Only she didn’t drive me to my bike. She took a wrong turn on Woodland and drove all the way down past my pad and past 3rd Street North and parked in the driveway of a house there. “I just need to make a pit stop here,” Rosalie said. She got out of the car.
I stayed in my seat. Rosalie waved for me to follow her. I did.
She unlocked the front door. “You live here?” I asked.
“Of course. Where did you think we were?”
“That’s strange,” I said. “I live a block away.”
“With Bart. I know.”
“But I never see you. I didn’t even know you moved back to Cocoa Beach.”
“I see you all the time,” Rosalie said. “Riding your bike around town. Going surfing.” She opened the door and went in. I followed.
“Why didn’t you ever stop to say hello?”
“I’m married now,” Rosalie said. She walked into the family room. The place was a mess. Clothes everywhere. Videos scattered in front of the television. A pile of papers on the coffee table. A cereal bowl left over from breakfast. Stuff like that. Rosalie gathered a pile of clothes off the couch, threw them onto the clothes piled on the recliner, and said, “Have a seat. Want something to drink?”
“I’m all right,” I said.
Rosalie went into the kitchen. “Well, you’re having a drink with me,” she said.
“Really, I’m all right.”
I could hear Rosalie breaking open ice cube trays and opening and closing cupboards and clinking glasses in the kitchen. I guess I was having a drink.
Rosalie said, “I married Paul Stromme from high school. Do you remember him?”
The name didn’t ring a bell. “No.”
“He remembers you. If you see him, act like you remember him.”
“Okay.” I started idly folding the clothes next to me on the couch and stacking them on the table. I don’t know why. I’m not usually like that. I guess I just didn’t have anything else to do. “How’d you two hook up?”
“At a real estate seminar up in Jacksonville. About four years ago. I didn’t remember him from high school, either.”
“What were you doing there?”
Rosalie poked her head out of the kitchen. “I’m a realtor,” she said. “You don’t think I wear these business suits ‘cause they look cool, do you?”
“It looks good on you,” I said.
“Quit folding my dirty laundry.” Rosalie went back into the kitchen to finish making the drinks. I kept folding. It was mostly dirty t-shirts with big prints of American flags and wolves and largemouth bass and stuff like that.
“Is Paul a redneck?” I asked.
“Kinda. He fishes a lot.”
She came back out of the kitchen with our drinks. The seat on the couch next to me was open now that I’d cleared the laundry off. Rosalie sat there. She tucked her feet under her and faced me. I took a sip of my drink. Gin and grapefruit juice. Heavy on the gin. I tried to put the glass down, but there was no room on the coffee table. I held onto my drink. Rosalie looked at me and twirled her hair and said, “So where were we?”
I knew that look in her eyes. I knew that hair twirl. “We were talking about your husband,” I said.
“Oh yeah, him,” Rosalie said. She sipped her drink, pushed some crap off the coffee table, and set the drink down. “Forget about him.”
“It’s hard to, with his clothes all around and everything.”
Rosalie reached out and touched the back of my head. Her fingernails ran down through my hair. “Don’t be mad about my husband.”
“Why would I be mad?”
“Because I always feel like I’m cheating on you,” Rosalie said. “Since we never officially broke up.”
I knew a line of bullshit when I heard it. “Officially?” I said.
“Never even got to say goodbye.”
Which was true. Rosalie and her family picked up and left pretty quickly back then, between our junior and senior years of high school. And seeing her there on the couch again, talking about high school, close enough to smell her, feeling her fingernails in my hair, feeling her knee brush up against my leg… For tiny moments, I felt that old high school feeling. That flutter of early afternoon and skipping school and heading back to Brother Joe’s when he was at work and Rosalie and I having sex until it was almost time to get caught. “Don’t try this,” I said.
Rosalie took my drink and put it on the table. “Try what?” She scooted closer. Her eyes locked on mine. I wasn’t ready for it. I hadn’t been with a woman since Libra, and I hadn’t even come close to dealing with that. And I was hung up on Helen. And Sophie was back in town. And I felt like I’d been steadily fucking up for so long that it was time to stop.
But then again, Rosalie always got her way with me.
She ran her fingers through the hair on the top of my head and rested her hand there, massaging my scalp a little. When she did this, my glance fell down to her chest, where a button of her blouse had come undone. Her red lace bra cut a wavy line across her cleavage. I tried not to stare, but I knew a little. I knew that that button hadn’t come undone on accident. I knew the score, here. I thought, come on, Rosalie, what are you doing to me?
She put a finger under my chin. I lifted my head. She came in for a kiss and I let it happen. Before I knew it, she was pulling off my t-shirt and undoing my belt and I was suddenly naked on her couch, not even quite realizing that I’d given in. I felt kinda silly, all white underneath where I usually wore my baggies. My goofy hard-on staring up at me. “How is this fair?” I said.
“You’re right. It isn’t. Come on.” Rosalie led me into the bedroom.
There was very little foreplay. Her clothes seemed to fall off of her like a dream and she stood before me naked, perfect breasts, stomach pretty flat but a new roundness to her hips and thighs. Here was my high school girlfriend turned into a woman. The age and extra pounds did her well. Our bodies more or less took over. We fell into that old rhythm. This was something that Rosalie and I had always been good at. Lord knows we practiced it enough in the bedrooms of these little Woodland homes.
The air conditioner pumped overtime, but with the heat of sex and the humid Florida summer, we were both pouring sweat. We slid and glided against each other. Rosalie took control, putting my hands where she wanted them, guiding my mouth to all her tender spots. At times, it was too much. At other times, I’d think of Rosalie’s husband and feel guilty. Or I’d think of Libra—the last woman I’d done this with—how different every aspect of it was. And I’d remember that Libra was dead. These thoughts would rip my right out of the moment. To Rosalie’s credit, though, she never let my mind drift far enough to lose my erection. I pinballed between guilt and horror and pure pleasure. The sex seemed to go on forever. Not that I was complaining. It was just way more than I could’ve anticipated. Finally, Rosalie pulled out all the stops: flicking her tongue on the soft spot of my neck, grazing her thumb across my nipples, grinding on me, saying the dirtiest things, demanding I come until I came.
When we were done, Rosalie rolled off of me and said, “There’s that goodbye I never got.”
If that’s what it was to her, that was okay with me. I wasn’t sure what it meant to me.
Almost immediately, though, Rosalie was up. She toweled off, dropped the towel on my chest, and started getting dressed.
“Is your husband gonna be home soon?”
“No. He’s gone for the week. Fishing.” Rosalie tossed my shorts to me. “But my daughter’ll be here any minute.”
I sat on the bed and put on my boxers. “You have a daughter?”
Rosalie looked at me like I was crazy. “Of course,” she said. “Aren’t you two best friends?”
This took me a second. I figured she meant Taylor. I didn’t know where Taylor lived, but she always did take a right at Woodland when I took a left. So this would make sense. But still, I didn’t understand. “How could you be Taylor’s mom?” I asked. “She’s, like, what? Twel
ve or thirteen.”
“She’s twelve.”
“Okay, how could you have a twelve-year-old daughter? I mean, shit, weren’t we dating twelve years ago?”
“Twelve years and nine months ago, yeah,” Rosalie said.
I didn’t see that one coming. Damn near knocked me out.
An hour later, I was still trying to get Rosalie to marry me. My point was that if I was Taylor’s father and she was her mother, then we should do what was right and become a whole family. Rosalie’s point was that she already was married, already had a family, and… Well, it took an hour of me harping on her before Rosalie finally laid it out for me. She said, “There’s no nice way for me to put this, Danny, but you’re a loser.”
“What? I’m not a loser.” Or, more to the point, only I get to call me a loser.
“What do you do for a living?”
I didn’t answer. What could I say? I pick up dead bodies? Then, I could’ve made the point that I’d been working at a metal shop and making good money and that was a respectable job, but I’d just gotten fired. And why had I gotten fired? Because my boss got sketched out by the private investigator who’d been following me because I’d left my last girlfriend dead on the train tracks in Flagstaff. I convinced myself more and more that Rosalie had a point. I said, “Fuck you.”
“Typical loser thing to say,” Rosalie said.
I tried to think of a comeback, but right then, Taylor walked in. She dropped her backpack on the floor right by the door and said, “Danny? What are you doing here?”
“He’s trying to get me to marry him,” Rosalie said.
“What?” Taylor asked. “Why?”
“ ‘Cause he’s your goddamn daddy,” Rosalie said.
“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ!” Taylor said. She started crying. She grabbed her backpack, stormed back into her room, slammed the door, and locked it.
Rosalie looked at me like it was all my fault. Which, well, a lot of it was. She said, “I think you should leave.”
And, don’t you know it, I was thinking the exact same thing.
26
Crazy Broads and Dead People
I parked the Space Coast van under an awning of red and blue swirling lights, slipped on a pair of rubber gloves, and walked out into the 3 A.M. carnage. A few fireman and cops stood around waiting for Bart and me. I asked the nearest cop, “Where’s the body?”
“Where isn’t it?” the cop said. Everyone around him laughed.
I looked down the train tracks and got a sense of déjà vu.
Bart stepped next to me. He had a body bag in his hands. We headed down the tracks. About fifty feet down, we found most of the stiff. He’d lost his head, half an arm, and his foot. The rest was slumped in a bloody pile right in the middle of the tracks. I picked the corpse up. Bart held the body bag open for me. I slid the corpse in. We set off down the tracks to find the head, arm, and foot.
There wasn’t much of a moon shining down on us. The only real light we had were the swirling ones on top of the fire trucks and cop cars. As we searched for the rest of the body parts, the fireman and cops started to take off. One cop would stick around, but now that Bart and I were on the job, there was no need for the rest of them.
It was all overgrown around the tracks. Weeds and hubcaps and fast food bags and empty cans. Still, I found the foot on top of a little bush. I bent down to pick it up. As I stuffed it in the bag, Bart tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to look and saw that he didn’t use his own finger to do this. He used the dead guy’s. I stared down the severed arm that Bart was tapping me with. “Goddamn it, Bart,” I said.
He was all grin.
I pulled the arm out of his hand and stuck it in the body bag. And right then, at that moment among the moonlight and weeds and body parts I was stuffing in a bag, it all hit me. I started crying.
Now, I never cry. I don’t know why not. I just don’t. I didn’t cry when I heard that Brother Joe was dead. I didn’t cry at his little grave marker. I didn’t cry when I saw Libra on the tracks or during that forty-nine-hour bus ride when all I could think about was Libra. I didn’t cry when Sophie stabbed me or when I left Helen or any of the dozens of times in my life when it probably would’ve been healthy to let a tear fall. I never did it. But there on those train tracks, with a stranger’s mangled corpse in my body bag and Bart and a few cops and firemen looking on and a missing head floating around in the weeds somewhere nearby, I started crying like a little girl.
I don’t know if Bart noticed. He said, “I’m gonna borrow a flashlight from those cops.” He headed back up the tracks.
I paced up and down the tracks, looking for the head. Bart got the flashlight and came back and we both looked. I wasn’t really crying in the same way any more. Tears were still dripping out, but I tried to ignore them. And, as for the head, we couldn’t find it anywhere.
By now all the cops and firemen were gone except for one. He was getting impatient. He yelled something from his car, but he was too far away. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Bart had an inkling, though. He said, “That cop’s right. Fuck the head. Let’s just take what we got and go home.”
“No,” I said. “What if some kid finds the head tomorrow morning?”
“Then he can bring it in the M.E.” Bart handed me the flashlight. He turned and headed back to the van.
I kept looking.
I found out later that the cop had recognized Bart from the days when Bart was a basketball star. The cop had gone to Merritt Island High School when Bart and I were at Cocoa Beach High. They played against each other a few times. This gave them something to talk about when I kept looking for the head. Later, this is probably what kept me from getting arrested.
I walked farther down the tracks. I went as far as I thought the head could possibly have flown. I thought to myself, I have to change what I’m expecting to see. It won’t look like any head I know of. It’ll be different. I have to open up my mind to that.
And there it was. Crushed. Mutilated. Hardly a head at all. But still human flesh and blood. I picked up the head and sat down on the tracks. I held it in my hands and just cried and cried.
The cop pulled out his bullhorn. “Bring in the head,” he said. “Quit fucking around. Bring in the head.”
Bart yelled out, “Come on, Danny.”
And I just cried.
Not for too long. Maybe twenty, thirty seconds, then I pulled myself together. I stood and dropped the head in the body bag and headed down the tracks.
By the time I got back to where the cop and Bart were, I wasn’t crying anymore. I had the body bag zipped up and draped over my shoulder. Bart opened the back of the van. I heaved the stiff on the gurney and we strapped it in. The cop stood behind us and watched.
“Who was this guy?” I asked the cop.
“Just some bum,” the cop said.
“How do you know?”
“Didn’t you smell all the booze on him?”
“I smell booze on Bart. That doesn’t make him a bum.”
“Look,” the cop said. “You do your job and I’ll do mine.”
“But I want to know. How do you know he’s a bum?”
“Don’t fuck with me, son,” the cop said, even though we were the same age and he knew it.
“Did you check for I.D. or anything? Did you take fingerprints? Dental records?”
This was what I asked for: dental records. As if I hadn’t been holding the crushed head in my hands just three minutes earlier. As if there were any teeth or jaw left.
The cop said, “What is this? Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“I want to know. How do you know who this guy is?”
By now, the cop was pissed. He had one hand on his gun and the other on his walkie-talkie.
Bart stepped in. “I’m sorry about this, Gene,” he said to the cop. He grabbed my arm. “Come on, man. Let’s go.”
I wouldn’t budge, though. I just kept asking the cop how he knew that the dead guy was
a bum. Or how he pretended to know anything about the dead guy. Or why he and the rest of the police department had no intentions of investigating this shit. When I said, “What? Are you too busy busting keggers? Too busy copping a feel off of high school girls when you do?”, the cop got pissed. He threatened to arrest me.
Bart physically picked me up at this point and started dragging me to the van. At the same time, the cop got on his walkie-talkie and radioed for back-up. I took the hint and left.
The next day, all I could think about was the corpse on the train tracks. And, of course, it wasn’t the dead guy’s corpse I was thinking about. It was Libra’s.
I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house. I could barely get out of the recliner. Bart tried to talk to me. I just shrugged him off. The phone rang a few times. I didn’t answer it. The television was on, but it would be a mistake to say that I watched it. I just stared straight ahead, seeing mostly that Betty Boop tattoo and that severed leg.
At about three o’clock, there was a knock at the door. I assumed it was Taylor wanting to go surfing. This sent another jolt through me, a sudden reminder that I was a dad. Shit. Things got complicated so quickly. I opened the door and there was Helen.
“Hey, Danny. Got a minute?” she asked.
I stepped aside and made a sweeping motion to welcome her in.
She handed me a Styrofoam take-out container. I opened it. It was a plate lunch from Duke’s. Teriyaki beef, rice, potato-macaroni salad. One of my favorites. “Thanks,” I said.
Helen sat on the couch. I walked into the kitchen, stuck the plate lunch in the refrigerator, and grabbed two beers out of the crisper.
“Bart had lunch at Duke’s today,” Helen said.
“Yeah?” I handed one of the beers to Helen and sat in the recliner.
“He told me all about that dead guy last night?” Helen said.
I nodded. I leaned back in the recliner and propped my feet on the footrest. I turned off the television. “Who’s watching Duke’s?”
“Shaggy,” Helen said. “No one comes in this time of the afternoon anyway.”
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