“What about Becker?”
“Brian Becker?”
“Is that his name?”
“If we’re talking about the same guy, yeah. Brian Becker. Him I did know. He used to live with Merodie. He was—God, what a creep. You heard he abused Merodie? That’s no lie. Slapped her around, called her names—he did it in public, too. We all told Merodie to get rid of him, told her he was no good, but she stood by him. I don’t know why. He treated her place like it was his. Drove her car. Took money from her. The day he died—I’ll tell you how much of a jerk he was. The day we heard that Becker died, we all went out and partied.”
“How did he die?” I asked.
“He died from being stupid, that’s how. You know what happened? He went out drinking without Merodie, but driving Merodie’s car. He drove back to the house, pressed the button on the remote to open the garage door, drove into the garage, parked the car but didn’t turn it off, closed the garage door, passed out, still in the car, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Merodie found him the next morning and called the police. The cops wrote it down as an accident. Personally, I think it was divine intervention. God decided Becker was just too stupid to live.”
“What about Richard?” I asked.
“Richard Nye?” Vonnie Lou spat the name. “Another jerk. He used to live with Merodie, too. I swear, Merodie attracted them like ants to sugar, you know? This one, Nye, he sold crystal meth right out of Merodie’s living room, I swear to God. Beat Merodie up when she told him to stop. Last I heard he was doing time.”
“For dealing drugs?”
“Yeppers.”
I made a note in my book and asked, “Did Merodie turn him in?”
“You’re damn right, she did.” There was pride in Vonnie Lou’s voice. “I’ll tell you what happened. Richard attacked Merodie in her own home, and in self-defense, Merodie hit him over the head with a softball bat.”
The instant she said “softball bat” I recognized that this was the missing piece G. K. Bonalay had been looking for, the reason the Anoka County attorney was pushing a murder charge against Merodie. It would seem to indicate—my inner voice was choosing its words carefully—a propensity toward violence and possibly even an MO since Merodie used the same weapon—the bat—on both victims.
“Merodie hit him with the bat,” Vonnie Lou continued, “and Richard broke her jaw. They both ended up in the hospital, only Richard was there for a night and Merodie was there for nearly a week. She complained to the cops, but it was one of those he said/she said deals. A domestic matter, one guy called it. As far as the cops were concerned, it was both of their faults.”
“What did they fight over, do you recall?”
“Silk.”
“Merodie’s daughter?”
“Yeah. See, Merodie has this fantasy that Silk is coming back to live with her, that one day she’s just going to just show up, suitcase in hand, or something like that, which is never, ever going to happen.”
“Why not?”
“Silk has been living with her aunt all these years and she doesn’t come by, not ever. Maybe it’s the aunt’s doing, I can’t say. I’ve known Merodie for, God, at least ten years, probably more, and I’ve never met Silk, never even seen her except for these photographs that Merodie has that are really old. I mean, it’s just not going to happen—Silk moving back. At least I can’t see it. Only Merodie believes, okay? So when she learned that Richard had been dealin’ out of her house, she freaked out, told him that she wouldn’t allow drugs in the same house as Silk. Richard laughed at her, and one thing led to another.
“Anyway, there was no way Merodie was going to let Richard get away with what he did to her—laughing at her, beating her. Right before she left the hospital she called the cops and burned him. Burned him right down to the ground. He was already in custody by the time she got home.”
Vonnie Lou was smiling—perhaps she always smiled—but her melodic voice suddenly grew hard and cold.
“Merodie, she’s one of the nicest people you’re ever going to meet,” she said. “I love her to death. I mean it. She almost never gets angry at anyone or anything, but when she does get angry—you know what? You don’t want to make Merodie angry.”
8
The Katherine E. Nash Gallery was housed just inside the Regis Center for Art in the West Bank Arts Quarter—at least that’s what the colorful banners hanging from the light posts along Twenty-first Avenue called the area. It was near O. Meredith Wilson Library as Benny had promised, on that part of the University of Minnesota campus known as the West Bank because it was located on the western shore of the Mississippi River. I had gone to the U, mostly on the East Bank. Graduated cum laude, thank you very much. Yet all this was new to me. I remembered the library and, now that I saw it, the Rarig Theater. I also remembered the Viking Bar on Nineteenth and Riverside. The rest—Barker Center for Dance, Ted Mann Concert Hall, Ferguson Hall, the parking ramp that I would have used if I had known it was there—when did all that happen?
You really should start paying attention to the alumni magazine, my inner voice told me.
A sign on an easel outside the entrance to the gallery read WELCOME MFA SHOW. I presumed MFA meant master of fine art and this was an exhibit of the students’ work. Probably Benny had a sibling or a friend in the show.
I didn’t know what to expect when I entered the gallery—a handful of elegantly dressed patrons examining the exhibits while waiters passed among them with trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres, I suppose. What I found was a pulsating throng of supporters, half kids around twenty-five and younger and the other half adults about fifty and older. Most were attired as if it were ninety-five degrees outside; I felt overdressed in black jeans and a black silk sports jacket. The crowd moved in a counterclockwise swirl, not unlike a hurricane, from one large room to another. I went with the flow.
There wasn’t much that interested me. One artist—and I use the term loosely—had built a model of a very narrow building that had a facade like the State Capitol. There was a silhouette of a man painted on the wall at the end of a long corridor inside the building and another painted on the wall at the other end. A much shorter corridor intersected the building in the middle. I’m sure it all meant something, I just didn’t know what.
Another artist exhibited a loop of photographs of ordinary women going about their everyday lives on a computer screen. I couldn’t detect what linked them together except, well, they were all photographs of ordinary women going about their everyday lives.
The four walls of the next room each held a single huge photograph of—I’m not making this up—a wall. The walls in the photographs seemed to be from an empty motel room or possibly an efficiency apartment. Three of the walls were blank. The fourth framed a small window and an air conditioner. Taken together I suppose you could argue that the photographs were meant to depict the emptiness of our lives, yet all I saw was a room badly in need of furniture, not unlike my own house.
I was beginning to think that Benny had brought me there as a test of character. If I went screaming out of the gallery—and don’t think I hadn’t considered it—then I just wasn’t the man for her. I sucked it up and kept moving, all the while searching for her.
I didn’t find Benny, but I did find an exhibit that I actually enjoyed—a series of woodcuts printed on silk. The prints were thirty inches wide and five feet high and hung from the ceiling in pairs, the images overlapping each other. One in particular I found fascinating. Looking at it from the front, I saw a hungry wolf stalking a woman who was on her hands and knees and drinking from a mountain pool. Stepping around and studying it from behind, the woman appeared to be stalking the unsuspecting wolf. After examining it for a few moments, I noticed that the face of the wolf and the woman morphed into one.
I discovered a title card that accompanied the wolf-woman. It read PORNO WOLF GIVES ME A STOMACHACHE, B. ROSAS. I decided right then that artists should not be allow to title their own work.
An arm looped around my arm. Benny’s voice said, “What do you think?”
“Beautiful,” I said.
She stepped back and spun in a small circle. Her full red cotton skirt swirled around tanned legs; a black fitted linen jacket embroidered with red flowers was tight around her torso. The jacket had three buttons, but only the middle button was fastened.
“I told you I clean up real good,” she said.
“Yes, you do. But I meant the silk screen.” I pointed at the wolf-woman.
She slugged my arm playfully. “So where are you going to take me?”
“Do you like the blues? Big Walter Smith and the Groove Merchants are playing at a barbecue joint in Uptown. Otherwise . . .”
“That sounds like fun.”
“Good.” I continued to study the silk print.
“You really like this piece of junk?” Benny said.
“Yes. I like it very much.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe because it asks questions that demand answers. Who’s the hunter, who’s the prey? It tells a story—I just haven’t worked it out.”
“The story could be different for everyone who looks at it,” Benny said.
“Isn’t that the definition of art? That it affects us all differently depending on what each of us brings to it?”
Benny shrugged. “What about the rest of the show?”
“That depends. Do you know these people?”
“Most of them.”
“Then I think it’s all just swell.”
“I think it’s mostly self-indulgent bullshit.”
Something in my expression must have convinced her that I was surprised by her announcement.
“I’m a skeptic.” Benny was speaking quietly so no one else could hear. “I’m skeptical about the place of visual art in society. Such a very small segment of the population will actually see it, and not necessarily the people I care about. It’s a very insular world, the art world. All of the art in this show—it’s for the artists. We love it, only I’m not sure what everyone else gets out of it.
“Personally, I don’t want to have my stuff shown only in museums and galleries to this tiny group of people. I’d rather do stuff for people like me, people who have real lives, if you know what I mean. I want to do stuff for people who might pay two hundred bucks for a piece and take it home and get some pleasure out of owning it.”
“Do you have something in the show?”
Benny pointed at the silk screens hanging from the ceiling.
“How is that possible?” I asked.
“Someone has to do it.”
“No, I mean—this is wonderful, Benny.”
“Thank you.”
“It really is.”
“Thank you.”
“But isn’t this for students?”
“Yes, part of their MFA thesis.”
“At the risk of being insulting, you’re what, twenty-eight, twenty-nine? How can you be a student?”
“I’m thirty-five, and I do not find you insulting in the least.”
Which means she could have voted in four presidential elections, my inner voice told me.
“It’s a three-or four-year program, and yes, most of the students are much younger,” Benny said. “As for me—I took a few years off after I got my BA and then took the course part-time.”
“While working in the sewers of Minneapolis,” I said.
“Inspiration is where you find it.”
“What are you gong to do now that you have your MFA?”
“Rent out a studio with a couple of friends. Buy an intaglio press—that’s what I used to create the prints. Make art. Sell it.”
“Are you going to quit your day job?”
“Eventually, if I can make enough money. Most people who get an MFA want to teach, or at least they want to make a steady living while they pursue their art. Some start applying for grants and support themselves that way, but you need to be a real go-getter to do that. I’m lucky because I work in the sewer.”
Now there’s eight words I never thought I’d hear, I told myself.
Benny nudged me along to another exhibit. This one featured two identical steel tracks that were twisted into an upward spiral not unlike a staircase. The steps consisted of thirty six-by-four-inch silk prints hung from the tracks by thread, starting with an image of a small child at the top and an old man at the bottom. In between there was a variety of images, some violent, some benign, some familiar, and some incomprehensible to me. The card on the wall read STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN, B. ROSAS.
“I have a question,” I told Benny.
“What?”
“Shouldn’t the child be at the bottom and the adult at the top?”
“The stairway to heaven doesn’t go up,” Benny said. “It goes down. As a baby, as a child, we are as close to heaven as we’re likely to get. We slide away because of the choices we make during our lives.”
“That’s a cynical attitude.”
“The images—Catholicism and religion run through the piece because that’s a part of how I was raised. But mostly the images are about me and how things were passed down to me—values, ideas, possessions like my grandmother’s brooch—and how all that influenced my life.”
Based on the images, I decided Benny must have had an interesting thirty-five years. I was about to ask her about them when her hand tightened on my arm.
“Oops,” she said.
“What is it?”
“My boyfriend.”
A man, I placed him at midthirties, was waving as he plowed through the crowd. I assumed he was waving at Benny, but he was looking at me when he reached us. From his expression, he wasn’t thrilled to see me. Benny maneuvered so that she was standing between us.
“Benita,” he said.
She placed a hand solidly against his chest, stopping him. “Lorenzo,” she said.
“Benita,” he repeated. “May I speak with you for a moment?”
“No.” Benita added a head shake to her words. “No, not now. We can talk some other time.”
“Please.”
Lorenzo reached out his hand, but I intercepted it before it could fall on Benny’s arm.
He looked at me with surprise that turned quickly to anger.
“I was speaking to Benita, not you,” he said.
“Like the lady said, some other time.” I told him. At the same instant my inner voice asked, When did you become Daniel the architect?
From the expression on his face, I was convinced that Lorenzo was preparing to attack me. I took a step backward. His hands came up. I put myself into a balanced fighting stance. Lorenzo could see Benny standing next to me, though, and she must have passed a message because the fight quickly went out of him. He lowered his hands.
“Good-bye, Lorenzo,” Benny said.
She tugged at my elbow, and I followed her through the crowd and out the door.
We stepped out of the Regis Center into suffocating heat—I was beginning to think that was the only kind there was—and began walking along the cobblestones of Twenty-first Avenue south toward Riverside. That was another thing. When did the University of Minnesota start paving its streets with cobblestones? It was something to think about the next time the regents pled poverty before the Minnesota state legislature, which only happens every two years.
I removed my sports jacket and carried it by the collar in my left hand. Benny walked with her hands behind her back and her head down.
I spoke first. “Back inside, with Lorenzo . . .”
“I’m sorry about that,” Benita said.
“I noticed you called him your boyfriend. Not ex-boyfriend.”
“He loves me,” she said.
“You are lovable,” I told her, trying to keep it light. “But that’s not what I’m asking.”
“I’ve known him for so long. We . . . He . . . Us . . .” She couldn’t get the words out.
Behind us, footsteps echoed on the cobblesto
nes.
“Benita.” Lorenzo was shouting. “Benita, Benita.”
I turned toward him, positioning myself between him and Benny.
He came at us in a hurry.
Benita called his name.
“Benita, please,” he said.
“Whoa, pal,” I said. I let my jacket fall to the ground.
“Leave us alone,” Lorenzo shouted.
I didn’t move.
When he got in close he threw a long, slow roundhouse right at my head—easily one of the most incompetent punches I had ever seen. I slapped it away and followed with a short right jab to his chin, putting my weight behind it. Lorenzo went down as if he had been hit with a surface-to-air missile, and in that instant I realized his punch wasn’t incompetent at all. Lorenzo knew exactly what he was doing. I realized it because of the way Benny shouted his name and pushed past me.
“Lorenzo, Lorenzo,” she chanted. There was no anger in her voice. Only concern. She knelt at his side on the concrete sidewalk. “Are you all right?”
She tried to caress his face, but Lorenzo pushed her hands away. She tried again. This time he let her succeed.
“I’m sorry,” Lorenzo said.
“No, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Benita said.
Somehow Lorenzo’s head ended up in Benny’s lap, and she stroked his hair.
Damn, my inner voice chided me. If only you had let Daniel the architect punch you out.
“Forgive me,” said Lorenzo.
“Forgive me,” said Benny.
“Forget this,” said I.
Benny glanced up at me.
“I’m guessing our date is over,” I said as I retrieved my jacket.
“I’m sorry, McKenzie,” she said.
Everyone’s sorry. Everyone’s looking for forgiveness.
I didn’t have anything to say, so I didn’t say anything.
If I had been paying attention, I might have seen him, but I was upset as I made my way west to where I’d parked my car next to the trash bins outside the North County Co-op Grocery. First Nina, and now Benny, with Shelby Dunston giving advice to the lovelorn from the sidelines. “It shouldn’t be this damn confusing,” I said to no one in particular. Still, it all seemed to prove a theory that I had been advancing for years now. When it comes to love and romance, none of us ever really leaves high school.
Dead Boyfriends Page 14
