“She’s a guest.”
“I know she’s a guest. What’s her story?”
“How the fuck should I know?” the clerk replied.
“I can see this is a class joint, the kind that protects its guests’ privacy. You accept food stamps?”
“I can give you a break on a coupon from Screw magazine,” the clerk said. “You got to provide your own sheets, though.”
“You’re a funny guy. That boner fills out your pants nicely. Enjoy your movie.” Zappa left the office and got ten steps down the sidewalk, then turned around and went back. “I’m gonna ask you this once, and I don’t want a smart-ass answer. Is the girl in room nine by herself?”
“She came in by herself.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“It’s a single. On Sunday nights, it’s twenty dollars. For two people, it’s thirty dollars. She paid twenty dollars.”
“Are you retarded? Answer my question. You see anybody else hanging around? A cowboy, maybe?”
“We have three kinds of guests here: shitkickers, drunk Indians, and street people. The street people pool their money and send one person in, usually a woman. The Indians drink on the balcony and puke over the rail on the cars down below. Most of the street people were kicked out of detox.”
“I didn’t ask for all that information. Did you see a shitkicker in her room? A guy with a white straw hat?”
“No.”
“If you’re lying to me, I’ll be back.”
“Go fuck yourself, man.”
“Tell you what. I’ll be back whether you’re lying or not.”
Zappa went back down the sidewalk to room nine and twisted the doorknob. The door swung back slowly across the carpet. He could hear the shower running in the background. “All right if I come in?” he said, his eyes searching the room. “Can you hear me? I’m coming inside. Don’t come out without a towel around you.” The bathroom door was ajar, and the water was drumming loudly on the tin sides of the stall. “Hey, I’m inside now. I’m closing the door. I got a little weed. You mind?”
No answer.
He turned in a circle, letting his eyes adjust to the poor light and the shadows the neon sign outside created through the curtains. There was nobody else in the room. He pulled a Ziploc bag from his coat and sat down in a chair by the bed and rolled a joint and lit it, ignoring the NO SMOKING sign above the doorway. He stood up and faced the bathroom, holding down the hit, releasing it incrementally, feeling a great calm take hold in his chest for the first time that day. “What are you doing in there?”
He heard the outside door open behind him. Before he could turn around, an arm that felt as hard as angle iron clenched around his throat and squeezed his windpipe shut and almost snapped his head from his shoulders.
“Howdy-doody,” Wyatt Dixon said into his ear. “Let’s talk about what you boys done to my friend Miss Bertha. It’s a pleasure to get together with you.”
GRETCHEN WAS DRESSED and blotting her hair with a towel when she came out of the bathroom. Tony Zappa was sitting very still in a chair, his hands duct-taped behind him, a rubber ball wedged and taped inside his mouth. His eyes were bulging, the tubes of muscle in his triceps as taut as rope. She spread the towel on top of the bedcover before she sat on it.
“We’re going to keep it simple,” she said. “You got stung. We win, you lose. Maybe you can walk out of here. Maybe not. That depends on what Wyatt decides and how much you cooperate. I’ll be up-front with you. When I was a little girl, I knew several guys like you. I see them in my dreams and sometimes in the middle of the day. I’d like to kill them, but I can’t do that because they’re already dead. That makes you the surrogate, Tony. You know what the word ‘surrogate’ means?”
He kept his eyes on hers, not moving, the rubber ball wet in his mouth.
She pulled on a pair of latex gloves. “I’m going to take the ball out of your mouth. You’re going to talk in a normal voice and answer our questions. You’ve got no parachute, no cavalry, no Love Younger to back you up. You thought Compton was a bad gig? Those were your salad days, pal.” She pulled the ball from his mouth and set it on the carpet and wiped her glove with a paper napkin. “Don’t speak until I tell you,” she said. “I know everything there is to know about you. You were in juvie and Atascadero and Lompoc. You went down once for distribution and sale to minors and once for theft from the mails. In juvie, you were repeatedly sodomized. Maybe it’s not your fault you’re a bucket of shit. Believe it or not, we’re probably the best friends you’ll ever have.”
He started to speak. Dixon slapped him across the side of the head, so hard his eyes crossed and the imprint of the blow glowed on his skin. Gretchen raised her hand for Dixon to stop. “He’s all right,” she said.
“Leave him with me, Miss Gretchen.”
“No, no, Tony wants to cooperate. He’s been around the block a few times and isn’t going to take somebody else’s weight. Right, Tony? Whatever you did, you were ordered to do. In a way you’re a soldier, just like mobbed-up guys are. Here’s the problemo with that. From everything Wyatt and I have been able to figure out, your attack on him and his friend was meant to provoke him, not scare him off, because you know a guy like Wyatt doesn’t rattle or scare off.”
“It wasn’t me,” Zappa said.
“Wyatt saw the red spider on your hand.”
“Years ago kids all over East Los wore those,” Zappa said. “Love Younger hires ex-felons and gives them a second chance. I know at least two other guys working for him who were Arañas.”
“How’d you get bruised up?” she said.
“Fell off a ladder.”
“Look at me,” she said.
“What do you think I’m doing? Where else am I gonna look?”
“When is the last time you saw Asa Surrette?”
“Who?”
“You were wired up earlier,” she said. “Why would a guy who did time in Lompoc and Atascadero be wired up in a yuppie bar on Sunday evening?”
“Because I’m not good with women. Because you got big knockers. Because you look like you could rip the ass out of an elephant. I get nervous about those things.”
She pulled off her latex gloves and dropped them on the floor. “Bill Pepper drugged and sexually tortured me.”
“I don’t know anybody by that name.”
“I believe you. You know why?”
“Because I’m telling the truth?”
“No, because you blinked after you spoke.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“When I asked you the previous questions, you widened your eyes so you wouldn’t blink. That means you were lying, Tony,” she said. “We’re back to square one. You remember what square one was, don’t you? On square one, you were the rapist who attacked Wyatt’s friend. For me, that makes you the kind of guy who deserves anything that happens to him. I don’t want you to misunderstand. I’m not trying to scare you. I just want you to know what your victims feel about you and what they’re capable of doing when they get the chance. Am I getting through?”
“No,” he said.
“There was this mobbed-up guy named Bix Golightly who forced his cock into the mouth of a six-year-old girl on her birthday and told her he’d kill her if she ever told her mother. The little girl grew up and found this guy in New Orleans sitting behind the wheel of his van. She parked one in his forehead, one in the middle of his face, and one in his mouth. It was pretty messy. See, the shooter was using twenty-two hollow-points. They don’t exit, they bounce around inside the skull. As I recall, Bix Golightly’s brains were running out his nose.”
Zappa’s lips were gray, his elongated eyes sweeping around the room, as though an answer to his situation lay inside the shadows.
“Wyatt is not the person you need to worry about,” she said. “I want to pop you and do it in pieces. I hope you keep lying. I’ve got a feeling you’ve hurt lots of women, and all of them will be cheering wh
en we drop you in a Dumpster. Want to clear your conscience?”
“I’m a gardener. I stacked time when I was young. I got a good job in Carson City and cleaned up my act. If you know everything, check my sheet. I work for the Youngers, but I never talk to them. The old man is in his helicopter or in his library with his guns. The daughter-in-law acts like her shit don’t stink and we don’t exist. Caspian hands out the chores through the head groundsman.”
“Let me show you something, Miss Gretchen,” Wyatt said. He positioned himself in front of Tony Zappa and ripped open his shirt, popping off all the buttons. Then he tore the shirt off his shoulders and peeled it down his arms. “See that bruise on his forearm? That’s where I hit him with a cottonwood limb. See that gold hair on his chest? It was sticking out of his shirt when he come at me with the knife he took off me.” Dixon looked down at Zappa. “I told Miss Bertha I was gonna bring her your ears. She cried. That’s the kind of lady y’all ripped the clothes off. You smiling at me, boy?”
Wyatt picked up the telephone book and swung it with both hands into Zappa’s head. The chair toppled backward, Zappa falling with it hard against the floor, the back of his head thudding against the concrete beneath the carpet. He stared at the ceiling with the empty look of a man who had plunged backward to the bottom of a well. “I wasn’t smiling. I wasn’t doing anything,” he said. “Do to me whatever you want. I heard talk about a guy you’re not gonna like meeting.”
“Maybe the guy who did Bill Pepper?” Gretchen said.
“They say this guy can’t die. I’ve heard about what he’s done to some women. I hope you meet him. I hope I’m there to watch it.”
Gretchen squatted on her haunches so she could look directly into Tony Zappa’s face. She could smell the weed on his clothes and the beer on his breath and the deodorant layered under his armpits and the sunblock he had rubbed into his scalp and cornrows. She took her Airweight .38 special from her side pocket and flipped out the cylinder and removed four of the five rounds loaded in the chambers. “You were one of the guys who attacked Wyatt and his friend, weren’t you?”
“I never saw the guy. Why should I want to attack him?”
“Earlier tonight you were worried about a cowboy with a limp and a cut on his head. That’s the man you’re looking at right now. How could you describe him to me if you never saw him?”
The blood drained from Tony Zappa’s cheeks. Gretchen rotated the cylinder of the Airweight with her palm without looking at it, then snapped it back into the pistol’s frame. “Do you know who Percy Wolcott was?”
“No.”
“He was my friend. I think someone you know sabotaged his plane.”
“I never heard of him.”
“I had a feeling you might say that. Are you good at math?”
“What are you doing to me, lady?”
“There are five chambers in this revolver. Only one of them is loaded. On the first trigger pull, there is an eighty percent chance the hammer will come down on an unloaded chamber. To be honest with you, I don’t feel good about tormenting a man whose hands are taped behind his back. I’ll start the process, and maybe you’ll do the right thing and our situation will be over. If not, we’ll have to take it from there. You with me so far?”
“No,” he said, swallowing as he spoke.
She pulled back the hammer and placed the muzzle of the Airweight against the side of her head and squeezed the trigger. Her face jerked when the hammer snapped on an empty chamber. She heard Wyatt release his breath. “Miss Gretchen, don’t do that again,” he said.
“It’s your turn,” she said to Zappa.
“Lady, don’t do this to me,” he said.
“The chances are one in four that the next chamber is loaded. That means you have a seventy-five percent chance of being okay. Are you following me?”
“You’re going too fast.”
She touched the barrel to his temple and cocked back the hammer.
“Please,” he said. “You don’t know everything involved. I didn’t have a choice.”
“About hitting a man in the head with a baton?” she said. “About gang-raping a woman? You didn’t have a choice about that? You’re starting to piss me off.”
“Kill me. I don’t care.” Tears were welling in his eyes. “I saw pictures of what this guy has done. Go online. Somebody sold them to a guy who makes snuff films. Maybe it was the guy who sold them.”
“What guy? What’s his name?”
“I don’t know. I’m a gardener!” He squeezed his eyes shut and kicked his feet and ground his teeth.
Gretchen heard the roar of a truck engine on the other side of the wall, followed by someone pounding on the door and shouting: “Hey, asshole! Your Harley is being towed! Come outside and see how it’s being towed!”
Gretchen pulled back the curtain and looked outside. The clerk had backed up a wrecker to the handicap zone and attached a steel hook and cable around the Harley and hoisted it into the air so it was hanging at an angle, upside down, the handlebars and gas tank and engine partially on the concrete parking pad.
“Did you hear me, shit-breath?” the clerk shouted, pounding the door again. “I want to thank you for helping me quit this job! Put your plunger back in your pants and watch the show!”
The clerk climbed into the cab of the wrecker and shifted into gear and clanked forward into the street, dragging the Harley over the curb and banging it against a light pole. Then he gave the wrecker the gas and roared down Broadway, the Harley bouncing end over end, skittering off a fireplug, metal screeching, sparks geysering in the dark as he made a wide turn at the intersection.
Gretchen and Wyatt were standing at the window, dumbfounded, the curtain peeled back. “I don’t believe this,” she said.
“This ain’t too good, Miss Gretchen,” Wyatt said.
The reversal of their situation was not over. Behind them, Tony Zappa picked himself up from the floor, wobbled once or twice, and charged through the side window, smashing through the curtain and glass, the chair on his back, landing on the gravel slope behind the building. Upon impact, the chair splintered into sticks, and in seconds he was running across the rocks along the river’s edge, his wrists still taped behind him, his ripped shirt streaming in rags.
“Time to get out of Dodge, Wyatt,” she said.
“I got to tell you something, Miss Gretchen. I don’t like what you done, snapping the gun at your head like that. It froze my heart up. You shouldn’t ought to do that, even if you was pretending. You was pretending, right?”
“Not exactly,” she said. “You’re a good fellow, Wyatt. Come on, I’ll buy you dinner.”
His face resembled a clay sculpture, his glasslike eyes absent of any emotion she could detect. She held her eyes on his. “Something wrong?” she asked.
“That smile of yours, it’s the light of the world,” he said. “You got the prettiest smile in the history of smiles, woman.”
GROWING UP IN the old Irish Channel, down by Tchoupitoulas, Clete Purcel heard older boys and men share their knowledge about the opposite sex. He heard the same wisdom in the Marine Corps and from fellow cops and any number of newsmen and barroom personalities and frequenters of pool rooms and sports parlors. All spoke with authority about the rewards and perils of romance and gave the listener the sense that they had women of every stripe at their disposal. These great authorities on sexual relationships knew every detail about the joys of copulation as well as some of the pitfalls, which they reduced to the cynical and succinct statements that entertain the readers of pulp fiction and please those who have the thinking powers of earthworms. Here are a few bits of bedroom wisdom passed by these wise and worldly men:
1) Don’t go to bed with a woman who has more problems than you.
2) Divorcées and widows can’t get enough.
3) Catholic girls are better in the sack because they’re full of guilt and stay on rock and roll right down to the finish line.
4) Black women hav
e more powerful libidos than white women and are always eager to get it on with white men.
5) Old ladies make outstanding mistresses because they are not only mature but their parts are tender and they are ever so grateful (this observation was made by Benjamin Franklin).
This is the counsel that millions of men and boys have heard and probably on occasion taken seriously. Once in a long while, inside a late-night bar or the cab of a long-haul semi or a foxhole when trip flares are floating down over a piece of third-world moonscape, you might hear a cautionary word connected to reality. Someone who has strayed from his marital vows, or betrayed his lover’s trust, or destroyed his family or someone else’s, will describe to you in painful detail the nightmare that can be yours if you make one wrongheaded decision.
If the errant lover or husband is willing to tell you everything, he will confess his naïveté. He will say he had no idea how many lives would be affected by his decision. He will acknowledge that none of the players was either all good or all bad but were little more than children. This is not a welcome revelation for those men who wish to feel that the cuckold precipitated his own fate or that he was saving the adulterous wife from an abusive marriage or that he was lured into the situation. It’s no fun to discover you’ve been swindled. It’s even worse when you discover that the swindler is you.
Clete arranged to meet Felicity at the stone cabin on Sweathouse Creek Sunday evening and got there before she did. The sun was gone, and the air was cold and smelled of the creek and the lichen on the stone walls of the canyon. When she arrived, she was wearing a long dark dress with tiny white flowers and a white lace hem, and a knitted white sweater and a tiny hat like a woman from the early twentieth century would wear. Her hand was shaking when she turned the key in the plated lock on the door.
“Are you okay?” he asked when they were inside.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “We just made our first visit to Angel’s grave. Something happened that really bothers me. Caspian cried. I’ve never seen him do that.”
“That’s the way people behave in those situations,” he replied. Those situations? They were talking about the murder of a child. What was he saying?