He’d shorn his hair close in prison, a gesture to self-denial, and he looked like a large, savvy monk. Complicating the picture was his new suit, received only yesterday by mail. It still bore the creases from its packaging. Worse, he had on nothing but a white T-shirt underneath. The family friend who’d sent the suit had forgotten to send a shirt along.
After a cursory up and down, the driver said, “Screw how you look. How do you feel?”
Abatangelo uttered a small, nervous laugh. “First time thrown in the pool. Multiplied by a thousand.”
“A word to the wise?”
“Feel free.”
“You seem the brainy type.”
Abatangelo wondered where this was going. “Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. Listen. I’ve known guys like you, they come outta prison a little too ready to just keep on keeping on. Hole themselves away, read everything they get their hands on. Never quite get the flow of being on the outside. You follow?”
“Yes. I do.”
The driver tapped at his temple again. “Just because you can think deep thoughts, that don’t mean they ain’t got you right where they want you.”
“Point taken,” Abatangelo said.
“Lash out. Fuck parole, break the chain. It takes some practice, remind yourself you’re a free man again.” The driver’s eyes were intense, but his voice was calm. “Got yourself an old lady? In Frisco, I mean.”
The question caught Abatangelo off-guard. He felt the pressure of Shel’s letter against his chest. “As a matter-of-fact,” he began, but then found himself unable to finish.
Putting a fresh cigarette between his lips but not lighting it, the cabby reached up behind his visor and from beneath a rubber band removed a business card and a keno pencil. He scrawled a name and address on the back of the card.
“You’re due,” he said. “I get up your direction now and again. Why’s a long story. This girl here, Mandy’s her name. I’m not saying she’s a knockout, but you gotta make sure the pump still pumps. Don’t think it over, don’t contemplate the fallout, just call. Go. Fuck her till she cries. You’re a free man. You owe yourself. They stole ten years from you. Steal them back.”
Abatangelo accepted the card and read it. There was a Tenderloin address beneath the words MANDY PODOLAK, HOLSTEIN HOTEL. He pictured a woman large, plain, and nonjudgmental. A long story.
“I’ll tell her you send your best,” he said.
“Don’t bother.”
The driver put the cab in gear and drove off. His arm appeared from the window in a final salute as he merged with outbound traffic. Once he disappeared, Abatangelo dropped the card into the nearest rubbish bin.
He reached into his coat pocket, felt the envelope with Shel’s letter inside. No return address. That was coy. And she’d written about her new life, the man in that life, some guy named Frank, blah blah blah. The good news was, she didn’t sound like she was any too thrilled about the guy. And she’d thought enough to keep track of Abatangelo’s release date after three years of silence. That meant something.
It meant she wanted him to find her. Find her, or die trying.
CHAPTER
3
Frank awoke with fragmentary images of the night’s final dream trailing away. The last thing he remembered was sitting in an empty room, alone at a wood plank table, eating tripe with his fingers.
Sitting up, he tested his balance at the edge of the bed. Why is it, he wondered, I do crank and up pop the weird little nightmares about food. His skin felt like it’d been stretched across a larger body then allowed to shrink. You’re a walking road map of your own sick impulses, he thought. Where was Shel? Where was his shiny white nurse?
He rose to his feet, tottering a moment, then felt his way toward the door. The morning was quiet, except for the intermittent howl of wind funneling between the house and the barn. He made his way to the guest room. Shel went in there sometimes to have a smoke or read when she couldn’t sleep.
He turned on the light, smelling a faint reminder of her shampoo. A pair of sweatpants and two mismatched wool socks lay scattered across the floor. The bed was unmade, the window open. She liked the window open at night. It had something to do with the stint she’d pulled at the FCI in Dublin.
Just then his head erupted in pain, like his eyes were exploding from the back. He put his hands to his face and dropped to the floor. On his knees, head to the floorboards, he waved his hand overhead trying to find something to grip. After a moment he gave up, struggled to his feet and charged blind down the hallway toward the kitchen.
He forced his head beneath the cold water spigot. Violent chills broke across his back, he bolted straight and roared. Forgoing a towel, he shook his hair and let the droplets fly. Stopping to catch his breath, he felt the water drip onto his naked shoulders. One hand gripping the edge of the sink, he slid to the floor.
Where was Shel?
He found himself revisiting his dream—the cavernous room, the bare plank table, the bowl of steaming tripe. The slithering gray meat in his hands, the spicy fecal odor, it came to him so vividly the skin of his fingers felt sticky and warm. He fought back a surge of nausea and wiped his face with the soft of his arm.
Where’s Shel, he thought. I need my long-stemmed nurse.
He returned to the bedroom and ransacked his things till he came across the small white pharmacist’s envelope in which he kept his secret daily ration of Thorazine. He hid the rest of his stash in the tool chest tucked behind the seat of his truck, where Shel was unlikely to happen upon it. Like any longtime meth enthusiast, he and Thorazine were pals. It tamed the shakes and spooks. Valium was good, too, for the shakes at least. That’s all they ever gave you at Emergency. It wasn’t so much the shakes, though, as the spooks that gave Frank a problem.
He regretted having to hide these things from Shel. She believed in: Good Things Happen To Those Who Stick With It. And it was not a bad philosophy, he supposed. She’d seen him through hell and more, stuck with it in ways he knew he didn’t deserve. And for that, he loved her. Loved her hard. If she didn’t quite love him back, well hey. No big thing. We’re all adults here.
With five hundred mills in his system he sank into a fitful sleep. Waking sometime after noon, he rose and made the same path to the guest room he’d made earlier. This time, Shel was there. And his heart skipped at the sight of her.
She sat on the bed cross-legged, her red hair hanging loose about her shoulders, a cigarette in her hand. She was dressed in a T-shirt three sizes too large, her arms sticking out of the billowing sleeves like a little girl’s. She wore sweatpants, too, a pair of heavy socks. The same pants and socks he’d seen on the floor earlier.
“How long you been home?” he asked.
She turned to look at him. Her eyes were beginning to betray her age. They were too serious for the tomboy face. She’d started putting henna in her hair, too, to ward off the gray. All in all, though, she remained a looker. Frank, who was ten years younger, returned her gaze and thought, I need you. Every minute, every day, I need you. You’re all I got.
“I woke up, you were gone,” he said.
“That’s not true. I’ve been here all morning.”
“Don’t do this,” Frank said.
Shel cocked her head. “Do what?”
“Make out like I’m nuts.”
“Frank, what’s going on?”
“You weren’t here.”
She turned to face him squarely. “I went out to stretch my legs for a while. Just to the road and back. That what you mean?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said, misery in his voice. “That must be it.”
They stared at each other. Shel turned away first. Frank moved to where her gaze landed and pounded flat-hand at the wall.
“Quality Sheetrock, here. You bet. Lamefuck plaster job, though. Second-rate latex. A color they call ecru.”
“Frank, good God, what is it?”
He crossed the room, knelt down and wrapped
his arms about her, settling his head into her lap. “I’m sorry,” he said, eyes shut tight. “It’s just …”
She put her cigarette to her lips and stroked his hair. “I know,” she said softly, exhaling smoke.
His grip weakened. He looked up at her. She rose from the bed and searched for her jeans. “I’ll make you some lunch,” she said. “How’s that sound?”
Good things happen to those who stick with it, he thought. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “Sounds first-rate.”
In the kitchen she fixed up sandwiches and soup. She regretted lying to him—of course she’d slipped out that morning, and not just for a little walk. She’d needed time with her thoughts. Danny was getting out today and, well, that was a lot to deal with. She did not mean to trick Frank. Things were just hard right now.
The last thing she wanted to do was make out like he was crazy.
It wasn’t that she thought he was unbalanced, just vulnerable. He had trouble piecing things together, he flew into easy rages. His hunger for human contact was only exceeded by his inability to make it count for much. Shel couldn’t say if all that added up to something a psychiatrist would put a name to, but after living with it at close quarters for a little over two years, she could testify that it signified at least a broken soul, if not exactly a sick mind.
She’d met him while working at a brunch and dinner spot in Port Costa overlooking the strait. She’d been out of prison four years, and it had taken that long to get half her confidence back. A convicted felon, she’d been turned down so often by casinos and even card rooms she’d returned to waitressing just to get by. It had taken some effort, untangling all that bitterness and loneliness, wandering town to town, just like she had before Danny. And him still being inside and all, her being too broke, too ashamed, to go down and visit him in Arizona. The letters, well, they were just letters.
Finally, she worked her way up to a nice place—starched formal shirt, red bow tie and cummerbund, a tony wine list. One day Frank wandered in, for Saturday brunch. He had a boy with him, a three-year-old named Jesse.
Frank was sweet like a pound mutt and reasonably good looking, rangy and dark with an easy smile, reminding Shel of Montgomery Clift in The Misfits. But it wasn’t his looks that charmed her. It was the way he interacted with his son.
She never meant for it to amount to much, just some company once in a while, till Danny got out again. Sex was tense, haunted by guilt. Mostly they just took walks with Jesse or did the playground bit as Frank talked through his problems. He was in his sixth month of rehab. His wife wouldn’t go. She binged on crank, disappeared for days, sometimes leaving Jesse alone in the house till Frank showed up to find him soiled and crying. What do I do? Frank wondered. Turn her in? Keep trying? She’s not evil, he’d say, just strung out.
Shel, once upon a time a collector of strays herself, said she saw his problem. Like her mother before her, she’d taken in a hard case or two over the years, knew how easy it was to draw the line, how hard it could be to honor it. Danny’d been the first whole human being she’d ever loved. And that was why she’d loved him madly.
Frank, at that point, was more distraction than attraction, to steal a line from her mother. Truth be told, Shel’s interest focused on the boy. Jesse had blond hair that erupted like crabgrass from his head, emphasizing ears so large he’d be ten before they matched the rest of him. He played like a puppy. He squinted when he smiled, and the smile would stop you dead.
The few occasions Frank stayed over, wanting moral support because his wife had been gone longer than usual this time, Shel secretly left the bed in the middle of the night and padded down the hall to the living room where she’d fussed up covers on the couch for Jesse. She plopped down on the rug and just sat there in the glow of the night-light, watching the boy sleep on his stomach, hands bunched beneath his chin, breathing in and out. Every now and then she’d reach over, brush a strand of hair from his face, or lay her palm upon his back, simply to feel the warmth of his body. Any person who can create a child so beautiful, she told herself, has light inside. Maybe, she thought, once Danny’s out again, him and me, we can try.
Frank’s old lady finally got wind there was another woman in the picture. She didn’t bother to flesh it out. She disappeared for good this time. Being the woman she was, she took Jesse with her.
Frank came a little unhinged then. Later, Shel would tell herself that if there’d been a time to walk away, that would have been it. But her favorite parable growing up had been the Good Samaritan. And the Good Samaritan didn’t interrogate the lost, beaten, dying man he found by the side of the road, didn’t ask who he was, where he came from, whether what happened wasn’t really his own damn fault. He just picked the man up and took him to the next safe place. Samaritans and victims are wedded together. They share a bond almost as fierce as love, or so she soon found out.
She joined in, searching up and down the county for Jesse. The thought of the boy out there alone, with only a wild woman on drugs to fend for him, it haunted her. And, privately, she felt pangs of guilt—if not for her, the boy’s mother wouldn’t have snatched the boy and run.
Together, she and Frank stapled handbills to telephone poles, pinned them up on community service message boards or tucked them under windshields at supermarket parking lots. They checked emergency rooms and SRO dives, questioned liquor store clerks and streetwalkers and chatty tweaks. This went on for nearly two months. Then one day a couple of detectives showed up, telling Frank to collect his coat and come along.
At the station the detectives had Frank identify some clothing found out on the rim of Honker Bay. “Kid’s corduroys, woman’s blouse and bra. Give it a sniff, chief. Tell us something.” Trembling, Frank inspected the stuff and said yes, he recognized it. That earned him free admission to an interview room. He spent the next four days in there, being grilled, the detectives convinced his wife and Jesse were dead. And Frank was the killer.
Frank was not the kind to bear up well under such scrutiny. Bad enough his boy was gone. Now death was all but certain, and though they couldn’t accuse Frank into confessing to a murder he didn’t commit, they did shame him into a craven mess.
Shel had her hands full keeping his head on straight once they finally were done with him. Talking him down from screaming jags. Wrapping him three-deep in blankets to fight cold spells she couldn’t convince him were just in his mind. Hiding the car keys, the money, the razors.
Finally the real murderer, some drug-addled freak Frank’s wife had fallen in with, succumbed to a lightning bolt from God. Showing up in the Antioch sheriff’s station, he announced he had something he wanted to show everybody. He led three deputies out to the spot where he’d buried the bodies. He’d crushed the boy’s skull with a hammer, making the mother watch. Then he’d killed the mother.
“She said she was gonna leave me,” he confessed.
Over the next year, Shel saw Frank in and out of the hospital after psychotic breaks. She found him hiding in the shower with a baseball bat. Curled up naked beneath the dash of his truck. Once he just stood in the doorway to his room, screaming, “Hey wait, I hate this movie.”
When asked by intake nurses, “Your relationship to the patient is …,” Shel usually resorted to “sister.” It gave her privileges “girlfriend” didn’t, she lacked the gold band that would’ve made “wife” credible, and besides, sister wasn’t such a reach. Frank was her damaged little stepbrother. They’d become family when Mother Mercy had hooked up with Father Fucked.
Outside the hospital, she did her best to steer him clear of the lowlife sorts he returned to when things broke down, the kind who played him like a fool. She reminded herself that this was the man who’d given life to Jesse, and using that for inspiration, she found ways to get Frank up and walking toward the better side of his character. The backslides could be brutal, though, requiring a special vigilance. Every year, at about this time, he went through the anniversary spooks of Jesse’s death, and that
was not a sight for weak minds.
She heard Frank turn on the shower. Throughout the old house the water pipes banged and groaned behind the walls from the sudden flood of heat. It seemed heartbreaking, that sound.
Frank wasn’t the only one with a problem. She was lost. She’d taken a wrong turn, and now found herself engulfed in a haze, unable to retrace her steps. Worse, she felt robbed of the will to try.
It wasn’t like her. She’d been a feist, a firecracker, the Devil’s own redhead—at least she had been long ago. Now, she thought, chuckling sadly as she folded a piece of nameless lunch meat, now you’re the sadder but wiser girl.
First there’d been the arrest in Oregon, and all the tangled-up guilt, fury and humiliation it entailed. Next came prison, where the counselors harped and hammered on you about the notorious knack female offenders had, once free again, of inflicting more damage on themselves than anyone else. Then, after her release, the relentless, all-too-familiar life of dreary jobs and drifting town to town. It felt, at times, like her life with Danny and the happiness she’d known had all been a mirage. Nothing had really changed, except she’d grown older, life was harder. The loneliness had become more vicious and personal.
And so it was cheap to blame Frank for anything. She’d been heading toward Frank, toward Jesse’s death and the awful aftermath, all along. Besides which, what she saw that absolutely no one else did was that once, before his son’s murder, Frank had been capable of a great love. And great loves—like between her and Danny—they were rare indeed. Frank had possessed a true, selfless devotion for his boy. And that devotion had been savaged in a way all the naysayers dared not imagine. Shel herself recoiled from the images when they erupted, unbidden, in sleep, or an unguarded moment. Well, that nightmare belonged to Frank like the blood under his skin. And when its worst moments hit, there was no one—no one—in the world to talk him down but Shel.
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