Mesopotamia

by Arthur Nersesian

  For effect, I slammed the door indignantly as I got in. Gustavo stirred when I turned the key and sped away.

  “Did we win?” Gus muttered groggily.

  “He thought I was Chesty Chung, Connie Chung’s voluptuous sister.”

  “Huh?”

  “I got to speak to his connection for only two hundred and forty bucks plus all the rubber he could photograph.”

  “Suppose he discovered the hoax you were perpetrating,” Gustavo mumbled as he watched me yank the ridiculous prosthetic out of my shirt.

  “Then I would’ve flashed the real ones, which were less than a hundredth the size of his man boobies. Hell, I did him a big favor. He’s going to be in his shower all night, plunging his own drain.”

  “So what exactly did all that get you?” Gustavo had pulled the rubbery boobs over his own droopy chest.

  “A one-way ticket back up to Daumland.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought I saw her in his photographs, but it seemed too far-fetched.”

  “Whose photos?”

  “I think Scrubbs knew Missy was cheating on him. After all, he hired him.”

  “Who hired who? What in the Fallujah are you talking about!”

  “I told you. Last night I got suckered into checking out a possible homicide up in Daumland.”

  “I’m lost.”

  “The plumber’s friend said he saw Missy Scrubbs with some rural Romeo who drove an old pink Caddy.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “I saw a pink Cadillac yesterday parked behind the bar called the Blue Suede Shoes—and a cutout of the Elvis pompadour is the logo on their sign.”

  “So?”

  “We’re going up to a small town near my mom’s house to find the car owned by the guy who Missy Scrubbs was kissing a few weeks ago.”

  “Well,” he mused philosophically, “I guess getting drunk up there is no different than getting drunk down here.”

  We drove to his motel where he cleaned out his room.

  “Be careful if you’re driving tonight,” said the cordial hotel clerk before we exited. “The weather gal says the remnants of Hurricane Irene are passing through.”

  After Gustavo dumped all his belongings into the trunk of my car, I followed him to the rental agency and he returned his vehicle.

  He came out of the office, staring down the boulevard away from me. When I honked, he turned his large granite head and I could see tears in his eyes.

  “You okay?” I called out.

  “I tried to be a father to that boy, I swear.”

  As the sunset faded and the sky grew darker, neither of us spoke for a while as I headed northeast along Interstate 40. Daumland is loosely a midpoint between Memphis and Nashville. Since he seemed to be in mourning, I tried my cell phone, but couldn’t get any signal.

  I broke the silence after an hour or so: “There’s this young widow who lives up here in Daumland with seven kids.”

  “Seven, wow! I don’t think I’ve even ejaculated that many times.”

  “Her husband got drunk and blew himself up a few months back while cooking crank, but he was involved in some funny business.”

  “What’s funnier than getting blown up in a crystal meth lab?”

  “I’m not quite sure, but his wife thinks he wound up getting killed by the same guy who killed Elvis Presley.”

  “You stumbled across all this while visiting your ma, did you?”

  “Yeah. She lives in a town right near Mesopotamia.”

  “Earl was killed in Mesopotamia,” Gus said. “That’s what Iraq is, you know.”

  “The cradle of civilization,” I recalled.

  “And we’re the graveyard of civilization. That’s what I feel with every new article I write, every fluff piece on Britney and Amy …”

  “And Twinkle Toes McGillicutty,” I kidded.

  “Mess-up-o-tamia—that’s where we live.”

  “True, but I don’t really think tabloids are killing America.”

  “No, neither is bad government or corporate corruption or religious fanaticism—but altogether they are slowly bleeding us dry. And for our part, instead of pursuing real news stories like the fact that boys like my nephew Earl are dying for absolutely no reason, while companies like Halliburton grow richer and move to Dubai, we’re hunting down supermarket fodder.” He then lapsed back into silence.

  After another thirty minutes, the rains started falling just as my cell phone picked up a signal. I made a call to my New York neighbor whose named rhymed with asshole to see if there had been any change on my homeless status. Upon getting Wanda’s recording, I hung up, knowing she’d never call me back. Despite—or due to—the mix of drumming rain, an Eminem CD, and Gustavo’s baritone snore, I found myself growing increasingly drowsy. If my cell hadn’t chimed when it did, I might’ve driven off the curvy road. Checking the display, I saw that it was Vinetta, the merry widow. Wishing she’d just go away, I let the call go to voice mail then checked her message. She said she had made a big discovery. Perhaps she had remembered that she was her husband’s killer.

  In fairness, my entire time with her had not been in vain. Because of those poorly exposed photos in Loyd’s cellar file, I had a possible confirmation on the hunch I was pursuing. As the wind and rain blasted, I kept speeding into the twenty-five feet of winding road that my headlights barely illuminated.

  The further northeast I drove, the more runny red circular flashes of reflective mirrors replaced roadside lights. The outer rings of Hurricane Irene were moving upstate at an alarming rate. No high-speed windshield wipers could’ve improved the smudged view of dark swirls, which was all that was visible.

  Finally conceding that I was driving blind, I pulled over and waited for the deluge to subside. Gustavo slept the entire time. After forty minutes I was beginning to worry that the road was going to get washed out from under us, so I slowly resumed driving.

  Around midnight, in the face of a demonic wind, I spotted a sign that welcomed me to the submerged township of Daumland. Gustavo slept through the occasional broken branches whacking into the side of the car. He snored through a ferocious pelting of what must have been golf ball–sized hail on the windshield. It was the roar of a freight train that eventually awoke my colleague from his slumber. As I stared ahead in terror, the first thing he did was pull a Dixie cup out from thin air and carefully fill it with his silver flask. Little streams of water were trickling through the sealed doors.

  “Did we drive into the Mississippi?” Gustavo shouted, holding his little cup in one hand and the flask in his other.

  “I don’t know!”

  “What’s that fucking sound?” He peered out into the dark netherworld. “We’re not on any train tracks, are we?”

  At that moment, we started moving, but it wasn’t forward. We were slowly spinning counterclockwise.

  “Oh shit!”

  I had unwittingly driven us into a fucking tornado! As we spun once, twice, three times, I instinctively clung to the sides of my little car. Fearful that any moment might be my last, I glanced over at Gustavo. He was happily slurping from the top of his cup as though we were on a carnival ride.

  When we finally stopped spinning, and the incredible deluge started tapering away, I assumed he was still preoccupied with his nephew’s murder as he muttered, “I sure hope he didn’t suffer.”

  “I’m really sorry,” I said sincerely.

  “Where the hell are we?” he asked, apparently hoping to change the subject.

  “Near the Blue Suede, I suspect.” My car didn’t display any noticeable damage, so I slowly resumed driving.

  “And what the hell is that?”

  “The roadhouse where I saw the pink Cadillac.”

  “Why is it that every answer you give me only makes me more confused?” He was still clearly out of it.

  Since we weren’t making much headway, I again tried to bring him up to speed: “Remember the plumber’s electrician?”
/>   “Who you showed your tits to!” he exclaimed happily.

  “Kind of. Anyway, he saw Missy Scrubbs—”

  “The missing child bride!” he shouted out as though on a game show.

  “He saw her in a mall near here kissing some guy in a car, and I believe I saw that very same vehicle out here.” I spoke slowly as though to a child.

  “So what now?”

  “I thought if we could find the car and follow it, maybe we can find the child bride.”

  “Sounds like a great idea.”

  “Thank you,” I said, still driving along through the dark rain.

  As I recalled the pink Cadillac with the Elvis decal parked in the lot behind the Blue Suede, I also remembered something else. “Jesus.”

  “What?” Gustavo stirred.

  “When I was in the woods behind that saloon, I saw a rectangular mound of freshly plowed dirt.”

  “You think it’s a grave?”

  “I hope not. But it looked like a strange place to put a flower garden.”

  “Tell me again about this saloon?” He was too tired to grasp all the other messy details.

  “Just let me handle it.”

  “Wake me up when we get to this honky-tonk, cause I definitely need a drink.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  When the blue sign finally caught the glare of my headlights—The Blue Suede Shoes Tavern—I turned into the lot, past a couple battered pickups, and drove toward the dilapidated garage in the far corner. Just as I remembered, a pink Cadillac was parked there; I pulled up behind it. In the headlights through the streams of rain I could make out the Elvis pompadour bumper sticker that the electrician had mentioned on the phone. The only problem was that the plumber’s informant had described an old beat-up Caddy. This one was brand spanking new.

  It was time to show where I excelled beyond all others. As I located a flashlight and took off everything that I didn’t want drenched, Gustavo again woke up.

  “We’ze low on der drinky. And I … I need to take a leaky,” Gustavo tried to rhyme. He was grinning with his eyes closed. Even though he was slurring and his bladder was filled beyond capacity, he still wanted to squeeze more alcohol into his system. Since this was more characteristic of me than him, I knew he was still trying to blot out his profound grief.

  “I’ll be back in a flash and we’ll get a new bottle together.”

  Opening the door was like popping the hatch of a submarine. I was grateful for the relatively mild winds as I walked over to the pink Cadillac and looked inside: two shiny, empty seats. There was nothing in there indicating an abduction, let alone a murder, had taken place. In fact, it looked like it had just been driven off a 1960s car dealer’s lot. Still, I knew that if a crimescene unit were able to dust and scour the vehicle, they’d turn up some print, fiber, or telling residue. So I didn’t even try opening the door lest I should inadvertently wipe any of it away. I went over to the wooden garage and tried the warped door; it was padlocked shut. Walking around back I looked into one the cobwebbed windows. Again, no great secrets were yielded. It seemed plausible that the body might turn up under that fresh mound of dirt in the hillside. Taking a deep breath, I trudged up the same hill I had climbed a few days before. After getting hit by countless pelts of Spanish moss dangling from the many oaks like nature’s own car wash, I was utterly soaked. In the muddy darkness, I eventually located that rectangular plot of quicksand. While stomping around in it, my right foot sunk deep into the earth and rose up shoeless.

  With no shovel in sight, I got on my knees in the warm mud and started slinging handfuls of black water downhill, looking both for my missing shoe and the possible remains of one Missy Scrubbs. Thanks to the driving rain, the mud from the sides of the hole kept rushing back in with every scoop. Five, ten, fifteen minutes later, having found neither my shoe nor her body, it felt as if I hadn’t actually dug any deeper; I was merely diverting the slow flow of a mudslide. I would’ve kept digging, at least for my shoe, had the gun blast not brought me to my feet.

  Scurrying down the hill, I could see a red light spinning through the trees. In the foreground a flashlight was pointing uphill in the woods toward me. A walkie-talkie broke through the pitter-patter of rain.

  “Yeah, I need an ambulance pronto!”

  Relieved to see that whatever was happening was nowhere near my car, I called out as I approached.

  “Hands up!” I heard a sharp voice shout out. Two flashlights from different angles caught me coming down that dark hill.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, lifting my drenched hands above me. As I stepped closer I could see the body not far from where I had seen the dead Elvis impersonator a few days ago. Moving closer, I made out Gustavo splayed out over the walkway, groaning. A large old man was bent over him trying to compress his wounds. It was Jeeves.

  “NO!” I raced over and pulled his large wet head into my lap.

  “Who the hell are you!” a cop shouted.

  “His wife!” Only by saying that would they allow me to help him.

  “Just hold on!” another cop said, trying to grab me.

  “I can vouch for her,” Jeeves kindly intervened.

  “Oh dear,” Gustavo mumbled, “I can’t believe this.”

  “An ambulance is on its way,” Jeeves said. He had tied a tourniquet around Gus’s limbs trying to keep the blood concentrated in his torso. Yet it did no good. Blood was bubbling out of him. Sitting there, I pressed my hands down over the big hole in his chest, but it was useless.

  “I’m going to die here,” he smirked, “in the state that Gore lost to Bush, costing him the election.”

  “That’s Florida.”

  “But Gore didn’t serve Florida in Congress for sixteen years … He should’ve won this state hands down … And if he did, we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq and Earl would still be alive … And I wouldn’t’ve needed that drink.”

  “You can’t blame all that on Tennessee,” I replied, though I knew that he was half-joking. When he didn’t respond, I whispered goodbye and just held him until Jeeves gave me a gentle nudge.

  “Who the fuck shot him?”

  “We’ll ask the questions,” said the first uniform who had spotted me. “What were you doing up there?’

  “Whoever shot him is a murderer.”

  “You are trespassing,” said the single African American cop in the group. “You have the right to—”

  “I know my rights! How about arresting the racist son of a bitch who shot Gustavo!” I yelled, searching around for those fat drunken losers I had seen in the bar who looked like they were just waiting for an opportunity to kill someone.

  “Ma’am, you’re under arrest for trespassing and disorderly conduct,” said the black cop as he and another guy in a Smokey the Bear hat stepped forward. Out came the handcuffs. I was frisked and, still wearing only the one shoe, loaded into the back of his squad car.

  When we arrived at the station house, I was led into a small interrogation room, where I was offered a towel and a cold cup of coffee. Then I was asked to take a blood test, which I consented to since I wasn’t caught driving and really didn’t think I was that intoxicated. A moment later, the inside of my forearm was swabbed and a hypodermic withdrew a small plunger of blood.

  “Doesn’t it seem odd to you, deputy, that they killed Gustavo in the same exact way they shot that phony Elvis just three days ago?” I asked the arresting officer, who I imagined would be more sympathetic since he was African American.

  “I’ll ask the questions,” he responded without looking up at me.

  “Do they know who shot Gustavo?” I asked, crossing my legs so my bare foot wouldn’t touch the filthy floor.

  “I’ll tell you who shot your friend if you tell me what the hell you were doing up there.”

  “Taking a piss, or at least intending to. We decided to stop for a drink and found the place locked. So I went up to pee in the woods.”

  “Were you driving the vehicle?”

/>   “Nope.”

  “What was your friend doing?”

  “He wanted another drink, he probably tried pulling at the door just like—what’s his name—Pappy East. It was probably one of those old bastards who always sit at the bar! Because I’ll tell you right now, that Snake son of a bitch and his sleazy buddies tried raping me the last time I was there and—”

  “I shot him,” the officer interrupted me.

  “What!”

  “I got a report that a suspicious car had pulled into the closed lot. The Blue Suede closed early tonight because of the weather. I went up to investigate and saw this strange man holding a rifle over his shoulder. When I told him to put the weapon down, he pumped it forward with both hands, like he was loading it, so I shot him.” He paused and added: “We didn’t know until afterward that it was an umbrella.”

  “FUCK!” I remembered the goddamn novelty umbrella sitting on the floor of the car and would’ve taken it myself, but the rain was coming from every direction at once. It would have been pointless using it in a storm like this. He asked me a few more questions, but I just couldn’t talk. My personal effects were removed, then I was fingerprinted, photographed, and a pair of oversized flip-flops were located for me. Since I was permitted one phone call, I dialed the boy editor. Expecting to get his voice mail at that hour, I was surprised when he picked up. I told him that someone had killed Gustavo Benoit and I had been arrested. If he would call someone to try to post bail for me tomorrow morning, I’d greatly appreciate it.

  “Why were you arrested?”

  “Drunk and disorderly and trespassing, I think, but that doesn’t excuse him.”

  “Who?”

  “The cop who shot him.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I guess.”

  He asked for a variety of details, contact information and such, then said: “I’ll call our legal department.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Cassandra, I’m sure you’re a fine reporter and I’m truly sorry about Gustavo, I really liked him, but in this business we’d rather find the news than make it. We’re already regarded as one of the most hated professions, and stories like this don’t help us—”