Paul’s worst fear was being liked by these assholes.
“You smell her?” Montie asked. “I can smell her on my skin. Like she’s inside me.”
Paul cocked his head. He wanted a drink right now. He wanted a drink really bad. No time for barroom philosophy emceed by a man with an intelligence quotient of sixty. “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing. What can I get you?” Montie asked.
Paul felt incredibly grateful. He paused, trying not to look desperate. No one likes an obvious drunk. “Coffee,” he said. He did not know why he said that. He tried to change his order, but saw the way Montie’s eyes widened in surprise, and his pride wouldn’t let him take it back. Yes, his first drink would be coffee. His second, a triple scotch.
Montie poured him some coffee and sat on a stool next to him. He wore his usual uniform; a white T-shirt full of holes underneath an apron with the map of the London Underground printed on it. His fingernails were bitten jagged and low. Still, there was dried blood and dirt underneath them, like he’d been digging his own grave. And gin. No matter how drunk Paul ever got, he could always smell that gin coming off Montie’s pores. The fact that the humidity inside the bar was high enough to make the wood under Paul’s hands slick and soft to the touch did not make that smell any better.
“Why do you collect all these license plates?” Paul asked.
Montie looked up as if seeing them for the first time. “Oh, them? They were here when I bought the bar.”
“When was that?”
“Eighty-eight.”
“Oh. I thought you collected them.”
Montie laughed. His stomach folded on itself so that Brixton and Central London were one. “Why the hell would I do that? Just a lot a crap.”
Eighteen minutes later Paul sipped his black coffee and winced. His stomach cramped and gurgled, but still, he sipped his coffee. This was the plan. This was what he would do. Because he didn’t want people thinking that after his family left him, after Susan died, that he went out and got drunk. Went straight for the bar. He didn’t want to think that himself. No, he would wait until six o’clock. Exactly twenty-three minutes from when he’d arrived. Functional alcoholics start at five. He would start at six. Five minutes left. Like counting down until the end of class.
At three minutes before zero hour, Montie made him a sandwich; two pieces of bread slopped together with mayonnaise and pickled egg. The bar was mostly empty; Cancer Dan, The Duke, and Sean now departed for whatever dry-rot shelters they called home. He pictured them hiding in their moldy dens, waiting for this maddening rain to end as the people of this town did every year, as they would do every year, forever. He pushed his sandwich away. “I’m not that sick,” he said.
At two minutes before zero hour, Danny entered the bar. It was the first time they’d seen each other since he’d driven home from the police station Thursday night. The sight of Danny gave Paul a flicker of déjà vu. What he remembered most was the toilet paper Susan had used as a napkin. The slathering of pizza sauce on her lips. Then it was gone. Same thing, he thought, like nothing happened, like a girl didn’t die. Same old shit. Less than a minute left. The second hand on Paul’s watch wavered as if it might go backward. He resolved to give up counting seconds. It was impossible to count that slowly.
Danny stood. Paul motioned for him to sit. He didn’t. Well, maybe not same old shit. Montie lingered behind the bar, watching them as usual. “Cathy was at my house,” Danny said.
“She does that.”
“She shouldn’t have gone out with this rain. I don’t know how she did it, but she got across the bridge. Probably in Saratoga Springs by now.”
Paul ordered his drink. Montie nodded and got it for him, then stood over the two of them, waiting no doubt for their jeers to devolve into violence. Paul sipped his drink. Slow sip. Then a big gulp. He drained the glass and felt that familiar, welcome, wonderful burn. A few drops rolled down his chin and he lifted them up with his finger and tasted them.
Danny curled his lip in disgust, and Paul turned to him. “What am I supposed to say?”
“You know what really pisses me off—”
Paul knew just from the look on Danny’s face what he was about to say. There are things you know, without being told. Things you already feel. “—No, and I don’t care,” he said, cutting Danny off. Then he ordered another drink. Montie gave it to him. He took a sip. It was the cheap stuff that tasted like Tide detergent though Paul had asked for a neat Johnnie Walker Black.
“Everybody does these things for you,” Danny said.
“What exactly do they do?”
Danny gave Paul a knowing look. “Well, nobody’s comin’ around asking you about fleeing the scene of an accident, are they?”
“You’re kidding.” Once, a week ago, he could have pushed Danny around. Once, a long time ago, he would never have been in this situation to begin with. He would have had better things to do than loiter in this bar with a stomach full of worry and a gaggle of half-wits by his side. The worry that persisted whether he drank nothing or a quart of whiskey. He looked down and noticed that he was fingering the place Susan had bitten. Through the bandages, there was blood. He must have been picking at it for a long time without even knowing it. “She won’t go away. I don’t think it’s my fault, but she won’t go away,” he said.
“She’s worried about you.”
Paul picked up the trail of the conversation. “Is that what she told you?”
“Yeah, and a few other things.” Danny again looked like he was about to continue, to go on and on about the few other things. Great, Danny, wait till my life is so shitty I can’t even stand and then attack. Great, Danny, I know just the kind of guy you are.
“So ring her bell and have a ‘Crucify Paul Martin’ party. You leave James out of it, though.” He had meant this last part to come out soft, threatening, rational. Instead it was nasal and loud, like a cartoon version of himself.
“You know what pisses me off, Paul? You know what really pisses me off?”
“What, Danny, what really pisses you off? Tell me,” Paul yelled. He lost his balance, grabbed the bar, and pulled himself back onto the stool.
Danny sighed.
“Well, fuck you, too, Danny,” Paul said, but it sounded like, “WAFUYOOTOO,” some distant, aboriginal language.
Danny stood for a while longer, in what Paul considered a kind of gloating. Paul managed to stand. He took a swing, right hand up under Danny’s chin. Sucker punch. Danny reeled backward, seemed almost to gain his footing, but then his knees buckled and he hit the floor. Montie came out from around the bar and knelt next to him. “Get out of my bar,” Montie said, while Danny croaked indecipherable sounds from his bruised windpipe.
Paul left before his clothes had a chance to dry. He stood outside the bar for a while, waiting for Danny to appear, maybe finish this thing they had started. But Danny did not come. Hiding, probably, and telling Montie that because he and Paul were friends, he did not want to have to go outside and arrest him.
He felt like a human sponge. His wet clothes chafed at every place they touched his body. And the shaking, still the shaking not in the least diminished by four ounces of eighty proof. Could a man die from withdrawal?
He decided to walk, he did not know where, passing houses and the trailer park, until he stood in front of her house. He went around to the side entrance. Inside, he saw the place where she had fallen six nights before. There was no yellow police line, no marker. Just a stain, a little more brown than the rest of the wood, at the foot of the stairs. He tried to think of something to leave for her. Reached into his pockets and found his wallet. It held eight dollars, an American Express card, a library card, his driver’s license with the photo taken seven years ago (back when he’d carried a few extra pounds and his smile had been a little more easy, a little less self-mocking), and a People’s Heritage bank card. He took off the iodine- and blood-stained gauze from his arm and dropped it on the
floor, hoping that if she was watching from somewhere above, below, wherever, she would accept this gesture in the manner in which it was intended.
Rossoff poked his fleshy head out of the entrance to his apartment. Paul felt an instant unease. Rossoff’s door was open only a crack, but beyond, Paul could smell the man’s house. It smelled of secrets. People who count their money every night and do not say personal things over the phone because they think someone might be listening. People who change their clothing in the dark. People who hoard food in their refrigerators until it rots. People who do not take out their garbage. People who wait until their babies are sick before they change their diapers. It had that kind of smell. Nothing specific. Just a mold.
“Don’t come around here,” Rossoff said. He was so fat that he could hardly fit through the door, and in his beard were little pieces of white cotton.
“I won’t,” Paul said.
Rossoff smiled. As he opened the door just a little wider so that they spoke face to face, the cotton things squirmed. A speck fell out of his gray beard and onto the collar of his black shirt. It continued to squirm. The blood drained from Paul’s face, and bile rose in his throat. Crabs. Pubic crabs.
“’Cause I wouldn’t want to have to call the police,” Rossoff told him.
It dawned on Paul just then. Maybe he had known it before, just never believed it. She never locked her door. She never paid her rent. This man, Susan.
“Because none of us needs that,” Rossoff said. “None of us needs the police. Like to hear about all your pissing around here Thursday night. Pissing in dirty pots.” And then, he winked. A quick, skilled wink.
This man, Susan. At first Paul walked, but after a few steps he was running. Rossoff yelled after him but, thankfully, he did not hear.
Around eight that Wednesday night, when he normally would have been eating pot roast with his wife and son while doing his best impression of a guy having his first drink of the evening, his feet were bloody. The muscles in his stomach clenched again and again in dry, painful heaves. Don’s Liquor Bonanza was closed. He’d been tempted to break in, but he wasn’t in such great shape. He probably wouldn’t have escaped before Danny pulled up in a squad car, lights flashing, ready to arrest him. Not a tempting prospect. He could have knocked on someone’s door and asked for something. It wasn’t like his reputation was something that needed to be upheld. He could have asked some friendly Bedford neighbor, maybe the parent of some student at his place of former employ: Sorry to disturb you, after I leave, please go on about your business and forget that I was ever here, pay no attention to my appearance, but could you spare a drop? Anything will do. Or he could have gone back to Montie’s and done some groveling. But he did none of these things. He took a stroll, thoughts of white insects and runaway wives not even entering his head. He took a walk and let things empty out, and he kept walking until his mind was an absence of memory, his physical body in such agony that all else was wiped clean.
That was his state as he sat on the bench next to Susan Marley. She looked like hell. Worse than him, even. She was wearing a blue dress with white trim. Her head had been shaved bald, and she struggled to hold it erect. Black autopsy sutures weaved their way down her throat and beneath her dress. It might have been a tasteless joke: Devil in a Blue Dress. In might have been a DT hallucination. This might even have been happening. Sadly, he didn’t care.
He first saw her at Don’s Liquor Bonanza. He had taken a seat on the edge of a gutter. Kicked out some leaves with his wilted wing tips so that it drained a little better and then just sat there, recognizing this point as the lowest of his life. He knew what Cathy might do right now, were she in his place. Only he had kept her from doing it. But he did not think those very dark thoughts. They were not in him, not just yet.
He saw her shadow. It moved in jerks like someone carrying something very heavy. She walked on the outer soles of her feet. He lowered his head and let himself believe that what he saw was just a dream. And then, on the ground, he saw her feet. They were bare and bloody. Her fatty pads hung loose like flaps, and underneath them he was sure he could see the ivory of her bones.
He could not help but follow. She waved to him and he got up from the gutter. They did not walk together. He kept a distance, yards behind. She limped farther south. In the dark and wet, he only saw her silhouette. She had a tiny body, like a child’s. And this is how he kept from thinking about what was actually happening: It was not simply the pain of withdrawal that made his mind a blank. He never saw her face.
She led him to the river. The tide had risen above the two-foot railing. She waded to the center of the bridge and stood between Bedford and the outside world. There was lightning, and he kept his eyes squinted so that he would not see her clearly when it came. But he did see.
She pointed at the water. There were whirlpools, crests of white. A bucket floated. He followed its path with his eyes. It rushed under the bridge, heading toward the lake thirty miles south. He imagined that it would wash up on a bank there, covered in rust. Really, this was what he wanted. This was what he had been looking for since he moved to Bedford. A way out.
His life flashed before him. Grandmother and her cigarettes. Chess. Meeting Cathy. Telling her the night before the wedding that he loved her, he really did love her, so no matter what happened everything would work out. Seeing, smelling, the Clott Paper Mill before they even got off I–95’s Bedford exit. Its shadow had blanketed Main Street like something out of a nineteenth-century novel, and he’d thought: People still live like this? And then he’d thought: Yes, of course they do.
He remembered Susan Marley. Even in high school, her eyes had been wild. And Georgia, who’d first cut his hair ten years ago. She’d shown him pictures of her son, “Smart as a whip!” she’d told him. And then she’d spun him on her swivel chair once, twice, three times, laughing: “Everybody likes a ride, right?” Was it so surprising that he got his hair cut every other week that summer?
He thought of his children most. What would they think of him if he died in this river? Andrew, he could not say. It had been so long since the boy had been his boy. And James, well, James. He might make it through. Paul pictured him all grown up. Years from now he might be sitting in a bar, offhandedly telling a second or third date about his dad. Yeah, he would say, you might know my dad. He’s not the guy who writes books and appears on Journal Report. He’s not the guy who helped my mom through a hard time. My dad was a drunk. Every town has a few. He killed himself.
Paul turned from Susan and the river then. Left without fear or in haste. Knowing this would not be the end just as he knew he was not ready to do what she wanted. Not yet.
She followed him. Things in the town seemed to change, maybe just his perception of them. Maybe just his sickness. But there was an echo as she walked behind him. He could hear it above the rain. An echo of water splashing, one foot a quick splatter of water, the second a slow gulp, and on and on.
Had he not been so sick, had the shaking in his body, even his hands, subsided for just a second and allowed him a shred of mental coherence, he would have seen the people who looked out their windows when he passed. He would have noticed how some of them stood on their porches, not bothering with coats, some in flannel pajamas and robes, some in yellowed undershirts and boxers. They watched, not him, but something behind him. He would have understood that they saw Susan Marley.
When he reached the park and took a seat on the bench, he was not surprised when Susan joined him. The bones in her spine made popping sounds as she bent to sit. Rigor mortis, he thought, without being able to connect this thought to the present action. Like her relationship with Rossoff, too awful a thought to place.
He did not look at her. He watched the way the seesaws bounced up and down with no ostensible cause of momentum. Watched the swings rock. They pumped themselves. He could hear this as well, the rusty creakings. As if inside an enormous haunted house that had no limits, he could hear it above the rain.
>
When it was time, when he was ready, when he knew he could handle it, he saw her face. It was a massacre of skin; premature wrinkles caused by decay, funeral parlor makeup in red and brown splotches, and stitches. He believed then what he had not allowed himself to believe before. “Oh, God,” he said. In a moment of clarity that chilled him so deeply he could feel it in his bones, he wondered: Where had she gone, and what had she brought back with her?
Before he had the chance to run, she placed her hand on the back of his head and squeezed. At first he felt only the dampness of her fingers. It was the coldest touch of his life. And then she squeezed harder and there was pain. She squeezed harder still, and a flood of emotions filled his consciousness. The sound was like a loud fluorescent light, a discordant buzzing. He heard the stories of the town. He heard April Willow praying for her dog. He pictured Liz Marley climbing a fence in a cemetery and landing in another world. He saw Susan prowling the woods. He heard Bobby Fullbright trying to make a fist. He saw inside Louise Andrias, and the color was black. Cruelty so pervading that everything she’d ever touched was marked by it. He heard Georgia O’Brian fantasizing about a merchant marine who looked a good deal like himself. He saw Cathy’s uncertainty like a thick suspension cable that over the years had gotten thinner and thinner until this week it became a piece of twine that broke. He felt himself going insane. “Stop,” he shouted. “Please stop.”
Susan squeezed harder, and the voices stopped. He looked in her eyes, and he saw his own reflection. He saw himself through Susan’s eyes. In her left eye was a man to whom she was grateful. In her right eye was a man who had betrayed her. These men stood side by side. One man was bigger, but then a drinking man’s devils are always stronger than the angels of his nature.
Keeper, The Page 17
