Girls (34 page)

“Then what kind of news, Jack?”

I shook my head. “Gas. Wind. Noises.”

He nodded. “I know what you mean,” he said.

“I think you came up with the wrong man, Randy. You should have looked for a real detective. Or advertised, I don’t know, in
Soldier of Fortune
or someplace. You know? A real damned cop. All I do, I wander around, I get into trouble, I make people sad, and I bring that woman nothing.”

He leaned in, shaking his head. His loud, hard voice got softer. “You’re the man,” he said. “I knew you. You were the guy I wanted from the beginning.” He leaned back. “Jack, think of it this way. They have all those professional cops. They’re already working on it. I wanted a man with brains who knows the community, who has a
heart.
”

“You’re a gent to say it.”

“Really,” he said.

“No lie?”

He said, “Come on, Jack. For chrissakes.”

I sipped some more beer. I knew it cost about seven dollars a six-pack in the market, when you could find it. I thought I might buy some one day if there was something to celebrate.

Name it, I thought.

“Well,” I said, “you got me, I’m afraid. I didn’t help Janice, and I didn’t help her parents, and I surely didn’t help you,”

He watched me again, all eyes and brain.

He said, “I’m a man whose family left early in the morning while I was at school. My wife and my son and my daughter. In the car I’m still paying off in installments. One of those big Buick station wagons nobody needs unless they have to run errands before the country club dance. You know the kind of shit I mean? I know about screwing up so they never forgive you. I’m saying never. They never will.”

I wanted him to tell me what he’d done. We can sit here, I thought, and drink designer beer and tell each other how much of other people we broke.

He said, “So I know about fucking up, I’m saying. You didn’t.”

I said, “Randy, I couldn’t have done less if you went from town to town and took a collection up and
paid
me to fuck it up.”

“You want another beer, guy?”

“I have to feed the dog.”

“Bring him in,” he said. “We’ll all three of us have some sausage and peppers and beer. Your dog drink beer?”

“Not this kind, that’s for sure.” I had to be in the car, driving home with windows open for me and the dog. I had to feel cool. My armpits and crotch felt clammy, and the ribs underneath the bandages were just broken in two and the parts bumping into each other, it felt like. I’d had enough. I’d done enough. And none of it was any use.

Strodemaster said, “You feel all right, Jack? You’re pale as hell.”

“Gotta sleep, Randy.”

“Want to sleep here? I meant it about staying for dinner.”

“You take good care of your detectives,” I said. “Thank you. No. Gotta get home.”

“You want a ride? You look peaked. You look like about a yard of shit in a pickup, Jack.”

“Considering how I feel, that’s a compliment.”

He got up when I did, but he did it more smoothly. My right side felt like it moved in several sections. I leaned on the chair, then pushed myself off.

He told me, “You stay in touch, pal.”

I swore to him I would, so he let my shoulders go and I worked my way down off the porch. It was a long trip to the car. It was a long time getting my legs under the wheel and the rest of me straight up, more or less. I couldn’t tell you now whether I drove home or the dog did.

I don’t remember a lot of the dream. It had to do with pieces of girl. I knew in the dream they were all over the floor and I had to keep from stepping on them. I ran down the stairs; I almost jumped them,
getting away from the crudely cut wet bits that made the noise of soaked washcloths hitting a floor when I couldn’t help stepping on them. They were the consistency of old, soft fruit. I was on my way down when the pain in my knees and then ribs woke me up. I was on the floor beside the bed in our bedroom, and I knew I was awake, because the dog thought we were playing a game. He had his face in mine and he was nipping gently to show me he understood the rules.

It took me a while to stand. I settled for sponging at myself from a basin of soapy lukewarm water. I did brush my teeth, and not in the same water. I don’t remember what clothes I put on. It was dark and it was five in the morning, almost. When I was dressed, I let the dog out and then in and fed him. I figured on breakfast at the Blue Bird, coffee at least, so I filled his water jug and told him he could come in the car. Outside, he did his circling around himself, then got to the car ahead of me in case I needed reminding.

We were in town before quarter to six. I drove to the hospital, told him to stay, and went in. They were beginning to make noises in the hall outside the ER, just in case the patients in the adult ward were sleeping. In the emergency room, a woman who was not Virginia sat at the desk to the left of the door, typing at a word processor. In the little rooms down the small corridor from her, just off where they stopped the bleeding or set the bone, I heard the scrape of a chair against the linoleum floor. The bright lights bouncing their glare off aluminum equipment hurt my eyes the way the oncoming lights of a couple of trucks and some cars on Route 8 had hurt them. I wondered if I’d hit my head against the floor or bureau while running the stairway out of my dream.

The woman at the desk said, “Yes,” which sounded like No. I pointed past her and nodded, the way I would if I agreed with her. She made some wait-a-minute sounds, but I was past her and into the office I thought I’d heard her in.

I was right. She was sitting on a high table with paper stretched out from a roller at the top that covered it. Her face was down; her arms were holding the edge of the table at either side of her legs. She
didn’t swing them. They hung straight down from the knee. I thought she was asleep sitting up.

I said, “Fanny.”

She jumped or winced, and she knew it was me by the time her face was level. Her eyes looked awful.

She said, “Since when don’t you shave?”

I asked if she could get away a little early. “Maybe we could have some breakfast at the Blue Bird,” I said.

She said, “Why?” She looked at my face and I guess she saw me looking at hers. I didn’t know how to walk closer to her. I wanted to. I hoped she would see that along with whatever else she was seeing. “Is something wrong? I mean—something else?”

I said, “Did any more posters go up that you noticed? Did you hear anything from any cops coming in about more girls missing?”

She shook her head.

“It isn’t a serial thing, I think. Mass killings or just a girl for every phase of the moon. I think it’s a guy—I’m talking about Janice Tanner—I think it’s a guy who snapped one time. The others—Christ, I don’t know. I don’t know. It isn’t fair. You’re a small person, a little girl person, and you go outside of your house but where it’s supposed to be safe. It’s
supposed
to be safe! And people come and they hunt you. They pull up next to you in a car and the back door opens and your nose is peeling off and they’re fucking you to death or making soup from your brains. It isn’t
fair.
Christ. Listen to it, huh? I don’t—I got involved here a little, I think. I shouldn’t have done it, but they knew I would. I was a natural to get into this up over my head and drown inside of it.”

She looked the way you do when someone talks to you in a foreign language but for a minute you thought it was English and you couldn’t figure out why you didn’t understand.

She said, “You’re crazy, Jack. I think you’re going crazy with this. Or us. Or the combination. Jack, what was that about you shouldn’t have done it? What were you telling me?”

“Shouldn’t have—is that something I told you?”

“Just now.”

“Shouldn’t … Oh.
Oh.
Shouldn’t have taken the job. Shouldn’t have let them talk me into, I don’t know, investigating, I guess you’d say. The Tanner girl. Janice Tanner? I didn’t need that, did I? Of course, Archie would say I did.”

Her head dropped. Then she got her chin level again. She shook her head very slowly. “I would say you didn’t.”

“I would, too, right now. It’s just, it didn’t seem fair. I couldn’t figure out why somebody couldn’t look after these kids a little. I know. It isn’t fair. It isn’t. Their parents didn’t want anything bad to happen. I sure know Mrs. Tanner’s hanging on to her pain just to find out something good so she can die. Damn thing is, there isn’t anything good for her to learn.”

“You know about it? I mean you know who?”

I nodded. I said, “Yeah. I do. I think I do.” Then I said, “Fanny.” I said it like a kid who was waiting to get his nerve up and ask for a date. “Could you come home again?”

All she said was “Jack.” I’d known her so long. But I couldn’t make out what she was telling me. “Jack,” she said again.

“Could you drive home from here instead of going to Virginia’s? I promise not to go there and bother you. Just go there and take a bath and go to sleep. Take the dog. I’m really boring for him, and he hasn’t seen you in a long time. Just go to the house. When I come in tonight, stay there. Don’t go to work. And we can talk. Or we don’t have to. We can hang around together. Or just be in the same place. Or you can go to work and you don’t need to see me.”

She said, “I gather you’re giving me a series of options here, Jack.”

I shrugged. I made sure not to wince, because the last thing I wanted was for Fanny to see me move strangely, and then for her to unbutton my shirt and run her hands along my skin and then undo the bandages around my chest. It was also what I wanted nearly the most. I confused myself by remembering how Rosalie had opened my shirt and put her hands and then her mouth on my skin. I put my left hand in my pocket and let the right hang by my thumb to my belt buckle, and I waited.

She said, “Did you leave any out?”

I waited.

She said, “I’m not really cracking jokes. I’m trying not to cry.” I would have bet a week’s gas money that the dog was slapping his tail against the seat of the station wagon. She asked me, “Do you think I did us any good by moving out?”

I said, “Not for me. Maybe you saw things clearer or something. Except I don’t think you were having any seeing problems. You said it when you left. You wanted to force me into understanding our situation differently. Something along those lines. Do
you
think it helped?”

She said, “No.”

“Do you want to stay away from me forever?”

“No.”

“Do you think it’s my fault she’s dead?”

She closed her eyes. The tears ran under her lids. Her voice sounded like she was trying not to cough. “I don’t want to know. I don’t want to remember.”

“You remembered, though.”

“I can’t. I don’t want to anymore.”

I said her name. I said, “Hannah.”

It didn’t make her cry harder. I don’t think anything could.

I heard voices outside, near the entrance. She whispered, “Change of shift.”

“Come outside with me?”

She didn’t answer. She got down slowly, and she went down the hall to the right. After a few minutes, she came back with her coat on. She was wiping her face with a paper towel. She walked past me and past the people at the desk and out the big doors. I went after her. I felt them looking at me, and I knew they doubted I was human.

Outside, she was at the Torino wagon, opening the tailgate so the dog could get to her. He went up in the air, wriggling like a puppy. He went around her, then he took off. He went to the far edge of the parking lot, kicking up slush and snow, skidding on the ice, dragging his tail and rounding his hips when he turned. He was making the signal of playing a game. He looked like a ball carrier giving the
dead-leg juke to a defensive back. I waited next to Fanny, not touching her.

When he stood next to her, panting, waving his tail, banging his head into her coat, I said, “Where to?”

She said, “I’m going to get into my car. I’m going to turn the engine on. When it’s warm enough, I’m going to let it roll. At the entrance to the road, I’ll either turn left to Virginia’s or I won’t.”

“Turn right,” I said. “Take the dog with you. Make a right.”

I went to my car and I kept my mouth shut when I got in. I watched the dog jump into her car. I started the engine and shut the window so I wouldn’t hear her motor. I held on to the wheel and looked at my hands. I closed my eyes. I counted one Mississippi two Mississippi three Mississippi four Mississippi five Mississippi six Mississippi, but I couldn’t get myself to ten.

I opened my eyes. I looked for her car, but she had left. I thought I saw her gray-violet exhaust smoke in the air. It blew raggedly on the wind, like the smoke from the hospital’s heating plant. You can tell it’s the dead of winter when the smoke stands straight up, stiff. When it blows apart, you can think of warmer temperatures. I thought it made a lot of sense for me not to wonder why she’d hurried.

H
E WAS IN THE
B
LUE
B
IRD
and eating something I think is called a horn. It was large and crescent-shaped and it seemed to have a great deal of shiny material on top of it. He wore a dark blue chamois shirt with frayed broad collars. It was opened several buttons, showing the mesh of the long-sleeved thermal undershirt that also showed beneath his sleeves rolled to the forearm. He had a lot of hair on his arms and wrists and it sprouted around the undershirt. The heat was high and wet in the Blue Bird, and the smokers were laying down a screen. Verna screeched her jokes; senior citizens laughed in what was probably among the pleasantest times of their day, since now they weren’t alone.