by Laird Barron
I couldn’t separate the living from the phantasms. What a parade it proved to be: departed Mother waving to me from the edge of a glacier; evil Father, belt wrapped around his sinewy forearm, as he snarled and instructed me how to avoid the worst of the slash from a knife or busted glass; my sweet, dead dog Achilles, tongue lolling joyously; lovers, enemies, and some guys I’d rubbed out along the way. My double with a rifle, my double with a garrote, my double grinning an animal’s grin as heads rolled. Exploding cars, a black smoke cloud swallowing the hunter’s moon. Bloated faces of kingpins laughed in the smoke. Mocking me, the pissant.
Reba held my hand and apologized for cussing. She thanked me for rescuing her, even though she remained convinced nothing would’ve happened, the boys came from a different culture, everybody had to understand that. Virgil waited nearby, visage grim as an old stone monument. Reba dematerialized and Jade kept spooning bitter medicine down my throat. Herbal remedies from China, she said. Mainstream doctors were butchers and quacks, she said. I realized for a fleeting moment that everybody thought I was a goner.
Wait, I said in my mind to Reba’s departing shadow. Wait. And I reached for her, though I didn’t know why. Virgil poured more ice into the tub. Jade shushed me and placed a damp cloth over my face. I went under again.
* * *
—
SIX DAYS AND NIGHTS I LAY in my open grave of a bed. Six days and nights of compresses and sponge baths and psychedelic visions and that god-awful Chinese elixir. The Walkers distrusted modern medicine, thus no emergency room trip for their number one tenant. Too weak to argue, I slipped into deep and tormented slumber.
In my nightmares, I was five again. Dad had come home from the barracks drunk, blood on his shirt, scotch on his breath. A beast in a rage. He’d smashed the door and turned his baleful glare upon Mom, had taken a step toward her and I recall, albeit as a blur, hurling myself against his leg, punching ineffectually while yelling at him to leave her alone. I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, yada yada. Brother and Sister cried and Dad regarded me blearily, then tousled my hair and wandered into the night, lost. I dreamt of Achilles and how he’d fallen into blue-and-green space, how he looked me in the eye as he floated away, dying so that I might live. I wandered through Elysian Fields and the Boar of the Wood hunted me, his tusks as sharp as spearheads. He felled the tall golden grass with each sideways swipe of his massive head. My grandfather, dressed in skins and a necklace of sharks’ teeth, floated always two paces ahead, his gaze serene as a storm cloud. He raised a flint ax and I woke, the blare of a conch horn trailing into the ether.
It was the seventh morning.
THIRTEEN
Believe it or not, I don’t mind cops. The incompetent ones are stupid and about as dangerous as flies buzzing in your hair. The competent ones know what’s good for them and keep clear, or you can grift them, or you blackmail them, or you shoot them.
The detectives who dropped in to visit me were on the take. Fancy cologne and nicer shoes told all. The pair were only going through the motions. Rourke and Collins. A heavyset man with hangdog jowls, and a bemused blonde who might’ve fooled me with her aw-shucks schoolmarm act if I hadn’t seen it all before.
Normally, I don’t speak to Johnny Law unless my counsel is present. The coppers caught me off guard. Dizzy, weak, disoriented, and vulnerable. I said as little as possible; just lay there, slack-jawed, while they lobbed softballs with nasally northeastern drawls. Their inquiries concerned the three fine gentlemen at whom I may or may not have discharged a firearm during the night of the Fire Festival.
In my wooziness, I didn’t comprehend that their interest in those punks might run deeper than our primitive tête-à-tête. I figured a witness had complained and sicced the dogs on me, so to speak. I gave the cops a partial plate on the Suburban and denied firing a pistol. All the usual jazz. I needn’t have sweated it—they didn’t care.
Collins winked.
“I admire your style, Coleridge,” she said. “Sincerely. Any maggots slapping around a sweet young thing deserve what they get.”
“You remember anything, let us know, chief,” Rourke said.
“Be seeing you, handsome,” Collins said.
The detectives showed themselves out the door.
Jade brought my laundry and my meals and I tried to thank her, but she hushed me with a stern glance and hustled off. It wasn’t until another two days passed that I could do more than hobble around the cabin. Not one to lie around like a sluggard, I decided to resume my duties—fetching and carrying as per my routine.
Even starting well after noon and moving at drastically reduced speed, I sweated like one of the horses after a lunging. Honest labor had a salutary effect on my well-being. When dusk rolled around and I called it a day, I felt something near to alive once more. I rested on my porch, ate a can of stew, and drank a tall glass of iced tea. The landscape disappeared as the blue-and-orange sunset downshifted to black.
The Walkers’ rig pulled into the drive and lights in the house came on. I scraped my plate and scoured it with sand from the horseshoe pit and finished the tea, then made my way up the path to the house.
The funereal aspect permeating the living room halted me in my tracks.
“Reba’s gone,” Jade said when she saw me. Her eyes were red. “They took her.” They could only mean her friends in the red Suburban.
“Those goddamned dirtbags,” I said and sat on the couch next to her. Felt weird—I wasn’t sure whether to put my arm around her or not. She stared at the darkened main window, that portal into the Ancestor Cave, and wrung her hands.
“We don’t know if it has anything to do with them.” Virgil was behind the kitchen counter. An uncorked bottle of Wild Turkey rested near his hand. “We aren’t even certain . . . The police aren’t convinced she’s missing.”
Jade slowly looked at him. They’d been together an eon and it was a cold wind that blew between them in that moment. The liquor wasn’t making her happy either.
Virgil said to me, “Like Jade says, the girl is gone.”
“How long?”
“Five days.”
I covered my face with my hand and tried to organize my thoughts. Five days. Five days equaled deep trouble unless Reba was simply off hitchhiking or shacked up with friends. Otherwise, no news after five days was the worst kind of news.
“Okay. What do we know?”
Reba was last seen by her roommate in her Kingston apartment on the previous Saturday, around midmorning. She’d made plans to go clubbing with friends. Nobody, whoever nobody was, recalled seeing her that night. Her car, an old Mazda, remained on the street outside the apartment. She and her purse were gone, vanished from the face of the earth.
Where was the cavalry? I already guessed the answer. No cavalry. Reba had a rap sheet. Reba had a history of running away. Once, she’d hitched a ride with a trucker to New Orleans and was off the radar for two weeks until calling at 3 a.m., broke and hungry. Reba was black. The authorities clucked sympathetically and filed the report, sent a couple of bored detectives out to the farm as a weak gesture to public relations. Meanwhile, somewhere down the Hudson, a blue-eyed blonde girl was late getting home from work and the media were issuing nationwide red alerts.
“Is Reba on probation?” I said.
Virgil shook his head. “She’s a good kid. Some scrapes. She once stole her uncle’s motorcycle and wrecked it. Played hooky. Got caught with marijuana and beer at a party. That was the incident that pushed things too far. Her parents stuck her in that blasted reformatory, but she never belonged there. Right, honey?”
“Right,” Jade said, distant and frail. “Dawn wouldn’t have done it. It’s Dante’s fault. That plonker.”
“Honey.”
“Mom and Dad?” I said. “Where are they in all of this?”
Virgil poured me a double and Jade crossed her arms and scowle
d.
He said, “Dante’s our boy. He’s out of the picture. Been out of the picture for a long time. Postcards-from-the-front bullshit.”
“I am familiar with the routine,” I said.
“He was in Rikers for a stretch. Gang involvement. Minor league, but enough to ruin his life. He lives in the Bronx. Dawn is an angel. She took a position as an RN in Cleveland last summer. Reba didn’t want to leave her friends, so she stayed and we’ve tried to look after her. She’s eighteen and there’s only so much we can do.”
“The day she disappeared . . . Where was everybody?”
“Lionel and I went to see a farmer on the other side of the valley. Haying’s in a few weeks and we helped him get his tractor running. Gus was in the stables later in the afternoon, as usual. Coates and his wife and granddaughters had nipped off to the coast for the weekend. They have a cottage and a fishing boat. Honey, you were with Isaiah, right?”
Jade studied her hands.
“That’s about right. I was either here or in the house. Kept my cell on me. Reba never called, if that’s what you want to know.”
“Can’t say I know what I want to know,” I said.
I asked a few more questions, treading lightly as possible.
Did Reba do drugs? No, she was clean, although she’d had various prescriptions during her stay at Grove Street Academy, per doctor’s orders. Some were to treat mood disorders. She also suffered minor but chronic pain after getting injured in the motorcycle accident.
What were the names of the dudes in the Suburban? Virgil and Jade had no idea because Reba kept mum on the subject. Apparently, she’d also refused to comply when the police asked why I’d allegedly gone berserk that night. Stand-up kid.
Had she dated any of the ghastly trio? Not that the couple was aware. My takeaway was that these guys were bad news. Gangbangers, drug dealers, real live desperadoes, and Reba had grabbed a tiger by the tail. No doubt they’d acted sweet as pie in the beginning. Once the sugar wore off, she’d come to fear them.
Oh, and had anybody seen Lionel? I thought he must be holed up in his shack.
“You gotta understand, Lionel drinks,” Virgil said. “By that, I mean he drinks a lot. When he came here a year and a half ago, he was suffering mightily. Saw some things overseas that shook him to the core, I expect.”
“He seldom speaks of his service,” Jade said.
“Iraq or Afghanistan?” I said.
“Both. And some other places. He’s on the mend. There are rough patches. He disappears for a while. Comes home beat to hell like a tomcat that got in a tussle with every rival in the neighborhood. Scared us the first couple of times.”
The cops had questioned Lionel and poor mentally challenged Gus with the same pronounced lack of diligence I’d observed firsthand. Last night, Lionel declared a holiday and went careening down the road in his Monte Carlo. His shack remained untenanted as of that moment.
I muttered reassuring nonsense and retreated to my cabin, where I powered on a fresh cell phone and made the first of two calls.
Detective Rourke answered. I asked if he was still looking into the Walker case and he said yeah. I reminded him that I’d provided a partial plate and requested to be apprised if he tracked down the owner.
“Thanks for the assist. But, see, I’m not in the habit of involving civilians in police business, chief.”
“Think of me as an informal partner. Let’s do lunch.”
“I brown-bag it.”
“Perfect. I’ll fix you a sandwich. Lots of lettuce.”
The line went silent for a few moments.
“Okeydokey, chief. Gimme a day or two. Take care.” Detective Rourke hung up. Next I rang County and found out Lionel had been locked up on a drunk-and-disorderly beef.
There wasn’t much to do after that except wait for the gears to grind in the machine. I dressed in a plaid long-sleeved work shirt, jeans, and a new pair of steel-toed logging boots. Shrugged on a plaid lumberjack coat, locked the door, and jumped into the Ford and headed for town.
FOURTEEN
I paid the cash bond and waited outside the Ulster County Jail until Lionel limped through the double doors and down the granite steps. He looked like a ball of yarn that’d gotten batted around by a tiger. Clothes ripped, eyes blacked, nose busted, the rest of him bruised up, down, and sideways. He remained in high spirits, however. I figured it had something to do with all the skin missing from his knuckles. He whistled a jaunty wartime tune and climbed in beside me with only a brief grimace of pain.
“Howdy, pardner. You must be the disturber of the peace,” I said.
“Rootin’, tootin’ straight,” he said. “I am also a raiser of hell.”
His car had been impounded and the four patrons who’d given him the beatdown behind the Golden Eel stole seventy bucks and a picture of an ex-girlfriend from his wallet.
“Heck of a photo,” I said.
“Swimsuit model. Linda’s in Tahiti doing magazine covers as I sit here in my misery. She’s doing magazine editors, photographers, and towel boys too. That’s why she’s an ex. Fuck, I’m out of cigs.”
“Obviously, this is an emergency.”
I threw the truck into gear and squired him to the Benson Bros. quick stop and loaned him a twenty. I observed through the window as he leaned on the counter to chat up the trailer park princess working the till. He emerged with a pack of Marlboro Reds and a carton of Steel Reserve. He already had a cigarette in his mouth and smoldering before he made it back across the lot.
“Time to drink,” I said as we flew down the road. “You eighty-sixed from the Eel?”
“Nah, Hoss. You don’t get eighty-sixed from the Eel.”
The Golden Eel was a shabby conglomeration of shotgun shack and Quonset hut plopped next to the slimy bank of the Rondout. The curved span of the 9W bridge loomed overhead like the flying buttress of a medieval cathedral. On the opposite bank stretched a chain of marinas, wrecking yards, and warehouses. Across the street were vacant lots, abandoned garages, and a limestone ridge screened in heavy underbrush and beech trees. A block and a half south, Gunderson Avenue cut east and west, its length bracketed by Italian restaurants, tony salons, and bars that catered to the touristas and well-heeled locals. The north–south culture war sometimes resulted in broken bones.
The lot was crowded on this Friday night, including a squad car with two unis slouched on its hood eating calzones and chugging beer. Their bright eyes were cold.
We strolled in through the bat wings and found a recently evacuated booth. Yeah, this was a hole-in-the-wall you dared not bring the wife and kids. A smoky, greasy joint that smelled of pissed alcohol, burnt tobacco, and testosterone. The main room was low-beamed and dim as a cell, packed with off-brand bikers, longshoremen, and Catskills rednecks. AC/DC, Joan Jett, the Allman Brothers, and David Allan Coe took turns raging from the jukebox. The scene reminded me of a hybrid of a Viking longhouse and a honky-tonk in a dystopian future after all the bombs had dropped.
I ordered Jim Beam from a buxom waitress with golden eyeshadow. Lionel went with that old standby, Cuervo.
“Got anything like this back in AK?” He licked the salt from his wrist and slammed his shots, one, two, three.
“Dutch Harbor and Seward do it Thunderdome-style.” I flattened my left hand palm-down on the table so he could see the jagged scar that sliced from knuckles to wrist. “Had me a time there.”
“What does a Samoan do at the North Pole? Bust the legs of the elves who try to unionize?”
“Samoans love Alaska. They’ve got the best gangs. However, I’m Maori. There’s also some English peasantry lurking in the tall grass of my lineage.”
“Same fucking question, then.”
“I make awesome snow angels.”
Lionel winked at the waitress. The intricate skull-and-crossbones patch on his shoulde
r had nearly come unstitched.
“Marine Force Recon,” he said upon noting my interest. His eyes shone. “First Battalion. Been in Fallujah and Helmand. Heard the owl hoot and seen the crow fly. Those bastards last night . . . Nabbed Linda’s photo, but I’d be damned if they were gonna take my colors.”
The waitress brought more tequila and bourbon. Lionel offered one to the lady and us three clinked tumblers. She downed hers and patted his hamburger cheek and swayed her way toward the bar.
“Slàinte!” I said.
“Shlàinte, fuckers!” He drank and pointed with the empty at four men who’d prowled through the doors. Average height, well-muscled; two with buzz cuts, one bald as Kojak, one shaggy on the collar like myself, except he had a whopper of a Fu Manchu going. Dark shirts, khakis, and the requisite pouts of macho gunslingers and bullyboys.
“The devils appear. This is their favorite watering hole.”
“You serve with them?”
“Not in the Corps. The mean-looking dude on the end—baldy? That’s Teddy Valens. The asshole in chief. Green Beret. We did a hitch with a merc outfit together. Might say a disagreement over the treatment of civilian natives led to bad blood between us. He thought they should die so we could loot their shit. Me, I’m not so much with the raping and murdering. Ain’t no U.S. laws to worry about in some of those theaters of operation. Cowboys and Indians all the fuck over again.”
“Ah. I had you fitted for the white hat.”
“Don’t know about white. Gray, maybe.”
“DynCorp?”
“Black Dog out of Maryland. Provides security for American contractors at a shitload of hot spots. Iraq, Afghanistan, the Congo. Valens is no nice guy. His boys aren’t sweethearts either.”
Watching the mercenaries strut and preen and forcibly occupy a table of college girls and their frightened college boy dates, I had to agree. These soldiers weren’t sweethearts. After a bit of threat and posture, the heroic mercs let the college kids depart in peace. The girls were crying; one of the boys too.
