by Melanie Finn
Rosie thought of Billy. Should she go and summon her? Billy would stride in with her gun and banish Wheezie. But, no, Wheezie was a small, fast, sly creature, he was hard and bionic.
“Come on, we’re friends.” Bennett’s smile was beautiful, sincere and for a moment Rosie’s heart pitched. “Buddies.”
Wheezie sniffed, “Hours of listening to your bullshit stories. Vietnam? Viet-nam. That is what did it for me. I might’ve let you slide. But to lie about that.” He made a motion to spit. “I was there, man, I lost buddies there, man.”
Bennett seemed to be trying to say something about Vietnam “— Alpha Company, Kai Lam —”
“You read it in a book, that’s all.”
Rosie suddenly felt braver than a gun. “You want to fuck me?” She was matter of fact: “You can fuck me.”
Now Wheezie pivoted his focus to her. “That’s sweet of you, Rosie, dear. But no one fetches that kind of moolah up here. Not even the cherries.”
“The cherries?” Rosie was tilting toward him, a kind of attraction or fascination.
“The farmers bring their daughters. They’ve got meth debts you would not believe. Those guys are getting up at 3:30 a.m. and going to bed at midnight. The only way they can keep doing that is to pipe in the speed. And believe me, they are all mortgaged to the hilt. The dairy industry is in the shitter. All the big ag outfits in the Midwest get the government aid, and these local guys get totally shafted. It makes my heart bleed for them. You have to get their daughters young, though, before the uncles and the cousins have a go. In some cases the dads themselves. You’re bugging hard enough, any port in a storm, right? So I must get them very young, ripe, very very —”
Young, Rosie heard. Five or six. Four is even better.
“What,” she said.
Little cherries.
Wheezie did not have a face, it was a black sucking hole and it led down his throat and into the indifferent universe. Around the hole were small white teeth, like Tic Tacs. The teeth were opening and closing in a rhythmic way. There were sounds from the universe, howling space sounds, galactic winds that shattered the human body, and the teeth were somehow modulating the sounds. “Miranda” was echoing from therein.
Bennett was stuttering, “Is a toddler.”
“Just photographs,” Wheezie was saying.
Rosie leaned over and grabbed his ears and bit his nose and did not let go until she felt her teeth meet.
Bennett held them as they lay on the bed, Miranda asleep on one shoulder, Rosie awake on the other, the taste of blood still on her tongue. She wondered if Wheezie had gone to the hospital and if so would the police be summoned, he was so obviously the victim of an attack. If he didn’t go, his nose might become infected. He might die under a bridge, like a wounded dog. Or he might be fine, wounded but absolutely fine.
She turned her face into Bennett’s chest. He smelled of dry cleaning and cigarette smoke. The hot, still afternoon seemed to stick at three o’clock. Three o’clock would linger forever, the world would stop just this once. Darkness would not pad down from the mountain on its silent paws and cross the overgrown lawn and lean its hungry jaw on the window sill. Bennett kissed her head and his confession came at last: he’d stolen from Hobie and Mitzi — the dining silver, jewelry, and these he’d sold over the winter months. He stole from his rich friends, a kind of compulsion, a bit of a lark because they never suspected him, always the staff, the tradesmen. It wasn’t a business plan but a way to make money and keep moving. He couldn’t bear to be still. And then he met Wheezie and the coke, some freebase, a bit of meth, the odd smoke. He’d been so unhappy, the winter cold, God, how he hated Vermont, and he just hadn’t realized Wheezie wasn’t sharing out of generosity. “I needed someone to talk to,” he said: “I thought we understood each other.”
She rolled onto her back. “You never told me you were in Vietnam.”
“Oh, Rosie. A soldier doesn’t speak of such things.”
She heard the shrill ttzzzeeeeoop of a red-winged blackbird. They often perched on the fence posts where the field was marshiest. Miranda sighed in her sleep. A car was coming up the valley and Rosie thought she should be afraid. But she wasn’t. Not of a car. Because when Wheezie came back he’d be silent. She said: “We should go, we should leave now.”
“How? We have no money.”
“But you used to. You used to have a Picasso hanging in the dining room.”
In one motion, he stood, braced himself against the window, framed by the soft round copper of late evening.
“It was all lost.”
The car droned down Wilder Hill, carried on. The night was warm, so she opened the window and saw there were fireflies.
He flung his arm out. “Fabulous riches. All lost.”
The apartment in New York, the house in Kennebunkport, the boat, the tailor, the concierge, the tea at Claridges in London, the estates, the compounds, oh, the invisible pathways the wealthy travel, never by bus or subway, instinctively turning left when boarding an airplane. Unless by private jet. Economy refers only to finance. The particular Venn diagram of first names shared by WASPs, drug dealers, and dwarves: Babbity, Babs, Wheezie, Sneezie. The last names carved on libraries, museums, cancer wings of hospitals. Tiffany gift boxes in pale blue with ribbons. All lost.
“My father. Dear, old Pap-pah. You’d think it was impossible for one man to make so many bad decisions — all the money, the incredible all of it — but he did. A sort of mad hubris took over him after my mother died, he believed he was a genius investor. Friends tried to tell him, ‘We hire other people to touch the money.’ And even when he started losing — crazy investments, scams, a tunnel between Ireland and England — he thought he was visionary, and he just kept going. He didn’t understand what broke was until he couldn’t pay for lunch at the Algonquin and Bunty Speer had to pick up his tab. Aunt Bee had married a minor Mellon, and they tried to help him, they’d staple on a tie and brush away the dandruff and put him about as a consultant. But losing is catching. And it smells. He drank and lived in their pool house and died of a heart attack.”
Blink blink blink went the fireflies.
“And Vietnam?
Bennett sighed with loss, with the pain of remembering. “I wanted to be brave. A young man. It was all happening. Woodstock. Kent State. I used words like honor and duty as if they meant something. Oh, they were shiny like King Arthur’s sword. And I believed nothing would happen to me, I was special, I was protected. Money protects you.”
The bulky muscles of his shoulders flexed when he shifted, and the light showed all the lines in his face, especially the finer ones she’d never seen or noticed that pulled at his mouth, that frayed downward from the corner of his eyes.
“Shards of teeth,” he said. “You have to watch out when a body hits a Claymore mine. Charlie Duck was blinded when a piece of Pete O’Brien’s molar lodged in his right eye.”
He lit a cigarette, and she thought the pause effective, he didn’t let it go on too long. “Sometimes I get scared. The glitches in my soul, Rosie, the glitches in my soul,” he clicked his fingers. “The glitches, glitches, you know, like fuses blowing.”
Or fireflies glowing.
Rosie stood, she went and made supper, a can of tomatoes, a box of spaghetti. She chopped the garlic. Pete O’Brien, she was thinking, and the book she’d seen in his car by Tim O’Brien. Going After Cacciato.
In the end, there was no shroud of mist, no horror-film theatrics — the single knife missing from the knife block, the cellar light that doesn’t work. Instead: a knock on the front door and she opened it, for it must be Billy with a luna moth for Miranda or directions to a patch of chanterelles. Instead: the smell, beneath the old apple of Miranda’s that must have rolled under a chair, beneath the tang of his aftershave and the brine of cigarette smoke: the loamy stink of wet sawdust.
In a movie, she would have slammed the door and leaned her back against it, wide-eyed, panting, searching the room for a
weapon to wield in self-defense. But in real life, this actual place from which she could not escape and from which she would not be saved, she stood and regarded him. Her guts roiled. A scream began in her throat, a mechanism to carry the fear from the cavern of her stomach to the surface, yet when she opened her mouth, the horror shapeshifted into reasoned words: “Come in, Wheezie.”
Because he would come in, one way or another, he had been waiting to come in for weeks, she was certain now, not sneaking, not breaking and entering or leaping from a dark corner, but invited. He took a seat at the kitchen table, leaned back in the chair and removed his Wayfarers. The scar was impressive, a raw arc across his nose. He smiled. A mere movement of the lips.
“I’m not sorry,” she said. “I wish I had bitten your nose off and spat it back in your face.”
“Understandable. My mother tried to castrate me when she found me with my sister.”
“This is all about your unhappy childhood?”
He tilted his head, “Au contraire. I’m grateful. It has given me an unsentimental perspective.”
“It’s made you a drug dealer pedophile.”
“Made me? Or did I choose?” Seeing something in her face, he made an odd expression, a downturn of the lips that was either mocking or sincere, she could not tell. “Ah,” he continued. “It happened to you.”
“What did?”
“Who was he? Helpful neighbor? Kindly uncle?”
“How could you possibly know?”
“Oh, goodness look at you, tying yourself to a dope like Bennett. Don’t try to tell me you love him. The damaged don’t love.”
“That’s not true. I love my child.”
“You should note that you only contradict the love part of that equation. Not the damaged.”
“I hope you die a slow, painful death.”
“You were a vulnerable child, lonely and unprotected by adults who were otherwise pre-occupied. It’s always the same.”
Rosie flushed, hot blood through her cheeks to her ears. She turned away.
“I wanted to be an architect,” Wheezie went on, casually. “A large office with a corner view, worthy projects, designing houses for the poor. I’d wear nice suits, Italian shoes. But it didn’t work out that way.”
Damaged, she thought. But not ruined. Not yet.
“How did you know Bennett wasn’t in Vietnam?”
“Only the poor go to war.” Wheezie was looking at her, and she saw, for a moment, another version of him, and he was tired and sad and pathetic.
If things were different — looking-glass different — Rosie considered that she might value what he knew. Wisdom doesn’t only come from the good. But he was a wicked elf, he moved within people’s very worse intentions. He was a pedophile.
He said: “You don’t have a phone. So I came to tell you. Out of the kindness of my heart. Bennett has been arrested. Up on Derby Line. The CBP busted him bringing in a car-load of cheap prescription drugs from Montreal. It’s an open-and-shut case, five-to-seven, three hots and a cot.”
The cracked linoleum: Rosie studied the spidery fractures, one led to another. “You’re here for something, aren’t you? Not just to tell me about Bennett’s arrest.”
Sucking briefly on one arm of his Wayfarers, almost insouciant: “There is still the matter of his debt.”
“It’s not my debt.”
And right then Miranda toddled in from her nap. She glanced shyly at Wheezie, then buried her sleepy face in Rosie’s skirt.
He put his Wayfarers back on. “You have a self-sufficiency I admire, Rosie. You’re like a wild animal. It’s quite beautiful.”
The car was a sun-faded silver Subaru Forester registered to Samuel J. Dinkins of Sheffield. It was exactly the kind of car Rosie saw other mothers driving around. In the back was even a high-quality car seat. The gas tank was full. By 9 a.m., she was on the road. Miranda chatted contentedly to herself. The radio, playing soft rock, began to crackle near Barton and snatches of quacky French broke through. For a moment, she forgot what she was doing, and imagined herself merely a tourist, in fact, traveling to Montreal for a day of shopping.
At the border, entering Canada, she showed the driver’s license Wheezie had demanded she get and Miranda’s birth certificate. The border agent looked French, dark-eyed, olive-skinned, and he spoke with a heavy accent. “What is your purpose in Canada?”
“Shopping.”
“You have no shops in Vermont?”
“A friend recommended a children’s boutique near Montreal. There’s nothing near where I live, I’d have to drive all the way to Boston.”
“How many days will you be in Canada?”
“Just today, up and back.”
“You have the baby’s father’s permission to leave the United States?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
He looked sternly at Miranda, now fast asleep in the back seat. Rosie hoped this relaxed state would indicate all was well. For long minutes, the officer disappeared. She frowned and began looking impatient, as she supposed an innocent person might.
At last he returned. “We have to be careful. There are many kidnappings across the border.”
“Really?”
“Custody cases.” He handed her back the license. “Bon voyage.”
Wheezie’s directions were exact, and by noon she was entering a lowland of shopping malls, by-passes, and housing estates — the specific, soul-less way humanity flattened the life out of the land. Humans simply sat the earth with a giant cement bottom and this was the imprint. Beyond, she could just see the steel balustrade of Le Pont du Champlain and the spires of Montreal. Spires, like New York. She could not even imagine the young girl who had once lived there.
At hand was The German Sausage, exactly as Wheezie had described. With some effort, the square cement building had transformed into a Bavarian mountain chalet — dark beams, white paint, geraniums hanging in baskets, a looming wooden door with huge metal studs. She carried Miranda inside, encountering a strange Heidi-land of wooden chairs, checked tablecloths and photographs of snowy mountains. She was the only customer and the waitress — buxom, of course, in an embroidered dirndl — showed her to a wooden Heidi seat. The meal was pleasant, other customers filtered in, and by the time Rosie had finished an hour later, the lunch rush had started in earnest.
The car felt no different, parked in the exact same spot. Had it even moved? Were there even drugs in it? Or was this a fool’s errand — Wheezie’s idea of a joke? She buckled Miranda into her seat and spotted the shopping bag in the footwell of the front passenger seat. Peeling back the layers of pink tissue, Rosie lifted out a dark-blue velvet party dress with a sequined collar. It was beautiful, Miranda’s size and color. A filthy image flashed through her mind of Miranda in the dress, Wheezie pulling up the hem to tickle her, and she stuffed it roughly back into the bag.
Heading east, only several miles since she’d returned to the highway, she saw an exit for I-89/Vermont — the other entrance to the US. To return via Derby Line, she’d need to simply continue straight. At the very last minute, she swerved south. Perhaps this would make no difference — if the border was alerted to her vehicle, they’d surely be alerted at every port of entry. Perhaps she was even making it worse, for Wheezie had a contact on the inside at Derby Line who’d make sure she passed through without trouble.
Yet, she crossed the border without incident. The US Customs Officer merely glanced at the receipt and at her passport. She drove south, through Burlington, then onto Route 2 at Montpelier, east for another hour and a half until Kirby Mountain enfolded her. With relief, she unlocked her door, entered the cool, quiet kitchen. Miranda had been brilliant all day, the perfect accomplice. Rosie lifted her child into her arms and murmured into her soft hair, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” The warm smell of her child triggered in her a great wash of relief and her eyes began to tear up: she’d done it, she’d done it, safe and sound!
From the living room, a polite cough.
Wheezie was sitting in an armchair, drinking a cup of coffee. He gave her a round of applause. Blank-faced, she handed him the keys. “So,” he said. “Only three more runs.”
“No.”
“Wasn’t I clear? I’m giving you a good deal, Rosie. A special deal because I know your situation. Five hundred a run.”
“I can’t do that again. I will not.”
He put down the cup. “This coffee tastes like old shoes.” Then he sighed, immensely patient. In the drug business, he had to deal with recalcitrant and unreliable people; he should have stuck to architecture. “Did she like the dress, the little darling?”
This time he was ready for her. He caught her just as her hand grabbed the coffee cup and began its arc toward his face. He held her wrist, twisting it so she cried out and dropped the cup. “What is wrong with a few photos? Just pictures. No one will know it is her, she herself will never know.”
Rosie spat, but again he had experience, he ducked and the spittle hit the back of the chair.
“On your knees.”
She almost laughed as he torqued her arm up behind her back. Only this? She prepared herself to smell his musty crotch, she hoped his penis might at least be clean and small.
“Lick the floor.”
“What?”
“I don’t like old meat.”
Rosie got down on her knees, examined the floor. The feeling was familiar to her, as she had once raised her foot upon the first stair, and the second, the way up to The Giggle Man’s room, the heavy wet-dog dread, another step. “I’ll be back in a few hours,” Gran had said. She had called up from the hallway so those remaining in the house would know they were alone. With her handbag upon her arm, her shoes on her bunioned feet, she had walked out, shutting the door behind her.
Generously, Wheezie did not make her lick the entire floor, merely around his chair. When she was done, she sat upright on her knees. He patted her cheek like a dog.
Good girl, there’s a good girl.
“What was done by that man, it’s not you. Not you, Rosie. That’s what you need to understand. Me, on the other hand, I am defined by it. Don’t you see? Strangely, I’m the victim. Every day, every hour, like a wolf dying of hunger I obsess. I obsess.”