Lamentation

by Joe Clifford

  Ashton may not have been New York City, but the town was hardly a stranger to violence, especially at that truck stop. A couple summers back, a prostitute had been found badly beaten and left in a dumpster. But there’d never been a detective up from Concord to investigate before. This was bigger than some run-of-the-mill lowlife fished out of a river.

  I hadn’t mentioned the strange phone call to Turley. Charlie had obviously been listening. We’d talked about it and Chris’ visit on our way to the TC. Last night, I’d believed the computer story was another one of my brother’s myriad delusions—Chris suffered fits of paranoia like some people get heartburn after eating spicy food—but following that bizarre phone call and the discovery of Pete’s body, I knew his conspiracy theories weren’t going to be so easy to write off this time.

  If the cops were looking for Chris, that computer shop of his would be the first place they’d check out. But dope fiends and crack-heads aren’t going to be as forthright with the police as they might be with someone else. I offered to drop Charlie home first. He insisted on coming along. Fine by me. I didn’t want to deal with this freak show all on my own.

  Turley was right, I knew the spot. Taking the old Pearl Street exit off the Desmond Turnpike, we dipped into a heavily forested gully, and the surrounding scenery began to take on a vaguely familiar appearance, like the edges of a repressed, unpleasant dream. When a dilapidated red shack came into view, I clearly recalled driving by the place on the way to Coal Creek. Never ate the food, though. Even back then, you’d have to have had a death wish to go in there.

  It always had been an odd location for a restaurant, since there were few other stores in the vicinity, and you’d have to be literally wandering, starving in the woods to stumble upon it. You could barely see it from the road with all the overgrowth around it.

  As we pulled in the small parking lot, a big man with a shaved head, slathered with tattoos and dressed in only a tank top, flicked his cigarette butt in the snow and ducked inside. As the door closed he caught it with his hand and eyed my truck, before gently easing it shut.

  The shack projected that creepy-crawly, frenetic energy of amphetamine abuse and long nights spent picking at invisible bugs. Grinding, industrial music droned inside. I could see single tire tracks, like the kind a motorcycle leaves, etched through high snow, curling around back. Long slivers of faded red wood curled from the exterior like whittled plastic.

  In a particularly depressing touch, someone had actually taken the time to set out a sandwich board, using portable letters to spell “Computer Solutions,” and, below that, “Electronic Recycling.” Only, instead of the letter t, they had substituted the number 7, and the word “Recycling” was missing the y.

  The entire setup played like a rabid, ugly porcupine, whose quills and foaming mouth said, in no uncertain terms, stay away.

  Charlie and I sat in the parking lot. I didn’t know what I had been expecting. Certainly not this.

  “What the fuck is your brother into?”

  I knew a little about the local drug scene, only because I had to, but I didn’t know what these people did behind closed doors, and I wasn’t itching to find out.

  Chris would inject, inhale, or imbibe anything you put on the table, although he seemed to have a special affinity for uppers, primarily speed, one of the many sordid particulars I had gathered from all the times I’d brought him into rehab, stuck as I was playing the parental role. Talking to doctors and psychotherapists about my brother’s various treatment options, I learned that methamphetamine wasn’t mass-produced up here or controlled by organized crime like it was out West or in the South. Meth up here consisted mostly of the bathtub variety. Small, independent pockets of ambitious individuals who cooked batches in toolsheds or suburban basements, crushing antihistamines to strip pseudoephedrine from over-the-counter cold medicines, before cleaning it with acetone and plopping copper pennies into stainless steel bowls to reverse polarity, in order to bond the right ionic charge. Like a science project for sleep-deprived zombies. Gun bluing and industrial-strength ammonia, miner’s coal and jet fuel, corrosive chemicals you find under a sink. Basically, the very last kind of ingredients you want to put in your body, and this had been my brother’s primary diet for years. No wonder his brain was oozing out his ears. In a few years, he’d be draped in garbage bags and talking to beer cans at the bus station.

  I stared at this shooting gallery, this crack den, this drug house, this whatever the hell it was in the middle of nowhere, and steeled my nerves to open my eyes to a part of my brother’s life I would’ve preferred not to have seen. For years, I’d put up a hand over my face and blocked these views from sight. Now I had no choice but to peel back the blinders, willingly step inside, and have a good look around.

  “What are you going to do?” Charlie asked. “Just knock on the door?”

  “I don’t suggest sitting here,” I said. Another thing I knew about speed: that shit made you jumpy. “Liable to get a shotgun stuck in our faces.”

  “I figured we were going to be dropping in on some druggies playing video games,” Charlie said. “This place ain’t right.” He swallowed hard.

  I made for my door handle. “You can wait here, if you want.”

  My work boots crunched snowy stone. I kept my hands out of my pockets. A moment later, I heard Charlie’s door slam behind me.

  As we drew nearer, the music churned louder, grating and dissonant.

  The door was ajar. I slowly pushed it open.

  There was scarcely any light, just whatever natural gray filtered through the windows. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. When they did, I found the big, bald-headed man with the tattoos and wife-beater waiting. He didn’t look happy to see us.

  It was as cold inside as it was out, not even a space heater, but he didn’t wear a jacket, just the tank top, the word “Bowman” stretched across his broad chest in cracked vinyl letters. He had shoulders the size of bowling balls and the Star of David etched into his neck.

  Behind him, three other men with the kind of inked-up bodies you get only from long stints in prison, matching flaming-wing-and-gun tattoos, glanced up from a card table where they sat. Workers on an assembly line, screwdrivers and solder in hand, huddled over a mound of squiggling computer innards. Tendrils of smoke slithered from ashtrays and melting wires. You could taste the chemicals burning. But it was what was beyond them that really caught my attention.

  On the grimy floor, a half dozen malnourished girls and boys lay, their gangly arms and legs intertwined, blissed-out heads resting in each other’s laps or drooping in a nod. The girls appeared woefully underage and whorishly dressed, the boys all weak and thin. It was easy to see my brother was not among them.

  The inside of the shop was gutted like a construction site. Sheet-rock had been kicked in, exposing two-by-fours, bands of electrical wires yanked out and dangling, the concrete floor covered in crumbly plaster and nails. The shrill metal music wrenched to an out-of-time beat.

  The junkies lazily stirred, like cold-blooded lizards unable to reanimate for lack of sun, pawing, groping, grasping. They looked barely alive, fighting to keep their eyes open. I felt disdain for the whole sorry lot well inside me. Who chooses to live like this?

  Then I saw the bruises. Up and down arms, around the wrists, deep blues and purples. My eyes darted to a dark corner and a wood chair. No one sat in it, but twine hung loose from the arms and legs. Liquid pooled underneath, as if someone had pissed himself.

  “Can I help you?” Bowman said. It wasn’t really a question.

  I’d been in a few bar fights over the years, and I had some weight on me, but at that moment I was really glad Charlie had agreed to come along. I was out of my element here.

  “I’m looking for my brother,” I said, unable to think of anything better.

  Maybe the honesty disarmed him, or maybe that was the whole sizing-up process and I didn’t pose a threat—I don’t know—but Bowman eased up, haunches and
shoulders relaxing. He sniffed hard, grabbed his pack of Camels off what used to be the hostess station, struck a match, and took a long pull, tip glowing cherry red. He blew a ring of smoke in my direction.

  “Who’s your brother?”

  “Chris Porter,” I said. “I thought this was his computer shop?”

  Bowman peered over his shoulder. The men at the table chuckled.

  “He ain’t been around here lately,” Bowman said, before affecting the mannerisms of the world’s most unconvincing receptionist. “But if he stops in, who should I say was asking?”

  Charlie and I looked at each other.

  The guys behind Bowman laughed some more.

  Then he turned to the boom box, a monstrosity from the ’80s, cranking the shrill noise louder, and went back to talking to his boys like we weren’t even there.

  “Did you know Pete?” Charlie shouted above the grind. “Pete Naginis?”

  I elbowed Charlie to shut up.

  “Because the cops just found his body,” Charlie said, “over by the truck stop.”

  That caught Bowman’s attention. He spun and stepped to Charlie, hard.

  “The fuck, you say?”

  “Nothing,” said Charlie, backing up.

  “He means the police called to tell me one of my brother’s friends had died,” I said, wedging in front of Charlie. “They’re looking for my brother. It’s better if I’m the one to tell him.”

  Bowman smirked. “Better for who?”

  Trace flurries drifted from a silver sky, wipers swishing in a lullaby. Fast cars whisked past us going in the opposite direction, as the sounds of spinning wet tires on pavement echoed down the valley boulevard, lost to the menacing tower of Lamentation Mountain.

  As we drove back to his place, Charlie and I didn’t speak. You grow up in a small town like ours and you develop a false sense of security; you forget that beyond county lines lurk predators much bigger than you. Bigger. Tougher. Meaner. And a helluva lot more dangerous.

  “What are you going to do?” Charlie asked as I pulled up his driveway.

  “I don’t know. Wait for my brother to call. Hope he does before the cops pick him up. Or maybe those guys at the shop will tell him I was looking for him.” I wanted to add, “if they don’t break his neck first,” but I was pretty sure that was implied.

  “You going to call Turley? Y’know, about what we saw?”

  “What did we see, Charlie? Nothing. A bunch of drug addicts and biker dudes.”

  “What about the chair?”

  “A chair with some rope? What do I say? There’s a bunch of junkies lying on the floor who aren’t looking so good? I told those guys my name. What’s going to happen when the cops show up half an hour after we left?”

  I lit a cigarette and gazed over his yard, which connected to an old farm, which connected to another old farm and another old farm, until the mountain range rose up to define our borders, like the glass walls of a snow globe. That’s what it felt like too. As if some prankster god had scooped up my world and given it a hearty shake, and now was sitting back, laughing.

  “I want to find my brother,” I said. “But going up there was a mistake. This really has nothing to do with me.”

  “You remember I was telling you about Fisher?”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s an investigator now.”

  “Fisher’s a cop?”

  “No. Like, for a private company. I’m not sure, exactly, but he’s definitely an investigator. He stopped in the Dubliner for a drink a couple weeks back. I was pretty hammered. Maybe he can do something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” Charlie said, exiting. “But I’ll give him a ring. Can’t hurt, right?”

  I didn’t bother to mention that I hadn’t talked to Fisher in years, or that the last time I had, I vividly recalled the dude hated my guts. I could hardly refuse the offer.

  Our trip to that shop had made one thing abundantly clear: my brother had sunk too deep into the muck this time for me to go wading in to pull out his ass on my own.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Next day, the murder was all over the front page of the Herald. The paper didn’t speculate on motive, nor did it delve too much into specifics beyond what Turley had already told me. The article didn’t come right out and say my brother was a suspect, only that he was wanted for questioning. Pretty much the same thing. The piece mostly broached hot-button peripherals like prostitution and dealing drugs at the TC, with several quotes from town officials proselytizing what needed to be done to eradicate the problems, including an impassioned plea from Adam Lombardi, who said he “hoped this senseless killing would be the wake-up call Ashton needed” to close down the truck stop, which he called “a bad influence and an eyesore.” Which was the response you’d expect. It was no secret what took place at the truck stop, but that didn’t mean folks wanted it shoved in their faces, either.

  I fielded phone calls and questions for the rest of the morning and on through the afternoon. Turley bugged me a couple times. Charlie rang to see how I was holding up. Word had even drifted down to my aunt and uncle in Concord. Though they’d distanced themselves from Chris a while ago, they were still concerned. The only person I wanted to talk to was Jenny, but it was never her on the line, and I was still too angry and prideful to call her. When I went to the market around lunchtime to stock up on beer, I felt everyone staring at me, probably due to my own paranoia. I was anxious to get back to my place and hole up, which made me feel like a prisoner. Finally, I powered down my cell, took the landline off the hook, pulled the blinds, dragged a six-pack to the couch, and cracked open a cold one. I glugged it down. Then I cracked another.

  Ashton wasn’t some hick town. We had two supermarkets, a movie theater showing up to three new releases at a time, four pizza and grinder shops, a McDonald’s and an Arby’s, two banks, a credit union, a barber, a stylist, two dentists, and a Dairy Queen that closed every fall. Plus several liquor stores. Even a football field for the high school. But Ashton was still small enough that everybody knew everybody’s business, which made life a lot rougher when you had a brother like mine.

  I was eight years old when my parents died. I should’ve had more than enough time to put the loss behind me. Only I hadn’t. The tragedy was woven into my very person, like cigarette smoke on a cable-knit after a long night at the bar. I couldn’t put the accident behind me because small-town innuendo wouldn’t let me, and I knew this latest fiasco with Chris would only grease the rumor mill wheels. Turley wasn’t the only one. Everyone had heard that goddamn story, and even when people didn’t bring it up, you could still tell they were thinking it, which made it just as bad. Sometimes what isn’t said can be every bit as damning as what is.

  For a while, it was just Chris and I living in the house. He had a good job at Hank Miller’s garage. Chris was a pro when it came to fixing cars. Wasn’t a motor he couldn’t put back together blindfolded. He’d had a shot to attend college on a wrestling scholarship, but he stuck around. He stuck around, in part, to help take care of me, which is something you don’t forget, no matter how bad someone turns out.

  That Chris and our father had fought so much publicly didn’t help the situation. They were always at each other’s throats. Once, at a wrestling meet, they had to be physically separated. Another time, they got into a shoving match in the DQ parking lot. Chris was messing with drugs even then. Mostly pot, I think. Hash. Acid. I hated being in the middle of it. Like our mom, I steered clear and tried not to pick sides. Maybe I was a coward. What did I really know? Like the drowning story, I couldn’t trust my own memories. Chris never wanted to talk about it, except to call the old man an asshole, and there was no point poking that dog now. We were way past the talking stage.

  All kinds of shit happens when your parents die and you’re still a kid—executors, creditors, social services, mortgages and banks, court orders, insurance claims—a bureaucratic nightmare that neither Chris
nor I had been equipped to handle, not that it should’ve been my responsibility at all.

  I didn’t blame my brother. He’d done his best. He was just a kid out of high school, and he’d always been off somewhat, head screwy, easily rattled. Chris began drinking more, getting high more, fighting with everyone. Honestly, it was almost a relief when the bank finally tacked up that notice. When my Aunt Dee Dee brought me down to Concord, I worried about leaving Chris behind.

  They never talked about Chris living with us in Concord. The police had spoken with Dee Dee plenty, and already people were regarding my brother as a lost cause. I doubt Chris would’ve accepted an offer anyway. Dee Dee was our father’s sister and the spitting image of him, and Chris hated her too. Chris still had his job, girlfriends; he got an apartment in town. He liked living in Ashton. How could I know he’d end up on the street?

  Every time I came back, he seemed further gone. I worried about him constantly, which made it hard to concentrate on my future. I’d always been good at school, got straight As, just came naturally, didn’t need to study much or anything. Guidance counselors and my aunt pushed me to apply to colleges. I even flew to check out a couple. In the end, though, I felt I needed to get home.

  When I moved back after graduation and saw how bad Chris had gotten, I did everything I could to make it right. I could still talk to him then, and I thought I could fix him. I’d convince him to try and sober up. I’d drag him into detox units, plead with rehab counselors, begging them to help him. They’d calmly explain that you can’t help someone who isn’t willing to help himself. I’d get so angry, screaming, accusing them of callousness and not doing their jobs. Of course, they were right.

  I woke in a cold, dark place, empty cans and plastic rings littering my lap, head clogged like I’d just landed after a long, turbulent flight and had forgotten the chewing gum. I thumbed on my cell. 10:41. A few lousy beers shouldn’t have been able to knock me out like that. Probably the stress. These last couple days hadn’t been easy.