Crime Plus Music

by Jim Fusilli

  “Yes,” I lie. “She looks beautiful.”

  It’s an open casket. Bret is lying on her back, arms crossed over her chest like Snow White in her glass coffin. She’s wearing an ivory dress with a high collar, under a hairstyle I’d be shocked if she had ever favored in life. People change, of course. I only knew Bret as a teen, a lifetime ago, and I understand this. But still there is something about the way her body looks, the enforced primness. The way it has been styled beyond her control, her hands arranged. . . .

  I remember her telling me how much her sister’s wake had scared her—how unfair it was that she’d been forced to look at something that was no longer Trina, just a stiff outer covering, painted to look human, posed like a doll. Trina’s shell, she had called the body. I remember this. I can hear her say it in my head and it makes my throat clench up. A tear slips down my cheek.

  “Did you know her well?” says the custard-streaked woman.

  “I haven’t seen her in a long time,” I say quietly. “Not since we were kids.”

  “Nice of you to come,” she says. “I know Bret from church. We ran the Christmas toy drive together. I had no idea she was so. . . . She always seemed quite happy, actually.” She gives me a probing look, introduces herself as Georgette.

  “I’m Lara.”

  “Her mother’s over there.” Georgette gestures at a delicate woman standing at the far end of Bret’s coffin, talking to a big bear of a man who keeps shaking his head. She peers up at him, says something. It looks like “thank you.” Though her hair is white and cropped close now, Mrs. Raines otherwise is much the same as I remember her. Very small, with sharp features, a tiny pointed nose that looks as though it was pinched from clay.

  She’s full of tension, always has been. Squinting eyes, pursed lips. Hands that keep clutching each other. I think about Bret’s father, how hard he’d try to smile. “Have fun, kids!” he’d said once after dropping us off at a movie, “Don’t get into trouble!” I used to wonder what they had been like before their older daughter had died, if they had ever been able to relax their faces or if they’d always been this tense, as though they were bracing for a fall. Mr. Raines was dead now too, according to Bret’s obituary.

  “Bret should have had children,” Georgette is saying. “Single women adopt all the time.”

  I turn to her. “Do you think children would have made her happy?”

  She shrugs “It would have been something.”

  I have no idea what that means.

  We weren’t Facebook friends, Bret and me. We have never sent each other Christmas cards. She wasn’t invited to my wedding, and I wasn’t invited to either of hers. I have two boys now, aged twelve and fifteen. I have no idea if she knew this about me; if she had ever seen the birth announcements I sent to our school’s alumni magazine.

  “Who is Bret Raines?” my husband said yesterday morning, when he saw me reading her obituary online.

  Married twenty years, he’s never once heard me say her name.

  “We used to be friends,” I said.

  BRET AND I HAD MET at the beginning of junior year. She’d come to my town from Beverly Hills, four years after her older sister’s suicide—a news event that had made the papers because of her family. Her dad was a producer who’d worked with some of the top names in Hollywood. And so, even though we high schoolers from Pasadena might not have remembered the story from when it happened, our parents had. By the time the school year started, we all knew about the tragic Raines family and how they were escaping to our quiet town to build a new life.

  Death is so attractive when you’re young, so romantic and rare. And Bret was beautiful—a golden California girl—which added to the allure. Senior boys stared after her, the popular girls in our class passed her notes, inviting her to parties. Everyone wanted to help her, to talk to her, to be her friend. But for some reason, she spoke only to me.

  Our last names were close—that was part of it. Hers was Raines, mine Ramsey, and so we sat next to each other in homeroom. But really it was more the way we looked at the world—both of us bored, bookish, not very happy. “Is this place as lame as it seems?” she had said to me on the first day of school.

  “Lamer,” I’d replied. And things had taken off from there.

  That first Friday after school, she had invited me to her house. I’d expected some kind of castle, celebrity that she was. But really, it was just a clean, two-story house a lot like mine. All over the living room, there were pictures of Bret—as a toddler in a ballet outfit, in a puffy white dress at a debutante party, in a Girl Scout sash dotted with merit badges, as Wonder Woman for Halloween. A couple of shots of Bret’s parents, too, but nothing of her dead sister. You’d think she was an only child.

  After dinner, she’d taken me up to her room and pulled a box out from under her bed. Inside were several pictures of a girl with huge brown eyes and silky, pale blond hair like Bret’s own. In one, the girl was about seven and held a toddler Bret in her arms. In another, she was in a formal dress, standing stiffly beside a dark-haired boy much shorter than herself. In one of the more recent ones, she’d shaved off part of her hair and wore a ripped T-shirt held together by safety pins and heavy, Cleopatra-like eyeliner. A punk-rocker.

  “My mom thinks she threw all of these pictures out, but I stole ’em out of the trash. They’re all I have left of her.”

  The night of the X concert, I was aware of that box under Bret’s bed as we put on the bad-girl clothes we’d bought at a thrift store the previous week. I kept wondering what Trina would think of us, sneaking around like this without her parents knowing, wearing fake leather skirts that we’d hidden in the back of Bret’s closet. I hoped she would approve. I didn’t have a sister of my own and so the closer Bret and I became, the more I began to think of Trina as my sister too—a guardian spirit watching over everything we did, approving and disapproving. Helping us. Trina’s favorite movie had been Somewhere in Time. Her favorite book, Forever. She had discovered punk rock when she was sixteen, like us. As with us, the music had saved her from the boredom of growing up. She loved the screaming, the swearing, the impatience of the sound. Her favorite bands had been the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and, most of all, X. I knew these things about Trina because Bret had told me, doling out each piece of information quietly, reverently, unwrapping them for me like gifts.

  Trina had taken all those pills because a boy had hurt her terribly. I didn’t know the details. But Bret wanted revenge. We both wanted revenge. It’s my whole life’s purpose, Bret would say. And you’re the only one who knows it.

  Once we were all dressed, I crouched down, looking for the box, thinking maybe I could get a clue as to how Trina would feel about what we were doing if I looked hard enough at the face in the Mohawk photo. Most punk rockers scowled in pictures, but in that shot—a shot taken by the hurtful boy—Trina had been smiling.

  “It’s gone,” Bret said.

  “Huh?”

  “The box,” she said. “It’s gone. My mom found it.”

  I pulled myself to my feet. “Oh no,” I said. “Oh Bret.”

  But she was busy gazing into her full-length mirror, examining herself from every angle. “You know what, Lara?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever had a better friend than you.”

  Beneath the caked-on makeup, my skin warmed. “Same here,” I said.

  Bret took another pull off the bottle of peach schnapps and handed it to me, her words slurring a little. “You ready for our adventure?” she said.

  I took a big swig. It tasted like furniture polish. “You bet your ass,” I said. We both started laughing.

  THE MEMORY GROWS STRONGER IN my mind as I kneel in front of Bret’s coffin—the heat of the alcohol in my throat, the feel of fishnet stockings and a too-tight skirt, the way everything blurred and my words slurred and I weaved on my feet. The dizziness of that night. The thrill.

  This song is about a drug that makes guys need t
o have sex every hour.

  I hear Bret’s voice in my head, that song playing on and on in the funeral home like it did on the tape deck of Trina’s Karmann Ghia as it sped along the Pasadena Freeway on its way to the X show back in 1984. I feel as though I’m trapped in time. I shut my eyes tight, wishing somebody would turn it off. “To shoot all Paulenes between the legs,” John Doe sings. I remember Bret saying, “He thinks all girls are named Paulene” and I can’t even think enough to pray.

  “Lara? Lara Ramsey?”

  I know Bret’s mother’s voice. It sounds the same. I’m surprised she recognizes me. I’m glad I’m here without my family because I don’t want them to see me like this, reacting this way. But it feels so strange, being here at all.

  I stand, move toward her. “Mrs. Raines I’m so sorry.” I say it too loudly, trying to drown out the song.

  “God, it’s been such a long time.” She hugs me. I feel her ribs through her black linen dress. “How did you find out?”

  “Facebook,” I say. “Our high school has a page and it posted her obituary.”

  “Technology.”

  “Yes.” There is an envelope in my purse, Bret’s name on the return address. It came in the mail after I saw the obituary and I haven’t been able to open it. I have no idea what it could be, but the possibility scares me. The timing. She had to have sent it right before taking the pills.

  I came here to the wake because I thought it might give me the strength to open the envelope. I thought it might give me some closure. But I can’t tell that to Mrs. Raines. I can’t tell her about the envelope and anyway I hate that word. Closure.

  “There’s something I need to ask you, Lara,” she says.

  I swallow hard, taste bile in my throat. I may as well be sixteen again. It may as well be the day after. “Yes?”

  “That sleepover you and Bret had. The summer between junior and senior year.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you two stop talking after that?”

  Funny. I must have imagined her asking me this question a hundred times when I was a kid. But in my mind back then, she’d always sounded so angry. Now, she sounds sad, defeated. Bret is gone. What’s the point in lying anymore? For several seconds, I teeter on the brink of telling her the truth.

  “Bret told me you fought over a boy that night.”

  My jaw tightens. “Right,” I say, giving in to the lie. “Now I remember.”

  She places a hand on mine. It’s cool and dry as a dead leaf. “You were a very good friend to her. I wish you two hadn’t fought. Sometimes I think her life would have been happier if you’d stayed close through the rest of high school.”

  I close my eyes for a few moments, listen to the song still playing, to John Doe singing about the last Paulene, the one who wouldn’t cooperate. When I open them again Mrs. Raines is looking up at me, thin lips trembling. I put my arms around her and hug her. I want to start sobbing, but instead, I tell her the only truth I can. “Mrs. Raines,” I say. “I wish that sleepover had never happened.”

  “YOU KNOW WHAT THIS SONG is about?” Bret said.

  I didn’t answer right away because my heart was in my throat. We were in the Karmann Ghia on the Pasadena Freeway, all treacherous bends and Bret behind the wheel, X’s Los Angeles pounding on the tape deck. She’d just dived head first into a sharp curve at full speed and I saw now for the first time how drunk she was to be driving. “Jesus, Bret,” I breathed. “Be careful.”

  “Don’t be such an old lady.” At least she slowed down a little.

  The music blasted. I tried listening to the song, but everything sounded like it was under water. It was hard to make out the words.

  “It’s called ‘Johnny Hit and Run Paulene,’” she said. “It’s about a drug that makes guys need to have sex every hour.”

  “Need?”

  “Uh huh, so the guy in the song takes it. He shoots it up with a needle and for twenty-four hours, he is like attacking every girl he can find. He’s pulling them off of busses. He’s not taking no for an answer. . . .”

  “Why would a guy take a drug like that?”

  Bret shrugged. “He calls all girls Paulene, too,” she said. “And he spells it weird. . . . Hey, there’s the off-ramp.” She cut across three lanes fast and swung onto the ramp that took us to the Hollywood Freeway.

  I gasped. “You’re going to get us arrested.”

  She ignored me, driving faster. She shifted into the fast lane, nearly cutting off a Porsche. Its horn blared.

  “Arrested or beat up or dead.”

  “I vote for dead,” she said. Trying to be punk rock.

  “Shut up, Bret. We’re from Pasadena. We wear uniforms to school.” I took another swig of the schnapps and closed my eyes. Best not to even look at the road, I thought. So I didn’t.

  “WE’RE HERE,” BRET SAID.

  I’d fallen asleep for a few minutes. I had to blink a bunch of times just to get my eyes focused. Bret was checking herself out in the rearview mirror, re-applying her dark lipstick. Out the window, I saw the Whisky, the legendary Whisky, X’s name on the white marquee, a long line in front. I wanted to squeal over it, but I was too drunk to get excited, too queasy. Bret handed me the lipstick and tilted the mirror my way. Again, I was startled at my own image and the schnapps buzz made it hard to put the lipstick on straight. “I can’t believe we’re in Hollywood,” I tried.

  “I need to tell you something,” Bret said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I need to tell you why Trina killed herself.”

  I turned to her. “Now?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because it happened here.”

  “What?”

  “At the Whisky. At an X show.”

  “She killed herself here?”

  “No,” she said. “No, listen. That boy I told you about. The boy who . . .”

  “Hurt her terribly.”

  “Look at me, Lara.”

  I had been watching the crowd out the driver’s side window. I shifted to Bret. Her face was perfectly still. She stared into my eyes with all her death makeup, and I felt as though I was dreaming and would never wake up. “He did it to her here,” she said. “Took her out to a show and did it to her in his van. In front of other guys. With other guys.”

  “What did he do?”

  She gave me flat eyes.

  “But . . . but he took that picture of her. She was smiling.”

  “So?”

  “So . . . I thought they were in love.” I cringed at the sound of my voice, the words I’d chosen, but still I couldn’t stop myself. “I thought he just broke up with her. I thought that’s what you meant by hurting her.”

  “He gave her a bunch of pills and then he wrecked her,” she said. “He shared her, Lara. She told me.” Bret stared out the window at the line outside the club. Her eyes burned through the glass. “It took hours.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh my God.”

  “She never told our parents. But she told me. Three days later, she locked herself in her room. Put Los Angeles on the tape deck. Took the pills. . . . That song, ‘Johnny Hit and Run Paulene.’ It was the last song she listened to.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She stopped it, right after the line about the Paulene who wouldn’t cooperate.” Bret leaned over me and snapped open the glove compartment. Her words weren’t slurring anymore, and I noticed how smooth and calm her movements were, the drunkenness gone, as though she’d pushed it off. “Lara,” she said. “He’s the bouncer at The Whisky. He does all the X shows. He’s there.” I turned. She was watching my face.

  “We can get revenge,” she said.

  I swallowed. Revenge. The word pulsed through me.

  Bret removed something from the glove compartment and placed it in my hand—a pocket knife. She held up another one of her own.

  Are you serious? I wanted to say. But I knew she was.

  “We can hurt him,�
�� she said. “We can scare him, at least.”

  I opened my mouth, closed it again. I wasn’t sure if it was all the schnapps or the story itself or that picture of Trina, the trust in her smile. But I liked the idea. I liked the feel of the knife in my hand, solid and real as a drumbeat. “We could get caught,” I said.

  “Are you kidding me? Look in the mirror, Lara. No one will recognize us.”

  I looked at her. “You planned this.”

  She put her hand on mine and smiled at me with blood-red lips. “I’ve been planning it for four years.”

  HE WORE A TIGHT BLACK T-shirt with The Whisky’s logo on the front and he leaned against the club’s door as though he owned it. I had the strangest feeling when Bret pointed him out—a mixture of anticipation and dread, as though he were a dangerous animal we were hunting. As we approached the door, Bret told me his name was Johnny. “For real,” she said. “Like the song.” Then she waved at him. Winked.

  “What have we here?” he said.

  Johnny was thicker than I’d imagined he’d be, with beady green eyes, dumb, pouty lips, and a fat head. I couldn’t imagine Trina wanting to be with someone like that, but Bret insisted it was him, so who was I to doubt her? I hung back while she sidled up to him, the crowd streaming past, jostling for a place inside. “Do you have black beauties?” she said in a shy voice. “I heard you did.”

  He grinned. “I can get some for you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They’re in my van.”

  My van. My heart pounded. I pressed my purse to my side and thought about the knife.

  “Can my friend come along?”

  He glanced at me. “Why not?” he said. I looked at the kids in line, laughing and shoving each other, shouting to be heard. Inside the club, I could hear an electric guitar being tuned, someone banging on a cymbal. For a few moments, I was filled with a longing I couldn’t quite name. . . . A longing to be a kid, I suppose, going to an all-ages X show. A longing to be thinking about nothing but the music like all those kids were, like I would have been if I hadn’t swallowed so much schnapps and if Bret hadn’t told me what had happened to Trina.