Bad Men

by John Connolly

  Seconds passed, followed by the sound of a chain being undone, and a lock being turned.

  The door opened.

  Joe Dupree stood on Marianne’s doorstep, out of uniform. She had to look up slightly to see his face, his eyes shining brightly amid the shadows that congregated around them.

  “Joe? Is there some problem?”

  But Dupree merely shook his head. “I was just passing. I brought this for Danny.”

  From behind his back he produced a small wooden gull and handed it to her. She took it carefully in her hands and held it up to the light. It seemed almost crudely carved in places, but it was clear that it was not from lack of craft or care. Rather, the primitivism of the carving was designed to capture something of the bird, a reflection of its nature. He had taken great pains, with the head in particular, depicting the beak as slightly open. She could even see a tiny carved tongue in its mouth. The paint was newly dry.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, and she marveled at how the big man’s hands had created something so small and wondrous, for she had difficulty imagining him even holding the knife in his fist. It must have taken him hours to do it, she thought. He killed the bird, then spent hours re-creating it in wood.

  “Would you like to come in?”

  “I don’t want to disturb you.”

  “I’ve finished what I was doing. I was about to open a bottle of wine,” she lied.

  He hesitated, and she pressed home her advantage.

  “You’re not on duty, right?”

  He didn’t need much persuasion, just a little. She recalled again all those months that he had spent circling her, like a small male spider working toward a female, unsure of the safety of approaching, in fear of his life. In this case the physical proportions were reversed, but she still had the power. She had wondered why it was taking him so long to approach her, for she had seen the way he’d looked at her when she’d begun working in the market, the bashfulness with which he spoke in response to her polite remarks. She had the answer almost as soon as she asked herself the question. She knew it was because of how he looked, his consciousness of his own difference, and so it was she who had broken the ice between them, taking the opportunities, when they arose, to talk with him, walking with him along Island Avenue when their paths crossed, attracting nudges and smiles from the locals. She wasn’t sure, even then, that she was interested in the man himself. Instead, it was his timidity that drew her, the fragility of his self-esteem strangely enticing in such a huge figure.

  She stepped aside to let him enter and caught the scent of him as he brushed by her: he smelled of wood and sap and saltwater. She breathed it in as discreetly as she could and felt something tug inside her. He was not a conventionally handsome man. His teeth were gapped in places, seemingly too small to create a single wall of enamel in his great mouth. His face was long, but widened at the cheeks and chin. She could see wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, and knew at once that they were the consequence of some pain, perhaps physical, perhaps psychological, and that this man was frequently in distress. She was a little surprised when she began to find him attractive and guessed that it was, at least in part, a combination of his power and size along with the capacity for gentleness and subtlety that had enabled him to carve the bird out of a piece of driftwood; to deal sensitively with Jack the painter and his problems; in fact, to interact with most of the islanders in such a way that they both liked and respected him, even when he was forced to come down on them for some minor infraction. Marianne Elliot had spent so long among the kind of men who used their power to hurt and intimidate that Joe Dupree’s graciousness and humanity naturally appealed to her. She wondered what it might be like to make love to him, and was surprised and embarrassed by the surge of warmth that the fantasy brought. She had not considered her own desires for so long, subsuming them all in order to concentrate on Danny and his wants, and on their combined need for constant vigilance.

  Now, as she watched the big policeman gingerly sit down at the kitchen table, the chair too low for him so that his own legs remained at an acute angle, she was conscious of the muscularity of his shoulders, the shape of his chest beneath his shirt, the width of his arms. His hands, twice as large as hers, hovered in the air before him. He cupped them and placed them on the table, then unclasped them and moved them to his thighs. Finally, he folded his arms, jolting the table as he did so and causing a china bowl to tremble gently. He seemed even larger in the confines of the little kitchen, making it appear cluttered even though it was not. She had not seen the inside of his house but was certain that it contained the minimum of furniture, with the barest sprinkling of personal possessions. Anything fragile or valuable would be stored safely away. She felt a great tenderness for the big man, and almost reached out to touch him before she stopped herself and turned instead to the business of the wine. There was a bottle of Two Roads Chardonnay in the fridge, a treat for herself bought in Boston. She had been saving it for a special occasion, until she realized that she had no special occasions worth celebrating.

  Marianne was about to open the bottle, by now instinctively used to doing everything for herself, when he asked her if she would like him to take care of it. She handed over the bottle and the corkscrew. The wine looked like a beer bottle in his hand.

  He read the label. “Flagstone. I don’t know it.”

  “It’s South African.”

  “Robert Frost,” he said.

  “Sorry?”

  “The wine. It’s named after a Robert Frost poem. You know, the one about the two roads diverging in a forest.”

  She hadn’t noticed, and felt vaguely embarrassed by her failure to make the connection.

  “It’s hard to forget a poem like that on an island covered by trees,” he said, inserting the corkscrew.

  “At least you can’t get too lost if you take the wrong road,” she replied. “You just keep going until your feet get wet.”

  The plastic cork popped from the bottle. She hadn’t even seen him tense as he drew it out. She placed two glasses on the table and watched him pour.

  “People still get lost here,” he said. “Have you been out to the Site?”

  “Jack took Danny and me out there, shortly after we arrived. I didn’t like it. It felt…sad.”

  “The memory of what happened still lingers there, I think. A couple of times each summer, we get tourists in to the station house complaining that the trails out to it should be more clearly marked because they went astray and had trouble finding the road again. They’re usually the worst ones, the loudmouths in expensive shirts.”

  “Maybe they deserve to get lost, then. So why don’t you signpost it better?”

  “It was decided, a long time ago, that the people who needed to find it knew how to get to it. It’s not a place for those who don’t respect the dead. It’s not a place for anyone who doesn’t find it sad.”

  He handed her a glass and touched it gently with his own.

  “Happiness,” he said.

  “Happiness,” she said, and he saw hope and sadness in her eyes.

  If Marianne was curious about the giant, then he was no less interested in her. He knew little about the woman, except for her name and the fact that she had brought with her enough money to rent her small but comfortable house, yet he had recognized an attraction toward her and thought, however unlikely it might at first appear, that she might feel something for him too. It had taken all of his courage to propose a dinner date, after months of gentle probing, and it had taken a moment or two after she replied for him to realize that she had accepted.

  Yet something about her troubled him. No, that wasn’t true. It was not about her, precisely, but to do with some undisclosed element of her life. Joe Dupree had learned to read people well. His father had taught him the importance of doing so, and life on the island, with its exposure to the same faces, the same problems day after day, had enabled him to hone his skills, weighing his first perceptions against the rea
lity of individuals as their characters were inevitably revealed to him. He glanced at the woman’s fingers as she put the cork back in the bottle and replaced it in the fridge. She sat down opposite him, and smiled a little nervously. Her right hand toyed with her ring finger, yet there was no ring upon it.

  It was something that he had seen her do a lot, usually when a stranger came into the store or a loud noise startled her. Instinctively, she would touch her ring finger.

  It’s the husband, thought Joe.

  The husband is the element.

  Bill Gaddis was not a happy man. There were a lot of reasons why Bill was unhappy even at the best of times, but now he had a specific reason. He was leaving a fine woman in the sack to answer an insistent knocking at his door, and that made him very unhappy indeed. He might even have been tempted to ignore the knocking, under other circumstances, but around here people had a habit of being good neighbors and the good neighbor at the door might take it into his or her head that, what with the lights being on and no reply coming from the Gaddis house, maybe somebody had had an accident, taken a tumble down some steps or slipped on some water in the kitchen, and nobody wanted to be the one who had to say, “Hell, I was out there just last night, knocking and knocking. If only I’d checked through the windows, or tried the back door, they’d still be alive today.” And Bill didn’t want old Art Bassett or Rene Watterson coming in the back way, hollering and nosing about, expecting to see someone lying on the floor with blood pooling, only to find Bill with his ass in the air and his mind on other things.

  He wondered now why they had even decided to settle here. It was Pennsylvania, goddamnit. Pennsylvania. As far as Bill was concerned, the only people who settled here willingly were religious zealots who regarded buttons as sinful, and folks who regarded buttons as sinful were likely to cast a harsh eye on Bill Gaddis’s activities. Compared to those people, Billy Gaddis was virtually the Antichrist. Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, didn’t even figure on most maps, but Bill knew that was why they were here, precisely because you had to look hard to find it.

  It had its good points, though. His wife had picked up a job at the Holiday Inn in New Cumberland, just off the turnpike, working the desk a couple of evenings each week. On weekends, she worked a few hours at the Zany Brainy over at the Camp Hill Mall, Saturdays, as though spending time in a children’s store could make up for the fact that she was never going to have any of her own. Two Sundays a month, she worked in the Waldenbooks at the Capital City Mall. The manager there, a guy named Jim Munchel, gave her books to take home and read, and she seemed to get along with the other folks who worked in the store. She told Bill that they were good people. Bill got the feeling that they knew just enough about him to not like him, so he stayed out of their way. A little independence of spirit on his wife’s part was a small price to pay for keeping her out of his hair.

  Bill got himself a job driving trucks for a paper company, and they saw just enough of each other to remind themselves why they preferred to see only that much. In the first weeks, Bill would drive over to the Holiday Inn and take a seat in the Elephant & Castle, the English pub attached to the hotel. When she finished her shift, he and his wife would eat there, largely in silence, then return home and sleep at the two farthest extremes of their bed. Eventually, she got herself her own little car, but Bill kept going back to the Elephant & Castle. He’d met a woman there named Jenna, a little older than he was but still good looking, and pretty soon Bill had even more reason to be grateful for the time his wife spent working, and the regularity of her hours. Now someone was knocking on the door, depriving him of some much-needed R&R.

  Bill shrugged on a robe, rearranging it to conceal his dying hard-on, and shuffled to the door, swearing as he went. He left the lights out in the hallway and pulled back the curtain at the side window. He didn’t recognize the woman on the step, but she looked fine, maybe even finer than the woman he’d just left, and that was saying something. She had a map in her hands.

  Bill swore louder. How hard could it be to get lost with a mall slap bang in front of you? Christ, if Bill stood on his lawn, he could see the mall, clear at the top of Yale Avenue. He took his time looking the woman over, lingering at her breasts. Bill swore once again, this time under his breath and more in admiration than in anger, then opened the door.

  He barely had time to register the gun in the woman’s hand before she jammed it into the soft flesh under his chin and forced him against the wall. Behind her came a redheaded man, and after him two others, a real pretty boy and a Richard-Roundtree-after-a-beating motherfucker with a big ’stache, who brushed past Bill and headed straight into the house.

  “The f—”

  “Shut up,” said the woman. She ran her left hand over Bill’s body, stopping briefly at his groin.

  “We disturb something?”

  From the bedroom Bill heard a scream, followed by the sound of Jenna being dragged from the bed.

  “Just the two of you?” asked the black woman.

  Bill nodded hard, then stopped suddenly as he considered the possibility that the action might get his head blown off. The pretty boy stayed by the half-open door while Bill was forced back into the living room. Jenna was already there, a sheet wrapped around her. She was sobbing. Bill made as if to go to her, but the woman stopped him and gestured toward the wall. Bill could only shoot Jenna a look of utter helplessness.

  And then he heard the front door closing, and footsteps coming along the hallway. Two people, thought Bill. The pretty boy and—

  Moloch entered the living room. “Billy boy!” said Moloch. His eyes flicked toward the woman, then back again. “I see you haven’t changed a bit.”

  “Aw, Jesus, no,” said Bill. “Not you.”

  Moloch moved closer to him, reached up to Bill’s face, and grasped his hollow cheeks in the fingers of his right hand.

  “Now, Billy boy,” said Moloch. “Is that any way to greet your brother-in-law?”

  Dupree nodded approvingly.

  “The house looks good,” said Joe. “You’ve done a lot with it in the last year.”

  He was holding the glass as delicately as he could while she showed him around her home. To Marianne, the glass still looked lost in his grip, with barely enough capacity to offer the policeman a single mouthful. They had paused briefly at her bedroom door and she had felt the tension. It wasn’t a bad feeling. After looking in on Danny, who was fast asleep, they went back downstairs.

  “I wanted to put our own stamp on it, and Jack didn’t object. He helped us out some, when he could.”

  “He’s a good man. There’s been no more trouble, has there? Like before?”

  “You mean drinking? No, none that I’ve seen. Danny likes him a lot.”

  “And you?”

  “He’s okay, I guess. Lousy painter, though.”

  Joe laughed. “He has a distinctive style, I’ll give him that.”

  “But he was friendly, right from the start, and I’m grateful to him. It was kind of hard when we got here. People seem a little…suspicious of strangers, I guess.”

  “It’s an island community. People here tend to stick pretty close together. You can’t force your way in. You have to wait for them to loosen up, get to know you. Plus, the island’s changed some recently. It’s not quite a suburb of Portland, but it’s getting there, with people commuting to the mainland for work. Then you have rich folks coming in, buying waterfront properties, forcing up prices so that families that have lived here for generations can’t afford to help their kids set up homes. The assessments for waterfront properties out here are based on one sale made last year, and the assessor in that case only went back three months to make his valuation. Lot prices increased one hundred percent because of it, almost overnight. It was all legal, but that didn’t make it right. Island communities are dying. You know, a hundred years ago there were three hundred island communities in Maine. Now there are sixteen, including this one. Islanders feel under siege and that makes th
em draw closer together in order to survive, so outsiders find it harder to gain a foothold. Each group is wary of the other, and never the twain shall meet.”

  He drew a breath. “Sorry, I’m ranting now. The island matters to me. The people here matter to me. All of them,” he added.

  She felt the tension again, and luxuriated in it for a moment.

  “But working in the store, that’s a good way to start,” he continued. “Folks get to know you, to trust you. After that, it’s just plain sailing.”

  Marianne wasn’t sure about that. Some of those who came into the store still limited their conversations with her to “Please” and “Thank you,” and sometimes not even that. The older ones were the worst. They seemed to regard her very presence in their store as a kind of trespass. The younger ones were better. They were happy to see some new blood arriving on the island, and already she’d been hit on a couple of times. She hadn’t responded, though. She didn’t want to be seen as a threat by any of the younger women. She had thought that she could do without the company of a man for a time. To be honest, she’d had her fill of men, and then some, but Joe Dupree was different.

  Joe wasn’t like her husband, not by a long shot.

  Moloch sat in one of the overstuffed armchairs and sipped a beer.

  “Fooling around, Billy boy?” he said. “Out with the old, in with the new?”

  Bill had stopped weeping. He’d had to. Moloch had threatened to shoot him if he didn’t.

  Bill didn’t reply.

  “Where is she?” asked Moloch.

  Bill still said nothing.

  Moloch swallowed, then winced, as if he had just swallowed a tack.

  “Queer beer,” he said. “I haven’t had a beer in more than three years, and this stuff still tastes like shit. I’ll ask you one more time, Bill. Where is your wife?”

  “I don’t know,” said Bill.

  Moloch looked at Dexter and nodded.