When she turned and met my eyes it was as if we were having a conversation about loneliness, and had gotten to the point in the discussion where we were asking ourselves why we didn’t just go ahead and cure two cases of it with one shot.
The “single scene in Kalkaska.” Who was she kidding? We were it.
I stared back at her. Since coming back home I’d been sleeping exclusively with myself—would it be so wrong to reach out for a little human warmth, maybe give some in return?
I might have turned off the truck and followed Janelle into her house if it weren’t for the piece of paper with the name “Katie” written on it. Janelle and I could collapse gratefully, or at least desperately, into each other’s arms, but what if Katie turned out to be real? Or, if not Katie, someone like her, and then I would be just one of a series of men dropping Janelle for another woman. The thought of participating in that process made me recoil.
Janelle read the answer in my eyes and her lips formed a bitter smile. She pushed open the door and walked away from me with her head at a stiff angle. I waited until she had turned on the lights in her house before backing into the street, and my last view of her was of her shadow watching me from her front window.
It was just past two in the morning. I was wide awake and in the kind of bad mood that could only be fixed by stealing someone else’s car.
At Milt’s lot I swapped my vehicle for the tow truck, then drove down and let myself into the Black Bear without turning on the lights. The only illumination came from Becky’s TV show, where some guy who probably doubled as an underwear model was ripping insulation out of an attic. Bob the Bear stood sentry in the corner, silently watching my approach as I stood on a chair and unscrewed the bolts on the back of his neck.
Something about Bob I don’t think Becky even knew: his head came off.
I unbolted the bear head and stuffed it and a big rain poncho in the front seat of the tow truck. From the storeroom in the back, I felt rather than saw the couple of rifles in my dad’s old gun closet, pulling out the pellet gun I’d received for Christmas when I was fifteen. I stood in the ambient light drifting in through the front windows and turned it over in my hands, examining it.
“What is that?” Alan demanded loudly.
“Agrhh!” I shouted, staggering back. “Geez, you scared the hell out of me, Alan! Don’t do that!”
“Why are you so jumpy?”
“Where have you been? I thought you were dead. I mean, not dead the way you say you are, but dead as in not in my head anymore.”
“Oh. I was asleep.”
“You sleep?” I responded incredulously.
“Sure. Mostly it’s just been little naps, but today I think I was out for a couple of hours. I needed it, too.”
“Wait a minute, what else are you doing in there?” I demanded.
“I’m not going to the bathroom, if that’s what you’re implying,” he huffed.
“I have no idea what I’m implying. I can’t believe you sleep, that makes no sense to me.” I closed up the bar and returned to my truck. “As opposed to the part of this that does make sense,” I added after a moment. I looked down at the rifle in my hands and actually heard him draw in a breath, proving my point—none of this made sense. He couldn’t draw in a breath, he had no lungs.
“What are you planning to do with that gun?”
“I’m going on a little wild-goose chase,” I explained, starting the truck and heading north to East Jordan.
“You’re going to shoot Doris? You can’t do that!” he protested indignantly.
“What do you want me to do, euphemize her?”
“Huh?”
“The goose bit me and nearly broke my arm.”
“I know, I felt it.”
“Well okay, then. Alan, I need that repo. I’ve already been advanced the money on it. Milt will carry me a bit but soon he’s going to want interest payments at the least—and meanwhile, I have my own expenses. You need to go along with me on this; I know what I’m doing.”
I parked the tow truck a hundred yards down from Einstein’s place and wandered into the trees, circling so that when I approached his home it was from the rear, where I had a perfect view of his truck—and the open doorway of the shed, where I could barely make out the white form of Doris, sleeping peacefully. I looked at her over the gun sight.
“Ruddy! Please,” Alan begged.
I swung the gun barrel over and sighted down on the three floodlights, squeezing the trigger and taking each bulb out with a satisfying plink. Doris stuck her neck out curiously, but didn’t leave the shed.
“Why did you do that? Make me think you were going to kill the goose,” Alan demanded as I made my way back to the tow truck.
“Just having fun.”
“Well, I think you’re a horrible person.”
“You’re welcome to leave anytime, Alan.” I lifted the snarling bear head and set it on me like an ill-fitting hat, holding it up there with one hand and draping the poncho over the whole assembly with the slit in front so I’d be able to see. I grabbed a gallon jug of water and headed back to Einstein’s house.
I’m not sure what Doris thought she saw coming up the driveway, but it was huge and had the face of a bear in a bad mood and that was enough to keep her quiet. I slipped over to the pickup under cover of uninterrupted darkness, making motion without detection, and poured the contents of the water jug directly into the gas tank. Doris eyed me uneasily the entire time from within the safety of her shed, and didn’t respond when I waved at her as I departed.
I didn’t know what time my customer left for work in the morning and didn’t want to take a chance of missing him, so I settled in the driver’s seat of the cab and tried to make myself comfortable. From where I sat I could easily see Einstein when he left for his job at PlasMerc, where he probably worked on the line, assembling subatomic particles.
“Hey Alan, you awake?”
“Yes. Where did you get the bear head? That was a pretty good idea.”
I told him about my father, how I grew up playing at the feet of Bob the Bear, and how he showed me something no one else in the world knew, that a couple of bolts in the back were all that held Bob’s head on.
“How about you, Alan, you grow up around here?” I asked carefully.
“Why do you ask it like it’s a trick question?” he responded.
I blew out some air in exasperation. “Just answer me, okay?”
Alan told me he’d moved to East Jordan because that was where his wife Marget lived. He met her on an airplane, sat next to her on a flight to Denver, where he was living at the time, asked her to dinner that night and every night for the next six, and when she left Denver to return home to Michigan he made up his mind to follow. Her father owned a real estate company in East Jordan, and that’s where he found himself working. In Denver he’d managed a movie theater complex in the Cherry Creek area but the work wasn’t portable—not too many theater complexes in a town of twenty-five hundred people. Working out of East Jordan, though, Alan was able to do pretty well for himself selling lakefront property and hunting cabins.
As he spoke I ticked off the things he was telling me. I’d never even been to Colorado and had never heard of Cherry Creek, but I could look it up and see if such a place existed. He seemed pretty knowledgeable about both movie theaters and real estate sales, competently fielding my questions as I put them to him. If he wasn’t real, how could he know all of this stuff? If I were schizophrenic, wouldn’t my split personality be confined to my own knowledge base?
I started the tow truck to pump a little heat into the cab. “So, Alan … I’m sorry about when you told me you were dead. I’ve just … I mean, what do you say when someone tells you that? It’s not exactly something that ever gets covered all the time in Dear Abby.”
“I felt completely ignored.”
“Well, okay, but I said I was sorry.”
“You think this is easy for me?”
“
What is your problem?” I snapped. “I said I was sorry. What more do you want, a box of candy?”
He was silent for a bit. “I want you to find the people who did this to me and bring them to justice,” he finally said.
“Oh ho, now we’re down to it! You want me to kill somebody, don’t you?”
“No, of course not!” he sputtered.
“No? No? Are you sure? Because a second ago it sure sounded like you wanted me to find some people—not just one person, now, but a whole group of people—and do to them what they supposedly did to you.”
“Not a whole group, just two people, two men.”
“And then I suppose they’ll be in my head, too,” I raged. “And they’ll want me to kill somebody else, and pretty soon the TV networks will be in my neighborhood, interviewing my friends who’ll be saying, ‘Gee, he seemed like such a nice guy, who knew that he had all those bodies buried in his basement?’”
“You don’t believe me,” Alan replied, hurt.
“Which is weird, because this is all so plausible.”
“Look, couldn’t we just … we’re in East Jordan. Won’t you just let me prove it to you? We can go to my house, talk to my wife, see my little girl. Then you’ll know.”
“Your little girl? How old?”
“She’s sixteen. Her name is Kathy, Kathy Lottner. My wife’s name is Marget Lottner.”
I mulled it over. “I can’t believe I’m going to do this,” I finally muttered.
“Great!”
“But not right now.” I shut the truck off, and it rattled into silence. “Right now, I’m on what we professional repo men call a stakeout.”
“That’s what cops call it.”
“Right, they stole it from us.”
It was cold when I lurched awake at dawn. Shivering, I started the tow truck and let the wipers and defroster work on the layer of ice on the windshield. Alan was quiet and I could feel that he was asleep, now that I understood what it meant when I experienced the peculiar sensation of him not being there.
About half an hour later, just as I was talking myself into abandoning my post for the time it took to get a cup of coffee, Einstein Croft wheeled down his driveway and gunned his truck, his back end sliding as he headed off for work. I gave him a half mile and then unhurriedly crawled off after him; I knew where he was going—PlasMerc, home of the surly gate guard.
I was close enough behind him on the highway to see him speed up and slow down twice, his tailpipe blowing clouds of black smoke as he tried to clear his engine by stomping on his accelerator. Satisfied that his erratic progress was a sign that the water in his fuel line was doing its job, I pulled a U-turn and sped off in the opposite direction.
Half an hour later I cruised back down the road and there was his pickup, all by itself, emergency flashers blinking away. Einstein must have thumbed a ride to work. I eased up to his truck and hooked it with the hoist, drawing nothing but a curious glance from the few vehicles that drove by. Car breaks down, car gets towed, God bless America.
You might think you’re a genius, Einstein, but you cannot outsmart the repo man.
I called Milton from the junkyard we used as a storage lot in East Jordan, and he grunted in satisfaction. “The cosigner’s a real nice guy, too. Makes you wonder, since his kid is such a jerk.”
“His kid’s a walking jerk,” I corrected, somewhat gleefully. Repo humor never gets old for me.
I hung up, feeling like the greasy phone had probably left a black mark on my cheek. Everything in the junkyard was coated with motor oil, even the people.
“This place is disgusting,” Alan muttered. One of the mechanics was standing at the other end of the counter, so I didn’t reply. I fished out the card I’d gotten from the woman at the bank in Traverse City, and dialed her number to see how things were progressing in the mystery of Jimmy’s checks, leaving a thumbprint on the paper in the process.
“Yes, Mr. McCann, I remember,” Maureen the banker told me when I introduced myself.
“I’m wondering if you were able to—”
“I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to help you in this matter,” she interrupted.
I blinked. This did not sound like the motherly person I remembered. “But I thought you said…” I started slowly.
“I have no information for you.”
“Maureen, are you saying you can’t help me, or won’t help me?” I persisted. “I’m confused.”
There was a noise, as if her kind nature was being strangled, but she replied firmly. “I can’t help you, Mr. McCann. Please don’t call here anymore.”
I listened to the click in disbelief. What could have happened to make her so uncooperative?
The good feeling from reintroducing Einstein to the concept of nonvehicular travel had evaporated. I felt tired and old as I fired up the tow truck.
“There’s something strange going on,” Alan observed.
“Right … this coming from a man who claims to be a ghost stuck in my brain.”
“No, I mean, the change in her demeanor was striking.”
“Yeah, all of a sudden she’s mean.”
“No, not mean. More like scared,” Alan observed after a moment.
I cocked my head, considering. “You’re right. She was frightened.”
Since I had nothing else to do and we were already in East Jordan, I agreed to drive Alan around to check out his past. He directed me with barely restrained excitement up North Street, past homes that would probably cost a million dollars if they weren’t located in what the locals awkwardly called “northern lower Michigan.” Here, a nice four-bedroom house could be had for what would be a down payment anywhere else. Made you wonder why the people living in Phoenix didn’t move here en masse. I flipped on my heater to dry up the puddle of melted snow at my feet.
East Jordan sits at the south end of Lake Charlevoix, which is a beautiful, deep blue body of water that joins Lake Michigan via a river. Tourists mostly ignore East Jordan—to its benefit, I believe. In the winter a few small factories plus a big one, the East Jordan Iron Works, keep the economic blood flowing, and a small flock of summer people come in for July and August to hang out in little cottages mostly built in the twenties. It’s a poor cousin to Charlevoix, the town on the north end of the lake, where all the yachts bob up and down in the summer. I like the people in East Jordan the way I like the citizens of Kalkaska and the way I probably would dislike the yacht people in Charlevoix if they ever invited me aboard their boats.
Alan urged me to slow down as we approached his house, as if to savor the anticipation, and then went quiet. I eased over to the curb and looked at a vacant lot at the address he’d given me, the snow smoothly untracked and an old Plymouth up on blocks, both engine and hood missing. “Where’s the house, Alan?” I asked softly. I moved my eyes slowly, carefully, like a searchlight probing for escaping convicts. I wanted him to take it all in. “Is that your car, maybe?”
“This is impossible. It has to be here!”
“Let’s go check out the office,” I suggested.
According to Alan, his real estate office was right on Second Street, a block from Main. We pulled up in front of what was obviously an ice-cream shop and nothing else.
“This wasn’t here! It was an old two-story building with a bay window on top. Next to it was a shoe store; they’re both gone.”
“These stores have been here as long as I can remember, Alan,” I said gently. I couldn’t really recall what had been here when I was in high school, but since I started working for Milt a couple of years ago, the shops had been open for business.
“It’s like … it’s like someone is following around after me, erasing my past,” he whispered.
I didn’t advise him that it sounded like my split personality was developing paranoia. Instead I sat there, letting his mind work on it. (Or was it my mind?) He recovered pretty quickly. “Okay let’s … let’s go to the school, see if Kathy is there. I know she’ll be there! And Ma
rget wouldn’t leave town, her parents are dead but all of her friends are here. I know! Let’s go talk to the guy who runs the iron works, Mr. Malpass. I sold him a house on Highway 66, I’ll show it to you.”
“Alan.” I sighed. “Listen to me.”
“I know what you’re going to say, but dammit, Ruddy I can prove to you I exist!”
“Don’t you think it’s likely that the reason your house wasn’t there, and your office wasn’t there, is because I made them up, and I made you up, too?”
“For God’s sake, Ruddy!” Alan replied, anguished.
I pulled the tow truck away from the curb. “I have to face the fact that I’ve been talking to myself, which isn’t exactly a sign of good mental health.”
“No, you’re not! I’m a real person!”
“You need to face the fact, too,” I told him, as if that made any sense.
I spent the afternoon picking up a voluntary repo way north in a tiny spit of a place called Cross Village. The man who owned the Ford Explorer had left his keys in it when he took his family and moved back to Detroit and, as a further assistance to the repo man, had taken an ax and whacked the living crap out of the thing. I knew it was an ax because the head of it was buried in the windshield, the handle snapped off and pointing skyward like the business end of a sundial.
The whole time I was occupied with hauling in the Ford, my voice was blabbering away, reciting from the Book of Alan. I learned his Social Security number and that his father’s nickname was “Boots.” He told me his first real girlfriend wouldn’t kiss him unless he gave her chocolate. He recited the names of at least fifty people he claimed could verify that he’d once lived.
I snorted in derision. “I can see me calling them up. ‘Hello, have you heard of Alan Lottner? Did you kiss him for chocolate? Because I’ve got him in my head.’”
It was dark and cold by the time I got back to Kalkaska, and my body ached from camping out in the tow truck, which I exchanged for my pickup at Milt’s lot. Tonight, I decided, the Black Bear could do without a bouncer. I eyed the bear head on the seat next to me, wondering what people thought of Bob the Headless Bear.