by Derek Haas
But no. The girl hides right behind my eyes, popping out like a child playing peekaboo whenever I close the lids. I’ve killed people without blinking, without feeling a twinge of remorse, and yet this girl continues to haunt me like an itch under a plaster cast.
“That’s right,” she says. “You and me. We’re stuck together. Scratch-scratch.”
I shake my head, and the water in my hair sprays the shower curtain. But I do not open my eyes. I like the way she looks. I actually like looking at her, I giggle to myself. And then for the first time, I think my past has finally caught me, my defenses are being stormed by a battering ram of life I’ve tried so desperately to shake. I thought if I ran fast enough, if I shirked the past off my back the way I bucked that bookcase in Mr. Cox’s living room, it would be too heavy and slow to catch me. But it’s here, in this shower, in full force, pissed off and angry and bringing madness along for the ride.
“Tell me about your mother,” the girl says, so close to my face I can smell the dirt in her breath.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I mumble, although I can’t be sure if it’s aloud or in my head.
“I want to understand,” she says, floating, swimming, just on the other side of my eyes. “Tell me about your girl. Tell me about Jake.”
Then the water runs hot, a surge of searing heat, and the spell is broken. I jump back from the stream and wait for it to cool a little. Finally, it tapers back to a nice tepid temperature, and I rinse quickly, towel off, and collapse on top of the bed. I feel my eyes close, searching for the dead girl.
I did have a girl once. For just a few months, a long time ago. She had honey-blond, shoulder-length hair and a chocolate Lab named Bandit. She had bright, cheerful eyes that were amplified behind thick black glasses and a single-bedroom apartment above a bookstore in Cam-bridge. She was smart, engaging, lithe, and alive. Her name was Jake.
We met after my release from Waxham Juvenile Corrections and right before my new term started, the bondage that began when I shook hands with a fat man named Vespucci. The handshake with that dark Italian ended things forever, but before that, right before that, was the only period in my life where I felt normal. The only period where I believed, if only for a few fleeting months, I could make it, could whip life, could become a “new” man, like the priest, Father Steve, always repeated at Waxham.
“You came in here dirty, debased boys, but you can leave here as new men. The blessed waters of forgiveness will cleanse you, make you new men, but only if you bathe in a pool of repentance.” And I wanted to believe it, every word. For someone who had been a dirty, debased boy all his life, who didn’t know his mother or father, I thirsted to be a new man the way a desert traveler thirsts for just one drink of water. For once, just one time, I wanted to be a new man drinking a clean glass of water.
When I was released, I hurried to Boston, where Father Steve secured me a job loading cases of beer into trucks. Apparently, Father Steve’s brother hadn’t received the same telegram from God that had found Steve, and he had prospered as a beer distributor. The siblings were cut from the same cloth, though, and Father Steve’s brother helped “new men” get on their feet, get closer to that cool glass of water, even if lugging stacks of beer was the only way he knew to get them there.
A couple of weeks after taking the job, I received the first paycheck of my life. Me, orphan, foster child, ex-convict, me, with a check for four hundred and seventy-two dollars made out in my name. I wrote to Pooley as soon as I got home. We were sentenced to serve until we were eighteen, and since I was older, I had gotten out a couple of years before him. Receiving a letter was one of the few joys a boy could have at Waxham, so I sent him one just about every day. He had to know I had made it, there was something to look forward to, something to dream about in the darkness of that damn rat cage. He had to know I had received a paycheck, was opening a savings account, was waiting for him when he got his release.
It was on the way to the bank to cash my new check that I met her. I didn’t know how to open an account, but Father Steve’s brother had explained to me how easy it was, how glad the banks would be to hold my money each week. I was wearing a clean shirt, and my pants were only slightly dirty. I felt good.
She grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around. “Louis?” she had said. My instinct was to watch out, to protect myself, so seldom had I let someone touch me. But for some reason, as firm as her grip had been on my shoulder, I didn’t feel threatened.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry, I thought you were my brother.”
I felt a smile coming. Her laughter was real, exposed, infectious. “I’m sorry,” she finally finished, catching her breath, and then her hand extended toward me. “From the side, you looked exactly like my brother. I’m Jake.”
“Jake?”
“Jacqueline. Jake. I like Jake better.”
I nodded, grinning like a madman, and shook her hand. Damn, did it feel soft. “I do, too.”
Her eyes narrowed, still smiling, and she examined me almost with affection. “I swear. From the side, I thought Lou had come to town.”
“Yeah?”
“It was uncanny. I was just heading in to have a coffee, and bam, there goes Lou, walking right past me.”
“Except it was me.”
“Yep. From the side, the spitting image. Man, that’s something.”
The way she said “something”—she sort of lifted up on her toes and then rocked back on her heels—I melted like candle wax.
“Say, you want to go in and have that coffee with me?” Somehow, I found my voice. “Yeah. I’d like to.” I’d never had coffee in my life.
EVERY day for a week, we met at the frog pond and watched the tourists take their shoes off and wade in the ankle-high water. She talked a lot, and I loved to hear her husky voice tickle my ears like a feather. God, that girl could talk, and I would have done anything to stay there, my head in her lap, watching the tourists pass by.
“My philosophy is this. We don’t owe anything to our family, to our parents, just for conceiving us and putting a roof over our heads for so many years. The question becomes, do you like these people? Do you want to spend time with them, have a coffee with them, eat dinner with them? If the answer is ‘no,’ then so be it. Why should you waste your time with them if you don’t even like their company? What society deems appropriate is contrary to rudimentary truths. Life is precious. Life is fleeting. Life is fragmentary. It’s here today and whip! it’s gone before you know it. One second you’re a little girl asking if you can please, please, please get the Barbie Easy-Bake oven for Christmas and the next minute you’re twenty-one and you have nothing in common with these people you call mom and dad. They don’t understand anything about you. You are speaking a foreign language to them. So why do you care about them at all?”
I just stared up at her chin as it bobbed up and down in the rhythm of her words, and it didn’t matter what she was saying, the voice wafted down and covered me like arms. A couple walked by holding hands and smiled at us and I thought, My God, that couple is us. We are them. For once, for the first time in my life, I felt loved.
I didn’t see Vespucci coming. There was no portent of evil rushing my way, no accumulation of dark clouds on my horizon. As I said, things were good. I had been loading beer for several months, piling the cases onto pallets, spreading shrink-wrap around the cases, and hauling the pallets onto the trucks. It was difficult but fulfilling work, the kind that exhausts and exhilarates at the same time. I was good at it, my arms having grown strong in Cox’s living room and the weight room at Waxham.
The way it worked was one shipping boy was assigned to one truck driver on each load, working until the truck was filled and ready to depart. Then the next truck would come in, get loaded, and take off. There was no order to the trucks, and we would work with nearly all the drivers in the course of a week. The aspiration of the shipping boys was eventually to get to drive the trucks, which mean
t greater pay and at least part of your day in the air-conditioning or out of the rain. When a driving vacancy occurred, Father Steve’s brother promoted from within based on driver recommendations. This meant all the shipping boys busted their asses for all the drivers, so coveted were those recommendations. It was a good system.
One of the drivers was Hap Blowenfeld, and every shipping boy looked up to Hap the way some people look up to movie stars and ball players. He was larger-than-life, with perfect hair, a quick smile, and pearl white teeth. He had huge arms, could load a truck faster than anyone, and bought a six-pack of Coke for the shipping boy who helped him each day. The day you got assigned to Hap was like winning the lottery, and if you got him twice in one week, you were the envy of every other shipper in the crew.
“What’s your story, Buck?” he asked me after I had worked there a couple of months. We were loading Budweiser, and it was hot outside. We hadn’t said much to each other, both concentrating on stacking the cases on to the wooden pallets. I wasn’t much of a talker, and the question caught me off guard.
“No story,” was all I could mumble.
Hap looked up with the hint of a grin, his arm leaning on one of the beer cases. “I’ll let you in on a little secret. I spent my time in Juvenile, too.”
I didn’t say anything.
“That’s right,” he said, starting to lift the cases again. “Five years in a place called Skyline Hall in Sacramento for choking a kid to death. I grew up on the West Coast, in Arcadia, outside Los Angeles, went to school with mostly Mexicans. Well, this one bean-eater stole my daddy’s billfold, and I didn’t like that too much. I didn’t know I’d kill’t the poor bastard until someone pried my fingers off his throat.” He stopped and wiped his head with the back of his hand. “I was thirteen years old. I thought I was gonna play college football.”
I didn’t know what to say, and for a moment we resumed loading the crates onto the pallets and the pallets onto the truck in our comfortable rhythm. I was beginning to think maybe Hap’s story was all in my head. He broke the silence again.
“So what’s your story, Crackerjack? And don’t go soft on me.”
Hap wasn’t the kind of guy I was prepared to lie to, so I just spread it out before him like I was unfolding a map, starting with my first venture inside the Cox house and finishing with my release from Waxham. Before I knew it, my story was over, the truck was completely loaded, and Hap and I were leaning against the back bumper sipping Coke out of bottles through pharmacy straws.
“You didn’t kill him?” Hap asked, gnawing on his lower lip a little bit.
I shook my head side to side.
“But you wanted to.”
“Yep.”
“I’d’ve liked to get my hands on that sum-bitch.” He stared down at his hands, as though he could see it happening, what Cox’s throat would look like caught in his massive fingers, squeezing the neck until it caved in on itself.
Hap looked at me sideways. “You think you had it in you to finish him?”
“If I could’ve, I would’ve.”
Hap grinned. “I’ll bet you would. I just bet you would.”
He drove off a few minutes later, and I went to get my next assignment, feeling a slight pull in my chest.
A week later, I had completely forgotten about my conversation with Hap when a Cadillac limousine pulled alongside me while I was walking home from work. A dark window slid down and an olive, moon-shaped face stared out at me. I thought this man must have mistaken me for someone, the way Jake had mistaken me for her brother. A fat hand extended out the window toward me.
“Vespucci,” the face said, the hand waiting in anticipation.
I shook it, unsure what to say.
Then a second face filled the window behind Vespucci’s, with a broad grin and a wink aimed in my direction. “Get in, Buck,” Hap said, as the door opened my way.
THE car was bigger than anything I had seen before, like the inside of the empty beer trucks, and I sat facing the dark Italian and Hap. Their eyes studied my face like they were trying to read a book; what exactly they were hoping to find in my expression, I had no idea. Waxham had taught me to suppress my emotions, to make my face as blank as fresh paper, and for a long moment we rode in silence, measuring each other.
“You some kind of orphan?” the dark face asked in a thick Italian accent.
“Yes.”
“Yes, what, kid?” Hap corrected, his face urging me.
“Yes, sir,” I said, not wanting to disappoint Hap.
“Good. Dat’s good, kid. What’s your name?”
I answered him and he laughed. “You get a new name starting today. A new name when you work for me.”
I had no idea what this man was talking about.
“Work for you?”
“Dat’s right. Starting today.”
I looked at Hap, and he just nodded at me, smiling, like he had done me a great favor.
The car pulled up alongside an abandoned warehouse, a large building in a part of town I had never visited. The building took up a city block, and was probably once teeming with factory workers and sweat and life, but now just stood blank and forgotten, like an old man put to rest in a nursing home. The windows in the upper stories looked shattered, and natty birds flew in and out intermittently. On the side of the building COLUMBUS TEXTILES was printed in faded block letters.
“But first, a test,” Vespucci said. “To see what kind of . . . possibility . . . you might have.” He seemed to linger over the word “possibility” like it tasted sweet in his mouth and he was savoring it. “Let’s go.”
Inside the warehouse, dust settled over what little furniture had been left behind when the company packed up and moved. The place had once been used to make textiles, and inoperative looms and abandoned sewing machines lay dormant on the tops of forgotten tabletops. The main room was huge, like a cathedral, and a small desk had been recently pushed to the middle of the floor. On top of the desk lay a pistol.
“What is this?” I asked, puzzled, searching for answers in the faces of the men who’d brought me here. If those faces held answers, I wasn’t experienced enough to read them.
Just then, another door opened on the other side of the enormous room. Three men approached us, their hollow footsteps clomping over the concrete floor, but in the dim light of the room I couldn’t make out their features. One of the men, though, had a hauntingly familiar gait, a way of walking as unique and identifiable as a fingerprint.
“What is this, Hap?”
Then a voice I had tried to forget so many times reached out and punched me in the gut like a fist. “Yeah,” said Pete Cox, representing the middle of the trio who approached. “What the fuck is this? These two fellas promised me there was something I’d . . . want . . . to . . . see . . .”
His eyes found mine, and for a moment he was as surprised as I was. He said my name, then repeated it, dumbfounded, like he was waking from a dream. Then he looked over his shoulder at the two men flanking him, their eyes as hard as concrete. “What is this?” he repeated, weakly.
“This,” said Vespucci in a rough growl, “is a test.”
“A what?” said Cox, like he didn’t hear the man correctly.
“A test for the boy you liked knocking around so much, tough guy.”
Cox’s eyes settled on the pistol resting on the desk and he started backpedaling, his feet moving almost involuntarily. But the two men closed on him, and held him firmly by the elbows so he could no longer move.
“Hey, wait, what’s this . . . ? What’s this all about? He . . . he killed my wife. Did he tell you that?” His voice sounded shrill.
Hap spat on the ground. “He told me everything I needed to know.“
I still couldn’t find my voice . . . this clash with my past jarring me as though I’d been shell-shocked. Here was Mr. Cox, the man who had caused an enormous abyss in my childhood, standing before me. The only item positioned between us was a pistol.
V
espucci spoke. “In ten seconds, my men and I are going to leave this place and lock the door behind us. On that desk is a pistol. Somewhere in this room are the bullets that can be fired from that pistol. I will open the doors again tomorrow morning and only one of you will come out. If there are two of you standing here when I open the door, I’ll cut you both down. Only one walks out tomorrow morning.”
I looked at Mr. Cox’s face with what must have been a feral snarl and I could almost feel him reeling back, looking for an escape route.
“You must be joking. I can’t . . .” he started to protest, but every man in the room besides us turned on their heels and headed for the exits, leaving the sentence to die in the air, unfinished. We both stood silently, as two sets of doors swung shut and were bolted behind us. Neither of us flinched, nor twitched a muscle; we just stared at each other.
Then as the weight of the silence threatened to crush us, he leaped for the gun. My legs took over, and I tackled him before his hand could grip the weapon. We smashed into the desk, overturning it, and the gun skittered across the floor.
His hands went for my face, trying to claw my eyes as we both fought for leverage. He was still bigger than me, and his legs straddled mine, so I couldn’t gain my balance, while his hands continued to scratch at my face. The only thing I could do was ball my hands into fists and start driving my knuckles into his rib cage, his kidneys, one, two, three times, again and again. He may have had a weight advantage, but I had learned a great deal about dirty fighting in the exercise yard at Waxham. I must have caught him under a rib, because suddenly he gasped for breath and fell over sideways.
I sprang up, my eyes a bit blurry from the pressure, and stumbled toward the gun. He caught his breath and stood to follow, just as I scooped up the weapon.
As I held it up, he sneered, “Lot of good that will do you without the—” But before he could finish that thought, I pistol-whipped him across the face, smashing him so hard his mouth filled with blood and he fell to the floor in a heap. He started to rise, so I smashed him again, harder, putting all my weight behind it, and this time he stayed down. Faint whimpers came from his throat and quickly died in the large, hollow room.
