Rankin felt vaguely sad and disappointed by the scene, a feeling similar to how he used to feel after flunking a grammar school test he knew he’d been smart enough to pass.
He recalled he’d been unable to picture the dead guy alive.
He tried to envision him living now—walking, talking, reading a book; still, he could picture him only as a mutilated, stinking corpse.
He picked up from the floor behind him a multi-colored throw rug and draped it over the body. The four foot rug covered the corpse only down to its knees.
He strode across the room, sat down on the lowest step of the stairs, picked up a walnut, opened it with his palms, dropped it in pieces at his feet. He gazed out at the upturned furniture, broken glass, smeared blood, scattered nuts, smashed telephone, festering human cadaver; as if it belonged to a person who had just come into the house and found him there, a voice inside him asked of him, Who was it that did this? Who is it that has come back to it?
Rankin picked up a pecan and randomly threw it toward the landing at the top of the open stairway right of him. The pecan hit a crystal chandelier hanging from the vaulted ceiling over the landing, scaring from the light an orange-and-black parrot. Watching the bird wing across the room, Rankin thought, it better not call me no names. It better not say to me a Goddamn thing.
The bird disappeared, squawking, down the far hallway.
Rankin gazed back up at the chandelier (transparent teardrops dangled from its bottom). Rankin couldn’t remember having seen it before today, ever. He decided that must mean something; he couldn’t say why or what it might mean. He speculated that living in a nice home like this one, knowing until you died no one could move you out of it, was about as good of a feeling as a person could have. He scooped up a handful of nuts, flipped them one at time at a large urn near the dead guy, trying to get them in the urn, recalling, as they hit the floor, the sound of falling pinecones landing at night on the floor of those woods he wished now more than ever he’d never left.
He stood, walked to and picked up the smashed telephone. He pressed its reset button, carried it over to and placed the lopsided instrument as best as he could make it fit into the cradle it had come out of. He looked back at the dead guy. He wondered what his name had been. He decided, whatever his name had been, the guy ought not to have to lie there half-exposed that way. He opened a closet left of the door, grabbed from it a man’s raincoat, and lay it over the cadaver’s calves and feet. He shoved the body against the wall. He put a table and two chairs in front of it. Then he followed on foot the parrot’s earlier flight down the hallway.
He remembered finding in the laundry room of an apartment complex he and his mother were then living in a doctor’s or nurse’s smock (a very small person must have owned it because it was only a little big for Rankin, who couldn’t have been more than eleven) and for a week or so walking around wearing the smock over his clothes, determined one day to be a doctor, to make sick people better.
He glanced into a room where six fish lay dead in a neat row on the floor, and, in a tank above them, a single bitten and chewed-on one moved in the perpetual motion that kept it alive. What sounded like a muffled cry or whisper reached him; he saw the parrot perched above the tank, flapping its wings. He wondered idly if this day had for him a tomorrow. He tried, but couldn’t remember what had changed his mind about wanting to be a doctor; nor could he recall, after he’d stopped wanting to be one, ever again wanting to be something special or someone particular or wanting to be anything at all except big enough to not have to take anyone’s shit. He heard from the room he was approaching a noise suggesting a muzzled dog trying to bark. The door to the room was three-quarters shut. He peered inside through the opening at a baby’s crib, without, he remembered, a baby in it.
Or a baby was in it, making to him muted cries.
He pushed the door completely open.
In his head Florence’s voice told him, “Don’t dream it, Charlie.”
The woman looked as if she’d fallen off the loveseat and been unable to right herself. She lay before the crib, partly on her back, partly on her left side, her mouth rhythmically opening and closing (Rankin recalled those green fish dying at his feet) emitting crackly, soft noises he was several seconds realizing were words.
He stepped into the room and over to her.
A folded, knotted scarf blindfolding her was darkly stained and moist, her bound wrists and ankles chafed and bleeding, the wine-colored fingerprints embedded in the flesh of her throat forming a brand to match the one on the dead guy. Rankin understood her to say, “Who’s there?”
He leaned in at her.
“Hello?” the woman hissed.
Rankin knelt down next to her.
“Are you the police?”
Rankin shook his head. Then he recalled the woman couldn’t see him. He said, “I maybe came to the wrong house.”
The woman’s lips stopped moving.
“I was looking for Maynard Cass’s house.”
The woman said nothing in reply. Rankin could feel her trying to draw a picture of him in her mind. He felt naked in the gaze of her thoughts. He said, “You thirsty?”
The woman’s head moved in what he took for a nod.
“I’ll get you some water.”
The woman sibilated words he couldn’t understand.
You idiot, thought Rankin. How could she drink water with her hands tied? He reached down to her ankles and pulled at the cords securing them. The knots were tight. He couldn’t loosen them. The woman’s head rocked slowly side-to-side, bringing to his mind a set of windshield wipers in a rainstorm he had spent a long ride (he couldn’t remember where or when) fixated on. “Swish, swish,” a voice in his head reminded him. Rankin took out his gravity knife.
“He came back,” the woman whispered.
Rankin threw out the knife blade. He imagined the woman flinching as it clicked open.
“He was ready to go—he was half out the door—and he came back—I was sure this time he would kill me for good— the hate, the anger—but then, then something in him—and he tied me tighter and, and, my eyes—”
Those eyes locating Little Charlie finally even behind his mask.
Rankin cut the cord from her ankles. Then he brought the knife up and severed the one securing her wrists. The woman seemed not to grasp that she was free. She lay still, moving only her hands, flexing them crab-like by her sides. For seconds, maybe minutes, she flexed them (they were bone-white and spotted purple). Rankin, avoiding looking at her blindfolded face, watched her fingers working in the air like the legs of two varmints being held up by the scruffs of their necks.
“He’s at 210.” The woman’s haunted whisper might have been the scream of a person trapped deep within her. “The man you meant to see.”
Rankin folded his knife.
“You’re at 212.”
Rankin slipped the knife into his pocket. He said, “I ain’t got to see him right away.”
The woman stiffened some. “He couldn’t, could he, be here still?” Her question seemed to be directed not at Rankin, but to the wall past his head, a few feet below the ceiling.
Rankin wasn’t sure who she was referring to; then he guessed she was referring to Little Charlie. “Nobody but me’s here,” he told her.
“And my husband. You’ve seen my husband?”
“I guess so. Somebody in the big room.”
“My husband’s dead. He killed my husband in front of me.”
“Best you not think about that now.”
“I tried to stop him.” The woman’s muted voice contained no inflection; she might have been reporting to Rankin the weather. “He was too strong.”
“He was one person?”
“I didn’t hear a heart in him, even when he was on top of me, killing me.”
“A man alone?”
“He had no voice. No face.”
“Not a boy?”
“A boy? A boy couldn’t kill my husba
nd. A boy couldn’t do what he did to me.” Rankin looked up from the woman’s hands, at the tightly twisted scarf concealing her face above her nose. He couldn’t remember, even in one of Little Charlie’s dreams, anything happening in this room past when Little Charlie’s mother’s eyes had suddenly accused Little Charlie of causing everything.
Rankin stood up. “I’ll be a minute fetching the water.”
“I offered him what was in our safe.”
“What?” said Rankin.
“He wouldn’t even hear me. It didn’t matter to him.”
Rankin felt as if she was telling him about this guy he’d heard about but didn’t know well, a guy she’d maybe gotten a handle on after spending time with and could fill him in on.
“What was he after if he wasn’t after what you offered him? “
“To do just what he did do.”
“What do you mean?”
“To torture us, to mutilate us. To murder my husband. To make me at once wish that he’d murdered me and grateful to him that he didn’t.” Rankin found the woman’s matter of factness, the monotonous cadence of her hollow whisper eerie, as if her voice were coming from a cassette deck playing inside her.
“Why would he pick out you and your husband to do that to?”
The woman moved painstakingly up into a half-sitting position against the loveseat. She’d made no motion to remove her blindfold. Nor had Rankin. Suddenly Rankin felt as if he were grasping at air while falling increasingly faster through it toward the ground. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Maybe it was a mistake.”
“A mistake?”
A vision of the woman’s eyes watching him independent of her hit Rankin. He suppressed a strong urge to get down on the floor and search under the furniture for them. “A guy don’t do what he did without a reason.”
The woman said in her crepitating voice, “I care less about him or his reasons than I care about a single bug being stepped on.”
The thought struck Rankin that a criminal any good would have emptied the guy’s safe, that someone who had done what had been done in this house and hadn’t emptied the safe wasn’t much of a criminal; Rankin wasn’t sure what he was.
He walked from the room and down the hall toward the bathroom.
He remembered a doctor (the doctor’s breath had smelled of peppermints) urging Little Charlie to tell the doctor the truth about how Little Charlie’s face had gotten filled with the dozens of glass shards the doctor had just pulled with forceps from it, promising Little Charlie if he did tell the truth he’d be safe and bad things would never happen to him again, and the doctor’s disappointment (Little Charlie had felt like crying for how sad the doctor had seemed) when Little Charlie had insisted to him he’d tripped and fallen face-first onto a mustard bottle just like Little Charlie’s mother had told the doctor.
Specks of blood dotted the sink farthest from the bathroom door. Rankin rinsed out the blood. He opened the medicine cabinet above the sink. Why hadn’t the woman, an internal voice inquired of him, taken her blindfold off when Rankin had freed her hands? Why hadn’t Rankin taken it off for her? Why was Rankin, as he stood there, suddenly petrified at the thought of looking into the baby’s crib? What didn’t Rankin remember happening last night just after, he remembered, the woman’s eyes had turned that way on Little Charlie? A sensation more horrible than the feeling of falling faster and faster at the ground hit him; a sensation of falling at nothing, of falling with no chance of landing.
He took from the cabinet a plastic cup and an aspirin bottle.
Even after Little Charlie had disappointed him, remembered Rankin, that doctor had given him a silver badge that said on it, “I never cried.”
He drew water into the cup. He brought it and the aspirin bottle back to the woman. He fit the cup into her right hand. The woman gripped the cup, though didn’t seem aware of doing so. “I haven’t forgotten even a little bit.”
“You’d maybe be better to,” said Rankin.
She shook her head. “And I don’t want to either. I’ll be able to help the police, even though I didn’t see his face, with the tiniest details.” Her robe gaped somewhat at the top, partially exposing her breasts to Rankin. Rankin wondered if she would be more embarrassed if he told her about the break, if he reached over and closed it, or if he said or did nothing and later she discovered the robe had been open before him all that while. Best, he thought, to ignore it. “He had a smoky, road-weary smell. I imagined someone who’d spent a lot of time on buses and in crowded places, picking up other people’s smells.” She lifted the cup to her lips, her hand trembling, water dribbling onto her.
“His teeth were white—he couldn’t have been a smoker, the smoke smell must have been from someone else—and straight. And horrible. Perfect teeth in a monster’s mouth.”
She sipped some water. She lowered the cup, moaning. “His nose was cut. Maybe it’ll scar.”
“Cut how?”
“I think my husband caused it.”
She moaned again.
Rankin imagined that they were sharing the same pain, that they both hurt so bad everywhere that no part of them hurt the worst. He shook four tablets from the aspirin botde; he put them in the woman’s hand not holding the water glass. “What are they?”
“Aspirins.”
The woman lowered her head silently at her palm.
“They were in your medicine cabinet.”
“You’re a doctor.”
“No.”
“A doctor or paramedic’s on the way?”
“With the police.”
“How long will they be? I don’t want to forget things. I have a lot to tell them.”
“They won’t be long. You can tell me and when they get here I’ll tell them whatever you don’t.”
The woman held the aspirins in her hand, facing Rankin. Rankin had a vision of two empty holes, where her eyes should have been, aimed at him. “He wore new boots.”
“How do you know they were new?”
“They squeaked.”
“Squeaked how?”
“When he walked.” The woman swallowed wincingly. “I remembered them when I heard yours squeaking on your way toward me.”
A painting on Buddha’s cell wall of a guy strolling down a busy sidewalk, a black-and-white, bland figure in a crowd of fully fleshed-out people wearing bright colors, above the caption “A Dangerous Man.”
“Where’s the baby?” asked Rankin.
The woman’s tongue, swollen and cracked, touched gingerly her lips, absorbing from them a single drop of water. “I don’t know what you mean. There is no baby.”
“There’s a baby’s crib in here.”
“I was going to have a baby but last week I lost it.”
“To who?”
“To God. He took it from me, after I’d carried it seven months.”
“See the kinds of things He does? And people pray to Him.”
“Did you call the police from the other room? Is that why I didn’t hear you at it?”
Rankin touched the woman’s hand holding the aspirins. “Best chew ‘em ‘fore you swallow ‘em.”
“Do what?”
“Shape a your throat it’ll hurt less.”
The woman moved her head slowly left, then right, as a seeing person would do to get their bearings upon waking in an unfamiliar setting. “Maybe I haven’t been lying here alone as long as I thought,” she whispered, again seemingly to some invisible person past Rankin. “Maybe he walked out of the room only a few minutes ago.”
“You’ve been lying where you are a full day,” said Rankin.
“How do you know how long I’ve been lying here?”
“From the looks of things.”
The woman, appearing oblivious of doing so, let the aspirins roll from her palm into her lap.
“My girlfriend”—Rankin liked how it sounded, him saying he had a girlfriend—”she thinks I’ve got a good soul. That with her— another good sou
l—loving me I’ll end up, after all the wrong I done, doing right.”
“Doing right?”
“I’ll know how, she says.”
“Where is she?”
“My girlfriend?”
“Yes.”
“She’s in the car. I left her in my car.”
The woman swallowed again. Rankin imagined her phlegm descending excruciatingly through her. She said, “You didn’t, did you, give the police Maynard Cass’s address? You told them two-twelve, not two-ten, Viner Lane?”
“You must be angry enough to kill,” said Rankin.
“Angry?”
“I would be if I were you.”
“There’s a phone behind me, on the desk. You could call them again—to make sure you told them the right house.”
“Angry enough at God to kill for what’s been done to you.”
“God didn’t break into my house. God didn’t murder my husband and all but murder me. A mute man in a mask did.”
“He created the mute. Ain’t He responsible for that?”
“For creating him maybe. Not for the life he chose to live.”
“What would you know about that mute’s life from your big golf course house life?”
The woman didn’t answer. Suddenly exiting her more rapidly than it had been, air made a whistling sound in her nostrils. Rankin pictured a crowd of tiny people pushing and shoving to escape from her as if from a burning building.
“And He took your baby, who you’d have raised to a good life and He let Little Charlie be born to no life at all—how’s that fair?”
The woman drank and spilled more water. She coughed up some of what she’d half managed to swallow. “Did you tell them—the police”—she sputtered—”there’s no number at the base of the drive? That we’re the fifth house on the right after the club house?”
Rankin could tell she was hurt inside (bleeding from her guts, he guessed); he hurt in the exact way he imagined she did. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“What?”
“That you’re the one to take the brunt of it.”
Boot Tracks Page 18