Unreliable

by Lee Irby

  “Go away,” Gibson hisses at him.

  He grabs his crotch. “Come get some.”

  “There’s nothing to get.”

  This random scuffle has all the makings for a senseless slaughter. She’s questioned his manhood, and he’s got a gun. Any second he’ll start firing away. I leap in front of Gibson, more than happy to take a bullet for her. But it turns out my valor was unnecessary as the kid spews more venomous insults and then jumps back into the car, which speeds off toward the Poe Museum.

  “That was fun,” I quip once the danger has passed. “I guess you get that a lot.”

  “What?”

  “Guys hassling you.”

  “I guess so. Especially from the idiots who come down here.”

  Even the parking lot attendant gets into the act and tells Gibson how pretty she looks tonight, his voice dripping with lascivious intent. I admit to feeling protective of her, since she possesses the kind of ineffable beauty that makes men behave like beasts. I want to whisk her into the Honda and shield her from this unfeeling world. Together with my drunken mother, I’ll ferry these vulnerable women to safety. But there are still two more I worry about, their whereabouts unknown—Leigh Rose and Lola, one trapped, the other in hot pursuit—and both symptoms of a deeper problem I can’t fix.

  Mead is waiting with my mother outside the restaurant. I pull up, Gibson hops into the back, and my mother wobbles into the passenger’s seat. Mead gives her a peck on the top of the head like he’s seeing a toddler off to preschool, and then we depart.

  “Wasn’t Paula pretty?” my mother asks, as if she can formulate only one thought, that of setting me up with a woman.

  “I already agreed she was.”

  “Smart too. Beauty and brains. Oh, why did I drink so much? I never drink this much! Now Mead’s mad at me.”

  “He’s always mad,” Gibson chimes in from the rear.

  The voice startles my mother, who whips her head around and then back again like her skull is rotating on a broken axle. “Why is she here?” my mother asks as though Gibson can’t hear her.

  “I was bored,” she huffs.

  “You’re always bored.”

  “That’s not true,” I interject, earning a guffaw of rebuke.

  “She says she is, all the time!”

  “I do not!”

  I put the radio on and expect my old favorite, XL102, to come on, but my settings are for Ithaca stations and so static fills the car. We crawl along Main Street, thronged with motorists and pedestrians. At one point I knew all the navigational shortcuts to avoid the traffic, but now I’m stuck like the rubes from the sticks who seldom venture into the big, bad city. Once I find the radio station, some crappy “alternative” song comes on (Papa Roach, I think), but it seems to quiet everyone down. Gibson tells me to take a right and then a left, and soon we’re on Franklin Street and in the clear. My mother falls to sleep with the profundity of a heroin addict, and I can tell by the ghoulish glow emanating behind me that Gibson is on her phone. All is well, so it seems.

  “Can you drop me off somewhere?” Gibson suddenly asks, as we approach the intersection at Lombardy Street. “Please, please, please! We’ve got a gig tonight!”

  “Seriously?” I don’t want to accuse her of lying, especially about anything relating to music, which she knows I consider sacred. My mother actually stirs a little, as if trying to send me a message from the depths of her alcohol-induced stupor. Maybe I should wake her up and ask if Gibson has permission. But she seems out of it, so I’ll have to make the call. Looks like another episode of Pervert Knows Best.

  “Where are you playing? What time do you go onstage?”

  “At the Dungeon. It’s on Broad Street. Like in an hour we can get onstage.”

  “Broad and what cross street?” The light turns green and I accelerate, once again confronted by a half-baked entreaty from this mercurial young woman whose plans change by the minute. My resolve, however, has worn thin, and I don’t feel much fight left in me. If Gibson wants to ruin the weekend by traipsing off with whatever coterie of lowlife she desires, I can’t stop her. Hell, maybe I’ll go check out her band myself…with Paula. Oh my God, make it stop…

  “Broad and Allen. I think it’s near here.”

  “How will you get home?”

  “I can get a ride. Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you! You just made me the happiest person in the world.”

  “Don’t mention it.” The truth is, I live to make young women joyous, whether through grade inflation, harmless flirting, or sordid decrepitude (if they’re so inclined).

  “Graves just texted me. He is so weird.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said I need to be careful tonight.”

  “That’s pretty good advice, especially for you.”

  “I’ve got more common sense than he does. There’s Allen, take a right.”

  I put on my blinker and ease over to the turn lane. As soon as we round the corner, a huge statue comes into view—that of General Robert E. Lee, towering sixty feet over us like a backlit god, regal in the night, still offering the hope of victory to a defeated people. In an interesting twist, I actually find the Lee statue somewhat noble, even elegant, which is hilarious because I know that these impressions spring from my contrarian mood and are intended to counteract Bev’s heated dislike of all things Confederate, especially the statues on Monument Avenue.

  A huge traffic circle takes me around the fenced-off statue that sits on a parklike enclosure, and at that moment it’s crystal clear that I’m no longer myself. Something fundamental has changed within me, a gear has shifted and is now stuck, and I’m speeding along a highway the destination of which remains hidden from me. I shouldn’t be dropping Gibson off at some sleaze bar but I am, acting against my better judgment.

  “It’s around here somewhere,” Gibson says once we reach Broad Street, at one time Richmond’s grand avenue but parts of it remain mired in urban decay, such as this block appears to be. I understand that this is the kind of downtrodden environs where subaltern music blooms, but letting Gibson out here, attired in that dress, near a small deployment of winos and street detritus, strikes me as unduly dangerous. But I do so anyway.

  “There it is!” she calls out, too loudly.

  I pull over in front of the Lucky 13 Tattoo Parlor. The Dungeon looks like it’s situated in the basement, hence its name, and a burly bouncer is perched on a bar stool though no one waits in line to enter. When the car stops, my mother awakens for a brief second but then falls back into slumber. Gibson hops out and promises to be home “at a decent hour.” Luckily the wedding isn’t until the late afternoon, and so she has plenty of wiggle room.

  “Maybe I’ll come down and catch your set,” I tell her, earning a quizzical look.

  “Okay, if you want to.”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “No, that’s cool. They said an hour but who knows. The owners aren’t very organized.”

  Some wraithlike guys carry musical instruments into the club, and I can tell Gibson is eager to join them. I wave her off and then drive away, speeding down Broad Street, eventually passing the old train station, an enormous building that resembles a Greek temple but now is home to a science museum. The only Amtrak station I ever used was located in a tiny little hut next to nowhere in Henrico County, a place without grandeur or romance. During college I would hop on a train bound for Gotham to go see music and generally bop around the Village, where I’d pick out my future apartment. But it never came to pass, did it? Never did make it to NYC after all. But I’ve got no regrets…

  Liar, liar, pants on fire!

  How many regrets can one man possibly have? I’d need a large suitcase to lug them all around. Or cargo shorts from the Gap.

  “Where’s Mead?” my mother groggily asks.

  “He’s driving his mother to the hotel.”

  “Is he mad at me?”

  “He didn’t seem mad.”

 
; “He gets so mad and I try so hard.”

  “Maybe you should think twice about what you’re doing. You could be rushing things. I don’t see why you need to be in such a hurry. If you have doubts, now is the time to question. Don’t you think? I don’t mean to be such a jerk—because I want you to be happy—that’s all I care about.”

  I nervously wait for her reply, hands trembling as I grip the steering wheel—there, I’ve done it. I’ve spoken. I’ve officially butted in and now she’ll weep and I’ve ruined the entire weekend. How could I be so thoughtless? What is wrong with me?

  At the next red light I glance over at her and see that her eyes are closed. She’s got a beatific smile on her sleeping face, indicating inner harmony. I’m guessing my words fell on deaf ears. She literally didn’t hear me. A reprieve of sorts. It would prove to be my last.

  14

  We arrive home fifteen minutes later, with my mother awakening at the sound of my tires rolling over the gravel in the driveway. She blinks a few times to orient herself and then remains still even after I park.

  “Did I make a fool of myself?”

  “No, don’t be ridiculous. You were bubbly and cute and a gracious hostess.”

  “I drank too much,” she chides herself in misery. “I never do but I did tonight. I’m so stupid.”

  “You’re home now, and it’s still early. You can take a shower, have some green tea, and you’ll be fit as a fiddle by the morning’s first light.” Edwin the Optimist, always looking on the bright side! Making lemons out of lemonade!

  “Why is the garage door open?”

  I focus my gaze on the house and notice that indeed the garage door hasn’t been closed all the way, leaving a foot-wide gap from the concrete floor. Instantly I’m reminded of the first of the times we were robbed, the crime being detected in the same manner, except my mother had been driving and I sat in the passenger’s seat. The thieves had smashed a window in the side door and let themselves in. They stole some jewelry and a gun my mother had purchased for protection.

  History might be repeating itself, as there are guns galore in the basement.

  “Stay here,” I tell her, adrenaline flowing like lava as my brain responds to the perception of danger, a biochemical reaction older than humanity and thus one of the most authentic experiences a mammal undergoes. Too often I get confused and never know what is or isn’t real, a common problem for academics. Not now.

  “I told him this would happen!” she cries in anguish, already fearing the worst, which is another trait we share, along with our love of hats. The one I need to doff now is a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker. The intrepid detective must use his powers of reasoning to crack the case.

  “Let me go scope out the situation. Stay here until the coast is clear.”

  “We should call the police.”

  “Just hold on a minute. I’ll be right back.”

  “Eddie, don’t do anything stupid. These people Mead deals with, they’re bad. I don’t trust them. Especially that Russian man. He was so rude!”

  “You don’t want the cops sniffing around here with all the stuff Mead’s stored in the basement. Some of it might not be entirely legal. So one step at a time. Let me go check it out and then we’ll plan our next step.”

  For some odd reason, more along the lines of a hunch, I suspect that Lola has had a hand in this devilment. She doesn’t know my Richmond address, but she is a skilled online data collector who’ll stop at nothing to gather all the dirt on someone she thinks has wronged her. At any one time she might be holding six or seven different grudges, and assembling a dossier of damnation if she should ever need the ammo to retaliate. After one spat, for example, she’d unearthed the restraining order Bev had taken out against me—that’s something I haven’t yet mentioned, for the simple reason that I’m deeply ashamed of it. Not that Lola found it off-putting. No, no: in her febrile postadolescent brain she thought my inexcusable behavior was romantic, even sexy. I didn’t know you could get so passionate! I’d love to see that side of you, Edwin. You don’t seem to care about anything or anyone like you cared about your ex-wife. Lola enjoyed saying the phrase “ex-wife” because it made her feel all grown-up. But she was also correct in her analysis: only Bev could generate enough electricity to power my lifeless soul. Only Bev could cause me to pick up a lamp, her favorite lamp, the lamp I’d brought back from Prague for her, and smash it into a million little pieces at her feet, resulting in a well-deserved restraining order. And should Bev ever turn up dead, that restraining order will be exhibit A in the case of The State of New York v. Edwin Stith.

  Slowly, like a two-toed sloth, I walk down the driveway to the garage. The fact is, no strange cars are parked in the driveway or nearby that I’ve noticed, though Lola knows better than to tip her hand. Whoever was here is probably gone, but the question is: what did they take? All of it? Some? Did Fyodor Ublyudok come to claim his purchase—or was the phone call Mead had to take during the rehearsal a vow to collect, no matter what?

  Once I get close enough so that I can see through the gap, I sink down to my knees and use my cell phone as a flashlight. Right off I can discern that the boxes and crates remain. I don’t know if they’ve been emptied of their contents, but the weapons would be hard to move otherwise.

  So will Lola hop out now and shout Boo!? I wait, expecting her to attack. Crickets chirp nearby, and a dog howls in the distance. Maybe I’m giving her too much credit. It’s also possible that someone forgot to close the garage door all the way and lock it. If you don’t lock it, it will slide up.

  I stand back up, sweating profusely but somewhat relieved that this situation didn’t call for an emergency response. Still, I want to check out the house before I allow my mother to go inside. I walk over to tell her this, and I find her on the phone and speaking in a hushed tone.

  “It’s Mead,” she tells me anxiously, now a sober drunk who hangs suspended between the two worlds, alert but not quite. “He wants you to go check on something.”

  “Sure. I was going to go through the whole house.”

  “He said you know what he means by the Giap pistol?”

  “Right. He showed me that earlier.”

  “Can you go check if it’s still there?”

  I have no problem doing that, but I do immediately question why Mead would harbor suspicions about that particular gun. He must have a suspect in mind, an entire scenario, and I’d love to ask him who or why, but there isn’t time. So for now Lola appears to be off the hook, though her arrival is imminent…so many meteors hurdling toward us!

  Back at the garage door, I’m about to lift it up and duck in when I stop to consider a salient question—how did anyone gain entrance without breaking in? The side door appears to be locked—it is, I quickly check—meaning I’ll need to run upstairs and do the same for the front and back doors—because as of now, this is looking like an inside job, perpetrated by someone with a key. Or who knows where the spare is hidden (beneath a rock in the front garden).

  The garage door furls up, automatically turning on an overhead light. Before taking a step in, I wait for any strange sounds or movements. An arresting stillness greets me, the calm after the storm. I make my way directly to the box where the Giap pistol is kept, and I find it opened, with the gun missing. Mead was right. This in no way solves the mystery, but deepens it further. Before reporting this news, however, I gallop upstairs to determine the question of a forced versus unforced entry, and not surprisingly I ascertain that both front and back doors are locked at the dead bolt, all the windows are shut and latched, and the house shows no other signs of robbery. Whoever came in knew exactly what they wanted and took only that, leaving a host of expensive and easily pawned items behind.

  Graves George, come on down!

  There’s no reason to sugarcoat it. At this point he’s the most likely culprit, but I’ve taken great pains to show you that I’m suffering from various mental lapses, that I’m an inveterate liar, and that I have my ow
n secrets to keep…so don’t hold your breath waiting for some neat ending that will tie up all the loose threads. At some point I’ll just stop, when I run out of lies and am left with only the truth, which is usually too terrible for most of us to confront.

  I hurry back down to the driveway so that I can deliver the grim news to my mother. She relates my intelligence to her almost-hubby and then listens to a lengthy disquisition back from him, nodding and repeating “Okay” in a halting voice. Finally she gets off the phone, which she drops in her lap as if it weighs a few tons. “He said he’ll be home soon and take care of it,” she says quietly, perhaps because she’s as confused as I am.

  “Take care of what? Who does he think took it?”

  “He didn’t say. I’m tired, Eddie.”

  I help her out of the car and walk with her into the house, entering through the basement because the garage door is still wide open. I close and lock it after we get inside, which is itself curious. Graves must know by now that the garage door will rise up if not locked, and so whoever exited through it didn’t lock it, not knowing about this flaw. Meaning? I don’t know…someone had a key? A door was left unlocked?

  My mother trudges up the stairs and I follow behind, determined again to be Mr. Bright Side, but it’s hard to see how lemonade will get produced from this crop of lemons. She has imbibed not only too much wine tonight, but also too much whine, from Mead, his children, herself. The person who broke in tonight took more than a vintage gun; my mother’s happiness also has gone missing. She stands at the kitchen sink and lets the water run, staring at it uncomprehendingly, and I offer to make her some tea.

  “Where’s Gibson?” she asks instead of answering. I pick up the kettle and fill it, then turn off the faucet.

  “I dropped her off at a club because her band is going to perform tonight.”

  “She’s using drugs again. She’ll never learn.”

  I turn a burner to high and place the kettle on it. “Music can be a very therapeutic outlet. In case you haven’t noticed, Gibson is quite pretty and I can see her making it. She also seems very determined.”