Hidden Bodies (38 page)

He claps. “Hunter S. Thompson.”

“Yeah,” I say, and I can’t get out of this parking lot fast enough. I hand him a bottle. “Here,” I say. “We gotta hydrate before we trip.”

He tears off the cap. He didn’t notice the broken seal. He gulps. “Old Sport,” he says. “I like the new you. Fuck all that shit in Hollywood and the family and the
pressure and the nonsense. We’re artists, man. My sister isn’t. God bless her but she’s not, you know.”

He turns on the music, my
Pitch Perfect
pool mash-up. He laughs at me and says my horrible taste in music is proof of my creative genius. “This is it,” he says.
“Freedom.”

I put the car in reverse. “Yeah,” I manage. “Freedom.”

He unzips his backpack and takes out a
butter knife
and dips the soft-edged blade into a bag of blow. He sniffs and this might be another Fincher occasion. I might not have to kill
Forty. At this rate, he’ll do it to himself.

THE
alkali springs are disgusting, just two brown holes in the desert, like something you’d see in
Little House on the Prairie
or some
Charles Manson documentary. It’s disgusting in every way you can imagine. There’s a fucking Magnum condom on the ground nearby, used, crusty. The wrapper is here too, along with a can
of Bud.

Forty swipes the can and sips—I might vomit—and he strips down and there’s blood on his shirt—somehow he managed to cut himself with his butter knife—and I turn
away. I never wanted to see him naked but I did want to see him here, alone, in the middle of nowhere, near Area 51, nothingness filling the land for miles.

He screams and pounds his chest as he steps into the water. “There it is!” he cheers. “Fucking springs, baby! Woo!”

He drank the Percocet water on the way here and not only is he still alive, but he talked the entire car ride here. He’s not Henderson and apparently it takes a pharmacy to kill a
pharmaceutically enhanced person like Forty. I hope I have enough.

Forty settles in and someone else’s ass was there and animals probably dip into this and people are foul. “Come on, Professor,” he calls, waving. “I know you’re all
New York and shit but there’s nothing gay about getting into a spring with another dude.”

“I’m good.”

“Come on,” he says. “This is God’s hot tub. This is home, Old Sport. Get in here. Man up. Live up! Feel the fire! You get in here, this is how you make a movie. You let
your mind go.”

He waves his arms at the blue blanket sky and howls. I sit down in the dirt. “You know,” I say. “There are just as many creative people out there who aren’t into this
sort of thing. Woody Allen would never get into dirty hole of hot water.”

Forty laughs. “He’d fuck a tween though.” He smiles. “He’s an artist! We’re weird! Professor, you need to get your weird on. Stop being so safe. You think,
you bear down, but do you ever just
go
for it? Honestly, you’re a great writer. But I think you’d be
golden
if you had the guts to get
in
it.”

This coming from a guy who sold my scripts in his name and I go back to the car to make him more Percocet water. Every time he does coke, he fights my downers. He’s making this so much
harder than it has to be and we can’t stay here forever. I shake the bottle and offer it to him.

“I’m fine,” he says, waving me off. “Get in!”

It’s my turn to tell him I’m fine and he attempts to swim in his little hole, as if there’s room. It’s fitting that he will drown in two feet of water when his sister
appointed herself a national advocate for water safety. I sip my water, no drugs.

“You sure you don’t want some?”

“Fuck, yes, I want a sip!”

His memory is eroding. I read about wet brain. Maybe that’s what it is, Forty swallowing the water he said he didn’t want a minute ago. I need him lower, weaker. Henderson had no
tolerance. He went so quietly in the end but this is ridiculous.

“What else you got in your bag of tricks?” I ask.

“Iowaska, baby!” He reaches in for his tea. He drinks. That’s a good boy. Let that tea mix with the Percocets. Let the poisons collide. He passes me the bottle. I pretend to
drink. I am a good boy.

In
Closer
, Jude Law tells Natalie Portman, “This will hurt,” and then it does hurt. That is where I am right now, no matter what a dick he is. It’s starting to hit me.
Killing Forty will hurt Love. In a fucked-up way, she won’t know how to live without the drama and this is going to be harder than I thought. But then, all change hurts. In the end, Love will
be a new person without her brother. She’ll sleep better. She won’t have to find a way to forgive him every time he fucks her over. She won’t have to let him into her home or
rationalize her feelings. Imagine what she could do with the power, the power I’m giving to her by doing away with him.

Forty flips onto his belly, a baby whale. He dips his butter knife into his bag. “I feel whoa,” he says. “Like whoa.”

“Just go with it,” I tell him. “Ride the wave.”

“Wouldn’t that be cool if there were waves in here?” he asks. “You ever think about that? How there can’t be waves without a lot of water?”

This is the part of college I never wanted: a self-important fuckwit contemplating
the sea.
I get my phone. I can’t listen to this shit. It’s only going to get worse as he
slips away and loses access to his brain, what’s left of it. I have a new e-mail, a Google news alert. My chest tightens. I click on the link and it takes me to the
Providence Journal
Bulletin.
There is a picture of Peach Salinger, looking happier than she ever did in real life. Peach’s parents love her more dead than they did when she was alive. They whitened her
smile and enlarged her eyes and now they are seeking justice.

“A wave.” Forty pontificates. “A wave never goes away. Like, what if the ocean just stopped? What then?”

Forty blathers. His words aren’t words anymore, just sounds, as I read the news, the unbelievable news.

The Little Compton Police Department received an anonymous tip regarding local girl and Brown graduate Peach Salinger. Authorities won’t reveal details about the tip but they do confirm
that they have reopened the case. They were wrong that it was suicide. Or at least, they think they were wrong. The language is delicate, hesitant, but the message is clear. They think Peach
Salinger was murdered. And they have started a brand-new investigation. Oh, fuck. Double thousand triple fuckity fuck. Forty starts slapping the surface to create waves and I have no patience for
the whale in the water anymore. I have to get out of here. I have to deal with this.

I put my phone in my pocket and I walk to the hole in the mud. He’s half gone, pupils warbling toward the underside of his skull where that poisoned pink brain slows to a halt. He’s
going, but I can’t wait. I can’t sit here, not with an investigation open on the other side of the country.

“Hey, buddy,” I say. And when he swims toward me, I lean over and push Forty Quinn’s head under the water. My hands are on fire. The water is at least ninety degrees and the
air is hot and I feel my body become a furnace, the heat rises, curling around my arm like something out of a Dr. Seuss poem. He isn’t like Henderson. He doesn’t struggle. He is weak.
Dark yellow piss whispers out of his soft, vile dick. Dehydration. I look up at the sky and I wait for his unconscious body to stop flailing.

Finally it’s over. Monty Baldwin is dead. His fake ID is stuffed into his brick of coke. The condom wrapper is a godsend, more DNA, not mine. I pull my hands out of the water. I catch my
breath. At some point the butter knife fell into the water with him and it’s there, glistening at the bottom. I’ve never tried cocaine before. I dip my finger into his bag. I do like he
did, one tiny bump. I shake. But maybe that’s just that feeling you get when you’re next to a brand-new corpse.

THERE
is no way around it. I have to lie to Love. I am on the phone with her while I wait in the JetBlue Terminal at McCarran Airport. They have slot
machines here too and I am leaving Las Vegas and I am going to Little Compton but I can’t tell Love that.

I have no explicit plan. It’s probably stupid of me to return to the scene of the crime. But I can’t stay in Vegas and wait for the police to find Forty and I can’t go to LA
and sit on the sofa with Love and refresh the search engines for information on Peach Salinger. Because the truth is that I fucked up. I left the
mugofurine,
my one loose end, and I
won’t let it be my undoing.

Besides if I’m going to be caught for murdering that depressive, vicious Salinger, I’d rather it happen there. This is why dads don’t let their kids visit them in prison, why
people dying from cancer don’t want their picture taken. This investigation could expose that mug of piss and I don’t want Love to have to see me in handcuffs.

Love is on the phone, silent, sighing every few seconds, a signal that she wants me to stay on. It is never a good thing when a woman is silent. I have to keep asking if she’s there.

“Yes,” she says. “Why?”

“’Cause you’re not saying anything.”

“What do you want me to say?” she asks. “I’m irritated. I’m sick of this. I can’t get anything done and I don’t know if my brother’s dead and it
sucks.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m trying.”

“Did you start at Caesars like I said?”

And I say yes and we retrace my steps again and I promise to keep trying. “You know he’ll turn up,” I say.

“Which casino are you at right now?”

“Planet Hollywood,” I lie.

She sighs. “He doesn’t like their tables.”

“I know,” I say. “I remember you said that, Love. But I’m trying everything. Unless you want me to come home . . .”

“No,” she says. “God, no. I’m sorry. I’m just tense.”

“I know, it’s okay,” I say.

I know she wants to stay on the phone and say nothing, but my flight to Providence, Rhode Island, is boarding.

“You there?”

“Yes! Joe! Stop asking me! Are
you
there?”

“I’m here,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She cries. I tell her it’s okay and now I’m gonna have to wait. I can’t board with Group A. People are real assholes about their suitcases and I’m nervous there
won’t be room for mine, but Love comes first. Suddenly she is laughing.

“I’m watching
Friends
,” she says. “It’s the one where—”

“Shit,” I say. “I think I see him.”

I hang up and rush to the Jetway. It’s a shitty thing to do, but watching
Friends
while you’re on the phone with your boyfriend is also a shitty thing to do. I text her:
Sorry. False alarm. I love you.

She writes back:
XOXOXOX

I wish she had said
I love you
but then again, I have to prepare myself for change. I go online again because I still can’t believe it. I watch a press conference with
Peach’s parents and her mother is identified as Florence “Pinky” Salinger. She is an old version of Peach, with fuller lips and broader shoulders. “I repeatedly told the
police that while my daughter battled depression, she was not suicidal.” She breathes. “While it is comforting that the authorities are now treating my daughter’s disappearance as
a crime, a murder, it is deeply disconcerting that the police declined to investigate until someone called in an anonymous tip.” The woman heaves. The woman has no soul. No wonder Peach was
so terrible. “It is a sad state of affairs when a mother’s instinct and knowledge means
nothing
to a detective. But we are grateful that my daughter’s murderer will at
last be brought to justice.”

She straightens her jacket, as if it matters what she looks like, and steps back from the podium. I wonder what it’s like to be a mother and you’re going to give a speech for
reporters about your dead daughter and still, you go and get your hair and makeup done.

The broadcaster explains that the Salinger family intends to use
all their resources
to resolve this homicide case and the video ends.

We take off and it’s strange to be going back to Little Compton, to think of a time when I was so in love with Amy. I haven’t thought about her or our trip in so long, about Noah
& Pearl & Harry & Liam, about
Charlotte & Charles
and all that food and all that sex. I remember the way she tasted and I remember the blueberry-stained sheets and the
sound of her voice when she said she would try to learn to trust. If I never took Amy to Little Compton, would we still be together? Is life predestined or do you change it by shoving your way into
small, quaint towns because you’re fascinated by how out of place you feel there?

It’s a risk, going back to Little Compton. But I’m doing it for Love; our love can never be safe so long as the
mugofurine
is out there taunting me. And really, it’s
like love itself, like drinking. We all get our hearts broken. We get fucked up and throw up and we cry and listen to sad songs and say we’re never doing that again. But to be alive is to do
it again. To love is to risk everything.

WE
land in Providence and no flight was ever this fast. I text Love:
My phone died and I’m gonna crash. Nothing yet, wish I had better news.
Love you.

She writes back immediately:
Ok

I buy some crap in the airport. A candy bar that’s too big, a copy of
Mr. Mercedes
, and a Red Sox cap. I walk directly to Budget Car Rental. There’s no way to rent a car
without showing an ID and providing a credit card. I do these things. What I have going for me: I was only here with Amy this summer, a vacationer. That guy who was here in the winter, that guy who
smashed up his car and killed that girl? His name was Spencer Hewitt.

I don’t get a convertible. I get a Chevy. I start it up and I drive into my life, into my past, my future, my genetic coding, my mistakes, my possible salvation, my probable doom, Little
Fucking Compton.

THE
theme of my life appears to be working vacations. Like so many Americans, I appear to be incapable of taking a fucking break. And it’s bad
for you. This is where Europeans are healthier. They relax. They rest. They turn off their phones and leave their work in the office and when they go to the beach they take off their tops, they
show their tits and their hairy chests and they drink and sunbathe and they fucking go for it. I, on the other hand, am one of those fucked-up workaholic Americans plodding on an empty beach, not
savoring the sunset, not romping in the waves—though it’s too cold, it’s autumn—and I am working hard, deciding how the hell I am going to get into that motherfucking
house.