“I thought about it. She’s got a ring through her pussy too. I seen you look at that.”
“It’s there to look at, but I don’t want it. That’s like asking for it. Guys do this, take that stuff, they’re just asking for it. And they kill in the same place, same way, dispose of the body the same way—”
“We’ve done some of that—”
“Yeah. But we change up too. And we don’t do it all the goddamn time. You got to hold back some. Have some self-control. It’s more fun when it’s built up some steam, and then you still got to be careful. That’s the thing matters, self-control.”
“I don’t know. We had self-control, we wouldn’t do it.”
“It doesn’t take any self-control not to do it. It’s the self-control to do it that matters. To know you’re taking a chance, and still keep your head.”
His partner turned back to the curtain and the lights.
“I suppose.”
Sometimes he worried about his partner, thought maybe he was just a little flaky, out there on the rim, wobbling.
“I’m gonna wipe the place down,” he said, “do the cleaning. Then we’re gonna go. Got some DNA here…well, they got to connect it to us. Isn’t any reason to connect it to us, is there?”
“I suppose not.”
“Most little burgs like this, you know they don’t even have fucking DNA tests. Costs to get that done. Costs too much for little towns. You know that. So it ain’t like a fucking television show where they find one nut hair and know some fucker in Cleveland did it. Not if we’re careful. Shit, man. Risk is part of it, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Then, we do what we’re supposed to do, any DNA they got, we don’t worry too much about, ’cause they got to match it to us. And why would they? It’s the more practical shit ought to worry you. Like leaving your fucking wallet or some such thing.”
“Yeah. You’re right.”
His partner was back at the bed now, looking down at the nude woman’s body.
“She was sure easy. I didn’t get, you know, what I was looking for. I sort of feel sorry for her. For me, she was kind of a waste. I don’t like to waste. Get what you want, it ain’t a waste, but she died and I didn’t get what I wanted.”
“Sometimes it’s a thrill. Sometimes it ain’t much. It’s like dinner in a strange restaurant. You can’t count on anything. But sometimes it’s pretty special. You got to take a run at it, see how it turns out.”
The big man went into the bathroom to run the tub full of water.
Later they drove away in her green Dodge, leaving her in the motel, at the bottom of the tub, covered in soapy water, this after cleansing and rinsing her a few times. They drove the Dodge to the woods, both of them wearing gloves now.
They got out and paused to light cigarettes and lean against a tree and look up through the branches at the moon, careful not to toss their cigarettes, so as not to leave anything of themselves behind.
Finally they loaded up in their car and drove back to where they lived, some hour or so away. When they got to the big man’s house, first thing they did was remove the shoes they had bought at Goodwill, wiped them down and put them in a bag and took them to the Dumpster.
The big man thought it all over. By the time anyone found the car, maybe found their tracks, even if they came to them, checked out their shoes, looked for them in the dump, if they could find them, those shoes would be plowed way under, could be anyone’s shoes, mixed in with coffee grounds and used Tampax and rotten tomato slices.
Living this kind of life, even taking precautions, keeping the kills down to different towns and wide apart, you still had to be careful. DNA could really be a problem. His partner was right about that. But it could be beaten, this DNA. Wasn’t magic. Was beaten all the time. Otherwise nobody would get away with anything.
Besides, what was the game without the thrill of discovery? Fear of prison and the hot needle full of drop-you-down-dead? Fear of getting caught, that was the hullabaloo that kept it all exciting. Gave life the juice. ’Cause without death, without fear of it, without having it hanging over your head like a slow-tipping bottle full of acid, the whole of existence was merely about floating from one moment to another, like a frog on a lily pad, and he didn’t like to think of himself as a frog.
No. Had to compare himself to some other kind of critter, something that had to do with water…well, he’d go for big water. The ocean. And he would be a great white shark.
Yep. He was a shark. And his partner…well, he was a sucker fish clinging to his belly. No. His balls. Sucked up tight on his balls. That’s how he liked to think of him.
A sucker fish.
And him, the shark, dragging his partner through the water, clinging to the old shark nuts.
12
When he and Joey came into the bar it was cool and dark, and Harry wanted a beer. He wasn’t supposed to drink, remembered the talk with his dad, but lately he had been tying them on. Thing he found out, just by accident on New Year’s, was that when he drank he didn’t hear the sounds and see the images, no flashes of color. The alcohol numbed something inside of him. You could beat on a spot where a sound had leaped at him before, and it would lie dormant.
He knew this for a fact because of Joey’s apartment, and something that had happened there, but he didn’t want to think about that. Not now. Not ever.
He hadn’t told Joey about it. It was the same as how he didn’t like to go over to Joey’s house when he lived at home, didn’t want to go there because of Mr. Barnhouse, who could be all right one moment, then find offense at most anything the next, fly off the handle, go into a cuss-a-thon, snatch Joey up and beat him like a bongo drum. And now that Joey had moved out, he didn’t want to go to Joey’s new place.
Mr. Barnhouse wasn’t there, but…now there were new problems.
He told himself he wouldn’t think about that and now he was. But he wasn’t going to keep it up. He was going to let it go. Now if he went to Joey’s he always went snookered, and it worked, but he had the memories too, and they were with him all the time, and when he was at Joey’s, well, they were there, like those flickering movie images seen so long ago through the windows overlooking the drive-in show. Alcohol helped with some things, but it didn’t really help all that well with the memories.
He wanted a beer. Several.
He hoped, as he always hoped, that no dark sounds, as he had come to think of them, lurked somewhere within the bar. Sheehan’s Place it was called.
Place like this, where the alcohol seeped up out of the floor with a spoiled-ham kind of smell, would be where some past violent event might be contained inside a stool used to bean someone, a table where a face got slammed, the walls where someone might have been thrown against them.
That violent stuff, that past business, it could skulk about almost anywhere. And at the right moment, the right sound could reinvigorate the event. At least for him.
A scratch, a wham, a slam, a thud, and his head would be a bag full of noise, colors, and bad mojo.
Yeah. He wanted to get numb quick.
He thought maybe he had to quit going out altogether, except maybe to the store down the block. Buy his medicine in the liquor section, keep himself in a stunned condition. Sober up just enough to make it to the liquor store, get his stuff, start all over again.
He and Joey ordered a pitcher of beer at the bar, carried it and the glasses to a table in the corner, where it was rich in shadow.
There was country music playing, and there was dancing, and there were a lot of great-looking women on the floor, guys with their hands on the women’s asses and such, and Harry found himself jealous. Or lonesome. Or both. He wasn’t sure.
“That one right there, the one in them jeans and the red shirt,” Joey said, “she ought not to wear pants so tight. She either looks like she’s got a tallywhacker or she’s on the rag. See there up front, it’s pushing out the zipper.”
“Oh, shut up. She lo
oks all right.”
“If you like ’em with a dick, or on the rag. Think she’d use a feminine-protection plug or something, not that old rag deal. Something stuck up there, out of sight, like a gopher in a hole, that’s the way to go, not a rug over a manhole. That’s just nasty. Hell, maybe it is a dick. I think she could be a man. I think she’s got a bit of a mustache, now that I look.”
“Joey, no wonder you don’t do well with women.”
“Like you do?”
“You got a point there.”
They sat and watched and listened and drank. The music was loud but good, came from a sound system, all recorded stuff. The lights became dimmer and the dark profiles of the dancers moved and the lights behind the bar fuzzed. The shapes danced this way and that, and after a while it seemed to Harry they all danced at a tilt, and that the table was on a boat, and the boat was on a nasty sea.
Harry was downing one cold glass after another, ordering pitcher after pitcher, thinking it all tasted like rubbing alcohol. Hell, he didn’t even enjoy it. But it treated him right when it came to the sounds.
He thought about his mom in that old house. He hadn’t been to see her in a month. Had to drive back over there. Had to go. But it was no longer a sanctuary. There was a trauma there, where the kitchen table was. What if he moved the chair his dad had moved when he stood up, right before keeling over?
Would it—that bad moment—be there, hidden in a scraping chair leg?
After his dad died, for the three years he continued to live at home, he never ate at the table. Never moved that chair.
To please him, his mother didn’t move it either. She must have thought him nuts, but she didn’t move it. She listened to him. She let him have his way, like she always did. She sat the chair out on the porch, laid it on its side, way he asked, and it stayed there while he lived at home.
But, the times he had been back, he saw the chair had been replaced. That she had been sitting in it. Her husband’s chair. The last place the old man had sat before his heart exploded.
Harry felt as if it were lurking there, waiting for him: the bad memory of it all, trapped in a scrape or a thump.
Still, he had to go home. His mother hadn’t been looking well. Pale. Scrawnier than usual. Walking kind of funny. Bit of a limp. Too much work at the dollar store, ringing up purchases. She had worked there three years now so he could get out on his own, go to college. And he had worked too. Bit jobs. Part-time at a bookstore. Had a scholarship and a college loan.
He liked being out of the house, because of that one sound he knew was there. Maybe two. Daddy had to have hit the floor after he pushed back the chair. Did the sounds register if you were dead, or was it all in the dying?
He wasn’t sure.
He poured another beer and sudsed his lips with it. Drank quickly. Thought: Got to go home. Have to check on Mom. Have to. Soon. Real soon.
“Look over there,” Joey said. “Those guys are giving that old fucker some shit.”
Harry looked where Joey was nodding, toward a table that could be seen through a split in the dancers. One moment you couldn’t see the guy, then, when the dancers moved a certain way, you could.
The man was sitting alone. He wasn’t really that old, Harry thought. Fifties, maybe. Kind of stocky-looking. Bit of belly, thinning gray hair. Lined face. But Joey was right about one thing: Guy was taking some smack. And he was shit-faced. Harry could tell that because he was shit-faced too. You could recognize a fellow traveler on the alcohol river, and like him, this guy was navigating without a sail. Might even be a hole in his boat.
The guys bothering him, there were three of them. One was standing on either side of him, the one on the left was rubbing the old guy’s bald spot, saying something and laughing. The third guy was at the front of the table, drinking directly out of the man’s beer pitcher.
“Assholes,” Harry said.
“They’re just having some fun,” Joey said. “Ain’t hurtin’ nothin’.”
“It’s not their beer.”
“You gonna set it right for him?”
Harry shook his head. “Not me against three, no. But somebody ought to do something.”
“Yeah, well, maybe somebody will show up. Me, I don’t see it’s so bad. They’re just having some fun.”
“Why do I hang with you?” Harry said.
“My charm.”
“Yeah. That’s it.”
The dancers closed, and for a moment Harry forgot about the man at the table.
When the dancers parted the man was gone, and so were the guys.
Then he saw them heading toward the back door. One of the guys had his arm around the man’s shoulders, and the man was wobbling.
“They’re gonna mug that guy,” Harry said.
“What?”
“They’re gonna mug him. See there?”
Joey looked. “You don’t know that.”
“I got a damn good idea.”
Harry got up and the floor tilted way left. He put one leg out, trying to find his drunk legs, and the floor tilted the other way. The music was loud and it wrapped around him like a hot gel. He put his head in his hands and closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
When he opened his eyes he saw the guys taking the old man out the back door. He stood up straight and started after them, making big drunk steps, like he was stepping over something on the floor.
Joey stood up, grabbed him by the elbow, stopped him, said, “Man, don’t go out there. You might be right, and they’re gonna mug him. And your ass might be next. I ain’t going, man. You’re on your own, hero.”
Harry didn’t listen. He kept stepping. Big and serious, trying to focus.
When he got to the back door and pushed it open, the cool air hit him, sobered him a mite. That along with the stench from the alley, the smell of urine and rotting food and waste from the Dumpster. It was like a bracer.
But what he saw, it made him think he was major-blowout drunk. Maybe even hallucinating.
Joey was there with him, came up beside him after all. Was he hallucinating him too? Was he having some sort of sound flash? What the hell was going on, because, you see…
The man with the thinning hair, the older guy, the slightly thick one, he was pretty drunk, or seemed to be, but one of the guys, the biggest one, one who had drunk from the old man’s pitcher, he hit the old man in the side of the head with his fist, real quick-like, and the old man, he moved.
Man, did he move.
He wasn’t drunk anymore. That one shot to the side of the head kicked the drunk out of him, and what Harry saw next amazed him.
The guy who hit him, he was the first.
The old guy jerked out a leg. Sloppy-like, or so it seemed, but it caught the guy’s knee, took it out with a sound like someone snapping a garden-fresh green bean.
One of the other guys started for the man, and the man grabbed him by the crotch with his right hand and shoved his left palm into the attacker’s face, took his feet out from under him, let his head drop like a cantaloupe on the cement.
Third guy was coming in now, and he was big, and he was gonna fix the old man’s clock big-time, you could see it on his face, but the old man ducked, and the punch the guy swung went over the man’s head and the man snapped out with a right and a left, two loose shots to the solar plexus that made the assailant straighten up, then bend over in pain, trying to puke. The old man made with a kind of quick drunk step toward the guy, and standing sideways to him, brought his forearm up under the puker’s throat, drove his head back. Then the old guy slid in and snapped a sideways elbow to the dude’s chin, just under it; then that loose kick flew out again, this time a little higher, right in the old chicken neck and two potatoes.
Down the guy went.
The one who had his head bonked on the concrete got up at a wobble, came at the old man, really mad now, and the old man stepped sideways and the guy went past, and the old man stuck out a foot and caught the guy’s ankle, and it was aspha
lt rash all over that dude’s nose and chin, and he didn’t get up this time. Harry thought maybe he could get up, but didn’t want to, was trying to play dead, maybe even imagine he was buried six feet under, out of this old guy’s way.
The guy with the ruined knee lay on the ground, screaming. The old man grabbed him by one arm and the hair and rolled him on his belly. He got the guy’s wallet out of his back pocket and took the money. He went to the other two, did the same.
He saw Harry and Joey, standing in the doorway, their mouths wide-open.
“How’s it hanging?” he said.
He grinned, shoved the money in his pocket, turned, and fell over on his back, stiff as a board.
“Well, I’ll be fucked in the butt,” Joey said.
The guy with the screwed knee was still making sounds, writhing.
Harry and Joey eased past him, over to the older guy, looked down at him, amazed.
He was snoring.
13
“I’m a goddamn drunk,” the old guy said.
“No shit,” Harry said. “I thought I was ripped, but you were torn, mister. You may still be messed up. Me, after what I saw, I’m dead sober now.”
“I come in, and I go out,” the man said.
“Do what?”
“Sober, then not so sober. Never what I would call completely sober, but on the edge of it. Just enough to know I need to not go there. It’s an ugly place, this sobriety. Therein lies worry and evil. Have I talked much while I’ve been here?”
“Mostly you been out,” Harry said.
“That’s probably best for you. I like to talk. Weren’t there two of you? Or was I just seeing two of you? Though usually, I do that, one of you doesn’t look different.”
“There were two of us.”
“Good. I’m just drunk. Not crazy. Though I got to wonder sometimes.”
“You and me both.”
A spear of moonlight cut through a gap in the curtain and stuck in the linoleum floor like a spear. The man sat up and looked around. “I’m on the floor.”
Harry turned on a lamp, pulled up a chair, sat, and looked down at the man on the pallet he’d made. The pillow had a faded Batman pillowcase. Batman had come to look more like an inkblot than the Caped Crusader.