Abruptly, they stopped singing and clapping and fell back into the cliques they’d established before my arrival. Someone switched the stereo on to classic rock and I combed the crowd, wandering aimlessly between shoulders. Finally, I saw Joy leaning against one of the deck’s outer railings, and I wriggled my way over.
She wore one of her brightly coloured sundresses rescued from the dour racks of the church’s thrift shop. Her shoulders were bare, sun-kissed, and lightly freckled, with loops of auburn hair dangling just above them. She didn’t see me coming. She was talking with Jimbo, leaning into him, with her glass of red wine held inches from his bottle of light beer.
Jimbo was saying: “That little pecker drives me nuts. I mean you can only blame so much on your parents, right? So they drink. Who doesn’t? Like, you know? Is that a good reason to miss practice? Like, is he in tears when he tells you about it?”
Joy nodded enthusiastically, her delicate, peach-coloured lips shaping an answer. But she saw me out of the corners of her blue eyes and stiffened.
“You know I can’t talk about that kind of stuff, Coach,” she said, waving a dismissive hand in the direction of Jimbo’s gut. Then she turned to me, squared her shoulders, and exclaimed: “Wes! Hi!”
I thought she might finally hug me in public. Because it didn’t matter who knew at that point — the art teacher dating the guidance counsellor! — five years of Tuesday and Thursday nights behind closed doors, pizza boxes and foreign movies, red wine staining the kitchen counter and all our naked parts puckered and bitten. Then, in the middle of the night, when all the houses fell dark and the neighbourhood was quiet, she would sneak back home, stealing along the trail system to her side of town. But it didn’t matter anymore if Bill Carter saw us embrace in the full light of day, saw our lips pressed in scandalous passion. The son of a bitch had laid me off. His prudish staff policies couldn’t restrain us anymore. We were free to go public.
But Joy didn’t hug me. She sipped her wine and crossed her arms. She shot me a poignant look and cleared her throat. A terrible silence surrounded us, every second bulging with awkward tension, Jimbo swaying there with a drunken, flabby smile on his face, oblivious and indulgent. Finally, his cellphone went off, the ring tone a synthesized Bob Marley redux — Jimbo was jammin — and he stepped aside to take the call.
“You know,” I said, resisting the urge to reach out and touch her, “in a way, this is what we always wanted. What we always talked about. A job in the city, right? We don’t have to have secrets anymore. And the house I bought? It’s a fixer-upper. You said you like fixer-uppers. We can be who we want to be. Right out in the open. I mean, we can actually be who we say we are. That’s important, isn’t it?”
“Stop,” she said, at last looking me in the eyes. “Just stop. This isn’t a good time, Wesley. I mean, I still work with these people, remember?”
I squinted as she began shape-shifting before my eyes, the familiar features of her face dissolving into something sinister and gorgeous, something unknown, but then suddenly she was just Joy again — my lover, my mistress, my queen — leaning against the banister of Bill Carter’s enormous deck, a surviving maple rising from the yard beyond her bare shoulder.
“Why don’t you come over after?” I said. “So we can talk about it?”
She nodded as Jimbo hovered back into our orbit, still gabbing on his phone.
“No,” he said, shaking his head furiously. “No, honey, you’d be bored. Yeah. It’s totally stupid. Alright. Yeah. Bye.”
He clicked off his phone, stuck it in a belt holster, and slapped Joy on the back. She jumped and giggled and spilled wine on her sundress.
“Mosquito,” Jimbo explained with a shrug.
“It’s going to stain!” Joy shrieked, pushing past us, a girlish smile on her face as she threaded the crowd and disappeared inside the house.
Jimbo looked at me and shrugged. “Do you like tequila, Picasso?”
“Sure,” I said, cringing at that stupid nickname. “Why not?”
The night reeled past, a circus of long shadows and laughing faces. In the kitchen, there were devoured bowls of chips and pretzels, and all across the counter were twisted beer caps and torn wine labels. Outside on the deck, glass flutes fell off the railing and were lost in the grass. Beer bottles lined the picnic tables. Jimbo passed tequila shooters around the party, mouth bursting with laughter, head bobbing like a log down the river, and arms dangling from the shoulders of various women. My bladder full, I made for the bathroom, but the newish receptionist was already fumbling with the door handle, leaves stuck in her short black hair. I had to pee in the backyard instead, beside the maple. Occasionally, someone wished me well in the city, said they would miss me around town, that I’d been a staple for so long. But mostly I was invisible, roaming from one burning shot to the next, from one cold beer to another, all the while trying to catch Joy’s eye, to signal to her that we should leave.
And then, finally, the party began to fizzle. People tramped through the house to the entrance, some of them falling against the walls and tearing down the Rorschachs. Bill Carter stood there with a bowl of confetti, tossing handfuls over the crowd as he bellowed the intro to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.”
Joy’s face emerged from the crowd at the door, her cheeks dimpled with laughter and flushed with booze. Our eyes locked and I tried to mouth the words: See you in twenty minutes? But then a hand clamped onto my shoulder, wheeled me around, and Joy’s face was lost in the extreme blur of my rotation. Bill swayed before me, an endless void churning in his pupils, his hand clutching scraps of torn Rorschachs.
“Look,” he told me. “No hard feelings, right? I mean, it’s not like I had much say in the matter, right? I mean, this town is pretty well dying, right? You understand, right? I mean . . . right?”
He shoved the Rorschachs into my chest and hovered at my shoulder. I wheeled back around, looking for Joy. The night air tore at her dress as she approached the passenger side of her car. For a moment, I was secure in the idea that she was only fetching the bottle of wine to bring to my house as promised. We would meet up just once more in secrecy. We’d resolve her uncertainties and plan our future in the city. We’d shake off our long years of forbidden communion in a rush of intense lovemaking. Then the sun would rise and Joy would still be there, making coffee in one of my paint-spattered T-shirts.
But no. Instead, she opened the door of her car and jumped into the passenger seat, flinging her hair off her forehead, pearly teeth reflecting the streetlight as she laughed and laughed. Jimbo sat in the driver’s seat, a cigarette in his grinning lips, only one hand on the wheel.
Then Bill Carter belched at my shoulder. “Here’s the thing about rules, Picasso. They mean absolutely everything. Sure as we’re drunk, rules mean the world. But — and this is a huge ‘but’ — I mean, your happiness depends on this next ‘but’ — sometimes you just have to look the other way, you know? Otherwise, there’s nothing left.”
I stared at him, bewildered. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, he’s just making sure the young lady gets home safely.”
I bit my lip, shook my foggy head. “I know that, Bill.”
Jimbo pulled away from the curb as I teetered down the steps of the Carter residence. It took me fifteen minutes to walk home. I sat at my kitchen table, waiting. Packing boxes loomed from the shadows and the ceiling light shone on the messy bundle of Rorschachs. I drank directly from a bottle of merlot.
The next morning, when I woke up on the kitchen floor, my mouth was dry and the Rorschachs were scattered across the floor, wine spilled all over them. The ink had dissolved and flowed into spirals on the kitchen tiles. Staring into the patterns, grenades combusting in my temples, I called her name several times.
But Joy did not respond.
III.
Poor Randy.
One morning, late in the summe
r, I woke up to a cacophony of slamming doors and shouting voices. I stepped onto the porch we built, wiping my bleary eyes and blinking at the mess of police cars cluttering the road in front of Randy’s house, sunshine bursting off their windshields. Grim-faced officers in uniform combed Randy’s front lawn; they carried plastic baggies and stooped every once in a while to retrieve something from the long grass. Bright, yellow tape swirled around his property like bolts of cartoon lightning against the neighbourhood’s drab, grey colour wheel, and a procession of stern men in trench coats ducked purposefully beneath it and marched up the steps of Randy’s jumbled porch. Across the street, leaning against the back of her station wagon and smoking a cigarette, the old woman stood with her Rottweiler, leash taut as she watched the whole scene with her chin held high.
“Sir, excuse me, sir,” demanded a young lady suddenly beside me, her pumps stabbing my lawn, her eyes dark with makeup, and her face clenched on the other side of a microphone she thrust between us. “Mary Waidlow, Channel Eight News. How long have you known Randy Leineovich? What kind of a man did he seem like? Did you ever notice any signs of struggle coming from his house? Did you ever smell anything rotten?”
An older man with a backwards ball cap and tattoos on his hairy forearms stood a few feet behind her and pointed a video camera at me, a red light glowing from some small spot by the lens. I didn’t know whether to look at him, the camera, or Mary Waidlow, and breaking out in sweat, I began to wriggle my mouth in silence, a vacuum whirling in my brain, until she took a step closer and repeated her barrage of questions, her eyebrows stabbing at the bridge of her nose.
“Randy was a great man,” I finally spluttered, inching backwards until I butted up against the porch. “Is a great man. A reliable friend. Why? Is he okay? He helped me renovate my house. Look. It was a fixer-upper.”
I wanted to show her the work we’d done and was just about to invite her up, but two plainclothes officers intervened. They stepped between us and lead me inside to look at pictures and answer questions. I brought them into the front room, which was small but not as private as the rest of the house, and I motioned for them to sit on the secondhand couch. Breathing heavily, I sat across from them in a tatty armchair.
“Coffee?” I ventured. “There’s a fresh pot.”
“This ain’t really one ’a them coffee-type cases,” said the bald one with the salt and pepper moustache. “This here is more like one ’a them ‘don’t-eat-or-drink-till-it’s-over’–type cases. Know what I mean?”
I stared at my toes wriggling beneath my slippers. “Is Randy okay?”
The bald one snorted and the quiet one with tears in his eyes and sweaty patches spreading from his underarms curtly shook his head. They looked past me at the Birth of Venus replica I’d painted on my wall, their eyebrows raised in an emotion I couldn’t distinguish.
“Looks different,” the bald one said, nodding to the mural. “It’s a famous one, isn’t it? But it doesn’t look quite right.”
Glassy eyes still on the mural, the sweaty one tossed a folder on the coffee table next to a framed photograph of me and Joy celebrating my birthday on a Tuesday night. He shook his head again, opened the folder, and began arranging black and white portraits on the coffee table.
The bald one tapped the table. “You recognize anyone down there, Mr. Lowelist?”
Surprised, I tilted my head. “How do you know my name?”
“This is a murder investigation, sir. Among other things. Now look at the photos. Who do you recognize?”
He put five pictures on the table, two of which were of young blond women I didn’t know. A third featured a little girl in a bathing suit sprinkling a garden with a watering can. All three smiled at the camera, proud to have their photos taken. The other two were of Randy and his sister, though they looked considerably less pleased. Randy’s thin hair stood up in spikes and his cheeks hung from his face; he looked drunk. His sister’s face was gaunt and sickly, as if she hadn’t eaten in days. I didn’t want to connect these two people with such unflattering images, especially not Randy, who’d been so good to me since I arrived, but I told the detectives who they were.
“Sister, eh?” the bald one said, interlacing his beefy fingers and leaning over the coffee table with a smirk. “So you knew her.”
It had been raining the second time I met Randy’s sister. I was shirtless, overall straps dangling from my waist while I painted the kitchen walls: swirling black clouds leaping from the pores of a nude woman in recline, her ghostly face faintly resembling Joy’s, who I could not put behind me, the sound of her voice, little whiffs of her perfume, crystal clear images of her back, her forearms, her neck. Working on the porch gave me brief reprieve from all that, but as soon as Randy went home and I came inside, the barrage started all over again.
I’d spend hours working on my murals, but there was a knock on the door that night, a banging fist. I didn’t recognize her at first, standing there in the foyer. Her hair was stuck to her neck and pasted across her forehead, and her skimpy clothes clung to her thin frame. She said Randy told her to wait at my place until he got home. She said she hoped I didn’t mind, the rain was biblical, could she come in and warm up. “Anything for a friend’s sister,” I said, smiling awkwardly, self-conscious in my semi-nudity. I excused myself to clean up, walking into the kitchen to gather my paints and brushes. When I turned around, there she was, naked and pale, lips thin and blue, and a dark eddy between her legs. “That’s creepy,” she said, motioning to the mural, reaching out, pulling me into the shadows, onto the floor. She removed my overalls and made love to me in the storm, with sort-of-Joy spread across the wall, watching over us. After, we did not linger, snuggle, or exchange secrets. Her phone beeped from the living room. She left right away.
“Who’s this here?” the bald one said, holding the picture of me and Joy.
“That’s my ex.”
“You ever do any tattooing?”
“What?”
“Oh, I see now,” he said, flicking the picture frame with his fat index finger. “That’s her up there on the wall, eh? Christ. You’re obsessed. Look, Mike. He’s fuckin’ obsessed.”
I pinched the web of my thumb.
“So you like blonds, too?” The bald one turned to the sweaty one: “He likes blonds, too.”
The sweaty one nodded as if he’d known all along.
“Neighbour said he might.”
“So where is she now?”
“We’re separated.”
“Separated, eh? I thought that was for troubled marriages, separated. Not for pretty blond girlfriends.”
“Well, we’re apart. Anyway, she’s more of an auburn.”
The bald one snorted again.
“Look,” I said. “Where’s Randy? Is he okay?”
“Randy’s just fine.” He stood up, took another look around the room and shook his head. Then he motioned for the sweaty one to follow him to the door. “Guys like Randy are always fine in cases like this. But you won’t be seeing him for, well — we’re hoping, forever. So I dunno.You may want to rethink your friendship with the man. Maybe go on a date or something. Or, who knows, maybe we’ll be back to talk some more.”
They left and I locked the door behind them.
Later, I learned the alleged details on TV. Early that morning, a naked teenager supposedly threw herself in front of a police car on a nearby thoroughfare. Her name was Alexandria Weston, and she’d been missing for six years. The sweaty one had shown me her picture. According to the news, she led police to Randy’s house, where they found another young woman and a little girl hiding in the shadows of the attic, and I recognized them from the same set of photos. Even more chilling was the allegation of human remains found in a shoebox: a few small bones, some baby teeth, and lock of hair. As for the survivors, they all had black polka dots tattooed on their backs in the vague shapes of wings.
My interview played on heavy rotation. I looked ghastly on TV, a stammering face floating in front of a beautiful porch, testifying in the court of public opinion that Randy was my most reliable friend. A great man. Every time I said the word, producers aired the unflattering photo of Randy.
The lady across the street was also interviewed. She knelt in the lawn next to her panting dog and said that she’d twice called the police because of Randy. She claimed to have seen a topless woman crawling down the front steps. She claimed to have seen a little girl crying on the roof of the house. The police came, asked questions, and left again. The lady across the street bought a dog and named him Ripper.
More details emerged over the next week. Afraid to face the neighbourhood, I stayed inside my house and curled up on the couch, Joy riding a shell ashore on my wall, oblivious to my ordeal while man and beast fawned over her arrival.
Several reports confirmed the discovery of butchered human flesh in Randy’s deep freezer. The victims spoke out, described their ordeal to investigators and reporters, claiming Randy would duct tape their mouths and force them to ingest puréed meals through their noses. At first, they would gag, choke, vomit against the tape and swallow it back down. But eventually they grew accustomed to eating this way. One of them claimed that Randy impregnated her, but their baby was stillborn and they held a funeral with whatever they could find in the attic. They broadcast a photo of Randy’s sister and said she was a prostitute who had gone missing two weeks ago. Her last name, according to the newscast, was Beckerson.
I stopped watching TV.
Instead, I went to the kitchen window and peeked through the blinds at Randy’s house. I tried to imagine him coming and going from our construction project, our barbeques, his work, and each time he entered his home he would transmogrify into someone else: rapist; pedophile; killer; cannibal. The kitchen stank of paint as I pondered these impossibilities, testing them for lurid truths. Was Randy capable of all that? Of any of it? He’d been so neighbourly.
A Plea for Constant Motion Page 2