Hidden Bodies (37 page)

But he’s not
leaving Bellagio now
. He’s settling into another white leather chair, motioning for the dealer to deal, as if he doesn’t know that the dealer can’t
deal to him while he’s texting. He writes:
I heard there’s hella ice out there too.

I confirm that I have
hella ice
and I park myself at a slot machine with a lobster theme. I insert my ticket, now worth only $2.11. Forty is the world’s least interesting man,
bragging to the disinterested players around him about his
career
being
on fire,
as if people came to this place to talk about work.

My machine goes berserk. The screen changes and an animated lobsterman introduces himself to me. The woman next to me says it’s a bonus round and the fisherman reaches into the water and
pulls out cages of lobsters. My $2.11 turns into $143.21. The house doesn’t always win and I know when to walk away. I take my ticket to a machine and cash out. I text Forty:
Snow ice and
snow bunnies too gotta come now.

Forty gets off his ass and leaves the casino. He lost a lot of money but I walk through the casino a winner. I find my car in the garage and I text Love:
Any word?

She writes back:
Nothing. But he’s probably passed out in some hooker’s bed by now.

I write back:
Don’t worry. I’ll find him. Things are gonna change. They are.

And it’s the truth. If anything, this trip to Vegas has opened my eyes to what it’s been like for Love all these years. She is back in LA texting him and here he is ignoring her,
feeding her fear, eating away at her life. He’s a parasite, a user, and I think he enjoys torturing Love.

I can’t blame Ray and Dottie. No parents do everything right. No parents can control how they love their children. But this isn’t about blame. This is about the love of my life, the
pain in her eyes, the weakness in her voice, the way she is choking on his silence. I can’t let him smother her anymore. I love her too much for that.

TWENTY
minutes later Forty slips out of his cab and moseys to the back of this off-strip, derelict gas station. He’s wearing a stupid backpack,
like a kid going to camp, expecting to see his counselor/dealer. I step out of my car and smile, especially at the security camera that hangs by a thread, decimated, cracked, the reason I chose
this particular spot.

“Old Sport!” Only joy registers on his bloated face as he gallops toward me and throws his arms around me. His hug is too hard and he reeks.

“What are you doing here?” he yells.

“It’s a long story,” I say. “What are
you
doing here?”

“I was supposed to meet my dealer, but he didn’t show. Luckily I’m well equipped.” Forty shrugs and pats his backpack. “Does this mean . . . are you finally good
with everything? Down to party?”

I nod even though I hate drugs, hate the way people get around them, the need that comes through.

“Fucking Goldberg!” he sings, and then he’s on about his Molly and his blow, his this and his that. He wipes his fat hair off his stretched face. “You know, I know we had
some talks, some iffiness with the business, but that’s what it is, my friend. Business gets whack and shit happens and then what do you do? You smoke a little crack.”

He winks and slips into my car with his fucking backpack. “We need this,” he goes on. “I bet this is your first time in Vegas right? Professor Goes to Vegas! I love it!”
His eyes narrow, curious. “Where’s my sis?”

“At home,” I say. “With your parents.”

“Nice,” he says. He cracks open a forty-ounce can of malt liquor. It pops and fizzes. “You relationship people, I don’t know how you do it.” He burps and beer
dribbles down his chin. “You feel like you need to bring home the bacon and the big dick and make them babies and dance that dance and it’s like, fuck that. I answer to me and me alone.
Fuck love.” He laughs. “You know what I mean. Not Love love. I love my sister. She’s my rock. Do you know how many times she texted me today?”

I count to two. It doesn’t help. “Did you write back to her?”

He shakes his head. “It’s that twin thing, she’s my rock. She knows I split sometimes. She gets me. You want a bump?”

SelfishmotherfuckingpigdruggieLovewrecker

“I’m good,” I say. I think about those situations, when women are pregnant with twins and the doctors have to go in and remove the fetus that is sucking the life out of the
other. It’s the humane thing to do. Sometimes, one must die so that the other can live. Biology isn’t sentimental. None of Love’s other boyfriends had the balls to end Forty. But
I do. I look at him, scrolling through his texts from her. He only feels loved when she’s a wreck, worried about him, consumed. Some people are strong enough to share a womb and a birthday.
Love is. Forty isn’t.

“Check out the ass on that ass,” he says, pointing to a high school girl looking for the bathroom. “Should we take her with us?”

I want to kill him. Now. In this rental. I start the car. I can’t kill him here. I grip the wheel. He pounds the roof. The schoolgirl found the bathroom. She’s safe. We go. Silence
only lasts for two lights and then he’s at it again.

“You and my sister are my fucking
rock
,” he says. “You take care of her or else, right? You know that, right? Like, you get that you are a dead man if you fuck her
over?”

I clench the wheel tighter. “You’re a good brother.”

“I’m the best brother,” he says. “The motherfucking best.”

He pulls a little baggie out of his pocket and sniffs. I pull onto the freeway and he is so high that he doesn’t ask where we’re going. He only rants about how he’s
never
getting married
and how he’s gonna live with me and Love and all the fun we’re gonna have. He’s sealing the deal on his death and the car hums and we are farther and farther
from the bright lights, and there are fewer cars all the time. The inside of Forty’s mind is a grave place and it’s right next to me, soaking up the oxygen. He is the anti-Love and he
confesses that he shops at
Ralph’s.

“It’s fucking
groceries
,” he sneers. “It’s food. And you know what food is, Old Sport? It’s pre-shit. That’s all. It’s pre-shit and we
need it to survive. And it used to be a fucking pain for the cavemen, right, my friend? I mean, you had to get out there with your club and whack at woolly mammoths and drag that shit home before
the flies got all up in it and
that’s
why food was a fucking pain. But come on. It’s modern time. Food is fucking easy.”

He rubs his nose and shakes his head. “All you do is go in, you get your tacos, and you fucking eat. People like my parents, they want to act like it fucking
matters
so much, like
what you eat for dinner is so interesting but it’s not! It’s fucking food! Just eat it and shit it and be done with it and don’t feel special cuz you eat that shit
with
someone because in the end we all shit alone! Who the fuck cares that you ate the pre-shit
with
someone if you shit alone, on a toilet, door closed, whammo!”

He snorts more cocaine. I could pull over and roll him out the door but he’s on so much blow right now that he would probably just turn into a roadrunner, catch up to me, and jump back
in.

“I could eat a taco,” he says. “Fucking chomp right into that thing.”

He wants to call Love. I panic and my hand slips on the wheel. I sweat. I tell him we had sort of a fight.

“Then maybe we
shan’t
,” he says. He rolls down the window, all smiles, like a dog searching for fresh air. It’s telling, how his spirits lift the second he
thinks I’m on the outs with Love. He doesn’t want me to be happy. He doesn’t want anyone to be happy. Especially Love.

He brags about his time in Vegas, one lie after another, twisting it all, a mile a minute, deranged, and we can’t get there fast enough but I can’t speed—the mug of
piss—and he won’t stop talking about table minimums and hookers refusing to take his money. He doesn’t say one true thing for the entire journey through all this brown land, blue
sky, and he’s so fucked up, so full of himself, verbally expunging, the loneliest man on earth.

I can’t tell you what a thing it is to see our first stop glimmering, tiny, in the distance, finally, the place where I can begin to kill him: the Clown Motel.

“There it is,” I interrupt him mid-rant about his host at the Monte Carlo.

He drums his backpack, happy dog. And he tells me he has been here before—he has been everywhere, I get it—but this is my first time and it’s the greatest thing I’ve seen
in the west so far. It’s the Wild Wild West I wanted. The blue-and-white motel is decked out with clown signs, and the giant Nevada lettering above the building is straight out of a ghost
town or a Tarantino movie: welcome to the clown motel. The lobby is supposed to be a tightly packed swarm of clown dolls from different eras, but I won’t get to see it because I’m going
to murder Forty today, so I can’t very well go into the fucking lobby.

Forty is finally calm and his backpack is closed and he puts his baggie away. He checks himself in the mirror and he says this was a good call. “I love clowns,” he says, and of
course he loves clowns. He’s an imbecile, a clown himself, with his puffy red nose and his wild swath of dirty hair, his belly fat jiggling in his turquoise shorts; a nightmarish thing that
frightens Love, haunting her, weighing her down, the thing that she’s supposed to love, the way the world initially instructs children to love clowns even though we all know deep down that
they’re creepy, old, puffy men in masks leering at children.

“Hey, Forty,” I say. “You should look online to make sure they have rooms.”

“Old Sport, you and me are for
sure
shooting something here.” He sighs. “That will be aces. We could even call it
Aces.
Like
Ocean’s Eleven
but
with
Saw
and the clowns are the victims and the bad guys are those fucking tourists, the fucking little boyfriend and girlfriend holding hands and shit.”

“Right,” I say. “So the clowns are the good guys.”

“Exactly,” he says. “The couple gets here and the girl is like
I hate clowns
and the doofus boyfriend is like
I do too
and they complain and then eventually,
they get a machine gun and just spray the clowns.”

“Forty,” I snap. “Did you look to see if they have rooms?”

He ignores me. “You know,” he says. “Last time I was here, it was with Love and Michael Michael.”

I feign surprise, as if I didn’t already know this, as if we aren’t here because I know this. Love posted a #ThrowbackThursday photo a few months ago, harkening back to another era,
when she did drugs and had a
tongue piercing
and eyeliner below her eyes, not above. The three of them came here on the way to Burning Man—God, am I glad I didn’t know her
then. The comments told a story: Love and Forty and Michael Michael Motorcycle traveled here, lured in by the gigantic clown boards promising
FREE WIFI
and
WELCOME BIKERS
. Forty disappeared with the car. He showed up a month later. He didn’t apologize.

In minutes we are there. I pull into the parking lot and drive around to the back, the part of this tourist trap that I wanted to see most: the early American cemetery.

“Do you know what a travesty it is that we have no shrooms?” Forty asks. “You can’t be in this cemetery without shrooms.”

“Fuck, yes,” I lie. I park in the farthest corner. I don’t see any cameras but the mug of piss I left in Rhode Island is with me at times like this.

“Solid,” he says. “You know, Old Sport, I knew you had it in you, the cool.”

I offer him a hundred-dollar bill, my Vegas winnings. “If you use a credit card in there, your whole fam-damn-ily is gonna show up.”

“You think I’m an amateur?” He laughs and whips out a fake ID. “I’m Monty Baldwin, motherfucker! Get it? The lost Baldwin brother. Fuck yeah.”

And, of course, that would be Forty’s dream in life: to be a Baldwin brother, surrounded by brothers instead of Love. “This Baldwin will be back,” he says. He jogs toward the
manger’s office, his backpack bouncing, and I remember that first night at Chateau when I wondered if he and
Joaq
Phoenix were buddies.

I get out of the car and walk into the cemetery. The sun beats down on me and the dead people are nothing but bones under the dirt. The causes of death are listed: suicide, gunshot, plague. The
cause of Forty’s death will be me, but it won’t say that on his tombstone and I wonder how many of these stories are true.

There’s a shovel against the side of the motel. I wish I could bury him here, but there are too many people around: truck drivers, hippies with GoPro cameras, a family fighting over
whether this is too much for the kids. I just need Forty to check in, to talk with the manager. I read about the manager online and he’s the kind of guy that remembers
everyone.
He
will remember Monty Baldwin. He will confirm that he seemed
on something
. Even if he says Forty was talking with someone in the parking lot, I am unrecognizable in my baggy clothes and
Colts jersey and rental car.

I trudge back to the car, keeping my head down. I take out five Percocets. I mash them down and dump them into a bottle of water I bought at the gas station. As I shake, Forty emerges from the
manager’s office and returns to the car.

“Want to check out the hot springs?” I suggest when he slips into his seat. I Googled the springs when I was learning about the Clown Motel. It’s true. You really can kill
people in the desert. “They sound pretty crazy.”

“Alkali,” he says. “Fuck, yes. I have some iowaska and oh, Old Sport, you haven’t lived until you get in that water and you just
see
shit. This is what we were
missing.” He belts up. “Just straight-up road trip, writing all Kerouac and what’s the guy, the one with Johnny Depp, the one in Vegas with the backpack and the drugs and the
sunglasses.”

Jesus fucking Christ. “Hunter S. Thompson.”