“—but I tell you, that guy hasn’t got all the corn on his cob. I can sense it. Here, put these up. Earn your goddamn circus tickets.”
I finished off the Coke, got the box of Harlequins Waldo had brought in, took them over to the romance section and put them on the floor.
I pulled one out to look at the author’s name, and something fell out of the book. It was a folded piece of paper. I picked it up and unfolded it. It was a magazine fold-out of a naked woman, sort you see in the cheaper tits and ass magazines. She had breasts just a little smaller than watermelons and she was grabbing her ankles, holding her legs in a spread eagle position, as if waiting for some unsuspecting traveler to fall in. There were thick black paint lines slashed at the neck, torso, elbows, wrist, waist, knees and ankles. The eyes had been blackened with the marker so that they looked like nothing more than enormous skull sockets. A circle had been drawn around her vagina and there was a big black dot dead center of it, like a bull's eye. I turned it over. On the back over the printing there was written in black with a firm hand: Nothing really hooks together. Life lacks romance.
Looking at the photograph and those lines made me feel peculiar. I refolded the fold-out and started to replace it inside the book, then I thought maybe I’d throw it in the trash, but finally decided to keep it out of curiosity.
I shoved it into my back pocket and finished putting up the books, then got ready to leave. As I was going, Martha said, “You want a job here putting up books I’ll take you on half a day five days a week. Monday through Friday. Saves some wear on my bad leg. I can pay you a little. Won’t be much, but I don’t figure you’re worth much to me.”
“That’s a sweet offer, Martha, but I don’t know.”
“You say you want work.”
“I do, but half a day isn’t enough.”
“More than you’re working now, and I’ll pay in cash. No taxes, no bullshit with the employment office.”
“All right,” I said. “You got a deal.”
“Start tomorrow.”
I was lying naked on the bed with just the nightlight on reading a hard-boiled mystery novel. The window was open as always and there was actually a pretty nice breeze blowing in. I felt like I used to when I was twelve and staying up late and reading with a flashlight under the covers and a cool spring wind was blowing in through the window screen, and Mom and Dad were in the next room and I was loved and protected and was going to live forever. Pleasant.
There was a knock at the door.
That figured.
I got up and pulled on my pajama bottoms and put on a robe and went to the door. It was Jasmine. She had her long, dark hair tied back in a ponytail and she was wearing jeans and a shirt buttoned up wrong. She had a suitcase in her hand.
“Connie again?”
“Her and that man,” Jasmine said as she came inside. “I hate them.”
“You don’t hate your mother. She’s an asshole, but you don’t hate her.”
“You hate her.”
“That’s different.”
“Can I stay here for a while?”
“Sure. There’s almost enough room for me, so I’m sure you’ll find it cozy.”
“You’re not glad to see me?”
“I’m glad to see you. I’m always glad to see you. But this won’t work out. Look how small this place is. Besides, you’ve done this before. Couple times. You come here, eat all my cereal, start missing your comforts, and then you go home.”
“Not this time.”
“All right. Not this time. Hungry?”
“I really don’t want any cereal.”
“I actually have some lunch meat this time. It’s not quite green.”
“Sounds yummy.”
I made a couple of sandwiches and poured us some slightly tainted milk and we talked a moment, then Jasmine saw the fold-out on the dresser and picked it up. I had pulled it from my pocket when I got home and tossed it there.
She opened it up and looked at it, then smiled at me. It was the same smile her mother used when she was turning on the charm, or was about to make me feel small enough to wear doll clothes.
“Daddy, dear!”
“I found it.”
“Say you did?”
“Cut it out. It was in one of the books I was putting up today. I thought it was weird and I stuck it in my back pocket. I should have thrown it away.”
Jasmine smiled at me, examined the fold-out closely. “Daddy, do men like women like this? That big, I mean?”
“Some do. Yes.”
“Do you?”
“Of course not.”
“What are these lines?”
“I don’t know exactly, but that’s what I thought was weird. It got my mind working overtime.”
“You mean like the ‘What If’ game?”
The “What If” game was something Jasmine and I had made up when she was little, and had never really quit playing, though our opportunities to play it had decreased sharply over the last couple of years. It grew out of my thinking I was going to be a writer. I’d see something and I’d extrapolate. An example was an old car I saw once where someone had finger-written in the dust on the trunk lid: THERE’S A BODY IN THE TRUNK.
Well, I thought about that and tried to make a story of it. Say there was a body in the trunk. How did it get there? Is the woman driving the car aware it’s there? Did she commit the murder? That sort of thing. Then I’d try to write a story. After fifty or so stories, and three times that many rejects, I gave up writing them, and Jasmine and I started kicking ideas like that back and forth, for fun. That way I could still feed my imagination, but I could quit kidding myself that I could write. Also, Jasmine got a kick out of it.
“Let’s play, Daddy?”
“All right. I’ll start. I saw those slashes on that fold-out, and I got to thinking, why are these lines drawn?”
“Because they look like cuts,” Jasmine said. “You know, like a chart for how to butcher meat.”
“That’s what I thought. Then I thought, it’s just a picture, and it could have been marked up without any real motive. Absentminded doodling. Or it could have been done by someone who didn’t like women, and this was sort of an imaginary revenge. Turning women into meat in his mind. Dehumanizing them.”
“Or it could be representative of what he’s actually done or plans to do. Wow! Maybe we’ve got a real mystery here.”
“My last real mystery was what finished your mom and me off.”
That was the body in the trunk business. I didn’t tell it all before. I got so into that scenario I called a friend of mine, Sam, down at the cop shop and got him geared up about there being a body in the trunk of a car. I told it good, with details I’d made up and didn’t even know I’d made up. I really get into this stuff. The real and the unreal get a little hard for me to tell apart. Or it used to be that way. Not anymore.
Bottom line is Sam pursued the matter, and the only thing in the trunk was a spare tire. Sam was a little unhappy with me. The cop shop was a little unhappy with him. My wife, finally tired of my make-believe, kicked me out and went for the oil man. He didn’t make up stories. He made money and had all his hair and was probably hung like a water buffalo.
“But say we knew the guy who marked this picture, Daddy. And say we started watching him, just to see—”
“We do know him. Kind of.”
I told her about Waldo the Great and his books and Martha’s reaction.
“That’s even weirder,” Jasmine said. “This bookstore lady—”
“Martha.”
“—does she seem like a good judge of character?”
“She hates just about everybody, I think.”
“Well, for ‘What If’s’ sake, say she is a good judge of character. And this guy really is nuts. And he’s done this kind of thing to a fold-out because… say… say….”
“He wants life to be like a Harlequin romance. Only it isn’t. Women don’t always fit his image of what th
ey should be—like the women in the books he reads.”
“Oh, that’s good, Daddy. Really. He’s gone nuts, not because of violent films and movies, but because of a misguided view about romance. I love it.”
“Makes as much sense as a guy saying he axed a family because he saw a horror movie or read a horror novel. There’s got to be more to it than that, of course. Rotten childhood, genetic makeup. Most people who see or read horror novels, romance novels, whatever, get their thrills vicariously. It’s a catharsis. But in the same way a horror movie or book might set someone off who’s already messed up, someone wound-up and ready to spring, the Harlequins do it for our man. He has so little idea what real life is like, he expects it to be like the Harlequins, or desperately wants it to be that way, and when it isn’t, his frustrations build, and—”
“He kills women, cuts them up, disposes of their bodies. It’s delicious. Really delicious.”
“It’s silly. There’s a sleeping bag in the closet. Get it out when you get sleepy. Me, I’m going to go to bed. I got a part-time job downstairs at Martha’s, and I start tomorrow.”
“That’s great, Daddy. Mom said you’d never find a job.”
On that note, I went to bed.
Next morning I went down to Martha’s and started to work. She had a storeroom full of books. Some of them were stuck together with age, and some were full of worms. Being a fanatic booklover, it hurt me, but I got rid of the bad ones in the dumpster out back, then loaded some boxes of good-condition books on a hand truck and wheeled them out and began putting them up in alphabetical order in their proper sections.
About nine that morning, Jasmine came down and I heard her say something to Martha, then she came around the corner of the detective section and smiled at me. She looked so much like her mother it hurt me. She had her hair pulled back and tied at her neck and she was starting to sweat. She wore white shorts, cut a little too short if you ask me, and a loose, red T-shirt and sandals. She was carrying a yellow pad with a pencil.
“What you doing?” I asked.
“Figuring out what Waldo the Great’s up to. I been working on it ever since I got up. I got lots of notes here.”
“What’d you have for breakfast?”
“Same as you, I bet. A Coke.”
“Right. It’s important we pay attention to nutrition, Baby Darling.”
“You want to hear about Waldo or not?”
“Yeah, tell me, what’s he up to?”
“He’s looking for a job.”
“Because he got fired for the dog-kicking business?”
“Yeah. So, he’s staying in the trailer park here, and he’s looking for a job. Or maybe he’s got some savings and he’s just hanging out for a while before he moves on. Let’s just say all that for ‘What If’s’ sake.”
“All right, now what?”
“Just for fun, to play the game all the way, let’s go out to the trailer park and see if he’s living there. If he is, we ought to be able to find him. He’s got all these dogs, so there should be some signs of them, don’t you think?”
“Wait a minute. You’re not planning on checking?”
“Just for the ‘What If’ game.”
“Like I said, he could have moved on.”
“That’s what we’ll find out. Later, we can go over to the trailer park and look around, play detective.”
“That’s carrying it too far.”
“Why? It’s just a game. We don’t have to bother him.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” It was Martha. She came around the corner of the bookshelves leaning on her golf putter. “It’s just a game.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be counting your money, or something?” I said to Martha. “Kill some of those roaches in your storeroom. That club would be just the tool for it.”
“I couldn’t help but overhear you because I was leaning against the other side of the bookshelf listening,” Martha said.
“That’ll do it,” I said, and shelved a Mickey Spillane.
“We’ve spoke, but I don’t think we’ve actually met,” Jasmine said to Martha. “I’m his daughter.”
“Tough to admit, I’m sure,” Martha said.
Jasmine and Martha smiled at each other and shook hands.
“Why don’t we go over there tonight?” Martha said. “I need something to do.”
“To the trailer park?” I asked.
“Of course,” Martha said.
“Not likely,” I said. “I’ve had it with the detective business, imaginary or otherwise. It’ll be a cold day in hell when I have anything else to do with it, in any manner, shape or form. And you can take that to the bank.”
That night, presumably an example of a cold day in hell, around nine-thirty, we drove over to the only trailer park in Mud Creek and looked around.
Waldo hadn’t moved on. Being astute detectives, we found his trailer right away. It was bright blue and there was red lettering on the side that read: WALDO THE GREAT AND HIS MAGNIFICENT CANINES. The trailer was next to a big pickup with a trailer hitch and there were lights on in the trailer.
We were in Martha’s old Dodge van, and we drove by Waldo’s and around the loop in the park and out of there. Martha went a short distance, turned down a hard clay road that wound along the side of the creek and through a patch of woods and ended up at the rear of the trailer park, about even with Waldo’s trailer. It was a bit of distance away, but you could see his trailer through the branches of the trees that surrounded the park. Martha parked to the side of the road and spoke to Jasmine. “Honey, hand me them binoculars out of the glove box.”
Jasmine did just that.
“These suckers are infrared,” Martha said. “You can see a mole on a gnat’s ass with one of these dead of night during a blizzard.”
“And why in the world would you have a pair?” I asked.
“I used to do a little surveillance for a private investigation agency in Houston. I sort of borrowed these when I left. You know, boss I had hadn’t been such a dick, I’d have stayed with that job. I was born to it.”
“Sounds exciting,” Jasmine said.
“It beat smelling book dust, I’ll tell you that.” Martha rolled down her window and put the glasses to her face and pointed them at Waldo’s trailer.
“He’s at the window,” she said.
“This has gone far enough,” I said. “We’re not supposed to be doing this. It’s an invasion of privacy.”
“Settle down. He ain’t got his pecker out or nothing,” Martha said. “Wish he did, though. He’s an asshole, but he ain’t bad-looking. I wonder what kind of rod he’s got on him?”
I looked at Jasmine. She looked a little stunned. “Listen here,” I said. “My daughter’s here.”
“No shit,” Martha said. “Listen, you stuffy old fart. She’s grown up enough to know a man’s got a hooter on him and what it looks like.”
Jasmine’s face was split by a weak smile. “Well, I know what they are, of course.”
“All right, we’re all versed in biology,” I said. “Let’s go. I’ve got a good book waiting at home.”
“Hold the goddamn phone,” Martha said. “He’s coming out of the trailer.”
I looked, and I could see Waldo’s shape framed in the trailer’s doorway. One of the poodles ran up behind him and he back-kicked it inside without even looking, went down the metal steps and closed and locked the trailer, got in his pickup and drove away.
“He’s off,” Martha said.
“Yeah. Probably to a fried chicken place,” I said.
Martha lowered the binoculars and looked over her seat at me. “Would you quit fucking up the game? ‘What If’ is going on here.”
“Yeah, Daddy,” Jasmine said. “We’re playing ‘What If.’“
Martha cranked the van and followed the clay road as it curved around the park and out into the street. She went right. A moment later, we saw the back of Waldo’s pickup.
He had an arm hanging out the window and a cigarette was between his fingers and sparks were flaring off of it and flickering into the night.
“Smokey Bear’d come down on his ass like a ton of bricks, he seen that,” Martha said.
We followed him to the end of the street and out onto the main drag, such as it is in Mud Creek. He pulled into a fried chicken joint.
“See,” I said.
“Even murderers have to eat,” Martha said, and she drove on by.
My plan was to end the business there, but it didn’t work that way. I pulled out of it and let them stay with it. All that week Martha and Jasmine played “What If.” They pinned up the fold-out in my apartment and they wrote out scenarios for who Waldo was and what he’d done, and so on. They drove out to his place at night and discovered he kept weird hours, went out at all times of the night. They discovered he let the poodles out for bathroom breaks twice a night and that there was one less than there had been during the circus act. I guess Mommy had been wrong when she told her kid the poodle knew how to land.
It was kind of odd seeing Jasmine and Martha become friends like that. Martha had struck me as having all the imagination of a fencepost, but under that rough exterior and that loud mouth was a rough exterior and a loud mouth with an imagination.
I also suspicioned that she had lied about not being able to pay her rent. The store didn’t make that much, but she always seemed to have money. As far as the store went, it got so I was running it by myself, fulltime, not only putting up books, but waiting on customers and closing up at night. Martha paid me well enough for it, however, so I didn’t complain, but when she and Jasmine would come down from my place talking about their “killer,” etc., I felt a little jealous. Jasmine had moved in with me, and now that I had my daughter back, she spent all her time with a bald-headed, mustached lady who was her father’s boss.
Worse, Connie had been on my case about Jasmine and how my only daughter was living in a shit hole and being exposed to bad elements. The worst being me, of course. She came by the apartment a couple of times to tell me about it and to try and get Jasmine to go home.
I told her Jasmine was free to go home anytime she chose, and Jasmine explained that she had no intention of going home. She liked her sleeping bag and Daddy let her have Coke for breakfast. I sort of wish she hadn’t mentioned the Coke part. She’d only had that for breakfast one morning, but she knew it’d get her mother’s goat, and it had. Only thing was, now Connie could hang another sword over my head. Failure to provide proper nutrition for my only child.