There was a series of tables and desks, all of them covered in newspaper debris. There were several trash cans overflowing with refuse, a lot of it fast-food wrappers. Secret sauce on the wrappers had turned a little rank and the odor from it was muscling its way around in the air. There were printouts taped to file cabinets and pinned to boards. I leaned forward and looked at one. It was on some kind of weird cow mutilation in Kansas. I looked at the others. They all had to do with oddball events: strange murders, kidnappings, cats run up flagpoles. That last had taken place right here in Camp Rapture.
I looked up and saw a man coming around the file cabinets toward me. We introduced ourselves. His name was Jack Mercury. No joke.
Mercury was maybe thirty-five or thirty-eight, healthy-appearing, looked as if he might be able to bend a fireplace poker over his knee and on a good day bite the end off of it, but he wasn’t big on sunlight. He had blond hair and sharp blue eyes that seemed even bluer in his pale face. His clothes were rumpled, looked like he might have gone three rounds with a bear while wearing them.
He said, “Welcome to hell. I’m transferring all our old information from the files, from the microfiche, et cetera, to the computer and disc. It’s tedious, therefore, it’s hellish. As for you, well, you’re just visiting hell. It’s not a bad place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to work here.”
“Can I buy a souvenir?”
“Sorry. No concessions stand in hell. But you can take back our worst wishes. This place gets to some people. The tightness. Cut a fart, and you start a paper blizzard. Turn too quick, the edge of a table will castrate you.”
“All these things taped to the cabinets…This your personal interest?” I asked.
“Everyone thinks I’m nuts. Conspiracy nut they call me, paranoid. That’s why I’m down here by myself. I see connections where others don’t. All you got to do is pause and look and consider.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
“Ah, you’re humoring me. I do so hate that. What is it you want, fellow scribe?”
“I’m doing some research, and I was told you were the man to see…Mercury. That’s an unusual name.”
“I think it used to be something different, but my dad changed his last name, officially, to Mercury. Old hippie guy. I think he liked the band Queen. The lead singer was named Freddie Mercury. Now I’m a Mercury. Even though I’m not related to Freddie.”
“Just a wild guess, but I bet Freddie’s last name wasn’t Mercury either. Least not at birth.”
“Probably a good guess. What can I do for you? It’s Cason, isn’t it?”
I nodded, said, “Caroline Allison.”
His eyes narrowed. “Ah, yes.” But then he paused. “You’re originally from Camp Rapture, aren’t you?”
“Interesting everyone knows who I am.”
“That Pulitzer nod. Hometown boy. Everyone knows about that. You ran some football, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“Never cared for football myself. What’s the point?”
“To get the ball to the other end of the field,” I said.
“Again, what’s the point?”
“I’m afraid that’s it. If you played well, you might get in a cheerleader’s pants later in the evening.”
“Now I’m starting to understand football,” Mercury said. “Come into my lair.”
He led me through a maze of file cabinets and tables adorned with newspapers, books and folders. We came to a table that held only a computer, a pen and a pad. The computer screen gave off more light than the overhead bulbs. There were two chairs. He took one, I took the other.
“So what’s up with you and the Allison case?” he asked.
“Francine was planning an article on it, and I came across her notes.”
“Francine, writing about murder? That would have been a departure. She once did a series on common insects in the garden. An article a week in the Sunday paper, for, let me see, about twenty years is how it felt.”
“So the insect world was not that mysterious to you?”
“Not the way Francine wrote about it,” he said. “Under her firm and generic hand…well, trust me, a bug a week wasn’t that interesting. And, of course, there was her famous article on cat hair and why it keeps cats warm. I couldn’t wait to get up on Sunday morning and unfurl the paper to get to that one.”
“About Caroline,” I said. “No one knows for sure what happened, do they? There was never any body.”
“True, but hell, what do you think?” Mercury said.
“That she’s dead and her body has been lying rotting in some ditch somewhere collecting ants and worms, and the simple thing is no one has come across it, and someone she knew did it.”
“When you put it that way, it isn’t a lot more mysterious than the bugs or the cat fur.”
“You believe so much in mystery and adventure, what are you doing down here?” I asked.
He looked a little wounded by that. “Again, I’m down here because I don’t play well with others and am considered a loon. I believe in flying saucers, lake monsters and the rare twenty-year-old virgin. I believe our government has listening devices everywhere, and in some cases buried under our skin.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I went right to business. “Francine left quite a bit of stuff on Caroline in her files, but I was wondering if there was more. Wondering if there had been a follow-up to the case. If there were any suspects, that sort of thing.”
“There’s always more to everything, but we don’t always know what the more is. That’s how it is with Allison. She went to a fast-food place and didn’t come back. They found her car on the other side of town, near the railroad tracks, by the old train station. Police searched all over. Bulletins were put up. Dogs were used. People from out of town came to help search. It was all the news for weeks.”
“Nothing else?” I asked.
“To do with Caroline?”
“That’s what I’m asking about.”
“I thought you might be interested in some other stuff for columns. Might as well get them lined up. This town, you wouldn’t believe it, but there’s all manner of things that goes on.”
“My dad said as much.”
“He’s right. Cat’s body run up the flagpole.”
“I saw that taped to one of your file cabinets.”
“And there’s more. Someone put a bomb under the ass of the Virgin Mary statue in the Catholic church and blew the holy cunt right out from under her. There’s all this garbage going on with the blacks and the whites over a school some folks want to build.”
“I heard about that too,” I said.
“It’s all come down in the last six months,” Mercury said.
“It couldn’t just be coincidence?”
“Of course it could,” Mercury said. “You see cop shows all the time where someone says they don’t believe in coincidence, and let me tell you, those people are idiots. Coincidence is rife all over, my friend. But even though I believe in coincidence, I also believe in patterns and design. You have to pay attention and see the simple pattern under the chaos, beneath and between the coincidence.”
I stood silent for a moment, trying to sort out what Mercury had just said.
Mercury grinned at me. “Profound, don’t you think?”
“It’s something,” I said. “I don’t know I’m trying to link anything. I thought maybe with Caroline being gone so long, and no closure, that an article on her would be appropriate. To show she’s not forgotten. The other stuff, maybe I could get a grab-bag column out of it, mention in the last six months there’s been all of this weirdness in town. Like a bad moon is rising over Camp Rapture kind of thing.”
“To be frank,” Mercury said, “and possibly to get punched in the nose, I don’t think you are all that interested in remembering Caroline. I think you smell a good news story. Something you think the hicks in town have not followed up on. Am I right? And that you will be able to
nose it out because you used to be a real reporter. No emphasis, mind you, on the used to be.”
“Guilty,” I said.
“Of course you are,” he said.
Mercury turned to his computer, tapped the keyboard, brought up some information about Caroline Allison. There was a lot of it. It was much more than I had. I said, “Can you print this out for me?”
“Sure.”
He scanned through some of it, came to her photograph. A head shot. Her hair was as yellow as sunlight, her eyes so blue they broke your heart, her skin looked soft and warm as a spring day. And her mouth. Men would have ideas about that mouth, and so would a lot of women.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Looks like a movie star or a model, doesn’t she?”
“She is stunning.”
“Can you believe she was a history major?”
“Saw that in Francine’s note,” I said.
“Girl like that doesn’t strike me as someone that would spend her time in the library behind the stacks. A face like that, there had to be some party girl inside. There’s some devil in those eyes, don’t you think?”
“I suppose.”
Of course, from the moment I realized she was a history major, I had thought of my brother, Jimmy. She had been in his department, and most likely he had taught her, or knew her. And, of course, he would have known about her coming up missing, about her never being found. It was another lead-in, another angle. I filed that in the back of my mind.
Mercury reached in his shirt pocket, pulled out some greasy glasses, put them on, tapped at the keyboard some more, scanned through more files.
“Girl like that, in high school, you’d think she’d be more popular than a free back rub, but guess what, there’s hardly anything about her in her high school annual.”
“You have it?”
“I have it scanned in. I’ve looked through it. I think she was a member of the history club, and that’s it. No Most Beautiful. No Most Likely to Succeed. No Most Popular. And except for the history club, where there’s just the one picture of her and some other students, there’s little to nothing. She wasn’t too popular. Way she looked, that’s peculiar.”
“Peculiar, but not incredible,” I said. “Sometimes people are afraid to approach the good-looking girls, maybe even give them the ass end of things because they’re jealous. Print it out for me, if you don’t mind. All of it.”
“I’ll have it by the end of the day.”
“Perfect,” I said.
“You need any more information, drop in anytime. I’m here late at night, sometimes midnight, two in the morning. I don’t sleep that good, so I work.”
That afternoon, the file Mercury had made me was on the corner of my desk. I picked it up and went through it.
Good. He hadn’t added information about flying saucers and lake monsters. It was just the straight goods on Caroline.
Sweet.
8
I took off at four-forty-five. From Gabby’s ads in the Yellow Pages, I knew she was open until five. I drove by there and saw that hers was the only car parked out front.
I parked, took a deep breath and went inside.
When I came in I could smell some kind of strong disinfectant and the pungent smell of wet dog coming from somewhere, and then she came walking through a door that led to the back, rolling her sleeves up, ready to go home. She was whip-lean and her hair was still long and dark brown and time had done nothing to her, except make her look better. I felt a little nauseous and my throat grew tight. I stood by the door and didn’t move, and soon as she saw me her body twitched, then deflated a little.
“Cason, you shouldn’t be here.”
“I just wanted to say hi.”
She shook her head, looked at the floor. Somewhere from the back of the place a dog began to bark. Gabby finally lifted her head, looked right at me. Her eyes narrowed, like a sniper about to sight down a rifle.
“How clear can I make it?”
Several dogs started barking. Maybe they knew it was closing time. Perhaps they got treats before she locked up. Somehow, I was messing up their schedule.
“Cason, I don’t know how to tell you this any better. I wrote you the letter. When you got back, I talked to you on the phone. I read all the notes you sent me. They don’t change a thing. I tossed them. It’s not about finding someone else. It’s not about any of those things. It’s about the fact I don’t love you. Maybe I never did.”
“Don’t say that.”
“There’s an old saying: When the dog is down and dying, you shoot it in the head. Sometimes, love is down and dying.”
“Is that a folksy veterinarian saying?” I said, and stepped forward.
“Stay where you are,” Gabby said, and she held out one hand like a traffic cop.
“For Christ sakes, you don’t think I’d hurt you, do you?”
“I don’t know what I think, the notes, the calls…But it’s done, Cason.”
I shook my head.
“You were over there alone, scared, I’m sure. I was your anchor. It was a way for you to hang on to something. I represented home. Escape from fear, and you blew it all up in your mind, how we felt about one another. It was never that big a deal.”
“That’s not what you said, not how you talked when we were together. You telling me you were lying to me all along?”
I hadn’t meant for it to happen, but my words came out a little loud.
“I’m telling you, Cason, I was caught up in the moment. I was in love with the idea of being in love, not with you. I didn’t know it until you were gone…Cason, I didn’t miss you. I felt sorry for you, and was worried about you, like I would be for any soldier over there in harm’s way.”
“Any soldier?”
I was starting to feel as if I needed to sit down. The dogs were really barking now.
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” she said.
I stood there for a moment. No words would come. I took my hands out of my pockets and put them back.
“I really need you to go, Cason. I see you again, I’m going to get a restraining order. I want you to stay away from me. No more notes. No phone calls. And if you have to drive by my office, drive by, don’t coast by, rubbernecking. Six months from now, we pass on the street, I see you, we can wave, say hi, like old acquaintances, and that’s it. Please go. While I at least don’t hate you.”
I went outside and got in my car and drove away, not even considering which direction I was driving.
9
There were all those months in Iraq, the earth the color of a dried-up tortilla, the sky a bright blaze of hot blue forever, and always the sounds of explosions and the smells of death, and me counting down the moments, knowing to the hour, almost to the minute, when my time was supposed to be up, expecting to have my stay extended, certain of it, feeling as if it would all never end. It was as if I had been dropped down onto another planet where the people and the world bore no relation to me.
There was the loss of my buddies and seeing innocent Iraqi people, as well as those who were not so innocent, lying dead and bloated and full of the stink of the bloody departed.
All those months, those days, those hours, those minutes, riding around in half-assed vehicles with hillbilly armor, stuff we made for ourselves out of whatever we could find and tack on to our rides. So there we were, cruising, expecting a blast to blow right through it all, knock shrapnel up our asses, then, to top it off, came Gabby’s letter and nothing much mattered anymore, except maybe dying, and then there was the big fight in the Baghdad street, and I caught some business, and some buddies of mine caught it too, killing two of them. I was injured, but saved.
Booger, he just got blown skyward, like some kind of goddamn circus act, and he did a few rolls and came up wearing smoking clothes, still had his piece in his hand, and baby, he let it rock. Rocked and rolled all over that street. I don’t know if he shot anyone, had anything to do with anything, but he rocked it and
bopped it and bullets tore this way and that, and when it was over there was meat all over the place, pieces of cloth, disconnected Iraqi souls colliding together into a rising smudge of thick, dark smoke.
I was saved. Booger did it. And saved for what, if not to go home to Gabby, to make a life with her? I could imagine her with her long brown hair brushed until it was so lustrous it glowed like wet chocolate, and I could see her in one of the outfits she wore, a blue suit jacket with wide lapels and white pinstripes, and a skirt to match, and I could remember the way her high heels made her legs look, long and muscular in dark stockings, the way her eyes flashed and the way she smiled, her teeth perfect. And in my imaginings we would come together and kiss. I would be the conquering hero. We would go to her place, and I would slowly take her out of that suit and pull her boots off and gently guide her stockings off her legs, and we would make love, slowly and happily, like we had always done, but this time, it would be even more wonderful, because it would be a new beginning, and soon we would marry, and the sunlight would always be warm and the moonlight would always be romantic, and our days would be full of fine moments and even the rain would be gentle and sweet to the nose and rhythmic to the ears as it splashed to the ground.
Such are dreams.
It was a hard pill to swallow, even now, and to make it go down good, I drove out to a little bar that didn’t belong to my boss’s husband. When I got inside it was cool and dark as if it were hours later. The place had that peculiar smell bars have that is a mixture of spilt liquor and cigarette smoke, sweat and shit-filled dreams.
There was a pretty good-looking woman on one of the bar stools wearing a dark blouse and a short blue jean skirt and some oversized white shoes. I could tell from the way she sat there, smoking her cigarette, her legs crossed, one foot bobbing a shoe, the near empty glass on the counter in front of her, that she was as regular here as the rising and the setting of the sun.
I sat on the stool next to her and looked at her and showed her the smile my mother always said was electric. I said, “Can I buy you a drink?”
“Actually,” she said, “I’d rather just have the money.”
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