Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  “You were being led around by the penis. By a girl criminal one-third your age.”

  “I suppose I was.”

  “You suppose?”

  “All right. I was. Full stop.”

  “You’ve paid almost $20,000 for adulterous sex with a professional con-artist. You think David in his wildest dreams could exercise worse judgment? You remember all of that shit you gave him, Hollis? About the Academy? About the … the stupid football? Do you remember any of that?”

  “Yes. I remember.”

  “You want to remind me about actions and consequences?”

  “No. I don’t. I’m trying to make it right with David. I tried today. I’ll keep trying. I tried with Tilly too. I couldn’t find her. I tried.”

  “What do you mean you tried?”

  “I drove to California. To find her.”

  “You drove… when?”

  “Two days ago. I didn’t know how to find her. I called her last night. She’s on her way to Africa to start this new movie. I told her I wanted to talk. To make peace.”

  “And? What’d she say?”

  “She was evasive. As usual. Didn’t want much to do with me. It will happen though. I’ll keep trying. But I think I’ll just have to wait for the right time. The right circumstances will present themselves. I’ll keep trying.”

  He looked up and watched her trying to read him; trying to figure him out; to gauge his sincerity. He concluded that she knew. She had to know he was sincere.

  “I love you, Susan. I really do. We can work through this.”

  “I’m not stopping,” she said. “I’ve found myself, Hollis. I remember now. I remember who I am and I’m not stopping.”

  “I know. I saw the speech. On television. Part of it. I don’t want you to stop.”

  She gave him one last searching look from the doorway. The muscles in her face relaxed and her beauty took the shape of exhaustion. She turned and disappeared saying, simply, “I’m going up to make dinner.”

  Hollis stared for a long time at the deadly rectangle of white paper in the middle of the floor. Eventually, he found the energy to lean forward in his chair and pick it up. He did not re-read it. He tore it slowly into thin little strips and then tore each of the strips into quarters and each of the quarter strips into eighths and then scooped the entire pile off the desk into the wastebasket.

  He regarded the bonsai.

  Susan was clattering the cookware and clunking the cupboard doors and chirping at Ben in her perfect voice. It was the voice of happiness. The voice of freedom. Not because she felt those feelings at that moment – he was quite sure she did not feel those things – but because she believed in them as an integral part of her own birthright. Her own destiny.

  And because she knew that that was the voice Ben recognized above all others.

  Hollis extracted the clippers and began again, the careful task of pruning and shaping the tiny old tree; encouraging growth in all the right ways by trimming the excesses and forgiving its odd form and by making some allowance for its hidden perfection.

  CHAPTER 79 – David

  Karl Gustafson is bent over a long, wide plank of wood that is laid across a rolling table. The table is set up near the open garage at the top of his driveway. There is a small mountain of sawdust and wood scraps at his feet. He runs his rotary power saw across the plank and its severed length drops into the pile. It is not until the saw stops spinning that he hears me dragging a garbage bag to the curb. He looks up.

  “Karl,” I say, nodding, as though nothing has happened. As though he had not called the police out of concern that I, a teacher, had beaten an intoxicated teenage girl in my home made out with her on my driveway, stuffed her into my car, and sped away. As if he had not witnessed the police arresting me, handcuffing me, hauling me off. As if Chuck North has not filled his head with images of me as the next Jeffrey Dahmer. As if, in his various interactions among family and friends, Karl has not already become vested in the imagined minor-celebrity status of living next to the next Jeffrey Dahmer.

  Karl nods warily and then quickly returns his attention to repositioning the wood over the table. The blade whines back to life.

  I leave the bag on the patch of dead grass that separates the sidewalk from the street. It’s full of broken fish tank and is barely holding together. Two triangular shards of glass have sliced through the bag on opposite sides. They glint lethally in the sun. The air is clean and crisply autumnal; just right for a little reckless endangerment. I head back inside, wondering if I will be sued by the Columbus Department of Sanitation.

  Standing in the threshold, my back to the world, I survey my hallway. All of the time it has taken to bag up the fish tank, or most of it, has done nothing to make my home more presentable. Rocks and sand and fish lawn ornaments are strewn everywhere. A slick green scum coats the baseboards and something of a muddy orangish hue seems to be thriving on the wall in the place where the aquarium once stood. The air has an indoor-summer-landfill quality to it. It needs a couple of fat seagulls and a few rats.

  I push forward, leaving the door open. The rocks and sand and plastic knick-knacks and bits of glass provide each step with a sound and texture that my sopping, mildewing carpet would not otherwise provide.

  On the counter by the phone is the stack of unopened mail I brought in from the mailbox. Cleaning fish scum is easily preferable to opening my mail. At least for now.

  On the top of the stack is a thick manila envelope from the law firm of Randolff, Meyers and Shoon, the people who sign Melvin Etus’ paycheck. I do not need to open the envelope to know that inside is the list of witnesses and copies of the exhibits that Etus had referenced. Checking my mail before the hearing would have been prudent.

  In the envelope, for instance, is certainly the name of Chuck North, from which I might have surmised that the hearing was not to be so neatly confined to classroom conduct. Also inside is a copy of the transcript of my last meeting with Principal Robertson. I would have realized that the late Bobblehead Bully was a spy. Presumably there is also something in there inquiring as to my own list of witnesses, which might have prompted me to actually get some.

  I have no interest in the envelope, or any of my mail. Whatever aspects of my life may be referenced in the stack of glued, paper rectangles, I cannot bring myself to care. The very thought of caring – that I should care, that I must care – is oppressive. It all seems so crushingly, unbearably irrelevant. I feel as if I have crossed a line. Everything on the other side of that line, including my stack of unopened mail and the voice messages that are throbbing in the light on my answering machine, are irrelevant. Ancient history. It may as well be Abraham Lincoln’s mail.

  Although I doubt the bank would send Abraham Lincoln a foreclosure notice, which I am reasonably certain is also in the stack.

  I open the refrigerator. Most of the once edible contents now rightly belong on the soggy hallway carpet, a treat for the gulls whenever they show up. There are three beers in the door. Good enough.

  I open one and take a long pull and close the fridge. There is a red smear of blood on the corner of the cabinet where I impaled my head. It matches the smear of blood on the corner of my coffee table where Brittany Kline impaled her head. There is dried vomit on the floor at my feet. The trail continues up the side of the cabinet to the sink. There are chunks of color; unintended mementos from my surprise break-up dinner at Leoni’s. I know that somewhere over by the sofa there is a similar pile of puke that belongs to Brittany, although presumably less Italian.

  The details of that singular evening come rushing back. It hurts my already bruised and swollen head. All I can do is wince and let it come and then go. It will blow through. I am no longer interested in pretending I have the ability to suppress the past. Control it. Contain it. It can’t be done. You only end up denying the present, which is the only thing that matters anyway.

  I find that I do some of my best thinking in jail. It occurred to me in tempo
rary lock up – as Glenda Laveau and my father and Ben were somewhere in the upper floors of the police station fighting for my release – that spelling is partly to blame here.

  Past. As a noun it seems so tidily self-contained. A discrete little package of time that you can decide to open and unpack and rummage through or, alternatively, that you can stuff into a closet or tie to an anchor and drop into the ocean of your subconscious. Suppressing the past actually seems somehow doable. A plausible option. But suppressing the passed seems like a ridiculous notion altogether. Like calling backwards a freight train of events that have blown through your life. Like stopping the part of the river that is already downstream. It’s already fucking happened. It’s gone. Let it go already. Be free.

  And rivers don’t have parts; a river is all one thing stretched over different locations. What is there to suppress or deny or not think about or regret? It’s all one thing. That, anyway, is what I was working on when they finally came to get me.

  My cordless phone is in pieces on the counter. My cell phone is in pieces scattered across my parents’ back deck. I am a hidden island. No one can poke me with their electronic signals. I have no flares to send up so that I might be found. No one wants me to come to work. No one wants to arrest me. No one wants to put cosmetics and feminine hygiene products in my bathroom. I am alone. It sucks and feels wonderful at the same time. I take another long drink and step back out into the hall.

  “Interior decorating is not exactly your forte.”

  Caitlin Carson Lewis is leaning up against the open door. We look at each other for a moment. She takes off her baseball hat and stuffs it into her back pocket.

  “Where’s the wig?” I ask. She laughs, pulling her hair behind her ears.

  “Boy, there’s no foolin’ you,” she says.

  “Boots gave you away.”

  She looks down at her boots.

  “Reporters wear boots.”

  “Not with bat-like smudges on the toe.”

  She glares at me in mock offense.

  “I’ll have you know that is the Mother of Christ on the toe of my boot.”

  “Sorry. My mistake. Looks like a bat.”

  “I’ve been trying to call.”

  “All of the phones in my life have been violently disassembled.”

  “Makes it hard for a girl to say she’s sorry.”

  I don’t know what to say. The pregnant pause lengthens and then flattens out into nothing. “Have any more of those?” she asks.

  I look at the beer in my hand, then nod. She steps over the threshold, moving gingerly down the hall, as I step back into the kitchen and grab another beer and open it. I turn to hand it to her. Her face is clean and open. The sideways smile slips out of hiding. Her eyes go to work on my emotions, looking intently for absolution. She reaches up to my face, touching the bruise.

  “He clocked you but good.”

  “Yeah. Fucker.”

  “I am sorry, Dave. I really am.”

  “But you’d do it again, wouldn’t you?”

  She takes the beer. Drinks. Nods.

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought I told you not to come.”

  “No. You said you didn’t want to see me at the hearing. And you didn’t. At best you saw me at the elevator outside the hearing. And do you really think I’d miss it?” She juts out one hip and dismisses me with the back of her hand. “Teacha’, please. Y’all had the bess show in town up in ‘eh.” Suddenly she is serious again. She drinks. “Besides, I keep my promises.”

  “What promise?”

  “I promised that I would bear witness to your fate, Dave. Remember? Sink or float? I’d be there. You floated. Imagine my surprise.” She looks around wrinkling her nose. “God damn it stinks in here.”

  I point towards the open door and we go outside and sit on the lawn in a patch of sun that is inches from the spot where I was hand cuffed.

  “So how was the joint?” she asks.

  “I’m there so often they’re going to start giving me the corporate rate.”

  “So?”

  “So, technically they booked me and held me on charges of assaulting a police officer. But Glenda says that’ll go away in pretty short order. She says they’ll end up dropping the charges as a part of the investigation into Chuck North.”

  She drinks. Smiles. “Really? Investigating Chuck North? Whatever for?”

  “Right. Like you don’t already know all of this. I should be asking you.”

  “I figured you knew.”

  “Glenda told me almost nothing. She said she has an attorney-client obligation to Shepp, so she would only be able to tell me part of the story. She said to ask you. Besides, she was racing back to the office. I stole her whole morning.”

  She snaps a blade of grass from its roots and holds it up to the sun.

  “So ask.”

  “Cait. Fuck. I don’t know where to start. Who’d you call? I mean, besides my dad. The one person you were not supposed to call. And how the hell do you know Glenda Laveau anyway?”

  She drops the blade and drinks. Karl buzzes his way through another board.

  “Is that all he does?” she asks. “What’s he making over there anyway?”

  “An ark I think. Quit stalling.”

  “Okay. So it started to come together when I was talking to Carmen Denoffrio at the school.”

  “You mean getting stoned with Carmen Denoffrio at the school.”

  “Yeah. That too. Several things occurred to me. Some of this you already know. Carmen and Brittany were working together. She was driving the car that picked Brittany up after she ditched you in the middle of the road. The night all of that happened.” She nods her head in the direction of the open door to the wreckage of my condo. “The getaway car in her garage put that one to rest. Whatever they’re into, they’re in it together. And by ‘it’ I mean drugs. Carmen had some shit to sell me. All I had to do was ask. And you confiscated a purse-load from Brittany at Billy Rocks. So it was suddenly pretty clear to me that Carmen and Brittany were dealing dope at the school and that they had a pretty reliable supply line.”

  “Richie.”

  “Right. This Richie character is tapping into the teen pothead market, using the teens themselves as dealers. They probably get a discount on the product and they get some serious popularity points to boot.”

  “How stupid can the guy be? It’s only a matter of time until someone gets busted and starts talking.”

  “Right. But I’ll bet there’s at least four layers between Richie, if that’s even his real name, and these kids. Probably couldn’t identify Richie if their lives depended on it. Besides, just how many I.Q. points do you want me to assign to Richie-the-drug-dealer?”

  “Still. Okay. Anyway.”

  “Anyway, as I’m talking to Carmen, this good-looking blond guy with a Frisbee walks out of the school and heads across the parking lot. He walked over to my van and started talking to you.”

  “Shepp.”

  “Yeah, as it turns out, but I didn’t know who the hell he was. I was just looking for opportunities to bond with Carmen. So I made some lecherous remark about his ass and Carmen laughed in agreement and then said that he was a teacher and then holds out her joint, you know, meaningfully, and says something like Mr. Shepp is way cool about a lot of things.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, I didn’t know at first, except that, at the very least, Shepp likes weed and, further, that he knows she’s into weed too and that’s okay with him. So far that’s just a really cool college teacher in my book.”

  “This is high school.”

  “I said college. Can I please tell this?”

  “Sorry.”

  “So then I asked if she was concerned that Shepp might get her in trouble. You know, a teacher knowing that she’s a pothead.”

  “And?”

  “She laughed. She said no way. And she said it as emphatically as is possible.”

  “So… what… the
y get high together?”

  “Undoubtedly. Think bigger.”

  She can see me thinking, trying to work it out. The answer slaps me in the face.

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The Fifth Amendment.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s why... Oh man. Shepp is one of those layers. Under Richie. He’s in the distribution chain.”

  “Maybe it was a leap under the circumstances, but that was the leap I took. Richie has inside help. Richie, or someone who works for Richie, keeps Shepp supplied and Shepp supplies the girls. The money flows in reverse, everyone taking a cut.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. I was out there trying to sound laid back, like I didn’t really care about anything Carmen was saying, but my mind was racing. I couldn’t be sure, but…”

  “But when he pled the Fifth, you were sure.”

  “No. I was sure of it long before he pled the Fifth.”

  “How?”

  “After you told me about your conversation with Shepp, and that he had been subpoenaed to testify, I got concerned for you.”

  “Why?”

  “You told me that he was eager to testify to what a great teacher you are; that he was really going to go to bat for you. Like he’s your best friend.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “So why would they subpoena someone who’s just going to testify in your favor? That didn’t make any sense. That’s when I decided that you were dead wrong about the scope of the hearing. They were not going to limit the issues to classroom conduct. They were going straight for Billy Rocks. Why else would they want to force an otherwise unhelpful witness to testify? Shepp was their Billy Rocks witness.”

  “Clearly you were right.”

  “And if they were going to get into Billy Rocks, then they were going to get into the drugs and if they were going to get into the drugs then …”

  “Then they were going to get into Brittany.”

  “Right. So I got very concerned about how this hearing was going to go.”

  “In all of your brilliance do you think you might have let me in on this little revelation?”