Bad Intentions

by Norman Partridge

  Larry tickled her belly. "I'm glad Hank didn't get your pretty skin."

  Color rose in her cheeks. Her fingers drifted over Larry's chest. She'd heard enough, said enough. She wasn't here for any of that.

  We got back to what she was here for.

  We rocked back and forth, listening to the rusty complaints of the cab. I noticed tiny scratches on her legs. Red skin. Razor burn. She'd been nervous or overeager about a big night out on the town. She wasn't beautiful and she wasn't young. I wondered how long she'd been waiting. In a place like Fiddler, she'd have to be very careful. She couldn't do it with just anyone, not if she wanted to keep her daddy happy.

  I expect that I'd nearly ruined things for her. She didn't want to know about the carnival—gawkers never do. No, she wanted to believe the lies, wanted to lay two tough roustabouts who'd fucked with the local big shots.

  Larry nuzzled her furry shoulder, making love to a coat, not even realizing what he was doing. The way he was going at it, I figured the least he could do was pay her six bits. Disgust churned in my belly, and then she was kissing me. She put a finger to my lips and promised that good things come to those who wait.

  I stared through the safety-cage, up at the stars, promising myself that I wouldn't think anymore. I'd be like her, like Larry. Like all the others who believed in stories. I'd believe too, and then she'd be a lady in mink, an angel out of nowhere....

  After a while she undid my belt. Her lips closed around me. I heard Pa laugh, saw him exchange handshakes with two men in front of the Death Car tent. One of the men—a skinny guy wearing a black suit—held Fort Knox. Pa held a black suitcase crisscrossed with white leather straps.

  Then the cab rocked, and the stars came into full view, and I closed my eyes and squeezed a handful of mink.

  The trailer door banged open. Pa came down the narrow hallway, the black suitcase in his hand bumping against the pine wallboard. I pulled a blanket over my head and pretended to snore.

  Pa pulled back the blanket. "Hey, Sleepin' Beauties, I got somethin' to show — "

  I squinted up at him. His good eye darted toward the empty bathroom, then back to me.

  "Where's your brother?"

  A chill ran over me, and not because I was missing the blanket. The other half of the bed was indeed empty. I thought back to the Hammer and the woman, half remembering Bud Ezell getting us down long after the night air had turned cold. Then an argument—Larry volunteering to take the mink lady for a ride in the Death Car, me saying she could get home on her own. Had he whispered something about wanting more? I couldn't recall.

  "Hey, I asked you a question," Pa said.

  "I don't know. He could be just about anywhere, I guess."

  For once, Pa didn't seem to mind a less-than-straightforward answer. "We'll just have to celebrate twice, then," he said, setting the suitcase on the bed. "I got somethin' here that'll sure enough put us back in business."

  I stretched. "Unless you've got Hank Caul's bones in there, I don't think — "

  Pa's laughter cut me off. "Better than that. Last night I bought the motherfucker's skin."

  A self-satisfied grin spread across the old man's face. I'm not exaggerating when I say that Pa's grin, more than the thought of the contents of the suitcase, made my skin crawl.

  Pa unfastened the scuffed leather straps that crisscrossed the suitcase, keyed the lock, and opened it. I saw a hand, fleshy-brown and twisted like an old leather work-glove, and then a foot. A face, sagging and empty, scarred.

  A neck dotted with a silver bolt.

  Pa gasped. "Goddamn! This ain't what they showed me last night. I swear it ain't!"

  I slipped the Frankenstein mask over my fingers and let it rest there. I remembered the mink lady's lips. Pa and the men standing below the Hammer. I remembered closing my eyes.

  "Pa, how much did you pay them? Where's Fort Knox?"

  Tears welled in the old man's eyes. "They got the whole damn stake!"

  The trailer door banged again. A werewolf shouldered down the hallway.

  "Larry, where in hell have you been?" Pa asked.

  The werewolf pulled off his mask. Bud Ezell stood before us, sweaty and panting. "It's only me, Mr. McSwain. I ran all the way over here...."

  "What is it, boy? Spit it out!"

  "The Death Car," he said. "It's gone!"

  I drove into Fiddler behind the wheel of Bud's piece-of-shit truck, just another farmhand passing through. Not that anyone would have noticed me even if I'd been driving the Death Car and wearing Hank Caul's skin—the valley fog that swam in the streets was that thick.

  I passed the mortuary, a brick building cloaked in fog, then turned down a narrow access road that led to a ranch-style house hidden behind it. A black Cadillac was parked in a driveway lined with freshly planted bare-root roses, now little more than naked stems jutting from the dark soil like so many tiny bones. There was no sign of the Death Car.

  Damn. This wasn't going to be easy. Larry wasn't inside sleeping it off, and I was sure that I'd have seen him if he'd been heading back to the carnival. Even in the fog, I wouldn't have missed the Death Car.

  Leave it to Larry to put what remained of our business in danger. I didn't know which I should look for first, my brother or the Death Car.

  Bud's truck coughed and complained as I down-shifted and pulled to the shoulder. Family first, I told myself, repeating another of Pa's favorite sayings. First Larry, then the car. And then we'd figure out what to do about Fort Knox.

  I climbed out, stretched, and took a quick look around. No neighboring houses, and no one out for a morning stroll. I sauntered up the driveway, pausing only to touch the Caddy's hood. It was cold, still beaded with moisture. The Caddy hadn't moved today.

  No one answered my knock. A spade was planted nearby in the flower bed—apparently the house's owner hadn't considered the black chuckles such an obvious symbol might elicit from people who knew his profession. Hiding in the porch shadows, I tromped the flimsy blade flat. Then I angled the tool against the front door molding and set to work.

  The house was empty. No people, not much stuff. The first bedroom I came across belonged to a man who favored black suits and white shirts. A yellow notebook lay open on his mahogany desk, page after page filled with scribbles analyzing the wholesale prices of silk and velvet, charts that recorded seasonal flower prices, and notes about the best way to close a sale— the usual things you might expect a businessman to fret over.

  The second bedroom—the master bedroom—belonged to a woman.

  No one had slept in the mink lady's bed. I opened her closet. Satin dresses, lacy nightgowns, but no mink coat.

  Silk blouses tickled my hand as I reached deeper, and then my fingers brushed something rough and heavy—a green coat with red leather sleeves. A Roman soldier, sword in hand, sneered at me from the back of the coat. Above him, large furry letters spelled FIDDLER SPARTANS.

  I slipped the coat off its hanger. A name was stitched over the breast.

  PERRY.

  I stared down at the corpse. A farm woman, her skin wrinkled, her hands soft with powder, as if she'd been making biscuits when she keeled over and no one had bothered to dust the flour off her hard, plump fingers.

  He approached me quietly, but not so quietly that I didn't hear his expensive Italian shoes whispering over the wool carpet. He stopped at arms length, just outside my field of vision, no doubt trying to decide why a mourner had appeared in work clothes and muddy boots.

  I turned quickly and caught him shaking his head over the soiled carpet. His jaw dropped a bit in surprise—mine did too, in recognition—but he caught himself and smiled benignly, the way undertakers do.

  "It's a shame," I said, remembering the Hammer and the skinny, black-suited man I'd seen holding Fort Knox.

  "Yes," he agreed. "She was a fine woman."

  He wiped away a tear.

  God, I stared at that tear like a gawker with a hardon for the Death Car. The power to do that
on cue. Amazing. Unnatural. Like slicing a monster mask and getting blood. Suddenly, a jolt of fear shot through my legs. Could it be that here, in this silly little town, I'd found an equal?

  Maybe he knew. Of course he did. He'd have to know. After all, funerals were designed for gawkers, and to be in the funeral business you'd have to understand how their minds worked. You'd almost have to know, or else you couldn't make them happy.

  The undertaker smeared the tear across his cheek. He blinked, and a drop of milky discharge oozed at the corner of his left eye. The bottom lid hung loose, away from the eyeball, and looking down at him I saw the rosy-pink rim of his inner flesh. I trembled with excitement, staring at tiny veins rimmed with old, rubbery flesh, but then he daubed his swollen eyelid with a soiled handkerchief and disappointment washed over me.

  "Just an infection," he said, smiling feebly. "Nothing to worry about... nothing contagious." And then, "Did you know Mrs. Fleming? Are you a relative?"

  "Where is your daughter?"

  "Why, she's... I mean, she's not here. Do you know... my daughter?"

  I grinned Larry's grin; it was as if the old bastard couldn't remember her name either. I grabbed his tie and pulled him close, staring into his red, basset hound eye. "I fucked your daughter last night. At the carnival. Up on the Ferris wheel. I saw some things going on down below in the dark."

  A look of recognition bloomed on the undertaker's face as he detected something of Pa in mine. "It wasn't my idea. Willie—Sheriff Martin—he has the money. He said it was money made from Fiddler's grief, from us...."

  I didn't want him to get started on excuses. I shook him and asked, "Where's Hank Caul's skin?"

  "There isn't any such thing. I mean, of course there is, but it's buried, it's on his corpse up in Fiddler Cemetery in an unmarked grave. The business about his skin has been blown out of proportion over the years, just like all the other stories about Hank. It's an old wives' tale, like the stories about bloody footprints and hitchhiking ghosts." He wiped at his infected eye. "And Willie said that if we could get your father to believe a story like that... Look, if you don't hurt me I'll pay you what I can. I'm quite well-fixed for cash."

  I pictured Pa salivating over a shadowy heap of rubber, Pa exhaling like a stunned gawker....

  I slapped the undertaker, hard.

  A tear spilled from his healthy eye. "God, you don't have my daughter, do you? I mean, you haven't hurt her, have you?"

  I wiped his tear away, rubbed it into my thumb. I couldn't help asking. I had to know. "Did you know that your daughter fucks little boys?"

  "Wait, now, there's no call — "

  I slapped him again; his bad eye oozed. "Did you know that your daughter fucks Perry Martin?"

  Whatever steel was left in the old man rose up. "You lying sonofabitch. My daughter wouldn't touch that little bastard."

  He'd gone all white. He wasn't lying. He knew nothing about his daughter and Perry Martin. And he knew nothing about his daughter's whereabouts. That, along with the simple fact that he hadn't recognized me immediately, meant that he knew nothing about my twin brother, either.

  "Your daughter is a very careful girl," I said. "I expect that there's a lot you don't know about her. But I'm not lying when I tell you that she's Perry Martin's tool." I grinned. "You should understand that. I believe you have the same relationship with Perry's father."

  His head dropped in shame. He didn't even squirm.

  I took hold of the undertaker's drooping eyelid. It felt like slick, oily rubber, the way a monster mask feels when it's brand-spanking-new.

  "Old man," I whispered, "you've disappointed me."

  And then I pulled.

  I found the mink lady's address book in her bedroom, right next to a cute little princess phone. Both the phone and the address book were pink. There wasn't a listing for an Ellie, but there was an Ellen Baker. I dialed her number, knowing that she was the weakest link.

  She answered on the fifth ring, laughing a laugh that I remembered. "This better be good," she said. "I'm washing my hair."

  I wanted to ask her if she was getting the blood out, but I resisted the temptation. "Ellie, are you alone?"

  "Of course I am, Perry. You know that Mom and Dad are — "

  "Look out at the fog, Ellie. What do you see in the fog?"

  "Hey, you're not Perry — "

  "Hank Caul's out in the fog, Ellie."

  Silence.

  "Hank is looking for you. He wants your skin."

  A pause. She was fighting the gawker inside her. "You're the guy from the carnival, aren't you?"

  "Don't say that. Don't even remember that you went to the carnival. That's my advice, Ellie."

  The telephone hum. The gawker taking hold.

  "Ellie, I can stop Hank. I can keep him away from you. See, he's inside me. I guess I spent too much time driving his car. God, it's so hard to explain...."

  I paused. Now that was a good story, and it had come bubbling out of nowhere. I let it sink in.

  "That damned car," she whispered, giving in so easily.

  "I don't want to hurt you, Ellie. But Hank does. Maybe if you help me I can make him leave you alone."

  "I'll tell you anything... and I promise I won't tell anyone about you, only you have to promise that you won't hurt me."

  "I can't promise, Ellie... but I'll try. I really will."

  "They're up at Hank Caul's place. That's what you want to know, isn't it? They're going to bury your brother in Caul's old orange grove. After what your brother did to him, well, Perry got so crazy. And then when he told her about it... Mister, believe me, I didn't have anything to do with it. I didn't even want to watch. But Perry made me, and Mel —"

  I hung up before she could finish saying the mink lady's name.

  Melody. Melissa. Melinda. Melanie.

  Nothing special there.

  The Mink Lady.

  That was a name the gawkers would appreciate.

  I threw the address book into the closet, suddenly afraid that I'd see the Mink Lady's real name written inside.

  There was no need to ruin a good story.

  The suit was too tight in the shoulders, and the Caddy only made wide turns. Really, those were my only complaints.

  Lights off, I edged the black car against the side of the weatherbeaten farmhouse. I got out and circled the property, telling myself that if just one house on earth was haunted, this would be the one. But I saw no sign of Hank Caul's ghost, heard no spectral whispers in the fog. And the only smell was the thick odor of moss and rot.

  All I saw was an abandoned house. I couldn't make the gawker's leap of faith. I was incapable of such an act. The Death Car had taught me too much about mythology, not the kind that you find in books, but the kind that's worth six bits. Hank Caul's house only brought Pa-thoughts surging through my brain—buy this place real cheap... fix it up... one hell of a tourist trap.

  Ghosts weren't real. Neither was fear. The cold truth was that they were things to be sold. Commodities. Only the gawkers believed otherwise.

  I kicked in the back door and explored the house. It hadn't changed much in the five years since we'd bought the Death Car at public auction. Even then, the gawkers had been frightened by ghost stories. How else could you explain the fact that no one bid on the house that day, even though the hillside location of the Caul property offered one of the best views in the county?

  The view couldn't be appreciated today, not even from the attic window. Fog pooled above the valley floor, suspended from the hills like a sagging spider-web. God, but it was a perfect place for stories. Maybe Pa had been thinking too small when he bought the Nash. Maybe we should have bid on the house.

  The idea gnawed at me. For the second time in so many hours, I felt disappointment in someone I'd admired.

  A car door slammed in the distance. I came across the sagging porch and spotted a glowing fire in the east orchard, a speck of orange nestled in a foggy blanket.

  A spider lurked
amid the fruit trees. I was sure of it. A big red spider with an engine of bone and seats of human flesh, or so the stories told. And somewhere near the spider, two little flies who believed.

  I reached into my pocket, my fingers closing on five-o'clock-shadow stubble and bristly eyebrows. Starting down the muddy path that descended to the east orchard, I slipped the undertaker's face over my own.

  No fruit hung from the gnarled branches. It was the wrong season. The oranges had fallen unpicked, and I had to watch my step, weaving a path through clumps of shriveled black fruit that reminded me of the rubber shrunken heads that hung in the Castle of Horrors.

  I moved fast, noisily, waiting to be noticed.

  The Mink Lady stood on the other side of the fire, daintily prodding Larry's clothes into the flames with a long stick. The Death Car was parked behind her; there was no sign of Perry Martin. A steamy sizzle rose from the blaze, and for a moment I imagined Larry's blood burning, but it was more likely that the wood was green.

  She tossed Larry's boots into the flames. Oily smoke curled from the rubber soles; her eyes followed it up and she noticed me. "What are you doing here?" she asked, blinking as the smoke turned and wafted into her face.

  I stopped short, safe in the fog. "Where's the suitcase?" I asked.

  Her answer came fast. "What suitcase? What are you talking about?"

  Beneath her father's face, I smiled. They were two of a kind, this pair; she knew nothing more of his activities than he'd known of hers.

  Perry Martin came around the Death Car, a shovel gripped in his right hand. "What's going on?" he asked. "Who are you talking to?"

  "Perry, it's my daddy!"

  They stared at me, cringing like guilty children. Daddy wasn't supposed to know about his little girl and Perry-the-stud, let alone these goings on.

  I waited for them to make a move. The fire crackled and hissed. Rubber dripped from Larry's boots; the laces burned like fuses. I daubed my left eye with a handkerchief. For now, I would stay in character.