The Enigmatologist

by Ben Adams

  “So don’t worry, Private Ramsey, if our surveillance didn’t pan out. It’s just one operation, one piece on a very large board.”

  The drunk slipped on the top step. He tumbled forward, almost falling into the trailer, but caught himself, dropping the case of beer on the floor mat. Three cans popped out, like they were expelled from a malfunctioning vending machine. One Slinkyed end-over-end down the steps, landing on the gravel. The other two rolled across the pitched floor, into the living room, and under the removable coffee table. He swayed for a moment. The closest piece of furniture in the small trailer was a cabinet next to the stove and he flopped against it and yanked off his boots, flipping them. They caromed off the cupboard and sink, landing on the dirt-stained linoleum.

  He slapped his cheeks, then looked up at the off-white acoustic tiled ceiling. He shook his head from side to side. He bounced, building momentum, and shook his arms and hands like he was drying himself after a swim. He exhaled three times, rapidly, emptying his lungs of air. On the last breath, he inhaled deeply, filling his chest and stomach, then grunted, loud and painful, like he was giving birth to a walrus with diamond-studded tusks.

  His legs stretched and grew until the hem of his pants ended at his calves. His arms grew out of the sleeves, and his torso expanded, untucking his shirt. The thin, gray hairs on his head blackened and thickened, growing several inches on the top, until it formed a perfect pompadour. Sideburns grew from the pores along his jaw, ending just below his ears. The skin and the wrinkles around his eyes, the visual representation of his guzzled and seldom remembered life, tightened. The skin on his body that sagged, his chin, man boobs, the undersides of his arms, retracted until they resembled the semi-freshness of middle-age. His bulbous nose, the physical sign of his alcoholism, reverted, the veins disappearing, the extra cartilage vanishing. He unbuttoned his shirt and pants as his stomach inflated into a small gut, and he wiggled his toes underneath it.

  “Thank you. Thank you very much,” Al Leadbelly said, finally returning home.

  He hadn’t used his ‘Gus’ disguise in years. Leadbelly was grateful John had warned him about the Air Force, giving him an excuse to become the old alcoholic for an afternoon. He knew they were watching him, even before the bar fight. Over the past week he’d been careful, drifting between the blind spots of their inefficiently placed cameras. He also knew he’d have to leave town eventually. He’d even prepared for it. But John showing at his job meant Leadbelly had to accelerate his plans, or as he liked to say in moments of drunken cheesiness, ‘Get the Lead out.’

  He opened the cabinet under the sink, the thin, brown door. He took out the trashcan, spilling SpaghettiOs cans, candy bar wrappers, empty, cheese-filled hot dog packages, and empty tins of cake icing. Behind where the trashcan rested, a hole had been drilled into the wall. Leadbelly stuck his finger in it, pushed the button inside it. The floor popped open, a false bottom. Among fake passports, stacks of cash, and a copy of Elvis, Live in Nöbsak, Germany, was an encrypted cell phone, bedazzled with the image of a naked woman.

  “He’s here, man,” Leadbelly said. “I, uh, I talked to him a couple a minutes ago.”

  The voice on the other end sounded shrill, berating him. He rolled his eyes. He’d spent his entire life working for them, helping them achieve small objectives, miniscule pieces of a larger goal, and they still didn’t trust him.

  “Yeah, I know what to do. I, uh, I won’t let you down… Seriously, man, you’re gonna bring that up? That was just that one time…It won’t…If you woulda seen her. The way she was shaking her…Shit, you’re really gonna…Jesus Christ, it was just that one time…And that time in Atlantic City. But that was it. I swear…Alright. And in New Orleans…Calm down. I got this…You don’t got…You don’t got nothing to worry about, man…I know that’s what I said last time, but this time I mean it…Alright, I love you, too, Momma. See you soon.”

  All the work he did, hiding and documenting, it was against his nature. Leadbelly was born for greatness, born to entertain thousands of people, sweating under the lights, getting women’s panties tossed at him on stage, partying all night with devoted female fans. Not this covert business. It was enough to make an Elvis impersonator start drinking.

  Leadbelly snatched a beer from his fridge and chugged half of it. He broke the phone in half, removed the SIM card. The phone clanged against the dirty dishes and basin as Leadbelly tossed it in the sink. He put the card in his pocket, his unbuttoned pants hanging loosely around his hips. He couldn’t believe they thought he was careless.

  He had spent the past four years living in the trailer, a home away from home. At first he resented being sent there, viewing it as a punishment. He had lived most of his adult life in the real Vegas, the one with the showgirls and cheap, all-you-can-eat buffets and lax public drunkenness policies. Then he was unexpectedly sent back here, back to where everything started. He didn’t understand it at first, but when he saw John at the lumberyard, he understood why he’d been sent there, why he had to wait. He just wondered when the others, the ones who exiled him, would let him tell John the truth.

  The shirt and pants clung to his body like plastic wrap on an old ham. They smelled like stale booze and baloney. His regular clothes lay in piles on his bedroom floor. Leadbelly yanked on the accordion door, trying to get to them. It popped out of the wall and its runner, screws, and small, plastic wheels flew across the room. He stumbled back a few steps, the door in his hand. Laughing, he tossed it onto his unmade bed, brown sheets wadded at its foot. His room was just as he left it, clothes covering his bedroom floor, his closet door shut. He pulled a pair of pants and a shirt from one pile and sniffed them. Clean enough. And tossed the smaller clothes against the wall.

  He’d be going home soon. He’d have to answer a lot of questions, what he’d been doing all this time, why he only called when he needed money, why he never married or settled down. He didn’t like the idea of moving home. He’d be around friends, but it wasn’t the same as being on his own. No one to answer to, staying up as late as he wanted, playing his music whenever he felt like it. Moving home just seemed like a step backward.

  His stomach growled like he hadn’t eaten since lunch.

  “Beer munchies,” he said, rubbing his belly.

  In the kitchen, he slopped together some sandwiches, peanut butter and banana, while singing a song about how much he loved sandwiches and wished he had some hot sauce to put on them. His trailer smelled like suntan lotion spread on the back of giant, monocle-wearing peanut. He shoved a couple in his mouth, choked a little, then washed them down with another beer, and Ziplocked the rest, setting them on the counter.

  His trailer was full of trash accumulated through neglect and indifference. And even though he was moving, he knew he couldn’t leave it like that. Leadbelly opened his cupboard and pulled out a long knife.

  In his living room, the aquarium and karate trophies. A girl he met in a bar in Tucson told him should get a pet. He found the aquarium at a rummage sale and inadvertently killed the first three fish to swim in its green and slimed waters. Not wanting to see any more two-dollar fish float upside down, it became a convenient place to store his karate trophies. He tossed the empty aquarium onto the floor, breaking it. Karate statues tumbled to the ground. He never really liked the aquarium. Foam stuffing spilled from the couch cushions as he slashed them. He flipped his coffee table and kicked his chair, breaking both. He emptied the cupboards in his kitchen, sending pots and pans skidding against the ground, and dumped the drawers. Utensils, coupons, and a rubber band ball crashed, floated, and bounced on the linoleum.

  In his bedroom, he jerked his drawers out of the built-in chest and dumped out the few clothes, socks, wife-beater t-shirts, underwear with stretched out elastic. He picked up a red gym bag that lay in the corner. A light traveler, he liked to pack the essentials. He took a deep breath and opened his closet. When he saw the jumpsuit, he smiled.

  “Oh, baby, it’s good to see you aga
in,” Leadbelly said.

  He gently took the sequined jumpsuit off the rack. He hadn’t worn it in four years. But every night he opened his closet and dreamed of a time when it was all he wore and longed for the day when he could wear it again. He held the jumpsuit in both hands, one hand on the back of it, tickling the sequins with his fingers. Light danced across the eagle’s chest. The gold stars shimmered around it.

  He lowered it on the bed and slowly slid the zipper down, exposing the white interior of the suit. The hanger flopped in the shoulders and he tossed it like a Frisbee. It hit the bedroom window, landing on a pile of clothes. He scooped up the suit and folded it neatly, legs underneath, arms behind the back, and nestled it into the gym bag, finally putting it on the closet floor.

  His room was a pile of dirty clothes, food wrappers, and cheap cologne in plastic bottles. Leadbelly felt it sent a certain message to anyone who visited, that he was too busy loving life and the loving the ladies to clean up, but this wasn’t the message he wanted to send anymore. He plunged the knife into his bed, slashing it. He lifted the mattress and heaved it against the far wall and cut large, diagonal gashes into its back. A hole had already been cut in the box spring. Leadbelly leaned over and pulled out a book and a stack of three-hundred and twelve photos. He flipped through the photos, sighed, and set them next to the book, its cracked leather back barely holding the cover together. The people who sent him to the trailer park thought it was lost, but Leadbelly had kept it hidden for years like it was a once-in-a-lifetime find.

  He took the book, closed his eyes, and kissed it.

  “Shame I never got to know you, man,” he said to the book, “but you never gave me the chance. You were right, I know that now. It was the right call. But still…” That sonuvabitch abandoned him, sent him away to be raised in the desert. Even though it had taken him years to understand why it had to happen, when he thought about it, it still hurt.

  He wiped a tear from his eye. He set the photos on the edge of the box spring. Next to the knife.

  The book that he’d protected for all those years was his father’s journal. Leadbelly’s heart almost exploded when he first read his father’s thoughts and words, his love and hopes for the son he kept. And just a few sentences about Leadbelly, nothing more, coldly describing his thought process in deciding which child to keep. Leadbelly’s mother tried to explain to him why his father chose another son, but Leadbelly was young and angry and didn’t understand. He wanted to hurt his father, to make him feel what it was like to lose something you loved, but his father died before Leadbelly had a chance to meet him. When he was alone in his trailer, a tipped-over bottle of whiskey spilling on the floor, Leadbelly often wondered how his life would have been different if he had been allowed to stay. He wouldn’t have become an Elvis impersonator, he knew that much. Sitting on the box spring, he felt the anger building, urging him to lash out, to destroy something. He touched the book to his forehead, set it on the photos. He picked up the knife, his face reflected on the blade.

  And slashed at the mattress again.

  Leadbelly panted and wiped the sweat with his sleeve. He opened another beer and grabbed the sandwiches in the kitchen.

  The clock, now resting on the floor, the image of a beer spokesmodel on its face, her arms gradually moving to beer-thirty.

  The jumpsuit lay neatly packed on the closet floor. He loved it more than cheap beer, an open mic, or a middle-aged woman with questionable morals. It needed to be protected, remain clean and unsoiled for his travels. He layered the gym bag with Saran Wrap and tossed in a couple of beers and the other peanut butter and banana sandwiches. He picked a couple of black socks off the floor and sniffed them. They smelled like rotten fish, but he shrugged his shoulders and slipped them on, zipping the black patent leather boots over them.

  Dressed, packed. Cameras were aimed at his front door. This didn’t bother him. One thing he learned working in Las Vegas was the headliner always leaves by the back door. He stepped over the piles of clothes, the empty cupboards, the Styrofoam barbeque takeout boxes that blocked his way to the closet. Leadbelly tapped the closet floor with his foot. A spring-release trapdoor popped up. He caught it with his foot before it closed again and propped it against the wall. The brown and gray gravel of the trailer park lot floated underneath him. Leadbelly dropped the gym bag onto the New Mexico dirt. There was a foot and a half between the bottom of the trailer and the ground. Leadbelly lowered his legs through, until he was sitting on grease-stained earth, the upper half of his body still in the closet. He sucked in his belly, slid out, and rolled from under the trailer.

  He emerged behind the trailer, between it and a chain link fence that had chunks of green plastic woven throughout. He sat up and started to rise, but stopped. He slapped his head, having forgotten something, and rolled back under, hearing the same critiques, that he was careless, forgetful, selfish.

  A pile of clothes was underneath the mattress. Leadbelly pushed it aside and searched for the jeans he wore when he was pretending to be a drunk. Needing a safer place for incriminating evidence, he dug the SIM card out of the front pocket and opened his wallet. The compartments were full of gas receipts, small images cut from porn magazines, and an old condom. He threw the condom across the room. He didn’t use them anyway, couldn’t feel nothing with them on. He slipped the SIM card into the empty slot and rolled out of the trailer again.

  He stood in the gap between the trailer and fence and lifted a panel that had been built into the side of the trailer. Underneath it was a keypad. Leadbelly entered a sequence into it and heard a noise coming from inside the trailer. It sounded like his trailer had been converted into a large toilet and someone had just flushed it. He entered another code. A timer appeared on the screen, counting down. He closed the panel, his hand lingering on the side of the trailer. It had been his home for the past four years, the place he slept, ate, snuck to when he tip-toed out of women’s bedrooms late at night. Leadbelly sighed. He’d actually miss this place, the town, the trailer park. But it wasn’t the only town out there. The country was full of towns, trailers, and women. Maybe they’d let him go back to Vegas. Do it up, Elvis style. Leadbelly scooped up the gym bag by the strap. He patted its underside and heard the jumpsuit rustle. He grinned, his lip curling up.

  He shimmied between the trailer and the fence, heading to the back of the trailer park, staying in the camera’s blind spots. The chain link fence that separated the trailer park from its neighbors had been by cut by kids, a potential escape route from bottle rocket fights. Leadbelly slipped into someone’s backyard. He stepped over rusted tricycles and a small swimming pool shaped like a turtle, and through the front gate.

  In the street, dogs behind fences barked with aggressive insecurity. Children somersaulted and cartwheeled out of minivans while moms carried grocery bags, three in each hand. Dads parked their trucks, eyed their neighbors’ boats. Leadbelly stood in the middle of family activity, needing to find something to do for the next fourteen hours. In front of him was the town where he’d had four years of small exploits. He thought about where a man of his tastes could feel welcome, relax, and find some entertainment. He smiled wide and strutted down Silva Avenue, heading toward Brandi Cartwright’s house.

  Away from the last four years of his life.

  Away from his father’s journal, still sitting on box spring’s edge.

  As he got closer to Rosa’s Restaurante, the feeling John had been carrying in his stomach all day moved upward. It wasn’t the same intestinal twisting he’d endured earlier. His chest pulsated and, despite the cool evening, he began to sweat. He laughed at how unglued he was becoming, and knew it was because he was anxious about seeing Rosa again. The last time a girl shook his nerves he was in high school, standing by the lockers waiting for Alison Mayhew to get out of her eighth-period art class. He intended to ask her to the prom, but when she walked by with a group of friends, John panicked. He stood with his back to the lockers, awkwardly waiting for t
he bell to ring while the group of girls giggled and collected their books. John was technically an adult now, had outgrown his teenage insecurities. He’d overcome his fear of rejection, and tonight he had another advantage, something aiding his courage. He’d been drinking most of the day.

  The sign on Rosa’s glass door said she’d be closing in an hour. John exhaled and opened it. The bell above him rang, the smell of cooking meat and peppers hit his nose.

  Food sizzled.

  A wooden lattice with fake vines separated foyer from dining area. A girl who looked like she was in high school, menus in hand, asked, “How many?”

  “Um, I was wondering if I could talk to Rosa for a minute, if that’d be alright?” John asked, stepping side to side.

  “Uh, sure. Let me see if she’s around,” she said, and walked into the back.

  In the foyer, carry-out menus fanned on a table. Maroon vinyl covering stackable chairs. The local newspaper reporting football scores, weekend sales. In the dining area, two tables had customers.

  The restaurant was mostly quiet. The background music had been turned off, although music came from a small radio in the kitchen. It was soft and John heard Rosa’s footsteps. She walked toward him, wiping her hands on a towel hanging from her apron. John grinned. When he crossed the street, he wondered if he’d still feel the same excitement he felt at lunch, still want to be near her. And watching her glide toward him, all he could think was how lucky he was that he had another chance to see her again, and he wondered if she felt the same way.

  Rosa kept a straight face at first, professional, but when she recognized John, she blushed and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

  “Are you back for dinner?” she asked, putting her hands in her apron pockets.