DeMarco unfolded his wallet, withdrew two twenties. He pressed the bills into the man’s hand.
“I take it you’ll be sleeping out there?” the clerk asked.
“Possibly,” DeMarco said.
The man smiled and stuffed the bills into a pocket. “All right then. I expect I’ll be seeing you two later. Say hey to Jayme for me.”
DeMarco had turned away, his hand reaching for the door, when the clerk asked, “Jayme still got that smart mouth on her? I never knew what it was turned me on more about her, that sassy mouth or that tight little ass.”
DeMarco paused; blood surged into his face, made his eyeballs ache. Then he turned and smiled. “She still has both. Only difference is, she backs them up now with a master’s degree in psychology and a combined rating of ninety-six percent in the use of pistol, shotgun, tear gas, and three forms of martial arts.”
The clerk blinked. “I heard she went into law enforcement of some kind.”
“Only female cadet I’ve ever seen take down a two-hundred-forty-pound man using nothing but a choke hold. Had him on his knees in three seconds flat.”
“I thought them choke holds got banned.”
“Not the lateral vascular neck restraint. Shuts off all blood to the brain. Puts your lights out just like that,” DeMarco said with a snap of his fingers.
Seeing the look in the clerk’s eyes, DeMarco stepped closer, then leaned forward and softened his voice. “Of course, if the guy really deserves it, we can maintain the hold as long as we want. It can get tricky, though, calculating just how many brain cells we want to destroy. Jayme and I both like to err on the long side, you know? Why send him back out onto the street when ten more seconds of pressure will have him slobbering in his soup the rest of his life?”
The clerk’s Adam’s apple went up and then down as he swallowed hard.
“By the way,” DeMarco said, “I didn’t get your name.”
“Richie,” the clerk said, and looked away for a few seconds.
“You get those tats in prison?”
“County jail. I never did hard time. Nothing serious, just…juvenile shit.”
“Everything we do is serious, pardner.”
Richie nodded and rubbed his arms. “I hear that. I surely do.”
TWENTY-ONE
After parking the RV, DeMarco took his time walking back to the house on Jackson Road. He had been hoping for another year or so to prepare himself for meeting Jayme’s whole family. Mother, three brothers, so many aunts and uncles and cousins that even she had trouble remembering them all. Just the thought of that suffocating crush of people all giving him the Matson hairy eyeball made his legs heavy.
For over a dozen years he had lived alone. Had been on the verge of turning feral when he met Thomas Huston. The brief friendship had started some alchemical change in him, and then Jayme’s embrace had galvanized the change, made it all but irreversible. The hard part was in dropping the trooper stoicism in groups larger than two. He wanted to shed it, truly wanted to be open and lighthearted and full of joie de vivre. But how to become what he could not remember ever being?
So he walked slowly and admired the wide, clean streets of Aberdeen. The neat yards and homes. The vivid greens and pinks and yellows of the manicured landscaping, all of it scented by the flowery heat of full summer. In five minutes he saw more butterflies than in a whole summer in Pennsylvania. And found himself smiling. Feeling lighter somehow. Thinking, if all those butterflies could metamorphose, why couldn’t he?
Grandma’s front porch loomed through the leaves of a birch tree. Suddenly he was overweight again, sweaty and unshaven from the long drive, his stomach sour from the truck stop food they had resorted to since learning of Grandma’s death.
By the time he made the turn up the sidewalk and headed for the porch, fourteen eyes were fixed on him, every conversation silenced.
“How’s it goin’?” DeMarco said as he mounted the four wide stairs.
“You get that boat parked?” a grinning man asked. He was tall and slender, his short-cropped hair more orange than red.
DeMarco held out his hand. “Ryan DeMarco. You’ve got to be Cullen. Brother number three.”
“I prefer to think of myself as brother number one,” Cullen said, and took DeMarco’s hand. “Last born male but best of the litter.”
“Best at the bullshit,” said another man, slightly less tall and less orange than his brother. DeMarco’s hand was barely free before being seized again. “Bryan. And you’re the man who’s shaggin’ our sister.”
“Well,” DeMarco said, and blushed.
Bryan laughed and slapped DeMarco on the shoulder. “As long as she’s happy.”
“It’s when she’s not you’ll need to watch your back,” Cullen told him.
And then everybody was laughing, and DeMarco shook five more hands, and soon found a cold beer in his left, an awkward smile on his face as he was relentlessly teased.
“Jayme says you used to live in a cave till she came along.”
“Is that true, Ryan? And what’s with this Italian surname anyway? Ryan is Scottish. What are you, some kind of alien hybrid? If you came here looking for lasagna, you’re going to go home hungry.”
“Actually,” a cousin said, “there is a platter of lasagna in there.”
“Made with haggis, of course.”
“We make everything with haggis. Even that beer you’re drinking.”
“You know what haggis is, don’t you, Ryan?”
DeMarco said, “I can’t say that I do.”
“Why, it’s sheep pluck. Ground-up lungs, liver, and heart, mixed up with oatmeal and stuffed back into the stomach. Let’s go inside and get you some.”
The look on DeMarco’s face brought all the men nearly to tears with laughter.
Finally Cullen took him by the arm. “Come on; I’ll help you find Jayme in that mess inside.”
TWENTY-TWO
It was a long afternoon for DeMarco. He was introduced to another twenty people, even the little ones. Was kissed and questioned by Jayme’s mother, still a beauty at nearly sixty, and half a dozen aunts, and shook hands with every male. Every natural-born Matson woman looked like Katharine Hepburn’s sister, while the Matson men ran from plump to stout to gangly, from bald to brown to chestnut to orange of hair.
Conspicuously absent among the Matson males were Jayme’s father, four years deceased, a small-town lawyer dead at sixty-six from congestive heart failure caused by an undiagnosed mitral valve prolapse, and Jayme’s oldest brother, Galen, an anesthesiologist living in Seattle. Both men were present only in photographs, both tall and slender and long-limbed, noses a bit sharper than Jayme’s, eyes a bit darker, smiles less easy, and faces less open.
“I’m sorry Galen isn’t here to meet you,” Jayme’s mother, Nedra, told DeMarco. “His work, you know. He couldn’t leave his work.”
“Of course,” DeMarco said, but did not fail to notice how her gaze faltered when she offered her son’s excuse.
“We don’t get to see him much these days,” she said.
“It’s very demanding,” DeMarco offered, “the medical profession.”
“It is, it is. Still, it would have been nice. He and Jayme were particularly close. Has she told you that?”
“I got a bit of the family history from her. I know she adores every one of you.”
“That’s our Jayme,” Nedra told him. “But it was Galen she was closest to. He took such good care of her. Protecting her from the other boys, you know. They used to torment her so.”
“Bryan and Cullen did?”
“Oh my, it was awful. They teased her mercilessly. Unless Galen was around. He’d put a stop to it. I do wish he could be here to meet you.”
“Someday,” DeMarco said.
“And what of your family?” Nedra asked.
“Jayme tells me you’re divorced?”
Reluctant to lie to her, DeMarco answered with a smile.
Around five that evening, neighbors started showing up with hot casserole dishes and steaming foil pans full of even more food to crowd onto overloaded tables and counters. Again and again he was introduced to these strangers, most of whom became a blur in his memory the moment they turned away. A small, white-haired woman with piercing gray eyes was the one exception. She not only stared intently at him throughout the brief introduction, but every time he came into her view. When he had a chance he pointed her out to Jayme. “The one with her back to the doorframe,” he said. “She keeps staring at me. Is she like a psycho great-aunt of yours?”
“Close,” Jayme said. “But not a relative. And psychic, not psycho. She’s a retired librarian. She’ll read your tarot cards if you want.”
“Can I leave now?” he asked.
“Don’t be rude.”
“I can’t eat another bite or drink another drink of anything. And I’m fairly certain my face is permanently deformed from all the smiling I’ve been doing.”
“It will be an improvement,” she told him, and patted his cheek. “Get a cup of coffee and a dessert plate, and keep both of them full. Women can’t stand to see a man with an empty plate.”
“Can you at least ask old Miss Elvira to quit staring a hole into my forehead?”
“Relax. She’s probably just reading your dirty little mind,” Jayme said, and left him alone again with a kiss on the cheek.
As DeMarco wearied and sagged over the hours, Jayme grew more energetic. Around eight that evening, she found him asleep in a living room chair. She knelt and awakened him with a whisper in his ear. “Wakey-wakey.”
He jerked awake, blinked, looked around. “Sorry,” he told her.
“Don’t be. You had a long drive, and now this. You’ve been a fine little soldier.”
He blinked again. “Is everybody here except me on an amphetamine diet?”
She squeezed his hand. “Mother’s insisting we spend the night here, but all that’s left is an air mattress in the basement. Why don’t you slip out and head back to the RV? We’ll have brunch here tomorrow and then go to the funeral home.”
The thought of a night without her brought his eyes open wide.
“Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I won’t be long.”
He sat up. “I don’t want you walking back in the dark alone.”
“Please,” she said. “I’ll borrow a baseball bat. I can handle myself, you know.”
He said, and was surprised to hear himself say it aloud, “But I don’t want you to have to.”
She leaned close, put her cheek to his. “See how good this has been for us? You’re a member of the family already.”
“And I didn’t even have to eat haggis,” he said.
“Yet.”
TWENTY-THREE
That night he lay awake a long time, feeling more than thinking about or remembering the incidents of the previous days, some pleasant, some uncomfortable, but most strangely empty, hollow of meaning. What had he done of lasting import over the course of those days?
He traced back through his memory to locate his last meaningful action. He had thought at the time that packing away his uniform and the duties that came with it was a meaningful act, but now saw it had been just the opposite; it had been a walking away from the last remaining definition of who and what he was, a surrender to meaninglessness.
He was a floater now, little more than a corpse drifting along on the current. Physically the corpse retained all indications of life, could smile and eat and make love and… No. Wait. He truly was alive when making love. There was nothing fraudulent about the connection he and Jayme shared. But afterward the emptiness always returned. So how could love alone, adrift in a sea of meaninglessness, have any meaning?
Maybe retiring really had been a mistake, even under the guise of the temporary leave Kyle had talked him into. Kyle was a good man. DeMarco shouldn’t have teased him so mercilessly. They were all good troopers, Carmichael and Lipinski and Morgan and all the others, each with their own strengths and shortcomings, but all intending to accomplish some good, to keep the madness of the world in check. All except him. He had thrown in the towel. Burned out. Washed up. Not even fifty yet and already irrelevant.
And here he was, dragging Jayme into oblivion with him. She lay sleeping on her side, one hand beneath her cheek, the other touching his arm. He thought of Thomas Huston and the exit he had chosen. A magnificent exit. DeMarco’s single shot into Inman’s heart had been little more than a period at the end of Tom’s final line. God, how he admired that man. And how he missed his friendship.
All the people he had let himself love were gone. His mother gone. Laraine gone, at least from his life. Ryan Jr. ineluctably gone. Thomas gone.
Duty gone. Purpose gone. Meaning gone.
Only Jayme remained. A vibrant, intelligent, ambitious, and relevant woman, now reduced to this, companion to a floater.
He moved an arm across his chest, let his fingertips touch hers. Closed his eyes and thought, Please, God. Tell me what to do. Don’t let me ruin her life too.
TWENTY-FOUR
DeMarco was awakened by the cackle of a blue jay. Or maybe it was by Jayme’s hand between his legs, a light, tickling touch that sent an electrical charge into his scrotum, up through his spine, and into his wearied brain, where it produced a static discharge that shocked him awake with a sound remarkably similar to a blue jay’s cackle. Whatever the source of the sound, he opened his bloodshot eyes in a tight squint. Dim pink light stung his retinas. “I hate you,” he mumbled.
“You disgust me,” she said softly, then brushed her lips slowly down over his chest and stomach and down the length of his lengthening penis. When she took him into her mouth, he felt himself falling, so he put his hands in her thick hair and held on until she lifted away and sat atop him, her back to his chest, right leg bent at the knee, left foot flat against the floor as she rose and fell atop him in languorous, gentle waves of movement.
Later she lay against him chest to chest, heels hooked under his ankles, her mouth to his neck. He waited until their breathing slowed. “That was exhausting and wonderful,” he told her. “I’m going back to sleep now. If I’m not awake by noon tomorrow, do that to me again.”
She chuckled. “I’m headed for the shower, babe. And then it’s your turn. And then we’ll go run and get sweaty. And then we’ll shower again and go to Grandma’s for brunch, and then we’ll go to the funeral home. Then you can take a nap.”
“There’s not enough water for four showers,” he said.
“Then we get up and run.”
“Nooooo,” he said.
She rolled over and sat up. “Come on, it’s good karma. A man’s body is his temple.”
“Your body is my temple.”
“Nice. And if you ever want to worship there again, get your sweet butt in gear.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Only seven minutes into his first sluggardly jog in Aberdeen, he gave up the pretense and slowed to a trudge. Jayme was probably at the far end of town by now, maybe cooling her feet in Lake Barkley. How could she run so lithely, so gazelle-like, after such a grueling day and unrefreshing night? Were it not for the sexy wake-up call, he might still be dead to the world. He had to admit there were perks to not living in solitude. But there was also a price to be paid. He intended to keep paying it but worried that he was quickly running out of currency.
It was not yet 8:00 a.m., and the sunlight off the pavement stung like vinegar in his eyes. So did the blue of the sky. The thousands of blooming flowers punctuating every lawn seemed to explode upon his retinas in silent little bombs of color. Only the still-dewy grasses did not irritate his eyes. So as he walked, he kept his gaze just to the left of his feet, just beyond the curb.
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It was the anomalous length of the grass after all those manicured lawns that caused him to look up. An empty lot, long untended. And centered in the lot, standing nearly motionless behind the low, weedy mound of a filled-in foundation, was another anomaly: a man in a black suit. A very round man, who was looking his way.
DeMarco, out of embarrassment, smiled and nodded. Both gestures hurt. And that was when the day turned strange for DeMarco, took on a kind of dreamlike unreality though everything remained visibly the same. A minute ago the day had been utterly real and concrete for DeMarco, the unpleasantness of jogging, the steamy, heavy air. But now, with the appearance of a rather odd-looking man in an empty lot, DeMarco felt as if the world had made a tilt of some kind and shifted off balance.
The man responded to DeMarco’s smile with the one response DeMarco did not welcome. Speech. “Shameful,” he called out.
DeMarco tried to stand a little straighter. That hurt too. “Pardon me?”
“What happened here. It’s shameful. You agree?”
Damn, DeMarco told himself. Now you’ve gone and got yourself into a conversation.
He weighed his options: begin jogging again, or explain later to Jayme that he had just hit his stride when a stranger interrupted his run.
He lifted one foot and then the other over the curb. It would be easier to trudge thirty feet than to project his voice the same distance. He crossed to the man.
“Sorry,” he said, and held out his hand. “Ryan DeMarco. This is only my second day in town. So I have no idea what happened here.”
“Name’s Hoyle,” the man said, but kept his hands at his side.
After an awkward few seconds, DeMarco lowered his hand too. “So what shameful thing happened here?”
“Used to be the First Baptist Church,” Hoyle said. His throaty voice moved with a distinctly southern lilt, but his articulation was precise, educated, a halting delivery that suggested an agile mind racing far ahead of every word.
Walking the Bones Page 7
