by Dale Bailey
“That’s right.”
Nick gazed blindly into the headlights of the Acura. A thousand motes swam there. He could almost feel the money, heavy in his hand. He and Sue had talked about what would happen after graduation, but those were pipe dreams, he knew that now. He would go back to Louisiana, and work for a year or two on the rigs. Maybe then he could afford a couple years of graduate school. Maybe. If he didn’t get crippled offshore. If he didn’t get trapped in the lifestyle, three weeks on and a week of shore leave, blowing his earnings on ice-cold Delta beer and Cajun honeys who would be fat by the time they hit thirty. Just like Dad, he thought. Just like Jake and Sam.
And Sue? She said she would wait, but they both knew better. Sue ate strictly flavor of the month—Finney could attest to that—and just now she had a taste for Nick, but unless something changed he didn’t have a shot at permanence. She would be gone before the ink on her diploma dried, back home to Savannah for the summer and straight into the arms of some moon-faced rich guy with a gold Visa and a Jag. Some asshole a lot like Reed Tucker.
He could feel the money, heavy in his hand.
“Nicky?”
“Don’t call me Nicky.”
“Whatever you say, man, but you got to make the call. A car could blow through here any second.”
“Let’s do it.”
He turned to face them, and Finney nodded. “That’s my man.”
“I’m not touching the dead guy,” Tucker said.
“Fine,” Nick said. “Start picking up glass.”
Nick hunkered down and picked up the roll of hundreds, pausing to meet and hold their eyes, first Finney, then Tucker. Then he zipped the money into an inner pocket of his own jacket. Together, he and Finney wrestled the body erect. It was harder than he had expected. Every time Nick had dragged a drunk off to bed, the drunk had woken up enough to stumble along beside him, helping a little, blowing beery breath into his face. Never had he struggled with truly dead weight—and now the full meaning of the term bore in upon him. Lifting the dead guy was like lifting a sodden carpet. His muscles ached in spite of the high school years and college summers loading and unloading crates of fresh fish in Glory, Louisiana, in spite of the two hours he spent lifting weights in the gym three days a week.
They dragged the guy between them, his boots scraping the pavement. Tucker knelt to begin gathering fragments of the parking light’s smashed reflector panel, strewn shards of glass and rubber. Their progress slowed at the verge of the road. The dead guy’s legs kept tangling in the undergrowth. Once Finney stumbled and fell, cursing, and the entire weight of the dead man collapsed onto Nick, so heavy he did not think he could bear it.
After that, they decided to carry him between them. They argued in frenzied whispers over who would get the feet, who the bloody head, then Nick relented, aware of the money in his jacket, knowing that he had surrendered control of the situation somehow in taking it, but powerless to give it up. Fleeting images of Sue kept passing through his head—of Sue, of his father twisted in his wheelchair, of the enormous stinking gantries of the oil rigs, the sea in flux about their enormous support columns, bearing away a freight of sewage and cast-off food and garbage, black gouts of raw, spilled fuel.
He knelt, and got the guy under the armpits and lifted on Finney’s count of three. The dead man’s head flopped back against his stomach, and Nick suddenly wished he had thought to close his jacket. His heart raced. His breath formed enigmatic patterns in the air as they stumbled farther into the underbrush. The hum of the Acura’s engine grew distant, the lights receded beyond a screen of brush and trees. His muscles burned like he had been in the gym for hours.
They moved through the trees silently, panting with exertion. Once Nick thought he heard something. He thought about that crashing sound in the underbrush, something big moving through the woods. But Finney didn’t say anything and besides the woods were full of noise. The only people who ever talked about the silence in the woods had never been there. So he held his peace, trying not to think about the dead guy’s bloody head, all that blond hair smearing black blood across the belly of his T-shirt. He could feel it, warm against his stomach, and a tight, hard kernel of hatred formed in his chest, displacing the fear. Finney. Fucking Phineas Durant and his big-shot dad. The Senator, that’s what Finney called him. Not Dad, just the Senator, another asshole rich guy in a hand-tailored suit. But Finney always cashed the checks the Senator sent, didn’t he?
Nick forced the bitterness down. He always shared the wealth, too. Nick had tucked more than a dollar or two of Finney’s money between the garter and the slick flesh of one dark-haired honey that night, and he had left Ransom broke, drinking Finney’s beer.
A few minutes later, the sound of the water began to grow louder. The smell of it rose to meet them, the algae-grown, faintly metallic odor of a mountain stream. They emerged from the undergrowth and it was right there in front of them, fifteen or twenty feet wide, black and fast moving, barely visible in the thick darkness under the trees.
“We’re going to get lost in h—” Finney started to say, and then Nick slipped, losing his purchase in the wet soil. Nick let go of the dead guy and caught a glimpse of that blond head bouncing off the ground, and then he went in the water.
“Jesus, cold!” he gasped.
Finney laughed as Nick clambered out of the stream, wet to the knees, his jeans clinging about his calves like a second skin.
“Fuck it,” Nick said. “Far enough.”
“Have to be. I’m not going into that water.”
Together they maneuvered the body into a mass of pine saplings, working it under the low-growing fronds. Finney waited while Nick scooped pine needles here and there, trying to hide the dead guy, though it was too dark to tell if he was doing any good. Then he stood, tucking his hands into his pockets, aware of the roll of money poking at him through the lining of the jacket.
“Enough,” he said. “I’m going to freeze.”
They stumbled off into the woods. For a few moments, Nick imagined getting lost back there, freezing to death—situational irony, Dr. Gillespie would have called it—and then he could see the lights of the Acura through the trees. They both heard Tucker yelling at the same time.
“Fuck,” Finney said, and then they were running.
Branches lashed at them, the underbrush seemed to cling about their ankles. A moment later they fought their way free and emerged onto the edge of the road. Tucker stood by the Acura waving at them.
A car blurred past—an enormous, black, seventies-vintage caddy moving fast, fifty or sixty miles an hour, Nick guessed—and braked into the curve, rear lights winking like knowing eyes.
“Too fast,” Nick said. “No way he could ID the car.”
They stood there for a moment, catching their breath in the silent woods, and then they heard it: the sound of the car carrying through the stillness as it slowed, stopped, and returned, gaining speed, growing louder. They broke for the Acura as the caddy slipped past for the second time, brake lights flaring. Nick’s heart lurched, but a moment later the caddy accelerated, tail-lights winking around the next curve. That’s when Nick saw it: a glittering shard of metal, bright against the graveled shoulder. He scooped it up in stride and only paused to examine it when he was safe in the back seat, trees and ridges blurring beyond the window as Finney gunned the car hard toward Ransom.
A key.
A shiny silver key, embossed
KNOX
409
Nick had ridden too many Greyhounds from Glory to Ransom and from Ransom back not to know that it would fit a bus station locker. He leaned back and rested his head against the seat, trying not to think about the money, but powerless to prevent it. When he opened his eyes, Tucker had turned around to look at him, and Nick realized that he had seen the key there in his open palm.
“What is it?” Tucker said.
“A key,” Nick told him. “What’s the matter, you blind?”
“Hey, Ni
cky,” Finney said. “Whyn’t you reach me a fresh brew?”
Sunday, 3 AM to 12 Noon
Ended up Nick didn’t tell Sue about the strip club. But he did tell her about the body.
They’d driven home quickly, each nursing a warming beer, Finney tight-lipped and Tucker, for a change, blessedly quiet. No one talked. Nick watched the black silhouette of the mountains glide by. The three times cars passed them, headlights filling the Acura with a ghostly light, his blood turned icy and his hands closed into fists. None of them was the behemoth Cadillac.
At just past three the Ransom sign loomed out of the dark: RANSOM, NC–HOME OF RANSOM COLLEGE SINCE 1838. Five minutes later Finney whipped the car through the wrought iron gates of College Park Townhouses and into the single car garage beside the apartment he and Tucker shared. Finney cut the lights and engine. They sat in silence, listening to the engine tick. The cold crept into the car.
“Fuck this.” Tucker climbed out, dropping his half-empty Bud. The can rolled under the car, spitting foam.
Finney and Nick got out, Finney punching his key ring to lock the doors and set the alarm. Tucker flicked on the overhead light. They stood in the small garage, looking at each other, the silence like something waiting. Nick, after what seemed a long time, walked to the front of the car. Even in the light you could hardly tell. Besides the shattered blinker and the crumpled fender, Nick found a hairline crack running drunkenly across the right headlight. Nothing dramatic though. No bloody pieces of scalp or tatters of clothing. Looking closer, he could make out a small crease running from the corner of the hood to the middle, maybe the length of a man’s arm.
“Not bad,” Tucker said from behind him. He ran a finger along the crease. “Could have been a dog, a fence post, some drunk at the strip club.”
But it wasn’t, Nick thought. It was a man. He could see the sharp, Aryan features of the dead guy, could feel his head bearing into the pit of his stomach as he lifted him. He stepped around Tucker and Finney and walked outside. The air felt like fire in his lungs. It always caught him by surprise, nothing like the warm, briny air of the Louisiana Delta. He breathed deeply and looked up at the sky, bright with stars. His head filled with a kaleidoscope of tumbling images: his father’s mangled legs, the husk of his mother’s cancer-riddled body, the shuddering sensation as the Acura sped over a body at sixty miles an hour.
A blare of music—R.E.M.? Smashing Pumpkins?—broke the pristine night.
The Torkelsons.
Nick glanced at the townhouse three doors down from Finney’s. It was dark save for a dim light visible through the kitchen window. A beat-up pickup and a Lexus sat curbside. The Torkelson twins, identical behemoth blond boys, ran a perpetual party. They were in their sixth year at Ransom, both Criminal Justice majors without even remote dreams of graduating. They kept a keg on tap in the fridge and smoked the best dope on campus. Their father, a broker in Pittsburgh, paid their damage deposits, booze bills, and tuition without blinking an eye. He’ll pay anything to keep us from coming home, Jarrod Torkelson—or maybe it was Joel—had once drunkenly confided to Nick.
The music vanished as abruptly as it had come. A loud crash followed, glass shattering.
Then silence.
Nick pressed the wad of cash in his jacket pocket. He stamped his feet, still damp from the stream, and startled his blood into flowing again.
“You okay, Nicky?” Finney stood behind him, hands in his pockets. Even at three in the morning, even with a dead man’s sweat barely dry on his hands, Finney looked composed. Something in Nick hated him for that.
“Where’s Tuck?”
“Inside. Says he’s got that Western Civ final to study for tomorrow.”
Nick snorted. It was a week before finals and Tucker had made his eight o’clock four times at most.
“You going to Sue’s?”
Nick glanced up sharply, words dying unspoken on his lips: If I don’t, will you?
A flashbulb seemed to detonate inside his mind. For half a moment he could see nothing but the image that had haunted him for weeks now: Sue, her legs flung wide, Finney laboring between them—
Then, mercifully, it faded.
Finney held his gaze.
Nick looked away, studying the gradually curving street. Just beyond the bend he could make out Sue’s townhouse. It was dark, the curtains drawn. College Park was a block and a half of manicured mini-lawns and thin, color-coordinated townhouses. Rent ran close to a thousand a month.
“No,” he said finally. “I’ve got to read half The Great Gatsby before Monday. I need to get some sleep.”
“Yeah, me, too.” Finney turned toward the townhouse; then, hesitating almost imperceptibly, he looked back at Nick. “You going to be all right, man?”
“Right as rain.” Nick forced a grin and thought about how the blood had looked black in the dead guy’s hair.
“We’ll get together sometime tomorrow and sort this shit out.”
“Whatever you say, Finney.”
Nick lived in the Fort, formerly the site of a Civil War stockade, now a student ghetto of Victorian houses subdivided into cramped nautiluses of apartments. He shared an efficiency with about a thousand roaches on the second floor of a moldering heap of dry rot and gingerbread. Paper-thin walls let in the cold, the toilet ran incessantly, a mop handle propped up the kitchen sink. The back door opened onto a thirty-foot drop, the porch beyond as irretrievably disappeared as the Confederate fort itself—burned up piecemeal by decades of drunken college students, or so Nick had heard. The fireplace had been walled up years ago, and even if it hadn’t been, he would never have dared use it: the place was a firetrap, pure and simple. At two hundred a month, he felt like he was being gouged.
No road connected the two neighborhoods, but generations of party-searching students had worn a meandering umbilicus through an intervening patch of undergrowth and the drainage ditch beyond. The rank smell of the ditch always reminded Nick of coming home—of the cracked, heat-baked streets of Glory, Louisiana, and the stinking grime his father used to drag back from the rigs, an oily sheen of black dirt that mired itself in the creases of his palms and the crow’s feet that fanned from his eyes. Nick could never have confessed it, but that was how he thought of the ditch: a boundary, a borderland between the world he had known as a kid and the charmed universe Finney and Sue inhabited by default.
Sue and Finney. Finney and Sue.
It still stunned him how quickly he had become enmeshed in their lives, how inextricably his hopes and dreams had become bound up in these glittering people he had known less than a year. He had seen them on campus—two glistening and immaculate spheres as remote as the ones Dr. Landon raved about when she described the Ptolemaic view of the universe—but he hadn’t actually met them until last spring. First Sue, then Finney, the twin poles of his new existence.
He’d met Sue in a British novel class. He sat beside her, but he might as well have been on the other side of the world for all she cared—until he’d saved her from Dr. Gillespie, who had a reputation for deconstructing unprepared students. They were halfway through Heart of Darkness when Gillespie asked Sue a question. She began by calling Marlow “Martin.” Gillespie froze in mid-pace, then slowly turned to face her, his eyes as cold and gray as the Gulf of Mexico in December. He paused, then said, each word painfully articulated, “Tell us, Miss Thompson, about Conrad’s notion of the hollow man.”
Sue stammered and searched the corners of the room. She later told Nick that she hadn’t bothered to read any of the novels. But Gillespie had no intention of backing off. He smelled blood. Her eyes, wide and desperate, lit on Nick, and before he could clamp his teeth together, the words were out:
“Hollow men—”
The class turned toward him as one.
“Ah, Mr. Laymon fancies himself a knight in shining armor. Please, Mr. Laymon, don’t let me stop you.”
“They’re the ones who haven’t been, um, morally tested. They’ve never been c
hallenged. Neither Kurtz nor Marlow is a hollow man. They’ve both been tested. But, um, only Marlow passes—he doesn’t succumb to the savagery.”
Gillespie nodded and resumed his lecture. Nick leaned over to Sue and whispered, “The horror, the horror!” She smiled at him blankly. A week later she asked him to help her study for the midterm. Things moved fast after that.
Sue wore the ambiance of money like perfume. Her family in Savannah had made its fortune in cotton and textiles. Her father owned mills by droves. Nick had a hard time with the money, the way Sue constantly picked up checks. He had puffed up the first time, demanding she turn over their thirty-dollar bar tab. She called it redneck hubris, laughing as she paid the bill. He had learned to live with that—that and half a dozen other eccentricities, the ying and yang of her personality. Her appetites, say, insatiable and experimental when she showed up at Nick’s place two and three times a week, using the key he’d had made for her barely a month after the British novel midterm. Or the dark side of those same uninhibited desires: the nights when she didn’t answer her phone for hours on end, the occasional whiff of a strange cologne, the unfamiliar cigarette butt stubbed out in the ashtray of her Mercedes. Most of all, he’d learned to live with those haunting images, his best friend laboring between his best girl’s thighs. For how could he confront them?
After all, it was Sue who had introduced him to Finney. They had been dating for maybe a month when she took him to a keg party at the Torkelsons’. Reed Tucker had been funneling on the back patio, far beyond conversation by the time Sue and Nick arrived. They found Finney in the kitchen, center of his own private universe the way he always was. Sue drifted off after a while—something else Nick had learned to live with—but Nick and Finney stuck together for the rest of the night.
A lot of that evening was kind of fuzzy in retrospect—Nick had been hitting the Torkelsons’ keg pretty hard—but he could remember like yesterday when Finney recited the Lord’s Prayer in Latin on a bet. Their eyes had met across the room as Finney began—
