“I feel about as clear-headed as I ever get, Charlie. How ‘bout you? How you feel?”
“Like you’re talking at me from a thousand Goddamn different directions outta that many heads. That’s how.”
He wondered what she’d done to his mind to make him not dump her one of the hundreds of times he should have dumped her; then, with a sudden tyrannized feeling, he wondered what he’d do to her after he’d finished doing what he’d come here to do because Charlie Rankin wasn’t one to leave loose ends. “206, Charlie.”
Stark white in the dashboard’s luminescence her hand, in the space between them, motioned at a mailbox at the base of a driveway out his window.
Rankin slowed the Tranny.
On the hill above the mailbox appeared an unlighted conical-shaped building shades blacker than the night. “How many more before the one, Charlie?” inquired Florence, as if Rankin hadn’t just told her the address.
“One more,” he said, “on this side. Then the place.”
“You sure?” she asked, as if she thought he might not be, as if she was half-certain he’d miscalculated.
“Goddammit—yes. 210.”
“210. That’s the one?”
“Ain’t that what I said? 210—it’s what was written on the Goddamn piece of paper with the guy’s picture!”
“I don’t doubt the guy lives there, Charlie. At 210.”
“What the hell you asking me?”
Florence, instead of answering him, lightly touched his arm. She pointed ahead, to the next driveway; the mailbox (if there was one) marking the drive was obscured to them; a fluorescent pole lamp partly lit the way up to a rectangular-shaped house showing only two exterior lights.
Passing the place, they started into a long bend. Rankin decelerated the car to a virtual crawl.
Florence said, “A quiet, peaceful neighborhood.”
Rankin thought, how could it be (quiet, peaceful) after last night? Unless last night was still in the future. Unless to this point last night had taken place only in a dream in which he was in the aftermath of.
“Or like nobody lives in it at all,” whispered Florence.
Rankin, struck by an eerie sensation, glanced in the rearview mirror. As he had since they’d entered the area, he saw only darkness behind and in front of them. A few scattered lights in the trees were the only indications of a human presence in the neighborhood; since entering it, they’d encountered no pedestrians or vehicles; even the clubhouse had been dark. Rankin had a vision of empty homes, their occupants out in the woods, eyeing the Tranny as it passed them.
Dragging its hindquarters, bleeding from one hip, a yellow dog crossed the road in front of them. The animal bared its teeth at the car. Florence either gasped or loudly drew air in around her cigarette. Rankin rolled down his window. From the early winter night no scent reached him, no hint of life. He closed the window. They rounded the corner. A thin mist that had been moving with them, left them. The Tranny’s headlight beams suddenly seemed boundless in the forward blackness. Rankin switched them off. At the same time that he remembered counting to himself “210” as he’d driven by it the night before, he saw atop a rise past his window the indistinct outline of a large building hidden in trees. A single light shone in either end of the structure. Rankin turned the Tranny into a snaking, unlighted drive leading to it. He stopped the car twenty feet from the road. He shut it down. He rolled his head at Florence.
“This is the one, Charlie,” she said, “you’re positive?”
Rankin, not responding to her, got out the .22, withdrew its clip, checked to make sure it was full. “Some things ain’t worth giving up for nothing, Charlie.” Rankin returned the clip to the gun and the gun into his pantswaist. “Like hunger—for food, for fucking, for laughter, for love—I’d be happier locked up for life feeling them things and not being able to satisfy ‘em than walking the world never feeling ‘em again.”
Rankin reached out and pulled the cigarette from her mouth.
“They ain’t got the death penalty in this state, Charlie. I read that in the newspaper.”
In the sky’s faint light entering through her window Florence’s head seemed to Rankin to elongate, as if two invisible hands gripping her at the nose were pulling in opposite directions, and her mouth to expand as if she were working up to swallowing Charlie Rankin whole. “Who you talking to?”
“I’m talking to Samson, Charlie Rankin.”
Rankin extinguished her cigarette in the ashtray between them. “Likely all your smoke’s what’s been making me sick.”
He took his gravity knife from his jeans pocket and flicked out its blade. “Don’t be scared,” he said.
“Don’t you be, Charlie.”
Rankin took hold of her seat belt and cut it out of its retainers. Then he did the same to his own. “Birds fall from the sky don’t nobody notice.”
“He notices, Charlie.”
“The man in the moon—that who you mean?”
“Out there walking, Charlie”—Florence flicked her eyes at the night—”listen, okay? Everything’ll come out right you trust what you hear.”
“I’m maybe going to dream it.”
“Don’t dream it, Charlie. Dreams don’t matter. This matters.”
“Put your hands behind you.”
Florence, turning to the door, allowed Rankin, with one of the straps to tie her hands together at the base of her back. “Was me who wanted to come with you, Charlie, and you who wanted to bring me, remember? Why would I leave you now?”
Rankin bound her ankles together with the second strap, then took the keys out of the ignition and the flashlight from the glove compartment. He put them both in his jacket pocket, got out of the car, locked its two doors, and headed up the driveway toward the house.
* * *
The soft, rhythmic tattoo of his boots hitting the pavement; a rustling from a scant wind moving the shrubbery left and right of him; a whiff of hemlock; glimpses of his breath hitting the rimy air; a clammy feel in his sweat-damp clothes.
Two hundred feet before the house the drive split, forming what looked to be a big circle in the frontyard, Rankin picturing Maynard Cass and all his golf club friends, in their golf club type cars, never in that O-shaped drive having to back up, turn around, look behind them, see again what they’d run over on the way in and forgotten about.
The overcast sky above the house a dark room’s fogged-up window with, here and there, eyes pressed to it.
Chester Rhimes yelling from the bed he shared with Little Charlie’s mother to Little Charlie trying to sleep invisibly on the room’s couch “don’t think I can’t see you over there in the dark hating me,”
A building half the size of the house but bigger than any place Rankin had lived at stood three-quarters of the way along the loop’s upper course, behind a metal fence. From the building’s rear corner, attached to its roof line, a single halogen bulb shone onto a plastic-covered, egg-shaped swimming pool. A tennis court lay in dark shadows past the pool.
Buddha, tousling Rankin’s hair, telling him tennis was a gentleman’s sport, not a sport for Charlie Rankin, then, as Rankin rubbed his back for him, how he—William Pettigrew—had won some club tennis championship three years running.
Rankin, on his way to Maynard Cass’s big house, gripped and swung an imaginary racquet; he tried to envision himself loping gazelle-like after a little bouncing ball. The image wouldn’t take. He flung his fake racquet into the foliage, a voice in his head screaming, “any son of a bitch’s bad luck they look straight on tonight at Charlie Rankin!”
A rustling more focused than the wind could cause came from his right flank.
He remembered Florence nodding at the night, telling him to listen in it. The thought struck him that if he returned to the car at that moment she’d be gone from it, that he’d been foolish to think he could keep her in a place he wanted her at, that even killing her he couldn’t keep her out of his head, that she’d maybe never bee
n alive to begin with. He remembered her in that long blonde hair and the blonde woman in shadows in his mind reaching out to him. The rustling, just ahead of him now, grew in intensity.
Pitch-black night upon pitch-black night in which Little Charlie’s senses were never at rest (not even in his dreams) when a word, a footstep, an exhale might ignite an explosion.
Rankin drew the .22.
Ten feet forward of him a four-legged shape broke from the bushes; it stopped in the drive, facing him. The night-obscured creature (it resembled a wolf or large dog) made no noise or movement. Rankin got the flashlight from his pocket. Training the .22 on the animal, he hit it with the light’s beam.
Part boxer, he surmised of the cur in his path, part bloodhound, part whatever, the whole of it shit-kicked, the same mutt that had crossed the road snarling at the Tranny earlier.
The look of its injured hip suggested it had been bitten or stabbed. Blood and filth matted its yellow fur. The septum dangled from its nose, as if it had been half-ripped out. Porcupine quills protruded from its snout. From weakness or rage (Rankin couldn’t tell which) it was quivering slightly. He imagined it, while staring blandly into the light toward him, contemplating whether to lunge for Rankin’s throat or to lie down and mewl before him. Rankin couldn’t decide if to loathe or pity such a creature.
He pushed the gun into his belt. He stepped slowly toward the dog. The animal warily raised its ears, not otherwise reacting to him. A rawhide collar adorned its neck. Rankin knelt down beside the animal. It smelled of the awful times its appearance screamed to the world it was infected with, radiated from its pelt anger-and-petrified-induced heat, breathed raggedly through its mouth. Rankin envisioned Mister Full Boat the day after Rankin had gone inside, gazing up at Sam Jenkins, suddenly finding its life in that son of a bitch’s hands.
He reached down to the dog’s neck. He slipped his fingers behind its collar. The cur made a warning growl. Ignoring it, Rankin angled the light at its collar; words were carved into it. Rankin inclined at and read from the circlet, “I never warmed to this dog, though it gave me no reason to shoot it, so I’ve cut it loose in the hope whoever finds it will take more of a liking to it than I did.”
Rankin lay the light on the drive, aiming it at the animal. He fitted the bend of his left elbow around its neck. The dog’s eyes were filmy and opaque past the pain they conveyed. Rankin imagined them mirroring his own. He didn’t know from them if the dog had in mind to rip his heart out. He had another vision of that woman in shadows, this time beckoning to him, as if trying to draw him into the darkness with her or maybe just deep enough into it for him to make out her face. With the forefinger and thumb of his free hand he seized the end of one of the quills protruding from the dog’s snout; locking the animal’s head between his other wrist and bicep, he yanked out the quill.
The dog made only a slight whimper. Rankin took hold of and jerked out another quill. The dog’s body trembled, but it didn’t fight Rankin. Rankin whispered to it, “Smart enough to know what’s good for you.” He felt drops of moisture on his face. He reached up and discovered the drops had come from his eyes. He swiped them away. He couldn’t tell if it was the dog’s or his own body trembling. He seized the end of a third quill and drew it out. He felt something loosen in him, as if one of his internal organs had come free of its moorings and was pushing its way up through his throat. He made a whimper like the dog’s whimper. “There ain’t no other way,” he told it, “but to fucking hurt.”
He yanked out another quill. He imagined the drone of an airplane traversing the space above them as a steel bit drilling into his skull. He felt himself being mystically drawn closer to the woman beckoning at him—now he saw her face angled downward, the sharp curve of her nose, the swell of her bosom. The dog’s head positioned pliantly in his grip suddenly brought to his mind a shapeless life form he imagined he had spent his entire life struggling to at once rescue from itself and kill. “My mother made a great omelet,” he told the dog.
He tugged a quill from the pulpy flesh of its nose. Drops of blood, sweat—maybe tears—rolled down the dog’s face. Rankin dabbed more moisture from his cheeks. He sucked snot up into his nose.
He took from the dog all the quills in it (fifteen). He released the dog. The dog shook itself. Rankin took off his cap, dabbed lightly with it at the blood surrounding the gash on the animal’s hip. Not deep, the cut nonetheless was vicious, as if made by a claw or fangs. He pulled up from the border separating the drive and bushes a half-frozen clump of grass and soil; he pressed the clump into the dog’s wound, the dog squirming, though not protesting. “I ain’t equipped to do no more for you,” said Rankin.
The dog stood looking at him.
Rankin picked up his light and rose to his feet. A loud heehaw shattered the night behind them. Rankin pivoted and looked toward the sound, seeing several hundred yards in the distance, through what looked to be woods, the shape of a dimly lit building. He turned back to the dog to try to convey to it that it should stay where it was, that in a few minutes Rankin would return for it, bring it back to his car, and put it in the hands of someone who would make it better and maybe even find it a permanent home.
The dog was gone.
Rankin turned away from the house he’d been headed for, angled his light at the ground before him, and started making his way toward where the hee-haw had sounded.
* * *
Little Charlie’s mother, placing before Little Charlie a steaming concoction of eggs, toast, bacon, saying, “You’re the only guy’s ever loved me best for my omelets, Charlie.”
In the algid air red oaks, elms, sugar maples, naked and bunched together, crackling, coated with hoarfrost. The underbrush thick with briers, nettles, Juneberry bushes. His light finally delineating a course moderately thinned by old pruning. Above ground roots like huge paralyzed snakes marring the path. A boulder he pictured a kid sitting next to a troll on. The sky’s dim backdrop making of the overhead branches a spidery mosaic of twisted limbs. A dark winged shape silently piercing the canopy on its way into the woods. The hee-haw again, Rankin thinking how could anyone not know the source of that sound after hearing it once?
At the edge of the far side of the woods, he stopped.
He blinked, hoping the octagonal building a hundred-odd yards in front of him would vanish. It wouldn’t. He crouched down. Past a vast open area he surmised to be lawn, the house showed three lights downstairs, one up. He could see in the driveway fronting the home, in a splash of light thrown from an entranceway lamp, the outline of a basketball hoop.
He remembered carving a person’s name into a huge pine tree in those woods he’d run away into (not the name of anyone he knew) hoping a life attached to that name (it didn’t matter whose life as long as it wasn’t the life he’d been born to) would become his life. Shielding the light’s bulb with his free hand, he stood and started for the house. In twenty-five or so yards he heard to his left what he took for a large animal moving about. He veered that way. Five or six steps brought him to a slatted wood fence. Keeping the beam on the ground, he played the light left and right. The fence looked to form a good-sized circle. Rankin had the sensation while gazing blindly into what he guessed to be a rounded paddock of being face to face with a creature described to him by a man who himself had not seen the creature, but had dreamed or imagined it. Then he remembered that in the dark dreams and imagination have better acuity than eyes do. A grey or brown animal, two-thirds the size of a horse, he told himself, with big floppy ears. He turned his back to the paddock.
He continued on his way to the house.
From the woods bordering the golf course an owl’s sepulchral hoot reached him as the latest in a series of hoots. A moment later it occurred to him that he’d heard the earlier hoots in the series 24 hours ago, that this was the first hoot he’d heard out of those woods tonight.
The thought hit him that he, more than that creature he’d avoided seeing, ought to be locked away from the
world.
His light beam exposed in the crystalline grass a muddied, roughed-up spot prompting him to picture a young boy rolling away from a man beating him with a shovel handle. In a few more steps he found the handle, splintered and dangling its spade.
He switched off the light and walked in an unwavering line to a flagstone patio on the house’s near side; miniature statues and outdoor furniture (two chairs lay overturned) partially took up the space; a thick hemlock hedge lined its backside. The hedge ended at a concrete sidewalk, running, perpendicular to it, toward the driveway. In less than ten feet another walk turned sharply left off the main walk, directly to the house’s front door. A lamp over the entranceway shadily illuminated the walk. Dark, moist blotches stained the concrete.
He strode down the walk to the stoop, the lamp limpidly displaying beneath him the stains. Similar, only larger, stains defaced the steps. A sickly odor tinged the air. He briefly stared, intrigued, at two small cannons, their barrels big enough to fit a hand into, framing the doorway. The stairway rail was sticky in his grasp. He had a vision of Florence in the flesh tied up back in the Tranny and of her soul next to him smoking a cigarette. He felt that woman in shadows pulling at him, as if he were a hunk of metal and she a magnet. He rang the doorbell. He reached to ring it a second time, then instead grasped and twisted the door handle.
The door was unlocked.
He pushed on it. Three-fourths of the way into the house the hardwood slab stopped moving with a dull thud that ended any hope Rankin had had that what he’d half-convinced himself he’d dreamed Little Charlie had done in that house last night Little Charlie hadn’t done with Rankin wide awake.
He walked into the building and shut the door.
He peered down at the object that had halted it.
The dead guy’s skin was pastier than Rankin remembered, the marks scarring his neck harsher, his blood darker, thicker (in places on him encrusted); his mouth, his nostrils, his eyes, staring fixedly at the ceiling, teemed with black flies; his broken-toothed expression might, in isolation, have been a grin or leer; the stink of him rotting added to the offal-and-piss stench as much a part of him as it was a part of the waste-permeated clothes half-torn from him.
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