Train Wreck Girl (19 page)

That's how my story should've ended. I had my little day in the sun. Everyone came out to see. I turned the trash of my life into something beautiful. People dug it. I got a toe-hold into an art community and got a little security knowing that people would at least consider my work in the future. It was a high point. No doubt about it. Even goddamn Janie had to admit that I'd done well. But this wasn't the end because 1.) Libra was still dead and 2.) I was still that special kind of stupid.

Three days after the gallery opening, Sal and I sat in a pair of firstclass seats on a plane to Arizona. We got rip-roaring drunk. Sal's goal was to get so drunk that they'd land the plane early and kick us off. That did not happen. Instead, a few businessmen around us on the plane were entertained. They drank with us. Hell, they bought us drinks. One guy had a ukulele with him. He played and we wrapped arms around shoulders and sang along and Sal even got a stewardess to dance with him in the aisle. At one point, I wondered if this was what it would be like when my soul was shipped to hell.

Then we landed in Phoenix.

I half expected Libra's parents to be waiting for us at the gate. I halfexpected cops and my arrest. No one was there, though. Just me and Sal and our new drunken friends shaking hands and saying goodbyes.

My Galaxie was waiting in long term parking. I asked Sal, “What the hell?”

“Like it? I rescued it from your front yard after you left.”

“I like it,” I said.

Sal opened his door, sat in the driver's seat, leaned over, and unlocked my door. I sat inside. Sal started the engine.

“Purrs like a kitten,” I said.

“Not only that, but I've trained it. It can sniff out the nearest bar, no matter where we are. Watch.” Sal pulled out of the airport and, as promised, drove to the nearest bar.

Three nights earlier, after the gallery showing and after Sophie had gone home and Bart had gone to bed, I got Sal to come clean. What was he doing in Cocoa Beach? He was a good guy. A good friend. And the art exhibit was a big deal to me. I won't deny that. But Flagstaff is two thousand miles from Cocoa Beach. Good friend, big deal or not, that's a long way to travel to see some welded metal. So what the fuck?

It took some prodding. I had to throw out a few dudes with the long “u.” As in, “Duuuuude, this is Danny you're talking to.” And finally Sal told me the whole story.

Sal's Story

After word got back to Libra's folks about what I'd done to the Samoan, they decided to take another tack. They approached Sal. They knew Sal was friends with both Libra and me because Sal had identified the body.

He'd gone to the Medical Examiner's office in Flagstaff on a cold February morning and looked at that severed leg and the crusty Betty Boop tattoo and he said, “Yep. That's Libra's leg all right.” This, of course, led to several hours of interrogation. The Flagstaff P.D. had a wide array of theories and scenarios that led to Sal pushing Libra into a train. Sal listened to the stories and looked at his brown Mexican skin and got worried and thought and thought and thought and finally said, “You can push someone
into
a train, but you can't push someone
under
a train. If you push someone into a train, the impact will throw them off the tracks. It won't throw them underneath. And you'd have to be underneath to get your leg cut off.” This intrigued the detectives. Two detectives and Sal went down to the train tracks in Old Town, where no one was looking. The detectives took turns pushing Sal down on the tracks. They noted how he fell. They tried to look at it from every angle. Sal kept pointing out to them that, no matter how he fell, it wouldn't lead to him losing a leg at the hip. A few more scenarios came up. He could've tied her to the tracks. So they went to the spot where Libra had been found, and, no, that theory wouldn't work. There was no good way to tie a body down. Plus, there would've been rope at the scene. This was no
Dudley Do-Right
cartoon. The next theory was that he placed her unconscious body on the tracks. “But why place a body so that just the leg hangs over the tracks?” Sal asked. The detectives admitted there was no reason. They talked things over for a while on those tracks. Sal offered to let them push him down a few more times. But, no. There was no point. Sal clearly had nothing to do with this. He was who he said he was: a friend doing his civic duty. A good guy. Bending over backwards to help out, really. The detectives didn't even bring Sal back to the station. They dropped him off at his garage.

Sal thought that was the end of it. He had wondered a few times what happened to me. He wondered if I knew about Libra. He wondered even if I was responsible for Libra getting hit by that train, but he'd gone through all those scenarios with those cops. The evidence was clear. She'd fallen asleep on the tracks. No one to blame but herself. As far as Sal and the Flagstaff P.D. were concerned, the case was closed.

Libra's parents felt differently. How could they not? How could they believe that their beautiful, intelligent daughter got fucked up on booze and pills and fell asleep on the train tracks? How could they accept it? How could they not spend all their energy looking for someone to blame? And who better to blame than me?

After the Samoan had taken a beating from me, they approached Sal. They offered him money to go to Cocoa Beach and bring me to Flagstaff. They just wanted to talk to me, they told Sal. This was all about closure. They handed Sal a newspaper clipping about my art exhibit. They gave him a round-trip, first-class ticket to Florida. There was also the promise of a round-trip, first-class ticket for me. I could fly back to Arizona with Sal, talk to Libra's parents, give them their closure, and be back in Florida before the end of the week.

“Don't do it, though,” Sal told me.

When I told Helen the story of Sal, she agreed with him. She kept telling me, “If Libra's parents only want to talk with you, they could do it over the phone.”

Bart had another opinion. He was convinced there'd be a reward. He kept asking questions in the middle of conversations: what was Libra's full name? Where did her parents live? What were their names? When was Sal supposed to fly back?

When Bart got all the information he needed, he called Libra's parents and asked them about the reward. Ten thousand dollars. It lit up everything inside of Bart. He realized that he could change his life with that kind of money. He could sober up and go back to graduate school and study more philosophy and get a job in a university and quit picking up dead bodies and driving the short bus. Helen told him that he could do all this stuff without the ten thousand dollars. He shrugged her off. He did everything he could to convince me to go back to Flagstaff. He even arranged for my plane ticket and set up a time and place for me to meet with Libra's parents. He really could be a treacherous friend.

Still, I had decided to go back to Flagstaff before Bart had said a word. I'd made up my mind by the time Sal had finished telling his story.

So that was how I came to be sitting inside that old man bar in Phoenix, drinking dollar drafts with Sal. Outside, the waves of desert heat cooked up everything that couldn't run for shade. Inside, we had dark and air conditioning and Sal spending a little time with each beer trying to convince me to stay out of Flagstaff. He had his work cut out for him. I don't often change my mind.

Sal ran a finger up his glass of beer. Condensation had collected on it. He used those drops of water to wet down his eyebrows. “Best case scenario,” he said. “What happens when you meet with Libra's parents?”

“I don't know.”

“That doesn't sound like you. You always have some kind of daydream about the way things will work. Let's have it.”

I scratched the back of my neck. I did have a daydream. I knew it would sound foolish if I said it out loud, though. I shrugged it off. We went back to drinking.

This scene repeated itself eight or nine times as we had eight or nine beers and got completely tanked. The bartender cut us off. Four stools down, an old man was asleep on the bar. Another guy made out with a transvestite hooker in one of the booths. The bartender served those three. Me and Sal, he cut off.

We stepped out into the Phoenix night and Sal said, “Fine, man, I'll take you to Flagstaff. But first, we go on a bender. We get a six-pack of beer and we drive to fucking Mexico. We have a three-day drunk. Exorcise every demon. Kill every ghost in Danny's head. And then we go face the music.”

I looked down a six-lane Phoenix highway and beyond that to the molehill of a mountain that guarded the town and beyond that to the saguaro and sagebrush of the south and said, “Now you're making some fucking sense.”

Sal drove the Galaxie to the first convenience store he found. We picked up a six-pack of the cheapest beer they had. Sal hunted down the entrance for the first freeway we could hit. We got on the freeway and rode it until it ended and dumped us off in a neighborhood. This was okay. We needed more beer, anyway. Another six-pack and we followed the freeway back the way we came. It couldn't be too tricky. If we were heading west, which we assumed we were, then we only needed to make a left turn and head south. We'd hit Mexico sooner or later.

The only problem was, even though we were on a westbound freeway, we were on a leg of the freeway that headed south. Our left turn took us east. We got lost. On a sober, sunny day, it's almost impossible to get lost in Phoenix. On this night, with both of our internal compasses off by ninety degrees, it was impossible not to. After the second six-pack dried out, we stopped at another gas station. I asked the clerk how to get to Mexico.

“Mexico?” he said. “You're in Mesa.” Which was ten miles away from where we'd started two hours, twelve beers, and ninety miles of driving ago.

I went back to the Galaxie. “Which way to Mexico?” Sal asked.

I pointed to an all-night burrito joint across the street. “Let's get a snack.”

So we ate burritos. When I was done, I crawled into the back seat and went to sleep. Sal slept in the front seat. Mexico could wait until morning.

Libra's mom sat across the linoleum table from me. Everything about her seemed to be too good for this little mountain-town diner. Without saying a word, she screamed money and leisure: her deep brown tan, the blonde streaks in her otherwise coffee-colored hair, the diamonds on every finger, those sculpted shoulders that had to take hours of daily gym time. I hate to say it, but she was hot in a Mrs. Robinson kind of way. She'd been crying, but her mascara didn't run with the tears.

Libra's dad sat next to her. He was dressed in a standard business casual kind of way: silk shirt, khaki slacks, loafers. He gazed off at the rack of free weeklies by the front door. His eyes hadn't met mine once since we'd sat down.

I'd just finished my speech. It was the one I'd rehearsed again and again in my head since deciding to come back to Flagstaff. The one when I told them that I, too, had a daughter. I understood all too well how attached we become to our children, how we want to shelter them from the world, how we want to give them the best of ourselves. “If anything bad happened to my daughter,” I told them, “nothing on hell or earth could keep me from striking back at the guilty party.” But I wasn't the guilty party. They had to understand that. I'd broken up with Libra just like they'd wanted me to. I'd agreed with them when they said she was too good for me. I'd tried to make Libra understand that. And I was nuts for Libra. Over the moon for that chick. I was so in love with her that I had to leave her. I was so crazy about her, I wanted what was best for her so badly, that I recognized how bad I was for her. So I ended it. I'd even left town to make sure that she didn't sour things with her parents once and for all.

I conveniently left out the part about my finding the body on the tracks and freaking out. Libra's parents didn't need to know that.

At the end of my speech, what could they say? They nodded. Libra's mom, as I said, cried. Libra's dad stared at the free weeklies. I'd cut their fuse. What was left? I said, “So I hope you'll please stop sending people after me. I'm broken up enough about this as it is.”

I didn't give them time to respond. Enough had been said. I walked away.

At least that's how it all played out in my mind. That was my best case scenario that I couldn't tell Sal about. It was foolish. Things didn't happen that way at all.

What really happened was this: Sal and I woke up in the car. August Arizona heat swallowed the Galaxie by six in the morning. We hadn't slept much. We weren't very sober. Sal rolled down a window and stuck his arm outside. “Mesa. Two hours of driving and we're in fucking Mesa.”

“I thought you were Mexican, man,” I said. “How does a Mexican drive east to Mexico?”

“I'm Chicano. And fuck you. You were sitting right next to me the whole time.”

“Fair enough,” I said. I rolled down both back windows, crawled into the front seat, and rolled down that window. “Let's go to Flagstaff.”

For most of the drive up, Sal tried to convince me to skip my appointment with Libra's parents. He kept saying, “Do you really want to walk into a room with two wealthy, powerful people who blame you for the death of their daughter?”

And of course I didn't. But what could I do? They were rich. They were powerful. They'd hound me until I finally gave myself up. I felt like it was better sooner than later.

The drive to Flagstaff took two hours. We had a six-pack of beer for the ride. It kept the hangover away, but it wasn't enough booze to get us lost. We knew good and well where we were going.

When we got to town, I asked Sal to drive me to my old trailer. “I need to dig something up,” I said. Sal nodded like it was the most normal thing. He took a few turns up the hill just west of downtown and pulled into my old, weed-ridden lawn.

I got out of the car and walked to the shed. I touched the middle support of the shed, took five steps forward, and started digging with my hands. The ground was hard and rocky. A shovel would've been helpful. I figured it would take more effort to go to the store, buy a shovel, and come back than it would to just claw at the ground for a few minutes. I didn't need to get too deep.

A guy came out of the trailer. He saw me digging in the yard. He said, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I used to live here,” I said. I kept digging.

The guy was short, chubby, completely bald. He held an infant in his arms. The baby cooed. The guy said, “You don't live here anymore.”

“No. I don't.” I kept digging. The guy walked toward me. Sal got out of the car. The guy stopped walking. He and Sal stared at one another. By now, my hole was about six inches into the ground. I was close. I could feel the corner of a plastic container. It was still there. I picked up a flat stone and used it to dig. The guy started walking closer. So did Sal. I cleared the dirt around the plastic container and pulled it out.

Inside was that old monkey that I'd given to and stolen from Brother Joe. It was part of the reason I came back to Flagstaff. I wanted to rustproof that old monkey and weld it onto Joe's grave marker. I took the monkey out of the container. The head was oily, worn smooth. The plastic had done its job. The monkey was as clean as the day I buried it. I held it up in the sun.

“What the hell is that?” the guy asked.

“It's my monkey.”

“It's in my yard. Doesn't that make it my monkey?”

I stood and faced the guy. The top of his head barely reached my chin. It was eight-thirty in the morning. I was drunk. I hadn't shaved in three days. I'd slept the night before in the back of a car. I'd just dug a monkey up out of this guy's yard. Now, my brown buffalo of a buddy and I were gonna leave with the monkey. I stared the guy down until some of these thoughts had time to run through his head. “No,” I said. “It's mine.”

The guy stepped back. Sal and I left.

I spent about an hour at the post office buying a box and packing material and packing my monkey up nice and solid. I sent the box to myself in Cocoa Beach. I said to Sal, “Get some breakfast before I face the music?”

“Why not?” Sal said.

By two that afternoon, I was still drinking. Sal had long since left me. I sat at the bar at Uptown Billiards. Libra's parents were supposed to meet me at one. They were an hour late. I'd spent a good deal of time talking about books with the bartender. But by two, nothing could distract me from one simple thought: Libra's parents aren't going to show.

At the other end of the bar sat a middle-aged guy in a suit. He'd come in at one o'clock. He read a newspaper and watched a baseball game on television and drank three cups of coffee. He didn't talk to anyone. I asked the bartender, “Do you know that guy?”

“Nope.”

So I thought to myself, if he's not here to drink and he's not here to talk to people and he's not a regular and he's positioned by the door and he's wearing a suit, then is he a cop?

By my best reckoning, he was.

Was he waiting for me?

I thought so.

I asked myself, should I get this over with?

Why not?

I finished my beer, paid my tab, and stepped right into it.