by Lee Goldberg
The first thing that tumbled out was the “Where Are They Now?” newsletter. There was a nice write-up on Lauren that made her sound happy, successful, and very rich. It was an enticing advertisement for easy money to Arlo Pelz.
I flipped through the stiff, glossy pages of the yearbook and found Lauren’s class picture. She had a bright smile, full of hope and enthusiasm, that was in sharp contrast to her eyes, intense even then, hinting at a darkness I didn’t see in any of the other teenagers’ faces. It was a darkness that was still in Lauren’s eyes when she looked at me on the overpass, right before she took a flying leap.
There was nothing in Jolene’s picture that hinted at the disappointments and violence in her future. Her face, like most of the others, radiated nothing but boundless expectation and desire. When she leaped into the air in her cheerleading photos—her arms and legs spread, her face arched up into the sky—the borders of the page could barely contain her from soaring free.
A few pages later, alongside another photo of Jolene in liberating flight, was a picture of Lauren, looking slyly at the camera as she emerged, slick and wet, from the swimming pool. It was the women’s sports page, the page a hundred horny high school boys undoubtedly jerked off to. I would have. It was a page for dreaming, for looking at a picture of a cheerleader or swimmer or runner and thinking as you came in your fist …
She could be mine.
Years later, Arlo Pelz looked at that page and had the same dream.
The next few pages were torn out. I flipped to the index to see what was missing—it was the crew picture of the women’s swim team.
I closed the yearbook, slid it back under my seat, and turned off the map light. I spread out across the big, bench seat, shut my eyes, and worked on some dreams of my own.
Chapter Twenty
I woke up because I had to piss.
It was still dark outside. The clock on the dash said it was a little after four A.M. I sat up slowly, my back stiff, my ribs aching, opened the door, and staggered across the empty parking lot to the restrooms.
The bathroom reeked of stale piss. It probably hadn’t been cleaned in months. I relieved myself at the urinal and trudged back to my car, thinking I might get another hour or two of sleep before hitting the road again.
That wasn’t going to happen.
The driver’s side door of my car was open, and so was my trunk.
“Hey,” I said.
The trunk slammed shut and revealed a man, about six feet tall, wearing a puffy down jacket, flannel shirt, jeans, and a pair of muddy Doc Martens. Seeing the guy scared the shit out of me.
“No fucking suitcases?” he said angrily, looking right at me.
I suddenly realized just how alone I was. I glanced around and noticed a pickup truck at the far corner of the lot, hidden in the shadows. It must have been his. The infrequent traffic on the Interstate seemed a long way off.
And then I remembered who I was, and where I was going, and why I was in that parking lot. I wasn’t afraid anymore. I was excited.
“Get the hell away from my car,” I said.
“Or what?” He whipped out a switchblade from somewhere inside his jacket and marched toward me, a lopsided grin on his face. “Give me your wallet and your fucking car keys and maybe I’ll let you keep your shriveled little balls.”
I made like I was reaching into my back pocket for my wallet and pulled out my gun. He froze, his eyes wide with shock, and then he forced a smile.
“Well, fuck me,” he said. “I guess this makes us even.”
“Not unless you’ve got a semi-automatic handgun hidden up your ass,” I said. “Then again, you’d have to get to it first.”
Now that I had my gun out, I wasn’t quite sure what to do next. A hundred tough-guy scenes from a thousand TV shows and movies seemed to run through my head at once. And they all made me realize just how important this moment was for me.
“Drop the knife,” I said.
“This is my special knife. I got it in ‘Nam.” He just stood there, smiling, as if I wouldn’t notice he was twenty years too young to have been in Vietnam. “What if I put it in my pocket and I just walk away, no harm done?”
“You could,” I said.
He retracted the blade and his hand started towards his pocket.
“But you’d better ask yourself a question first,” I said. “Do you feel lucky today?”
His smile began to waver and his hand, the one with the knife, stopped before reaching his pocket.
“Well, do you, punk?” I grinned.
I probably sounded more like Bart Simpson than Clint Eastwood, but the props and the atmosphere more than compensated for it. From the way he looked at me, I could tell he’d decided I was crazy. He dropped the knife.
“This was a setup,” he said. “You’re one of those psycho-assholes who goes looking for trouble.”
“What if I am?” I asked, motioning him towards me with my free hand. “Walk this way until I tell you to stop.”
As he came towards me, I moved off to one side, and we made a little circle, until I was near my car and he ended up where I’d been standing before.
“Stop right there and empty all your pockets,” I said, “then pull them out so I can see them.”
“Fuck you.”
“You want to make this hard?” I shrugged and aimed my gun at his groin. “Go ahead, make my day.”
He must have seen something in my eyes, because he quickly held up his hands in submission. “Okay, okay, I’ll empty them.”
He hesitated for a moment, then slowly reached into his jacket. First one wallet, and then another, and then another, hit the ground. Then watches, necklaces, and some car keys. Then he got to his pants; out came some condoms, some loose change, and another wallet, which I figured was his.
I shook my head at him. “You’ve been a bad boy.”
“No worse than you, motherfucker.”
I grinned again. I liked that he thought I was tough. But the truth was, if I didn’t have my fake gun, by now I probably would have given him my car keys, my wallet, and been sobbing for mercy while he butt-fucked me into the pavement.
As much as I was enjoying the moment, I didn’t want to press my luck. If I stayed much longer, I was afraid the guy would see my gun in the right light and realize it was a fake and kill me with his bare hands. Or somebody would drive in, see me with the gun, and think I was the criminal. And if I was really unlucky, that somebody would be a highway patrolman.
“I want you to crawl into the bathroom, then lie face down on the floor with your feet sticking out the door so I can see them.”
“No fucking way I’ll crawl for you or anybody else,” he said. “You’re gonna have to shoot me, asshole.”
I sighed. “Works for me.”
I aimed at his head.
He immediately dropped to his knees and glared at me. I grinned at him.
“A man’s got to know his limitations,” I said. “You can thank me for showing you yours. Start crawling.”
He turned around and began to crawl towards the bathrooms, his butt facing me. “You better hope I never see you again, motherfucker.”
I ran up and kicked him in the stomach, and when he hit the ground on his side, I kicked him twice in the head. He went limp and lolled on his back. I wasn’t sure if he was faking it until I heard his bladder empty against the inside of his pants. I was certain he was unconscious then. No one goes that far to be convincing.
I pushed him onto his stomach, rushed to my car, and got out the roll of duct tape. I hog-tied him with the tape, checked his pulse to make sure I hadn’t killed him (though I don’t know what I would have done if I had), and left him there with his stolen goods. If he didn’t get arrested, and somehow managed to get away, he would certainly think twice about robbing someone else at a deserted rest stop.
“You’ll rue the night you met Dirty Harvey,” I hissed at him. It was the first time I’d ever said rue to anybody, whether they we
re conscious to hear it or not.
I picked up his car keys and his knife and drove off in a hurry.
A half-mile away, I tossed his things out the window and smiled to myself, a smile that lasted for the next two hours.
I considered the experience at the rest stop good practice for the day I’d meet Arlo Pelz again, a day I hoped would come very soon.
I arrived in Spokane at daybreak. It didn’t impress me much as a city. If it was worth visiting, somebody would have set a TV series there by now.
It struck me as the kind of place where everybody drove a pickup with a camper shell and owned at least one pair of overalls. There were plenty of old buildings downtown, but I was never interested much in architecture.
I followed I-90 through the city and then drove up Division Street, a row of fast-food franchises that would become the northbound 395 and take me to Deerlick.
As I drove past Riverfront Park, I could see the skeletal remains of the big tent that was the centerpiece of the 1974 World’s Fair. It was certainly no Space Needle. That should tell you something about the city’s character.
I guess they built a big tent as their enduring landmark, instead of a huge camper shell, because they didn’t have the money to erect the giant Ford pickup to go with it.
I only had one set of clothes left after the fire, and I’d just spent the night in them. So I stopped at a Wal-Mart and bought a few shirts, some underwear and socks, and two pairs of pants. I also bought a denim, letterman-style jacket to hide my gun and holster, some toiletries, a nylon gym bag, and a fresh Ace bandage for my ribs.
After making my purchases, I stopped at a Shell station and used the restroom to clean up, put on my new bandages, and change my clothes. I dumped my old clothes and bandages in the trash bin and hit the road.
I felt like a new man.
In fact, I know that I was.
It didn’t take long to put Spokane behind me and find myself winding through big stretches of farmland under bright, morning sun. As I passed places like Denison and Clayton and Jump Off Joe, I discovered it didn’t require much in Washington State to declare a patch of dirt a town, just a couple gas pumps and a burger place.
By the time I got to Deerlick, I wasn’t expecting much and I wasn’t disappointed. The turn-off took me down a narrow road past a trailer park, a small cemetery, and an old brick schoolhouse.
The center of the town was dominated by a ’60s-era supermarket that might once have been the wreckage of a flying saucer before somebody got the bright idea of building a parking lot around it and selling groceries. The original bright colors of the supermarket had long since faded into shades of gray, the big windows fogged by countless layers of transparent tape used to hang posters for the last forty years.
The supermarket was bordered by Main Street, A Street, and Broadway, which were lined with old storefronts, most of them empty. There was a diner, a beauty salon, a barber shop, a drugstore, a tackle shop, and a post office.
I kept driving down the street, past the town center. There were a few car and boat repair shops, a gas station, and a bar; then the road took you behind the trailer park and around to the highway again.
I made a U-turn and headed back into town, took a right on A Street, and found myself in the residential section. The houses were fifty or sixty years old, the kind with porches and basements and detached garages. Almost all of them had some kind of beaten-up boat on a trailer in the driveway. There were bicycles and kids’ toys on the lawns and GM cars parked on the street. I wondered what kind of people lived there and what they did for a living and what would happen to the first person on the block who bought a Japanese car.
I turned around, parked in front of the supermarket, and got out of the car. I was immediately overwhelmed by the smell of sizzling bacon. A hunger I didn’t know I had suddenly asserted itself big time.
Like a drooling dog, I followed the scent of bacon to the diner across the street.
The Chuck Wagon was the kind of ’50s diner that people in LA buy to renovate into authentic ’50s diners.
You lose the real place, with history you can read in the sedimentary layers of grease on the walls, and end up with Johnny Rockets or the Denny’s in Camarillo, full of sparkling chrome and shiny, colored tile and a jukebox playing Chuck Berry songs. You end up with a diner the way people think they should have looked, not the way they actually did.
There was nothing shiny about the Chuck Wagon and there was no jukebox. The red-vinyl upholstery in the booths was torn. The linoleum counters and floors were scuffed and chipped. The wood-paneled walls were yellowed by sunlight and steam. There were store-bought bottles of catsup and jars of mustard at every table. The windows had ratty drapes and the ceiling fan twirled lazily.
It was my kind of place.
The Chuck Wagon was about half-full, and just about all the customers were deeply-tanned men wearing faded jeans, faded shirts, and sweat-stained baseball caps that advertised outboard motors or farm equipment. The Evinrudes and Chris Crafts and John Deeres looked at me in my new shirt, new jacket, and new slacks as if I were some kind of alien being the likes of which they hadn’t seen since the supermarket landed from outer space in 1962.
I smiled feebly and took a seat at the counter. I snatched the one-page, laminated menu from the napkin holder and gave it a quick look.
There were less than a dozen items on the menu: combinations of eggs, pancakes, hamburgers, and steaks. On the back there was a list of four homemade pies (apple, pecan, chocolate, and banana cream) and two kinds of ice cream, chocolate or vanilla, to choose from. The prices were covered with white tape and written over by hand in ballpoint pen. There wasn’t anything over six bucks. I wanted to try everything.
“What’ll it be, sir?” the waitress asked wearily.
I looked up and saw a tired woman in her forties, stuffed into a too-tight, stained white uniform, her hair pinned into a bun. She wore a bra that made her breasts look like airplane engines, her name stitched in script across one of them.
I ordered the Rancher’s Breakfast of eggs, steak, bacon, pancakes, and hash browns, and asked Georgette for an extra-thick chocolate shake to wash it down with.
While I waited for my meal, I watched the short-order cook move piles of hash browns and stacks of bacon strips around the grill, making room for the eggs and pancakes and steaks he was preparing. In between all that, he ladled oil onto the grill and used an ice cream scooper to dig butter out of a bucket, dropping the gobs into his frying pans. It was excruciating, gastronomical foreplay.
By the time Georgette set my plate down in front of me, I was so hungry I was nearly slobbering. I wolfed the hot meal down in about ten minutes and immediately ordered another shake.
It may have been the best breakfast I ever had in my life.
When she brought me the shake, with a dollop of whipped cream sprayed on top, I was sated and finally ready to get to work.
“Excuse me,” I said, stifling a burp. “Have you seen Arlo around?”
She looked like I’d slapped her, but she recovered quickly. I guess she was used to being slapped.
“Who?” she asked unconvincingly.
“Arlo Pelz,” I replied, and took a big slurp of the shake to drown out another burp. “You know Arlo, don’t you Georgette?”
I was aware that everybody in the restaurant had stopped talking. They were all listening, which was fine with me. The more people who heard, the better. I wasn’t all that great at detecting, so I figured it would be a lot easier to let him find me.
“I haven’t seen him,” she said. “You a friend of his?”
“You could say that.” I smiled and leaned over, plucked a pen from her apron pocket, and started scrawling a note on my napkin. “If he stops by, maybe you could give him this for me.”
I wrote: Jolene is really into her TV. She asked me to thank you. Your pal from the Sno-Inn.
I read it out-loud in case she lost it, and so everybody else got my m
essage. I wrapped the napkin around a ten-dollar bill and put it, and the pen, back in her apron pocket.
“I appreciate it,” I said, flashing her another insincere smile.
She dropped my breakfast check on the counter and walked away without bothering to ask me first if maybe I wanted a slice of pie or something.
I took the hint, though I would have liked to try a slice. I gulped down the last of my shake, dropped another ten on the counter, and walked out.
I visited the barbershop, the beauty salon, and the drugstore, and left pretty much the same message at each place. In the post office, I asked the aged clerk behind the counter if he knew where the Pelz family lived.
“There isn’t any family left here except for little Billy,” the clerk said. “Still lives at their place on A street. Sixteen A Street.”
“What about Arlo,” I asked. “Seen him around?”
The old man narrowed his eyes at me. “Once, right after he got out of prison. You a friend of his?”
“Not really,” I said. “How about you?”
The clerk just turned and walked away, disappearing into the back of the post office.
I walked out and went next door to the tackle shop. They sold fishing poles, reels, lures, hooks, and all kinds of worms, crickets, and maggots. A man sat at the counter stringing a fly. As I got closer, I realized if you drew a line connecting the five moles on his cheek, you could make a lopsided star. I wondered if he knew that.
He looked up at me as I approached the counter. “Can I help you?”
“I’m up here doing some fishing,” I said.
“Whatcha interested in catching?” he asked. “Salmon, trout, perch, bass, mackinaw?”
“Arlo Pelz.”
I felt really cool saying that. I don’t think Mannix could have delivered it any better.
“I understand he’s a bottom-feeder native to these parts,” I said.
He stopped working on his lure, stood up, and gave me a hard look. “Are you a cop of some kind?”
I smiled thinly. “Of some kind.”