No Regrets, Coyote

by John Dufresne

  I felt sore and stiff and tried to stretch out my back. I started coughing and couldn’t stop until I drank a glass of water. A lot of folks were taking the county’s Emergency Management’s advice and were heading out of harm’s way. Traffic to the Keys was backed up from Islamorada to Cutler Ridge. The turnpike and interstate north were gridlocked. The Highway Patrol estimated a three-hour drive time from New River to Palm Beach. The phone rang. Django hopped down from the plant and clawed his way up my pant leg and onto the table. I answered the call. A crisis at Almost Home. Dad had pulled a gun on Mr. Jake Machinist and threatened to fire a bullet through his eye. No, I’m not making the name up, Mr. Melville. Mr. Machinist is … was … a prominent attorney before his recent series of strokes. He’s been rushed to Memorial with an apparent heart attack. The police were interviewing my father as we spoke. I said I’d be right there.

  Django was at my plate licking my eggs. I told Red to stay inside. He said he’d regrout the bathroom tiles. I said that wouldn’t be necessary. He lifted his eyebrow and looked over the top of his sunglasses. On the way to Almost Home I listened to a voice mail from Georgia: “A miracle has happened, Wylie. Tripp is alive, praise Jesus! He was found wandering disoriented, weak, and starving in a little seaside village in Barbados. The last thing he remembers before being saved is these two menacing black men heading his way on the deck. The boys have flown back to the States to be with their grandmother. You remember Carolina, don’t you?” Yes, I did. The unforgettable Carolina, who spent her days shoplifting at Walmart and her nights in front of the TV watching Perry Mason reruns.

  When I arrived at Almost Home, the cops told me that Myles was incoherent. Yes, they knew the pistol was a prop, but that didn’t change anything. Officer Troupes said, “Your dad keeps saying he’s got a lot of ham in him. He’s not Jewish, I take it.”

  I said, “He’s doing Lionel Barrymore.”

  “Who?”

  Officer Troupes said, “We’ve Baker-Acted your old man. He’ll be held for seventy-two hours in the psych unit at Everglades General, and if all goes well, and if Mr. Machinist survives and doesn’t press charges, you can have him back.”

  Officer Bradley stated the obvious. “Your father’s certainly not competent to stand trial.”

  They allowed me five minutes with Dad. I asked him what he thought he was doing. He laughed and said he’d made Machinist piss his pants. He pulled a gun on him because Machinist was the man they sent to kill him. Who sent him? The drug lords.

  “You’ve done it now, you know. They’re throwing you out of here.”

  I later learned that Attorney Machinist had represented unscrupulous mortgage lenders who were being sued by the home buyers they defrauded, and maybe I shouldn’t have, but I did, in fact, feel just a little pleased at this manifestation of instant karma. Shame on me, of course. I sent a breathtaking floral arrangement and sincere apologies to Mr. Machinist, Esquire. I wished him a swift and complete recovery.

  DA Millard arranged for me to meet with Wayne for thirty minutes at the county jail. I sat at the metal table in the middle of the ten-by-twelve-foot room listening to the hum of fluorescent lights above my head and wondering who was watching me shift uncomfortably in my chair. The room was four cinder-block walls painted a glossy, but sallow, green. The green metal door had a small window of reinforced glass. I assumed the room was bugged and that whatever we said would be recorded. The squashed body of a cockroach was stuck to the wall a foot from the ceiling where someone at some time must have dispatched it with the heel of a shoe. Some wag had drawn a circle with a Magic Marker around the roach and written, Gregor S.

  Wayne was led into the room by an ESO guard with tiny blue eyes and a cast on his left wrist. Wayne’s head was shaved, and his left cheekbone was swollen and bruised. He wore an orange jumpsuit, white socks, and plastic sandals. He sat and held up his hands. The guard unlocked and removed the handcuffs and told me to buzz him when we were finished. He pressed the white button by the door to illustrate and stepped outside.

  I told Wayne that I’d spoken to his mom. He said if I spoke to her again to tell her not to come see him and not to attend what would be a very brief trial. He’d plead guilty, and he expected to receive the death penalty. That would be the only justice, wouldn’t it? He touched his mouth with the tips of his fingers, brushed his hand along the side of his head, grabbed his nose between his thumb and index finger, and wiped his face on his sleeve. He said, “So why have you come?”

  “I want to know why you killed those two girls.”

  Wayne tried to gather a yawn in his hand. “I don’t know why.” He pumped his right leg.

  “Or you don’t want to know why?”

  “I did it because I could.”

  “You could rob a bank, but you didn’t.”

  “Money doesn’t interest me.” He stopped pumping his leg, folded his hands between his thighs, and began swinging his knees together and apart over and over.

  I said, “Do you think about those girls?”

  “I think they aren’t suffering anymore.”

  “What did it feel like to kill them?”

  “You want an honest answer?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “I found it disappointing.” He stood and stretched. He walked to the wall and leaned back against it. He put his hands behind his back and stared at his feet. “At first it was kind of a rush. I guess the thrill was that I was doing something new and powerful. And then it just felt like work. I resented having to finish the job, and that just made me angry. I wanted to be alone with a bowl of cereal and my computer.” He shut his eyes. “It’s hard to kill someone who doesn’t want to die.”

  He walked behind me and stood. “I remember being in school—Ronald Reagan Middle School—in the cafeteria, sitting alone, watching other kids smile and talk to each other, and I looked at my miserable uncut bologna-oleo-yellow-mustard-white bread sandwich and my carton of warm milk, and I hated my life so much I squeezed the sandwich into a ball until the bread began oozing out between my fingers.” He walked to his chair and sat.

  I said, “You sound more sad than angry.”

  He looked at me for the first time. “Don’t tell me how I feel. I’m sick of people telling me how I feel. You can’t know what’s going on in here.” He pointed to his head and then his heart. He told me what a fraud I was. And then he stared at me and waited. “Go ahead,” he said, “tell me I’m angry and ask me if I want to go with that.” When I didn’t respond, he said, “We’re finished here.”

  I stood by the door and pushed the buzzer. I waited. I pushed it again. Wayne said, “The guards are fucking with you.”

  Phoebe had gotten me an appointment with Kai to work on my aching and stiff back. He told me to throw away the Flexeril I’d been prescribed. No one ever got better by treating the symptoms, he said. The body will heal itself once the insults have been removed. Kai had set up a temporary office in the back room of the house. Phoebe was in the kitchen when I arrived, packing dinnerware into cartons. She blew me a polite kiss, said Kai was in back waiting for me. I asked her when they were leaving. Soon, she said.

  Kai had me lie on my stomach on the adjusting table. He bent my left leg at the knee and raised it. He touched my lower back. He did the same with my right leg, touched my lower back again, and whistled. “We need to loosen the muscles here. The trauma has contracted them into a steel knot.” He made a fist. I moved to a massage table and lay on my back as rollers in the cushioned bed slowly moved along my spine. Kai told me to alternate ice and moist heat, to take an Advil every six hours. He said I’d need to come back to see him. He asked me how many chiropractors it took to screw in a lightbulb. I didn’t know. He said, Just one, but it takes ten visits.

  Dad remained under observation at Everglades General for eight days, the extra time being necessary, doctors said, to build up his strength and to treat a bronchial infection. By the time I fetched him and brought him home with
me, a lot had changed:

  •Wayne Vanderhyde was dead, murdered by inmates—allegedly—at the jail, stabbed with a soup spoon whose handle had been filed to a point, stabbed fifty-one times, stabbed in the eyes, in the throat, in the ears, and elsewhere. How a prisoner on suicide watch could somehow manage to get himself killed is a mystery, the sheriff admitted, but the ESO had promised a swift and thorough investigation.

  •Georgia and her husband were suing the cruise line for criminal negligence. I learned about this on the local news as Tripp told his harrowing story to a credulous Channel 7 reporter. Only a miracle saved my life, he said. It was not his time to go. Tripp clasped Georgia’s hand and said that God must have a plan for him. I also found out that Tripp’s given name was Bynum. Bynum Fleming “Tripp” Morris. And that his lawyer was Ron Ellis, who had worked for Mickey Pfeiffer.

  •An ESO deputy shot and killed his ex-wife, a thirty-year-old waitress at Eggstasy. About a half hour before Cricket Dorval was murdered, ESO had been warned by Cricket’s sister-in-law that Elton Dorval had an assault rifle and was driving to Lake Ellie to kill his ex. Sheriff Hayes told his dispatcher not to issue a BOLO to other law enforcement agencies, saying he would take care of the situation himself. “I thought I could get the quickest response by making personal contact,” he told the press. He could not.

  •Phoebe had gone ahead to Sedona to get their new house in order. No bon voyage dinner at Kurosawa, no goodbye drink at the Universe, no e-mail farewell, no phone call, no heartfelt letter, no nothing. I decided to believe that saying goodbye would have been too painful for her.

  •Two of our more bellicose senior citizens, strangers who, improbably, shared the same name—Irving Ross—(I wouldn’t lie to you) got into an altercation while standing in the ticket line outside the Regal Maplewood Plaza Cineplex. Unpleasantries were exchanged, voices were raised, and embarrassed wives were shushed. Jostle led to shove led to push led to punch. The recipient of the roundhouse right to the jaw fell and struck his head on the concrete. He died on the way to the hospital. The living Irving Ross was arrested for manslaughter.

  •Dermid Reardon, worried that I would somehow talk him out of his voluntary amputation, found a more sympathetic therapist, a psychiatrist who, in turn, set him up with an accommodating orthopedic surgeon, and the operation had been scheduled. Patience told me that it’s easier to live with no legs than with the overwhelming obsessive desire to have them gone. I said, He’s having them both removed? One at a time, she said. She also said she had seen my profile on thats amore.com and wanted to know why I had never asked her out. I said, I have all my parts. She said, I’m sure you’re missing something. So we made a date.

  •Early on Sunday morning, two groups of refugees were found on beaches in South Florida. A dozen Cubans reached the shore near Matheson Hammock and were taken to the Krome Detention Center, where they were processed and released to their relatives and welcomed to America. The thirty-six Haitians who landed on Melancholy Beach were also taken to Krome, where they would be detained until their imminent deportation.

  •Django the Intrepid caught his first anole in the house and pranced across the living room with the slender fellow in his mouth. He set his trophy on the floor, placed his paw on the anole’s tail, and glanced around the room to see if any admiring eyes were watching. When the tail detached itself and writhed on the floor like a beached eel, Django leaped straight up in the air. While he wrestled the frenetic tail into submission, the bobbed anole dashed away. Red moved his belongings into the Florida room and began painting interior landscapes. He had found himself a volunteer job caring for sick and injured animals at the Wildlife Care Center. Sable delivered a sermon at the Holiness Church of the Saved but Struggling on the subject of “The Body Is a Temple of the Soul.” Bay and I went searching for Marlena, who had gone AWOL from rehab. We checked the motels along Main and Dixie, the bars, the strip joints, and the greasy spoons. We showed the working girls a photo of Marlena, but no one had seen her. We checked the homeless shelter, the weeds along the railroad tracks, and the sea grape thickets along the beach. Every morning Bay got up and sat in front of his iMac and scrolled through the arrest records in Miami-Dade, Monroe, Everglades, and Palm Beach Counties. And then he read through the obits in the Herald and the Journal-Gazette.

  And some things remained the same. The fires had not abated; the winds had not shifted; the tourists had not returned. Some folks had taken to wearing military surplus gas masks, so it looked like a fifties sci-fi movie out there on the streets. Everyone anonymous and insective. And you half expected some colossal, monstrous A-bomb-mutated creature to rise up out of the sea beyond the reef, terrify the few innocent sunbathers on the beach, and flatten our Eden. Kevin Shanks was still among the missing.

  Dad was quiet on the drive home. He sat with his surgical mask on, coughing once in a while, and staring straight ahead. I saw the same bicyclist we’d seen on Christmas morning, the guy in the Santa hat. Hatless now, he’d somehow attached a beach umbrella to the bike’s frame, and now he pedaled in the shade.

  I settled Dad into my bedroom, showed him where his clothes were and his toiletries. He sat on the bed, bounced a bit, nodded his approval. Not wanting to miss a trick, Django climbed up the bedspread and onto the bed. He bounded over to Dad’s hand and bit it.

  “He’s playing,” I said.

  “Who’s he?”

  “Django.”

  “Where will you sleep?”

  “On the couch.”

  I reintroduced Dad to Red, who was leaving for work. I asked Dad what he wanted for lunch. He said, Canadian peas. I said, How about eggs? He told me he liked his eggs “easy on the over and out.” After lunch he said he’d take his pills with a Bloody Mary. I told him we were going to see how life without meds would feel. Maybe it’s all the drugs screwing you up. I made the Bloody Mary. He drank two sips and went to the bedroom for a nap.

  I had a three o’clock with Vladimir, so I drove Dad to Venise and Oliver’s. On the way, he told me that Geronimo slept on his chest and scratched his throat.

  “Django.”

  He asked me how the hit man was doing.

  “Machinist?”

  “The guy who pissed his pants.”

  “He’s back at Almost Home. It wasn’t a heart attack after all. You’re not a killer.”

  “Your uncle Guy used to drive a red and white Studebaker Silver Hawk. He loved that car. Kept blankets over the seats to keep them spotless. Only took the blankets off when he had a date, which was every Saturday night with Baby, his Swedish girlfriend. We thought he was making her up for the longest time. They usually went to the drive-in, he told us, but one Saturday night he got all dressed up, so I followed him in my Dodge all the way to the Scandinavian Club. Sure enough, inside there was Guy and Baby, his blond beauty and a head taller than him. When he was with Baby, Guy looked like the cat that swallowed the canary. Happy as a vulture on a slop wagon.”

  Before I got to my office, Venise called. She said, “He’s not the same person.”

  I said, “He’s confused.”

  “I’m not taking care of someone I don’t know.”

  “Give him time. He’ll adjust. I’ll be back at five to get him.”

  “Who’s Fernando?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He keeps saying someone named Fernando bit him.”

  Vladimir shook my hand and dropped into the chair. He sat with his hands folded on his lap. I did not stare at his neck. I did and I did not want to hear the story of that scar. He wore a starched blue oxford shirt, black slacks, black socks, and black shoes—clothes you wore if you didn’t want to be seen. He began by quoting Pushkin:

  Я жил похоронить моего желания,

  и посмотреть мои мечты разъедать ржавчиной;

  Теперь все, что осталось бесплодны пожары,

  которые горят мои
пустое сердце в пыль.

  Which he translated as:

  I’ve lived to entomb my desires,

  And see my dreams corrupt with rust;

  Now all that’s left are futile fires

  That sear my barren heart to dust.

  And then he wrote it down for me. He touched his heart. “Pushkin speaks for all Russian people.”

  I said, “Tell me what’s going on.”

  He shook his head and leaned back. “The money in this machine is over.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Is metaphor.”

  “Help me out.”

  “Like ATM with no more cash.”

  “You’re spent?”

  He nodded.

  Vladimir told me that he was depressed for the first time in his life and had been now for some weeks. He had assumed this cloud would lift, but it had not. He’d been sad before, of course: when his father, Sergei, died (banquet/fishbone); when Zenit lost to Spartak Moscow in the Premiership semifinals; when he remembered his childhood friends and their games of cowboys and Indians in Kirov Park. Sadness seemed almost quaint to him now—a tug at the heart; a whiff of regret; a brief, sweet taste of nostalgia, and then a shrug back to composure.

  Depression felt like a crushing weight that left him feeling sluggish, dull, and apathetic. Yes, Kouzmanoff’s death had something to do with this. It was like losing a brother. Vladimir said he was staring into the abyss and was angry because he felt helpless to do anything about it. I asked him what he saw in that abyss, and he said himself.

  “You have done something. You’ve taken a step. Today is the day you began to take back your life.”