by Neal Bowers
CHAPTER 8
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DAVIS WATCHED A NN L OUISE drive away, then stood looking at his mother’s house. He didn’t want to go inside but needed his blood meter and insulin.
The contents of his mother’s purse were just as he had left them on the table, and as he passed by on his way to the bathroom, he picked up the condoms and the cigarettes and dropped them into the kitchen trash can. Looking back, he considered how easy it was to edit a life. Ellen now looked more like his version of her—his mother.
No point in checking blood sugar to find out the obvious. So he drew the amount he needed for the breakfast at Moss’s into the syringe, thumping the needle to clear the air bubbles. Then he squirted the contents onto the palm of his hand. Such a small amount. A smell like musky Vaseline. How could the absence of so little insulin mean the difference between life and death? “The elixir of life,” he mused, then filled the syringe again, this time to its limit, and held it up to the light. “Or maybe death.” Lifting his shirttail once more, Davis touched the tip of the needle to his skin. No sensation. He had taken injections for so long he couldn’t feel the point. But there was power in this moment, the power to overdose on the only thing that would keep him alive. He felt the irony as a shortness of breath, a chill at the nape of the neck. Until a bead of blood formed where the needle slightly depressed the skin, Davis couldn’t break his focus. It was his blood, his life. He pushed the plunger, watching the little stream arc into the sink, then drew up the right amount and jabbed himself, wanting to live.
*
Needing to escape the emptiness of the house, Davis decided to drive somewhere, anywhere. He was about to back into the street when he checked the rearview mirror and saw something behind him—LIER, in letters large enough to cover the whole back window. Black letters which, when he glanced over his shoulder, turned inside out and backward. His first thought was the need for literacy among vandals. Could start a school for young thugs, teach them to put the “n” on “damn” and the “e” on “asshole.” Something in him wanted not to rub the word off the glass but to correct it. He got out and scraped at the “E” with a fingernail. Shoe polish.
“It was a kid in a green truck.” The voice was disembodied, and Davis couldn’t locate its source until an elderly woman in the adjoining yard stood up and stepped from behind the bush where she was digging dandelions. She leaned to read the word.
“Did he do anything besides write this on the window?”
“Don’t think so. He parked up the street from my house and walked back. Looked kind of sneaky, so I stayed put and kept an eye on him. Would have called the police, but he was gone in a minute.”
“It’s just a little practical joke.” Davis smiled. “Nothing to worry about.”
“In my day, being called a liar, spelled right or not, was nothing to joke about.”
The woman watched as he backed down the driveway and into the street, and he could see her straining to read the word again as he pulled away. He stopped at the first gas station, intending to scrub the window, but changed his mind. The word suited him. Why should he reject being tagged with it, especially when it also indicted anyone who drove behind him? Maybe this was something like Uncle Oscar’s revelation, this being invested with the Word.
Davis hadn’t realized how wounded Gaylon was. Hadn’t counted on him being the vengeful type, but then he didn’t really know the kid. Hell, he had just tried to show him a shortcut across some pretty rocky ground. If the boy was too proud to appreciate it, too damn bad. Maybe he’d like a big black word on his shiny truck. A couple of words. Maybe a whole goddamned sentence. But he didn’t deserve it. Anyone who couldn’t spell any better than that wasn’t worth a visitation.
It was a little past nine. Almost five hours before he was due at the cemetery. Almost three before visitation at Berkley’s, where Aunt Goldie would be managing the room like a maître d’. Time to kill. To kill time. Killing time. He turned the phrases over and around in his mind until the words lost their meaning and he began saying them aloud, tapping the steering wheel in cadence—time to kill time to kill time to kill timetokilltimetokilltime. Before he knew it, he was singing a medley of songs, “I’m Sorry,” “Moon River,” and “Strangers in the Night,” all with three words as lyrics—time to kill. The universal language. Laughing, he challenged himself to think of a song that the words couldn’t be made to fit but got only as far as “Somewhere over the Rainbow” before cracking himself up: “Time . . . tooooo . . . kill time to kill . . . time to kill.” Music was dead time. Time measured and boxed and repeatedly disinterred, commemorating not only the time of its own composition or performance but also the time expended listening to it. Music was death. This thought struck him with such force that he pulled off the road and got out of the car. “Shit, I’ve wasted my life,” he said, kicking at the gravel on the shoulder.
A utility truck pulled up behind him and one of the men in the cab yelled, “Havin’ trouble?”
Davis walked back to them and said, “No, just thought I’d left my gas cap when I filled up a mile or so back, but I didn’t.”
“So, what’s that on your rear window?” asked the other man, leaning in Davis’s direction.
“That? Oh, that’s a French word, ‘lee-air.’ Hard to translate. Means something like ‘good journey.’ Some friends of mine wrote it there when I took them to the airport. A little Parisian goodwill, I guess.”
“Whatever you say.” The driver put the truck in gear and edged back into the flow of traffic.
Lee Air might be a nineteen-fifties subdivision. Davis inhaled the exhaust of passing cars and let his mind drift with the fumes, thinking of the old billboard on the Fort Campbell Highway. BEL AIR ESTATES, it lied, with a vaguely antebellum rendition of a house. In reality, the development was a scalped field of ranch-style dwellings with attached garages. Close to the army base, it attracted young lieutenants and their families. Olive drab and squalling babies. Homes for the homeless and the far away from home. The kid from New Jersey or Michigan with a bride from the Phillipines or Clarksville, culture shock one way or the other. Trying to make sense of the language, trying to hold down a helping of boiled okra. LIVE ON YOUR OWN BLOCK, the billboard had exhorted.
“Block.” It was a reference to an army-base address. Davis found himself remembering the address hidden in his mother’s coin purse. What was the name of the street? His wallet—he had put the slip of paper in his own wallet. Fanning out the bills on the passenger seat, he found it tucked between two twenties. Block D, 1322 Perimeter Road. Couldn’t be anywhere but on the army base. It tantalized like the answer to a question he hadn’t yet formulated.
As he neared Fort Campbell and the Kentucky state line, Davis tried to remember where the main gate was, then turned abruptly at a sign marked VISITORS. There was the little booth with its blockade arms, exactly as it had been in his childhood; a soldier with MP insignias on his uniform and helmet stepped smartly out of the booth and bent down to look through Davis’s window.
“Yes, sir?” he clicked in a brisk voice, his intonation halfway between a question and an exclamation.
“I’m looking for this address,” Davis said, holding up the creased slip of paper.
After giving it the slightest of glances, the soldier stepped back from the car and said, “Straight ahead, sir, then follow the signs to Block D.”
“Thank you,” Davis said, hesitating a moment, wondering if he should say “dismissed.” This caricature of a guard was almost amusing. When his father had brought the family here to visit friends in the sixties, the security had seemed much more menacing, and the MPs had frightened Davis as they walked around the car, asking to look inside the trunk and peering through the windows at him and his mother. As Davis pulled away now, he could see, in the mirror, the young soldier disappear into his little booth, like a clockwork figure after the hour has struck.
Block D was easy to find, and Perimeter Road, true to its n
ame, turned out to be the outermost street in the residential area. The buildings all looked the same—green and white duplexes with an occasional playground between. Kids at recess were throwing a football, and some of them turned to watch as Davis drove slowly past, trying to read the numbers on the houses. When he stopped and got out of the car, one of them kicked the ball hard in the opposite direction, and they all ran farther away. From the sidewalk, he could see the numbers plainly. Immediately in front of him was 1508. Next door was 1510, so he turned around and walked the opposite way, leaving the car at the curb. When he reached 1322, he stood so long looking at the number that someone came to the front door.
“Whatcha lookin’ for?”
Unable to see the person who spoke from the other side of a screen, Davis tilted his head and walked toward the house, squinting for better vision. “I’m looking for an old army buddy of mine.”
The door opened, and a thin woman stepped onto the front porch. “This is the Haupt residence,” she said.
The woman’s age was hard to determine—somewhere in her forties. Her thinness seemed unnatural, as if she were recovering from a terrible illness. “Bill Haupt?” Davis asked tentatively, hoping his dart would strike the right name.
“No, Roger,” said the woman, coming all the way out to the front steps, her hands caught up in her skirt as if she were drying them. “I’m his wife.” Seeming hopeful of a conversation, she said, “My name’s Amy.”
“I think I’ve got the wrong Haupt. Bill and I did a tour of ’Nam right at the end of the war. Was your husband in-country, in Vietnam, I mean?”
“Yeah, he was there. Middle name’s Dale, though, so he’s prob’ly not the guy you’re lookin’ for.”
“Big fellow with sandy-blond hair. Wasn’t married at the time but had a girlfriend somewhere out west, Wyoming or Utah.” Davis was in total free fall now, tumbling through the descent of his own inventions.
“My husband comes home for early lunch. Should be here any time.” She abruptly turned and went back into the house, leaving Davis alone.
Had he struck too close or too far from the mark? Either she was irritated to think about one of her husband’s old girlfriends or suspicious of Davis’s story. As he turned toward his car, a jeep pulled up beside him and a man wearing sergeant’s stripes jumped out, saying to the driver, “See you at 1300.”
Sizing up Davis, the sergeant snarled, “Who the hell are you?” emphasizing every word as if Davis were supposed to lip-read.
“Roger Haupt, I presume.”
“Never-the-fuck mind who I am. What are you doing nosing around my house? You selling something? No salesmen are allowed on this base.”
“I found your address in my mother’s purse.”
“I don’t damn well care where you found my address; answer my question. What are you doing here?”
Davis started to walk away, but Haupt grabbed him by the arm and spun him back. “I want a goddamned answer.”
“Afraid your wife will find out about my mother?” The question was a desperate counterpunch, a wild roundhouse swing that shocked even Davis. Haupt still had hold of Davis’s arm and began guiding him toward the playground equipment in an adjoining field.
“What did you say to my wife?”
“That’s between her and me.”
“Listen, asshole, you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know anything, and you’re messing around where you don’t belong.”
Feeling the anger rise in him, Davis pulled away from Haupt’s grasp and said, “Yeah, my mother was seeing a married man, who might have killed her for all I know, and it’s none of my business.” Rushed along by his own line of free associations, he was speaking without formulating thoughts.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You were with her when she died, weren’t you?”
“Who told you that?”
“Well, weren’t you?”
Haupt turned and sat down in one of the swings. For a few moments, he rocked back and forth, studying the sand beneath his feet, then looked up. “You’re older than in any of the pictures I’ve seen. Why is this so damned important to you?”
“I need to know what happened to my mother.”
Haupt lifted his feet, letting himself swing slightly. “Yeah, I was with her.”
The confirmation of Davis’s wild guess stunned him. Haupt looked absurd in a child’s swing, wearing his camouflage fatigues, and Davis had a sudden vision of him as a playground bully. “Well . . . ?” he asked.
“Well, what?”
“Don’t be an asshole, Sergeant. You know exactly what I mean. Details—I want the details.”
Looking up with what might have been a half grin, Haupt began, “First she got pretty sick and threw up all over the place, and then . . .”
“Tell me where you and my mother were when she died.” Davis felt light-headed.
“I thought you wanted the dee-tails,” Haupt mocked.
“Where were you when she died?”
“Nashville, at the Howard Johnson’s near downtown.”
“Nashville?”
“We’d been in Printer’s Alley, listening to live bands and drinking a little, and decided to check into a hotel instead of driving back to Clarksville.”
“And my mother died in the frigging Howard Johnson’s?”
“Not many of us get to choose where we die. Anyhow, she wasn’t actually pronounced dead until she got to the hospital.”
“Which one?”
“What does it matter? The heart attack was so massive no one could have done anything for her if she had been in a hospital when it happened.”
“You took her back to Clarksville, didn’t you?” Davis asked, the incredulity in his voice edged with anger.
Haupt pushed off with his feet, increasing the arc of his swing.
“You son of a bitch! You put my mother in the car and drove her forty miles to Clarksville when you could have called 911 and had an ambulance at Howard Johnson’s in minutes.”
Haupt still said nothing, the darker parts of his camouflage uniform making it seem as if chunks of him were disappearing.
“You could have saved her life.”
“Look, I had her at the Memorial Hospital emergency room in thirty minutes, and she was still breathing when I got there.”
“Oh, wow! My hero!” Davis said sarcastically. “I can just see you now, doing ninety on the interstate while my mother dies in the backseat.”
When Haupt replied, he was so close that Davis could hear a small rasp in the man’s sinuses. He hadn’t seen Haupt get out of the swing. “You make trouble for me, and I’m just the man who can return the favor.”
Taking a step back, Davis felt his heart quicken, and his voice tensed with false bravado. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“Maybe you should be. I’m a dangerous man.”
“What if I told your wife about my mother?”
“You wouldn’t want to do that.”
“Maybe I do. Maybe I want to repay you for taking my mother on a death drive up I-24.”
“She wouldn’t believe you.”
“She seemed pretty suspicious already, from my short talk with her.” Davis waited for a response. The kids who had been playing football had all gone back to their studies, and the schoolyard was silent.
“Okay, what do you want from me?”
“The truth.”
Haupt huffed a little laugh. “Big request.”
“Just tell me about you and my mother.”
Drawing in a deep breath, Haupt exhaled slowly, then said, “Not much to tell, really. We met at a bar. Just hit it off, you know. She knew I was married, but it didn’t make any difference to her. Neither one of us was a kid, so we understood what we were getting ourselves into.”
“And you stayed over at her house?”
“Sometimes. Or we’d go to Nashville. One time we drove all the way over to Branson, in Missouri, and spent a weekend.”
“Why do you suppose she never told me about any of this?”
“Why do you think? Look, I’m sorry she’s dead. I cared about her, you know. We had some good times together.”
“Then why did you drag her back to Clarksville instead of getting her some help?”
“She stopped me. I started to call 911, but she said she didn’t want us to be caught together in Nashville. Said we could make it to Clarksville if I’d hurry.”
“She said all this while she was throwing up and having a heart attack?”
“Believe what you want. You asked for the truth.”
“And she was still alive when you got her to Memorial Hospital?”
“Yeah. I carried her into the emergency room and put her on a gurney myself. They were working on her when I left.”
“You left her there alone?”
“I’m not proud of that, but it’s what your mother wanted. She was terrified someone would find out about us.”
“And you discovered her purse in your car.”
“Right.”
“And you returned it while I was away from the house today.”
“Yes.”
Davis walked away, down the street toward his car, and Sergeant Haupt stood so still that he became a blotch on the playground green.
CHAPTER 9
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DAVIS MADE A sloppy U-turn, one he had to back up to complete, and looked straight ahead as he passed 1322. His hands gripped the wheel so hard his arms were shaking, and he couldn’t breathe. Out of view of the Haupts’, he pulled over and rolled down the window, taking in air as deeply as he could.
Sergeant Haupt didn’t fit. He was the wrong man for Ellen Banks, a kind she never could like. A bulldog with cropped blond hair, tattoos on his forearms. A man wearing the signature paunch of his middle fifties. And yet they had known each other—in the biblical sense. Chastising himself for his cautious, almost prudish observation, Davis forced a thought: “My mother was fucking a goddamned GI. A married man.” But the baldness of the assertion, even made silently, caused him to shift nervously in his seat.