“Something’s down,” she said, her voice sounding to Rankin as if it were coming out of a hole in the earth. She pulled her head back inside. “I can’t see who or what, just a crowd around it in the intersection.”
Charlie Rankin ignoring a warning from the wide-open eyes of a warm body lying dead from no apparent reason in the road before him.
Rankin heard himself say, “Two people maybe died last night that shouldn’t have.”
“What people?”
“They lived in the wrong house.”
“Are you sure?”
“What?”
“Which house did they live in?”
Rankin didn’t answer her.
“Trust me, Samson. I’m in a soul older and wiser than yours.”
Rankin looked at her.
Florence placed a hand on his chest; as if her touch were regulating it, his heart, as she felt of it, accelerated. “It acts to want to break out of you.”
Rankin pushed her hand away. “I told you to get out, didn’t I?”
“No. You didn’t. Are you telling me to now?”
Against his intention to nod Rankin shook his head. “What are you doing to me? I can’t think right.”
“You’re thinking good enough to drive.” The Tranny, under Rankin’s direction, was following the now advancing line of traffic. “I’m awful proud of you.”
“What?”
“You better stop for this cop though. We wouldn’t want him to ask to see your license.”
His hand up at them the cop stood directly under the traffic light; off to his right were two more cops, a pickup with a stove-in front, a sanitation truck into the back of which three men in jumpsuits were hoisting a brown-and-white animal cadaver, the size of a German shepherd dog, that Rankin was convinced he’d seen, dead or acting dead, on another road.
“Poor thing,” said Florence.
Rankin, fighting an urge to get out of the car and surrender to the cop for every crime he’d ever committed or dreamed he’d committed, swabbed at his face from which sweat was boiling.
The cop waved them forward.
Rankin eased the Tranny ahead, through the intersection, not looking left or right.
* * *
On the far side of the bridge, Florence, as if she’d been on the lookout for it, pointed him into a grass pulloff shrouded by evergreens. “No peeking,” she said.
Dangling her big shoulder bag, she stepped from the car, walked to the left edge of the headlights arc, raised her sweater over her waist, lowered her underpants, squatted, and peed.
She rearranged her clothes, and moved deeper into the trees; in the near-dark Rankin could make out only her shape; she appeared to him to be taking off her head, putting on another one. She approached his window, tapped on it until he rolled it down, told him, “See if I don’t rev you up more this way.”
Shoulder-length dirty-blonde hair falling from the face of that strangled woman gazing up dead-eyed at Little Charlie.
The woman’s upper body came through the window, into the car. Rankin jumped back from it. In the dashboard light’s faint glow, the face hunting his had a bloodless pallor.
The woman pulled her head out of the car, went around to and opened the passenger door; placing her bag on the seat, she climbed in next to it, then shut the door. She touched a finger to her long, flowing hair. “Ever since I had mine chopped off a week ago I carry this with me case the mood hits me to be again the woman I was.”
Rankin shrunk from her.
She reached out and pressed to his forehead a hand as cold as frozen earth. “My God. You’re burning up.”
“I feel sick.”
“I should have seen it coming.”
Sweat stinging and blurring his eyes, Rankin tried to identify the woman as Florence.
She unbuttoned his shirt, slipped it off of him, Rankin (his hand, his whole body trembling) feeling powerless to stop her. She shut down the car. The interior light disappeared. She unbuckled his pants. She whispered, “I can feel in your skin the beautiful baby you were.”
Sounding to himself as weak and faraway as Florence had talking to him with her head out the window in Old Town, Rankin said, “You poisoned me.”
“How could I have? You ain’t ate nor drank nothing I offered you.”
“You did it to me another way then.”
“You did it to yourself from the trouble churning in you.”
“I’m dizzy. One thing seems like another and everything together seems like nothing.”
“Hold my cold body you’ll maybe cool down.”
“You know what’s good for you you’ll stay off me.”
“I never know what’s good for me till I do it.”
“I keep trying to warn you.”
“About what?”
“Who I am.”
“I know who you are.” The voice came now from the car’s opposite side; hands no longer were touching him. “You had a dog you loved more than anything in the world that died and you’re hoping, after you die, for a thing called reincarnation.”
Little Charlie’s mother whispering to Little Charlie, entwined in her arms, that if being loved for being beautiful was a sin both him and her were doomed to eternal hell.
“I’m Charlie Rankin.”
“I’m Florence Merriweather Jane.”
Rankin saw in the dark void right of him the orange glow at the end of a burning cigarette, heard lips snap sucking on it, bare skin squeaking on the vinyl seat cover, lungs emptying; he sensed, then smelled, smoke enveloping him. He said, “You’re in it now—I can’t let you out of it—because now you know, don’t you?”
“Know what?”
“Why I’m here.”
“Why don’t you tell me why you think you’re here.”
“I owe Buddha my life.”
“That doesn’t answer why you’re here.”
“I musta fucked up killing who he paid me to last night, so I’m back to do it for sure tonight. Then we can eat, go to any restaurant you want.”
“You think you came here tonight to kill someone?”
Rivulets of sweat descending his belly into his groin felt to Rankin like small insects. “I know why I’m here. I don’t know why you are.”
“Who do you think you came here to kill?”
“Some guy”—(Cartilage and bone filled flesh snapping as Little Charlie squeezed it; a human face draining of blood above Little Charlie’s grasp)—”it don’t matter who.”
“It will to him if you do it. It will to you too. It’ll make you sicker and sicker.”
Pursuant to a sudden panicky feeling Rankin reached down for the gun in his belt; he found it gone, his pants, his underwear off. While burning up, he was shivering.
“Where’s the .22?”
“Likely with your jeans, on the floor where you shucked them.”
“I don’t remember.”
Out of the dark came a hand holding a tissue; it dabbed at the perspiration wetting his cheeks. “It acts, Charlie Rankin, to want to pour out of you.”
Rankin reached out and seized her by a shoulder. “Who are you?
“Who is it you keep mistaking me for?”
“Where’d you get that hair?”
“At the Alto Wig Emporium.”
Rankin snatched off the wig. He threw it into the back seat. He put his hands to her throat, half-intending to wrap them around it, but they fell lower, onto her back, and he found himself squeezing or hugging her. Florence moved so that she was directly facing him. She lay down on the seat beneath him (her sweater was up around her neck and she was naked beneath it) then pulled him down onto her, her deathly cold body as welcome to his feverish one as an unexpected breeze on a sweltering day. “Get inside me and feel better,” she said, putting him between her legs.
“Now make love to me.”
Even with all her help—and as much as he wanted to—he couldn’t. He slipped mostly out of her, then fell into unconsciousness.
/> * * *
In that danger-charged darkness he shared with her and whoever Little Charlie night after night dreaming he was a clerk (selling exercise equipment or groceries or cooking utensils or movie tickets or throws with fifty-dollar whores and their sons) smiling pleasantly to his customers, while picking out one of them each day to follow home, murder, back into bits, and incinerate.
Feeling only slightly heated, he woke with his head in Florence’s lap.
He wondered if he’d had a fever at all, if she’d only convinced him of it.
He gazed up at her face (her eyes were closed, her lips slackly together as if that were their natural position) seeing in it, without comprehending what he was seeing (he was aware only that he was feeling sadness and anger), every beautiful thing, sight, person beyond his reach.
He sat up, turned to and twisted down his window.
The entering air made steam rise from his wet skin, sent through him an eruption greater than a shiver.
Who? Who? Who? inquired an owl in the trees left of him.
Over the blackened river past the windshield a fog bank stalked them, into the dark sky beyond it a faint white halo from the lights of old town intruding. Jolted anew by stomach pain (his pain seemed to him now to have plagued him forever) Rankin abruptly realized he’d been sick as long as he could remember, that what he was suffering from had been festering in him since birth. “You slept two and a half hours,” said Florence.
Rankin stayed staring out the window.
“I guess you feel better,” she said.
“I had a bout of something. Maybe ‘cause I didn’t eat.”
“Are you hungry now?”
“You know I ain’t.”
Florence pulled on her underpants. “I love you no matter. That other—fucking, what all—it’s just mechanics.”
Rankin, still not looking at her, reached down and picked up his clothes and the .22 from under the steering wheel.
“You could learn how to love nice.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I could teach you.”
Rankin yanked on his jeans, buckled them, then got into his shirt. He buttoned it. Then he put on his boots. He said, “My mother made a good omelet.”
“Omelet?”
“As good as I’ve ever eaten.”
“What sort of one did she make, Charlie?”
“Whatever was left from what we’d ate for a couple days before she’d put in one—potatoes, hamburg, bacon, macaroni, little broken up chunks of rolls.” Rankin slipped the .22 into his pantswaist. He faced his window again. “I ever forget how good them omelets was and how she’d make one just for me, ‘cause didn’t nobody else but me like ‘em, I’d as soon die the same second.”
Florence straightened her sweater, her dark reflection in Rankin’s window half-blotting out to him his own image. “If you could forget, Charlie, you wouldn’t be Samson.”
“I can’t make nothing out of half what you say.”
Florence didn’t answer him.
Rankin turned to her, seeing less of her straight on than he’d seen of her in her reflection; he had a vision of her red, curdled nipples, as she’d laid beneath him earlier, protruding from her breasts like the heads of two bodies in quicksand; at the same time he saw in his mind a mailbox, marked #210 Viner Lane. “There’s a 7-11 up the road. You promise not to call the cops I’ll leave you at it. You can catch a ride home from there.”
“It’s up to you, Charlie. It always has been.”
“You think it ain’t going to happen if you’re along, like me not taking you out to dinner after I said I would?”
“I told you, Charlie—you want to never see me again just say it.”
“You aren’t ready for the things you think you’re ready for— because what you know about them is just talk.”
“About what?”
“Charlie Rankin.”
Florence lit a cigarette. “I think, Charlie, I know more about why you’re here than you do.”
Rankin suddenly had the sensation that a part of his mind had been usurped from him and implanted with a picture of a woman in shadows, suffocating; in the same moment, the fog bank that had been nearing the Tranny enveloped it, extinguishing the sky’s meager light, eclipsing Florence to him. Rankin could see only the burning end of her cigarette. “I’m guessing when my soul was as young as yours is now, Charlie, I musta been as full of anger and violence as you.”
The faceless woman in Rankin’s mind reached her hands out to him.
The cigarette end, bobbing, brightened and crackled across from him. “And spent a fucked-up lifetime from it.”
A gentle gust rocked the Tranny.
“But here I am on the far side of it, Charlie—feeling only love for the good in you only an old soul who’s been where you’re at can see.”
The woman disappeared. Rankin said, “You’re whacked out. Or a witch or something.”
Florence cackled (not a funny or an amused cackle). “Who do you think died for being in that wrong house last night, Charlie?”
Rankin, not answering her, started the car; instead of penetrating the fog, the headlights turned back onto the Tranny a radiant, non-illuminating denseness. Florence opened her window. She tossed out her cigarette. She picked up the wig from the floor; holding it out toward him, she nodded at it. “Good to know, I guess”—she stuffed the wig in her purse—”you like the new me better than the old me.”
Rankin grabbed her by an arm. “What all words come out of me back then?”
“Say again, Charlie.”
“When I was out my head them few minutes.”
“Out of whose head when?”
Rankin dropped her arm and put the car in gear. “After that 7-11 there ain’t no more stops—not for this car—’cept the last one.
“I don’t need to go to it, Charlie—the 7-11. Unless you need me to.”
“We take a right up here at an intersection, then a left. It ain’t more than fifteen minutes from here to the end, understand?”
“You’re driving, Charlie.”
Rankin, his mind’s eye suddenly seeing the route he would follow as clearly as if it appeared on the windshield before him, angled the Tranny out onto the road.
* * *
Little Charlie over and over again reading bad shit in the sons of bitches eyes, voices, scents, postures (they were so transparent and his mother blind as a bat) and over and over again being as helpless against the shit as he was to escape being Little Charlie.
“The guy’s name is Maynard Cass.”
Silence from Florence.
“He lives at 210 Viner Lane.”
Nothing.
“The places are spread way out, so this time no fucking around—no mask, no bushwhacking, no peeking in fucking windows.”
As if he were talking to himself.
“I douse the headlights, pull her into the drive a few yards, shut her down so she can’t be seen from the road or house, then walk up, knock on the door like a guy from a breakdown needing a phone— that’s it.”
Too late, he thought, she’s come down from her high and opened her eyes for the first time on Charlie Rankin; too late she’s wishing she was back doing blow with her old boyfriend, the video store guy; too late she’s knowing that she should have left Charlie Rankin at the 7-11, that she should have never taken up with him at all.
“Past them trees lays a golf course.” He waved at the window beyond Florence. It seemed to him that in the same moment his destination had become clear to him he was at it. “It’s all rich people live on it. Probably get their windows broke all the time by golf balls and just buy new ones like most people do a cup of coffee.”
Not a word back to him.
“I know what the guy looks like”—a picture of the guy in a photograph had, that second, popped into his head—”so if it’s him answers I’ll put one in him right off, then finish him with a head shot. If it ain’t, I’ll m
ake who does bring me to him and do him wherever I find him, tie up the other one, and go.”
“Chill, Charlie,” said Florence, her voice sounding no different than it had when she’d been telling about her cat that died.
Rankin stared toward her.
“You ain’t got to be scared.”
She didn’t sound at all scared.
“Scared?” Rankin remembered her with that wig on, how it had seemed to transform and age her. “What do you mean scared? I was born to do this. I ain’t scared.”
“Just follow your instincts, Charlie.”
“What?”
“They’ll take you to the right place.”
The oddly hopeful thought struck Rankin that he was still on this road at the beginning of the night before, that anything past then hadn’t happened—or hadn’t happened yet—except in one of Little Charlie’s dreams. A sign ahead for the River Run Golf Course Club House reacquainted him with an angry, unjust feeling that had him picturing Charlie Rankin, shivering in a hail storm, peeking through a window into a room warmed by a fireplace at a bunch of golf course guys (one golf course guy looked in his vision of golf course guys like every other golf course guy) drinking, talking, laughing, living high off the world’s short supply of pure oxygen, leaving the Charlie Rankins outside that room only sick, polluted air to breathe.
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“What?”
“Once we get there—to the house—should I come up to the door with you? Would that make it easier?”
Trying to distinguish Florence’s face in the semi-dark, Rankin saw in his mind again that woman in shadows; he couldn’t tell if in reaching out to him the woman was begging for mercy, asking for help or pointing Rankin out accusingly to someone not in Rankin’s vision. He blinked at Florence, tried to bring her into focus. “What I want is you to stay in the Goddamn car.”
“You change your mind let me know.”
“Why would I change my mind?”
“Mine usually gives me plenty of reasons to change it from doing one thing to doing another thing right up until I do the thing I end up doing.”
“Are you so fucked-up you don’t get what’s about to go down here?”
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