Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead

by Steven Womack

  Doing her bookkeeping, sorting, and posting took me the better part of forty-five minutes. By then I was getting the beginnings of a blood-sugar-crash headache. I’d been so preoccupied since getting back to town last weekend that with the exception of dropping in at Mrs. Lee’s, I’d been living off whatever I could scrounge out of my own kitchen and fast-food joints.

  Then I remembered Marsha wanted me to clean out her refrigerator. I was peckish, and a tad short of cash, so why not combine the two agendas into one? I went through the refrigerator and found enough produce to make a big salad, as well as some eggs that were only a few days beyond their expiration date, and a couple of hunks of gourmet cheese that had the beginnings of a green sweater growing around the edges. A quart of milk was starting to turn, but being a bachelor, I was used to that. I pulled the salad together, then whipped up an omelette with spinach, feta cheese, and baby Swiss—minus the green fuzzy stuff.

  An old Bogart film was on American Movie Classics, so I sat down to a solitary feast, a great flick, and a couple more of Marsha’s beers. The evening went on and fatigue caught up with me. A little human activity had transformed Marsha’s condo into a warm, safe, and comfortable place. I was in no hurry to get anywhere, and found myself slipping off toward the end of the movie. When I woke up, it was after ten. I changed channels quickly, but had already missed the local news. I thought about going home, but the drive was too long and I didn’t feel like facing my place alone.

  I washed the dishes and took a quick shower, then settled into bed with one last beer. I drifted in and out, tuned to the local ABC affiliate, until Nightline came on at eleven-thirty. I rarely get to watch Koppel because the local station delays the program to work in an hour’s worth of syndicated oldies: M*A*S*H and The Cosby Show, the classics that win their respective time slots even though most people have the scripts memorized.

  I was shallow enough into twilight sleep to recognize the opening theme music and claw my way to alertness. Live from Nashville, the Grand Ole Hostage Situation. Koppel did a quick recap, then introduced the filmed segment of the show.

  A crisp, cool professional whose name I didn’t recognize stood before the barricade at the foot of the hill on First Avenue. “Ted, it would be almost comical, if it weren’t for all the live ammo,” he began. “A dozen armed Winnebagos manned by religious fanatics demanding the return of the corpse of their leader’s wife have held off the Nashville Police Department for nearly a week now. And there appears to be no break in the situation expected anytime soon.”

  The correspondent rattled on, summarizing the latest stuff everybody here already knew, then cut away to a remote beside the walled estate of Brother Woodrow Tyberious Hogg.

  “The Pentecoastal Enochians are an offshoot fundamentalist sect that bases its bizarre theology on a connection between the resurrection outlined in the New Testament with Enoch of the Old Testament, who was the seventh generation in line from Adam and only lived three hundred and sixty-five years, a relatively short life span in biblical days. The mystical conjunction of seven and three hundred sixty-five has been used by the Enochians to predict the end of the world, which they believe will happen on October nineteenth, 1998. At the same time, the Pentecostal Enochians take an extreme view of the resurrection of the body, maintaining that cremation, dissection, and autopsy all deny everlasting life to the believer.

  “The result,” the correspondent added, “has produced chaos.”

  Cut to a bad, homemade video of a polyester-suited, overweight Brother Tyberious Hogg standing red-faced at a podium, Bible in hand, spit flying from his mouth as he screamed:

  “By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death! Hebrews 11:5! And have hope toward God, which they themselves also allow, that there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and the unjust!”

  The camera focused on the wide-eyed, enraptured audience, some with their heads rolled back, tongues exposed, spewing forth glossolalia as Brother Hogg took off in another direction with his own dramatic reading from what I thought I recognized as the Book of Revelations:

  “And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled. And after that he must be loosed a little season!”

  Then we cut again to a shining fat face shrouded in the angelic wings of hair that sprouted down the side of a bouffant hairdo. It was Sister Evangeline, and she was near The Rapture herself as Brother Woody really cranked it up:

  “And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus.…”

  Weird stuff, I thought. Very bizarre. Cut back to the Nightline correspondent, who explained that ex-cult members had revealed that the group became polarized over Brother Woodrow Tyberious Hogg’s recent disclosure that God came to him in a dream and told him to take another wife.

  And wouldn’t you know it, the wife God told him to take was Sister Jennifer, the sixteen-year-old daughter of one of the believers.

  Now, I thought, we get down to it.

  Sister Evangeline had gone along with it for a while, believing, of course, that her husband’s dream was a divine revelation of the Lord. Pentecostal Enochians don’t smoke, drink, dance, wear makeup, or play music during services, but if God tells them to bed a sixteen-year-old—hey, go for it. And gone for it they had, until Brother Woody tried to give Sister Evangeline’s Cadillac to his new wife, Sister Jennifer. Sister Evangeline went ballistic, and apparently wound up overdoing what was supposed to be a simple dramatic suicide attempt.

  As Ted Koppel introduced the guest for the discussion portion of the show, I laughed so hard I almost rolled off the side of the bed. I couldn’t take it anymore, so polished off the beer, buried myself beneath Marsha’s thick comforter, and pretended I could smell her hair on the pillow.

  Maybe it’s a measure of how frazzled I am these days, but I dropped off to sleep without setting an alarm clock. I’d completely forgotten my nine o’clock appointment with Mac Ford. I awoke in stages: first this dreamy, languorous, aroused state; then a dim awareness that there were other things that should have been on my mind; then a growing sense of panic; and finally, full-blown hysteria as I got my eyes open enough to hone in on the alarm clock, which read 8:25.

  I shot out of bed and dashed for the bathroom, brushed my teeth, then scrambled around the bathroom until I found a package of pink disposable razors intended for legs rather than cheeks. I lathered my face with bar soap and raked the razor over stubble, hoping I wouldn’t open up a spurter.

  I could shave and wash my face, comb my hair, and get most of the sleep out of my eyes, but I couldn’t disguise the fact that the same clothes I had on yesterday were going back on today. I took a wild guess that Mac Ford wouldn’t care, even if he noticed. I was a little embarrassed about Alvy Barnes, though.

  What the hell, I thought as I ran out the door with fifteen minutes to get from Green Hills to Music Row, you can carry this personal-grooming stuff too far if you’re not careful.

  Decades ago, the two parallel avenues that make up Music Row were just a couple of residential streets in Nashville. As the music business moved in, more and more of the older homes were taken over for commercial uses. Some of the most powerful independent record companies, agents, managers, accountants, and lawyers had set up offices in renovated old houses. Mac Ford owned one of them, and I was driving like hell to get there before nine o’clock.

  All the craziness was for nothing. I pulled into a pea-gravel parking lot in front of a gray, nondescript two-story Cape Cod. I had about ninety seconds to spare before being late as I stepped through the oak-and-beveled-glass front door. Beige leather sofas sat in
front of an open fireplace in what had once been someone’s living room. Behind them, against the opposite wall, a receptionist sat at a desk manning a phone system that had eight lines all lit at once. I stood before her, trying to calm my breathing after the mad rush through town.

  “May I help you?” she asked quickly between flashing lights.

  “I had a nine o’clock with Mac Ford,” I said.

  “I don’t think he’s in yet. Let me check with Alvy.”

  I sat down while the receptionist juggled the phone lines and tried to reach Mac Ford’s assistant. I settled into the soft, cool leather with an audible squish. The morning newspaper sat rolled up on a coffee table between the sofas. I picked it up and unfolded it. The news media having the attention span of a Chihuahua on methamphetamine-flavored Alpo, the hostage situation at the morgue had already faded to Section B importance. Today’s lead story was on another shoot-out at a local public high school, this one ending when a Metro cop assigned to security duty had to blow away a sixteen-year-old who wouldn’t drop his 9mm Glock because it would’ve dissed him in front of his homeys.

  I shook my head and whispered: “Fucking Looney Tunes …”

  By the time I finished the story, with the requisite sidebar about how the anguished parents were going to file police-brutality charges and one motherthumper of a civil suit, Alvy Barnes had descended the wide oak staircase with an apologetic look.

  “I’m sorry, Harry, Mac’s not in yet. And I haven’t heard from him.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying to keep a smile on my face. “Can I hang around for a bit? I’d like to see him before he leaves town this afternoon.”

  “Sure,” she said, very sweetly. “Why don’t I get you a cup of coffee?”

  “That’d be great. Cream and light sugar, if you’ve got it.”

  “I’ll bring it right in.”

  Alvy walked down a hallway behind the receptionist and disappeared. She seemed intelligent, and was certainly young and attractive in a Generation-X sort of way. I never thought I’d be old enough to look at women that age and think: She’s too young for me—but, damn, here I am.

  I wondered if Mac Ford was sleeping with her.

  Alvy returned with a steaming Styrofoam cup of coffee that felt as good going down as CPR to a dying man.

  “That’s great,” I said after the first sip. “Thanks. I’ll just sit down here and catch Mac when he comes in.”

  She smiled again and put her hand on my arm. “I’ll take care of that. He parks in the back and sneaks in through the rear stairway.”

  “Hiding out, huh?”

  She leaned toward me, her hand brushing against my forearm even harder. “There’s a few out there he needs to dodge.”

  I watched her walk back up the stairs. I tried to avoid an avalanche of lascivious fantasies without much success. I sat down and picked up the paper with one hand, the coffee cup firmly glued in the other.

  Section B was local news, with Day Six of the hostage story as the lead. A little clock in the upper right-hand corner of the page ticked off the hours that the crisis had gone on. A sidebar described the Nightline installment from last night, not without some measure of civic pride. There was a brief mention in the main story of Marsha and the other people locked in the morgue, but since no one in the media knew about Marsha’s private cellular-phone number, they hadn’t been available for interviews.

  On page four, buried beneath a two-column story on a zoning committee meeting, was a short piece about this afternoon’s funeral for Rebecca Gibson.

  I finished the paper and my coffee, then checked my watch: 9:40. Was Mac Ford doing a Phil Anderson-like dodge on me? Had I become a pariah? I shifted restlessly on the couch, impatiently flipping through the classifieds, growing more irritated by the moment.

  Ten minutes later I stood up and stretched, about ready to blow the whole morning off. Alvy Barnes suddenly rounded the corner upstairs and scooted down the flight of stairs. She stopped on the landing.

  “Good, you’re still here,” she said. “I’m so sorry. Mac just got in. I said something to him, but you know how—”

  “Yeah, I understand. He still got time to see me?”

  “Sure, c’mon.”

  I followed her up the stairs and down a long, carpeted hallway on the second floor. While the first floor was a model of decorum and cool professionalism, the upstairs could have been decorated by a graphic designer in the middle of a psychotic break. Splashes of neon paint covered the walls, with movie and rock posters outnumbering country-music posters at least two to one. A stuffed groundhog perched in one corner, with a straw hat planted fashionably on its head and a corncob pipe stuck in its mouth. We passed open office doors with T-shirted agents in jeans and thousand-dollar snakeskin boots making deal after deal. I could hear shouts, arguments, pleas, manipulations. Inside one large office, a Xerox machine painted in desert camouflage clicked away.

  “You guys are busy up here,” I commented to the back of Alvy Barnes’s head.

  “Oh, this is nothing,” she answered, outpacing me down the hall.

  We entered an anteroom that had been converted into Alvy’s office. It was a little more staid than the rest of the floor, but still revealed chaos as the operative mode.

  “Wait just a moment,” she said. She walked over to a large heavy door painted bright chromium white and opened it. A cloud of blue smoke drifted out of the crack she’d stuck her head into, along with the booming rumble of a loud reggae beat. Ford’s office, I surmised, must be heavily soundproofed.

  “Mac, he’s here,” I heard her say over the bass guitar and the steel drums.

  “Yeah,” Ford yelled, “get him in here!”

  I swallowed hard, wondering what I was getting into. Alvy turned, waved me to the door, then held it open for me.

  “Go on,” she said. “You asked for it.”

  I stepped into a thick cloud of cigar smoke illuminated by the kind of black light fixtures I hadn’t seen since my days as an undergraduate. Alvy shut the door behind me. I squinted in the dim light, my ears aching from the thunderous reggae now confined to Ford’s office. Across the large office, maybe fifteen feet away, Mac Ford sat sprawled out in an office chair beneath an enormous Tiffany lamp with about a ten-watt bulb in it. I squinted to focus. He was on the phone, shouting something into it I couldn’t understand over the music. It was meat-locker cold, the air-conditioning turned up to goose-pimple levels.

  Black light counterculture posters covered the wall: Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Avalon Ballroom stuff in that typeface that looked like melting letters and, I’m told although I never tried it, simulated reading under the influence of psychedelics. Ford McKenna Ford, I realized, was a Neanderthal throwback to the Sixties.

  And I was locked in his dream.

  From behind the haze of thick smoke, he motioned me toward a seat. My nose was closing up and the back of my throat felt scratchy. What was this guy smoking, old socks?

  He continued the phone conversation as I shivered in a chair across from him. The Jamaican CD roared on, with the Bob Marley sound-alike wailing away unintelligibly.

  I looked around. Clutter, chaos, piles of papers, magazines, framed gold records, photographs. A huge twelve-point buck with a pair of panty hose draped across the horns was mounted on the wall behind him. There were piles of empty Grolsch and Dos XX bottles everywhere, intermixed with discarded Coke cans encrusted with brown goo. A fisherman’s net was suspended from the ceiling with dried Spanish moss hanging down like tendrils. The walls rattled with the energy and the sound. Another minute or so of this and I was going to break a window to escape.

  Ford slammed the phone down and said something to me, but I not only couldn’t hear him, I couldn’t see his face through the smoke and the black light well enough to lip-read.

  “Could we turn the music down?” I yelled.

  He cupped a hand to his ear. Great, I thought, this interview is going just swell.

  “Tur
n down the music!” I yelled again, this time motioning downward in a curve with my right index finger.

  He said something like, “Oh, yeah,” and reached for a remote control buried in a stack of junk on his desk. He fished it out, hit a button, and the huge speakers went quiet.

  The silence was even weirder.

  “You know,” I said, “my landlady’s hearing-impaired. You ought to talk to her about what you’ve got to look forward to.”

  “Not a music lover, huh?”

  “I’ll let you know when I hear some.”

  “Ooh,” he moaned, then laughed. “That’s not going to make you any friends around here.”

  “I didn’t come to make friends,” I said. “I came to find out Rebecca Gibson’s secrets.”

  “If you do that, they won’t be secrets anymore.”

  “What’s it matter to her?”

  Mac Ford lodged the thick cigar in an ashtray, then found a bare spot on his desk and drummed it frenetically. He practically leaped out of the chair and circled around me. On a junk-cluttered bookcase, he found a neon hot-pink basketball and bounced it a couple of times on his hardwood floor, then let it fly toward the opposite wall. It bounced off the wall, then rolled around the rim of a basketball hoop he’d mounted above the door to his office. The ball circled the metal hoop three times and rolled off the wrong side.

  “No points,” I said. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you’re one of the most frenetic people I’ve ever met.”

  That stopped him cold. He recovered the ball and dribbled it a few times, then palmed it and held it against his side.

  “I prefer to think of it as dynamic.”

  “Could you be a little less dynamic, then? I’m getting dizzy.”

  “You know, I’ve already talked to the police. I don’t have to talk to you.”