The Man Offside

by A. W. Gray

  The Radisson was now a hazy outline through the sheets of rain. I braked and eased the Taurus across the slick pavement into the right-hand lane behind a forty-foot National Van Lines tractor trailer. “Well, at least I had a fan,” I said.

  “Oh, more than that. You went off to Texas A&I the same year Elvis came out of the army. Oh, I had a poster of Elvis along with everybody else in the world, but I’ll bet I was the only teen queen in America who hung Elvis on the left, the Beatles on the right, and the Texas A&I Javelinas in the center. And when you made the Cowboys, wow. There wasn’t anybody at Ray High School that didn’t hear about it from me. Rick, I’ve got a confession to make.”

  “Sounds like you’ve already made one,” I said.

  She stroked my forearm with a perfectly formed hand. “Only a small one. This confession’s a lot bigger.”

  I steered the Taurus into the right turn lane. The rain let up abruptly, as though someone had turned down the faucet. “I’ll drop two counts and let you plead to one,” I said.

  “Let me ...?”

  “Let you plead to one count if you make a confession. It’s a plea bargain: the U.S. attorney lets you plead to one count if you won’t take him to trial.”

  “Silly,” she said.

  “That’s what I thought about the U.S. attorney,” I said. “What’s your confession?”

  “Well, you remember when I came to Dallas and took the job with Wilson Drilling? The one you lined up for me?”

  Sure, I remembered. So had the county prosecutor and the FBI. I said, “Yeah. Buddy called me and asked if I could find work for his little sister. Tom Wilson had hit quite a few wells in a row and was a football groupie, always hanging around. It wasn’t that big a deal. I just made one call.”

  “Maybe not to you, but it was a big deal to me,” she said. “See, I already had a job lined up in Houston, as a secretary with Exxon. Only I hadn’t told Mother and Dad about the Houston job, and when Buddy suggested that he might be able to get Rick Bannion to find me a job in Dallas, God, I like to have swooned. I was supposed to go to work in Houston on a Monday, but I called Exxon on Friday and told them I wasn’t coming. Just on the chance I might get to see you. What do you think about that, buster?” She reached over and tickled my ribs.

  If I could’ve rolled the clock back a dozen years I would have known how to answer, but now I wasn’t sure. We were making the turn into the Radisson parking lot, the awning over the lobby entry on my right. We rolled through puddles that sent out fine sprays on both sides of the Taurus. The rain had stopped completely, the storm ending as quickly as it had come, the cloud bank thinning and showing patches of brilliant blue. I nosed the Taurus into a parking space near the sidewalk leading to the side entrance to the hotel. The wipers were making rubbery squeaking noises. I turned them off. I cut the engine and the Taurus gave a final shudder and was still. The motor ticked and cooled.

  Donna sat up and put her hand on the door handle. “What now?”

  My problem came back to me in a flood: the indictments, the warrants, our pictures in the paper, Connie Swarm’s riddled body, all of these superimposed over a leering image of Bodie Breaux. I said, “I think we’d better start moving, babe. Get you out of this town and over to Tampa. I don’t think we should chance another night here.”

  “You mean right now?” She nervously licked her lips.

  “Now. Pronto. I’ll breathe easier with you somewhere you can’t be found, and the quicker we get this handled, the quicker I can go about trying to straighten this mess out.”

  She opened her door and put one foot on the ground. “Well, far be it from me to question you, sir. I’ll go upstairs and pack, and you can go settle our bill. I do have time to pack, don’t I?”

  I hunched over the steering wheel and peered toward the side entrance to the hotel. A frail elderly woman wearing a pink sun bonnet and carrying an umbrella came out, looked upward and found that the rain had gone, and went back inside. I said to Donna, “I wish I could joke about this, and maybe someday I can. But right now I can’t see anything funny about it. Bodie shouldn’t have any way of knowing what hotel we’re staying in, but I don’t feel safe in the same town where he’s looking for you. And call me paranoid or whatever, but I don’t like the idea of you going up in that room alone. So tell you what. You settle the bill, and I’ll go pack. I paid cash for the room, but there might be a service charge, phone calls—yeah, we made a couple.” I reached in my pocket and gave her a hundred-dollar bill. “You can join me after I check everything out. And Donna. When you get to the room, knock loud. If I don’t answer, you beat it out of there.”

  She took the money and watched me, and for just a second I thought she was going to cry. Then she snapped out of it, flashed me a pretty good imitation of a smile, and left in the direction of the lobby. She carefully avoided the puddles of standing water as she crossed the parking lot and disappeared around the corner of the building. I went in the side entrance and up to our room.

  There was a tightness in my chest as I turned the key, brandished the derringer, and went inside. Everything looked shipshape: the freshly made bed, the couch and TV, the bottle of scotch, now half full, on the small table where I’d left it. I gasped at my reflection in the mirror as I entered the bathroom. Nothing there, either. I carefully folded my new shirt along with the clothes I’d worn on the plane and dropped them in Donna’s suitcase, then got the Siebrig .38 from the dresser drawer, and packed it as well. Also in the dresser I found two summer dresses, a yellow bikini, three blouses with matching shorts, three bras, and three pairs of skimpy lace panties that I looked over carefully. Just as I was about to toss Donna’s things on top of my own in the suitcase, I paused. There was a little warning bell going off somewhere inside me. Where was Donna? She should have been here by now. I went downstairs, stood outside the exit, and scanned the parking lot.

  The cloud cover had completely dissipated, and it was steamy as a jungle. Flashes of sunlight reflected from the puddles on the asphalt and the roofs of the cars. I watched a small red pickup truck—a Nissan, probably, it was about the right size—mosey off the thoroughfare and cruise slowly into the parking lot. Deciding to go to the lobby and look for Donna, I took a step in that direction. As I did, she came into view around the building. Her hands were on her hips and she was shaking her head. A sigh of relief escaped me.

  She saw me, stopped, smiled and waved. Then she cupped her hands at her mouth and shouted, “Their computer’s got bats in its belfry, God, I thought they’d never get the balance right.” Then she carefully picked her way around the standing water as she came toward me.

  The little red pickup pulled alongside Donna and stopped. Its driver’s side window was down and a hand was sticking out the window. Held in the hand was a ... Jesus Christ, I thought, is that a potato? That’s what it was, all right, someone was waving a potato at Donna. Only they weren’t exactly waving it, they were pointing it, and burrowed into the heart of the potato was the barrel of a slim automatic pistol. A potato: the perfect, foolproof, untraceable silencer.

  I was able to yell, “Donna!”

  The potato exploded with a dull pop like the breaking of a balloon. Donna pitched sideways as though hit with a flying tackle, tried to right herself, then sprawled headlong into a big puddle of water. The water flew in droplets. Donna lay facedown and didn’t move.

  The pickup’s gears meshed. It lurched, picked up speed, and wheeled out of the parking lot.

  My feet were pounding on the sidewalk, my breath whistling between my teeth. The pickup bounced up and down as it careened onto the thoroughfare and straightened out; the outline of a bald, square, hatless head was visible through the rear window. It was Bodie, of course. But then, I’d already known that.

  I charged across the parking lot. With my second long stride my foot landed square in a puddle; a sheet of flying water soaked my pants and shoes. I’d forgotten about the truck now, forgotten all about Bodie, about the hotel, about
where I was. All I could see was lovely Donna, facedown in muddy water. I thought, God, Donna, don’t die. Anything, anything at all, just please . . . Jesus, please, babe, hang on.

  I knelt beside her, my knees inch deep in muddy water, grasped her shoulder, and rolled her over. Her arms were limp as towels, her soft lips parted. A bright red stain was spreading around a hole in her blouse, over her heart. Her eyes were open, vacant, and staring. One appeared blue, the other gray.

  I shielded my face with my arms and cried. My body heaved with sobs, sobs of frustration mixed with grief and hatred for myself. Loathing for myself. I’d failed. Failed Donna. Failed.

  A gravelly female voice behind me said, “Careful, he’s got a gun.”

  A man, also behind me, said, “Are you sure it’s him?”

  “Never surer, dearie,” the woman said. “It’s the same man, just like in the picture. I thought there was something funny about that guy.”

  The man raised his voice. He had an East Coast, northern accent and his speech was loud and piercing. “Get on the phone, Billy. Get on the phone and call the police.”

  I raised my head. Not fifteen feet away stood the same overweight woman I’d seen the night before in the coffee shop. She wore a strapless, backless tube dress that was too small. A man stood beside her, a beer-bellied, gray-haired man with fleshy white legs, wearing flowered Bermuda shorts and rubber shower shoes. The man had a Miami Herald spread open in front of him. He was alternating his gaze between me and my picture in the paper.

  The man said, “Jesus Christ, Anna, it could be him.”

  I scanned the parking lot and the entrance to the hotel. Quite a crowd was gathering, people standing in twos and threes, groups clustered by the building and in the lot.

  I stood numbly. I didn’t remember drawing the pistol, but there it was in my hand, the derringer. I let it fall limply to my side.

  The man backed away, slowly at first and then moved faster, finally turning and making a break for it. His fat tail waggled and his white legs churned. “Take cover. Take cover, everybody. Jesus Christ, he may start shooting any minute.”

  The woman let out a terrified yelp and thundered after him.

  “I called them, Granddaddy.” The peanut-whistle voice came from a kid of around twelve who had just run from the direction of the lobby. He was a towhead whose mother let him eat too much. Puffs of flab were visible around the armholes in his purple tank top. “They’re coming, they’re coming,” he said.

  From the side entrance, a man yelled, “Inside, sonny, Christ, get a move on.”

  Out on the thoroughfare, faintly at first and growing louder, a siren bellowed.

  The fog inside my head began to clear. The keys to the rented Taurus were in my pocket; I dug them out and took a couple of steps in the direction of the car, then halted, turned, and looked toward Donna. For an instant I imagined her waking up from her nap, standing, holding out her hand, smiling at me. But it was over for her, she’d never stand again. Never smile again. Never ... I thought, Can you ever forgive me if I leave you like this? I’m not going because I want to. Please, babe, please understand.

  The siren howled louder, now only blocks away.

  I forced myself to look away from her and ran to the Taurus, yanked open the door, climbed in, and turned the key. The motor chugged, almost flooded, and roared to life. I backed up, dropped the lever into forward gear, and wheeled out of the lot. I didn’t really want to, but as I wheeled onto the thoroughfare I glanced in the side-view mirror. Donna lay where she’d fallen, and the crowd was gathering around her still form.

  15

  The suntanned guy was built like Popeye, complete with big, muscular forearms and an anchor tattoo. He wore a billed captain’s hat and a red-and-white striped T-shirt, and he was seated two stools down from me. He said, “Idn it amazing?”

  I squinted to gaze past him down the length of the bar, past the old-timey, dusty-slatted Venetian blinds, out the streaked and grimy window. In the distance a seagull made wide circles in the air, and finally landed on a piece of driftwood bobbing among the waves. Onshore a toddler stood ankle deep in salt water, scooping sand with a toy shovel and loading it into a pail.

  The muscular seafaring type said, “Hey, pal. I said, ‘Idn it amazing?’”

  The wooden bar top was scarred with carved initials. My rum and Coke was nearly empty; and melting ice had diluted the drink to the color of weak tea. I thought about draining the glass, but wasn’t sure I could raise it all the way to my lips without dropping it. My tongue was thick as prime steak. Finally I said to the guy, “Beg pardon?”

  “Hey, you deaf?” he said. “It’s fuckin’ amazing, that’s what it is. You shave and take a bath, you look like this guy. But don’t do it. Rum-dum that you are, you ain’t as bad off as this fucking guy. They get him, they gonna fry his ass.”

  He was showing me my picture in the Tampa Gazette. I’d seen the photo before someplace, sometime. Oh, yeah. In a different paper just a couple of days—or was it weeks?—ago. I said, “What day is this?”

  “What day . . . ?” The seaman bent for a closer look at me. He had a square jaw and a big nose over a droopy Fu Manchu. “Hey, Charley, what kind of rummies you serving in here? This fucker don’t even know what day it is.”

  Charley, a wrinkled, jockey-sized little guy who held the butt of a cigar clenched between yellowed teeth—for some reason I’d been calling him Joe—approached us and leaned on his side of the counter. He unscrewed the lid from a gallon jar, dipped into the pepper juice with grimy fingers, and held up a pickled sausage. He grasped the link between a thumb and forefinger and shook the moisture back into the jar. He said, “Man pays his money, sits up at the bar, I fixes him a drink. Hell, H.E., man’s twenty-one I don’t know if he’s drunk or not. Sometimes you don’t walk too straight yourself.” Charley bit a chunk of sausage off and made a face.

  “Yeah, but goddamn, Charley. You smelled this guy? Jesus, he’ll run ya business off.” H.E. tilted back his hat and took a pull from his beer. “How ‘bout that, rummy? You ought to take some of your whiskey money and getcha a bar of soap, you know that?”

  I scratched my chin through a half-inch stubble. Hell, money wasn’t the problem. I had a roll in my pocket. The problem was . . . what the hell, I wasn’t sure. I tried to remember how long it had been since I’d left the rented Taurus at a parking meter in downtown Tampa, but that had been a lot of hours and a lot of bars ago. I pictured a cot with dirty sheets and a guy who farted and snored sleeping next to me. Was it one or two nights that I had spent at the Salvation Army? Didn’t matter, did it? I said again, “What day is this?” I pushed my glass in Charley’s direction.

  “And another, please,” I said. Maybe one more would erase the image of lovely Donna facedown in muddy water. The hundred or so drinks I’d had in the past—how long was it?—hadn’t wiped out her image, but maybe this one would do the trick.

  The only other customer was a woman seated a few stools down from H.E. She was more of a girl, really, in her late teens or early twenties, with a pretty, round face and coal black hair, and she weighed close to three hundred pounds. She was wearing a red tent dress, and her puffy rear stuck out over three sides of her barstool. She said, “Hey, Charley, I’ll take him home wi’ me. He’ll find out what day it is over there, all right. His lucky day’s what it’ll be.”

  Charley cackled like a henhouse fox, then broke into a coughing spasm without bothering to cover his mouth. Neither H.E. nor the woman seemed to notice Charley’s manners. Charley took another bite of sausage and washed it down with water. “Hey, now, that’s an idea,” Charley said. “Want to go home with Rosie, fella? Trouble is, Rosie likes to get on top. The last two fellas she suffocated.”

  H.E. really seemed to get a kick out of that one, howling gales of laughter and slapping his knee. Rosie pursed her lips and didn’t seem to think that Charley was very funny. For some reason, neither did I.

  Charley leaned over for a clos
e look at me. He had a long, bony, crooked nose and his breath smelled of sausage. He said, “It’s Thursday, pal. And H.E.’s right, I ain’t serving you no more. Doin’ you a favor though you don’t know it. You’ll wind up in a squad car takin’ a ride downtown if you ain’t careful. They don’t fuck around with public drunks in this town.”

  Squad car? I wasn’t sure exactly why, but for some reason I didn’t want to see any cops. I said, “Call me a cab?”

  Charley pointed at H.E. and said, “What you think he—”

  “No way,” H.E. said. “Not me, it’ll take a week to air out the hack. “Sides, what makes you think this here rummy can pay for a cab?”

  I dug in my pocket, floundering, feeling dizzy, thinking for a second that I was going to fall off the stool. I found a wadded fifty-dollar bill and dropped it on the bar. “I got money,” I said.

  H.E. picked up the bill, smoothed it out, looked it over, flipped it, examined the other side. “Hey, rummy,” he said. “You smelling better every minute, you know that?”

  The cab was an ancient Ford. There was cotton stuffing poking out through holes in the upholstery, and the Ford rattled like a buckboard. It pulled to the curb in a neighborhood of prewar, grayish wood houses with patches of scrubby grass in the yards. The streets had been mended so many times that there was more asphalt on the surface than concrete. A row of thick oak trees with long, gnarled branches overhung the sidewalks and curbs. The sun was setting and the trees cast big, dark shadows.

  H.E. draped a weightlifter’s arm over the seat back and turned around. “This here’s the address you gimme. It ain’t no castle, but a damn sight better than where I expected the likes of you to be livin’.” A short, uneven sidewalk led to a house with a porch swing and a black screen door.