I guess I got jaded pretty quickly, too, because I was looking at that burnt pilot stuck to his seat and wondering where I could get a spatula to pry him out. As I was thinking of this, someone walked behind me and said, “Damn, Bart, where’d you find this loser?”
I turned around and looked at the guy who’d spoken. He was a cop. In the darkness, I could barely make out his face. He stepped closer and put his hand on my shoulder. “It’s good to finally see some black folks around here,” he said. As soon as he said this, I recognized him. Dante Jones.
We’d gone to high school with him. He and my ex-girlfriend Rosalie were the only black kids in the school. Whenever Dante saw me and Rosalie, he’d say that line about seeing black folks. At first, I thought he was just talking about Rosalie. After a while, though, he started saying it to me when Rosalie wasn’t around. I didn’t really get his joke, but I liked it, anyway. It always feels good to be included.
I gave him a big smile. “Holy shit,” I said. I held my hand out to shake his.
He said, “I’ll shake your hand after you wash it, you nasty motherfucker.” He squeezed my shoulder. “How the hell have you been?”
“Up to my ass in dead guys right now,” I said, “but pretty good otherwise.”
Bart said, “Hey, Dante, you got a knife?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“These bastards are stuck to their seats. We have to cut them out.”
Dante reached into his pocket and grabbed a Leatherman. He handed it through the cockpit to Bart. “Try not to get dead guy all over it,” he said.
Bart opened the knife and started cutting the passenger out of his seat.
Dante turned his attention back to me. “I heard you were back,” he said.
“Who told you?” I asked.
“The Flagstaff Police Department.”
This surprised me. This actually freaked me out more than the crispy guys in the plane in front of me. “Huh?” I said.
Bart stopped cutting the passenger out and looked up.
Dante said, “I got a call about a month ago from the Flagstaff Police Department. They’d called the station a few times asking about you. They said you were involved in some kind of shit back there. Somehow word got around to me, so I talked to them. They said some white chick died back there. Said they wanted to talk to you about that. You know anything about that?”
I shrugged. “What did you tell them?”
“I told them that you wouldn’t have anything to do with white girls.”
“If I had any sense, I wouldn’t,” I said.
Dante put out his fist. I touched it with my fist. “No shit,” he said. He looked down at the spongy grass around his police black loafers. “Anyway, you didn’t kill any white girls, did you?”
“No,” I said. “I haven’t killed anyone.” I looked at Bart. He was back to cutting up the seat. He’d cut open the side closest to him, and now he was leaning over the body, cutting the other side. “Is that what they thought? That I’m a killer?”
“Nah,” Dante said. “They thought you were more of a manslaughterer.”
I laughed a little nervous laugh. “That’s better, huh?”
Dante smiled. He told me that he’d looked into it. He said that, if the police department really had anything on me, they wouldn’t have been calling him. They were just trying to shake me down. “But if you go back to Flagstaff, they’ll probably throw your ass in jail,” he said.
By now, Bart had his dead guy cut free and stuffed into the bag. He handed me the knife. I started cutting the pilot’s seat. Dante kept talking. He said to Bart, “Do you know where Flagstaff is?”
“Arizona,” Bart said.
“Did you know that before this motherfucker told you?” Dante pointed at me. Bart shook his head. “I’d never heard of that town,” Dante said. “I had to get out a map and look that shit up. I didn’t even know which state to look in. What were you doing way the fuck out there?”
I shrugged and kept cutting. As I started getting around the pilot’s legs, I put my hand on the floor for balance. I felt something hard and metal under the seat. It was a flask. “What’s this?” I said. I handed the flask to Dante. He opened it and took a whiff.
“I think it’s whiskey,” he said. “I better make sure.” He lifted the flask over his mouth and poured about a shot of whiskey down without touching his lips. He swallowed and shuddered. “I can’t be sure.” He handed the bottle to Bart. “Taste like whiskey to you?”
Bart did a shot, too. “Yep,” he said. “It’s whiskey.”
Bart tried to hand the flask to me, but I wanted to get the dead guy free before I hit on any of his hooch. I kept cutting and Bart and Dante both did another shot. I got the guy free, dragged him into the wet grass, and stuffed him into the body bag.
“I’ll take one of those now,” I said.
Dante handed me the flask. I downed a little whiskey. Bart said, “Danny, why don’t you ask him about the wheelchair dude?”
“Who’s the wheelchair dude?” Dante asked.
“Some dude who’s been following Danny around. Danny thinks he’s a P.I.,” Bart said.
I shook my head. “I’m probably just being paranoid.”
“No, sir,” Dante said. “That’s Clay Barker. He used to be on the force until he got that spinal.” Dante took another shot. “Look out for that guy.”
I had more questions for Dante about Libra and the wheelchair dude, but I also kinda wanted to just catch up with him. I’d always liked Dante. So I asked him what he’d been up to, if he was married, if he still played soccer, that kind of thing. Dante told some stories and that led to me telling some stories and Bart telling some stories. We stood around that burnt out plane with two dead bodies in the wet grass below us and bullshitted like we were in a bar. I won’t lie to you. It was a little weird. It was also nice to run into an old friend like Dante.
After a bunch of stories and a few shots, Bart picked up the body bag at his feet. “Enough chit chat,” he said. “We should go.”
He started dragging the bagged body toward the van. I tried to hand the Leatherman to Dante. “Fuck that,” he said. “I don’t want that nasty shit.” He took another shot from the flask and put it in his pocket. I picked up one end of the body bag and started dragging. Dante patted me on the shoulder again and said, “Good seeing you again, man. We should hook up, get a beer sometime.”
“We should,” I said.
Dante turned and walked toward his cruiser. I dragged the body over to the van.
On the way home, Bart stopped at a convenience store to get beer. I almost got some beef jerky until Bart said, “You know what that looks like?” I thought about the dead pilot and put the jerky back and got some peanuts. We drove on. We didn’t talk much about the pick up, other than Bart saying a few times how fucked I was about all that Libra shit. I tried to ignore him and just drink my beer.
By the time we got to Cocoa Beach—I hate to admit this—I was only thinking about one thing: what the fuck was Sophie doing back in town?
20
Pink Speedo Lambada
Sophie looked at me and asked, “Do you know what’s on TV?”
The television was not on.
I was sitting on the couch in my living room, reading a Jim Thompson novel. A great Jim Thompson novel, all about a small town Texas sheriff who may or may not have been the second coming of Jesus. The sheriff’s killing spree was almost over and I was wondering if this really was how it would be: would Jesus return as a mass murderer? Crazy shit. But there was no reason for me to know what was on TV. I said, “Leave me alone.”
This was the beginning of the end between Sophie and me. It was roughly three years after that hurricane in Kill Devil Hills and one year before Sophie stabbed me and five years before Sophie showed back up in Cocoa Beach. That would put us at 1995.
Sophie said, “What’s wrong with you?”
What was wrong with me is that I was ten pages away from finishing
one of the best books I’d ever read and I had this crazy broad asking me what was on TV. But more than that. Insanity was brimming all around me. For one thing, Sophie was too broke to support her cocaine habit, so she was in the midst of an ill-advised crystal meth bender. She hadn’t slept a full night in weeks. She was not fun to be around. For another thing, it was the start of summer. Whenever it gets that hot in Florida, people start showing their ass. Sometimes, it’s good. Usually not. But the start of summer meant the Start of Summer Block Party in Cocoa Beach, which meant everyone on Woodland Ave. and into downtown Cocoa Beach and really for nine square blocks would get drunk and go nuts for the next three days. And I lived right in the middle of those nine square blocks. And for the last thing, I lived in a duplex on Woodland, and on the other half of the duplex were a bunch of drunks from Merritt Island. They were fun to hang out with, but they’d been drunk when I left for work at nine-thirty that morning, and they were still drunk when I got back at four that afternoon. So all I wanted to do was read a little Jim Thompson before it started. I said, “Please, Sophie, leave me alone.”
Sophie didn’t say anything. She sat on the other end of the couch, facing me, her knees curled up to her chest, her shoes on the cushions. I went back to reading. The sheriff started his long soliloquy. Right at the beginning of it, though, Sophie’s foot came flying through the book, knocking it out of my hands and bruising my knuckles. “Jesus,” I said. “You jerk.”
“You’re so mean,” Sophie said. She stormed off toward my bedroom.
The next door drunks were blaring music on their side of the duplex. Almost loud enough to shake the walls. Sophie crashed around my bedroom. Breaking shit, probably. Throwing shit, probably. Trying to get my attention any way she could. I felt like I’d been suddenly swept up into a wave of chaos. I figured I’d just ride it. I got up, walked over to the record player, and put on a Minutemen album. A little chaos to balance the chaos. I picked up my Jim Thompson book, sat down, and went back to the sheriff.
The sheriff thought he was Jesus. I wasn’t so sure. I wanted to believe it. I wanted to think good and evil could be that complex, that indelibly wrapped. I got so sucked into the novel that I didn’t notice Sophie until she walked over to the turntable, yanked my record off, and snapped it in half. Damn it. Adios, Double Nickels on a Dime.
“I want you out of here,” Sophie said.
Which was ridiculous because Sophie didn’t live there. It was my apartment. “If you want to go, kid, just go,” I told her. I looked at my broken record on the floor. “Just go.”
Sophie dropped to the floor. She sat Indian-style there, with her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands. Her back shook. She was crying. I wasn’t going to comfort her. She brought all this on herself. Her madness was not my fault. I thought, if she wanted comfort, maybe she could listen to the Minutemen. Damn it. I picked up my book again and tried to read, but it was all too crazy.
After a couple of minutes, Sophie looked up at me—red-eyed and red-nosed—and said, “What’s the point?”
“Exactly,” I said. Thinking she was asking whether or not there was a point to our relationship. A reason to go on. Hoping she’d come to the conclusion that there wasn’t.
“There is no point, is there?”
“Probably not,” I said.
“So that’s it? My whole life has no meaning? Is that why your fucking book is so precious and you don’t care at all about me?”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” I said.
“But you said it. You said there’s probably no point to my life.” What should’ve been the whites of Sophie’s eyes glowed like red coals at the bottom of a fire pit.
“That’s not what I meant. I’m sure your life has meaning.”
“What is it, then?” Sophie asked. “What meaning does my life have? That’s what I want to know.”
“I don’t know. What meaning does anyone’s life have?”
“None!”
“Oh, quit it,” I said. “Just because you don’t know the answer to something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
“But what is the answer?” Sophie asked. Like I was holding out on her. “What’s the meaning of life? That’s what I want to know. If it didn’t all seem so pointless…” Sophie drifted off. She grabbed half of the broken record on the floor and started breaking it into pieces. I don’t know why it bothered me. It wasn’t like I could’ve played the record ever again. Still, did she have to keep breaking it in pieces? Was I supposed to come up with an answer for the meaning of life while I watched her destroy my record?
I couldn’t come up with anything to say. I just stared at Sophie. She broke the record into bits.
The music from next door had stopped. I heard their screen door slam shut. Three seconds later, there was a knock on my door. I didn’t move to answer it. Neither did Sophie. Before we could’ve gotten to the door, it opened anyway. It was Swoboda, one of the next door drunks. He had a bottle of beer in one hand. He stood on my living room floor like it was a ship at sea, swaying back and forth. Rocking there. He pointed one finger in the air and said, “To the bar.”
Sophie looked up from the floor. She smiled. “I’m in.” She hopped to her feet. “I’m young. I deserve to have a little fun,” she said. “Hang on a second, Swoboda.” She walked back to the bathroom to clean up.
Swoboda looked at my broken record. He looked at me. “To the bar?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Nah.” I stood up and walked into the kitchen. Someone had left a bottle of Rumplemintz there, and I was trying to get rid of it. I poured a shot for Swoboda. Sophie walked past the kitchen and into the living room. I poured a shot for her, too, and brought both shots out to them.
“Dan the man,” Swoboda said and drank the shot. Sophie drank hers. She threw the glass at me. I batted it down. She grabbed a record out of my stacks. The Pixies. Doolittle. She pulled the record out of the sleeve, broke it in half, and walked out the door.
Swoboda looked at me, stunned. I waved to him. “Have fun,” I said.
He nodded and left.
I looked for my Jim Thompson book. It was gone. Sophie must’ve palmed it.
I went back to my bedroom. Dresser drawers were on the bed, one of them missing its face. The top of the dresser was empty and everything that had been there—surfboard wax and a couple of books and a zine and some cash—had all been swept into a trash can. I saw my favorite sculpture. I’d made it a few weeks earlier. I’d taken steel and shaped it into a waterspout and put a thick weld around it to look like it was foaming water and I’d made these little people out of bolts and wire coat hangers and scraps of steel, and the people were hanging onto the waterspout, riding it for all its worth. Only hurricane Sophie had knocked a couple of those little people off the waterspout. And the waterspout was now impaled through a longboard that my brother Joe had given me. Sophie knew enough to throw the metal through the stringer of the board, so even I couldn’t fix it. There was more carnage around the room, but with the fucked up longboard and broken waterspout, I didn’t even want to look.
The sliding glass door to my bedroom was open. Hot air from the backyard blew in. Most of my clothes were scattered around in the backyard. I went out there to pick them up. The sad thing, I thought as I picked up the clothes, was that this wasn’t the worst of Sophie’s bouts. One time, back in Kill Devil Hills, she’d taken scissors and cut open every t-shirt I had. From the collar to the bottom. Every single one. And I only had t-shirts at the time, so I literally had no shirts. I had to walk barechested into a store and buy some. I went to a tourist place and got the three-for-ten-dollars deal on shirts that said “Outer Banks, North Carolina” on them. I wore nothing but those stupid tourist t-shirts for months. One other time, she’d taken all of my records—not just a Pixies one and a Minutemen one, but all of them—threw them in the bathtub, poured lighter fluid all over them, and lit them on fire. They didn’t burn very well, but they did melt into a mass of crap. And there wer
e forever instances of her palming whatever she thought was valuable to me, and I’d never see those things again. Mostly, though, she only attacked my things. She never, up to that point, had been violent toward me. She’d never hit me or slapped me or anything. She just trashed my things.
I’d usually breakup with her after attacks like that. The breakup would stick for a couple of weeks or a month, depending on where she was in her cycle of drug abuse and whether or not she was back in therapy. I kept taking her back, though. I don’t know why.
I guess I do know why. I just don’t want to get into it.
Anyway, I was out in the backyard, picking up my clothes when one of the next door drunks, Lester, popped his head over the fence. “Getting thrown out?” Lester asked.
“I’m throwing myself back in.”
“Crazy Sophie,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind me saying, but that chick is nuts.”
“Who’s crazier: her for being the way she is or me for staying with her?”
“That’s a good question.” Lester looked at all my clothes in the backyard. “Fuck all that shit,” he said. “Come over here and have a beer.”
I threw my handful of clothes through the sliding glass door. “I think I will,” I said.
“Oh,” Lester said, as if he really were just remembering it. “Bring beer.”
Typical of the next door drunks. It was all feast or famine with those guys. They had a full refrigerator and shared with everyone or they had nothing and bummed off of me. There never seemed to be an in-between. It didn’t matter to me, though. People were always partying after hours at my pad. They usually brought more beer than they drank, pulling that old two A.M. trick of buying a case, drinking two beers, and passing out. I grabbed a six-pack of Miller Lite—because that was a better beer to give away than it was to drink—and went next door.
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