A Field of Darkness

by Cornelia Read

Dean was silent.

  “Is he calling us frat boys with tits again?” said Ellis, taking the beer from my hand. “Hi, Dean!”

  I could tell he’d heard that but was ignoring it. “Listen, I don’t want you guys going to STD’s.”

  “Yes, dear.” And I would have meant it, except Ellis made it all seem a lot better. Possible.

  “Bunny—”

  “Well, now that she’s here, it would be kind of nice to check out the Kingsnakes.”

  “You hate the Kingsnakes.”

  “I adore the Kingsnakes. I am a dedicated and lifelong blues fan.”

  “You called them ‘pompous derivative white boys’ at Tom and Maripat’s wedding.”

  “Only because they wouldn’t turn down the speakers and they were scaring your grandmother. I mean, they were playing at eleven—that’s one more than ten. And I did ask them once, politely.”

  He sighed.

  “I should go,” I said.

  “Just be safe, all right? Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “I love you.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and hung up.

  “I take it we have plans?” asked Ellis.

  “Cornering a corrupt ex-cop at a seedy roadhouse in order to solve a decades-old double murder that may have been committed by my second cousin.”

  “Perfect,” she said. “What are we wearing?”

  CHAPTER 18

  Ellis damn near fractured an axle on a bad chunk of parking lot. My teeth snapped into a corner of tongue—ice-cold pain flashing white down a thousand alleys of nerve and synapse.

  I shouldn’t have let her drive, especially since she’d shown up in a borrowed Toyota pickup.

  Ellis yanked the wheel hard left, skittering to a halt between an Econoline and a rusty Pinto.

  “You,” I said, tasting blood, “are a menace.”

  She shrugged. I leaned across and grabbed the keys from the ignition.

  The Kingsnakes were pounding away on a little John Lee Hooker from inside STD’s. Boom boom boom boom.

  Ellis waved a hand toward the sign glowing from the only visible window: “Budweiser” centered in an electric shamrock.

  “Why, look,” she said, “it’s the international symbol for cheap beer and shitty food.”

  “There is a God.” I arched my back, slid the keys in my pocket.

  “Sure,” she said, swinging her long legs out of the truck, “he’s malicious.”

  Outside, a barn lamp hung off a pole near the street. Gnats swam lazy in its cone of light, rising toward the galvanized-coolie-hat shade. Hot as hell but they wanted more.

  I raised an arm, swiped my forehead across a patch of T-shirt sleeve. Here I was with my trusty sidekick and suddenly the whole idea seemed beyond ridiculous.

  Ellis leaned against the back of the truck, draping her arms along the tailgate. “Okay,” she said, “tell me again what the hell we’re doing.”

  I’d filled her in on most of what I knew during the ride over: dead girls, dog tags, Lapthorne, roses . . . the full catastrophe.

  “Kenny told me the local cops figured the killer had to be experienced,” I said, “somebody who’d seen combat. That could exonerate Lapthorne, if he actually was one of the soldiers at the fair. Those guys were really young, supposedly—hadn’t shipped out yet.”

  “How old was he in ’69?” asked Ellis.

  “Nineteen.”

  She nodded.

  I looked toward the flat-topped building across the lot, scrubby woods grown hard against three sides. “This guy Schneider was lead cop on the murders. Kenny told me to talk to him, said he’d know the most about it.”

  Three big-haired girls spilled outside and the music went all crisply dimensional—drums and guitar dialed in with the bass for as long as the door was open. I watched the trio clatter across the lot, all done up in acid-washed stretch denim.

  “That band’s local,” I continued. “The Kingsnakes. Schneider’s way into them. Dean said he never misses a show.”

  I didn’t say anything for a minute.

  “Okay, so . . .” prompted Ellis.

  “Okay, so . . .” I said. “Okay, so . . . the thing is that Kenny . . . um . . . doesn’t know what I found out from the silhouette guy.”

  “About the thumbs?”

  “Right.”

  “Which is a problem because . . .”

  “Because now that I know Schneider’s involved somehow . . .”

  “So you’re pretty damn sure,” said Ellis, “that Kenny’d retract the suggestion, considering.”

  I nodded.

  She waited for me to say more, but that was pretty much it.

  “Um . . . so Maddie,” she said, “do you have, like, a concept here?”

  “I guess just to chat him up. Kind of . . . generally. Or whatever.”

  She smiled. “And you’re opening with?”

  I looked away. “No clue.”

  “Something will turn up,” she said.

  “I’m such an idiot.”

  “Hey, if you knew what you wanted to find out, there’d be no point having the conversation.”

  “So you vote we go ahead?” I asked.

  She looked at me. “Last time I said no, I didn’t hear the question.”

  “My mother always says that.”

  “I know.”

  “You scare me,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Maybe I’ll get lucky,” I said, “and he won’t show up.”

  She punched my shoulder. “Chickenshit.”

  I punched her back.

  “You know what this guy looks like?” she asked.

  “Just seen a couple pictures. Old ones, but he has a look.”

  She raised a speculative eyebrow.

  I shook my head. “Not, like, a good look.”

  “You’re buying, then.”

  “I’ve got six bucks. After that, we’ll need to make friends.”

  Ellis stood up, spanking grit off the back of her shorts.

  “Yeah,” she said, “like the two of us’ve ever had trouble with that in a bar.”

  Inside it was all knotty-pine walls and cheesy Styrofoam dropped ceiling. We bashed through the crowd and climbed a pinball machine to get up into the neon-shamrock window, having ordered two Rolling Rocks each.

  The Kingsnakes were slamming out a loud but mournful little number. I checked the shoving bodies below for Schneider’s hard face and crewcut, relieved not to see him.

  The bouncer looked over, ready to order us down from our perch.

  Ellis blew him a kiss and he winked instead.

  “Oh please,” I said.

  “He’d be doable if he had a neck.”

  “Would not.”

  She swung her foot against mine. “Seen you go home with worse.”

  “And better.”

  “Sure,” she drawled, “lots of times . . .”

  The band was cranking up to a flashy crescendo right then, so I just grinned, leaning to chuck my first empty under the pinball machine.

  The Kingsnakes thrashed out a final chord, brimming with upstate-Caucasian angst.

  I looked up and saw Schneider.

  He’d been there all along. I’d missed him because his hair was longer, Brylcreemed high with a greasy hank dangling front and center. Plus he’d grown a beard to soften that slash of mouth.

  Now, though, I could see his eyes. I should have remembered how literal Simon’s images always were, known that Schneider’s newsprint gaze—flat as a shark’s—wasn’t any trick of ink or light.

  The guy kept both elbows cocked, vain about those biceps. Tight T-shirt, stiff jeans with cuffs rolled doo-wop-wide. He’d asked the dice for Brando but thrown a Jack LaLanne.

  “That’s him,” I said, “with the redhead chick at the bar.”

  The girl was a touch taller than he was, not pretty but younger.

  I watched him survey the crowd—eyes fathomless black, clicking from point to point slow as a schoolroom-cloc
k second hand.

  Ellis lifted her chin. “Ozark Fonzie,” she pronounced. “Guy should lay off the Grecian Formula. Mongolians don’t have hair that black.”

  When the Kingsnake fans surged forward, I could see Schneider cup the redhead’s ass and squeeze. She fussed at that, waving a sloppy finger in his face.

  He did it again and she tried to shove him away, knocking only herself off balance. She clutched his arm and fought gravity, ankles bowing out over white spike heels, legs sheathed in “suntan” pantyhose. Her skin was otherwise so pale it had the blue tinge of skim milk.

  The band was blasting again, so Ellis put a hand on my shoulder and yelled into my ear. “Think they know each other?”

  He slid his hand from ass up to waist and the girl pressed into him, crotch first. She dropped her head and looked into his eyes, whispered something pouty.

  “Signs point to yes,” I said.

  Schneider shoved a hand deep in his jeans pocket, retrieving something small which he then tucked down the front of her shirt.

  She touched his cheek, mashed her mouth against his jaw for a second, and turned toward us.

  The ladies’ was just the other side of the pinball machine. Schneider’s date brought tremendous concentration to the effort of reaching it. Every bobble on those heels making this Moby Dick of a purse thump against her hip.

  Slow as her progress was, she nearly made the door before she puked.

  Ellis tapped my beer discreetly with hers. “Madeline, the gods have smiled.”

  The girl shuddered and spewed another bright plume.

  Schneider sipped his drink, watching.

  “Poor Vomit Girl,” said Ellis. “Not a friend in the world.”

  We jumped down, buoyed her up by the elbows, and whisked her right the hell on into that bathroom.

  “M’okay,” she said more than once, but we kept her moving toward the handicapped stall.

  We had the choreography down: Ellis hooked the stall door wide with a quick toe so I could angle in. I kicked up the seat and we muscled Vomit Girl into range.

  It was tough keeping her vertical, especially one-handed. The actual bouts weren’t so bad—her body arced with the effort, and we just had to keep her balanced.

  Slack, however, the bitch was a moose.

  Soon as things slowed down, we let her sink to her knees. Vomit Girl hugged the rim, head flopping onto a shoulder.

  I tucked a last strand of hair behind her ear and rubbed her back. She kept her eyes shut, breathing in short Lamaze-y puffs.

  “You ladies’re wicked awesome,” she said finally, voice echoing out of the bowl.

  Ellis looked at me. “Boston?”

  “Hyannis,” croaked VG.

  She raised her head and opened her eyes, dragged her hand across shiny lips.

  I got my first good look at her face: pug nose and a vixen chin, lashes gummed with too-black mascara. She was tired and nowhere near sober, but you could tell she was finished.

  “Man,” she said, “that was some fucked up.”

  She drew her knees to her chest, reached a milk-glass arm past orange legs to grab her purse, pulling out—what else—Virginia Slims.

  Vomit Girl got one in her mouth and thumbed a metal lighter going. Her hand shook and she had to shut one eye before aligning flame and tip, but she managed a French-inhale by drag three.

  She dropped the lighter to the floor and squinted at her nails. “Busted off a damn tip.”

  “How you holding up otherwise?” asked Ellis.

  Our charge smiled at us, head lolling back against the wall. “Have to say I’m feeling just ducky.”

  Her unbuttoned shirt revealed blue veins tracing the swell of each breast. Older than us, I thought, but then I wasn’t sure. She looked sixteen and fifty, all at once.

  Vomit Girl took one more drag and pitched her cigarette into the toilet, only a third smoked down. It hissed and went instantly dark to the filter.

  I watched her weasel a Jack Horner thumb into her bra, then extract a brown glass vial with a black plastic top.

  “So,” she said, “you ladies up for doin’ a little coke, or what?”

  CHAPTER 19

  There’d been so goddamn much blow in the Berkshires, I always pictured the Mass Pike choked with round-the-clock dump-truck convoys. The only plus for me and Ellis was we’d never paid for it, if you don’t count that whole year we squandered.

  In retrospect it was always February, five a.m. in some ugly condo with everybody blurting “Okay, okay, but wait—this one time I . . .” while a razorblade tick-ticked against a mirror and those android chicks with patent-leather hair pranced around Robert Palmer on MTV.

  Not exactly a high-water mark for Western civilization.

  I looked down at Vomit Girl, half repulsed by the vial. Then thought how awfully nice that aspirin-flavored drip down the back of my throat would feel if, you know, we all just did a quick line.

  “Love to,” said Ellis, right before I went, “Should we tell that guy you’re okay?”

  “Schneider?” snorted Vomit Girl. “If he didn’t already ditch me, the prick.”

  “I’ll find out,” I said.

  I drained my beer and shoved it into the Kotex bin.

  Ellis took out a credit card.

  Vomit Girl gave her the vial.

  I flipped the stall-door latch.

  “Hey,” Vomit Girl called after me, “could you give him this?”

  Her nails clicked against the floor and I looked back. When she reached to hand me the lighter, an old Zippo, the motion made her shirt slither down her right biceps.

  She yanked it up, but not before I caught the fist-print, black and green, tucked beneath the nexus of collarbone and shoulder. Schneider must have been wearing some big-ass ring to leave a cut like that.

  “Thanks a bunch, hon,” she said. “He’d kill me, that got lost . . . had the damn thing forever.” Fuh-evah.

  Ellis raised her AmEx, a mound of white balanced on one corner.

  “You wanna chop that up on something?” asked Vomit Girl, hand quick to purse.

  Ellis shook her head. “Open your mouth,” she said.

  The redhead obeyed like a baby bird and was rewarded with a sharp gust of powder—straight to the back of her throat.

  A little trick Ellis had learned from me, not so very long ago. I won’t bore you with a description of the unpretty circumstances in which I’d picked it up myself.

  I flipped the Zippo into the air and caught it.

  “See you guys,” I said.

  They didn’t look up, nor had I expected them to.

  “Not like it’s the first time,” Schneider confided at the bar. “Trouble is, we came down on my bike. She’s this drunk, I sure as hell don’t want to ride her home.”

  Ice was melting in his drink, brown liquor gone paler than tea. He raised the glass and swirled it. The ring was big. Ugly, too. One of those free-form nugget things, with random diamond chips.

  “Shit,” he chuckled, “I’m about ready to put ‘If you can read this, the bitch fell off’ ’cross the back of my jacket. Know what I mean?”

  I attempted a smile, took a pull off my fresh beer. “Bet she’s fine by now,” I said.

  The whole point of being here was to buddy up and coax him into talking, but I couldn’t get past the image of his fist slamming into Vomit Girl.

  The band wrapped it up, and everybody started crowding against us at the bar.

  Someone shoved into me, pushing me closer to Schneider.

  He smiled.

  Then he tipped his glass, straining bourbon dregs through his teeth. Opened wider, tossed in the shards of ice. Chewed with his mouth open.

  Through the slush: “You and your friend got a car?”

  I waited for him to swallow. “Truck,” I said.

  He laid a finger alongside his nose, then tapped a nostril. “Bring her home, I’ll be sure to make it worth your while.”

  He looked into his glass, t
hen at me. “Get you another?”

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  “G’wan . . . little something for a chaser?”

  He snapped twice and the bartender stepped up. Big guy with a mullet.

  “Another Jack rocks,” Schneider told him, “and a bit of the same, neat, for the lady.”

  He turned his head half back at me and winked.

  “Appreciate it, but I gotta drive,” I said.

  “Don’t you worry,” he countered. “I know where all the cops are hiding. Used to be one.”

  Two glasses appeared and he dropped a twenty on the bar, then reached for the smokes rolled in his T-shirt’s right sleeve.

  Schneider smacked the pack against his fist, a pair of Camels popping up like bamboo fortune sticks. He nipped one out with his teeth before tilting the other toward me. Shrugged and rolled them back up in his sleeve when I declined.

  When he started slapping his pockets, I produced his lighter.

  “This what you need?” I asked.

  The Zippo was centered in my palm, engraving made plain by a stray shaft of light. “HUE,” it said, right above the words “DOUBLE VET.”

  Hue, imperial city on the Perfume River: Vietnam’s answer to Dresden. I remembered reading about all those lace-fragile wooden palaces, burning to nothing after they got bombed to shit in the Tet Offensive.

  “What’s Double Vet?” I asked.

  Schneider smiled but didn’t answer. He brought a finger to bear on one edge of the Zippo, flipping the thing onto its back.

  The B-side read “GET MORE IN ’64” with a naked chick splayed out beneath. I might have called it a beaver shot had the engraver’s talent allowed him to render female genitalia bearing any less resemblance to the muskrat family.

  And then there were those five cuts in the lighter’s bottom edge.

  I looked up, caught him savoring my disgust.

  “Notches . . .” I said. “Those’re for what, villages? I remember watching you guys on the news at night, when I was a kid. Lighting huts on fire, big-ass grins for the folks back home . . .”

  Schneider’s fingertips slid down around the edges of the Zippo. He pulled it away, dragging a slow knuckle along my hand—a sensation so exquisitely repulsive I wanted to penknife a pair of X’s into my flesh and suck out the venom.

  He lifted the lighter so I could watch him run his thumb fondly down between the cartoon legs.