by David Martin
“Simple?”
“Yeah. You know what I’m talking about don’t you … dirty pictures.”
“Filthy,” Paul concurred.
“You see them?”
“Did I see them?”
McCleany’s shoulders sagged. “I’m going to fucking shoot you.”
“Okay.”
While studying Paul, trying to figure out what to do with him, McCleany leaned on the three-wood like it was a cane.
“Sometimes I hear a piano playing,” Paul said.
“Hope played a piano.”
Paul thought about that for a moment then declared with great emotion, “What a beautiful thing to say.” Tears filled his tired, itching eyes. “Hope played a piano.”
“I met your wife.”
“Annie doesn’t play the piano.”
“She plays the flute.”
“She does?” Paul genuinely surprised by this bulletin.
“I caught her playing Camel’s flute.”
He didn’t understand.
“Your wife’s a sexy woman … red hair, cute little caboose. Know where she is right now?”
“With the police?”
As McCleany laughed he used thumb and forefinger to press the bridge of his fat nose. “I guess that’s one way of looking at it. She’s staying with an ex-cop, I walked in on them … there’s no polite way of putting this, son, she was giving him a blow job.”
Paul’s heart squeezed tight in his chest.
“Oh yeah,” McCleany said, examining his club. “They were going at it hot and heavy.” He looked at Paul. “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”
“I saw Satan, he has genitals hanging from his face.”
“Jesus kid you are seriously fucked up.”
“Yes,” Paul agreed. “I seriously am.”
McCleany regripped the three-wood. “Moe Norman holds the club the way you would a hammer, stands way back from the ball. He’s still around you know, didn’t have the temperament for the pro tour. I can’t get the hang of his swing.”
In response Paul told him, “Crazy people don’t hear voices inside their heads, they hear the voices talking to them from outside … if it was just a voice inside your head, you could ignore it … more or less.”
McCleany stared at him.
Paul asked, “Are you the policeman Annie sent to pick me up?”
“She’s sending a cop over to take you in?”
“She said something about a camel.”
McCleany laughed. “This particular Camel is the guy whose dick your wife was trying real hard to swallow.”
“Oh.” It was a lament.
“Come on I’ll give you a ride to Camel’s office, let you sort him and your wife out … but first you level with me about those pictures. Growler found them yet?”
“No.”
“You telling me the truth?”
“Yes.”
“Okay good, now we’re making some progress. Where’s Growler?”
“He’s looking for … a friend?”
“A friend?”
“What a friend we have in Jesus.”
McCleany raised the club. “Don’t start.”
“Kenny?”
“Growler’s out looking for Kenny Norton?” This pleased McCleany enormously.
“Can’t find him though.”
“Shit, if all he needs is an address, I can help him there.”
“You said Annie is … committing adultery?”
This question also cheered McCleany, he hadn’t been sure that his lie about Annie had registered.
“Is she?” Paul asked in anguished voice.
“She’s fucking Teddy Camel, yeah.”
“Please don’t say it that way.”
“It hurt less if I say she’s ‘committing adultery’?”
How can you tell what hurts less or more when everything hurts?
The golfer was speaking to him, asking something about how long does it take Paul to recover.
“From what?”
“A blow job.”
“Oh.”
“Me, my age, takes twenty-four hours to reload, ain’t that a kick in the ass … in my day I could fuck them on an assembly line but no more. A young guy like you, what … half an hour and you’re ready to go again? The question is, how about Teddy Camel?”
Paul was almost sure that’s the name Annie mentioned, she said he was an old friend of the family.
“Hey buddy.”
“Yes?”
“If we hurry up and get to Camel’s place maybe you can prevent a doubleheader.”
Baseball? Paul’s mind was such a muddle.
The golfer asked him if he had a gun.
“A gun?”
“Don’t repeat every goddamn thing I say!”
“Okay.”
“Now do you own or have access to a firearm?”
Paul thought carefully before answering, he didn’t want the golfer to get mad at him again. Finally he said, “No.”
“I sure as hell can’t loan you mine … how are you with a knife?”
“A knife?”
McCleany jammed him hard in the gut with that three-wood. “I saw some butcher knives down in your kitchen, we’ll grab one on the way out.”
Holding his stomach Paul leaned over on his side, putting both feet up on the couch. “I’d like to sleep now.”
“Jesus Christ—”
“Our Lord and Saviour,” Paul said dreamily.
McCleany grabbed an ankle and pulled him from the couch, when Paul landed on his ass he cried out in pain.
McCleany helped him to his feet, brushed him off a little, put an arm around Paul’s shoulder. “Got something for you.” The golfer held out a meaty hand, centered in the palm was a key.
Another parable, Paul thought … a key.
“The key to Camel’s office,” the golfer said. “Got it from a security guard. Go ahead, take it.”
Paul did, sensing inevitability.
18
“You’re back.” Annie got out of Teddy’s recliner and came to him but then wasn’t sure what to do when she got there, a kiss on the cheek, a friendly hug? She’d been in love with the idea of Teddy Camel for twenty-five years but they’d been together only two times, once when she was ten and then that summer when she was twenty-one … in some ways he was a stranger. And now that she was no longer immediately terrified about what had happened at Cul-De-Sac, no longer emboldened by vodka, Annie felt awkwardly shy around Teddy … ended up speaking too loudly and cheerfully, “Hey how’d that stakeout go, you catch the guy?”
Camel’s reply came as always in cool understatement. “No.” He didn’t tell her about it. “You ready for dinner?”
She made those exaggerated facial expressions a woman will use when seeking empathy. “Well I bought some food and a bottle of wine so we could eat here …”
“Good.”
Her big smile was followed by a broad look of concern. “But I finally got through to Paul and he sounds really disturbed, I’m not even sure he understood what I was telling him … I’m feeling guilty about what he’s going through so maybe we shouldn’t take the time to have dinner, maybe you should just go out to Cul-De-Sac and get him right now.”
“Okay.”
That’s what’s so maddening about this man, she thought … he won’t try to talk me into having dinner with him, won’t say he’s disappointed we’re not going to have some time together, doesn’t even act ticked off, just says okay.
“You got the keys to your truck?”
“Sometimes I could just slap you.”
“You’ve done that.”
“Don’t you want to know why you infuriate me?”
“Not really.”
She made a growling sound, wanted to shake him.
“Maybe we have time for a glass of that wine you bought,” he said.
She almost asked, And now I’m supposed to be grateful?… but knew it would sound bitchy. “Paul’s been out there at Cul-De-S
ac for a month on his own, I suppose he can survive another half hour … I’ll get the wine.”
Camel accepted the bottle from her without looking at the label and while he was pulling the cork he told Annie, “You look pretty.”
Which caught her by surprise … not that she hadn’t given thought to the clothes she’d bought: a simple white cotton dress that went down to her ankles, the bodice closed with a white cord that Annie had tied in a bow. She’d put on makeup, used a brand of lipstick called Red Abandon, wore dangly earrings. Annie was barefoot. She was also in the middle of her cycle.
Last month she read a magazine article that said women, married or single, more often than not initiate affairs at a time in their cycle when they’d normally be most fertile … and this holds true even if the women are using birth control measures, which of course Annie was not.
Being in the middle of her cycle was one reason Annie traveled from North Carolina to surprise Paul, hoping to get pregnant on their wedding anniversary … except now she was with the man who made her pregnant fourteen years ago, is it any wonder that clear-eyed people claim there are no accidents, no coincidences.
When he handed her the glass of wine, Annie took note of two things … one, the glasses he’d brought out were expensive crystal and, two, age had bent him over a little.
“Cheers,” he said.
“Cheers,” she replied, then talked a little about the wine.
He listened, adding nothing.
“Before I forget,” she said, “there was a guy in your office earlier … I found him standing behind your desk, he wouldn’t tell me his name.”
“What’d he look like?”
“About sixty, dressed like someone on the way to or from the golf course … said he was a friend of yours but I think he was lying about that.”
“Don’t know any golfers. You leave a door unlocked?”
“No. He knew why I came to you, he knew about Cul-De-Sac.”
Camel told Annie about his conversation with Jake Kempis, about the call Eddie got from the retired state police investigator. She asked if he thought any of that was connected to Cul-De-Sac, Camel said he didn’t know. They sipped at the wine and purposely didn’t catch each other’s eye, then Annie said, “In some ways you have changed.”
“Fourteen years.”
“You don’t seem angry anymore, your anger used to frighten me. Remember that fight you got in with that big red-faced guy on the beach?”
“Yeah.”
“Pow, pow, pow,” she said, throwing a flurry of blows with her left hand that caused the glass in her other hand to spill a little wine on the floor. “Sorry,” she said, looking around for a towel.
“Leave it.”
She stopped looking for the towel and told him, “That fight was over before it got started.”
“Stupid of me.”
“He was a jerk.”
“Yeah but all we had to do was move on down the beach. He was there with his wife and kid, remember? I ask him to turn down the radio, he’s got to show the wife and kid how he’s their protector. It wouldn’t have hurt us none to move on down the beach.”
“You were showing off for me.”
“And he was showing off for his family … ends up with a busted nose, humiliated in front of his wife and kid. To what point?”
“Prove you were the baddest dog on the beach.”
“Yeah well …”
“What?”
“Mostly now I stay up on the porch.”
“Just stopped being pissed off at the world?”
“I guess.” He poured them each another glass of wine. “I used to wake up in the morning, like you said, pissed off at the world, I was mad before anything happened to make me mad, by the time I got out there among people I was loaded and cocked, I don’t know why, never did figure it out, not like I had some trauma in childhood to make me angry all the time … but it was there, I could feel it like a knot in my stomach.”
“And it just went away?”
“Right here in this room, or at least that’s the first time I knew it was gone. A crew had been sent by the building manager to paint the place before I moved in, I specified that I wanted the walls white. All my working life I’d been looking at institutional green, I wanted plain white walls. I come in, the crew’s just finishing up … every wall here was painted green.
“I said to the crew chief the walls are supposed to be white. He didn’t take it very well. I guess he’d had a rough day, everybody on his ass, it’s Friday afternoon and he didn’t have room enough for one more complaint. So he said to me, ‘Well, pal, they’re not white, they’re green.’ He told me I’d have to put in another work order, they’d catch me next cycle through, six months maybe. Then he told his guys start wrapping it up. Ignoring me. Daring me to say anything.
“In the old days that’s when the knot in my gut would’ve started twisting. I never had to work up an anger, never had to summon it … it just came on its own. So I stood there staring at that crew chief, waiting for the anger to hit, like waiting for a drug to take effect … any second now I’m going to shove his face against those wet walls, tell him he’d better start licking that green off. And either he would fight back or he wouldn’t. Guy probably could’ve beat the shit out of me, not that that ever stopped me before.
“But it never arrived. The anger. I just wasn’t mad. I didn’t feel twisted up inside, had no desire to fight the guy. I don’t know. Maybe you really do get wiser as you get older, maybe it’s just a lower hormone level.
“This crew chief, seeing that I’m not going to do anything, he decides to exploit the situation, tells me, ‘You got any problem with my work, keep in mind I could turn you in for setting up an apartment here.’ Because the building is supposed to be commercial space only, no residential.
“I showed him the work order that specified white walls and I said, ‘I had to look at green walls in the army, green walls all the time I was a cop … I was just hoping to get away from green walls, that’s all.’
“He asked me what I did in the army, I told him I was an MP and he said yeah I might’ve been one of the MPs hauling him out of the cathouses he used to frequent back when he was in the Army, and I asked him where he served, he said he did a tour in Nam, so I told him, ‘Welcome home.’ Because most of the guys never got a parade, never got welcomed back … and his whole attitude changed, he said he had a brother-in-law who was a cop and we talked about that for a while, then he took the work order, looked at it, looked at me … says he and his crew would be back Monday morning to repaint the whole place white. Said he knew where some carpet was left over from a big job, he’d arrange for it to be delivered after the painting was done, have it laid for me too … no charge. Apologized for the screwup with the paint. We went down to The Ground Floor and had a couple beers together.
“And afterwards I’m thinking, Jesus Christ, it’s that easy? I wanted to call people, tell them I was sorry for being such a hard case, I hadn’t realized there was an option. Wanted to call bars where I’d been in fights, apologize to guys I’d beaten up for no good reason—”
“Did you want to call me?”
Camel didn’t answer right away, he was unaccustomed to talking so much and finally settled for telling her, “I thought about you a lot over the years.”
“Not enough to write back, return any of my calls.”
“I guess not.”
“Did you keep my letters?”
“No.”
“Paul’s kept everything I ever wrote to him, even notes I left for him in the first apartment we rented.”
“There’s a better grade of man around now.”
“You think men like Paul are weak sisters.”
“No.”
Annie ran a fingertip around the rim of her glass. “I wanted to marry you so bad, I was going to show up one day on your doorstep and slit my wrists in front of you just so you’d have to take care of me.”
“It wouldn’
t have worked.”
“You would’ve let me bleed to death?”
“No I mean us getting married.”
“Why?”
He poured more wine, finishing the bottle. “You got pregnant that summer?” The question caught Annie off guard but of course Camel already knew the answer. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.”
She was afraid if she tried to speak right now she’d start crying.
“You were the best thing that ever happened in my life,” Camel told her.
Now she couldn’t even look at him or she’d start bawling.
There was a long silence but it didn’t make either of them feel particularly awkward, almost as if they were soaking up each other’s presence, reacquainting themselves by osmosis.
“I better have some coffee before I drive out there,” Camel finally said. “Would you like a cup?”
“No thanks.” Her voice seemed to be okay. “A cup of tea would be nice.”
Camel went to the counter by the sink, Annie watching him from behind. “Do you like living here?”
“It’s convenient.” The truth was, living here made Camel crazy, especially at night when he couldn’t sleep and had nowhere to roam. He surprised himself by confessing to her, “I wish I had a house.”
“Really?”
“When I was married I had a great house, two-story Victorian with a double set of stairways … I loved walking around at night when everyone else was asleep, checking on things, going out into the yard, coming back in.” It struck him as a novel idea now, to have grass under his feet anytime he wanted. “I used to end up down in the basement, putter around with my tools.” He remembered how, when the circular saw came on, the light bulb hanging from its wire over the workbench would dim like it was wincing from the power draw. Living here in this single room the only night-roaming options open to him were crossing over to his one-room office and standing in there or taking to the building’s hallways and stalking those empty corridors, getting bored stares from the guard who walked from one box to the next putting in a key to prove he was there.
While Teddy stood at the counter getting the tea ready, Annie came up behind him and slipped an arm casually around his waist, her hand resting on his hip where she felt the big revolver. “Armed and dangerous.”
He grimaced a smile.
