Midnight Lullaby

by James D F Hannah

  I waited for Doria to say something. Izzy came into the room, looked at each of us, walked over to me and nudged my thigh with her head. I scratched at the top of her skull, and she pushed herself into me.

  Doria finished her wine. “After all of that, dinner had better be goddamn good.”

  Doria had a second glass of wine by the time we finished dinner, and I brought cheesecake and strawberries out of the refrigerator. She was halfway down a third glass, and I was drinking Coke.

  I had set the dining room table, but Doria wanted to sit at the smaller kitchen table. Doria did a lot of the talking, about her daughter (Laura, a second-year med student at WVU) and her two exes (the first when she was right out of high school and three months pregnant, a messy nine-year thing fueled by the guilt and shame by two teens who didn't know better and became a pair of twenty-somethings who finally figured it out; the second was after she'd turned 35 and met a guy and decided she was afraid of dying old and alone, then figured out two years in that dying alone was better than killing the guy and dying in prison), and working at McGinley and Kurt ("scumbags and assholes almost the whole way around, and those are the ones I like").

  She finished talking and said, “Do you still love her?”

  “Maggie?”

  She looked at Izzy, who was stretched out sleeping close to us. “No, the dog, you moron,” she said. “Yes, Maggie. Your ex, or your current, or whatever you call her.”

  “I care about her. We had years together. That stuff doesn't just turn on and off.”

  “Does she want a divorce? Get to move on with her life?”

  “She does.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “I don’t want the sense of failure,” I said. “I don’t like the thought I pushed her away, and I worked to do what I thought it took to get her back, but at the end of the day, none of that mattered.”

  “She’s moved on, but you haven’t,” Doria said. “People change, thank God. Maybe you both have a right to change, and not just you.”

  I nodded. “None of this is very appealing in a boyfriend, is it?”

  Doria refilled her wine glass. "Honey, I haven't had a 'boyfriend' since I was 18 years old. And not to ruin it for you, but you wouldn't be the first alcoholic emotional wreck I've made the beast with two backs with."

  She walked around the table and pushed my chair back and sat on my lap, straddling her legs around me so she faced me and kissed me. Her breath was warm and sweet and I took all of it in as my hands slipped underneath her shirt, fingers finding their way to the clasp of her bra, snapping it open and setting her breasts free.

  We almost fucked right there on the kitchen floor, because that’s what people in movies do. That doesn’t work for the folks with knee replacements who've had the shit beaten out of them, because it would not be hot when we got down on the floor and I couldn’t get back up. Instead, we made our way to the bedroom. I turned the clock radio on to the John Lee Hooker CD inside, not that either one of us paid much mind to the music itself. By then, it was only the rhythm that counted for anything.

  She was gentle with me, knowing almost every inch of me ached. She lowered me onto the bed and undressed me and climbed on top and moved with the assurance and skill found only through years of practice. I almost felt like I didn't need to do anything, even as she orgasmed twice before I let loose, as she moaned and kissed me on the mouth.

  Afterwards, laying in bed, I said, "Any reason you think Walters would hang out with white supremacists?"

  Doria rolled over and propped her head up in her hand and said, "You really don’t get this pillow-talk thing, do you?"

  "I’m out of practice.”

  "No shit. But to answer your awkwardly timed question, I've known Richard for years. He's many things, with 'asshole' and 'lying, conniving bastard' chief among them, but he never struck me as an out-and-out racist."

  She took her cigarettes from her purse by the bed, wrapped the top sheet around her and went to the window, pushing it open and lighting up. She inhaled and blew a cloud of smoke out into the darkness.

  "He makes the same comments that most guys around the office make," she said. “They never see a black man up close unless he's running defense for WVU, and they say they're not racist but they've got the answers for what's wrong with black people." She exhaled more smoke. "I doubt he’s any more racist than the rest of the firm, which makes them the casually stupid most people are about the matter."

  "Then why would Walters be associating with them?"

  Doria laughed. "Why are you so sure it's because of him?"

  I pointed to my swollen right eye and the stitches. "It's not like I owed cookie money to the world's most hostile Girl Scout troop. Those jokers made it clear I needed to not be trespassing into someone's affairs. Now because I tend toward being lazy, I don't play in other people's pools often, so it’s not a huge leap that less than a day after I talk to Walters, I end up getting worked over by the Heckle and Jeckle of skinheads."

  She finished her cigarette and closed the window and laid back down on the bed. The sheet slipped and exposed more of her. "A sane person would walk away from this."

  I moved closer to her. Her body was soft and warm and I placed my hands on her hips and pulled her next to me. "Sane and I don’t hang out together often."

  "I suspected that," she said, leaning forward and kissing me.

  14

  Directions to Woody's place involved the phrase "turn off the paved road." That's not uncommon in Parker County, but Woody's house was its own thing, where you came off the state road, then the county road, then onto a narrow one-lane dirt road, then cut down a gravel road that coasted to the end where an old farmhouse rested.

  The house was original to the property, a two-story wooden construct with a front porch the size of some people's homes. Woody had kept up the house but had let the property go wild, with weeds and kudzu and wild grass swallowing up the acreage. All he kept clear was a few acres in back for his shooting range. That green was dead now, though, and the expanse of land was brown and desolate. No place like home, I suppose.

  As I pulled up, the front screen door opened and a half-dozen dogs rushed out in a flurry of barking and fur. One was a long-haired golden retriever, another was a boxer-pit bull mix, yet another might trace Dalmatian somewhere in its history, and the rest were a tangled mess of genetics too knotty for anyone to want to deal with. I counted a half-dozen as I got out of the car.

  Only six meant Woody had downsized. He almost always had double that number of various and sundry hounds, ones he found wandering along the road or got dumped off somewhere close by. He kept the dogs long enough for them to become reacquainted with people and pack mentality, and then found homes for them. When he didn’t, those were a “foster fail,” and they had a new home with him.

  I asked Woody if he ever took in human strays. He said, "Normal conditions, you can rehab a dog. People, not so much. People got too many issues. When you realize that about a person, the most humane thing is to put them down where they stand."

  Woody came out about two steps behind the dogs. His hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail, but he otherwise looked like a photocopy of every other time I'd ever seen him. His closet must have been a temple to simplicity.

  I struggled to pet each dog amid the blinding flurry of affection as I worked the forty feet from the Aztek to the porch and tried to not get knocked down. Climbing the porch steps gave the same sense of satisfaction as the last forty feet of Kilimanjaro.

  "I just put on a pot of coffee, if you want some," Woody said as I walked through the door.

  "Two alcoholics drinking coffee," I said. "Who the fuck ever imagined of such a thing."

  "Yeah," he said. "We should get a bunch of us together, have meetings, shit like that."

  "Never work," I said as I followed him through the house.

  "Probably right," he said as we walked into the kitchen. "Drunks are assholes, after all."

/>   The house was spartan, with basic Walmart furniture, nothing on the walls, an old tube TV on a stand in the living room, and a locked gun cabinet in every room. Oh, and the undeniable smell of dog. Because when you've got that many hounds running around, Febreze is not going to get the job done.

  I took a seat at the kitchen table. "Everyone’s an asshole. Drunks are just assholes who are, well, drunk."

  Woody clattered a pair of mismatched coffee cups. Milk and sugar were already on the table. He filled the cups from a percolator on the stove.

  I doubled the usual amount of sugar and milk I added for regular coffee and took a drink. It was like hot tar, except without subtlety and nuance. Woody took his coffee black.

  "How you feel?" he said.

  "I ache," I said.

  "You look better. You still look like a fucking train wreck, but it's better in the margins." He sipped more of his coffee. "So, you wanna stop lying like a fucking pussy and tell me why you're drinking again?" He looked at me with flat eyes. "Anytime now.”

  I heaved a deep breath. “Okay, fuck, yeah. You’re right.”

  "This I already knew. I want to know why."

  "You know why."

  "You're talking about excuses for why you drink. You line up 20 drunks and ask 'em why they drink, and the excuses will start sounding familiar about five in."

  I stared at my coffee. "I should have expected that this was where we'd end up."

  "Not really," he said. "I can shut up and we can go outside and we can shoot the holy hell out of shit if that's all you wanna do. All I'm doing is putting out there that whatever the hell your problem is, someday you might realize you're not a special fucking snowflake, you are not unique, and you're only as screwed up as the rest of us, so you can pull your head from whatever orifice it's resting in, see whether what you're doing is making your life any better, and consider what it is you need to do to make said life better." He finished the rest of his coffee in a long swig. "With that said, let's go shoot stuff."

  There was a thirty-foot wide curved wall in Woody's backyard, constructed from old railroad ties, with human silhouette targets hanging from it. Woody had built it over a weekend, marking off the shooting distance himself, setting up the hay bales and creating a rather respectable DIY shooting range. I doubt he could have been more proud if the whole thing called him "Daddy."

  Woody had two rifles slung over his shoulders, a .357 Magnum in a shoulder harness underneath his hoodie, a Glock in a belt holster, and a .45 in the hoodie pocket. I had the nine millimeter shoved into my back pocket, and my belt clenched so the weight of the gun didn't drag my pants around my ankles.

  The dogs opted to stay on the back porch; they were aware of what was about to take place. On our way out I snapped up shooting range ear muffs for us out of the living room gun cabinet as Woody chose the rifles.

  Woody set the rifles aside and took out the Glock and raised it into position and took a firing stance. He shut one eye, leveled the gun, and fired. Shots rang out quickly as spent cartridges slung out of the weapon. He cleaned out the 15-shot magazine in the time I took to exhale.

  We circled the hay bales and inspected the target. I counted all 15 shots, and each one was a high-value hit. Five were dead center bull's-eyes, the others grouped tight and not far off. From the corner of my eye I saw Woody smiling.

  "Show off," I said.

  I blew through about a hundred rounds, some on my nine, others on Woody's .357. We spent the afternoon in a haze of gun smoke and the smell of cordite and never said anything else about me drinking.

  Back inside, as Woody made another pot of coffee, he said, "You got a plan on this thing?"

  "Piss people off until they do something stupid."

  "That's a better constructed plan than what I expected, coming from you."

  "Thanks. Was awake all night coming up with it."

  "The Brotherhood, they like to get on the news by stirring up shit," he said. "Used to be the members made a big show with guns and marches, but numbers were down for a long time, so they've laid low a while. Maybe two of 'em went rouge and they're freelancing out for Walters."

  "If Walters was angry enough to send goons after me, might mean he knows something about Bobbi Fisher."

  Woody poured coffee.

  "You want some help?"

  "I could always use the company," I said.

  He nodded. "I get to control the radio, then."

  15

  Woody liked National Public Radio, which meant we listened to "Fresh Air" while we sat in Woody’s truck parked across from McGinley and Kurt. The host was talking Joyce Carol Oates, which seemed like a big deal to Woody. For me, the whole thing was like drinking NyQuil straight from the bottle.

  "Who the hell is this?" I said.

  Woody gave me a look like I'd just squat in the middle of Main Street to take a dump.

  "Joyce Carol Oates?" he said. "Are you kidding me?"

  "Don't give me shit about this, Woody. I'm asking a question here, that's all."

  "You've never read Joyce Carol Oates?"

  "I've never heard of Joyce Carol Oates, okay? If I'm asking who she is, why would I have read anything by her?"

  Woody dragged his hand down his face. "She's one of the great living American writers. I ... how in the hell have you never read Joyce Carol Oates."

  "You keep saying all three parts of her name like it'll change something. You can just refer to her as 'Oates' now. We've established who she is." A beat. "She's not related to the guy from Hall and Oates, is she?"

  "With God as my witness, Henry, if you're being serious, I will push you the fuck out of this truck and drive away. What was the last thing you read? For enjoyment?"

  I thought it over for a moment. "Graffiti on a gas station bathroom wall the other day. Something about calling someone for a good time."

  Woody returned his attention to the radio. I felt his scorn, though.

  We had been sitting there since 7 a.m., watching the firm’s employees shuffle their way into work. We listened to NPR to kill time, starting up the truck at regular intervals so the radio didn't kill the battery.

  I volunteered to get coffee from the Tudor's down the street on a too-regular basis. Coffee on a two-man stakeout is a bad idea, since it meant there would have to only be one of you left when the inevitable calls of nature rang and you had no other choice but to answer. But the trips were acts of self-preservation as we sat through a morning of news from places in Europe and Africa and South America I'd never heard of, followed by classical music. It seemed like a slow, painful death.

  "You have no class," Woody said.

  The comment caught me off-guard. "You really want to sell me on the idea that listening to this gives you class?"

  "It's an indicator for your appreciation of culture, that you understand there’s more going on in the world than what stops at the end of your nose."

  "I have plenty of appreciation for culture. I watched a black-and-white movie last night."

  "What was the movie?"

  "Pulp Fiction."

  "Pulp Fiction is not a black-and-white movie."

  "It is when Izzy falls asleep on the remote control and it screws up the menu settings so bad I can't get the color readjusted until the point that the one guy is butt-fucking the other guy."

  "Let's go about this another way. Have you ever sat down with the intent to watch a black-and-white movie?"

  "I have not, because they make color TVs."

  "They've made color TVs the entire time you've been alive."

  "My point. The world's never been black and white, so why would I want to watch movies intentionally in black and white?"

  He shifted his body around to face me. "You're missing out on an entire kaleidoscope of cinematic history with one bone-headed statement."

  "You can't call it kaleidoscope if it's not in color, can you?" I gestured through the window to the parking lot. "There he is."

  Walters pulled into the lot
in his BMW, sliding the car into his personal spot and getting out and heading into the building.

  "He looks like an arrogant asshole," Woody said.

  "He's a lawyer," I said.

  "The terms aren't synonymous."

  "I haven't seen that huge of a difference."

  "I'm not sure how you're a more cynical prick that I am."

  "Hours of spent at practice when I should be reading."

  "We all have to have our life skills."

  "It was this or CPR." I shook my head. "Don't like touching other people's lips."

  We kept on waiting, and the day kept on getting longer the more public radio we listened to. At noon a call-in show had a bunch of journalists talking about how Congress didn't doing anything useful or constructive, as if this was breaking news.

  Lunch at Tudor's was a cheeseburger and fries and a 20-minute piss thanks to the morning coffee. Woody took his break once I was back, and I scrambled to find anything else to listen to. An oldies station was doing lunchtime requests, so it leaned into too much AC/DC and Led Zeppelin for my taste, but at least I recognized it, and not droning eggheads chattering on about things I didn't care about.

  Once Woody was back, the dial found its way back to NPR and the rest of the afternoon was spent on reports about terrible things happening in places I couldn't find on a map. It made me feel like an ugly American, and I didn't enjoy that. I'm not one to savor my ignorance, but I wasn't prepared to fix anything, either.

  By five, I was ready to go home. My body ached more than usual from being cramped in the truck all day. I wanted a drink, a pain pill, Doria to fuck me until my eyes rolled to the back of my head, or a combination of all three. I was daydreaming about this possibility when Woody's elbow jammed into my rib cage.