by Neely Tucker
The door looked like the rest: brown wood, beat to shit. Rapping with his knuckles, he felt the throbbing in his back and looked at his watch. Still just ten forty-five. Billy Ellison’s funeral was across town at one o’clock. The eyehole darkened, then lightened, and a voice behind the door said, “What you want?”
“Hi, I’m a reporter? I’m here about David. David Rennie.”
The door pulled open about six inches.
“Don’t talk so loud,” said the young woman, short, stubby, looking up at him. “They’ll hear you.”
“They?”
Her eyes, behind glasses, darted down the hall, then back to him.
Sully, handing her his card, stage-whispered, “Ah, okay. Could you let me in, so we could talk? I’m writing a story about the Bend. And I wanted to ask you some things about David.”
“Why you care?” she hissed back, holding the card, not even glancing at it. “It’s been two years. More. Two years, three months.”
“Yeah. It has. But I’m just now getting around to writing about it. People keep getting shot.”
Her face did not soften but she stood back enough to let him in, warily, like she might just pop him with a shiv. Squeezing through the small doorframe, he was talking, explaining himself, the place opening up as tidy, small, and with a window open in the kitchen to catch a breeze. It was hard to believe he hadn’t stepped through a portal to a different realm. Wooden bookcases lined one wall—they were filled, top to bottom, with hardcovers and paperbacks—and there was a simple cloth couch and end table. On it rested an open textbook and a spiral-bound notepad. The place smelled nice. Grapefruit, he decided. It smelled like grapefruit.
“Homework,” she said when she caught him peering at the open textbook.
“Ah. Where you in school?”
“UDC.”
“In?”
“Graphic design.”
“Could I ask your name?”
“You can, yeah, and it’s Diamond, but we’re not talking about me. You wanted to talk about David.” She looked down at his card. “Mister Carter. What? They arrest somebody?”
“No, no, nothing like that,” he said, apologizing, explaining the story one more time—a long feature on Frenchman’s Bend, the slayings that happened there, how they were overlooked, and—”
“Your paper didn’t do shit on them, either,” she said. “I don’t know what you talking about, like somebody else overlooked them, and here you are, riding to the rescue.”
“No, no, you’re right. I didn’t mean to say we were.”
“Well.”
“But I am asking now. I’m interested. I am.”
She eyed him up, taking his measure, and let out a breath.
“What you want to know?”
“About him. About what happened.”
“This in the paper or not?”
“Whyn’t you tell me happened, and then we’ll decide what’s in and out. For now, out. Unless you tell me okay at the end.”
“Why I’m gonna trust you?”
He shrugged. “I dunno. You mind if I sit? My leg. It’s jacked.”
“Go ahead.” A nod.
He sat at the table, in a straight-backed chair. “Thanks. Thank you. So, let’s be straight, you don’t want to trust me, don’t. I’m not selling nothing. I’m just writing a story in the newspaper. Is it going to help you, your family? Find the shooter? Probably not. Check that, no way. It ain’t. But I’m here. I got my notebook open. I’m trying to find out what I can.”
“Hunh.”
“Whatever that’s worth, you tell me.”
“About what I paid for it.”
He held up his hands. “Stipulated.”
She sat down, too. Not really giving a damn but running through it.
“Davey ran shit sometimes,” she said, one elbow on the table, sometimes looking at him, sometimes looking at the television, which wasn’t on. “Couldn’t get a job worth the hassle. McDonald’s? Splash, the car wash? Please. Where else he going to work? He dropped out in tenth grade like all his stupid-ass friends. So, he sold a little bit, not a lot, but then, hey? He got a job at a moving company. He was working. He just kept dealing a little herb on the side. ‘Pocket money,’ s’what he called it.”
“Sounds fair.”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“And he went to get some shit at the Bend and got his ass shot.”
“Did the police ever—”
“No.”
“I didn’t get—”
“Don’t matter. Cops didn’t spend half an hour here. Detective called twice. Never heard nothing after that.”
“You got any ideas about—”
“I don’t sell shit, so, no.”
“You miss him?”
“Is this the emotional part of the interview? Yes? Kind of question is that? Of course. Every day. He was a fuckup but he was my big brother. Why you think I got through school? ’Cause if you fucked with me, you bought Davey bringing a beatdown. He looked out for me. For my mom.”
“She lives here with you?”
“Why you asking?”
“Okay, okay. I don’t have to know. I—”
“Look, I don’t mean to be rude. You seem all right. But I got an exam this afternoon. The problem with Davey, with most of the brothers out there, is margin of error. You hear? And let me tell you, the minute I get my degree in December and get me a job, Momma and me are out. Out. But the problem here is—and you know it—margin. Of. Fuckup. Bethesda, Potomac, white boy gets in drug trouble? Suspended, counseling, expunged. Puff, poof, bye-bye. Brother down here gets caught dealing? Arrest, record, expelled. And where he going to find a job then? Don’t talk to me about a GED. Right. The CEO of Riggs Bank, he got a GED? That truck driver what married your sister and beats her ass when he get drunk? Yeah. He got a GED. So the margin down here, especially for a lot of the males”—here she held up her thumb and forefinger toward his face, the two digits with their red nail polish separated by the width of the side of a piece of paper—“is about like that. How you going to write that in your newspaper? How wide you going to call that?”
NINETEEN
BACK AT THE house half an hour later, a second round of painkillers and a fresh shot of Basil’s had him feeling better, getting out of the shower, looking in the steam-covered mirror again at the twin welts across his back, deepening into something like a ripe eggplant. It didn’t hurt as bad as it had when he got out of bed. Buttoning his dress shirt, buckling his belt, sitting down to pull on his socks, he conceded that maybe it did still hurt as bad, he was just too numb to feel it. Prescription medication and alcohol. God was a genius.
By the time he was knotting his tie, the taxi was out front.
“The National Cathedral, quick like,” he said, sliding into the backseat.
The driver pulled out—he had never paused talking on his cell, going on in a language Sully couldn’t place—and Sully called the desk, the clerk putting him on hold while he went to hunt down R.J.
When the man came on the line, Sully jumped to it, looking out at the Capitol Building, rolling down the Hill on Constitution, crosstown traffic midday not bad.
“Carter? This you?”
“It is.”
“Well now. Off to the funeral event of the year?”
“I am. In need of a little pick-me-up.”
“How’s that?” Turning his mouth to the side, talking to someone else in the newsroom, muffled, coming back, “Yes, so, say what again?”
“Young master Billy turns out to be a fixture down there on O Street, but he’s not much of a dealer, looks like,” Sully said, lowering the window a crack to get some fresh air. “But, hey, the Hall brothers? Dudes what run the M Street Crew? Knew him well enough to call him a ‘faggot.’ So, yeah, Billy bo
y was known over there in the Bend.”
R.J. asked him to repeat it and he did.
“Ah, the dark underbelly of the American dream,” he said, and Sully closed his eyes briefly and thanked the stars that he had an editor who Got It. They were as rare as purple unicorns.
“It’s like Blue Velvet,” Sully said. “You see that? The David Lynch thing?”
“The underlying horror of suburbia,” R.J. said, “Dean Stockwell, ‘In Dreams.’ The severed ear.”
“Exactly. So we’re seeing it the same way. Horror Story in the City, as opposed to suburbia. It’s about the tragic pull of the Bend, the promise of the easy high and the quick dollar, the allure of slumming even for—”
“A kid who’s got it all,” R.J. said. “But the kid has to be sympathetic in this thing, even if, you know, he actually wasn’t.”
“I know it.”
“We can’t bash him, for God’s sake.”
“No plans to.”
“Who’s the hero?”
“Billy Ellison,” Sully said.
There was a pause.
“The dead kid is the hero? Gay, drug-user hero?”
“Absolutely.”
“Spin it to me.”
“In the tragic sense,” Sully said, moving around on the seat, trying to get comfortable. “He’s a charmer, this kid; he’s on the ball, carrying on for his dad who died too young, left him alone with—”
“The mom, the mom. Yes. Delores. Good. Good. I like it. But why isn’t she the hero? Mom? Soldiering on, despite the loss of husband and son.”
“Because what we’re really writing about is the Bend.”
“Right. But moms are good. Readers like moms.”
“Mom talked to me a little yesterday, but I imagine Shellie Stevens is going to break into hives when he finds that out, so it’s going to be hard to make her the hero when we don’t have sweet fuckall from her. She hasn’t set up a memorial trust, gone on television to plead for help, so what, you know, am I going to use to make her heroic? Besides, she didn’t get shot in the Bend. Him, Billy, he did. We’ve got the Lost Promise of Youth thing going.”
“I see what you’re thinking,” R.J. said. He paused, then said, “What’s with your voice?”
Sully, tensing—shit, he wasn’t slurring, was he? “Nothing,” he said, coughing twice, for the effect. “I was running the bike out at Leonard’s Cove last night. Got in late. Up early. I don’t get paid enough, I been meaning to tell you.”
“Running the bike? You’re out dicking around, we got this thing working?”
“What do you think I’m doing out there? Digging, brother. There’s some of the guys near the Bend got bikes. They race down there at the Cove. I went out there to confab.”
“Yeah? And?”
Sully thought for a second. “Like I said. We chatted. They didn’t care for Billy boy.”
“They say anthing else?”
“Ah, no.”
“Hunh. So you were just dicking around.”
Sully closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose with two fingers. Editors. Did he just think R.J. Got It? Seriously? What would R.J. say if he told him about the baseball bat beatdown?
“You put it like that, R.J., it was sort of a bullshit night.” He looked out at downtown passing by the window outside and bit his lower lip to keep from saying anything else.
“So where are we on the police investigation?”
“Dead in the water,” he said absently, the taxi braking for a light.
“Like young Billy. Punny.”
“It’s not what I meant. Well, figuratively, it’s what I meant. Police got nothing so far. Somebody thinks they heard a gunshot, that’s about it. The lead detective all but said flat out that it’s going to stay in red ink.”
“Which means, not closed.”
“Right. So, Billy, the kid, this guy, the way we write this, he’s our hero with the tragic flaw. Golden Boy, Golden Life, but . . . the Achilles’ heel. It’s Greek tragedy, man, I’m telling you.”
“All right. All right. Stop trying to sell me so hard. You’ll have to go easy on the gay business.”
“Wait, because why? I’ve got it solid. It’s not in dispute. He wasn’t all that closeted.”
“Not to his friends, but to the rest of his mother’s set, he certainly was,” R.J. said. “And we’ve got to consider relevancy. He was gay, so what? What did that have to do with him getting killed?”
“Maybe some, maybe nothing. Tony Hall, I told you what he called him. Indicates malice, motivation, like, relevancy.”
“Hall told you this on the record?”
Sully thought about it. “He knew he was talking to a reporter.”
“Well. Possibly. I’ll look at it when you get it in print. Which will be when?”
“In a taxi, brother, on the way to the kid’s funeral now. I’ll come in after that and get started. Need to round out some calls, some due diligence, and we’ll slap this puppy onto the front page. It’s going to kill. The Bend, I’m telling you—you want underbelly? You want nightmares? That place is dark.”
• • •
The cars and limos were backed up onto Wisconsin Avenue when the taxi approached at five minutes to one. They sat in the line of cars, police directing traffic, Sully looking out the window at the mammoth stone edifice, its Gothic towers soaring into the air, dominating the modest skyline. You could see them from everywhere, brooding, magnificent in the light of late autumn, cold and forbidding in the snows of January, resplendent in the haze of summer. If you were going to build a church, he thought, this was the way to do it, all those gargoyles and faces set into the limestone towers looking down on you as if they were God’s personal representatives.
“Quicker if you walked from here,” the driver said, taking his ear away from his phone. Sully looked over at him, startled from his thoughts. A Sikh guy, thick mustache and beard, salt and pepper, a light blue turban, looking at him in the rearview mirror, heavy accent.
“I know,” Sully said. “I’d rather ride.”
The man hunched his shoulders and turned back around, going back to his conversation.
They inched into the right-hand lane, the driver cutting in, waving thanks to the car behind. A patrolman held a hand up in front of them, tooting his whistle at the cars turning from the southbound lane, letting two, three, five cars pull in front of them, then stepping out of the way. It was ridiculous to sit here, but Sully, what with his face, that gimp-legged walk, would be easy to pick out of a crowd, and he was taking no chances in case Shellie Stevens had people looking to screen him. He walked a hundred yards of open ground to get to the front entrance? Any shark would chew him up like a slow-swimming seal.
Halfway through the circle, by the side of the church’s preschool playground, a group of college kids, ten, fifteen of them, came walking through the cars. Sully pushed open the door. He pulled a twenty from the breast pocket of his suit and held it out over the front seat, tapping the driver on the shoulder with it, the man’s brown eyes turning.
“Keep it,” Sully said.
He made it out of the taxi two steps behind the group and tried to nestle himself in the middle of them. Walking, head down, he made it up the steps before he looked up. Ushers were extending programs to the incoming streams of mourners. Then he was into the opening of the massive sanctuary, its grooved pillars shooting up and away into the overhead gloom, ushers steering the murmuring herd this way and that. He followed a man in a gray suit into the next-to-last pew at the very rear of the church.
The cathedral itself was ecumenical, but he was willing to bet the Ellisons were Episcopalians or Catholics or AMEs, certainly not the Baptists of the type among which he’d been raised in Tula, that tiny lost town just behind the levee, its shotgun shacks and ranchers set on concrete blocks.
&nbs
p; “I want to welcome you all,” a pleasant male intoned from somewhere up front, the assembled raising their heads, craning necks to see, the voice drifting around and past the flags hanging impossibly high in the nave above, floating to the rose window in the back.
When his family had gone to church, bleary-eyed and gussied up, Sully never really felt like they belonged. You had to go sometimes, at least sometimes, or be socially ostracized as the godless pagan white trash at the end of the road, so his mother clamped a smoke between her lips and pushed and bullied them out of bed every fourth or fifth Sunday. His father amiably stood for it.
“We gather here to mourn, yes, but also to celebrate,” the voice said, startling him back to the present. “To give thanks to our God for his solace in our grief, for the joy in having given us the life of this wonderful young man for as long as he did.”
Sully closed his eyes and saw his mother’s beauty parlor after the robbery. It was on a side road off Main Street, which is what they called Highway 65 as it passed through town, all twelve blocks of it. The big plate-glass window of the shop was pristine, the yellow cursive lettering just like his mother had liked it. The three swivel chairs were still there in front of the mirrors, the three big, bulbous hair dryers at the back. Everything else was knocked over and broken, one of the big mirrors was shattered, and there was still a messy glop on the black-and-white-checked tile where his mother’s body had fallen, shot twice in the chest and once in the head.
The sheriff, Mr. Evans, telling his dad all the money in the register was gone and they had no suspects and did he know anybody who’d have wanted to do Cindy any harm, anyone at all.
The morning after the funeral he’d been at the breakfast table in the half-light, weeping and snot nosed, moaning that he’d wanted to see his mother one more time but the casket had been closed, his father with a bourbon for breakfast, his sister stone-faced and unseeing, the old man himself seven months from the car wreck that would kill him, drunk out of his mind, the F-150 impaled on a pine tree on the side of the road, three miles from home and five miles from the roadside bar where he’d had six beers and six shots of Jack.
