The place on Carpenter Street was a three-story home—very well kept—and every room therein was a little bit different from the other. Some were soft rooms that had nice walls, pretty paintings, and silk sheets. Fluffy pillows. They were made to look like you could live there.
Some rooms were hard.
The hard rooms were painted black, or red, and had chains up on the walls and closets full of gadgets like handcuffs and whips, and God knows what. Vibrators, and all that crazy shit they use in the dirty movies. One room had a birthing table, with the things for someone’s legs and everything. Stirrups. I didn’t like that stuff. I didn’t like any of it. Neither did Alice. That’s why she had no scars to speak of.
Alice was twenty-eight. At least that’s what she’d told me, and I had no reason to doubt her. She was a natural blonde, maybe a little shorter than the average woman, and she had a simple, petite body. She never had any plastic surgery done on her, but none of the girls there at Mama Snow’s had work done on them either, I think, because Evelyn wasn’t that kind of town, and Alice was a native.
I’d been seeing her for three years. Usually it was the day after I got paid, but that wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule.
I liked her, and I like to think I got to grow on her too, not that I ever hoped anything would come of it, or that I had any fantasies of saving her from “the life.” It was nothing like that. More than anything, I think we just got used to each other. I liked her body and her personality. I liked it that we talked, now that we knew each other, and I liked it that once we got to grow on each other, she was comfortable enough with me to let her guard down and fall asleep on me afterward. It got so whenever I went to Carpenter Street, I paid for the night, not the hour.
What I was paying for was the time with Alice when she slept, not the sex, because that was … I’m not smart enough to know a good word for it, but the sex wasn’t the object of my desire. What was important to me was being in a soft, good-smelling bed with a beautiful woman who smelled good. What I paid for was the time when I felt like a normal man. An ordinary man who had a girl. I paid for the illusion, because the fact is that after Doris, I had no heart for another woman.
Once Alice picked up my routine, that I was there to see her approximately every six to ten days, she knew what to expect from me. She knew she wasn’t going to get hurt, and she knew it wasn’t going to hurt. She knew my rhythms. She knew she had a freedom with me she didn’t have with strangers. She knew me as much as anyone could.
Sometimes I saw her at the gas station or something like that. If there was eye contact, she would smile and wave. I’d ask her how everything was going. I got warm on the inside when she actually told me about her real life, the one far away from Carpenter Street. I would tell her what was up with me, not that anything ever was, and I would ask her if she felt like getting a coffee with me, or a milkshake, because at this point I had stopped drinking, and my understanding was that she was a diehard nondrinker because of her mother. Alice would point out the line in the sand and say no. She always did. Not in a hard way, but in a way that made it sound like it just wouldn’t be appropriate. She had compartmentalized me.
I had my reasons for never having a girl in my life, and somewhere deep down and private, I guess she had her reasons for never having a man. Regardless, I always walked away sad.
Mama Snow was concerned that she had a stalker on her hands when I kept coming by and asking for Alice. There were typically four but never more than five girls working in the house on any given night, and I only ever asked for the one. The business was small but lucrative because the location was secure and the girls were clean. Mama Snow was a Haitian woman, probably in her fifties, though it was hard to tell. She was a big woman, but she had the kind of body that a boxer gets once he lets himself go. Soft, but no less dangerous.
Relics and artifacts of a quasi-religious nature decorated the front room of the house. Homemade candles with leaves and twigs buried in the wax burned twenty-four hours a day.
At first, Mama Snow came off like some voodoo queen and tried to give me a warning with her one good eye. Normal men would’ve been bothered by it, I’m sure, but I didn’t give a shit. I couldn’t be any more cursed than I already was, and there was only so much her goon—Leon—could’ve done to me on any given day, him being the weird creature of the night that he was. Sure, he was bigger than me, and tougher, but I was harder to take out than a goddamn cockroach, and I had a right hook that could knock walls down.
When Mama Snow warned me about asking for Alice, all I did was give her a look. Maybe in some crazy, voodoo way, she saw what was inside me, and from that day on, she was more than accommodating whenever I made an appearance.
I parked my truck down the block, walked up to the front door, and rang the bell. It sounded inside the house. After a full minute’s wait, the heavy, wood door opened, and the monster known as Leon blocked my path. Leon was from the Philippines. He had the build of a sumo wrestler, and his head was shaved bald. He sported a Fu Manchu mustache. His hands were so big he could’ve choked the life from a bull if he was pissed-off enough. He was wearing a black suit that would have been a tent on any other man.
“Leon,” I said, by way of hello.
He squinted.
“Alice around?”
He nodded.
“Nice talking to you,” I said. Then, as a joke: “I’ll see you at the beach.”
He grunted.
I stepped into the parlor, which looked like a legitimate parlor with wood furniture, pretty prints on the walls, and the forever-burning candles. I went up the stairs and down the hall. I opened the third door I passed, and inside was an old-fashioned bed with bedposts, drapery across the top. White sheets covered the bed, along with a feather-stuffed comforter. The walls were covered with wallpaper with a simple floral design, and three Cezanne prints in heavy glass frames decorated the walls. Soft light poured forth from an antique-looking lamp, and a candelabrum burned brightly on the dresser. There was a coatrack.
I took off my Stooges T-shirt and hung that up, then lit two cigarettes.
Alice came in a minute later, wearing slippers and a nightgown. For other men she dressed up some, I think, but she knew I didn’t need anything like that, any kind of show.
I gave her the other cigarette and said hello.
“Hi,” she said, smiling, and we kissed.
I put my arms around her and lifted her off the ground, sat her on the edge of the bed. Her slippers fell off in the process. I buried my nose in her hair and told her she smelled good. She said thank you.
“I saw you yesterday at the Elroy’s, Alice.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“You should’ve said something.”
It was probably a lie, but it was exactly what I wanted to hear, and she knew it. “What’s new, girl?”
“Nothing much,” she said. “Saw my mom a couple days ago.”
“How’d that go?”
She blew smoke, looked down. “Nothing changes. I’m worried about her.”
Her mother must’ve been loaded.
I ran my fingers through Alice’s hair and said, “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to be sorry.”
“I am, though. It’s a shame things …”
“What?”
“It’s a shame the woman never saw what an angel she had.” She smiled.
“And it’s a shame that family has to hurt,” I continued. She took my hand and pressed it to her face, kissed my fingers. My rod shot up like the lighter end of a seesaw. “Is she healthy?”
“She’s never been healthy,” Alice said, “but she’s been with this guy lately who … I don’t know. He is not a good influence.”
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, lying. “But let’s not talk about that now.”
“Sure,” I said. “Later.”
“How was your day?”
“Oh,
you know. Same shit, different day. No surprise there.” I put my hand around the back of her neck and caressed her. She purred.
“I’m not the most terribly interesting man in the world.”
“You don’t have to be.”
I took her cigarette and put it out in the green glass ashtray. Mine too. I put my hands on her face and felt her, felt the warmth come off her.
She bent forward and undid my pants. She took it in her mouth. I exhaled.
After a few seconds of getting lost in my head, I gently pulled her head back by the hair and pushed her down on the bed. I bent over and pushed the nightgown up to her navel. I kissed her knees, and then ran kisses up her smooth thighs. Her head went back into the soft bed, and she scraped her fingers through my hair.
“Alice,” I said between kisses.
“Marley,” she said.
I couldn’t say what I wanted to say.
I parted her legs and licked her until she quivered, and the taste of her became heavy in my mouth, inside me. I got on top of her, kissed her like there was no tomorrow, and placed myself inside her.
In the morning, we awoke as the sun struggled to make a new day happen. We smoked a couple of cigarettes and talked. She talked about what kind of shopping she had to do. That was all I could get out of her that was real, but it would have to do.
I dressed. She watched from the bed as I slipped a stack of bills under the ashtray. It embarrassed me, paying for her like she was a tool, a product, anything other than the beauty she was. I tried to smile, and she told me not to worry. That was something she had to tell me often. I kissed her good-bye, and then went to work.
It felt like I was leaving home for good. It always did.
SIX
I took a quick look in the Evelyn white pages to see where Alice’s mother lived. It sounded to me like the woman needed a visit from the tooth fairy.
It would be proper for me to tell you here that there once was a time in which I happened to see Alice’s Honda on the road late at night. At the time, I doubt she knew what my truck looked like—seeing my truck once would brand it in your brain like a picture of a dead body—so I decided to follow her home. Just to make sure she got home safe.
She went about as far north as you could get in this town, to this house that was almost as small as mine, but much nicer. She parked in the driveway, and I passed her and parked on the corner. She got out of the car, set the alarm, and went in through her front door.
About an hour later, she turned off the bedroom light. That’s when I got out of the truck and went back to see her name on the mailbox.
Halliday.
So that’s how I knew her last name.
I checked the white pages, and there was Alice, over on Perry Street, and the only other Halliday in the book, I presumed, was her mother, Rebecca.
Rebecca seemed to live over on the east side, about a mile north of my restaurant. Now that I knew that, I knew what I’d be doing once the sun went down.
When I got home from work I ate a dinner that consisted of two boiled hot dogs sliced up like a banana into a can of tuna. I polished it off with a half a pot of coffee and a dozen crackers. Everything a growing boy needs.
Once I did my dishes—or should I say my bowl—I went into the living room and opened the big steamer trunk, which doubled as a coffee table.
I stored a bunch of odds and ends in there that I didn’t want out in plain sight. Not that anything was incriminating, and not that I had ever let anyone through my front door, but I just did not believe in leaving stuff out for people to see or know about.
I rummaged about for a few minutes and finally came out with an old pair of sunglasses and a Redskins cap.
From my bedroom closet I took out a beige sports jacket I had never worn but had found at a thrift shop once for a dollar. You never knew when you’d need such a thing, and now I needed it.
I put my hair back in a ponytail and then wound it up under my cap so it looked like I had short hair. Then I put on the jacket, put the sunglasses in my pocket, and got in the truck.
I drove to the east side, stopped at a Laundromat I’d never been to before, and picked up a roll of quarters. Given the proper life circumstances, a roll of quarters could be a man’s best friend.
Rebecca Halliday lived in a shit-ass apartment complex on a bad block. Two doors down was a no-tell motel, and on the northern corner were a pair of drug dealers who whispered slang names for drugs (trees, chronic, crazy train) to the pedestrians as they walked by. Most didn’t respond. Those who did shook hands quickly with the dealers and then took off like bolts of lightning. There was a kid on a bicycle going up and down the block who I suppose was the lookout for the police.
I parked the truck two blocks south, put the sunglasses on, and then walked back the rest of the way to the apartment building. When I got to her building, I saw that the front door was locked. There were buzzers up on the wall, one for each apartment, but I didn’t want anyone to know I was there. I looked over my shoulders to make sure no one was watching me, then I pushed the door hard, and the cheap lock gave.
I went up to 3G—Rebecca Halliday’s apartment—and put my ear against the door. I heard a woman crying, and the deep voice of a man telling her to shut up. I knocked.
I heard footsteps coming closer. I stepped to the side so I couldn’t be seen through the peephole, and I slipped the roll of quarters into my palm and squeezed it tight. I didn’t know what to expect.
“Who the fuck is it?” shouted the man behind the locked door.
“Tacos,” I said. It was the first thing to come to mind.
“Tacos?”
I heard him take the chain off the door, and then I heard him unlock the one lock. It swung open, and I let loose.
His hair was dark with strips of white above the ears. His gnarly mustache was nothing compared with mine. Either he or the entire apartment reeked of alcohol. The man was over six feet tall and weighed somewhere in the mid-two-hundreds, but it didn’t matter. His face exploded in a tidal wave of blood and splintered bone as my fist bent his nose to one side of his face. He fell back into the apartment with a wet scream, holding his face like it was a crying baby. I stepped in and slammed the door behind me.
The apartment was poorly lit and filthy. All the light came from one scrawny lamp with a torn shade, and there on the couch was the woman who I presumed had a beautiful daughter. What I saw before me was a shell of a woman. She was horribly thin, with bleached blond hair, a fat lip, and a row of bruises the size of the man’s fingertips running up both of her arms. She wasn’t wearing anything other than a stained bra and a pair of Daisy Dukes. She sat there with a shocked look on her face, but didn’t make a sound.
A half-eaten slice of pizza rested on the table next to a hunting knife—the kind that had a serrated edge to gut something. It even came with its own leather sheath. Right next to that were the keys to a big rig.
The man wore a mask of red. He roared and tried to get off the floor, but I made short work of him with a kick to the ear. He went back down, howling.
“Are you Halliday?” I asked the woman.
She nodded.
“I understand this ain’t the greatest guy in the world. Mind if I take him out for you?”
She nodded again, which I couldn’t help but laugh at. I reached over and took the knife and stuffed it in the back of my jeans. I also grabbed the keys. Then I turned to the man.
“Let’s go, tough guy.”
I grabbed him by the collar.
“Get the fuck off me,” he mumbled.
“Shut up.”
I dragged him into the hallway and kicked him down both flights of stairs. When we got to the lobby, I pushed him onto the street and made sure the door with the cheap lock closed behind me. As I did this he took a wild swing, but his eyesight must have been shit-awful because he didn’t connect. I threw a kick into his knee, then hit him with the right hook from hell. Like a bag of wet towels, he hit the st
reet hard and didn’t get up.
“If I find out you’ve been in that apartment again, I’ll be back,” I said, tossing the set of keys onto his soft gut.
The dealers on the corner turned. With that, I walked away. I must tell you, it’s a mighty fine feeling knowing there’s only so much damage a human being could do to me. Break my bones, I’ll be fine with the next full moon. Same thing if you were to take away one of my hands or legs. Personal safety isn’t something I think about, and after kicking that goon’s ass, I felt happy to be alive.
The Redskins cap and jacket were left in the first garbage can I saw.
My good deed for the day never made the papers.
The next night, I went back to the house on Carpenter Street. I didn’t have the money to play with to go see Alice as often as I wanted to, but I wanted to know what happened with her mother. I couldn’t very well call Alice up on the phone and say something roundabout like, “Hey, Alice, by any chance has some mysterious hero in disguise recently beat seven shades of shit out of the man your mother was shacking up with?” That wouldn’t be discreet.
Aside from being curious about the effects of my intervention, I just plain wanted to see her again.
I met her in the same room, and we did what we always did.
After, she told me that her mother had called. Some hooligan had dragged her man out of the house, and she hadn’t seen him since. The mother presumed he owed someone money, and he might be dead.
The mother was upset because she didn’t know if she had witnessed a kidnapping or not. Alice had told her to leave the police out of it, and to be happy that the guy was gone.
Alice didn’t want her mother mixed up in anything as bad as murder, but I asked her if she was at least happy that the guy was out of the picture.
“Of course,” she said, settling her head on my chest.
I smiled.
SEVEN
The Wolfman Page 7