by Mike Allen
You keep thinking about that moment, those giggles, her hurt frown, mortified she failed to impress you. You think about it two years later, when she runs away and your mom finds the needle hidden in the tape deck of your niece’s CD player. The way she’s scratching herself all over when the cops bring her back. The two of you together in the back seat during the ride to rehab, you as angry as mom and dad. You snap at her: I can’t believe you.
That same hurt look in her eyes, so like yours. Then her gaze flicks your way again. Read me something, she says.
I don’t have a book.
Can’t you remember something?
Bring me back, her eyes say. And you try. You recite what you remember: Fearful symmetry. The center cannot hold. Rage against the dying of the light.
She does come back, but never for long. And the last boy she takes up with, Billy Willett, that sorry sack of shit, he takes her somewhere that neither can come back from.
What they found of him wasn’t much. But he could still talk.
The county deputies think he was in a crash, his damned motorcycle struck in a hit-and-run during a late night kiss-your-own-ass curve on a mountain road. They found the wrecked hog, they found him down the slope, still alive despite all odds, most of him that was below the waist missing. Dragged off by animals, they think. His eyes gone too, pecked out by crows perhaps, while he lay unconscious on the old hillside. How he lived they don’t understand, he must heal up like Jesus.
Denise was with him, now missing. Can’t charge the boy with manslaughter with no body, and knowing her, so like her mom, she could be anywhere.
She was nineteen. You were twenty-three.
Willett gives you Lenahan’s name. He never gave it to the police. Just to you.
* * *
We can talk down here, Lenahan says. Just let me get the lights.
I see you fine in the dark. Keep the lights off.
How about this one? Just a desk lamp. No one outside will see it.
Go ahead, then.
The lamp’s slender fluorescent tubes do little to penetrate the gloom in the basement warehouse, a space much bigger than you expected from outside.
Lenahan’s shop used to be a schoolhouse, still has the look of a relic from a lost time; the street it fronts has surrendered to modern clutter, telephone poles and squawky burger drive-thrus. Even the schoolhouse’s Rockwellesque bell tower still points benignly at the sky, though the bell’s long gone.
The former school houses a fabric and craft store, one with a subtle reputation for eclectic and exotic selections that stretches for hundreds of miles outside the tiny dollop of a town where it nestles. Every room brims with bolts of fabric, regimented in racks or piled in bins, from burlap plain to prismatic textures and labyrinthine patterns that dizzy the eye. In at least two former classrooms long glass cases stand sentry, crowded with glittering baubles, costume jewelry. In the cavernous basement, tall steel shelves hold rows of thick fabric meant for towels, sheets, blankets, even tents. So many rugs hang from overhead racks, den-spanning designs of tigers, elephants, dragons, griffins, Egyptian gods and even wilder beasts, that they would make for mazelike layers of concealment if your quarry tried to run and you pursued–but he doesn’t try to get away, even though he must know this place by heart even in the dark.
In fact, he acts as if he’s invited you in. He sits down at the desk where the lamp shines, it’s more of a drawing table, tilted up, scattered with catalogs and pattern books, the kind that show a smiling woman strutting in an outfit she’s supposedly sewn herself. He settles a hand down next to a small red cushion bristling with needles and pins. With his other hand, he gestures at a folding chair at the corner of the table, going through motions he’s long accustomed to, have a seat here, let’s look this over. Beside the desk and your chair is a long coffinlike box. You study it, wonder what’s in it, why he wants you to sit next to it.
A long wooden chest of some dark wood, with what appear to be elaborate Polynesian designs carved on its side–you see a horde of faces peering out through a thicket of strange trees, their gaze aimed to the right, where a large figure is stepping out from a yoni-esque opening in a wall of reeds. The lid of the chest is open, perhaps even removed. Inside, small objects glitter like treasure in a pirate movie.
You peer more closely. The chest is filled to the brim with buttons, of just about every kind you think could exist, every conceivable size and color: sky blue, gold, oak brown, blood red, sea green, India ink, rose pink, oil swirls, crystal prisms, basalt opaque; some like grains, some larger than silver dollars, disks, cubes, knobs, triangles and stars, even crosses, moons, little grinning skulls, twining oriental dragons, snarling demon heads. The entire conglomeration shimmers as if the weak glow from the lamp transmutes to moonlight across their many surfaces.
Lenahan says, It’s amazing what you can find in there. Still amazes me.
You realize your attention wandered, you aim your focus and your Glock back where they belong.
Where is she?
He leans forward, his shadowed bulk alarming, his face a gibbous moon. I just gave you a hint.
You blink. His eyes have changed. You could swear when you looked at them before they were dark, not that eerie bright green.
You emphasize the command with a wave of your pistol. Don’t move. Don’t do anything other than tell me where she is.
Then what?
You inhale slowly. You tell yourself it’s not your plan to kill him, you just have to know.
You say, Depends on what you tell me.
He sits still, but his fingers on the desk twitch spider-like, drum softly in some random Morse code. He leans back a little, face going from gibbous to full, and you see his eyes are different, unquestionably burning bright green, like seeing your own eyes in a mirror.
He’s playing games, not taking you serious.
The little cushion full of pins trembles as his fingers drum. You shoot it.
The Glock hiccups in your hand, the sound like a sledgehammer smashing concrete. The cushion is simply gone, a long second before Lenahan jerks his hand away. The moment punctuates with the clatter of the spent shell casing on the floor.
Lenahan holds up his hand, stares, his sensuous lips parted. There’s a needle jutting from the tip of his ring finger. His expression makes you squirm inside.
He puts finger to mouth, grips the needle in his teeth, pulls. It protrudes from his incisors like a toothpick. Then he tosses it away.
He doesn’t seem frightened, but your heart is pounding crazy against its cell of ribs.
Under the lamp, a bead of blood wells from his fingertip. I don’t want to make trouble for you, he says.
A flick, the blood is gone. Why does the skin of his broad hand seem smoother, paler, the hairs between the knuckles somehow absent, reverse-werewolf?
Stop moving, you say.
He obeys, watches, waits.
You still haven’t answered, you say.
Answered what?
You scream an obscenity, put the gun almost to his chin.
His eyes flick to the button bin.
Just as with his eyes and hands, the buttons in the bin have changed. It’s hard to quantify what’s different, but you hit upon it: they look more real, more like the things they represent. The sea blue disks look like circles of ocean, the skulls gleam like real bone, the laughing demons seem to wink, the moons and suns shine with their own light, the faces on the fake coins frown or grin or simply breathe.
He knows your name. Shaun, he says. You reach in there, you’ll find her. You’ll know what happened.
You aim the Glock in his face and say, You do it.
* * *
Don’t you remember what Billy Willett told you? So intent you were on the who and where of Mr. Lenahan, perhaps you only lent half an ear’s credence to the other things he said.
You found Billy’s apartment, inside a house sided with flaking paint and rotting wood in a neighborhood once
proud and rich, now long abandoned to poverty, slouching among the drug lairs with cars coming and going at all hours, a rundown convenience store at the corner with crack pipes for sale by the register.
Half of the front porch has collapsed, you don’t know how whoever lives in the front apartments can get to their doors, but it’s not your problem because Willett lives in the basement apartment accessed from the back. A sullen pit bull watches you from a chain-link kennel as you walk past; the dog’s black back is splotched with mange or scars. It has no shelter from the sun.
You walk down the short concrete steps to the door. The house has sunk into the earth over many years; the bottom step and the threshold no longer meet. You bang the door, hear a woman’s voice croak inside.
A moment later she pulls the door open and squints at you, a short stick figure with tattoos flanking her withered cleavage, crowned with a shriveled apple face, dirty mop-grey hair cropped close to her head. Above her a chain stretches to its taut limit, restricting entrance.
You try to sound pleasant. I’d like to talk to Billy.
Get oughtta here, she croaks. You go.
The Glock presses cold against your skin, hidden in the waistband of your jeans beneath your baggy T-shirt. For a moment you think of simply forcing your way in. Surely, given the house’s decay, the chain would pull out of the wall with just a burst of pressure. You see yourself stepping over the old woman as she flounders on the floor.
I really need to see him, you say.
Let us alone, she says, and shuts the door. You turn to go. You look at the other houses, great rambling derelicts like this one, some sporting mock towers and turrets that were no doubt gloriously gaudy in their heyday. You wonder whether those windows will be lit after dark, if anyone might be watching. There’s a half-formed plan in your head, what you might do if you come back then.
But behind you, the jingling sound of the chain undone. A click, a creak, the old woman’s croak: He want to talk to you.
Once you’re inside, she watches you with eyes narrowed, wrinkles radiating out from the disapproving line of her mouth. The room you’ve stepped into is cleaner than you expected, a cramped dun sofa facing a vast widescreen TV with the sound off and the picture hopelessly blurred. She points down the hall, where a door stands ajar–this door incongruously painted with a crude scene of two kids playing on a swing set beneath a smiley-face sun.
As you head for the bedroom, she croaks behind you, Don’t you hurt my son.
You want to say, No promises, but you don’t.
The room is decorated in the same childish way as the door, but you don’t take it all in. You’re looking at Willett, what’s left of him, half-tucked beneath sheets in a bed that would have been too small if he still had legs. His arms, though, are still stout through the biceps, taut and wiry. His shoulders bunch and ripple as he hears you come in, props himself up. The sheet slides down and for a queasy moment you think it will slide off, bare him completely, and you don’t know what you’ll see then, what horrid mass of scar tissue he must truncate in.
But you’re spared, the sheet pauses at his navel, exposing tattoos that crawl up his abdomen and chest, oriental dragons coiled around naked bimbos. You think of Denise, staring at that vulgar art as she straddled Willett’s hips and sank down, and it makes you sick.
Willett’s thin, angular face, with the stubble-shrouded cleft in his chin, remains handsome, or would have without the fleshy puckers where his eyes once were. But it’s as if those scars can see, because he turns to you.
You’re finally here, he says. His voice sounds choked with grit.
Do you know where Denise is?
He laughs. It’s a bark tinged with hysteria. Yes. Yes. Lenahan has her. He put us both deep under but he only kept what he wanted from me. Denise, he kept all of her. He planned to all along.
Who’s Lenahan?
Maybe, maybe–and now he’s struggling to speak, as though someone just told him an incredible joke and he’s still gasping for breath–maybe if you ask nice he’ll bring her back. He wanted me to tell you if you asked. He told me to.
Who is he?
And Willett tells you.
He tells you Lenahan lives four counties away, runs the craft store in the schoolhouse, took it over from the Confederate daughter used to own it, made it into something spectacular. The place is well known but you’ve never heard of it, had no reason to know about it.
But the man has a reputation in a far different circle, one where Willett scuffed at the edge. In that circle, Lenahan has a different name, and only a few know who he really is. But most of the meth makers and meth pushers call him Mr. Buttons.
Willett giggles. Funny, isn’t it. Like some little pink bunny.
His puckered scar eyes crinkle with mirth.
He’s the one with the money, who keeps his people in good supply. He doesn’t use, doesn’t sell, just expects returns on what he puts down. And you don’t dare snitch on him if you get caught. The narcs don’t have a thing on him, won’t find a thing on him, and as soon as no one’s watching, you’re gone and no one will find you again.
Billy Willet tells you how eager Denise was to try crystal meth when they first got together. How he encouraged her by saying it wouldn’t wreck her mind and body like the heroin did. He leers as he says it, like he wants you to shoot him, hopes you will. But you don’t. You just tell him to keep talking.
And he details how he and Denise went to one of Mr. Buttons’ top men, the one with the barrels of chemicals in the storage shed behind his barn, and what Denise did to pay because they had no money.
And how the next time they went, word was Mr. Buttons wanted to meet them both, and this time their fixes would be free of charge.
Willett tells you where Mr. Buttons’ place was and who he turned out to be. He tells you he doesn’t know how Lenahan took his eyes and legs. He says he didn’t see what happened to Denise but he knows she can never come back unless Lenahan sets her free.
Maybe good ol’ Uncle Shaun can just ask real sweet, he says. Maybe you ask him just the right way, he’ll let you see her.
* * *
It took weeks of brooding, planning, stalking to reach the place you now sit.
He leans toward the button bin, the muzzle of your gun almost kissing the meaty curve of his ear.
His arm disappears to the elbow and he shudders like he’s plunged it in ice. You don’t hear the noise you expect, the clattering hiss of beads displaced. Instead a quiet wind-chime jostle, a patter of hourglass sand, a release of air like a lover’s soft exhalation.
Lenahan pauses. I’m not going to try anything, he says. Could you please pull that out of my ear?
Move slow, you say, but you back off a little.
His arm comes out slowly as if he’s having to extract it from tar and in fact the buttons seem to stick to it. There’s a squelching noise as his hand comes free.
Whatever you’re doing, stop it.
Just be calm, son.
He holds his hand up in front of his face, looks at his knuckles, looks at you between his fingers. Some of the buttons have adhered to his skin. There’s a cat’s-eye centered in the palm of his hand, gold suns in the crooks of his knuckles, blood drops around his wrist, black diamonds tracking in rows down his forearm, alternating with bone circlets. You realize the buttons have arranged themselves in deliberate patterns–it’s as if they lined up along invisible seams in his skin. Your heart is a madman pounding at the walls.
You aim at one of his bright green eyes, just like yours, like Denise’s.
You’ll never know the answer if you shoot me.
His palm still toward you, he takes his other hand, grips a demon-face button centered in his wrist, just below the ball of the thumb. Then he pushes it through his skin and out again, undoes the button as if loosening a collar. A vertical seam in his wrist suddenly gapes, like a new eye opening.
What you should see through that opening is blood and meat and te
ndons, but instead there’s something in there that wavers like heat shimmer, flutters like a moth, shines without color, and a scent wafts out of sadness and silence. It confounds your gaze, makes your stomach lurch.
Stop it! you say, but he’s unbuttoning his wrist, the skin parting like a cuff, something pale and gleaming and alive revealed underneath. The entire room has become strange, still dark but the darkness somehow agitated, animate.
He says, Do you see her yet?
His face contorts, his neck bulges and suddenly you think of Apeneck Sweeney, Eliot’s mindless brute, zebra stripes swelling along his jaw. Beside you the buttons in the bin crawl over each other, glittering mites that seethe at the lip of their container like spectators crowding a coliseum wall.