Train Wreck Girl (15 page)

“She's twelve.”

“Okay, how could you have a twelve-year-old daughter? I mean, shit, weren't we dating twelve years ago?”

“Twelve years and nine months ago, yeah,” Rosalie said.

I didn't see that one coming. Damn near knocked me out.

An hour later, I was still trying to get Rosalie to marry me. My point was that if I was Taylor's father and she was her mother, then we should do what was right and become a whole family. Rosalie's point was that she already was married, already had a family, and… Well, it took an hour of me harping on her before Rosalie finally laid it out for me. She said, “There's no nice way for me to put this, Danny, but you're a loser.”

“What? I'm not a loser.” Or, more to the point, only
I
get to call me a loser.

“What do you do for a living?”

I didn't answer. What could I say? I pick up dead bodies? Then, I could've made the point that I'd been working at a metal shop and making good money and that was a respectable job, but I'd just gotten fired. And why had I gotten fired? Because my boss got sketched out by the private investigator who'd been following me because I'd left my last girlfriend dead on the train tracks in Flagstaff. I convinced myself more and more that Rosalie had a point. I said, “Fuck you.”

“Typical loser thing to say,” Rosalie said.

I tried to think of a comeback, but right then, Taylor walked in. She dropped her backpack on the floor right by the door and said, “Danny? What are you doing here?”

“He's trying to get me to marry him,” Rosalie said.

“What?” Taylor asked. “Why?”

“ ‘Cause he's your goddamn daddy,” Rosalie said.

“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ!” Taylor said. She started crying. She grabbed her backpack, stormed back into her room, slammed the door, and locked it.

Rosalie looked at me like it was all my fault. Which, well, a lot of it was. She said, “I think you should leave.”

And, don't you know it, I was thinking the exact same thing.

I parked the Space Coast van under an awning of red and blue swirling lights, slipped on a pair of rubber gloves, and walked out into the 3
A.M.
carnage. A few fireman and cops stood around waiting for Bart and me. I asked the nearest cop, “Where's the body?”

“Where isn't it?” the cop said. Everyone around him laughed.

I looked down the train tracks and got a sense of déjà vu.

Bart stepped next to me. He had a body bag in his hands. We headed down the tracks. About fifty feet down, we found most of the stiff. He'd lost his head, half an arm, and his foot. The rest was slumped in a bloody pile right in the middle of the tracks. I picked the corpse up. Bart held the body bag open for me. I slid the corpse in. We set off down the tracks to find the head, arm, and foot.

There wasn't much of a moon shining down on us. The only real light we had were the swirling ones on top of the fire trucks and cop cars. As we searched for the rest of the body parts, the fireman and cops started to take off. One cop would stick around, but now that Bart and I were on the job, there was no need for the rest of them.

It was all overgrown around the tracks. Weeds and hubcaps and fast food bags and empty cans. Still, I found the foot on top of a little bush. I bent down to pick it up. As I stuffed it in the bag, Bart tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to look and saw that he didn't use his own finger to do this. He used the dead guy's. I stared down the severed arm that Bart was tapping me with. “Goddamn it, Bart,” I said.

He was all grin.

I pulled the arm out of his hand and stuck it in the body bag. And right then, at that moment among the moonlight and weeds and body parts I was stuffing in a bag, it all hit me. I started crying.

Now, I never cry. I don't know why not. I just don't. I didn't cry when I heard that Brother Joe was dead. I didn't cry at his little grave marker. I didn't cry when I saw Libra on the tracks or during that forty-nine-hour bus ride when all I could think about was Libra. I didn't cry when Sophie stabbed me or when I left Helen or any of the dozens of times in my life when it probably would've been healthy to let a tear fall. I never did it. But there on those train tracks, with a stranger's mangled corpse in my body bag and Bart and a few cops and firemen looking on and a missing head floating around in the weeds somewhere nearby, I started crying like a little girl.

I don't know if Bart noticed. He said, “I'm gonna borrow a flashlight from those cops.” He headed back up the tracks.

I paced up and down the tracks, looking for the head. Bart got the flashlight and came back and we both looked. I wasn't really crying in the same way any more. Tears were still dripping out, but I tried to ignore them. And, as for the head, we couldn't find it anywhere.

By now all the cops and firemen were gone except for one. He was getting impatient. He yelled something from his car, but he was too far away. I couldn't hear what he was saying. Bart had an inkling, though. He said, “That cop's right. Fuck the head. Let's just take what we got and go home.”

“No,” I said. “What if some kid finds the head tomorrow morning?”

“Then he can bring it in the M.E.” Bart handed me the flashlight. He turned and headed back to the van.

I kept looking.

I found out later that the cop had recognized Bart from the days when Bart was a basketball star. The cop had gone to Merritt Island High School when Bart and I were at Cocoa Beach High. They played against each other a few times. This gave them something to talk about when I kept looking for the head. Later, this is probably what kept me from getting arrested.

I walked farther down the tracks. I went as far as I thought the head could possibly have flown. I thought to myself, I have to change what I'm expecting to see. It won't look like any head I know of. It'll be different. I have to open up my mind to that.

And there it was. Crushed. Mutilated. Hardly a head at all. But still human flesh and blood. I picked up the head and sat down on the tracks. I held it in my hands and just cried and cried.

The cop pulled out his bullhorn. “Bring in the head,” he said. “Quit fucking around. Bring in the head.”

Bart yelled out, “Come on, Danny.”

And I just cried.

Not for too long. Maybe twenty, thirty seconds, then I pulled myself together. I stood and dropped the head in the body bag and headed down the tracks.

By the time I got back to where the cop and Bart were, I wasn't crying anymore. I had the body bag zipped up and draped over my shoulder. Bart opened the back of the van. I heaved the stiff on the gurney and we strapped it in. The cop stood behind us and watched.

“Who was this guy?” I asked the cop.

“Just some bum,” the cop said.

“How do you know?”

“Didn't you smell all the booze on him?”

“I smell booze on Bart. That doesn't make him a bum.”

“Look,” the cop said. “You do your job and I'll do mine.”

“But I want to know. How do you know he's a bum?”

“Don't fuck with me, son,” the cop said, even though we were the same age and he knew it.

“Did you check for I.D. or anything? Did you take fingerprints? Dental records?”

This was what I asked for: dental records. As if I hadn't been holding the crushed head in my hands just three minutes earlier. As if there were any teeth or jaw left.

The cop said, “What is this? Who the fuck do you think you are?”

“I want to know. How do you know who this guy is?”

By now, the cop was pissed. He had one hand on his gun and the other on his walkie-talkie.

Bart stepped in. “I'm sorry about this, Gene,” he said to the cop. He grabbed my arm. “Come on, man. Let's go.”

I wouldn't budge, though. I just kept asking the cop how he knew that the dead guy was a bum. Or how he pretended to know anything about the dead guy. Or why he and the rest of the police department had no intentions of investigating this shit. When I said, “What? Are you too busy busting keggers? Too busy copping a feel off of high school girls when you do?”, the cop got pissed. He threatened to arrest me.

Bart physically picked me up at this point and started dragging me to the van. At the same time, the cop got on his walkie-talkie and radioed for back-up. I took the hint and left.

The next day, all I could think about was the corpse on the train tracks. And, of course, it wasn't the dead guy's corpse I was thinking about. It was Libra's.

I couldn't bring myself to leave the house. I could barely get out of the recliner. Bart tried to talk to me. I just shrugged him off. The phone rang a few times. I didn't answer it. The television was on, but it would be a mistake to say that I watched it. I just stared straight ahead, seeing mostly that Betty Boop tattoo and that severed leg.

At about three o'clock, there was a knock at the door. I assumed it was Taylor wanting to go surfing. This sent another jolt through me, a sudden reminder that I was a dad. Shit. Things got complicated so quickly. I opened the door and there was Helen.

“Hey, Danny. Got a minute?” she asked.

I stepped aside and made a sweeping motion to welcome her in.

She handed me a Styrofoam take-out container. I opened it. It was a plate lunch from Duke's. Teriyaki beef, rice, potato-macaroni salad. One of my favorites. “Thanks,” I said.

Helen sat on the couch. I walked into the kitchen, stuck the plate lunch in the refrigerator, and grabbed two beers out of the crisper.

“Bart had lunch at Duke's today,” Helen said.

“Yeah?” I handed one of the beers to Helen and sat in the recliner.

“He told me all about that dead guy last night?” Helen said.

I nodded. I leaned back in the recliner and propped my feet on the footrest. I turned off the television. “Who's watching Duke's?”

“Shaggy,” Helen said. “No one comes in this time of the afternoon anyway.”

“So you came by to see me.”

Helen shrugged. “I owe you one, Danny. You saved my ass that one night. Remember? When you waited tables?”

I nodded.

“So I figure I owe you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate the lunch.”

Helen took a sip of her beer. “Do you want to talk about it? About the dead guy last night?”

I shook my head. I took a sip of my beer. It was the last thing I wanted right then. I put it back down on the end table and scratched my head.

“What was it about that guy?” Helen said. “Why did he get to you?”

I shrugged.

“You really don't feel like talking, do you?”

I shook my head.

“Then I'm gonna tell you a story,” Helen said. That was fine with me. At that point, I'd rather hear someone else's shit than think about my own. And I liked Helen's stories.

“Go ahead,” I said.

Helen said, “I have this friend Elena. She's a girlfriend of mine from college. She lives down in Costa Rica. She and her husband work for a little resort, renting out bungalows on the beach. Her husband is crazy.

“Now, you know I think most boys are crazy. But this guy is really crazy. Certified crazy. Spent time in a mental institution. For real.”

“And why are you telling me this?” I asked. Because you never know with Helen. This could be her way of saying I was certifiable.

“Just listen,” Helen said. “I visited with Elena and her husband for a week down there. This was earlier this year. Just before you came back to Cocoa Beach. And, while I was there, they surfed a lot. You know I don't surf, so I mostly sat on the beach and read. When they were done surfing, I would tell them that I had watched them surf. I hadn't really, though. Not much. But why hurt their feelings, right? When they came in from surfing, I'd say, ‘Oh, those were some nice rides you got.' And they'd be all happy. It made everything a little nicer.

“Maybe that's what I've learned from all my years bartending: how to tell nice lies.”

“That's a good thing to tell me,” I said. Not that I didn't know that she told nice lies. I knew that. It's just different when you hear it straight from her mouth.

Helen said, “Anyway, I did watch Elena and her husband while I was down there. And when I knew them in college, they were always fighting. Not anymore. At least not when I visited them. He'd be so considerate of her. He'd do dishes after dinner. He kept their little bungalow really clean. I even saw him iron one of her sundresses before she went to work.”

“Hell of a guy,” I said.

Helen nodded. “So it would seem. So I asked Elena, ‘What came over your husband? When did he get so sweet?'

“She said, ‘As soon as we found the red bus right.'

“That's what they called their surf spot: the red bus right. There was a red Volkswagen bus in the jungle right off the beach. That's where the name came from.

“So why am I telling you this, Danny? I keep thinking that you just need to find your red bus right. Not a surf spot, exactly. Just a spot where you can find peace.” Helen paused here. She looked me in the eye to make sure I'd been listening. I had.

“That's a nice story,” I said.

“Well, anyway, that's why I opened up my garage to you. I thought maybe you could find some peace there.”

“I appreciate it.”

Helen looked at me. I wasn't being condescending or anything. She had told a nice story. I did appreciate her letting me use her garage. I just wasn't in a talking mood. This clearly frustrated her. She stood and said, “Well, if you don't want to talk, don't talk.” She carried her mostly full beer into the kitchen and set it in the sink. She walked back into the living room and over to me. She put her hand on my head and mussed my hair. “Come to the bar later, if you want to talk.”

“Libra,” I said.

“What?”

“It wasn't last night's stiff. It was Libra. That's the problem.”

“Who's Libra?” Helen asked.

And now the cat was out of the bag. I wasn't sure how to tell Helen or how much to tell her. I let out the information in little bits. I said, “Libra was my girlfriend in Flagstaff.”

“Okay.”

“She got hit by a train.”

“Oh, no. Did she live?”

“No.”

“Oh, shit.”

“I found the body.”

“Whoa. Good christ.”

“I didn't tell anyone.”

“What?” Helen asked. “What did you do?”

“I just left,” I said. “I just freaked out and left.”

“You didn't tell the cops?”

“No. I just left.”

“Who do you think found her? Who reported it?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I don't know. That's why I'm freaking out. I just figured someone would've reported it, you know. I just assumed that. Now, with that stiff last night, I'm worried that she's been a Jane Doe this whole time. Maybe people don't even know she's dead.”

Helen looked at me, stunned. She didn't know what to say. How could she? Years of bartending wouldn't prepare you for this kind of confession. Nice little stories wouldn't give answers to problems like this.

I said, “For a while, there was a private investigator following me around. You know that wheelchair dude?”

“Clay. Yeah, I know him.”

“But I ran him off. I thought he was following me because Libra's parents wanted me arrested. Now I'm thinking that maybe they don't know. Maybe they're looking for Libra.”

Helen stared at me. She abandoned her nice little lies and said, “That's fucked up.”

I nodded.

“And it gets worse,” Helen said, “because lately, a Samoan guy has been hanging around Duke's looking for you.”