“Pretty funny,” Nolen said, grinning. “Actually … ”
A wave of relief washed over me. Nolen was good people, I realized. Anyone who would rather be masturbating is good people. Self-reliance is what makes this country great.
First thing I thought when seeing Nolen was that he was the kind of cop you argued traffic tickets with—which made his position as chief something of a mystery. He was fit in a gay, long-distance-runner kind of way, with hair just shaggy enough to suggest that he liked to rock out with his iPod. He had one of those soft faces where all the features seem to crowd inward—eyes, nose, and mouth packed into a space no larger than my palm—huddling as if trying to conserve expressive warmth or something. He had to be at least thirty-five, and yet his blue eyes made him seem younger, much younger. Adolescent jumpy. Adolescent eager.
Nolen began by telling me how much he liked the Bonjours, and how “this horrible Jennifer deal” had “rocked him like nobody’s business.”
“You try to avoid it,” he said, “but you do this job long enough and you … you start sorting people, you know?”
I nodded because it seemed expected. Usually—for men anyway— phrases like “you know” are a kind of verbal bondo, just something they say. They really don’t give a fuck if you know or not. But this guy said it as if he meant it.
“My shrink,” Nolen continued, “she says it’s a kind of reflex mechanism, a thing people do to protect themselves. Terms like, er, you know, ‘decent folk,’ ah, ‘low-lifes,’ stuff like that …”
Fawk. A cop who spoke openly about his shrink to a complete stranger … The most I could do was lean back and nod. I’m not easily astonished, trust me.
“You know what I mean?” Nolen continued. “You have to crack heads in this line of work—there’s no way around it. So you … categorize … or so she says. Dehumanize … You know, to make it easier.”
Like most cynics, I have the bad, well-nigh-irresistible habit of thinking earnest people stupid. What I wanted to ask at this point was, Are you the mayor’s retarded nephew or something?
Instead I said, “Well … you know … my secretary, she called, said you wanted me to, ah, check in … ”
“Yeah. Yeah. So we could coordinate.” He leaned forward like an orphan angling for a bite of turkey dinner.
“Coordinate?”
I was afraid that the meeting would go sour. I tend to expect the worst when it comes to me and regular, decent folk, but I had no idea it would be this bad. There’s nothing quite so ripe-smelling as excessive eagerness in an adult.
“Coordinate,” he repeated. “Two heads are better than one, as they say. I just figured that a man with your expertise—”
“Expertise?”
“Expertise,” he repeated, like it was a boardroom buzzword. “I’ve only investigated four missing persons in my life. Four. You could say I’m in … well, way over my head. But I like to think I have other … you know, gifts, that compensate for my lack of experience. I’m a puzzle man. I’ve always been good with puzzles.”
Gifts? Puzzles? Was this guy for fucking real? One part of me wanted to tell him that the coach had lied, that it wasn’t cool to brandish a little dick in the change-room shower, but the other part was actually beginning to like this guy.
“This is great. Coordination. Expertise. All great. I’ll need a day or two to find my bearings on my own … you know. Then we can get down to business.”
“Sure. Sure.” He smiled with the daft credulity of a teenage Scout leader—or so it struck me. “Here,” he said, standing to hand me a small stack of folders. “I’ve gathered everything I could, you know, reports, statements—some photographs of the road she used to walk along—I’m not sure why they’re in there, but … “
I hefted the phone book—sized pile with a friendly scowl. Jennifer had been missing, what, three nights? If weight translated into thoroughness, this guy was nothing short of exhaustive. At the time I failed to realize the fear this amount of case-overkill implied.
“All great,” I said. “But would you mind if I ask you a couple of questions? I have this thing with … you know … talking stuff through.”
The Chief grinned, placed his hands on his knees in that elbows-out, getting-to-work way. “Awesome. Me too. Talking is so much better.”
Lonely, I realized. The guy was fucking lonely. He probably talked the coffee-shop regulars cross-eyed in his eagerness to brainstorm the case. Just like that I “got” Chief Caleb Nolen. He was one of those exuberant, earnest souls capable of feeling both horrified and celebratory at the same time. I had no doubt that Jennifer Bonjour’s disappearance outraged him down to his deepest moral kernel. And at the same time, I knew this was the most exhilarating event in his bureaucratic life.
A real honest-to-God mystery … What would we do without dead hotties?
Never one to waste an opportunity, I began by reviewing the particulars of Jennifer’s disappearance, more to confirm the Bonjours’ version of events than anything else. Fact was, Jon and Mandy were too invested. Invested people tend to get all the details right in the wrong way, seeing ego-friendly things like hope and vindication where there is none. Caleb, I was beginning to realize, was also too invested, but in an entirely different way.
“I think about her, you know,” he said, waving his hands in a curiously frantic gesture. “Out there… somewhere … alone …” He swallowed against cracks opening in his voice. His eyes became frail in that men-don’t-cry way. “I’ve been doing this job for, well, about seven years now. I’ve even solved a murder or two—domestic stuff, though. But I’ve always felt more like a janitor, or custodian, I suppose. Cleaning up messes after they happen. But this … I mean, this girl, Jennifer… what’s happening to her is happening now. I feel guilty just taking time out with my daughter, or reading the paper. I feel guilty for being … well, you know, a small-fry cop in a small-fry town. I feel like she needs a comic book hero or something …”
I had this friend growing up, Joey Sobotka, who always told me that I had superpowers, that I would grow up to be someone important, envied and admired. A real-life superhero. He was killed in a train derailment somewhere out in Montana, of all places. Who dies in a train derailment?
And what kind of superhero lets his friends die?
“The world’s a toilet, Chief. Janitors are the only superheroes that matter.”
Apparently he didn’t know what to make of that. He just stared down at the fan of documents across his desk like a kid wondering how he was going to explain his latest D to his pop.
“Did you know her?” I asked on impulse. “Personally, that is …”
He blinked and frowned. “Yeah. She was the Framers’ representative at these community policing things we put together.”
“What was she like?”
“An angel,” he said. He laughed and scratched the back of his neck. “I would always get this … this … weird urge whenever I saw her …” He must have glimpsed what I was thinking on my face because he fairly tumbled over himself to explain. “No. No. Nothing like that. No. This urge to get her … well, a gas mask.”
“A gas mask, huh.”
“I know how it sounds. But you live here long enough and you begin to take a dim view of things, you know? There was just something about her that made you think she was, well, in danger. Like she was an endangered species or something.”
“She is, Chief. She is.”
I continued reviewing the details as the Bonjours had provided them. Not forgetting anything has made me quite the effective interrogator over the years. In a matter of several minutes I was satisfied that the Bonjour version was in fact the official version—though, given the peculiarities of Nolen’s character, it suddenly didn’t seem all that “official” at all. More like just one more dude’s take.
I then asked the standard questions, about known sex offenders, whether any recent events could possibly be related. No, not in Ruddick. None. Then I moved on to the question that had bee
n burning a hole in my curiosity pocket.
“So I gotta ask: what do you make of the Framers?”
Nolen hesitated.
“Drive up to the Compound yourself,” he eventually said, chewing the inside of his bottom lip. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say the Framers are good people, you know, but they are, ah … co-operative.”
Part of me wanted to say, But do they have any expertise?
“What about the locals? What do they think of them?”
A lick-lipping pause.
“The thing you need to understand about Ruddick, Mr. Manning—”
“Disciple,” I interrupted. “Call me Disciple.”
“Sure … er, Disciple, then,” he replied with an embarrassed How- could-that-be-a-name look.
The urge to hit him passed quickly, and not simply because he was a cop. You know the saying: bloody a cop’s nose, break your future’s neck. He was too … well-meaning.
“Well, Ruddick has seen better days. Pretty much anyone is welcome in our community, if you know what I mean …”
Ruddick was open for business. I could almost see him sitting with a bunch of Chamber of Commerce fat-asses strategizing around a bucket of KFC. Hell, even cult members make the odd run to the Sam’s Club for toiletries and whatnot. The Enlightened wipe their asses at least as much as the Saved, probably more, given all that hummus.
“But, you know, people …” he added uncomfortably.
“No one much likes them.”
“This is God-fearing country, Disciple.”
He spoke my name as though warming to it, as though realizing it would spike the tedium of his coffee-shop stories.
“And the Framers?” I prompted.
A curious shrug. A guilty shrug. “Well, you know. I don’t want to, you know, stereotype … “
Of course not. That would contradict the police code of honour.
Fawk.
“Not decent folk, huh?”
Nolen grimaced. “Well … Not to sound, ah, er … bigoted or anything, but they are a cult. They have a way of making you forget as much when you’re up there and all … but still …”
I couldn’t resist a winning grin. “They gotta be crazy somehow.”
Another thoughtful pause. “You tell me.”
I never did. Nor would I ever. What Albert had told me less than an hour previously about irrational belief had simply confirmed something I had suspected all along. “Crazy” is simply a numbers game. If there were only twenty-seven Roman Catholics in the world, they would be the crazy-ass cult, and people would be wagging their heads about how their symbol is simply an ancient electric chair, or how they pretend to be cannibal vampires once a week, washing down their Maker’s flesh with a gulp of his blood.
Nolen escorted me to the front door, pausing at an office to introduce me to his deputy chief, a dour old law enforcement lifer named Jeff Hamilton. He had the kind of face you see on banknotes from some obscure European country. Shrewd eyes. Buzzed grey hair. Flapjack jowls. He stood, nodded, smiled, and shook my hand with a banker’s choreographed cheer. But something in his look, a kind of Slavic intensity, told me that he disapproved—of me, of Nolen, of his subordinates—that pretty much everything except his wife’s lasagna fell short of his expectations. His office even reeked of cheese.
I would have bet my expenses that he had some kind of contemptuous nickname for Nolen.
I sparked a joint while still parked in the station lot, sat back, and began to review this latest conversation. One statement in particular kept floating back to the harried centre of my attention: “Well, Ruddick has seen better days. Pretty much anyone is welcome in our community, if you know what I mean …” Something about the way Nolen had said “anyone”—a kind of grimace in an otherwise avid, even eager expression …
Was it fear? Had the Framers got to him somehow?
Truth was, earnest people had been freaking me out since at least the second grade, when I announced to the entire class that there was no such thing as Santa Claus, that it was all another social control mechanism. Little Phil Barnes told me—with a conviction that would have made a suicide bomber blush—that not believing in Santa was naughty, and that everyone knew what that meant.
He had this list, you see.
I was out-and-out bawling by the time I got home, convinced I had been blacklisted by the fucking fatman. I’ve suffered an irrational fear of Santa ever since. And a deep distrust of honesty.
Decent folk like Phil.
As a cynic, the problem you face with earnest people is pretty much the same problem the British faced with Gandhi. All of our schemes are corrupt in some manner; gaming the system is inked in our DN-fucking-A. And a certain ability to ignore the disconnect between our rhetoric and our actions is all it takes to keep the show running, an instinctive tolerance of ambient hypocrisy. One honest idiot is all it takes to bring it all crashing down—which is why so many honest idiots end up at the bottom of the river, metaphorically or otherwise. Finding strength in your convictions may be good when it comes to independence from colonial rule, but when it comes to the weave of interpersonal schemes that holds offices and families together, it’s nothing short of disastrous.
In a world of funhouse mirrors, it’s the straight reflection that deforms.
“Pretty much anyone is welcome in our community …”
Nolen was going to be a problem. I could feel it in my bones.
I peered across the world beyond my windshield, the world of Ruddick, PA, my thoughts crusting about the rim of innumerable memories. The sun was still high, so that the people I could see had only shadows beneath their brows—no eyes that could be seen. Something about them and the surrounding collection of little buildings, scrubby trees, and cracked sidewalks made me smile.
Fucking small towns, man. You gotta love them. Big enough to pretend. Too small to be.
I cranked the key, listened to my poor old Vee-Dub rattle to diesel life. As I pulled onto Kane Street, one last fragment of my conversation came floating back to awareness.
“No. No. Nothing like that. No. This urge to get her… well, a gas mask.”
“A gas mask, huh.”
Gas mask, indeed. It was time to meet the Framers.
Track Five
THE LAW OF SOCIAL GRAVITATION
I’m guessing that when you pass a woman laughing with a clutch of children on the sidewalk, your heart smiles—or something like that. The sun abruptly shines, and your next breath feels like a lucky pull at the slots. This is because you see people as surfaces. Not me. For me, people are always the latest instance of a history. So where you see a smile hanging in the blank blue of now, I see a smile superimposed on a snarl, shriek, laugh, sneer—you get the picture.
I never see people—I see crazed bundles. Battered suitcases, stuffed to overflowing, cinched shut with belts and frayed twine.
An old girlfriend of mine, a visual artist named Darla Blackmore, once tried to convince me that the exact opposite was the case, that given the rarity of my condition I was likely the only person on the planet who saw “people.” Everybody else, she claimed, saw only thin slices of people, which they then mistook for the whole thing. They saw types, she said, not tokens. Apparently this was a big distinction among the philosophy majors she hung out with.
Now, I should have been flattered, but instead I was irritated. Not all repetitions are equal. Some, like sex for instance, never get stale, no matter how high I stack the pile. Sex is one of those things you always do for the first time, perfect recall or not. But others grate, and when I say grate, I mean grate.
Like when people call this curse of mine a fucking gift—as if it were a superpower or something.
So I told Darla that if people were in fact tokens, they would be better off being types, because what I see is ugly beyond redemption.
To which she replied, “Is that how you see me ?”
I should have seen it coming. Maybe that’s what made me so angry— angry en
ough to speak the truth, which is to say, too angry. I told her she was a chorus of Darlas, a cacophony of lyrics sung simultaneously, with only one sweet note to redeem her.
“And what note is that?”
Of course I had to be honest a second disastrous time. “Your—”
That was October 26, 1993. Another bad day.
The Framer Compound was an old horse farm a mile or so outside of downtown—on the edge of a largely abandoned industrial park. It’s funny the way movies fuck up your imagination. You begin to see Drama everywhere you look, little particles of it waiting to be taken up in this or that narrative arc. Everything I glimpsed while driving became a crime scene. A series of concrete cylinders, beached among thronging sumac and grasses: that’s where Jennifer was assaulted, where she screamed her last breath. A collapsed outbuilding, its aluminum siding buckled like discarded clothes: that’s where he watched and waited, holding his binoculars with one hand while rubbing his cock with the other. A swath of open ground, brown and ragged, where the toxic buildup prevented everything but the hardiest weeds from taking root: that was where she ran, trying to scream past sobs of exhaustion and terror. And the dead factories themselves, bland and imperturbable save where missing panels afforded glimpses of pitch interiors: that’s where she tried to hide, tripping through the whooping dark, gasping air that smelled of rust and residual hydrocarbons.
On and on, everywhere I looked …
A million and one places to hide a Dead Jennifer.
The Compound had that well-heeled rural manse look, everything prim and oh so agricultural, only with an inward Waco air. Us against the world—you know. The iron gates stood ajar. I clattered down the lane in my old Vee-Dub, craning my head this way and that to get a sense of things. Gravel popped loud through my open window. Two monstrous willows swayed their skirts in the summer breeze—a whiff of paradise in that, I suppose. The original farmhouse towered grand over a series of white-brick additions. Despite the obvious age of the original structure, everything about it had that tight, buttoned look— like new windows nailed down. Wood chip gardens sprawled around the foundations, bright with flowers. The lane hooked around, opening onto a lot hedged on two sides by long, low barns that had been renovated to house human livestock. The place was huge, I realized. At least thirty thousand labyrinthine square feet. Maybe more.
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