Bloodthirst in Babylon

by Searls, David

  Todd didn’t know what to say, but he finally came up with, “Houses are expensive.” He was speaking to his wife’s twisted reflection in the mirror, and it came out more sullen than he meant it.

  “Well, not a house then. A trailer. They don’t cost much.”

  “It’s the down payment that’s beyond us. And credit checks are tougher these days. Besides, we’re not talking about staying here.”

  Joy was rubbing her wet scalp with a thin towel, but she stopped to stare at him, her mouth opening and closing. Her robe, as threadbare as the towel, opened to partly expose one heavy breast. She pulled it tighter and notched it.

  “Why do you always do that?” she asked him quietly.

  He frowned his confusion at his wife’s distorted image.

  “Why are you always so eager to point out the downside? Why can’t you for once be happy with not one job, but two?”

  “You don’t have the job yet. The cop said it wasn’t a sure thing.”

  “See? That’s what I mean.”

  Todd swiveled to face her. His anger was dissipating somewhat at the thought of their private room. The kids occupied and unseen. When was the last time that had happened?

  “Come here,” he said, burying his irritation as deep as he knew how.

  Joy sighed as if beginning her litany of reasons why now wasn’t the time or place, but she plopped into his lap. Her robe fell away, once again, from that heavy breast. His mouth met hers and he tried to gauge the degree of enthusiasm with which she returned the kiss. Her lips parted slightly and she flicked at his tongue with her own.

  He liked the way she was breathing now. Soft, shallow hitches. Shower moisture from her hair dripped to his face. He tried to wipe it dry without killing the moment. One hand snaked to her naked breast as furtively as he’d done it in high school. She stopped his progress like she had on too many occasions back then.

  “The kids,” she said, still breathing hard enough to suit him. She pulled her face away and gripped her robe with one fisted hand. “The kids.”

  Todd wiped her shower water from the side of his face and shimmied his hips so she’d leave his lap. The moment was over.

  As she stood and moved away he said out of plum irritation, “Don’t you see anything funny about this town? Why would they roll out the red carpet like this, give us two jobs and connected motel rooms on credit?”

  Not that he was expecting an answer. Joy would ignore him until his mood lightened.

  Fine. Todd returned his attention to the cop’s scribbled directions. Could there really be so much work in this burg that they had to recruit out-of-town labor? Was it like that anywhere in America today?

  “Listen,” Joy ordered.

  He did, then shook his head. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Neither do I,” said Joy before flying out the door in her robe. “The kids,” she said again, tossing it over her shoulder.

  Chapter Four

  Hello, Dad.

  Not exactly throwing herself at her father’s feet, but what had he expected? His daughter Connie had met Darby Kinston when both worked at Anchor/Tatum, Darby as an account executive in the trading department and Connie still in law school and spending the summer in the firm’s compliance department. They’d bonded, two attractive young women thrown together at a stodgy investment banking boutique overrun with middle-aged men.

  They weren’t the only ones bonding at that time. Paul liked to think that his marriage was already unraveling when he began to take notice of the twenty-seven-year-old beauty and noticing she didn’t seem to mind the attention.

  As Paul exited I-75 and approached the inexplicably named South Dixie Highway he thought about how poorly he’d handled that day’s surprise contact with his eldest daughter. And yet it had, in many ways, seemed consistent with their personal dynamics. Not so different than the awkward way he’d interacted with each of his daughters from their teenage years forward. It seemed that the space between him and them had always been filled with stilted discourse and uncomfortable silences.

  The longest silence had started just over two years ago. Paul remembered it to the day: Darby informing him that she’d missed her period that month. It wasn’t late; it was nonexistent. So she’d gone out and bought an early pregnancy test kit to confirm her suspicions and the world had changed irretrievably for both of them.

  He was a father-to-be at fifty. A man with three grown—or nearly grown—daughters and a forty-eight-year-old wife who wasn’t the one expecting. He’d had a lot of explaining to do and it looked like he’d failed on all counts.

  There was hope, though, wasn’t there?

  He pictured Connie after she’d blundered into Freddie Brace’s office earlier that day, no idea that she’d find her father there. Coming to a standstill, mouth open and fingers fidgeting with the case file she’d been caught in the act of returning.

  After such painfully awkward introductory comments as “You look good,” and “I like what you’ve done with your hair,” Paul had tried this one: “Tuck is walking now.”

  Not expecting much from it, Tucker Highsmith being the girl’s most unexpected little brother, but her face had broken into its first honest smile. “Really?” she’d said. “I’ll bet he’s cute. I’d love to see him again.”

  Maybe that was something to build a new relationship upon.

  He gasped and jerked in his seat as his phone vibrated against his crotch where he’d laid it to be sure he was aware of incoming calls.

  “Yeah. Hey, Freddie, what’s up?”

  “You sound…startled or something.”

  His lawyer didn’t miss a thing.

  “It’s nothing. Just…driving. Wasn’t expecting a call, that’s all.”

  “Oh. Okay. Listen, I wanted to…” White noise could be heard washing over the other end of the line while Freddie tried to pick his way through his thoughts. “I just wanted to make sure you were cool with Connie dropping in. I mean, it’s none of my business but things seemed a little…”

  Again, struggling to put words to his thoughts, but this time Paul put him out of his misery with an interruption. “No, it’s fine, Freddie. Connie and I, we just, she’s still a little tender, that’s all.”

  Paul crossed the South Dixie Highway and headed deeper into the woods. Fewer cars, more scrub land, narrower, twisting roads. A sharp crunch of static on the line.

  Freddie said, “She loves you, man. You raised one hell of a daughter, one hell of a human being.”

  He raised her? Not really. He’d been stuck at work most of the time. It had been Meredith who’d taught all three of his girls to be decent and gracious and polite. To smile even when using diplomatic language to tell their old man to fuck off for what he’d done to their mother. To grow distant and formal while avoiding phone calls and courteously and succinctly responding to emails.

  “Freddie…” Paul had slipped onto the barely marked Darrow Road. It grew so narrow after a couple twists, century oaks and elms crowding the shoulder, that he was thankful he’d never seen a big rig coming the other way. He pictured himself reversing all the way back to the highway. “I never meant all of this to happen.” Meaning, he supposed, the cheating, the unplanned pregnancy, the legal troubles, the divorce, the estrangement with his daughters. “Jesus,” he said as it all hit him at once. “I’ve really screwed up, haven’t I?”

  His phone barked static again.

  “Things happen,” Freddie replied after a moment. He sounded farther away than before. “Bad things to decent people. If that wasn’t the case—”

  “You’d be out of business.”

  “Exactly,” said his lawyer with a sad laugh. “But listen, man. I just called to tell you…I’m there if you need me.”

  A long pause followed. Nearly as long as a few of the silences between Connie and himself back in Detroit, but not nearly as awkward.

  “You’re not billing me for this call, are you?” Paul asked.

  “I hadn’t p
lanned on it. But you’re making me second-guess myself on that, asshole.”

  Both men laughed comfortably.

  “I appreciate that. I really do,” Paul said. “Now you gotta hang up so I can call Darby and tell her I’m on my way. The whole town seems to be in a cell phone dead zone so I’ve got to call when I can.”

  “Uh huh. Tell me again why you moved to Babylon, Michigan?”

  Paul wore a grin as he hung up. The same uninhibited grin he’d pasted on his face while exiting the Penobscot Building and leaving Detroit as a man who’d lost all he could possibly lose and was now in full, triumphant retreat. Headed back to his new life, the one he was trying to construct upon the brightly burning bridges of all of his fucked-up yesterdays.

  Chapter Five

  “The kids.”

  Todd’s stomach dropped. He flew out of the room right behind his wife and found the front door to the adjoining room standing open. The room dead quiet. Empty. No wonder they’d heard nothing bus suspicious silence from that shared wall. Todd felt his face freezing into the sullen expression he wore when he felt emotions building, and knew he’d have to keep his thoughts from Joy. From himself, even.

  “Find them,” she said, the girlishness long gone as she clutched at her thin robe.

  “They’re around,” he said over his shoulder as he began gobbling up cracked sidewalk with big strides of his short legs.

  The family had been lodged on the ground floor at the rear of the motel, their view an open field before a steep ravine overgrown with scrubby woods and dissected by a swift creek that could be heard rather than seen, somewhere below.

  God, not the creek.

  Todd’s mind watched his kids slipping, sliding, flailing in the swift water. He called out, “Melanie Crissie Todd!” in a single burst of contained panic. Nothing came back from the wooded ravine but his own sharp echo.

  He saw rooflines a mile or more away on the opposite side of the cut, and wondered with vicious despair if the town liked little kids too much. That would explain the cop, McConlon, stopping strangers’ cars: to snatch children for perverts.

  But that was crazy.

  “Melanie Crissie Todd!”

  Nothing. Todd got back to the narrow sidewalk flanking the back of the motel and followed it around to the front, to a niche tucked under the metal stairs to the second floor balcony, and found them.

  His breath caught in his throat and he felt his vision threaten to go gray as he fought to catch up with his spent adrenaline.

  They stood in still fascination, watching a hollowed-out woman and two scraggly kids beat up a snack food vending machine. The woman was young, but as scrawny as some middle-aged Depression-era Oakie from photos he’d once seen in an admission-free museum in southern Ohio or Kentucky when he wanted to get the family out of the rain. He’d studied those stark photos with a burning sensation deep in his belly.

  The woman with the scraggly kids was wrapped in a pair of jeans that could have fit a fifteen-year-old girl, giving her an unwholesome agelessness. Smoke curled around her face from the cigarette dangling from her lips. Todd watched her miserly breasts twitch as she wrestled with the machine.

  She uttered something that had to have been a curse, but the words got twisted by her cigarette. Just as well for the sake of the kids who still watched the transaction in open-mouthed fascination.

  “You gotta shake it just right,” she drawled, apparently to Todd. Then she went back to hand-to-hand combat with it.

  The kids with her, a boy and a girl, looked as rode-hard as the woman. Their hair and clothing were dirty and they seemed underfed, underamused. They’d mirror his own kids after a couple more years of this, Todd admitted to himself with brutal honesty.

  He remembered the shame he’d felt about their grimy condition while parked on the shoulder of the narrow highway, waiting for the Babylon cop to approach. Now, as he watched Melanie, Crissie and Little Todd milling around the scrawny woman and her dirty kids, like the vending machine antics were the most excitement they’d experienced in a long while, Todd asked himself where things had gone so wrong.

  His life, he realized, kept coming back to this. He’d been born and raised in a mountain town where louse-ridden dogs and cars on blocks were part of the landscape. He felt like he’d been the only one in his big, extended family who’d even noticed how different their lives were from what he saw on TV. But then he’d perpetuated the hillbilly stereotype by getting Joy pregnant before they’d finished high school. A hurried marriage and the mine job, soon to follow. By the time his third child was born, Todd was making eighteen an hour plus overtime and Joy was working part-time taking appointments at a beauty salon in Parkersburg. Hardly the Trumps, but they’d saved up most of the down payment for a new home they’d already picked out and pre-qualified for.

  Then the economy went to shit and the ax fell at the coal mine and the salon. Story of Todd Dunbar’s life.

  “I said, is it okay if yours have some?”

  The scrawny but not altogether unattractive woman was dangling packages of chips and pretzels just out of reach of Crissie and Little Todd. Like taunting chimps at the zoo. Melanie hung back, but only slightly.

  “Oh…yeah,” he said. He wasn’t sure if there would be a supper that could be spoiled. He glanced at his watch. Not quite five o’clock. “Late summer days,” he said. “Hard to keep track of time.” Some sort of apology, but he wasn’t sure what for.

  She watched him like she didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, and he didn’t blame her. But the day had been something of a fog from the moment the Olds got pulled over.

  Trying to find a foothold back into the conversation, Todd told his girls to thank the woman for the snacks she quickly tossed at them. In seconds, all five kids—the woman’s and Todd’s—had pealed out of sight in one noisy clump. Todd hoped the lady wasn’t going to hold out her hand for reimbursement.

  “Nice kids,” she said.

  “Todd…Todd! Did you find them?”

  Oh Jesus, he’d forgotten. And now Joy appeared on the balcony almost overhead, still trying to grasp that thin robe around her no longer narrow hips.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I…yeah, I found them. They’re okay, Joy. Everything’s fine.”

  “Thanks for telling me,” she said. Pissed royally.

  “Joy, would you put some clothes on,” he said, feeling as ridiculous as his wild-eyed wife should have felt.

  She said something he didn’t quite hear—probably for the best—before stomping down the stairs and back to the room. Too angry and embarrassed to face the woman who’d grabbed Todd’s attention.

  “Your wife,” the woman said with the cigarette and a trace of a smile.

  She turned and plinked more coins into the vending machine.

  “Listen,” said Todd. “I’ll get you some money back at the room for what the girls ate. I just have to break a single.” Had to offer, at least.

  The woman gave a little laugh and shrugged her bony shoulders. “Money,” she said. “I got enough of it, finally.”

  “Well, I guess I should—”

  “Kathy Lee Dwyer.”

  She turned, hugging a bundle of cellophane-wrapped munchies from the suddenly amenable machine to her meager chest and took a seat on one of the metal stair steps leading up to the balcony. She dropped her stash next to her and looked up. “I guess it’s your turn now.”

  “Oh,” he said after an uncomfortable pause. “Sorry. Todd Dunbar.”

  “Glad to meet you, Sorry Todd Dunbar,” she said with a wink in her voice.

  With her sitting there, he couldn’t help noticing her bitter little nipples poking through the thin fabric of her tank top while she ripped into a bag with tiny, nicotine-stained teeth.

  “Dinner,” she said. “You work six, eight hours a day in a restaurant, last thing you want is restaurant food. Not that this is any better.”

  Nonetheless, she munched contentedly for half a minute.
/>   “You folks are new,” she said.

  “Just got in today, my wife and kids.” He half-waved toward the balcony above them as if reminding her of her near-meeting with his better half.

  “Yeah,” she said, that half-smile returning.

  Groping for more, Todd said, “I’m starting work here tomorrow.”

  “About as surprising as learning it snows in Alaska.”

  Todd leaned against the rust-flaked metal railing and watched Kathy Lee Dwyer finish one bag, crumple and toss it into a nearby waste container, and tear into another.

  It wasn’t a subject he wanted to delve deeply into, but Todd found himself saying, “There seems to be a lot of work here in Babylon.”

  The woman shook her head slightly and let out a chuckle that turned wet with cigarette phlegm. “It’s just like everywhere else. Not a lot of work at all.” She took a draw on the butt she’d let mostly burn away between two fingers. “There’s lots of jobs. Big difference.”

  “Uh huh,” he said, suddenly not anxious to hear more.

  Other voices and coarse male laughter started up, and Todd took a few steps toward the sounds. Beyond the alcove housing the vending machine, he could see a dozen people across the patch of brown lawn. They were gathering on the weed-choked pavement surrounding the pitiful swimming pool.

  Men, mostly, with working men’s tans and jeans plastered to their legs by a day’s accumulation of dust and sweat. They gripped six-packs and lawn chairs. One hoisted a big Eighties-style radio on a broad shoulder as he cut across the dead grass to join the others. A battered pickup truck churned up the long driveway from Pleasant Run and expelled more men, more beer.

  When he returned to the thin woman sitting on the stair she said, “After five. Place starts to fill up fast about now, when the factories and such shut down for the day.”