by Chris Bauer
He grabbed a second flashlight from the back seat for a closer look. One step up put him on the concrete slab, flashlight a-blazing; he reached its edge. Tourists could lean over this railing, and he could visualize them doing this, all trying for a better view into the deep abyss.
Some bodies had to have found their way down there, considering the hole had been thousands of years in the making. Unfortunate folks who either jumped, were pushed, or got tossed in. Still, according to the media, this hadn’t been the case, either here or anywhere else in Rancor, for the last fifty or so of those thousands of years.
That would now change.
He leaned over the railing and shined the light in, illuminating the hole’s topmost section. How deep it was, per the hype, he couldn’t remember, but it was definitely more than a hundred feet, the flashlight showing no more than a quarter of that. What he could make out was its spiral shape, winding and elliptical, the diameter decreasing the deeper it went, like the inside of a funnel cloud. He raised the flashlight, illuminated each section of the iron railing that surrounded the abyss’ perimeter. There, at three o’clock, where he’d stood earlier in the day while he reconned this caper, was a section of rail with a wide patch of grass leading down to it from the paved walkway. Room for a car to get a running start.
He was alongside that railing section now with his bolt cutters. Snip-snap, snip-snap; an expansive width of chain-link fencing connecting multiple pipe posts dropped to the grass. All that separated Nap’s body from a spectacular four-hundred-horsepower, deep-pothole burial in his newest classic car purchase were two thin pipe rails set in dirt postholes.
This will work.
He retrieved his supplies from the back seat, left them in the grass: two bottles of Poland Spring, one flashlight, the streetwear hoodie, and a gas can. Loretta’s full-size umbrella moved from back seat to front.
Here we go.
Headlights on high beams, convertible top up, transmission in neutral, and Randall in the driver’s seat with a chubber. He depressed the gas pedal, revved the 409, let it idle then grabbed the umbrella and jammed it between the gas pedal and a seat bracket. The throttle opened wide, the car’s tachometer approaching orgasm. Randall slid out of the seat, reached back in, and slapped the Powerglide automatic transmission into drive. The car jolted forward.
Enjoy the ride, Nap.
The car accelerated across the walkway, bounced down the wide grassy strip and slammed and uprooted the pipe railing. It jettisoned from the runway into an airborne arc, hesitated at its apex, then dropped headlong from view. Randall followed on foot in the car’s wake, expecting fireworks from an exploding gas tank. Instead he heard clanging and banging and crashing of metal against rock multiple times over as Nap and the car somersaulted to their deep grave.
Randall hustled to the concrete slab that reached out across the pothole and leaned over the railing. In the hole’s farthest reaches were faint, glowing red specks.
Taillights. The car still had juice.
How’s that for penetration, bitch.
He was now horny as hell, but he was also tired. Honey-Pot would need to wait. He’d hoof it back to the Buick and find a place to stay in Dickson City, maybe watch some porn and spank the gorilla, then he’d get some sleep. He’d make his way back into Rancor tomorrow.
Welcome back to violent crime, you deprived small-town motherfuckers.
15
A tabletop jukebox stared me down. There was one in every booth in this throwback diner heavy on chrome and Formica everywhere I looked. I felt for my fuzzy keychain on my belt loop.
I can handle this.
In 1994 I demolished a jukebox in a bar in Hershey, Pennsylvania. A Wurlitzer bubble-top floor model with real vinyl 45s. I made it flash and whirr and choke and puke up the record it was playing. The bar was a five-minute cab ride from the State Police Academy’s training facility. I was twenty-two, celebrating my graduation from training with a few newly minted State Police boots just like me, young men and women. Mom attended the graduation ceremony, was proud as hell. She returned to Philly right afterward; I was okay with that. What mattered most was she’d been able to attend, and she was beaming. The US Senate was in session, which meant my senator dad couldn’t break away from banging one or more of his aides for the afternoon.
My training buddy Vonetta and I were in the bar with Pennsylvania’s newest crop of state troopers, male and female, and we were getting ripped pretty good. Vonetta knew my affliction made me different, but she knew nothing about the other baggage that came with it. Like triggers. Great big, hairy, psycho-triggers. She sidled up to the juke and dropped in her money. Three plays for a quarter. She tripled up on one particular song. A mistake.
“Fortunate Son.” Creedence Clearwater Revival, John Fogerty lyrics. By then the anti-war classic rock rant had crossed over to become part of an unofficial US military music playlist. I loved CCR, loved John Fogerty too, but I’d have paid a sizable sum to never hear that song again.
By the third play all the State Police bar patrons were fired up and loving it. Vonetta led them in the lyrics, knew all the verses. They were overly familiar to me too, unfortunately.
John Fogerty’s senator fathers had pulled strings to keep their kids out of military service. My senator father did the reverse, went as far as greasing the Pennsylvania governor’s hands to make sure the State Police Academy would accept me, to help him wash his hands of me. A favor I didn’t need or want, and it put a target on my back in the academy and during my early years on the force.
I was a senator’s daughter, yes, biologically. But emotionally, ideologically, morally, he and I couldn’t have been from the same fucking universe.
I did not sing along. Near the end of the third play I put a spit-shined shoe heel through the Wurlitzer’s bubble top, then a few fists into its guts. I grabbed the offending record and snapped it in my bloodied hands. A shoulder shove tipped the jukebox over; multiple kicks retired it for good. It took Vonetta and two other troopers to subdue me. One night into my release from the academy and there I was in a drunk tank with bandaged hands and a fifteen-hundred-dollar bill from the bar for damages. An alcohol-intake fail on my part, considering the meds I was on back then. I changed meds after that.
Was a Senator’s daughter. A past tense distinction, one that sounded so much better.
A waiter appeared at my table now. Cute guy; young. I gave him my order. “Chicken-fried steak, garlic mashed, onion rings, and a biscuit. Gravy on all of it. With a Coke Zero.”
The waiter didn’t hide his smile, also couldn’t hide his dimples. “Coke Zee-rohhh,” he mouthed, finishing off my order longhand with an exclamation point on his tear-off pad. “The all-purpose, heart-friendly, dietary equalizer. Got it, ma’am.”
The tabletop jukebox playlist was open to more CCR and other early seventies music, some Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, other favorites of mine. I passed on all of it, ate my food, and further reminisced in the din of Aristotle’s Diner.
A warm night in May 1986. I was attending a sports ceremony and celebratory dinner, me a star forward on a Police Athletic League girls’ basketball team. League MVP, age sixteen, also an honors high school student at Sacred Heart Academy for Girls in Philly. This PAL dinner was the event that put Dad on notice, when my affliction laid a bold claim.
Mom, Dad, and Uncle Ernest, Dad’s disgusting brother who lived with us, were all there, at the ceremony, then at the dinner. Also there with us, seated next to Dad, and unknown to me until he was introduced, was the college admissions director for the University of Pennsylvania. Politicians had this reach; my father was no exception.
The only person I was happy to be eating that dinner with was my mother.
Over salads, Dad, Uncle Ernest, and the recruiter shared jokes, sports, and politics, smiling through all of it while Mom and I ate. Over dessert, Dad poked the recruiter. A cue.
“Counsel,” the recruiter began, “your father has told me so muc
h about you. It gives me great pleasure to inform you that the University of Pennsylvania would like to extend to you an offer to join its freshman class…”
My dad, the great Senator Edmond Drury, smiled his authoritarian smile, savoring the moment. His brother Uncle Ernest, with his sick fucking demented visage the same as it was at home, narrowed his eyes, drilling them into mine, same as when he would cram my brother Judge’s head into his crotch and make me watch him deliver a blow job, his hands gripping my brother’s hair so he couldn’t retreat, again, and again, and again, me seeing this at age four, five, six.
My older brother, my savior, taking the hit, always protecting his little sister…
It came over me like a bolt of lightning at the table, all liberating and powerful and mesmerizing and euphoric and Forrest Gump–like, but also devastating, with me unable to control some of my bodily functions.
What my left hand did: flipped the admissions director off with feeling, a full-fisted, bent-elbow, ram-it-up-your-ass gesture, delivered with the enthusiasm of a home plate umpire.
What my mouth did:
“—fuckface, dicknose, up your ass, garden hose/get in there, suck cock, big girl on your cumsock…”
What the off-duty cops from other tables did: subdued me, hauled me out of the room, then pummeled my teenaged hussy ass because I fought them, with them breaking all the fingers in my left hand and a bone in my forearm.
I was held overnight for observation in a Philly hospital’s psychiatric unit, where they sedated and straitjacketed me, to shut me up and keep my injured left arm from becoming a nonstop, uppercutting blur.
There was no mystery here. I hated pedophiles and abusers of children. Would never not hate them, would never accept their rehabilitation, and would always associate my Tourette’s with me witnessing these unspeakable acts.
A third Coke Zero appeared at my booth. It was a refill I wouldn’t touch, next to a dinner I now couldn’t finish, next to pie à la mode I hadn’t ordered, all delivered by an attractive young waiter with mommy issues who was chatting me up the whole time, and who was now telling me he finished his shift in half an hour, in case I was interested.
I never earned this. The cleavage, a haughty voice, and if I let it grow, a full head of long, straight dark hair that took its color well, all things that drew men of all ages to me. I occasionally took advantage of it, but after forty-nine years I still hadn’t earned it. Which was why my chin was scarred, some of my nails were chewed, and my hair was kept short. Compensation. And yet the hookups were always there if I wanted them.
I told him thanks, I was flattered, but I needed to take a rain check.
Back in the van, I checked my phone. No signal. Sixth sense said I needed to talk to Vonetta. The diner had a pay phone, but it also had the waiter I’d just rebuffed. I drove back to the bowling alley instead, pulled up a text from Vonetta when I got there, then lost the signal again.
The text was already a half hour old: Car is on the move.
At the bowling alley bar, I waited for Vonetta to answer her home phone. I was on the bar phone dialing her collect, landline to landline, a swallow of beer left. I watched the busy bowling lanes from a barstool. Vonetta picked up, accepted the charges.
“What, you in jail now, Sarge?”
“Phone service isn’t consistent up here. And a great big how-the-hell-are-you to you too. Tell me why J. Edgar’s feds are here in Rancor.”
It had cost me another ten to use the alley bar’s phone. I was now apparently persona non grata with Floyd, although the second ten went where the first ten went, into that old miner’s helmet marked The Maurice Fund. I watched bowling balls from three different lanes each hit the one-two or one-three sweet spots in succession, which gave us thunderclaps of ricocheting, pin-concussed fury. These senior women were serious.
“Are you bowling, Counsel?” Vonetta asked, except I could tell it was another pissed-off sneer masquerading as a question. But when I thought sneer I thought snicker. When I thought snicker, I thought snigger. When I thought snigger, the Tourette’s kicked in.
“—nigger nigger.
“Sorry, Netta. At a bowling alley but not bowling. Tell me about the feds.”
Stretch pants, bicycle pants, track pants, sweatpants, up and down all forty lanes. Loose bowling shirts. All women, mostly white, some with significant tans. Their bowling balls showcased the colors of the seasons. One short, thin woman on the lanes stuck out, her large black clip-on hair bow centered above the wrinkled leather of her tanned forehead, the hair bow nesting in a white bouffant perm. She picked up her ball at the ball return. The only all-black ball out there, and in her small senior hands it looked the size of a beach ball. A few jittery steps and the ball was gone, traveling the lane not quite as slow as a two-handed throw from a six-year-old, but straighter. She left one pin.
“Don’t worry about the feds,” Vonetta said. “No mystery there. Our bounty crossed jurisdictional lines. My offer’s still good. You bring him in, you earn the money. The feds… well, you know the feds. They mean well. Any takers on the photo?”
“Not yet. Where’s Mr. Linkletter’s car now?”
“What do you mean, where’s his car?” she said. “That tracking app on your phone should tell you where the car is. I see it on my end. You don’t?”
“Collect call for Ms. Vonetta Posey,” I sing-songed like a lobby bellhop. “It’s these mountains. Reception fades in and out.”
“Dude, that’s not good. What’s the last location you have?”
“Rancor. Somewhere on Layton Road, in Rancor.”
“What the fuck I’m gonna do with you, Counsel? That’s so five hours ago.” Right about now she was going into her Muhammad Ali, curled-lower-lip snarl. “Look, you cheap-ass diva, you need a real five-G provider, not that hamster-powered Sam’s Warehouse old-lady piece of shit you have. Or did you stop paying your bills again?”
“I don’t need your bullshit, Netta. Next time hire NASA, you deep-pockets fuck. Just tell me where the car is.”
“My pockets are deep like your dick is long. Hold on. Here it is. It’s in the vicinity of Glacier Pothole State Park, whatever the hell that is, just outside the Rancor town limits. Go get ’im, Sarge. And I’m signing you up for a better service provider, right the fuck now.”
I cruised Rancor Boulevard in the van, a mile away from the Glacier Pothole State Park entrance per a road sign. It was ten p.m. No scenery on this two-laner, and little traffic. The forest looked impenetrable for the past few miles, as dark on both sides as walls of chunk chocolate. Anticipation kicked in, of confrontation and a mounting danger. Along with this, an adrenaline rush. And along with that, excessive mouth action:
“—dark park, dog fart, choco-darts, the dog did it—”
Tess woke up in the middle of my verbal digression, raised her head, felt my tension. She hopped onto the passenger seat, nudged my elbow for a touch that did us both some good, except my subconscious was still in overdrive, spewing its alliterative pearls.
“—diddle kibble, doggie-doodle, doodle-dog, doodle your daughter—”
Tess licked my hand.
“—dickhead, dead dad, dad’s a dick, dad’s dick is dead—”
The signs were there when I was in my teens. Mom saw them. Dad saw them too, but the bastard passed them off as benign manifestations of female puberty, no worse than bad acne. He expected it, them, all of it, to “clear up.” He browbeat my mom into ignoring them.
Signs like tapping my heels to the drum solo in “Wipe Out” by The Surfaris in music class, age twelve. I couldn’t stop myself and was sent to detention for it. It continued for two hours, then the detention nun got smart and took my shoes from me to quiet things down.
Then there was a meltdown in the school nurse’s office at age twelve for aggressive nose-picking in class. I drew blood, both nostrils, both hands. This episode drove my already low self-esteem to new depths.
At age thirteen, the last day of Catholic gra
de school, when I said goodbye to a nun and it exploded into a repetitive fine-print disclaimer that she was a soul-sucking cunt. Sadly, she was a nun I adored.
Age sixteen, the college admissions director episode plus two high school suspensions, one for defending myself on the school bus, the other for multiple cursing infractions in the classroom.
My hand was now moist from Tess licking it. We were coming up on something as the van leaned into a curve. A car on the opposite shoulder. Someone in cargo shorts and a logoed hoodie approached the stopped car on foot, a gas container in one hand, a swinging flashlight in the other. My mouth quieted. I slowed the van, received an I’m-good thumbs-up from the guy so I moved on. Farther down on the right shoulder a fawn, alive and motionless in my high beams, was thinking about crossing. I honked the horn and braked. The deer did an about-face and returned to the woods.
And still farther down, the road bent then straightened out. Next up was a pickup truck on the right shoulder, its flashers on, and a man in the glow of the truck’s headlights. With a rifle. Also in the headlights was a deer struggling to get to its feet, trying to drag its mangled and bloody hindquarters away from broken headlight glass on the shoulder and into the brush, one leg at an impossible angle. A terrible scene. I pulled alongside, lowered my passenger side window and called out to better my van’s engine idle with an offer to help.
The guy called back. “Much obliged, ma’am, but I got this.”
I pulled away, and in my rearview mirror I saw him raise the gun and pull the trigger, the gun’s report echoing. A chunk of deer head separated from its body. The gun lowered, the man freezing in place for a moment, lingering over his handiwork. There was a good chance he was a hunter, and there was also a good chance his hesitation meant he was rethinking his hobby.
At the left turn to the park entrance, the dogs and I sat a minute staring into the woodsy interior. Two black iron gates were visible under a single elevated floodlight. The gates, taller than necessary, did not abut each other. With the park closed this time of night, my guess was they should have been connected.