She Talks to Angels

by James D F Hannah

  The office manager and Maynard talked to one another, glancing over at me and then resuming their conversation. Maynard came over and said, “What can I do you for?”

  I explained what I was there for, and he sighed and led me behind the garage. He propped a foot up against the wall and lit a cigarette. He didn’t offer me one. Asshole.

  He exhaled a cloud of smoke and squinted with the sun in his eyes as he looked at me. “Dolan’s still in prison, right?”

  “He is. He’s back to saying he didn’t do it.”

  “He sang that song when they arrested him. To be honest with you, I never understood Meadow hanging with a white-trash retard like him. Her family raised her better than that, not to associate with garbage like that.”

  It was apparent life hadn’t refined Maynard’s sensibilities or his empathy. Or maybe he was just an asshole. The not-offering-me-a-cigarette thing aside.

  “When did you and Meadow date?” I said.

  “Most of our junior year. I played football, she was a cheerleader, and kids like us did—we were supposed to date each other. Thing was, she was smarter than me. I thought she’d figure that out and drop me for someone like Mike Young. Team quarterback our senior year. Took us to the state championships.”

  I nodded and made a face that implied I gave a fuck about high school football. “Why’d you break up then?”

  “I was seventeen, dude. A fresher piece of ass showed up one weekend when I was at McClusky Lake. I dumped Meadow and hooked up with this other chick. Then I found out the bitch, she worked her way through the football team, and I’d just been the next guy in line.” He crushed the cigarette butt underneath the toe of his boot. “I called Meadow up, tried to get back with her, but that didn’t happen. Things were already bad with her.”

  “The drugs?”

  He scratched at his beard. “She was hitting it hard. Getting skinny, losing her tits. Stopped looking good.”

  “It’s a goddamn shame heroin didn’t make her pretty. What about when you dated, was she clean?” I said.

  “Yeah. She did stuff, but no hard shit. Go to a party and take an Adderall someone stole from their kid brother’s prescription so we could party longer. Smoke pot, take some E, shit like that. Nothing serious.”

  “What about Eddie? You ever talk to him?”

  Wallace smiled. “Are you kidding me? Him and that whole clan of his wasn’t anyone my folks would ever let me around. I’d see him in town, or after games on Friday night ’cause what the fuck else is there to do around here on a Friday night? But I never heard words out of his mouth until the trial was ready to start.”

  “Everyone keeps saying everyone loved Meadow, but she still ended up murdered, so anyone you know with a reason to kill her? Another cheerleader she’d pissed off? Guy who wanted to fuck her, she said no?”

  He shrugged and kicked at a few stones. They skipped across the concrete, and one bounced off a car’s tire. “She hung with a rough crowd after we broke up. That’s how she ended up doing heroin, right? People told me she had a tough time getting over shit when we broke up. You could talk to this chick April. She was trashy enough, she’d know something.”

  “April got a last name?”

  Wallace rubbed at the back of his head and squinted his eyes tight as so to indicate he was concentrating hard. “Bevins. This white-trash skank. One of those girls, makes sure shit stays stirred.”

  Maynard said April had left Parker County for a while but got knocked up and moved back without a husband to show for the effort, and was planted up Dixon Creek Fork with her kid and parents.

  “Keep driving until you think you’ve lost hope, and they’re right there on the left.” He lit a fresh cigarette. Still didn’t offer me one. He remained an asshole for it, though it was low on the list of reasons he was an asshole.

  He looked at his cigarette as if contemplating something deep and existential. “She had pulled herself together, there toward the end. I saw her a month or so before everything. Looked great. She had this light in her eyes. She even got herself one of those tattoos, the prayer they say in those meetings, the ones junkies and drunks go to.”

  “The Serenity Prayer. I’m familiar with it.”

  “She would have been something else—she had the chance, you know? Goddamn shame.” He finished his cigarette and flipped the butt into the street. “We done? I gotta finish this brake job.”

  I told him thanks for his time. “What about you? How’d you do at WVU?”

  “I got onto the football team as a walk-on. Got the fuck beaten out of me for a season, decided it wasn’t for me, drove down to Glenville State, partied liked a rock star and flunked out the next year, came back here.” He jerked a thumb toward the garage. “My dad owns this joint. He told me if I could learn what the hell I’m doing, it’s mine when he and my mom retire.”

  “How’s that going for you?”

  “It’s going. It’s the goddamn American dream, ain’t it?”

  13

  Deacon was at the St. Anthony’s meeting that night. So was Woody, which wasn’t earth-shaking. Woody was a fucking AA metronome—steady and constant. It could be exhausting on us lesser souls.

  Once the meeting had wrapped, Woody and some other drunks headed over to the Riverside. Woody invited Deacon and me along, and Deacon stood there, his gaze shifting between Woody and me like a child trying to pick which parent to side with in the divorce. I said Deacon and I needed to talk and get his steps moving along. Woody nodded and smiled and wished us the best. That, it seemed, was the right answer.

  Back at Casa de el Malone, I poured us sweet tea and we took seats at the kitchen table. Izzy wandered in and laid her head on Deacon’s knee. He stared at her as though she might rip off a limb. He tried to push her away, and she only leaned in further and harder on him.

  “Couldn’t find a bigger dog?” Deacon said. “You ride this guy places?”

  “She’s a she, not ‘this guy,’ and her name’s Izzy. Plus, she wants you to pet her before she goes off to sleep for another ten hours.”

  Deacon tapped at the top of Izzy’s head like he was getting hand soap from a dispenser.

  “Have you never pet a dog before?” I said.

  “Yeah, but my dad, he never liked animals, so we never had one growing up, so I’ve not been around that many.”

  From the top of the refrigerator—one of the few surfaces in my trailer too high for Izzy—I took down a cookie jar. Billy had sent me up into his attic the previous year looking for old tax forms he’d filed away, and I’d found this cookie jar—a teal blue porcelain cat—and snuck it out like secret government plans. There were fog-edged memories of it from when my mother was alive, when she would bake peanut butter cookies and fill the jar and I’d filch a few before dinnertime. Goddamn little remained that connected me to Elizabeth Malone, and I didn’t want the memories of my mother to evaporate and disappear into the ether. Plus, keeping Izzy’s treats in a blue cat felt subversive in a kind of way. Not that Izzy gave two shits about a cat. If confronted with one, I expected she’d snort, sniff in its general direction, and trot off.

  I took a treat out and set it on the table. Izzy’s eyes shifted to the treat, but she didn’t move her head.

  “Pick it up,” I said to Deacon.

  You’d have thought I asked him to handle uranium bare-handed. He stared at it as though it were staring back at him.

  “The fuck you say,” he said.

  “Don’t be a pussy, Deacon. Pick up the goddamn dog treat.”

  Deacon pinched it between his thumb and forefinger and moved it toward Izzy. Izzy raised her head and looked at the treat, then Deacon, then me.

  I nodded my head, and she leaned forward and swiped it out of Deacon’s hand. Deacon let go like it was on fire, drew his hand back, and wiggled fingers. Izzy gulped the treat down in two bites and one long swallow.

  Izzy stared at Deacon, anticipation and drool on her face. Deacon fit his hand around the top of Izz
y’s skull and rubbed. A satisfied growl rumbled out from deep inside her, and she leaned in close to him.

  “Congratulations,” I said. “She’s all yours now.”

  “My old man would drop a load that’d leave a hole in the floor, I showed up with this thing.”

  I patted Izzy on her end. She swung her head back to look at me, and I gestured to the door.

  “Out,” I said.

  She waited a moment, making sure I wouldn’t change my mind, before she strolled out back toward the living room.

  I sipped from my tea glass. “How you doing? Staying clean?”

  “Not much choice. Dagny, she keeps the hairy eyeball on me.”

  “That’s good. You know there’s shit I can do about the heroin. You’ve got a Narcotics Anonymous sponsor, right?”

  “Yeah. Larry.”

  “Good. All of that, that’s his focus. Same rules apply for both, though, because I know folks who’ve done NA. The principles are the same, but I don’t have any experience in any of that, so we’ll just focus on keeping you sober. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  “Good. Tell me about when you started drinking.”

  We talked for a few hours. Deacon was a conversational windup toy; once he got started, he plowed through until he ran out of words, and then you figured out how to get him going again.

  His drinking started around the age of twelve. His father and stepmother kept a plentiful supply of booze but didn’t have much time or attention for Dagny or Deacon. Dagny doubled down in school as her way to cope. For Deacon, drinking dealt with the void.

  Things progressed with increased access. Parties. Pot. Pills. Coke. Heroin.

  “Did you know Meadow was using?” I said.

  Deacon’s face twisted and tightened. He wiped at the corner of his eyes and wouldn’t look at me. “Can we not talk about Meadow? It’s . . . it’s too fucking much.”

  Playing amateur therapist, it made sense if Deacon had survivor’s guilt. In a way, the drugs had caught up to Meadow—there was no way to pretend she wouldn’t still be alive if she’d not been using—and Deacon had only raged on harder after her death. No, he wasn’t going to want to talk about it.

  “Sure,” I said. “You and Dagny. You’re close.”

  Deacon smiled. “Tight as thieves. Dagny’s always been the responsible one. High school valedictorian. Made all the smart decisions. Didn’t fuck her way through college. Always worked and did what needed done. It’s how she’s always been.”

  “You never had the pressure?”

  “Dagny stayed busy being the pride of the family, and I became the one to fuck their shit up, to balance it out.”

  “Your dad’s bank has a spot on the ‘Welcome’ sign into town,” I said. “People might think there’s a legacy to that.”

  “People can suck my dick. I never wanted that shit. Not Dad’s money, or his seat in the Chamber of Commerce, his closet full of suits, his country club membership—”

  “There’s a country club in Parker County?”

  “There is, but it’s not good enough for Dad. They let guys golf in blue jeans there. His is in Morgantown. It has a dress code. Everything is about the family name for Dad, keeping up appearances, and I don’t know how much he cares that what he does affects the people who have the name.”

  Izzy’s head poked around the corner. A smile flickered across Deacon’s face, and he motioned for Izzy to come in. She looked at me, and I nodded, and Izzy trod her way toward him. Deacon scratched her behind the ears, and she brought her front paws on his lap. He moved his way down her neck.

  “It didn’t feel like any time passed between Mom’s funeral and Dad bringing Brooklyn home and telling us ‘Hey kids, this is your new mom.’ Dagny, she stuck on a smile, stayed polite, but me, I pushed back. I’d watched Mom get sick, and I didn’t understand it because I didn’t get how dead meant dead, because mothers, they live forever. They don’t leave their kids behind. I was angry at Brooklyn because she was taking my mother’s place, but she wasn’t my mother. She didn’t give a shit about me or about Dagny. When Meadow showed up, that was who she cared about, and even then she was more like a kid with a new toy, and she got bored with her eventually. I felt bad for Meadow because she had to be the prettiest, or the smartest, or the most of whatever she did, just to make sure that Brooklyn loved her. And I’m not sure that Brooklyn loves anything that’s not herself.”

  He smiled and looked at me. He had Izzy’s head in between both hands, rubbing and scratching and massaging her, and she loved every second of it.

  “She’s a good dog, isn’t she?”

  I nodded. “She’s the best.”

  14

  I drove Deacon back to the palatial Charles estate, and he asked if I wanted to come inside for a few, and I said sure because I had nothing better to do. He led me to a kitchen the size of my trailer, a vast space of nothing but stainless-steel appliances and marble countertops, and pointed to a Keurig. He said to help myself to the coffee while he ran upstairs for a minute.

  I stared at the Keurig. I hated the goddamn thing on sight because it was a wasteful machine that produced a shitty sludge it claimed was coffee. Not that coffee at that hour was a great idea, but I had a lot churning through my head, and even if it didn’t help me focus, it would give me something to do while waiting on Deacon. I opened cabinet doors until I found cups. From behind several rows of blue Fiestaware mugs I found a French press.

  Woody leaned toward coffee strong enough to strip paint from furniture. He had recommended a French press, telling me it made a cup almost decent enough for him to drink. Mind you, Woody cooked his brew in a percolator, and the resulting potion could jump-start a tractor.

  I’d invested in a French press and found it to be a good way to go when you had the time to luxuriate over your coffee. It was better than the Keurig, which was like saying it was better than getting dick-smacked, because that wasn’t a real high bar to clear.

  I filled a kettle and set it to boil while I checked around for a bag of coffee. There were boxes of K-cups, and I thought if I emptied a dozen of them into the French press, I might strain together a serviceable cup.

  There was enough junk food to keep a teenager happy for a week—if teenagers can be kept happy, that is. Bags of chips, half-empty and clipped shut. Various plastic-wrapped cakes and cream-filled things that may have been food. Cans of soup that dated back a presidential administration. Many, many bottles of wine, and plenty of top-shelf booze. Deacon’s particular apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree.

  What I wasn’t finding, though, was simple coffee. I kept searching. The kitchen was massive, and I had to keep a mental track of where I had already looked. I had just laid eyes on a tub of Maxwell House when a voice said, “If you’re looking for the good silver, it’s in the far left-hand island drawer.”

  I set the canister down and turned around.

  Her mess of dark hair glimmered in the soft kitchen lighting. She looked like fifty pounds of sex poured into a twenty-pound sack, a tall, curvy woman dressed in a floor-length silk nightgown. The neckline on the nightgown plunged low and showed off a lot of surgically modified breast, tanned flesh, and freckles. The slit up the side hinted at strong, sturdy thighs, also tan, slightly dimpled but nothing to turn your head away from. She wasn’t wearing much makeup, just some lipstick that flaked a little, and eyeliner that accentuated dark brown eyes that felt predatory. She held a cigarette in one hand and a tumbler full of ice in the other.

  She came into the kitchen with movements designed to show off what was underneath the nightgown, and the years of practice paid off. She dumped the ice from her glass into the sink and got fresh from the freezer, then poured herself a straight whiskey and leaned against a counter, smiling at me.

  I watched it all, appreciating the show she was giving. And it was a show. From a distance, she would have passed for early thirties, but closer up, there were fine lines around her eyes and mouth and a puffiness in
her face from too much booze that hinted at a higher number. I bet she had a lot of filtered photos of herself on Facebook.

  “Should I be calling the police?” she said.

  “Do you think you should?” I said.

  “There is a stranger in my kitchen using my tea kettle.” She smashed her cigarette against the island’s marble top. “You’re not one of those weirdos who breaks into people’s houses so they can shower and make themselves a sandwich, are you?”

  “No. I’m a different type of weirdo.”

  She laughed. It was one of those throaty laughs that women have in black-and-white movies, the laughs that are all bourbon and nicotine. Viewed through a gauzy filter, it’s sexy with a hint of hope to the sounds she makes in the dark. In the harsh kitchen track lighting, it sounded like someone trying to hide hurt and bury the past, hoping she can plant enough flowers to cover up the grave.

  She took cigarettes and a lighter from a drawer and sat down at the island. As she positioned herself on the stool, the slit on the nightgown slipped, and I could see she wasn’t wearing underwear, and that she kept up with her personal grooming. I snorted a breath through my nostrils and tried to think about baseball.

  She shook a cigarette free and held it between her fingers, keeping an attentive gaze on me.

  “A gentleman lights a woman’s cigarette,” she said.

  I took the hint, snapping open the lighter and popping up a small flame that touched the tip of the cigarette. She drew in a lungful of smoke and exhaled through pursed lips that formed a perfect bow.

  She wrapped long, well-manicured fingers around my hand, slipping her fingers inside and stroking the inside of my palm. I focused on the achievements of the 1980 Cincinnati Reds and took my hand back.