The Bleeding Season

by Greg F. Gifune

  Before I could change my mind I forced myself from the car and jogged across the street to Julie’s building. A breeze kicked up but quickly dissipated. Litter and debris blew about at my feet, scraped the pavement then settled quietly.

  Not surprisingly, the front door was unlocked. I stepped through into a closet-like entryway. To my right I saw a row of mailboxes, none of which were marked with anything but an apartment number etched directly into their front panels. The interior door before me led to a short foyer and a worn and dusty staircase with a hallway to its left. There was a strong musty smell, like fresh air seldom found its way here, and the industrial tile floor was filthy, the dark tan walls shabby and stained. I looked up at a ceiling beset with watermarks and thick clumps of dust and grime, and released a lengthy sigh.

  The address in the phonebook had only listed the building number, not any specific apartment, so I moved past the staircase, into a narrow hallway and followed it to the first door. I hesitated, listened a moment. A man and woman were having a rather heated argument on the other side of the thin wall but were speaking Spanish, so I had no idea what they were saying. I moved to the second and only other apartment on the first floor. A small plastic sign that read: Beware of Dog had been tacked to the door, and beneath it was a thick piece of masking tape on which the name Barnett had been printed.

  I returned to the staircase and slowly climbed it, ignoring the spent paraphernalia and telltale rubbish in the corners along the floor that indicated the foyer was a regular stop for neighborhood junkies when shooting up or smoking crack. The entire stairwell smelled of decay. A bleary shaft of sunlight from a window facing the street cut the second floor landing in two. Dust motes danced in the colorless light, sprinkling the shadows just beyond the reach of the sun. I could hear a television playing somewhere nearby, the sound muffled but loud enough to echo throughout the building. Once I’d reached the top of the stairs I looked in both directions—the hallway was empty—then stepped away from the sunlight, into the dusty shadows and toward the first door.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  Startled, I looked to my right; saw the outline of a man standing at the far end of the hallway. “Uh—Hello,” I said awkwardly.

  “Yeah, howdy-do, motherfucker. You deaf?” He came closer, clad in a soiled t-shirt and grungy jeans. His body was gaunt and his gait clipped, as if walking were something of an effort. I noticed a series of dark purple track marks along his arms. His face emerged from shadow to reveal hollow blue eyes that had probably once been piercing but were now faded and foggy from drug abuse. His hair was mussed and badly in need of a shampoo, and black and gray stubble covered his scruffy face. “I asked you a question—who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m looking for Julie Henderson,” I said, squaring my shoulders, “that’s who the fuck I am. Which apartment is hers?”

  Realizing he had failed to intimidate me, the man dropped his tough guy routine and shrugged dejectedly. “I don’t know nobody, all right?” His eyes darted about as he nervously crossed then uncrossed his arms and shuffled his feet like a child in need of a bathroom. When his eyes finally settled on me again they did so with such intensity it was like being stared at by someone who had never seen another human being and was trying desperately to get his mind around the concept. “I don’t know no—nobody.”

  “Look,” I said, relaxing my stance a bit, “I’m an old friend of Julie’s. We grew up in the same town. I haven’t seen her in years and I—”

  “She’s at work.” His statement seemed to surprise him as much as it had me.

  “You live in the building?” I asked.

  The man nodded rapidly then stopped the motion just as suddenly.

  “Does she work around here?”

  “Yeah, she—she should be back any time, OK? Any time now.” He pawed at the bruises on his right arm and shivered slightly. “Any time now.”

  “What apartment does Julie live in?”

  “Same one as me,” he told me through a hard swallow, cocking his head quickly in the direction from which he’d come but indicating only the darkness behind him.

  I was stunned but tried my best to mask it. “You her boyfriend?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’m Alan,” I said, offering a casual wave since I had no intention of touching him. “Alan Chance.”

  “Cool name. Should be a spy or a movie star or something with that name.” The man leaned against the wall and sighed. “You ain’t a cop or nothing like that, right?”

  “Nope, just an old friend of the family.”

  “Julie’s shift ends at two,” he said, wiping some spittle from the corner of his mouth. “She should—she should be home by now, I—I don’t know what the fuck’s taking her so long.”

  I looked at my watch: 2:19. The hell with this, I thought. I wanted out of there anyway. “Well look, let her know I stopped by. I’ll be back around to see her some other time.”

  I turned to leave and nearly ran into a woman standing in the sunlight at the top of the stairs; a paper bag stuffed with groceries tucked under one arm and a set of keys dangling from her free hand. Images fired through my mind’s eye, a veil of memories slowly lifting to expose the woman now standing before me. Gone was the honey colored hair, the clear brown eyes, the perfect complexion and model body. In their place was a rather disheveled and tired-looking middle-aged woman in a polyester waitress uniform, nylons and dingy white sneakers. “Julie?”

  She exchanged a quick glance with the man then returned her focus to me.

  “Julie,” I said again, my heart racing, “you don’t remember me but—”

  “Baby,” the man said from behind me, “please can we take care of that other thing first? You got it on the way home, right? You—you got it, right?”

  I looked back at him, then at Julie. Eyes trained on mine, she gave a slow nod, reached into her uniform pocket and pulled out a small plastic bag. The man blew by me and rushed to her with speed I wouldn’t have guessed he had, snatched the baggy from her hand and shuffled off toward the apartment. “Beautiful, beautiful—I knew—I can always count on you, baby.”

  Julie approached me. “Who are you and what do you want?”

  “My name’s Alan Chance. I’m from Potter’s Cove. Your brother Brian and I used to play now and then when we were kids.”

  “Chance,” she said, expressionless.

  “Yeah, Alan. I was a few years behind you in school,” I said. “Like I say, you probably don’t remember me but—”

  “What do you want?” she asked, this time softly.

  I extended my hand and smiled. She left it hanging there, so I said, “I was hoping maybe you and I could talk for a few minutes.”

  “About what?”

  “Well—look, I—I know this is going to sound strange, but I want to talk to you about someone I think we both knew. Do you remember a kid my age—Brian’s age—named Bernard?”

  A slight crack appeared in her otherwise vacant expression, but she said nothing.

  “Bernard Moore,” I pressed. “Do you remember anyone from town with that name?”

  “I knew it,” she mumbled, as if to herself.

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly. “I’m sorry?”

  Rather than answering or repeating herself, her eyes dropped the length of my body with the detached air of a formal inspection, finally settling then locking on my chest. I looked down, following her stare, and realized the small gold crucifix I wore had come out of my shirt at some point and was dangling over my collar in full view. I grasped it and carefully dropped it back inside my shirt. When I looked back at her she was still staring quite intently, but now directly into my eyes.

  “I don’t mean you any harm, Julie,” I said gently. “I only want to talk.”

  “Not here,” she said in monotone. “Inside.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Despite having been invited in, I still felt awkward and out of place in Julie’s
apartment. We entered in single-file and with an unspoken but shared sense of sorrow—livestock to slaughter—Julie in the lead and myself bringing up the rear. She stepped to the side, let me pass, then closed the door and engaged a vast collection of locks.

  A tiny parlor opened into a substantial but modestly furnished living room, where an inexpensive circular rug covered most of the worn hardwood floor. The furniture was mismatched and old, and the walls had been painted a light gray, which gave the apartment a gloomy feel even in the light of day. Two windows dressed in faded white curtains stood at the rear of the room overlooking an empty playground and an adjacent avenue beyond. Small silver crucifixes dangled in each window, facing the street like sentinels. I pretended not to notice.

  Julie brought me through the living room and into an equally dismal kitchen. A card table, its vinyl top littered with burn marks and small tears, sat in the center of the room surrounded by four folding chairs. A large glass ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts, a deck of cards and various religious books, including an old Bible, lay scattered across it. Suspended from a curtain rod in the window over the sink was another silver crucifix.

  The apartment was filled with religious trinkets and small statues, but I couldn’t be certain if I’d entered a temple or a bunker. I’d not seen a single photograph of her family, or anything that linked her to anyone for that matter, only an impersonal and joyless space that seemed a shrine to isolation.

  Julie motioned to the table so I slid into one of the chairs while she put a kettle of water on to boil and excused herself; vanishing down a hallway off of the kitchen. Though I hadn’t seen him since entering the apartment, I caught a whiff of the pungent odor of cooked heroin, and assumed the man was down that hallway somewhere too, filling what was left of his veins. I was still stunned that Julie had let me in at all, and I couldn’t lose the disconcerting feeling that she’d somehow been expecting me. That was wildly improbable, of course, but it seemed the only reasonable explanation for her saying, I knew it, when I’d first mentioned Bernard, and for allowing a stranger into her home with virtually no questions asked. Coupled with the general feeling of unease the apartment emitted, my nerves were on edge and the back of my neck had begun to tingle. But there was certainly no chill in the stagnant air. In fact, it was then that I noticed all the windows were shut, and I found myself wondering why they would be on such a pleasant spring day.

  I could feel the man’s eyes on me before he emerged from the hallway and glided over to the table. Much calmer and under control now, but to the point of being just barely conscious, he sat down in slow motion and leaned heavily against the rickety table, a ludicrous drug-induced grin on his face. He seemed incapable of small talk so I looked at the Bible without trying to be too obvious. Like the other books on the table, it was tattered and dog-eared, and an inordinate number of pages had been book-marked with small sticky notes.

  But for the man’s slow steady breathing, the apartment seemed impossibly quiet.

  “You ever ask yourself,” he said, slurring the words, “how you got to be here—you know, like—like in this place at this time?”

  I looked into his filmy eyes. “Been asking myself that a lot lately.”

  “You look…tense.”

  “It’s a tense time for me.”

  “Well,” he said, his eyes closing, rolling slowly back into his head, “I figure worry is like this essentially useless, like, thing, you know? Because—dig it—because it like, it like makes us feel safe because it gives us this illusion, this lying-ass illusion that we have power. More power than we really have, you see what I mean? But in the end, man, in the end, all that leads to is fear, right? And fear leads to confusion.” He opened his eyes, smiled at me. “So the way I see it is, we all got to, like, to do whatever we can to clear our heads. You see what I’m saying, man?”

  I wanted to get away from him, but continued to hold his gaze. “Yes.”

  “Questioning where some burned out spike addict gets off tossing around advice, right?” He laughed dreamily.

  The creaking floor distracted me, and I turned to see Julie crossing the kitchen to a row of cupboards above the only counter space in the room. “Hush up now, Adrian,” she said coolly. She had changed into a pair of old jeans and a lightweight sweater, and had let her hair down, which now hung to just above her shoulders. Tied back, as it had been when I’d first seen her, the gray at the roots was far more evident. “Would you like some tea?” she asked.

  “No. Thank you, though.”

  She took two cups and saucers from the cupboard and placed them on the table along with a bowl of sugar, then went to the refrigerator and returned with a small pitcher of milk. She considered me a moment, as if she planned to speak, but instead moved back to the counter and rummaged through her purse until she’d found a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She lit the cigarette with her back to us, only turning around once she’d drawn an initial drag and exhaled it with a sigh.

  Julie Henderson was not aging gracefully. She wore no makeup and had gained some weight, and that, combined with a look of exhaustion and a clearly intentional effort to mask her natural beauty and appear average—if not outright unattractive—gave her a slovenly look. She took another heavy drag from the cigarette, and I noticed nicotine-stained fingers with nails gnawed down to nearly nothing. She was six years older than I, which still only made her forty-four, but in her current state she looked closer to sixty. An unhealthy, emotionally ravaged and physically debilitated sixty. Somewhere nearby, her magnificence remained, buried beneath lines and crevices and dark rings, as if every instance of pain and fear and sadness and loathing had left a physical mark, a reminding scar. The nineteen-year-old bombshell was long dead, and despite her obvious difficulties, living in her place was an adult, a woman, someone of substance, and someone for whom Madison Avenue-defined beauty was clearly no longer relevant or even of interest.

  Julie swept her hair back away from her face. “How did you find me?”

  “Your address is in the book, but I didn’t know you were in Cambridge until Brian told me. I bumped into him in town.”

  “Brian.” She spoke his name as if it left a foul taste in her mouth. “Does he know you’re here?”

  “No.”

  She quietly smoked her cigarette for a moment. “Why did you come here?”

  It was a good question. What had I been thinking—who the hell did I think I was? Whether my suspicions of what had happened years before were accurate or not, what right did I have to appear from nowhere and disrupt this woman’s already difficult life? “It might be better if we spoke privately.”

  “Whatever you have to discuss with me can be said in front of Adrian, it’s all right.” Her tone wasn’t angry but she had obviously already grown impatient. “I trust him completely.”

  I saw Adrian grin and wink from the corner of my eye. My palms had begun to perspire so I nonchalantly wiped them on my pants and attempted a coherent sentence. “Look, I know this is beyond odd—my showing up out of the blue like this, someone you never really knew that well and haven’t seen in years—but I didn’t know where else to turn. It’s probably ridiculous, my being here, but I needed to talk to you, Julie.” I folded my hands and placed them in my lap in an attempt to hold them steady. “I asked before, but—do you remember someone from town—from Potter’s Cove—a boy named Bernard Moore?” This time she gave no reaction, so I described him.

  She drew on her cigarette, the smoke slithering about causing her to squint. “What about him?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “So, what do you want from me, a sympathy card?”

  “He killed himself. Hanged himself.”

  Julie crushed her cigarette in the already overflowing ashtray on the table between us and expelled a final burst of smoke from her nostrils. “What was he to you?”

  “He was my friend.”

  She backed away, folded her arms over her chest and leaned back against the
counter. “Is that a fact?”

  I looked to Adrian almost reflexively, but he was staring at the table as if it were the most miraculous thing he’d ever seen, so I turned back to Julie. “But I think maybe Bernard wasn’t who I thought he was. Some things have come to light since his death that—”

  “What things?”

  I stood up. “Look, I’ve made a mistake. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have bothered you like this.”

  “I saw the news this morning,” she announced abruptly. “A body was found in Potter’s Cove.”

  “Yes. The body of a young woman.”

  “That kind of thing happens around here quite a bit. Bet it’s big-time news in that little shit-burgh though.” The kettle began to whistle. Julie strode to the stove, retrieved it and filled the two cups on the table. It occurred to me how easily she could have scorched me by removing the top of the kettle and flinging the scalding water in my direction, and although she had given no indication of violence, there was a troubled expression on her face that concerned me. “Sit down, Alan. You came here for answers, didn’t you? Why run off now that you’re so close to getting some?”

  Adrian dunked his tea bag and suppressed a giggle.

  I felt myself sink back into the chair, and once Julie had returned the kettle to a cool burner and rejoined us at the table, I said, “You knew Bernard then, I mean—you do remember him?”

  Julie clutched her cup with both hands, brought the tea to her lips and sipped quietly. “I remember he raped me.”

  At that point her answer should not have surprised me. But it did.

  “God, I…I’m sorry, I—”

  “That’s what you wanted to know, wasn’t it? That’s what you came here to ask me about. There’s nothing else, no other reason to link him to me that you’d know about. You already knew the answer. You would’ve had to.”

  “I suspected. He hinted before his suicide that he’d done some things, some horrible things.” I propped my elbows on the table and rested my face in my hands. “God almighty, this can’t be happening.”