymond, but this was... a different kind of strange. He twitched and fidgeted, paced like a housecat that heard mice under the floor, and occasionally snapped at her loudly, which was not like Raymond at all. He’d seemed so gloomy and quiet before taking the pill, and even after taking it. Now that he’d stopped, he was on edge all the time, and he appeared to be getting worse. Patty felt helpless but tried to keep her concern and frustration to herself until they could see Dr. Winkler.
She opened the door, got out of the pickup, then turned to look back in at Raymond. “Want me to get you anything?” she
said. “They got them smoothies in the food court, the berry flavor you like so much.”
He turned his head, and she thought he was going to look at her. Instead, his eyes moved past her to look at the shotgun hanging on the rack in the back window behind him. Patty disliked the gun almost as much as she disliked his smoking, but it was a family tradition. Raymond’s daddy had kept a shotgun on a rack in his pickup, and Raymond insisted on doing the same. After looking at the gun silently for a moment, he faced front again, shifted his position at the wheel once, then again, and took another drag on the Camel. He said, “Nah. I’m fine.”
“I won’t be long.” Patty closed the door and headed for JC Penney.
The sun was nothing more than a sickly glow behind the dirty ceiling of smoke, but it did nothing to lower the temperature. It was already over a hundred degrees and it wasn’t even noon yet, and the air was heavy, cloying. Once or twice a month, Raymond drove Patty to the mall so she could pick up whatever they needed. Wal-Mart was cheaper, but Raymond disapproved of the chain’s connections to China and considered in un-American. He said he didn’t mind paying a few dollars more someplace else.
She was frustrated that the antidepressant apparently had done nothing for him. Maybe it was for the best that the pill had suddenly become unavailable. Maybe now Dr. Winkler would prescribe something else—something that would work.
2.
After lighting his second Camel since parking the truck, Raymond grew tired of sitting in the silence and watching shoppers park their cars and head into the mall. He turned on the radio and found Rush Limbaugh and listened for awhile. Limbaugh was talking about Senator Walter Veltman, who was tangled up in a sex scandal. As he talked, Limbaugh repeatedly reminded his listeners that Veltman was a liberal extremist, and that the sex scandal in which the senator had been involved was just another result of the corruption and moral bankruptcy so characteristic of liberals.
