The Sleeping and the Dead

by Jeff Crook

  “I’m hoping we’ll find a print,” he said. I didn’t bother pointing out that they already had plenty of prints, but maybe he was hoping a fingerprint would definitively tie this victim to the previous murders and eliminate the possibility of a copycat. Or maybe he was just hoping for a fresh break.

  “So what’s his name?” he asked.

  “Whose name?”

  “Your date. Last night.”

  “James St. Michael.”

  “Isn’t he on television or something?”

  “That’s what everybody says. Actually, he flies crop dusters.”

  “I didn’t know people still did that.” He looked up at the sky as though he expected to see one. The air was so cold, I could barely breathe.

  “They do. Are we done here?”

  “You got another date?”

  “With my parents.”

  “That’s good. I’m glad you’re going home. Only, go back to your apartment first and clean up because you look like shit, Jackie.”

  “Thanks for noticing. Can I borrow forty bucks for gas?”

  Adam took out his wallet and passed me a couple of twenties, with the unspoken understanding that I wouldn’t go and stick it in my arm. He was paying me to go to an NA meeting. Clever boy, that Adam. He knew how to play me. I noticed several of his cop friends watching our exchange, so I smiled at them with my unshaved teeth. They pretended to be looking at something else.

  “Sergeant!” Wiley barked. Adam hurried over. He and Wiley were still on speaking terms, because Adam was good at being everybody’s friend, even friends with swinging dicks like Wiley. I dropped my cig and ground it out under my shoe, because I liked making enemies. It was the only thing I was any good at. I was free to go, but I waited to thank Adam.

  He walked back while they were still zipping up the body. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t look at anything. He looked like somebody had opened a vein in his neck. I grabbed his arm before he walked off the edge of the stage.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Cole Ritter,” he said.

  19

  I PUT THIRTY OF ADAM’S forty in the tank and bought two packs of cigarettes, a can of Mountain Dew, and a scratch-off. I won two dollars and that’s all the money I had in my pocket when I sat down in a room at the adult learning school to hear people talk about staying off the junk. I tried to care and they pretended to understand my backsliding twice just since my last meeting on Sunday. I also tried not to notice the two men sitting at the back of the room, weeping and chewing their hands, doomed to pay for the sin of their mortal addictions in the eternal hell of Narcotics Anonymous.

  I promised I would show up for next Sunday afternoon’s meeting, and as shitty as I felt at the moment, I really meant it. I put my life in the hands of a higher power and drove over the Hernando DeSoto Bridge a little after lunch time. Despite days of rain, the river was low, the muddy water beige with the sand bars standing out like an old man’s ribs. There were dead people walking on the waters—a whole continent’s worth of mob hits, flood victims, suicides and boating accidents. The clear blue of the sky had given over to high gray clouds. At least it wasn’t raining, but now they were talking on the radio about snow to the north.

  In West Memphis, Arkansas, I took I-55 north and was soon driving through farm country, the river delta, the rice and cotton and soybean fields shaved naked and brown, the land as flat and featureless as the sky, and a sharp north wind blustering across the barren land, rippling the rain puddles and knocking my little Nissan around like a punk in a locker room. My throat felt acid raw and hot. The highway was lined with shuffling pedestrians from the other side. They tried to wave me down as I drove by. Maybe they were trying to stop me, warn me, hop a cab to heaven, I don’t know. I ignored them.

  The old two-lane Highway 67 had been supplanted by a vast stretch of Nazca-straight four-lanes atop which you could land whole fleets of bombers when the Russkies invaded. I drove past rotting barns and abandoned school buses slowing rusting in untilled meadows, past the fields and farms of my youth where we used to throw empty beer bottles at mailboxes for fun. The landscape seemed smaller and meaner than the last time, the poverty a little deeper, the dilapidation a little more advanced. Nothing had changed except to fall into ruin. I thought I might have to pull over and puke. I was shaking so bad I could barely hold the wheel.

  The road rose and it began to snow as I crossed the bridge over the Black River and drove up into Pocahontas, my own private Mayberry. My grandfather’s dental office had been on the square for forty years by the time I was born. Our house, my parents’ house, was on Schoonover Street, about five blocks from the square. The house had belonged to my grandfather. When I was a little girl, he still lived in a smelly room off the back and wore a waistcoat and a pocket watch and walked to work at his dentist office every day except Sunday. He died one June afternoon the summer of my tenth birthday. They found him on Bland Street with a half-eaten peach in one hand and an old newspaper in the other.

  I drove by the Masonic Cemetery where he was buried beside his wife, a woman unknown to me save in grainy photographs, with all around them the graves of all the Pastors, except Uncle Dexter, the hero of the Great War, whose lost and shattered bones still lay beneath the buttercups in some unknown Flanders field.

  The Pastors populated an entire corner of the cemetery—Pastor Corner; the earliest of them spelled his name Pasteur. My grandfather was thirty-one years in the ground now, yet I could still smell the dirty yellow ashtray breath of him, the mothball reek of his woolen winter suits, and the soapy taste of his clean dentist’s fingers crawling around inside my mouth. In the years following his death, my brother and I believed his ghost was still wandering, like Hamlet’s father, through all the precincts of the third-floor attic of our Victorian manse. Sometimes at night I’d wake up and hear the ticking of his pocket watch, as though he were leaning over my bed in the pitch dark.

  Neither he nor any of my relatives were hanging around for judgment day today. The cemetery was eerily empty, unlike the roads and fields and towns I had driven through to get here. I have found cemeteries to be the least populated of all places. The dead seem to dislike them as much as the living.

  I pulled into my parents’ driveway, climbed out of the car and stood in the softly falling snow. Already you could hear the quiet. The tiny flakes of snow touched my flushed, upturned face and melted with an almost audible hiss. I climbed the steps and rang the doorbell like a stranger. Mama opened the door, drew me inside and led me straight to my old bed, where I lay down with a fever of a hundred and two, eyes of blue, and oh what those blue eyes could do.

  Saturday

  20

  I LAY IN THE LONELY narrow single bed of my childhood, beneath a red and black comforter bearing the Arkansas State University logo. My parents had always meant for this room to serve as summer hotel accommodations for some future granddaughter. As with most other aspects of my life, I had disappointed them.

  I felt shaky but strangely alert, no longer feverish thanks to my mother’s quiet ministrations and a double dollop of NyQuil. But I was sore and my sheets were damp and twisted about my body, as though I had wrestled all night with the angel of the Lord.

  Mom opened the door and looked in on me. “You’re awake,” she said. She had cooked country ham for breakfast. She didn’t often cook a full breakfast anymore. She came back a few minutes later with my clothes washed and folded. My suitcase lay at the foot of the bed. We were nothing alike, she and I. We were strangers to one another, always had been. I had never been able to understand this quiet giant of a woman, who seemed so content within these four walls and a bit of garden. She never could quite wrap her considerable, though underemployed, mental powers around short little Jackie Pastor, who couldn’t wait to get out of her house and leap, with eyes and teeth bared, onto the first train out of town. This girl who stripped off her pretty dresses at the age of four for the freedom of panties and a bare naked
chest. Who had always run with boys and outrun them, ridden with boys and outridden them, fought with boys and sent them home bloody-nosed and crying, and finally screwed those same boys just as joyfully. All the boys liked me because I gave tremendous head. I never had any girl friends, only accomplices. I would climb out my window after midnight and climb back in before sunup—the female incarnation of Huck Finn. I had never fooled my mother, though she never actually caught me with my pants down.

  My father, on the other hand, was willfully clueless, and for that I cherished him. He wanted no part of the daily chore of rearing children. To him children were a source of entertainment, subjects of experiment and study, as though he were Adam and had never been a child himself. I used to ask him after Sunday school, Did Adam have a belly button?

  What’s a belly button? he’d say. I’d show him mine and he’d say, That’s just the scar where the stem broke off. We found you under a persimmon tree and had to dig you up by the roots. Then he’d send me off to the kitchen to make him a banana sandwich.

  You’re a banana sandwich, I’d say.

  You’re a tom boy.

  You’re a roly-poly.

  You’re a codfish.

  I sat up in bed and gazed through the window curtains upon a world transformed. Snow lay three inches deep upon the windowsill. The sky seemed to hang just above the trees. My car in the driveway lay under a white blanket, and the driveway, the yard and the road were all one, all lines and boundaries erased. A man in a parka vest and red knit cap slid by on cross-country skis. I had awoken in Pocahontas, Norway.

  In the kitchen, Dad was already pulling on his boots over three pairs of socks. He looked like he was preparing to search for the Northwest Passage. Mom was setting plates on the table.

  “I am,” Dad said, continuing their conversation. “As soon as I finish my ham.”

  “Your father is going to buy whiskey,” Mom said. “In this weather.”

  He pulled his chair up to the table and waited for me to sit. The smell of the frying ham was just about to kill me. Mom had also made biscuits and grits, and there were pink grapefruit halves sitting in bowls. As I sat down, she slid a plain egg omelet onto my plate. Dad screwed off the top of the pepper shaker and handed it to me. I dusted my eggs for prints.

  “You ruin them,” Mom said as she sat. She was dressed. She never cooked in her housecoat and fuzzy slippers. She bowed her head and waited for me to stop eating.

  “Can I go with you?” I asked my father after Mom had thanked God for ham and eggs.

  “Of course.”

  “You shouldn’t go out,” Mom said, sprinkling a spoonful of sugar over her grapefruit.

  “I feel fine.”

  “You look terrible. You haven’t been eating. Do you take calcium?”

  “I’m fine, really,” I said.

  “If you don’t take care of your bones, by the time you’re my age you won’t be able to straighten your back.”

  * * *

  I met my father at the truck. He had already started the engine and let it warm up. He never drove anywhere without letting the engine warm up. I finished my cigarette and climbed in.

  “Since when did you start smoking?” he asked.

  “I’ve been smoking for years. Where are we going?” Pocahontas was in Randolf County, a dry county in the middle of a bunch of dry counties. Paragould, in Greene County, was the closest place to buy liquor, but that was an hour away, minimum. In this snow, and with him driving like an old man, closer to two.

  “You told me you quit smoking.”

  “I did,” I said. “Lots of times.”

  He drove slowly toward the town square rather than the highway, so I knew he wanted to talk.

  “Your mother cooked a twenty-pound turkey. I was up until midnight carving it. The fridge is full. You should take some home with you.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “You couldn’t have come home for Thanksgiving?”

  I changed the subject. “You should have told me you were out of whiskey. I would have brought you a case from Memphis.”

  “Like you have money to buy a case of liquor. How much do you have right now?”

  “I have money.”

  “You have two dollars.”

  I stared out the window, trying not to be pissed, because he was my old man and he wasn’t doing or saying anything I didn’t already know he would do or say. He said, “I emptied your pockets last night so your mother could wash your clothes. Two bucks and some change and a pack and half of cigarettes.” I rolled down the window. He had the heat cranked up to a hundred and forty. The snow was already starting to melt off the roads. “Your grandmother died of emphysema, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Where did you get the money for gas?” He turned south on Marr Street, past the drugstore where I used to skip school and read books without paying for them. Pretending I had money was a waste of time with my old man. He knew I didn’t have a checking account and couldn’t get a checking account. He didn’t have to search my pockets to know I didn’t have any money, not after all these years of me calling him up at midnight, begging for fifty bucks just to keep the lights on. Yet still he searched my pockets to see how much I had. And still I lied about having more.

  “I’m working,” I said.

  “For whom?”

  “Lots of people. I did some work for the police yesterday morning. They still owe me for work I did last Monday.”

  “Still doing the photography thing, then,” he said with a nod at my new camera.

  “It’s not a photography thing.”

  “But wouldn’t you rather have a steady paycheck?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Well, you could teach. You majored in history. The schools around here are dying for good teachers.”

  “I’m a photographer,” I said. I couldn’t imagine standing in front of a bunch of punk-ass delinquents trying to get them interested in what a bunch of old men did two hundred years ago. If it wasn’t about the Civil War or the glory days of the Southwest Conference, Arkansas kids didn’t give a rat’s ass about history.

  “Yeah, but what kind of future is there in what you’re doing? I mean, I don’t see you saving any money, and you aren’t getting any younger.”

  “Thanks for noticing, Dad.”

  “Do you have a retirement plan at all?”

  “Sure. I’m waiting for you to kick the bucket so I can pawn the family jewels.” He didn’t laugh. “I’ve been saving money. Look, I’m buying this camera. It’s a Leica.” I said it like he should know what that meant.

  “Buying,” he repeated in the fatherly voice he so rarely used, save in moments when he thought I was trying to borrow money.

  “I’ve already paid two thousand on it.”

  He turned with a surprised expression, and here was a man who was never surprised. “Two thousand dollars? For that?” But it wasn’t the price. He was surprised that I had two grand to spend on anything. “May I see it?”

  I pulled the strap over my head and gave it to him at the next stop sign. He turned it over in his hands, mystified by its simplicity. For two grand, you want bells and whistles, you want it to scroll out a sheet of French linen and wipe your ass for you. “What’s wrong with your other camera, the one we bought you?”

  “This one’s better,” I said.

  “How?”

  “It just is. It’s a Leica.”

  “What’s a Leica? Canon is a good camera.”

  “It’s the difference between a Mustang and a Maserati.” I was speaking his language now. Cars he could understand. “I need it for my work,” I continued. Lubricating the conversation with truth made lying easier. “I spent all I had on it.”

  I couldn’t put one over on my old man. Not completely, not when it came to money. “How much do you still need?”

  “Only five hundred more.”

  “Only.” He looked out the side window so long I thought he was going to crash i
nto something.

  “You know, five hundred dollars will last your mother and me two months.”

  He turned at the next corner. We slipped and skidded in painfully slow motion down Everett Street. Somehow, he managed to turn onto a side street and glide to a stop against the curb without hitting anything. I pried my fingers from the dash while he opened the door and hopped out.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back in a jiff.” He crossed the street and disappeared into an alley between two old brick warehouses that didn’t even have the charm of dilapidation. I rolled the window down a crack, lit a cigarette, and pulled out the ashtray. It was virgin steel inside, ashless and buttless, because my father, the sociable lush, had never once touched tobacco. He arrogantly turned up his nose at drunks like myself who did. I was, in fact, violating one of his commandments just by lighting up in his automotive sanctuary. But he would never say anything to me. I had long ago got the bulge on this man and could extract from him any concession I desired simply by dropping one of several names.

  I was twelve years old the first time I caught him cheating on my mother. First time of many, so many I sometimes had trouble remembering he was my father and not just another guy—older, fatter, but no different. Yet different nonetheless because I’ve never known a man, before or since, who got more pussy than my pop. I don’t know what it was about him. Maybe he had it, whatever it is, or maybe it was his money. His architecture firm mostly designed for the state government, which meant there was never any shortage of work as long as he made nice with both political parties. He supplied the liquor and women and the government contracts appeared like manna in the morning. So there were always women hanging around his office, women who would do things for money or power or just for the hell of it, mostly smartass country girls trying to be city.