The True Detective

by Theodore Weesner

  “See?” the man adds, sliding up over Vernon from behind. “Every time I recall that day it gives me the most genuine feelings. See? I know, I know I promised not to press you, and I won’t, but . . . it might relax you, too, you know.” There are the man’s lips again, on his neck. He presses closer; where Anthony was as smooth and hairless as a pear, this man feels like he is covered with steel wool, with hundreds of small wires lying flat.

  Vernon doesn’t reply; he isn’t sure where the man is and is confused and doesn’t know what to say or do. As he shifts away, the man maintains contact, reaches around him on both sides to soap his chest and belly, teasing about his center without touching. “Feel how high I am,” he whispers. “We can do anything you like. Your ass feels wonderful. I can make it awfully nice in there, if that’s what you’d like.”

  Vernon keeps what distance he can. A spark—a shock—shoots across his temples as he feels trapped or claustrophobic and required to pay. He feels he is degenerating, as the man continues around him and he has nowhere to go. This is a nervous breakdown, Vernon is saying to himself as the man slips his hand down over him and stops. And holds. Vernon urges response in spite of his tension. He closes his eyes. No response is forthcoming, though, and the man drops him. “Shit,” the man says.

  Vernon dies a little, standing there.

  “Goddamit,” the man says.

  Vernon is becoming naked now and doesn’t know what to do.

  “I guess I thought we’d get right through things and have a good time,” the man says. “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, it’s my fault,” Vernon says.

  “Doesn’t matter,” the man says.

  “I just—I don’t know,” Vernon says.

  “I think you’d better go. It’s just going to get worse.”

  “Go?” Vernon says.

  “I think so.”

  “You want me to go?”

  “If you don’t mind. The party’s over.”

  “Oh.”

  “Get on with your life and so on. I don’t mean to be rude.”

  “Oh,” Vernon says again.

  The man moves past him, leaves the shower, and Vernon hears him say, “You better rinse off.”

  Naked now, Vernon doesn’t know what to do next, cannot get himself to move. His skull feels as thin-shelled as an egg, feels close to cracking from pressure within and spilling. He sees the drain on the floor; he would slide away into the drain if he could, into the city’s waste, into the oblivion of the ocean nearby.

  He has to step out; he has to have the man see his face, on the slightest glance. He cannot die and escape so easily; he still has to pay. The several steps, a slight eye exchange are what he must do, what he must put up with, he is thinking. So he does put up with them; they are a part of dying, he thinks as he steps, washed, past the translucent plastic shower curtain and reaches for his underpants on a wooden chair painted banana yellow; his eyes are filled with tears as he steps into and lifts the underpants up over his damp legs.

  CHAPTER 17

  TAKING UP PLASTIC-COVERED MENUS, CLAIRE FOLLOWS A man and woman making their way to the last booth. Her legs have started to fill with sand. It’s how she thinks of waiting on tables. Her legs are hourglasses, empty at first, when the work is most pleasant, but with sand sliding in on every step she takes carrying menus, napkins and silverware, cheeseburgers, fries, bowls of chili, smiling, talking, wiping tables, carrying dirty dishes back to the plastic tub.

  Every week it seems the sand flows in just a little more quickly.

  Chili. More orders for chili. “How’s the chili?” a man asks.

  “I guess it’s fine,” she says.

  Thinking of Eric, on her way to the kitchen, she glances past the pool table to where he had been standing. She runs her eyes over the men and boys leaning against the wall, and seeing that he isn’t there, seeing the slightest space of blank wall where he had been standing, and missing him, she goes to the window opening to place the order.

  CHAPTER 18

  TOO NERVOUS TO SIT, MATT STANDS IN THE HEART OF THE Mall, watching the flow of people entering. There are benches before him, among red bricks and indoor plants, but he feels he would really look like a wimp if he was sitting down when she walked in. Guarded by the plants, he watches, and there she is, coming his way, moments ahead of time, for which promptness he all once adores her. To his surprise, though, she moves a little less boldly than he would have expected, even as a foolish smile is breaking out on his own face. She is black, he sees and remembers; yes, she is black.

  He heads around the centerpiece to meet her; she is scanning shoppers sitting there. He sees her eyes discover him. “Hey,” he says in a laugh and, reaching—he had no idea he would do such a thing—takes her hand for an instant in both of his.

  They turn to walk along the Mall’s avenue, past jewelry and cookie displays. He hears her say, “You seem really different.”

  “I do?”

  “Like you’ve changed,” she says.

  Glancing at her face he sees that yes, it is the girl Vanessa, with her black skin, her flash of red lips and white teeth. And they are together, which gives him this complicated and sensational feeling.

  “I hope nothing’s wrong,” she says.

  “No,” he says.

  “Not having second thoughts about being with a black chick?”

  “Oh, no. No. Not at all. Are you?”

  “Me? Heck, yes, man. Well, not second thoughts.”

  “Say that again?”

  “I’m aware I’m here,” she says. “It’s a little cool, but a little scary, too.”

  “We just look like friends, don’t we?”

  “Which is what we are—friends.”

  “Want to get a Coke or something?”

  “I guess it’s a little more than friends. That’s why it feels scary.”

  “I like the way you say things,” he says.

  “Meaning what?”

  “You don’t fool around. I just like to talk to you.”

  “Yeah? How about Papa Gino’s then, white boy, for a Coke?”

  Turning, they go through an awkward reversal of direction and an amount of smiling. He touches her arm above the elbow, and it is nearly daring. What they are doing is no longer imaginary, he thinks. They are together.

  At the counter, while she sits at a table covered with red-checkered oilcloth, he orders and pays for two medium Cokes. Standing among the pizza buyers, he smiles at the menu on the wall and smiles still as he carries the two paper cups to the table. He has never felt more self-conscious. To complicate things, she suddenly says, “Now what are you thinking about?”

  He looks at her.

  “Tell me,” she says. “I can tell you’re thinking about something.”

  He lies. “I was thinking about what a good idea it was to call you up,” he says.

  She seems not to buy it. “Really?”

  “No, that’s not true,” he says. “What I was thinking was, looking at your hands—was that I’d like to touch your hands.”

  “Well?” she says.

  He looks at her.

  “Why don’t you?” she says. “I could go for that.”

  He laughs and still doesn’t dare. It’s all too much, he says to himself. As if seriously, he looks into her eyes; she looks into his in the same way.

  “Want to go someplace we can mess around?” she says.

  He keeps looking at her and doesn’t move, as blood determines on its own to occupy his face. “Where?” he gets out.

  She takes a moment. “Our garage,” she says. “My mother’s Buick. She never uses it.”

  “Far from here?” he manages to say.

  She only continues to look at him as if to say, what a silly thing to ask.

  His face is flushed and he cannot hold her gaze any longer; he glances down. He strains at once to look up at her, but his neck is so stricken it doesn’t want to cooperate.

  “God, I have messed up again,�
� she says.

  “No. Oh no,” he says.

  “Oh, I have,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not anything,” he says. “I’m out of it, that’s all.”

  “I shouldn’t come on like that,” she says.

  “No, it isn’t you, really,” he is saying. “It isn’t.”

  “Let’s just back up and start over,” she says.

  “It’s okay,” he says.

  “Tell me something else you’re thinking,” she says.

  “Just what you said,” he says.

  “Listen, all I meant by that was—well, I didn’t mean what you’re probably thinking I meant.”

  He looks at her.

  “I just said that, you know, for shock value.”

  “Well, that’s okay.”

  “Except you look like you found a rattlesnake in your lunch bag.”

  He laughs, shrugs as if to say it’s true.

  “So,” she says. “Tell me what you’re thinking now.”

  “Same thing,” he says.

  She pauses. “Okay, let’s go then. But it ain’t to do what you think.”

  She smiles, looking at him over the red-checked oilcloth; he suddenly leans toward her and, surprising himself as much as he might surprise her, says, “I’m just dumb about stuff.”

  He resumes his position, and now she is the one who appears confused. “Which means what?” she says.

  “Just what it says.”

  “You’ve never even kissed no girl before, have you?”

  Well, that’s what he meant, he is thinking, and as he looks at her her larger meaning turns in his mind. “I gotta go to the bathroom,” he hears himself say.

  He is in the center of the Mall, walking among people he doesn’t see, when he asks himself, as if realizing he has committed some kind of social error, do you say to a girl you have to go to the bathroom?

  He walks through a wide opening into a department store and finds and then enters the men’s room, with its beige tile and brushed stainless steel, and seeing himself in the mirror, he cannot deny that something about what he sees is different. As an afterthought, he tries a breath in his hand.

  Heading back, he feels no less light-headed. As if, he thinks, all his life he has been housed, held—in a membrane—and here at last he is breaking through. It was a little like this when he first realized he could swim.

  Around him are women’s nightclothes, colors so lightly blue, so faintly pink and beige, so laced and silken that they seem to tend toward creating some puzzle of a creature within the trees. In the looks of a saleswoman whose lips glisten red, whose eyes and eyelashes look like miniature birds in small cages, whose cheeks are dusted perversely pale—in the midst of her perfume he seems to receive another glimpse.

  “Ready to go?” he says, approaching the table, not sitting down.

  Reaching to take his hand, to steer him into sitting again on his side of the table, she whispers, “One thing I want you to know. Don’t you go thinking I meant what I didn’t mean. I think it’s cute you never done nothing with no girl, if that’s what you meant. But don’t you think I meant what I didn’t mean, because that’s not what I meant at all.”

  There are her eyes, her red mouth, her glossy hair like icing on a cake. There are her gold earrings. “I know you didn’t mean that,” he says.

  “Let’s go do it then,” she says—and adds, “Just kidding.”

  CHAPTER 19

  HE HAS DRIVEN PAST SOMETHING THAT HAS ALERTED HIS mind and shifted his eyes to his rearview mirror. As if in a movie, in its odd reflection, there is a young boy walking on the sidewalk through the early evening air. Already there is a new beating in his heart, as he returns his eyes to the street before him and lets his car roll along.

  Approaching an intersection, slowing to a near stop, he has no idea where he is going or what he might do. He turns right and rolls slowly along the side street. Where there is space along the curb, he pulls over and stops.

  The boy may not come this way, Vernon thinks. He may have already passed back there on the larger street. He doesn’t look back; he decides not to let himself do so, so he turns off the motor. Life is chance, he thinks. Nor does he let himself use either of the car’s mirrors. Reaching under the dash, he pulls the car’s hood latch, sees the hood jump up an inch or two.

  Opening the door, he steps into the evening air. He still doesn’t let himself look back down the street.

  He lifts and props the hood. He leans into the motor’s warmth, as if to see something, and his thoughts are running over a notion of recurring distribution of lives within bodies, a notion that if a boy does appear, they will have known each other in the past or the boy will have been with him in the past.

  Reaching a hand near the motor’s hoses, from which heat is generating, he touches two fingers to a rubber hose coated with oiled dust; he is rubbing his soiled fingers over his thumb and standing upright, and the boy is there—he is there—coming along the middle of the street.

  Taking a step from the fender, brushing his hands, Vernon says to him, “You know anything about cars? Can you give me a hand?”

  The boy steps over. He looks into the car’s opened mouth. Stealing a glance at his hair, Vernon looks under the hood as well, and he says, “It won’t start. I don’t know what happened.”

  “What did it do?” the boy says, gazing into the dark mystery of metal and rubber.

  “It just cut out,” Vernon says. “It could be the fuel line,” he adds. “I was thinking, if you got behind the wheel and tried to start it, I could check the fuel pump.” He glances at the boy. He is eleven or twelve years old. “You know how to start a car?” he says.

  “I think so,” the boy says.

  “Let me show you,” Vernon says, leading him to the driver’s side.

  As he says, “Jump in” and the boy does so, Vernon is careful not to touch him. “That’s the key, the ignition,” he says. “The right pedal on the floor is the gas. All you do is turn the key and step on that pedal. When I say so. Step on the pedal lightly. You’ve never driven a car?” he adds, straightening away from him.

  An excitement is in him he has not known before, a boundary he has never crossed. He hears the boy say, “Not really,” as if at a distance.

  “It’s a good thing to learn how to drive,” Vernon hears himself say, allowing himself now to glance upon the boy’s profile.

  “When I say start it, turn the key,” he says.

  Stepping around the door, Vernon returns to the fender beside the raised hood. He really hasn’t done anything, he is telling himself; who could say his car had not stopped for some reason? Is anyone watching?

  Looking to the windshield, he says, “Give it a try.”

  He pretends, as the engine fires and trembles before him, to conclude some handiwork. Okay, he thinks, lowering the hood, letting it drop into place.

  “Good!” he says, opening the door where the boy, just able to reach the pedals and glimpse over the steering wheel, sits smiling. “Slide over, I’ll give you a lift,” he says, slipping into the car, closing the door, sensing success of a kind as the boy obeys.

  Vernon looks to his side only, and to the rearview mirror. “Once you start a car,” he says, “it’s easy to learn how to drive.”

  “That sure wasn’t hard,” the boy says.

  Vernon pulls away from the curb. He is trying to think of what to do next, what to say, and his mind skips over his old fantasies of adoption, of meals and games, of the friendship of a brother, and of schools and bicycles, baths in a tub, watching television . . .

  “You know there’s another car,” he says. “I have this other car to worry about, which belongs to my friend. It would be great if you could help me get that car started, too. It’s just a few minutes from here. Maybe ten is all.”

  “What’s wrong with it?” the boy says.

  “It’s something, I think, to do with the starter. I think the two of us could get it started, thoug
h. Just like we did this car. I could pay you five dollars for helping me to get it started.”

  The boy says nothing to this, and Vernon makes a move at once. Turning into a driveway, backing around, expecting the boy to say, simply, no, he accelerates in the other direction. “It won’t take long,” he says. “Just a short drive.”

  “Where is it?” the boy says, and Vernon believes there is no suspicion in his voice.

  “It’s back this way,” he says. “It’s right by this pond.”

  The boy says nothing.

  Vernon drives along. For the first time in the car, at an intersection, making his turn, he glances upon the small person in the adjacent seat. There is his slight frame, his sandy hair, his nose; Vernon realizes in a rush of affection how trusting the boy is. He would reach and touch his shoulder, and smile at him, but he restrains himself. “You have any brother or sisters?” he says.

  “Just a brother,” the boy says.

  “How old is he; what’s his name?”

  “Matt. He’s fifteen.”

  “And you, are you fourteen?”

  “No,” the boy says.

  “How old are you?” Vernon says.

  “Twelve.”

  “Tell me your name.”

  “Eric.”

  “I’m Vernon,” Vernon says, feeling an unexpected rush.

  He glances again. “This is an easy way to earn five dollars,” he says.

  Hands on the steering wheel, watching ahead, he blinks to clear his eyes of the curious emotion stirring there. What is crossing his mind is how much he likes this boy already, how his innocence makes him so likeable. Does he look like someone he has seen before? It seems he does.

  On Route 4, driving west, he thinks how he would simply like to drive on into the world with this young boy, this new young friend who trusts him so naturally. “I like your nose,” he says.

  “My nose?” the boy says, and laughs.

  “That little flattening makes you look strong, you know. Girls will be after you in no time.”