by Tom Wright
When the man turned and walked away, light as a dancer on his feet, I caught up with Aunt Rachel and asked her who the guy was.
“A middleweight, I think,” she said, her breath strong enough to take the paint off a lamppost. “Does odd jobs.” She gave a little snort. “Or maybe not so odd.” At that angle, in that light, she would have looked like an older version of L.A. if her hair had been wild enough.
I couldn’t get anything else out of her about who the strange man was or why she was talking to him.
We drove Diana home, then headed for Harlandale. When we got back to the house, I knew something was wrong. L.A. obviously felt it too; she went straight to her room, checked her pillows, looked under her bed and into her closet, then opened her underwear drawer. She stood there frowning for a minute, then looked at me. In that moment some decision was made between us, and we never told Gram or talked about what we both knew, but we went on knowing it just the same: somebody who didn’t belong here had been in the house.
2 | Contacts
WE KEPT EXPECTING to hear or read something new about the murder, some solution to the mystery that seemed to hang in the air around us like a dark humidity, but there was nothing. The papers were down to column heads like “No New Leads” and “Police Seek Witnesses,” and TV reporters had started collecting old unsolved murders to compare this one to, their tone opening the door just a crack to the possibility that the cops weren’t doing their job.
Then we got the call about Jack. Somebody had beaten him up and left him lying in the street, where a cabbie found him. He was still unconscious when he arrived at Parkland by ambulance, but they got an address from his driver’s license and notified Mom.
At that point it sounded to me like he was going to survive, but you never know.
When Gram hung up, she said, “We’d better go on over there, you two. Leah’s just beside herself.”
L.A. jammed her hands in the back pockets of her jeans and looked down at her sneakers without saying anything. It was clear to me that somebody lying unconscious in the street could very well get run over. Maybe even by a truck. Or a trolley.
Grabbing the keys, I headed for the door and held it as Gram and L.A. walked out, then locked it and double-checked the knob. As far as I knew it had never been locked before. Gram didn’t say anything, but she gave me a curious look.
I suddenly remembered it was L.A.’s turn to drive, so I tossed her the keys and we loaded into the Roadmaster with her behind the wheel. Since Gram favored young ladies having practical skills, I had no choice but to share driving time with L.A., but the truth was I didn’t mind riding while she drove. I know that sounds like disloyalty to guys, who are the true drivers of the world, but L.A. was a special case. Other people drove on the principle that all the bad things that are possible are equally likely to happen and had constant frights as a result. In fact, I had to admit that was more or less my style, because when you got behind the wheel of a car the streets turned into a jungle screaming with predators. But L.A. was basically a gunfighter by nature, about as bluffable as Doc Holliday, and didn’t think survival had anything to do with traffic signs and lanes and stuff like that. Instead, she kept us out of wrecks by seeing absolutely everything and always knowing exactly who her enemies were and what they were going to do next. But I could tell Gram didn’t understand this because she just kept stomping her imaginary brake pedal at every crisis point as we went along.
As much as it seemed to amaze her, we made it to the hospital and got the Roadmaster parallel-parked without incident. With her feet on solid ground again, her nerve returned and she briskly got directions from the candy striper at the desk and marched us all straight back past a sign stating that these weren’t visiting hours. She was very law-abiding in most ways, but once she laid her course she was unstoppable. We took the elevator to the third floor, got off, turned right and kept going until we saw Mom standing outside one of the rooms blowing her nose into a tissue.
“Well, how is he?” asked Gram.
Uninterested in secondhand reports, L.A. went to the door of the room and craned her neck to look in.
Mom snuffled, her eyes red and puffy. “Goddamn nigger beat him up,” she said. “He got a call and went out in the truck to pick up a car, and the guy just jumped out of the bushes or something and beat the livin’ shit out of him. Jack said Murval Briscoe was out there too.”
I knew by now that Murval Briscoe was the name of the huge cop who’d talked to Jack at the hospital after the fight at Mom’s house, but I couldn’t imagine what he might have to do with this.
We all went into the room. L.A. stepped fearlessly up to the bedside for a clinical inspection of Jack, who was a little hard to recognize in this condition. His eyes were purple and black and swollen almost shut, and his nose was flattened and pushed off-center. His lips, which looked like raw meat, were kind of ballooned out, like he was blowing the ceiling a kiss.
Gram stood over him. “What exactly happened to you, Jack?”
“Guy bussid m’ buckin teet,” he said. “Swald two ub’m.”
I saw the truth of this; Jack no longer had any teeth at all in the front, a fact that in combination with his overall condition sent a wild surge of joy through me. But that didn’t last, the pleasure almost immediately turning to constipated guilt. Mom honked into her tissue again and Gram patted her halfheartedly on the shoulder.
“I’m sure he’ll be just fine,” Gram said.
L.A. was still examining Jack. “Can you smell stuff?” she said, checking out both sides of the wrecked nose.
“Duh-uh,” said Jack.
A tired-looking little doctor with spiky blond hair came in the door. “Hello, folks,” he said without looking up from his clipboard.
“Enter young Hippocrates,” said Gram.
The doctor glanced up at Gram with a professional smile. “Are you the family?”
“Some of it,” she said. “Can you tell us about the patient’s condition, Doctor?”
“Well, we have multiple blunt-force traumata here, over most of the head, neck, upper torso and abdomen, but except for the neck apparently no internal injuries worthy of note. In terms of brain damage, which technically happens anytime someone is knocked out, whatever’s there seems to be minimal in this case. A number of defensive bruises on the forearms. In a couple of places you can actually see what appear to be knuckle marks. It looks like he got beat up.”
The words riding whip appeared in my mind and then vanished without explanation.
“Remarkable,” said Gram. “Are you a Harvard man?”
“A&M,” he said. “But I studied real hard.”
“Ah. Well then, you seem to believe our Jack is going to recover?”
“I think so. There’s some damage to a couple of disks in the neck, which may or may not produce sequelae . . .”
It was clear from Gram’s expression that she understood perfectly well what this meant, which gave me a fantasy of college classes where the students did nothing but sit around and learn weird words.
The doctor went on, “. . . and he’s lost some dentition, as you can see, along with the broken nose. There may be a little residual laziness of the right eyelid due to superficial nerve and muscle damage.”
“Sumbidge caw me nod loogin,” said Jack.
“But that seems to be about it,” the doctor said. “We’ll probably discharge him tomorrow. I imagine he’ll want to talk to an orthodontist.”
Mom indignantly piped up, “Rachel was here, and you know what she said? She said, ‘Well, hell, there goes the taffy apples.’ Can you believe that?”
Gram looked at her for a long beat. Her nostrils quivered and she cleared her throat but gave no other sign. Finally she said, “I suppose he was lucky at that. It’s just not much like our Jack to get into a fight with anyone who could do this to him.”
Behind her L.A. nodded.
“C’mon,” said Mom. “Don’t start up with that.” Her own nose was
red and tender-looking by now.
“Well, since you mention it,” the doctor said, “these injuries don’t exactly look like the result of an ordinary fight to me, especially when you take into account the condition of the patient’s hands. Or maybe we should say noncondition—”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t think he got many licks in.”
“You seem to have a forensic turn of mind,” said Gram, giving him the little lopsided smile she dispensed for dog tricks and clever children.
The doctor looked pleased. “It is an interest of mine,” he said. He glanced at Jack. “The damage we see here is quite a bit in excess of what it would’ve taken to simply win the fight, but on the other hand it doesn’t look like the guy, who I think was left-handed, by the way, was trying to finish him off either.”
“What do you conclude?”
“I think it may have been a matter of prolonging the action. If I were Sherlock Holmes I might say this was done in a rather clinical fashion, not out of rage. In fact, as bad as this is, it looks to me as if the other guy could have hurt him a whole lot worse if he’d wanted to.”
“Well,” said Gram. “That is intriguing. You know, Jack is a trained boxer.”
The doctor looked at Jack again. “No, I didn’t know,” he said. “That does add an element of mystery, doesn’t it? In that case you’d have to believe the other guy was very impressively skilled, though I don’t know what his motives might have been.”
L.A. went back to take another look at Jack’s face. She stood on her tiptoes and seemed to be comparing his eyes.
“Can you blink?” she said.
Jack blinked.
A long narrow nurse in silent shoes came in. The doctor talked up to her for a minute with a slightly annoyed expression, then shook hands with Gram and left. We all stood around watching Jack as the nurse leaned down and checked his pulse.
This was now a situation of expert routines and there didn’t seem to be anything left for an ordinary person to do or say here. I kept having mental pictures of somebody beating Jack up and thinking about what it would have taken to accomplish that. I couldn’t make myself believe anyone but a professional fighter could have done it, but that’s where I ran out of ideas.
“Jack,” said Gram, handing Mom a fresh tissue. “When you go out to repossess a car do you have to notify the police first?”
He nodded. “Esh,” he said.
“Mm,” said Gram, as if that settled the matter for her. “Well then, since it looks like you’ll live, I think the youngsters and I will be on our way. Leah, let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
“Sure, Mom.” She gave each of us a quick hug.
Now that I’d seen Jack, I wanted the hell out of there. I didn’t like hospitals. The air in them was full of pain, and death skulked around every corner.
On my way out of Jack’s room I ran smack into Shepherd Boy. He said, “Oh!” like somebody who’d never taken a hit before. In fact he felt as soft as a girl.
I couldn’t make sense of seeing him here, but he told us he was on a pastoral visit to see Jack. Then it didn’t make sense in another way because Jack, not being what you’d call an active member of the congregation, usually just showed up at church for funerals and maybe Easter. A look passed between Jack and Shepherd Boy.
We finished our excuse-me’s and I walked on down the hall. I never knew what this was all about but the next day I did hear Gram mention some shared literary tastes Jack and Shepherd Boy seemed to have, whatever that meant.
As we turned the corner at the end of the hall I glanced back at Mom in the doorway of Jack’s room, knowing she’d stay here at the hospital with him until he was discharged. He always had to have her nearby if he was sick or hurt, that being one of the reasons she didn’t have a job. This was in addition to his suspiciousness—like if he got the idea she’d been talking to some other man, for example, or wasn’t telling him the truth about something—which would mean he’d beat her up. As a matter of fact, trying to help Mom during one of these fights had been pretty much my last act before getting sent to Gram’s. Afterward Mom told everybody she ran into a cabinet door, and said I’d fallen off my bicycle.
Thinking of this reminded me somehow of Hubert, who kept a notebook that he drew pictures of skulls and snakes in. I didn’t know if there was any connection between the two facts, but he also drank beer or even hard liquor anytime he could get it. Even his music was edgy, full of rough chords and growling vocals, nothing like what you heard on the radio. For a second, for no apparent reason, I visualized him huddled over forbidden books with Jack and Shepherd Boy in some poorly lit, undefined place of shame.
“Now, James, I want you to drive us home,” said Gram when we were outside. “And I want you to get us there safely and unfrightened.” She slid into the passenger’s seat, set her purse on her lap and gripped it with both hands.
L.A. piled into the back and assumed her heckling position, elbows on the back of the front seat. “Scare me if you can,” she said.
I started the Roadmaster, backed out and headed for the house by way of Hampton. It was an uneventful trip except for one moron in a white Chevy with chewed-up fenders who ran a stop sign and almost hit us, scaring the hell out of Gram and me.
“Lord-love-a-fool!” Gram shouted, giving the floorboard a mighty stomp. “Curse and blast!” She glared at me as if I were to blame. “Now, you see there, James?”
“I knew he was gonna do that,” said L.A.
I looked at her in the rearview mirror. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“How else are you gonna learn?” Then she put her lips against my ear to keep Gram from hearing and whispered sweetly, “You dumb shit.”
We turned into the driveway and saw Diana sitting on the porch steps, her hair tousled up in the wind, twirling a dandelion in her fingers and watching the little parasols of fluff stream away. She wore tan cotton shorts, white low-top canvas shoes and a red golf shirt I happened to know Don had given her when it got too small for him. She dropped the dandelion stem, stood up in that unbelievably fine way of hers and walked across the grass to meet us as we got out of the car.
“I park,” said L.A. She enjoyed putting the Buick up in the garage, having absolutely no fear of the tight space.
“Guess what I heard,” said Diana.
“What?” I said, trying desperately not to stare at her legs.
“What?” said L.A.
“Pray tell,” said Gram.
“Some other girls got killed before the one Harpo and Biscuit found. Two of them. I heard Dad talking about it on the phone.”
3 | Moving Day
YOU CAN FOCUS on an idea, even an idea as big and momentous as other people dying, just so long before it numbs your mind and you run out of things to think and say about it.
The names of the other girls who had been killed were Mandie Peyser and Marybeth Nichols, Diana told us. Mandie’s body had been found at the drive-in theater, behind the screen, and Beth’s at the old lumberyard. Both of them had been naked, just like the girl L.A. and I found. I couldn’t remember any news about either of the first two at the time, but a lot happens in a city as big as Dallas and not every murder makes the front page, which I had to admit was about all I usually read if you didn’t count the comics and the sports section. And it was possible I had heard of the murders in a background kind of way, but because at that point I still hadn’t really gotten it through my head how much death actually had to do with me, maybe they didn’t get my attention above the general roar of school and everything else that was going on in my life.
None of us really knew either of the other girls, but Diana was pretty sure she’d seen Mandie around school back in sixth grade and thought maybe she’d moved over to the Catholic school the next year. We talked about the two of them for a while, little by little letting go of the unspoken assumption that dying was for the old and infirm, not people our age. For a while we kept coming back to
the things you say, like how rotten it was for them to die that way, and asking what kind of lunatic would do such a thing, but it wasn’t long before the conversation began to lose steam.
I still couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone about my night visitor, secretly suspecting she was a sign of insanity and, whether that was true or not, being sure nobody was going to have any answers for me anyway. When in doubt, saying nothing is nearly always the best policy. Silence can sometimes be repaired after the fact if need be, but not the wrong words. You can’t unring a bell.
“It’s just so ugly and sad,” said Diana. “Who could do a thing like that?”
L.A. shrugged. Dee looked at her with an expression I couldn’t read.
“Somebody who’s nuts,” I ventured, still locked on to the idea of insanity.
“More like evil,” said Diana.
And that pretty much covered what we knew and thought. Gram, who had walked into the room during the conversation, tsked one last time, warned us against lurking fiends and strangers at the door, grabbed her purse and left to go sit with Dr. Kepler. Diana and Dee, who’d been hanging out with L.A. and me for the afternoon, stuck around to play gin rummy. The murdered girls stayed in my mind, but not, as far as I could see, in Diana’s, so here was another item on the long list of things that didn’t worry her excessively.
Of course, there was never any telling what Dee or L.A. were thinking, but L.A. had now become the picture of deadly concentration. We were playing our third hand, and after my draw she carefully studied my eyes for a couple of seconds, discarded and said, “I’m knocking.” She spread her cards, everything in runs and sets except a red deuce and the spade seven she knew I needed. Nine points.
I laid out my hand for Diana to count. There was no occasion for drama; as usual L.A. had looked straight into my defenseless brain, seen all the points I was holding and busted me. When she was on like this, she was insuperable. Generally my only hope against her was the fantastic lucky streaks I occasionally had, when for a while I’d somehow know with perfect clarity what to hold and what to toss and sometimes even what card was coming up. Fortunately I could usually feel these hot streaks coming and play them for all they were worth when they did, otherwise the opposition would’ve had no respect for me at all.