by Robert White
She howled some animal gibberish at me and flung her hands at my face for another go at my eyes. I swung my fist toward the center of her face to split her hands like fighting a southpaw, and it worked. The wallop blinded her and smashed nose cartilage. I threw a right hand at her jaw and that toppled her over. She went sideways into the table edge and the blow knocked her out.
I scrambled out from beneath her and ran into the room where Carlos had gone. A rag of a curtain fluttered over a window. I went through it headfirst taking the thin curtain with me like a dirty shroud and landed in the overgrown grass and scrub brush that had grown up to the house. It was only a six-foot drop but it winded me.
Chunks of window frame and rotten board blew out above me just as the ricochet of automatic gunfire. I lay there for a long second like a rabbit frozen in fear and then I started rolling. When my body and my mind came back together, I slung myself around and kept low and crawled. The slugs tore into the ground behind me but I was moving too fast as he raked the edges of the house’s foundation in the belief I was still close. Calderone flew through the window and dropped to the ground. Then I heard random bursts from the gun and saw the muzzle flash as he raked the rifle back and forth in a scything motion. A flock of birds roosting in the tall grass near me exploded into the air. I lay still and listened. I heard a car starting up out front of the house.
Calderone heard it too. He cursed and sprayed a fusillade of hot lead in all directions.
I heard a car engine sputter-close.
Marija was out of the fight. That could only be my brother.
I heard the engine cough again and grind. He was flooding the engine in his panic. I fixed in my mind where the sound was coming from and imagined the road we had driven up. At the first bend before the house came into view was a cleared space that separated the orchards for the farm’s tractors and wagons. It was too dark to see anything clearly. If I bolted, I could hit a tree and knock myself out. I could turn an ankle, but waiting to be hunted down was far worse. I ran headlong into brambles and pricker bushes which punctured me for invading their nocturnal space – twigs snapped as I bulled my way through the foliage. Branches lashed my eyes. I left my shirt in a patch of briars and kept running. I had that angle fixed like a satellite’s coordinates in my brain. Pre-dawn light was breaking through the trees in the direction of my running. I saw a misty flame of fog rise from the marshes. I burst through a ditch where loose strife grew in bunches and almost lost my shoes in the muddy soil.
I heard another volley from the assault rifle. Another car coming fast – it was slewing from one side of the road to the other and the engine whined in low gear.
I broke through the brush where he’d have to slow to negotiate the last bend before the gravel road straightened out. He was coming too fast.
The car careened toward me, and I leaped out of the way before it rumbled into a steep drainage ditch.
Carlos, you bastard, stop! But Carlos wasn’t stopping.
I saw the mud kicked up from its spinning tires and picked myself up from the dirt. The ditch was soft earth but not steep enough to stop the car from forward progress. Once he had it back on the road surface, he’d be gone, and I’d be the quarry again.
The car bounced on its chassis as he brought it up and hit the gas hard. Pebbles spun around in the wheel well and missed me by inches. I gave it everything I had left. I held nothing back when I dove for the driver’s side door. If I missed, I’d never have the strength to pick myself up.
My hand cupped the latch and it popped open enough for Carlos to turn his head and see me sprawled in the ditch.
“I thought you were dead,” he said with a lopsided grin.
I lifted my head and started crawling toward him. He jammed the car in park and got out; he helped me to my feet and guided me into the back seat.
“Jesus fuck Christ, Jack, what the fuckin’ fuck!”
I pressed my face against the car seat. “Tired, can’t run anymore.”
He let out a cowboy whoop as he slung us onto 531 with the car bucking so hard on the rough shoulders I heard a wheel cover come loose. He floored it on the open road. The first thing I was aware of was the familiar pungent odor. I opened my eyes and saw the duffel bag lying on the floorboard. Packets of money and loose bills lay all around. The back draft of the speeding car sent tiny flutters among twenty-dollar bills swirling up in a vortex like slats of a roof caught in a twister.
When I was able to sit upright, I said, “What happened to that key you were looking for?”
He flashed me a huge smile from up front. He had a gold molar I’d never noticed before. His eyes were glassy again and the sweat dripped from his neck into the collar of his shirt.
“Let’s say we’re even, bro,” he said.
“I can live with that,” I said.
Flying through the dark of back country roads, a smile lit my face. I saw Carlos glance into the rearview mirror. “What’s funny, Jack?”
“I’m alive,” I said. “You remember that math teacher, what’s-his-name?”
“Devereux,” Carlos said. “Old man Devereux, yes.”
“He used to say the Pythagorean theorem would save our lives one day.”
When Carlos turned around, I was crying, shedding big tears, and then I was sobbing like a baby. My brother did me the kindness of turning around and not speaking for the next hour.
#26
He drove east into the sun staying on the country roads. The magenta sky became ochre and then a washed-out blue. The gold-fringed cumulo-nimbus clouds were the loveliest sight my battered eyes had ever seen. I was not being dissected, I was not being beaten with fists or feet, I was not being flayed or fricasseed or sautéed. Jack had climbed down the beanstalk.
“Where the fucking fuck we at?” he asked me. The sun was just clearing the tree line. I rolled down the windows to wash out some of the car’s reek. My clothes were dank, my body odoriferous, and my legs and feet soaked and full of seed pods and briars. Nature was oblivious to motivations.
“Denmark,” I said.
He nodded as if that made sense and kept driving. We passed through the center of town, a dismal square of shut-up shops and glazed windows where placards announced sales of farms.
“Jesus love a duck, fucking Christ,” Carlos said and pointed at a black buggy through the windshield. “They got those whatchamacallems here, Amish.”
“Go north, you’ll hit the Route Ninety junction. Connects Seattle to New York City.” I said. “Take your pick, Carlos.”
“You’re coming with me, man.”
“No,” I said. “I’m going back.”
“You’re on the run like me now, nigga. Cops or Calderone, shit, I don’t know which is worse. But I know you ain’t got a woman or a home to go back to.”
As he slowed just enough for the final stop sign leading out of town, I hopped out and covered the driver’s side window with my body. There was nothing but an identical bleak county ahead just like the ones we had passed through. He squinted up at me through the rays of sun streaming in.
“Hey, what the fuck’s this? You’ve got to come with me.”
“I liked what I had before you showed up.”
“You’re crazy, man.”
“I came by it honestly,” I said.
“I got mine the hard way,” he said. “I just can’t stay within the lines no more, Jack.”
“We all make choices, brother,” I said. I stretched my back again. It burned like ice where she had bit me.
“No catching up then, eh?” he said. What would have been the point, I wondered; most of our choices were made for us a long time ago. I didn’t say anything but he seemed resigned to it. I knew he’d think me left behind wouldn’t make a bad red herring and it was like something the old man used to quote from his Stalin period: “Two can keep a secret if one is dead.”
We shook hands like brothers, though, through the open window, and I watched him drive off. About twenty yards ahead,
he hit the brakes hard and my heart stopped. I knew he had a gun. When he was about five yards from me, I was prepared to bolt, but then I saw a packet of money come flying out the window in a high arc and land in front of me.
Fifties. They didn’t smell too bad, no worse than I did anyway, standing at the edge of a sleepy town square on a morning in early September. The undersides of tree leaves had a dull color like pewter that shimmered to silver when the breeze lifted them up. The whole square smelled of dust and manure.
I picked up the bag behind me and started to walk back the way we came. I never heard the tires squeal or the ear-splitting scream, but I could imagine them easily enough.
Forty yards in the distance was a fallow field, and I headed at a trot diagonally across it. At the edge of the field about three acres distant was a ravine where I could lie until sundown.
My brother wouldn’t risk hanging around long – not with Calderone and a dead body behind him and all the cops in the state converging on these roads. He might be stoned enough to ask a few locals if they’d seen a stranger carrying a bag, but sooner or later the looks they’d give him would tell him to flee or risk capture.
I meant to find a café around supper time and then sit and have coffee until I spotted some bored farm kid with a car and no money who wouldn’t ask questions about someone who kept a hand in his pocket to hide a dangling cuff link. I’d offer him a couple of the fifties my brother had gifted me – a little lagniappe as the French Canucks used to say in Montreal. I imagined that good deed had him standing in a black rage in front of his own ass-kicking machine wherever he was as he replayed how I must have scuttled out the door with the bag at my feet. Find the weakness, Carlos, I said to the opalescent sky high above the ditch, playing my father.
It turned out to be the dishwasher in the café who was my ride home. He got off at nine-thirty so I had to kill some time back in my ditch. His name was George and he asked me if I wanted anything else from him. I thanked him and said the ride would be sufficient. I told him a long, sad story about coming home and finding my wife run off with a boyfriend and the cops called on me for decking her when she came back for the TV. It was plausible and close enough to the truth.
I told him to drop me off at Point Park at the end of my street. No lights were on in the house and no cars sat out front. He said if I was locked out, he’d go halfers on a motel with me if I changed my mind. I declined and said no, I wasn’t locked out, although that part of my story wasn’t true. It wasn’t mine now and nothing else there was mine except some tools in the garage, a big rain barrel, and the lingering smell of a corpse’s recent occupancy.
Calderone left death and horror in his wake like the Four Horsemen. But I knew deep in the cockles of my own rotten heart that we make our own sorrows.
Thursday, September 9
6:15 a.m.
#27
Pippin found me the next morning at sunup sitting on my front steps, which I was now calling my ex-front steps to my ex-house owned by my almost ex-wife. He slammed on the brakes of his Navigator and was out of the car and striding up the slope of my ex-grass.
“You want to explain yourself?” he said.
“I don’t know what you’re referring to, Agent Pippin.”
“I’m referring to a dead body back there!” he shouted. “A dead woman! Lying choked to death on some shitty couch in some crappy farmhouse!” His arm waved behind him and his finger poked holes in the air for emphasis. “There! Back there! Twenty fucking miles from where you’re sitting with a goddamned smirk on your face!”
“That’s not a smirk,” I said. “It’s a rictus grin.”
“Don’t play games with me, God damn you!”
For a long second he looked at me with raw hatred seeping from his eyes, and I thought he was going to lunge for my throat.
“Where have you been?” This, much calmer, the SAC in command again.
“I’ve been around,” I said. “Here and there.”
His eyes reversed direction: from slits to popped; a worm-like vein of blood was ticking along his right temple.
“OK, so that’s how you want to play it,” he said. He pulled out a cell phone and spoke into it. The conversation was truncated down to syllables but all the pronoun references were pointing to me.
“Am I under arrest?”
Pippin stared at me. His wrath softened a fraction. “What has happened to you, man?”
“What do you mean?”
“You look like death eating a sandwich.” He stared at me hard.
“Summer colds are the worst,” I said.
“Summer cold, my shiny buffed black ass. Colds don’t swell up your face like that. They don’t turn you black and blue and make your eyes look like piss holes in a snowbank. You got the slim disease, Jack? You’re twenty pounds lighter since the last time I saw you.”
“The portrait in my attic must be aging,” I said.
“What the fuck are you sayin’?”
“Never mind,” I said.
“For a gardener that never got a high-school diploma, you got a lot of smart-assed things to say,” Pippin shot back.
“Landscaper,” I said making long syllables out of it.
“OK, land-sca-per. Take a ride with me. I want to show you something,” he said.
“I need to shower first,” I said. “I smell bad.”
“Yeah, I picked that up when I was downwind, but it seemed a minor point to bring to your attention given the rest of your new look.”
“She put a new door in,” I said. “I can’t get inside.”
“Jesus Christ, you idiot, go ask a neighbor if you can use the shower. Stop wasting my motherfucking time here, man!”
Only one of my neighbors would come to the door. She told me her plumbing was broken. I didn’t blame them. I tried Paul’s bed-and-breakfast across the street but no one there would acknowledge my knock. Sarah would be pitied as much as I was being reviled for the chaos I had brought to this quiet street in this small town.
Pippin drove me to the Salvation Army where I cashed another fifty in for some shirts, pants and shoes, and a gym bag. He took me to a motel on the freeway where I showered while he sat on the bed and made several phone calls, one all the way to DC headquarters.
“I’m sorry to take you out of your way,” I said rubbing myself down with a thick cotton towel. Hot water had never felt so good. I had gorged on bags of potato chips and candy bars from the vending machine in the lobby. I went back to toweling my hair.
“Whoah, Nellie. You look like somebody held you by the feet and ran you through a meat grinder. What happened to your neck? Are those bite marks?”
“Date last night.”
“Uh-huh, like those ligature marks on your wrist?”
“I dig rough sex,” I said.
“This isn’t my first rodeo, shithead. We’re gonna have us a long talk about your hobbies.”
“That bed looks good. Would you mind if I took a brief catnap, Agent Pippin? Just ten minutes. I feel as if I haven’t slept in three days.”
“Get in the goddamned car,” he said.
#28
He turned down the driveway and parked behind an ambulance with the driver giving him a bored salute. On the porch, I saw a detective talking to some people in jackets with the ERT logo on the back. One of them carried a trajectory rod in his hand.
“We’re still making casts of the tire tracks,” Pippin said. “Walk behind me.”
At the back of the ambulance, he paused. “The M.E. took an hour to get here. I had my own forensics people up here by then. If I ever decide to become a serial killer and dump bodies, I’m coming to this county.”
His stride was long. He stopped and turned around. “The place was stripped clean. People left in a hurry but they forgot to take something with them.” He opened the doors of the ambulance and climbed in. A black body bag was strapped onto a gurney.
He offered me a hand. “Come on up,” he said.
I c
limbed in and he led me to the back of the ambulance. He unzipped the body bag down to her pubis. Half her face was missing. The lone eyeball that was intact stared straight up behind her.
“Seen her before?”
“You know I have, Pippin,” I said.
“They probably used a fragmentation slug, do that kind of damage. Why strangle her? See the hand marks around her neck?”
“Her name is Tanya. I don’t know much else about her,” I said.
“We’re going to superglue her for prints,” he said. “But that’ll lead to dick. Help me here, Jack.” My mind replayed Calderone’s big hand wrapped around her neck pressing her into the back of the sofa while he slammed into her. Did she know what was happening?
“They find the gun?”
“We’re still looking,” Pippin said. “I’ve got some metal detectors coming up. We’re using the sheriff’s people to sweep around the house.”
“I’m not her kin,” I said. “I can’t legally identify her.”
“I thought you might want to see what you and your skinhead brothers-”
“Randall Calderone’s not my brother,” I said.
His height made it hard for him to move around inside the ambulance, but he had me by the arms, and I was surprised by his anger. His eyes were bloodshot. I wasn’t the only one going without sleep. He shoved me backward out of the ambulance so fast that I hit the dirt and went down on one knee.
“You want to remember you’ve got people from the house looking at us,” I said.
I managed to get to my feet and was brushing off the road grit from my second-hand clothes when he threw me against the side of the ambulance.