Bad Intentions

by Norman Partridge

  Screaming shadows spilled from the thing's lips, and the man was awash in a flood of midnight.

  The torrent pushed him backward, away from the thing with the girlish voice, and he grabbed at the casing of the door, but the flood was too strong. He couldn't hold it back.

  The black stream boiled from the room, screaming still, and the man lost hold and swam in it, his head above the tide, washed in sunlight now, blinking tattered shadows from his eyes as the great black wave washed across the dry white sand. The man grabbed the base of a Yucca tree and the shadows washed over his head and dunked him once again, each shadow with a different voice, a different scream that could only be heard within the black grip of the onrushing tide, but none of the screams fit him, and he was once more sucked into the dead, swirling chorus.

  How many how many I wonder...

  He broke surface, gasping, thankful for nothing so much as the pure silence of the desert, and he fought the torrid stream, arms flailing, battered fingers grasping a branch, grasping handfuls of dry, prickly leaves, his palms pierced by them, his hands closing vise-tight around the tree as they had once closed around the steering wheel of a van that traveled a highway, a highway that was nothing out of mythology at all, nothing more than a ribbon of asphalt contained by painted threads.

  But nothing could contain the shadows. Not the sun, not the earth. They spilled from the abandoned motel, an obsidian cascade a hundred times darker than any highway, cutting a path through the dry desert, shoveling trenching tearing into the earth, washing rock and sand and snake and lizard and yucca into the wide emptiness beyond.

  They pulled to a stop behind the van and Carmine Tonelli burst from the rear of the car with a gun in his hand, but the man didn't even move. He just sat there on the van's rear bumper, a beer can in his hand, shade dripping from his body in fat droplets.

  Bramble blinked. Blinked again.

  Carmine didn't pause. He moved forward, all business, and pressed the barrel of his pistol to the man's temple, sparing a short glance for Bramble. "This the guy?" he asked.

  The man wiped his lips, flicked shadedrops off of his fingers. He smiled at Carmine, and then at Bramble. An old rock 'n' roll song bounced around inside the van, trapped there. For the first time, Bramble noticed the van's personalized license plate: CHARON.

  "Well?" Carmine prodded. "Give me an answer!"

  "Wait a minute," Bramble said.

  The man studied Bramble. More properly, he studied Bramble's shade. "You're one up on me," he said, chuckling.

  "Shut up," Carmine said. "You don't talk."

  The man stood up. Carmine's hand started to shake. The man stepped away from the gun, toward Bramble, and Bramble saw nothing but the pure white sand around the man's cowboy boots, no shade at all....

  "I've wasted twenty years," the man said. "There's no finding it, because there are millions of 'em out there, all flowing God knows where. But let's go down to the river just the same, you and me... We can go swimmin'. Maybe we'll get—"

  If he said anything else, the words were lost in the thunder of Carmine Tonelli's pistol.

  The man fell. White dust puffed up around him.

  And then, in the quiet of the desert, the men from Vegas heard the cool rushing of a river.

  "It can't be," the doctor said.

  Carmine dropped his pistol. Tatters of shade slipped away from his heels, trickling in weak rivulets across the sand.

  Carmine slumped forward, into the doctor's arms.

  "We've got to get out of here!" the doctor said. "Now!"

  Bramble didn't move. He closed his eyes and listened. "Don't panic," he said. "It's only the wind... only the wind."

  But Bramble knew these words were lies. Even as he spoke them, he heard the cool rush of shadows... the old music trapped in the van. Eyes closed, he heard the quiet movement of a man without a shadow rising from the hot sand... and the scream of a doctor who knew nothing... and the solitary footfalls of the man... cowboy boots digging tired ditches in the white sand....

  Shadowstained fingers brushed Bramble's shoulder.

  The man said, "Just you know why..."

  WRONG SIDE OF THE ROAD

  SHE REMEMBERED THIS MUCH: her name was Helen and he'd picked her up in a Reno bar in 1946. It was autumn—maybe October or maybe November—but autumn for sure because he'd said that her strawberry blonde hair reminded him of the changing colors in the mountains.

  Autumn, 1946. Reno, Nevada. About that much she was sure. And her name was Helen....

  In 1946, Helen was employed as a cocktail waitress at the Prima Donna Casino. She made fairly decent money there thanks to an excellent memory that allowed her to sell more drinks than the other girls, but she'd been looking for an excuse to quit because her backside was a lot better looking than her front and her tips weren't exactly the greatest. Besides, working in spike heels was hell on her feet.

  Helen was waiting for a girlfriend in a downtown bar when she spotted him. His name was Roy, and he was a war hero. He had a nice smile and a thick head of black hair just like Tyrone Power's, and Helen didn't mind too much that what he didn't have was a pair of legs.

  "I'm just passin' through," he said in answer to her unspoken question. "I'm on my way to Hollywood. But I got time for dinner."

  It wasn't like Helen, but she forgot all about her friend and accepted Roy's invitation. Over Bloody Marys and rare steaks at the Riverside, he told her about a best-seller-to-be he'd written about his wartime experiences, a book so hot that it had been picked up by Universal Studios after an eager producer had seen the galleys.

  "That's great," said Helen. "Y'know, I was heading for Hollywood when I left Milwaukee, but I was stupid enough to think that I could beat the slots, and I lost my traveling money. That's the only reason I ended up staying in Reno. I think that's how a lot of people end up here."

  "Coulda been worse. You coulda been stranded in Salt Lake City."

  Helen laughed. "You're right about that. But Reno isn't really so bad— it's better than Milwaukee— and I don't think that I would have made it as an actress, anyway."

  So it wasn't just the lure of the movies that drew Helen to Roy; she had outgrown her Hollywood dreams. And it wasn't the tragic war hero bit or the way he smiled, either, though Helen admitted that she found both qualities attractive. No, more important than the romantic stuff was Roy's genuine interest in her. Helen could tell that his attentiveness wasn't a con— she'd been around Reno long enough to recognize the kind of phony compassion that covered up sick wants and needs that she didn't want or need.

  No, if anything, Roy was too sincere. There was something unusual about the way that he asked questions; he had a voracious hunger for even the most minor details of her past. Helen answered him automatically, patiently, abandoning the defensive shield that came from dealing with one drunken gambler after another.

  After awhile Helen's voice started to crack, and she realized with a start that she'd spilled her life story in the time it took to drink a few Bloody Marys and eat a charbroiled Kansas City strip. She told Roy that her voice was going to give out if she kept gabbing, but he only smiled and flagged down their waiter. The little man returned momentarily with two ice-cream sundaes and a bottle of Remy Martin, a combination that promised to be the perfect balm for Helen's throat.

  "God, you've got a fantastic memory," Roy said, and then he asked her one final question.

  Suddenly speechless, she nodded her reply.

  Hours later, when the morning sun climbed into the sky above the Biggest Little City in the World, Helen found herself laying with Roy in a honeymoon suite, smelling the Lucky Tiger in his hair and running her fingers over his muscular chest, and letting his big hands travel where they wanted because no one knew her like her new husband did.

  That day was all room-service champagne and tender kisses. And that night, as Helen loaded her belongings into Roy's specially modified Hudson, she realized that everything was going to be wonderful bec
ause Roy already knew all her secrets. He said that he understood about the abortion. He knew that she had left Milwaukee in disgrace, couldn't ever go back home, and wasn't exactly proud of everything she'd done since.

  "Honey, I'm so happy," she said.

  A cool wind whispered off the mountains, leaving the Reno sky icy blue, perfect blue. Roy said that the moon was the color of rum, and Helen started singing "Rum & Coca Cola." She didn't think it strange when he pulled up to a pawnshop on North Virginia and bought a tenor saxophone that was hanging in the window. But back then, on the day after her wedding, she hadn't known about Don Bragonier.

  "I didn't know that you played the sax," she said.

  "I don't." Roy laughed. "But I'm gonna start learnin'."

  Helen slid the battered alligator-skin case into the back seat, wedging the sax between two boxes filled with winter clothes. Suddenly she realized how little she knew about Roy. She stood on the grimy sidewalk, tottering in her spike heels, wondering if she should get into the same car with the man who was now her husband.

  "C'mon," Roy shouted. "Hey, we got us a life to live."

  Helen fingered her new diamond ring. She smiled. And then, blowing a final kiss at the Prima Donna, she kicked her uncomfortable heels into the gutter and hopped into the roomy Hudson.

  Helen's feeling of unease didn't last long. Pulling into the mountains, Roy took a deep breath and said, "Now, let me tell you about myself."

  Roy talked about the New York City gyms he'd frequented as a teenager, gray places where he'd spent countless hours sparring with kids who weren't half as talented as he was. He told Helen about the boxers he'd defeated at Madison Square Garden, and while she was sure that they were all famous men— contenders, Roy called them— she admitted that she hadn't heard of them. Helen had heard of Sugar Ray Robinson though, and she was disappointed to learn that Sugar Ray had KO'd Roy in three rounds on a hot August evening in 1943.

  Helen blushed, realizing that her embarrassment for Roy could never match his own. "After the Robinson fight, I was too ashamed to go back to the neighborhood," he said. "I enlisted in the Marine Corps as soon as I healed up— Jesus, Ray's jab made a mess outta my eyes. Anyway, a few months later I was in the Pacific."

  Roy described the savagery he'd seen at Bougainville and Iwo Jima, horrors that had never been printed in the newspapers. And when Helen gasped and said that war made good men into madmen, Roy explained that madness was the nature of war. He admitted that he had gone battle-crazy on Iwo, where he'd used his well-honed seven-inch K-bar to dig gold teeth out of the mouths of Japanese corpses.

  Roy wasn't proud of that. Helen forgave him, her voice full of compassion, and for the first time she realized that her new husband needed her as much as she needed him.

  The talk turned to happier subjects. Roy shared his wartime buddies with Helen, telling stories about Rod Markam, Sal Harbeck, Vinny Tocolli, Gary Van Bellen, and a dozen other guys. Helen could almost picture their young faces, and crossing into California she got the weird feeling that there were several extra passengers wedged between the tenor sax and the moving boxes in the back seat.

  A chill scraped up her spine. It was a strange feeling, the same one she got when she heard the squeaking door on Inner Sanctum.

  "Most of 'em are dead, of course. Never made it home." Roy brushed Helen's skirt away from her thigh, his fingers stroking her smooth, nyloned flesh. "I used to think they were lucky, but now my opinion's changed."

  In Hollywood, Helen began to notice confusing variations in Roy's often told stories— especially his Iwo stories— variations that were more than simple exaggerations. The changes worried her.

  Not that Roy was lying. Helen was sure that he wouldn't lie. Not to her, anyway. Not after he'd accepted so much truth from her lips.

  But if not lies, then what?

  Maybe boxing had made Roy a little punchy. That happened to fighters, didn't it? Or maybe Roy's forgetfulness was a way of dealing with the awful things that he had seen in the Pacific. Helen could understand that. She knew that the truth could be a painful thing.

  Helen's mind had played tricks on her after the abortion. Night after night she had awakened sweaty and cold, thinking that she heard a baby crying. Each time she'd search her apartment, sure that in the next room, around the next corner, she'd find a screaming infant that was indeed her own.

  Weird, remembering that.

  But in the months to come, Helen decided that Roy's memory was exactly like the strange, waking dreams she'd had after the abortion, only he didn't seem to notice the changes. Some days it took Robinson six rounds to knock him out. Some days the fight went to a decision. And some days— usually rainy days when they were cooped up together in the cramped bungalow— Roy talked about Rod Markam, Sal Harbeck, Vinny Tocolli, and Gary Van Bellen as if they were still alive.

  On days like that, Roy got out the tenor sax and told stories about Don Bragonier, a crazy guy he'd known on Iwo. Bragonier had been a jazz musician before the war, and he was the only guy in Roy's outfit who never talked about his hometown. He wouldn't even admit having one. "Man, I move. I'm from everywhere, like a gypsy." That was how Bragonier put it.

  After taking a burst of machine-gun fire in his legs, Roy found himself on the same hospital plane as Don. He had watched Don die from head-wound complications (most of the time Don died on the plane, but occasionally he died in a Marianas hospital).

  Roy always ended his Don Bragonier story by repeating his vow to master the sax in Bragonier's honor, but the awful squeals and squawks that came from the horn during the practice sessions that followed were enough to drive Helen outside into the rain.

  "Babe, I hope you don't believe in ghosts," Roy would say, not noticing that the very mention of ghosts made Helen cringe. "'Cause my blowing could wake the dead."

  Things didn't go so well in Hollywood. At first the producers kept Roy busy, arranging speaking dates for him, but soon it became apparent that the studio brass were hesitating. The producers told Roy not to worry. They promised that everything would change once his book came out.

  Roy enjoyed himself while he waited. He drank a prodigious amount of rum and Coca Cola. He took Helen to fancy parties. Occasionally he played poker with Errol Flynn and his cronies, and he brought home famous people who behaved like old friends.

  The publisher named Roy's book Marching Home. The reviews were good; the sales weren't. The conventional wisdom ran this way: too many people had lost sons and brothers in the Pacific, and no one really wanted to know what kind of hell the front-line grunts had faced.

  The studio brass dropped the movie, and then a month later they dropped Roy. They claimed that Marching Home was too grim. Someone mentioned nihilism, but Roy wasn't even sure what that meant.

  "You've got a great yarn," one producer admitted. "Maybe we can pick it up down the road. But there isn't a whole lot of compassion in the book... I'm not blaming you or anything, and it's not that we want to phony things up with a load of happy ending crap. But maybe you left that compassion back on Iwo Jima. Maybe you had to, just to survive."

  What the producer didn't say, what he was afraid to say, was this: "Roy, maybe the war stole more than your legs. Maybe it stole your soul."

  "I can get it back, Helen. You know I can."

  Roy was getting worse. He talked about "getting it back" a lot lately. The producer's words haunted him; he wrote them down in a notebook and spent his mornings drinking coffee and staring at them. In the afternoon he sat in the backyard, rereading Marching Home. Helen watched Roy from the kitchenette window, shaking a little when he threw the book across the lawn, for that was how his reading sessions always ended.

  One day when Roy was out playing poker, Helen sneaked a look at the book. She was shocked to discover that whole paragraphs had been crossed out and that the margins were full of tiny notes: Not the way this happened... Bragonier died in hospital, not on plane... Vinny killed at Bougainville, not Iwo... Rod is still alive a
nd living in Laramie. His wife just had a baby... Rod is dead, died in hand-to-hand combat near Motoyama Village on February 28, 1945....

  "Oh, babe, I can get it back."

  Helen looked at Roy. He was the only good thing in her life. But he didn't smile anymore and —

  "They lied. Those goddamn book people in New York. That goddamn ghostwriter that the editor brought in, just to 'tidy things up,' he said. See, I've been reading my book over and over, and you ain't gonna believe this, but the things they printed ain't the things that happened. That's why the movie fell through. That damned ghostwriter changed everything, and then the publisher still had the balls to put my name on the cover and my picture on the back...."

  Roy wheeled toward her. His big hands closed around her fingers, which were slick with dishwashing soap. He unintentionally twisted her wedding ring, and the diamond bit into her middle finger.

  Helen winced.

  Roy's voice quavered. "Believe me, Helen. I know we can work it out. It's just kinda mixed up in my head right now, but I know how to fix it. I need you to help me; your memory's so good. And mine, well, I don't think I can trust it anymore. But I can trust you, can't I?"

  At least he was admitting his problem. Helen was glad of that. She nodded automatically, and then felt her face go crimson because she wasn't sure that she could be trusted at all. Lately she'd been talking to a doctor at the VA hospital, a sincere young man who said that he'd helped other veterans like Roy.

  Roy didn't notice her blush. "Good. I knew I could count on you, doll. I'll tell you everything, 'cause you won't get mixed up, and you can write it all down. Then we can go from there to get it back. You can keep track of all the things we find out. And when we're done I'll show those Hollywood bastards. I'll have my own book." He tapped the well-worn copy of Marching Home with a stubby finger. "Not like this load of crap. I'll have it. Written down in my wife's own hand."