by Tom Kakonis
And that was the extent of his plan. What to say, how to begin, the words to use, persuasions, he had no idea. Extemporize, he supposed. Wing it. Flimsy plan.
He’d spent the better part of the day in bed, body still stitched with aches but mind racing through a host of fanciful scenarios, faking an exhausted sleep to forestall any more energy-squandering dialogues with his wife. What small energy remained needed conservation, preservation, shelter. None to spare in circular debates.
Mercifully, there’d been none—no arguments, no pleading, no tears—when, a quarter of an hour earlier (the scanty distance between Quinn and Wazinski residences continuing to astonish him), he’d mumbled a farewell and a vague “Be back soon” on his way out the door. She merely gazed at him blankly, eyes sluggish with a resignation hopeless and final. Said nothing. Retreated, no doubt, to the sanctuary of a private delirium. He’d have to do more for her, display more understanding, compassion, generosity of spirit. And he would too. Soon. Just as soon as this Wazinski matter was settled.
But for now, nerves tingling, anticipation mounting, she was furthest from his thoughts. Absent altogether once he spotted the number he was searching for. He pulled up at the curb in front of the house. Surveyed the scene. Plenty of light yet; a neighbor hosing down a car; across the street a couple of seniors chatting on a porch; thin stream of voices floating from the other side of a screen door at the house itself; a Ford Escort (though no Mercury) parked in the driveway. Somebody home for sure, conditions near to optimal—this was as good as it would get.
He took a leaflet from the stack on the floor, folded and pocketed it, stepped out of the car, and approached the door. He peered through the screen, saw no one. The voices, emanating from somewhere outside his range of vision, assumed that bogus, studio quality peculiar to television speech. He touched the bell, waited. Nothing. He hit it again, longer this time. Over a burst of canned laughter another voice, breezy, soprano, decidedly non-theatrical, called, “Hold on a minute, be right with ya.”
Faithful to the pledge, a smiley female appeared at the door a moment later. But the smile instantly collapsed at the sight of his battered face, its flowering bruises ineffectually smudged with talcum powder. She recoiled, said dubiously, “Yeah?”
“Mrs. Wazinski?”
“That’s right.”
“Your husband is Mike Wazinski?”
“Correct.”
“Works at Norse Aluminum?”
“Yeah, he works there. So?”
“Is he home?”
“No, tonight’s his—” She broke off, looked at him warily. “Why?”
“I was hoping to speak with him.”
“In regards to what? We’re not interested in buyin’ anything.”
“I’m not selling anything.”
“So what is it you want?”
Marshall hesitated. Inspected her. Was it the same woman from the toll booth? He couldn’t be sure. Time and the net of dust-flecked wire between them blurred his memory of that face. It was roundish, he recalled, like this one, crimson-lipped, brows plucked, eyes hooded in shadow and liner, also like this one. But the hair was silvery blond, close-cropped; this was short, yes, but tawnier, inky at the roots. The neck and shoulders he seemed to remember as pale and soft. Similarly here. The rest of the shape of that other woman was unknown to him, concealed by the car. This one was compact, diminutive, almost stumpy, a vampish abbreviation squeezed into hip-hugging shorts and skimpy halter top, bubble gum pink, revealing an abundance of creamy bosom, slight softening through the middle, thighs that lapped a bit at the knees. The same woman? Impossible to tell.
“You gettin’ a good peek?” she said, irritably but with just a shade of coquetry riding the upswing of a heartland twang.
“Sorry,” Marshall said. “I didn’t mean to stare.” And then, come this far, nothing to lose, he added, “But I think we’ve met before.”
“Oh yeah, right.”
“Don’t you remember me, Mrs. Wazinski?”
“Why should I?” she snapped, all irritation now. “Never laid eyes on you before in my life.”
“Yes, you have,” he plunged on. “At a toll booth. East-West Tollway. Less than two weeks ago.”
“ ’Fraid you got me mixed up with some other party. Now, I’m watchin’ a show in there, so if you’ll—”
Marshall produced the leaflet and flattened it on the screen. “Remember now?”
Her brows lifted. Cheeks paled. A gasp rose to her lips, choked there, inverted itself on a quick gulped breath. She didn’t speak. Didn’t have to. Her face told it all. She knew.
“This boy is my son. He was ab—he was kidnapped. About three months ago. You or your husband know something about him. You’ve got to help me.”
“Never seen that boy,” she declared stoutly. “You either.”
“You’re not telling me the truth,” he said, the words tumbling out in a frantic rush. “You saw me at that booth. I had this same leaflet, poster-size, in the window of my car. You looked at it. You recognized him. You said it. You were there. You’re the one.”
“You gotta be crazy. Now, I’m sorry about your kid, but I got nothin’ more to say to you.”
“Mrs. Wazinski, please, you’re the only lead I’ve got. If you know something, anything at all, please tell me.”
She glared at him darkly. “What I’m tellin’ you,” she told him, voice hardening, “is to get off this property. You don’t, I’ll have to call the police.”
“Look,” Marshall said, despising the mewling, beggarly whine creeping into his voice but powerless to erase it, “if you’ll help me I promise I’ll keep you and your husband out of it. You won’t be implicated in any way. All I want is to get him back, no questions asked.”
“I’m callin’ the cops.”
She reached over and clicked the latch on the screen door. The wooden one behind it banged shut, leaving him standing there, face scored with bewildered indignation. Squashed like an odious bug. He considered leaning on the bell, or dashing around to the back, forcing his way inside (shoulder to the door, the way it was done in the movies), shaking the truth out of her. But he suspected this was the sort of woman, spite-struck, deceitful, supremely malevolent, who might just make good on her threat, might be summoning the law even as he vacillated. In the echo chamber of his head he could hear it now: “This fella shows up at the door, Officer, perfect stranger, talkin’ crazy, accusin’ me of…” Humiliating visions of himself being dragged away, kicking and pleading, frolicked behind his eyes, mocked his forced-entry inspiration. He thought better of it, spun on his heels, crossed the parched lawn in a sprint, hopped into the wagon, and gunned it away from the curb.
Where now? He didn’t know. Away from here. For the moment. But not home either, not yet. What he needed was solitude, time. Time to digest this stunning new intelligence, deliberate on it, amend his plan. Maybe Lori was right. Now, maybe, was the time to call in Thornton and his vaunted “team.” But what, really, did he have? An incriminating expression, was what he had, a swallowed gasp, firm denial. An intuition based on a chance highway encounter that seemed anymore, even to him, as unreal as an hallucination, a dream spawned by a dream, so easily stonewalled, so shot full of evidential holes it crumbled like a castle of sand under a wash of hard, irrefutable fact. No, the police were out. Not till he had something more substantial than this.
He drove aimlessly. Arrived at a street identified as Cass Avenue. A memory surfaced. Cass. Lester somebody. Caulkins. Lester Caulkins. On an impulse he turned north, crawled along watching the signs. At the intersection of Cass and Chicago he swung right. There it was, the Lester building, unmistakable in its squalid, stuccoed grimness. He parked the Volvo in the same space it had occupied last night. Sat there a moment. What he was doing here, he didn’t fully understand. Some instinct, mysterious as the symmetrical formations of a flock of birds in flight, unerring as their direction. Something to do with his elastic plan.
He got
out of the car, walked to the entrance, checked names and numbers on a file of mailboxes set into a scarred plaster wall just inside the door. Lester Caulkins, 2-C. He climbed stairs covered with a filigree of powdery dust. The banister felt greasy to his touch. He went down the second-floor hallway, narrow, constricted, dark as a tomb, and found 2-C. Silence from behind the door. No bell. He knocked. More of the silence. He tried again. Nothing. Nobody home. Stalled again, though from what, precisely, he couldn’t begin to say. He returned to the car. Eventually everyone had to come home, even Lester. He waited, not so much from stubbornness as out of some baffling necessity, contorted and fierce.
The sun departed in a gorgeous fireworks of color. The night advanced. Stars, those violent eruptions of lethal gases traveling across unimaginable distances and eons of time, speckled a gradually blackening sky. Like those counterfeit stars, needles of light projected onto the vaulted dome of a planetarium a thousand years ago, in another life. This present life of his seemed little more than a gauzy mist of nights sliding into days into nights again, the way one borderless dream will flow crazily into the next, and then the one after that. Riddles stacked on riddles, the solution to one the birth of another. A curious numbness seized him, a detachment eclipsing all the remembered sorrows and guilts, and he waited, unconscious of his teeth noisily chattering in spite of the durable heat, rattling the bones in his fevered skull.
The interior of his own skull pitched in inebriate fog, blood-alcohol level skirting perilously near the stupefaction zone, the absent Lester was, just then, reeling through the hump day crowd at the Norseman Lounge, spinning his whimsical tales, theories, opinions, sentiments, philosophies, and antic jests to anyone foolhardy enough to listen. Which supply of audiences was rapidly dwindling when, happily for him, he spied Beans and Vic in the back, and he weaved over and slid uninvited into their booth. “Hey, fartman, cholo. What’s up?”
Beans, seated next to him, elevated a cheek and expelled a blast, presumably in wordless welcome. Across the table Vic scowled, muttered cryptically, “Nothin’ up. All down.”
Lester blinked the dour, mud-brown face into a semblance of focus, nudged Beans. “What’s burnin’ his ass?”
“Ain’t his ass got burned,” Beans drawled, indicating the bandage-swathed thumb of Vic’s right hand.
“Holy shit. What happen, Vic?”
“Like he say. Burn it.”
“How?”
“Work.”
“I figured that. Askin’ how, not where.”
“Don’t matter. It’s done.”
“Hurt, does it?”
“Hurt wallet,” Vic said sourly.
“Wallet? How’s that?”
Vic’s bandaged hand brushed the air impatiently.
“He got some vehicles suppose to tune up,” Beans explained. “Can’t work on ’em till the thumb’s okay.”
“Tough break,” Lester allowed. “Oughta heal up quick, though, ’less he got a dog. You got a dog, Vic?”
“Yeah, got a dog.”
“Whatever y’do, don’t let him no place near it.”
“Near what?”
“Your thumb there.”
Vic glowered at him. To Beans he said, “Fuck he talkin’ about?”
Beans shrugged.
“Fuck you talkin’, man, dogs?”
Lester propped his elbows on the table, laid his chin in the palm of a hand, gazed at Vic as steadily as he was able. “I knew this fella once, done the same thing you done, only to his toe. Burned it, I’m sayin’.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Beans groaned. “Another goddam story.”
“Listen,” Lester said earnestly, “this one’s important, Vic wants to keep his thumb.”
“He burned it, fucknuts. Y’don’t lose a thumb off a burn.”
“This guy did. His toe, I mean. An’ he had a dog too, just like Vic.”
“What’s dog gotta do with burn?” Vic asked, annoyed but still interested in anything remotely relevant to his painful injury.
“See, he’s livin’ in a trailer, this fella, one a them tin ones, tiny, everything packed in tight. His dog, it’s a big sucker, them kind grow almost pony size, got all that shaggy fur on ’em.”
“What breed’s that?” Beans wanted to know.
“Forget the name. Them ones they use up in the mountains, carry that little whiskey keg around the neck. Y’know, help out people get lost in a snowstorm.”
“That’s a Saint something you’re thinkin’ of. They’re big, but they don’t grow to no pony size.”
“Mine’s little,” Vic said. “Mutt.”
“Size don’t matter none. Comes to what I’m gonna tell ya, all dogs the same.”
“So tell,” Vic growled.
“Okay,” Lester began again. “This fella—can’t place his name—happen way back, I was just a kid—anyway, he’s playin’ with his pooch, wrestlin’ around in the trailer there, got no shoes or socks on, and damn if he don’t burn his big toe on a space heater. It’s winter, see, which is why the heater’s runnin’.”
“Must be hard up for tail,” Beans guffawed, “this buddy yours. Wrestlin’ a dog.”
“Wasn’t no buddy. Just a guy I knew. Besides, it was a he-dog.”
“Fag maybe. Liked them doggie chocolate speedways. Tight.”
“Sound like you talkin’ from experience, Beanbag.”
“Mine’s a she,” Vic said.
“He, she,” Lester insisted, “still don’t matter, point I’m tryin’ to make here.”
“We waitin’ on it. That point.”
“Where was I at?”
“Burned toe.”
“Yeah, right. Toe. So he puts some goop on it, that ointment they use, and first thing he knows the pooch is lickin’ on it. Toe, I mean. Guy swats him, don’t think no more about it. But all day long, every chance he gets, dog’s lickin’ away at that torched toe.”
“Too bad he didn’t burn his dick,” Beans said with a sly wink, beady eyes glittering in their wrinkled nests. “Get that hound trained, wouldn’t need no pussy ever again, his whole life.”
Lester uncradled his chin, threw up his hands. “Listen, this is serious shit, what I’m sayin’ here. Could be the difference Vic got a thumb or don’t. You wanna hear it?”
“Yeah yeah yeah.”
“Vic? You?”
Out of Vic a brusque affirmative nod.
“Okay,” Lester resumed yet again, “guy goes to bed that night, wakes up next mornin’, looks down an’ sees the dog lappin’ on his foot. Also sees blood all over the covers. He’s thinkin’ somethin’ funny goin’ on, somethin’ ain’t right. So he yanks ’em back, covers, an’ eyeballs his foot an’ it’s all bloody too. Looks for his toe and it ain’t there, just a stump where it suppose to be.”
“Wait a minute,” Beans put in. “You sayin’ the dog ate his toe?”
“Scarfed it right up,” Lester affirmed, and he laid his hands dramatically on the table, signaling a conclusion to the cautionary tale.
“Aah, that’s horseshit. Never happen. Dog start eatin’ your toe, you’d feel it, sleepin’ or not.”
“Oh, part I forgot to tell ya, this fella got that disease, that dibeet-eez, where y’don’t feel nothin’ in your body, like normal. Which is how come he don’t wake up when the dog’s chewin’ on the toe.”
“I don’t got that,” Vic said.
“Got what?”
“That disease you say.”
“Yeah, I know y’don’t, Vic. But supposin’ you was to get blitzed some night. Like tonight here, you been sloshin’ up a few. Come home blotto, zonk out, next thing y’know they callin’ you nine-finger Victor.”
“Had five beers, is all.”
“Been more’n that,” Beans corrected him.
“There y’are,” Lester said ominously. “I was you, I’d lock the mutt up tonight, keep him locked till that thumb’s right.”
“It’s a her.”
“Dog’s a dog.”
Vic’s
brown jaws ground thoughtfully. He glanced at the full bottle of beer in front of him. Didn’t reach for it.
“You don’t wanta pay no attention,” Beans assured him, “any this horseshit. Dogs don’t eat people. Least not your live ones.” With a chortling laugh he added, “An’ you ain’t dead yet, last I looked.”
“Listen,” Lester declared urgently, “dogs’ll eat anything, ’specially if it’s rotted, gives off stink. You ever notice how they always sniffin’ around piss, puke, flop? Walk in a room an’ where they head for first? Your crotch is where. Bend over, they got their nose in your ass.” He paused, fastened a bleary gaze on Beans. A thought seemed to occur to him. “You got a dog?” he asked.
“Me? No. Why?”
“Lucky for you. You did, he’d’ve chewed you a new asshole, all that poison gas leakin’ out it.”
“Carve you a new one,” Beans snorted disgustedly, “you don’t quit jackin’ your mouth off, worryin’ Vic with your dogdick stories.”
“Tellin’ ya what can happen.”
“Only place it happen is that sauced head yours.”
“My dog never do that,” Vic averred.
Lester rolled over helpless palms, a sotted Cassandra, prophecies forever spurned.
“Gotta go,” Vic announced, getting abruptly to his feet.
“Take a whiz go,” Lester asked him, “or home?”
“Home.”
“You maybe gimme a lift?”
“Far as Cass. Ain’t takin’ you all the way.”
“Cass be good.”
“No more dog talk, I do.”
“You got ’er, Vic.”
“C’mon.”
On their way out the door Lester ventured tentatively, “You wanna hear ’bout that time I was at the license plate office?”