Whirlaway

by Poe Ballantine

  “Too bad,” I said.

  “Wherever he goes now he does well.”

  “He seems fragile to me,” I said.

  “I hope this is my last Bay Minette trip,” he said, getting a mouthful of macaroni. “Hey, Donny!” he called.

  Donny wandered over, holding down his hat as if the wind might steal it. He looked like a rakish, spine-twisted, one-eyed Howdy Doody. “Mom is in heaven,” he said.

  “That’s right, Donny. Go pee now. We got a long drive ahead of us.”

  32.Whiplash I Was Taking a Bath

  AFTER SHELLY LEFT TO TAKE DONNY BACK TO ALABAMA I WATCHED his business once more. He did not bother to leave me any order forms or petty cash, not a single comment, bit of advice, or cross remark about the Japanese. Two weeks passed before an actual letter arrived, written on blue-ruled paper in his big round style.

  Eddie: Found a place for Donny with our Aunt Floss, not really an aunt but a second cousin who lives in Carrollton (north). She lives alone in a big house that my grandfather built. Donny likes her, even if Donny likes everyone. I think it will work out. After I took him to the cemetery to show him Mom’s and Dad’s graves he said that he was going to die too, but I know humans can’t simply die because they want to die. If we could I would’ve done it long ago. Ha ha. He says they’re in heaven now, which shows that he has no memory of what they were like, but he is eating again pretty well so he had enough energy to make the trip. I think he will be all right. I’m headed home tomorrow. Need to get out of the South. Think I am allergic to rednecks and black-eyed peas. See you in three days.

  Shelly didn’t return, however, in three days. It was well over a week before I saw him again. I was in the record room with Sweets sorting through the bundles of records that he had bought at the KLIK auction and never bothered to open. It was a fabulous haul, a year’s worth of revenue. Many duplicates, and many routine ten-dollar discs, but that’s what you need when the same people want the same records over and over. There were a few jackpots too: a seven-inch single of “Kissing in the Dark” by Memphis Minnie on J. O. B. Records worth about three hundred and Tom Crook and the Rock ’n Roll Four’s “Weekend Boogie” on Dixie worth close to a grand.

  The record-room window was open, and before I heard a car pull up in the driveway, Sweets said, Shelly’s here.

  There was talking, and I heard Shelly’s muffled thanks. I thought, well, he’s brought someone with him again, or maybe it’s Donny because Aunt Floss didn’t work out. I heard the car door closing, then the gate squeaking open. Looking out the open louvered windows, I saw a taxi pulling away. The front door whacked shut and Shelly appeared at the foot of the hall wearing a neck brace and a bandage on his elbow. Sweets and I went down to greet him. Stripes of sunlight from the open door fell across his upper body. His face had changed. He looked around as if he might’ve not known his own house.

  “What happened?” I asked

  He sniffed and took a seat at his work table. He wore this disconcertingly open but dazed expression.

  “I was on my way back from Bay Minette,” he said, fingering his brace. “I decided to drive in the day because I was almost run off the road the last time by a truck hauling chickens.” He smiled in a way that only people in neck braces can. “It was eleven in the morning and I was going down highway 98 at sixty-five miles an hour, not far out from Mobile, when an old woman in a ’67 Ford Galaxy pulled out in front of me. She had a face like a dried apricot. Her mouth was open. She had these big moronic eyes.” He laughed, as if it were not only a distant but also a fond memory. “My foot never made the brake pedal. I didn’t even have time to think about dying.” He licked his lips. “Just before we collided — I saw the next world.”

  “No,” I said.

  He grinned at me. “I saw it, babe.” He wiped at the air in circles with the heel of his hand. “You were right.”

  “I was?”

  He was so tranquil and glowing it was unsettling. I’d known many people who’d gone through religious transformations, usually because their lives were out of control. This experience seemed genuine.

  “What happened to the old lady?” I asked

  He laughed. “Our cars were totaled. I mean we’re both just sitting there with steering wheels in our hands and the rest of what we rode in on in pieces a mile down the road. Neither of us was wearing a seatbelt. Neither of us was hurt. You should’ve seen her expression.” He squeaked in absurd delight.

  “She must’ve been Catholic,” I said.

  He squeaked again, grabbing his stomach. “Easy on me, babe.”

  “You got a little whiplash.”

  “Yeah, and some bruised ribs and a scratch on my arm. But that’s it!” He held up the arm. “It was a miracle.”

  “How’d you get home?”

  “I took the bus. I was in the hospital three days. Am I dreaming, Eddie?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Am I a ghost? Are we ghosts, Eddie?”

  “Would my hair be cut like this if we were?”

  “I keep thinking about the next world.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “It was the first time I ever felt loved.” Despite the brace, he kept tipping his head, as if he could hear the music of that world where he’d felt for the first time loved. “I didn’t want to come back until I saw my old man standing down at the end there with a golf club. He hated golf.” He laughed until his eyes were wet.

  “Did you see your life flash before your eyes?”

  “Thank God, no!”

  “And you didn’t have any insurance?”

  He waved his hand at me with a wince as he had to quell the habit of flipping aside his hair. “It doesn’t matter. None of that shit I worried about all my life matters.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, wondrously. “I keep thinking about those goddamn little sparrows flying into the orange tree in your window. All my life that was me, a little sparrow flying over and over into a goddamn window. I’m done with that now.” A giggle like a hiccup erupted from his throat.

  “What about your business?”

  He threw down his hand. “Take it if you want it. I don’t ever want to see another piece of mail from Japan again.”

  “Tell me something. I’ve got to know.”

  “What is it? Anything, man.”

  “About the Tijuana prostitutes.”

  “The what?”

  “The missing prostitutes whose bones were found in the incinerator at La Zona Basura.”

  He stared at me a while incredulously. “What are you talking about?”

  “I couldn’t help but notice the articles that you’d clipped for your killer scrapbook.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And the burn marks up your door. I saw the same markings on another truck that pulled away from the incinerator at the dump in Tijuana.”

  “Yeah, I go there all the time, babe,” he said, lifting his palms. “It’s free, man. They charge you to burn your trash at the landfill here.”

  “Right, of course, right. Just thought maybe . . .”

  “Thought maybe what? That I was killing them?”

  “Why else would you snip the articles?”

  “I thought it was you, babe.”

  33.Mister Jang-Jingler (Dance)

  HEAD ON MY ARMS ON THE CUSHIONED BAR AT MOBY DICK’S, Tuesday afternoon, just me and Soo and a couple of men down the way dressed like Jackie Kennedy, both wearing blood-spattered double-breasted pink Chanel wool jackets and matching pillbox hats. The news was on the big TV up in the corner. They were running the Tijuana prostitute story again with alternating shots of bordellos and the big chimney at La Zona Basura. A few moments later Dr. Horace Jangler, my old bogus psychiatrist, was standing in front of a weather map indicating a low-pressure system with the sweep of his hand.

  “Can you turn that up, Soo?” I said.

  “Weather never change here,” she grumbled,
turning up the volume with the remote.

  “I know that guy. How long has he been the Channel Eight weatherman?”

  “All look same to me,” she said with a shrug. “You want one more?”

  “Yeah, can I use your phone?”

  She placed the telephone and a directory on top of the bar. I looked up the number of Channel Eight.

  “He can’t come to the phone now,” was the reply when I asked if I could talk to the weatherman.

  “Will you leave him a message?”

  “Of course.”

  “Tell him Willie Wihooley wants to see him.”

  “Wihooley.”

  “Yeah.” I spelled it for her. “Tell him I’m at Moby Dick’s. Tell him it’s urgent. I’ll wait for him.”

  “Moby Dick’s?”

  “Yeah, it’s a bar, in Del Mar.”

  “Okay.”

  I replaced the receiver and turned to the door as if Jangler might have the power to instantly materialize. It was an hour and a half before he strolled through the whale’s mouth, still wearing his weatherman suit. He was larger than I recalled and his gray locks were shorn. He moved briskly with an emphatic gunslinger swing of the shoulders.

  “By golly, Willie Wihooley, it’s good to see you,” he said, grinning broadly and extending a hand. We had an enthusiastic handshake.

  “Dr. Jangler,” I returned. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

  “I’m Dr. Jingler now,” he said. “With each new incarnation I like to change a vowel.”

  “Well that’s just fine,” I said. “I hope you never run out of vowels. Let me buy you a drink.”

  “I’ll take one of those tankards,” he said, indicating my schooner. Soo was already pulling.

  I slapped a stack of bills on the bar.

  Dr. Jingler mounted a stool and looked around. “Saw Bad Brains here in ’82.” He had a gulp from his schooner. “Hasn’t changed much.”

  “I almost fainted when I saw you on the news,” I said. “I thought you were going to be a cosmologist.”

  “I’m a cosmologist at heart, Willie,” he said.

  “You can call me Eddie,” I said. “I think we’re safe here among the freaks.” I looked over at a glowering Soo. “Present company excluded.” I returned my attention to Jingler. “Tell me why meteorology.”

  “Well, the job was open and weather has always appealed to me. It’s the sort of conversation that everyone enjoys having, and much like psychiatry you can’t go wrong with a bad prediction. And like psychiatry you have these tremendously vague concepts such as El Niño that explain just about everything. Of course you do get the occasional angry letter from airline pilots and so forth, you know: Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies can predict the weather better than you.” He had a chuckle and a gulp of beer. “Oh well, you can’t please them all.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “It’s a great gig. I belong on TV.” He looked me over. “You look good, a little thin. You off the meds?”

  “Only taking this,” I said, proudly holding up my Asthma Attack.

  Soo had primed the jukebox and the air was filled with the steady treacle of Jack Jones and Doris Day. An old kyphotic man entered, hat squashed in his hands, squinting into the darkness and glancing anxiously at a statue of Ahab wielding a harpoon to his left, then down the way at the Jackie Kennedy twins. He smiled when he saw Soo.

  Dr. Jingler loosened his tie. “So, tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself since you jumped into the Napa River?”

  “Well, I’m dealing records for a friend of mine. Not a bad living. Playing the horses here and there. And I’ve got a place up the hill in a little barrio my father built back in the fifties.”

  “Isla Escondida?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Been there many times,” he said. “But not since the poinsettia days. What’s on your mind anyway? Your message said urgent.”

  “Well I’m glad you asked.” I finished my beer and gestured Soo for one more.

  “Tell me what it is.”

  “You’ve heard about the missing Tijuana prostitutes?”

  “I’ve seen the stories.”

  “For a long time I thought I knew who the killer was. I thought it was my horseracing buddy, Shelly,” and here I outlined his terrible childhood, hypochondriasis, necro fantasies, claim of multiple personalities, lack of official identity, the scorch marks on his truck, his deep and unannounced excursions into Tijuana, the scrapbook, the cage in his garage, and his fond assertion that the serial killer is the last anyone ever suspects in the neighborhood.

  “Most recreational killers are not recreational gamblers,” he observed. “You can only have so much fun.”

  “Well, they’re all different, aren’t they?” I said. “I mean you can profile them, but one is an idiot, another like Bundy has an abnormally high IQ, some like Edmund Kemper are funny, some have normal upbringings, hold down regular jobs, are churchgoers, some are married and have children.”

  “Are you going somewhere with this, Eddie?”

  “It’s just that, well, I’ve been going down to Tijuana on a regular basis myself, to visit the brothels, you know, because of my trouble with women and all that stuff you already know about.”

  He only stared at me, his tankard suspended. “What are you saying?”

  “It’s just funny that I don’t remember much afterward and I always go to church.”

  “Are you saying you think you might be involved in some way with these missing prostitutes?”

  “Well, um, possibly, yes.”

  “Do you have any specific recollections?”

  “I remember names, places.”

  “Do you have any proof of malice?”

  “None,” I replied.

  “And do you feel imperiled or in any way at risk?”

  “Always. But here’s the part that bothers me the most. When I decided to drive down to the incinerator at La Zona Basura to have a look at it, I had no problem finding it.”

  “It’s a rather obvious structure, billowing smoke and hundreds of feet tall, yes?”

  “But I knew right where it was, as if I’d been there before.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “And Shelly seems to think I’m the killer because of course I’m the one who was court-mandated to a psychiatric hospital and tagged a sexual predator.”

  He knuckled his forehead for a time and said, “It seems unlikely that you’d off prostitutes and throw them into a furnace without any recollection of it. I fear that you’re falling back into old patterns of figment and fancy.”

  “Let me buy you another one,” I said.

  The schooners came. He did not touch his, only kneaded his forehead. “But if you have any real doubts,” he said after a good minute of head rubbing. “Test it empirically. Just go down to Tijuana as you usually do and try to find some of these young ladies you’ve been with. If you can locate enough of them, that should put the matter to rest.”

  “You’re a genius, Dr. Jingler,” I said.

  “One day I hope to find my true calling,” he said.

  34.Back to the Island

  I DROVE TO TIJUANA THE NEXT DAY AND PEEKED IN AT A FEW OF THE old hangouts, but I was unable to track down any of my previous amantes. Of course, Tijuana is a heaving metropolis, fluid with ever-flowing international humanity, and so after getting a hotel room at the Santa Cruz (which turned out to be gay!) I decided I had no choice but to apply Jingler’s test directly. After a late leisurely breakfast I cruised about until I found a cluster of floozies in short skirts out in front of the Miramar Hotel. I parked, got out, engaged a few in light conversation. I found the one who liked me the least and learned that her name was Juanita. She wore black hose, was pale as French bread, and her head was shaped like an oriental vase. I asked, as usual, if she’d like to take a drive to the beach or a restaurant. She said restaurant (bistek), quoted her price, and I gave her double up front.

  After we had dinner and a
drink I considered Jingler’s remarks about old habits and changed my mind about having a meaningless liaison with a woman who hated me, thanked her kindly, and dropped her off somewhat puzzled back in front of the Miramar. Feeling better than I had in years, I found a puesto that sold Kentucky Fried Buches, or chicken neck tacos served with grilled radish greens and pico de gallo, then shopped for records and found a promo seven-inch copy of “Timothy” by the Buoys on Scepter, 1971, with sleeve, the song about three guys trapped in a mine with no food to eat so two of them cannibalize the third, Timothy, a miner with good taste apparently.

  I stayed again in Tijuana that night, moving to a hotel not far from the Estadia Caliente, and the following morning I ran into Xena, an eighteen-year-old streetwalker (named after the Warrior Princess on television) I’d known a time or two before. Xena had lustrous plump orange lips and short hair that curled behind her prominent ears. She was thick legged with a big rump and wore white preposterously tall high-heeled shoes. I was so happy to see her I gave her twenty dollars, kissed both of her big ears, and wished her Feliz Navidad, even if it was September. She was nonplussed.

  Later that day in the Zona Rio I found Tamarinda, a tall gaunt woman who specialized in spanking and school uniforms, which normally excited me, but now I was only terribly glad to see her. We went up to her cuartito and I just sat with her on the bed. She seemed to be content with this. I read a newspaper for half an hour, the scent of the mattress like Arabian camels and the smoke from train-station cigars. She did not remember me and asked if I was rich. I said no, (¿de donde?) fuera bueno, so she decided, as she had the time before, that I must be a student. We talked about the narcos coming in and buying up all the brothels. She said her family back in Michoacán thought she was working here in a maquiladora, but she could make three times more in one trick than a whole day of labor in a maquiladora. I gave her enough money for twelve days in a maquiladora and vigorously shook her hand. Tamarinda was one of the tallest Mexican women I have ever known.