I Don't Like Where This Is Going

by John Dufresne

  “So did I, but they stopped cooperating.”

  “Lock them into a room until they come clean.”

  “What are we going to do with Charlotte?”

  “Get her out of town.”

  10

  I’M HONEST ENOUGH to know I have to lie from time to time. I lied to Gene because I thought he needed me to. I told him I didn’t think there was anything inappropriate about his dating Chyna, and I was sorry if I had left that impression. “Sometimes I speak without thinking.”

  “Sometimes the spontaneous utterance is the unvarnished truth,” he said.

  “I thought you were trying to ignore me.”

  “I was. I know these girls are safe with me. I do what I can to help them leave this place.”

  Gene and I were sitting at a shaded picnic table near the roller hockey rink in Aloha Shores Park. For the next hour and a half, Gene talked candidly about his life, and I listened. All his previous reticence had vanished. He lived, he told me, a celibate life. By choice, he said, or, more correctly, by compulsion. He understood that he was being irrational, but he believed that all sexual intercourse was an act of violence.

  I said, “We can work on that.”

  He said, “I don’t want to work on that.”

  I said, “Where did this notion come from?”

  Gene’s father, Delmer, president of the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Star City, was both a pillar of the community and a monster in the home, a man who enjoyed cruel and brutal sex with Gene’s mom and with his assorted mistresses. Gene had twice witnessed his naked father choking and punching his helpless mother after he’d run down the hall to see why his mother was screaming. After that, his parents mercifully locked the door, and he stayed in his bed with the pillow and blankets over his head, trying to block out the sobs from down the hall and the slap of his father’s leather belt on his mother’s raw skin. “Accident-prone,” they told their friends, to explain the bruising and welts and burns. “All thumbs.” “Clumsy as a June bug.”

  “Eventually she killed him. Left me with his millions. Drove herself and his sorry ass off the 165 bridge and into the Arkansas River down in Pendleton.”

  Long story short, he said, his unwillingness to copulate had alarmed Kiernan, who made it quite clear that she was not about to live in a sexless and childless marriage, and then she hopped a bus to Las Vegas. Gene followed her and began the six-month search that culminated when she was found murdered in her condo. No one was ever arrested for the crime. Gene bought a small house and began his volunteer work, hoping to do some good.

  I said, “How are you feeling?”

  “Good.” He lied to me because he thought I needed to hear a cheery answer.

  I said, “If you want to work on the sexual issue—”

  He said, “It’s not that big a deal. Think of me as a priest.”

  “You told me to wear my therapist hat.”

  “I’ve never talked about my father before. It helps.”

  On the walk back to our cars, Gene told me that he suspected, and had for some time, that girls at Refuge House were being sold into slavery. “That’s what it amounts to,” he said. “The girls were being shipped out of Vegas to the small towns around the state, maybe around the West, where there was a demand. “Sorry I lied when you asked about it that time.”

  He’d gone to the police and the FBI with his suspicions and his anecdotal evidence—straight from the girls’ mouths—and the FBI and the cops did nothing. Unless they were doing something undercover. We could hope. He told Helen Lozoraitis what he had learned, and at first she laughed at the implausibility of the story, but then became furious. At him, not at Refuge House. He didn’t think Helen knew anything about the trafficking, that she, in fact, worked very hard at not knowing the truth. The truth would upset her world too much. She had to think of herself as doing nothing but good in order to live with herself. “I suspect she has some serious demons locked in her attic.”

  He’d heard rumors that the Danites, a Samoan Mormon gang, were behind the enterprise, and rumors that it was the Polynesian Saints or the Vascos, a gang of Basque cowboys out of Elko, but he didn’t buy any of it. Yes, they were all useless and dangerous people, but the gangs had enough on their plates already. It was much simpler than that. What we had here was a gaggle of unaffiliated entrepreneurial businessmen taking advantage of an auspicious investment opportunity. Sex sells and greed motivates. Lust and lucre; supply and command. But it wasn’t exactly free enterprise and the American way. It was a feudal system, and the lords lived here in Vegas.

  When Gene spoke with Mr. Jory Teague, director of Refuge House, Inc., and told him what he suspected was going on, thinking that Mr. Jory Teague had no idea what certain of his perfidious employees were up to behind his back, Mr. Jory Teague put down his egg salad sandwich, picked up his brass desk lamp, and smashed it against the side of Gene’s head. Gene was then threatened with further bodily harm by a bruiser with a black truncheon but no neck, and threatened with a lawsuit by a cadaverous attorney with half-glasses and loose dentures, if he were to go public with these obscene lies and unfounded allegations.

  I asked Gene how shit like this could happen in a civilized country, or any country, for that matter. Gene responded with a history of the world in thirty-seven seconds. Fade in: A hulking troglodyte with a boulder crushes the skull of a terrified little herbivore who’s had his beady eyes on one of the feracious females in the cave. Might makes right. He who wields the biggest club runs the meeting, gets the girl, eats at the head of the trough. When the more discerning of the diminutive others grow tired of being pummeled or worse, they invent gods and worship and priests. Vengeful and capricious gods. Solemn and uplifting worship. Arrogant and pietistic priests, they who must be obeyed, who then preach to the shock-heads on the necessity of turning their clubs into plowshares or risk the same dire oblivion that befell their cousins the Neanderthals. And then come villages and cultivation and testosterone-soothing domesticity, and with settlement come laws and courts, and crime and punishment, and private property and money, and wealth becomes muscle. He who wields the largest stock portfolio runs the meeting, gets the Kardashian, eats at Per Se. And we’re right back to where we started.

  So, Gene said, we give everyone enough money to live with dignity and not a penny more. When everyone lives with dignity, he said, religion will rise on its slow haunches and slouch off to oblivion.

  Gene said, “Here we are.” He put both his hands on the driver’s window of his red pickup, pushed the window down, reached inside, and opened the door. “Refuge House is one of several distribution centers run by an affiliation of investors that I haven’t yet been able to identify. But I will.”

  I gave Gene Elwood’s contact info and told him to give Elwood a call.

  AND THEN I GOT a call from Elwood on my way to the airport to pick up Patience. Told me his car had been stolen. I said was he sure it wasn’t impounded. Good point! He called back to ask if I could drive him to the bank for cash and to the police impoundment lot.

  “Will an ATM work?”

  “Need more than the limit.”

  Patience looked more beguiling than ever. She wore a white linen shirt with a paisley necktie, a black sport coat, jeans, and blue sneakers. She asked about Charlotte, and I filled her in. I told her our first trip would be with Elwood and our second with Charlotte. Said she couldn’t wait. “Great to see you, Wylie.”

  Elwood was waiting outside his house. He had sad news, he said, after he shook hands with Patience. His pal Detective Lou Scaturro had suffered a stroke. He was at Desert Springs intensive care, and his wife was due any day now. When Elwood learned that Patience was a travel agent—another moribund profession—he told her he had always wanted to go to Tristan da Cunha, the most remote island in the world.

  Patience knew Tristan. “There are two hundred and sixty people, all farmers, and eight surnames. There’s one pub, one volcano, one crayfish-packing plant, and one cop
who’s made zero arrests ever. The jail cell door is made of plywood. No one’s rich. No one’s poor. No one’s alone. And there’s no place to hide. There is no private property.”

  I said, “It would be a great place to set a murder mystery.”

  Patience said, “You can’t fly there. You can take a ship from Cape Town, but that takes six days, and you might have to wait awhile for the next ship.”

  Elwood said, “Let me think about it.”

  BAY TOLD CHARLOTTE she had a reservation at the Silverland Inn and Suites in Virginia City under the name Alice O’Malley. She said she’d always wanted to be Irish. Bay said he wouldn’t hold that against her. She asked why he would say that, and he said, “The eight hundred babies buried in a septic tank by nuns in County Galway.”

  “I see.”

  He said, “We’ll have all the necessary paperwork in Alice’s name in two days. In the meantime, you’ll stay with Mercedes.”

  Four of us were sitting out on the patio at Mladinic’s nibbling on platters of fish carpaccio and grilled spicy sausage. Bay, Charlotte, and I were drinking beer. Patience thought she’d try the Croatian national cocktail, which was made with cherry liqueur, sour cherry juice, candied orange peel, and garnished with wild cherries. She loved it.

  Bay and Charlotte had already gone shopping for prepaid phones, prepaid phone cards, prepaid credit cards, an iPad mini, and a cute little ten-million-volt pink stun gun. They’d taken ample cash out of Charlotte’s Wells Fargo account and set up a Nevada corporation online for a few hundred dollars. This way, in the future, in an emergency, she’d be able to use the corporate credit card without her name being attached to the purchase.

  Patience might have been enjoying her Crocktails a little too much. She was smiling brightly at a black bird under our table that was wrestling a scrap of fish into submission. I asked her if she was okay. She said, “I’m lovin’ that buzzard.”

  “It’s a grackle.”

  “Just lovin’ it to death.”

  Charlotte owed no back taxes and had no outstanding debts, which was good, Bay said, because people you owe money to are better at tracking you down than the cops are. You can’t vanish forever under an assumed identity, but maybe you could confuse the authorities and any skip-tracers the Kurlanskys might have hired long enough for the skies to clear. As we spoke Mike was driving his Hummer through northern Arizona and southern California with Charlotte’s debit card, leaving a trail of ATM transactions and gasoline and sundry purchases that would keep any investigators busy for a while.

  WE DROVE THE MIRAGE up the mountain to Virginia City and arrived in midafternoon. It felt like it might snow. This was not a town you passed through on your way to anywhere. This was a destination, though not necessarily, we hoped, a final one. Virginia City seemed remote enough to be overlooked by sleuths, public or private, small enough to simplify Charlotte’s obligatory vigilance, but not so small she couldn’t blend immediately into the community of eager tourists, grizzled eccentrics, shopkeepers, artists, and artisans. We checked Charlotte into her room and walked out for a farewell meal. We found a place that served crispy pork bellies and medieval duck and had a fully stocked bar, and we knew Charlotte would be okay for a while. She told us that she had memorized her new Social Security number and had made up her family, the O’Malleys, in case anyone should ask.

  Alice O’Malley grew up in Revere Beach, Mass. Her brothers Tommy and Stephen were Massachusetts state troopers. Little brother John Jo was a Maryknoll priest, and was preaching the good word in the South Sudan. Her big sister Maureen had passed. Little sister Meg, the feisty one, was a flight attendant for United. Alice’s dad’s family hailed from County Mayo. Mom’s family, the Mad Lomasneys, were from Cork. “I’m working on cousins now. The family’s like a fisherman’s sweater—large and tightly knit.”

  We followed our farewell meal with farewell drinks at the Bucket of Blood Saloon. We toasted our friendship, long may it wave. We said our goodbyes.

  Sometimes when I drink too . . . make that whenever I drink too much . . . no . . . whenever I drink sufficiently, but not uncontrollably, I become relatively euphoric and somehow tranquil at the same time, if that’s even possible. When that happens, I imprudently disarm the filters of caution and good sense, which I normally rely upon as impediments to complete honesty. Whatever cheerful thoughts float across my buoyant mind, I express. And so as we descended the mountains toward Reno, a city 220 miles from the sea and somehow west of Los Angeles at the same time, and as I admired the delightful and sexy Patience asleep beside me in the passenger seat, I thought about wedding chapels and quickie marriages and the ensuing bliss forever after, and I shook Patience’s arm, and when she opened her eyes and smiled, I said, “Do you want to get married?”

  And she said, “To you?” Which I thought was a peculiar and disheartening answer. And when I didn’t respond, she said, “We can talk about this when we’re sober.”

  And I thought, No, we won’t. And I hit the accelerator a little harder. And the little engine skipped a beat.

  11

  I HAVE A better chance of understanding the origin of the universe, the laws of quantum physics, and the motivation of the sly pheromonal agents responsible for the carnal misalliance of James Carville and Mary Matalin than I have of understanding my own bewildering and miscreant self. This is not something a therapist should be proud to admit. And, trust me, I’m not. Why do I sometimes behave reprehensibly and against my own best interests? Every answer I come up with—stubborn, depressed, confused, distracted, hurt, blah, blah, and blah—seems brazenly false and insolently banal. I watch myself act boorishly, nastily, obnoxiously, and I tell myself to stop, but then go right ahead and do it anyway.

  So there I was in Valmy, Nevada, in my cramped little Mirage, in the parking lot of the Golden Motel, on an unseasonably cold morning in early June, waiting for my sweetheart Patience, who had seemed to be ready to leave ten minutes ago, but was now delayed for whatever reason, and I sat in the idling car, fuming for no acceptable reason. We were five days into our desert odyssey, and I was finding myself increasingly anxious and irritated. It had been my bright idea to roam the Silver State without an itinerary, to trust in serendipity—the journey is the destination and all that. So we followed our whim at every fork in the road, put our faith in chance to lead us on, and I arrived at the realization that where I really wanted to be was at home. In Melancholy, Florida. In my own house with my cat and my stuff and my work, helping my anguished clients to shape coherent stories from the chaos of their bewildering lives, doing so because, I believe, a simple narrative, and the awareness that is its consequence, are the only control we may have over our lives, and sometimes, for a while at least, that is enough to get us by. And in helping to give shape to their lives, I give meaning to my own. But out here, wandering in the desert, I felt expendable, false, and useless, like some malingering vagabond.

  UNION BIOLOGICAL TRANSPORT was the company name stenciled to the driver’s door of the box truck that forced me off the two-lane mountain road. I woke from this—last night’s final dream—before I sailed off into the uncompassed void. And now I realized the truck’s cargo had been human—undocumented women from the tomato fields of Florida—a reminder to my unconscious self that Blythe and Layla were dead, Charlotte was in hiding, and Audrey/Ruby Tuesday was indentured, most likely, to the Affiliation, as Gene called it. If I’d been a better dreamer, I would have rolled down the tinted window of the cab and seen who was driving the rig.

  When Patience finally backed out of Room 12, she tapped her pockets, cut the lights, and shut the door. When she turned, lowered her head, and held the collar of her jacket closed at the neck, I didn’t recognize who she was or understand what I was doing with her, and for that moment I was a stranger to myself. I recall the scene now in high-contrast, badly focused black-and-white, like a jumpy, eight-millimeter home movie, and I’m watching myself watching Patience walk toward the car, and when I cut to h
er, she lifts her brow, smiles into the camera, casts her eyes up and to the right like a child who’s been caught being naughty.

  Patience settled into the front seat and leaned over to kiss me, and when our lips touched in the cold, dry air, we were zapped with the sting and click of static electricity. Patience made a joke about my high-voltage smooch, and I pulled my head away. I drove toward Battle Mountain. Patience apologized for the lumpy bed and asked me if my back still ached. She had chosen the motel for the sign out front: THE GOLDEN MOTEL/BEAUTYREST. For years, she told me, she’d been letting signs guide her life. If you need something, open your eyes, and you will find it. Sometimes the signs were the written kind, like the one we’d seen at the New Wine Church of Jesus Christ in Tonopah, announcing Sunday’s sermon: SURELY, I COME QUICKLY. REV. 22:20. This Bible verse had become our bawdy mantra on the trip. Other signs might be zodiacal. I was an Aquarius, a wonderful match for her Libra, she assured me. Air meets air. It was all or nothing for the two of us.

  I looked out at the lightening sky and the scrubby landscape, so vacant it could blunt the senses. I felt the car jerk and hesitate, or thought I did, like it had been doing for the last five days. Patience said she didn’t notice it. Maybe it had something to do with the altitude or the cold engine. I tried to relax.

  She said, “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter.”

  But she was right, of course. I felt distressed, uncomfortable, tense, annoyed. I was still preoccupied by Layla’s murder, exasperated by the infuriating and inexplicable cover-up, and shaken by my own absurd but slightly terrifying brush with the law. I saw a restaurant in Battle Mountain, pulled to the curb, and parked in front of the green pleated-aluminum façade of the Coffee Shop.

  Patience took my arm and walked us to the door. “When you’re agitated, you set your jaw and flare your nostrils.”

  We took a booth beside the depleted breakfast bar. A hand-printed sign taped to the sneeze guard reminded the customers that it’s “all you can eat,” not “all you can heap on your plate.” We ordered coffee. The man sitting alone at the adjacent table wore wide red suspenders crisscrossed over his chest. He seemed to be reasoning with his pliable waffle and losing the argument.