by David Black
With a shiver of revulsion, Jack realized he wasn’t watching two rabbits fucking.
He was watching a weasel killing a rabbit.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1
Jack parked in front of the lodge at Hague Fish & Game.
The hall smelled of freshly waxed floors. Stale popcorn, rancid butter. The grain of the knotty pine walls made swirls: galaxies, cyclones.… The room was filled with hunting trophies—a red fox with reflecting glass eyes posed on a birch log; the head of a six-point whitetail over the stone fireplace; a feral hog, its flat snout looking like industrial tubing; a huge walleye on a plaque; two raccoons; a bobcat snarling.
Guns and bows were hung on the wall to the right of the entrance. A couple of old couches and easy chairs faced the big flat-screen TV next to the fireplace. In front of the couch, on a coffee table made of a huge spool for electric power cables, were gun, hunting, and fishing magazines. A couple of old National Geographics. Some out-of-date Albany and local newspapers.
Weaver—a retired Sears appliance salesman; Jack couldn’t remember his first name—was getting himself a cup of coffee from the stainless steel twenty-cup urn on the bar counter.
“I’m looking for my brother,” Jack said.
Weaver nodded at the urn. “Help yourself, Jackie.”
“I’m okay, Ned.” Weaver’s name came to Jack.
“Bix’s on the trail,” Weaver said, “fixing up the targets. Likes to keep them trim.”
Jack nodded and left the lodge.
2
Jack walked up one of the trails behind the lodge. Here and there, leaves had begun to turn, yellow or tipped with red. To the left and right of the trail, deep into the woods, half hidden—if you didn’t know to look, you might miss them—were life-size targets of rabbits, bobcat, bear, squirrels, deer, a curious wolf, halfway up a tree a porcupine.… A few of them, newly touched up by Bix, looked glossy. The air midtrail was touched with paint and turpentine.
Jack whistled two notes, high and low, their childhood signal.
From somewhere ahead, Bix whistled back. He emerged from a stand of pines, carrying in each hand three paint cans by their wire handles. One of the cans, empty of paint, held a quiver of paint brushes.
“You look like hell, baby brother,” Bix said.
“I keep running into things,” Jack said.
“Maybe instead of running into things you should be running away from things.”
Side by side, they walked back up the path toward the lodge. Sunlight through the branches dappled their heads, shoulders. Over their heads came the metal-on-metal whan-whan-whan of a nuthatch, which seemed to keep pace with them, the call sometimes behind, sometimes ahead. A snake rippled out of the dappled path. Jack heard it whisper away into the underbrush to their right.
“Tell me what you need,” Bix said.
“I need backup,” Jack said.
“Over lunch,” Bix said, “you tell me what kind of trouble you got in since I saw you the other night, okay?”
On the way to the Chief Taghanick Diner, at the intersection of Routes 203 and 66, Jack blinked his lights at a car heading the other way, which was about to make a left turn in front of Jack’s car.
“What’re you doing, Jackie?” Bix asked.
“Letting him”—indicating the turning car—“know to go first,” Jack said.
“Where you been, kid?” Bix asked. “Can’t do that anymore. We got Pakis up here now. You flash your light at them, they think you mean you try to cross in front of me, you son of a bitch, I’ll ram you, kill you, your family, anyone in your car.”
“As I was pulling away from the house,” Robert had said, “a car was about to turn the corner. I flashed my high beams. You know, what truckers do. To let him know I’d wait. He could turn first. He flashed back. So I started across the intersection, and the son of a bitch hit his accelerator. He almost broadsided me. In the rearview, I saw him park in front of Jean’s building and go in.…”
“Pakis,” Bix said. “Crazy SOBs. We can’t even drive like we used to.”
“Let me give you a rain check on lunch,” Jack told Bix. “I think I’m going to find something I’ve been looking for in our local Paki community.…”
3
The half a dozen Pakistani families in Mycenae lived together in a derelict 1950s motel off Route 9G, halfway to Kingston. Four generations, uncles and aunts, cousins, about fifty people all together, spread out in thirty-some rooms on the two floors of the old L-shaped building. In places the green stucco had flaked away from the concrete blocks beneath. The shadow of the second-floor balcony angled across the first floor façade. The empty pool had a scarlike crack in the bluish concrete. Old cars and trucks filled the parking lot. The motel office had collapsed in the middle as if a giant had stepped on it. The broken neon sign tilted, the arrow that used to point toward the rooms now aimed up past the electrical power lines at the sky.
“It’s haunted, you know,” said Kipp, the young Pakistani, who seemed to be the clan spokesman, a tall man with a neat mustache in a peach-colored V-neck sweater and chinos. “By the ghost of a little girl. Six, seven. In jeans and a T-shirt. Once, twice a week, she roller-skates down the halls, singing Hound Dog, you know the Elvis song.”
In a sweet tenor, standing in the parking lot, one hand on the top of the chain-link fence around the ruined pool, Kipp sang the song’s opening. Various relatives watched from the balcony. When he finished, they clapped. He mock bowed, right, left.
“The ghost got a better voice than me,” Kipp said. “But loud. She wakes people up. Ever since we moved in last June. No one gets any sleep. Pain in the ass.”
Jack showed Kipp the photo of Jean from the local newspaper clip about her death.
“I seen her,” Kipp said. “With my nephew, Hussein, we call him Stickman. ’Cause he’s so thin, you know. ’Cause he does so much drugs. He only comes home when he runs out of money. He only runs out of money when he’s too strung out to rob some 7-Eleven. I say, Why you robbing 7-Elevens? Boy’s crazy. He’ll get caught. He’ll want my help. Not me. I won’t lift this finger. Petty larceny. I read the law books. Take night courses at Hudson Valley Community College. My family needs a lawyer. This country, every family needs a lawyer. Lawyer, doctor, teacher. And someone to slap the kids back in line. My brother, he’s a big guy, tried to slap Stickman back in line. That’s when he leaves. Good. What this family don’t need is a thief.”
“I want to talk to him,” Jack said. “About this girl.”
“This dead one?” Kipp said. “You think he can tell you how she died?”
“It’s a shot,” Jack said. “Someone may have seen him at her house just before.”
Kipp shrugged.
“Try the auto body out on Horatio,” he said, meaning Horatio Seymour Avenue.
“Seed’s?” Jack asked. “He works there?”
“He sleeps in the junkers,” Kipp said. “You see him, don’t tell him we talked.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
1
Seed’s Autobody was hidden behind a seven-foot-high corrugated and galvanized fence, two blocks long and one block wide. Bucky Seed, the grandson of the original owner, was in his seventies, a spry, wiry bantamweight with faded tattoos covering both arms. Every day, he scavenged in the municipal trash cans. If you had an old box spring or refrigerator the town garbage collector wouldn’t pick up, Bucky would load it on his pickup for anywhere from five to fifteen dollars and add it to his collection. The lot, which under Bucky’s grandfather and father had been a garage and auto body shop, was now a junkyard. Behind the old garage, which hadn’t been used for that purpose for thirty years, since Bucky’s dad died, was a collection of old cars, motors shot, shattered windows, floors rusted out.
For a few years in the early eighties when Bucky, never married, inherited the place, he held nightly games of Magick, a sword-and-sorcery card game, which attracted the area’s oddball teenagers, who, walking to the lot
in their inevitable ankle-length coats, looked like big, ambulatory bats. The second time kids were busted for smoking dope at his place Bucky disbanded the games, which parents had objected to, assuming more than cards and marijuana were involved in Bucky’s nights. No one ever proved anything, but the place developed a creepy reputation. Because Bucky never sold anything except the occasional cannibalized Seventies Datsun headlight, no one understood how he made a living. His expenses were minimal: He lived in the old shop, ate canned tuna—there were bins of dirty empty tuna cans behind the shop—and drank jug wine. But he always had money to gas up his truck. And once a week he frequented one of the Columbiaville Street whorehouses, where, rumor had it, he didn’t fuck, but bathed.
Every two or three years, his neighbors signed petitions and tried to close him down. On his galvanized fence, he’d painted an American flag. With only forty-eight stars. Below the sloppily painted Save Local Businesses—Fight Prop. 65, was the recently added Save Seed’s Autobody—Authentic Historic Mycenae Landmark.
Two Dobermans prowled the yard, but they had never attacked anyone, not even the kids who slipped past the fence to tease and torment Bucky. The new generation, if they played games like Magick, did it on the Internet.
Occasionally, if for example the kids were setting off cherry bombs, Bucky ran out of the shop, sometimes in his boxers, occasionally in pajama bottoms—once, for reasons no one could explain, in scuba gear—firing an old Saturday Night Special into the air.
Jack could easily believe Stickman slept in one of Bucky’s junkers.
2
The moon glinted off the household appliances. Behind a row of dishwashers, rank upon rank, stood ovens, washing machines, dryers, refrigerators, top freezers in one line and side freezers in another. Beyond that, fading into the dark, were hot water tanks, radiators and, almost obscured in the shadow of the shop, a row of some large insectlike machinery Jack couldn’t identify.
The junkyard smelled of scorched plastic, oil, and dog shit. One of the Dobermans pricked up its ears when Jack slipped through a break in the fence, raised its head to blink at Jack, and then went back to sleep, chin on forelegs. The other Doberman came around a pile of scrap metal, sniffed Jack’s shoes, and raised its head for Jack to scratch behind its ears. The dog’s breath smelled of tuna fish.
As Jack headed across the lot toward the old cars, Bucky came out of the old shop, dressed in a ratty L.L. Bean nightshirt with a Vermont Country Store nightcap on his head—Salvation Army seconds Jack figured. It was unlikely Bucky would have ordered them new.
“How’re you doing, Buck?” Jack asked.
Bucky probably had no idea who Jack was, but Jack wanted to keep the encounter casual.
Especially since Bucky was holding a shotgun.
“Doing okay,” Bucky said.
“You mind if I take a look at some of your cars?” Jack asked.
“You always do business this time of night?” Bucky asked.
The shotgun was still aimed at Jack’s belly.
“Days get pretty busy,” Jack said.
From the shop Jack heard the end of Gene Vincent’s old rock-and-roll song “Race with the Devil.”
“Golden oldies,” Jack said, fixing a smile on his face. “Cruisin’ one-oh-one point three on your dial.”
Bucky raised the shotgun to Jack’s head.
On the radio the The Dell Vikings’ “Come Go With Me” started. Jack sang along.
Bucky blinked.
Jack sang.
Bucky lowered the shotgun.
Jack sang.
Bucky started nodding in time.
Jack started doing the Lindy he used to dance in junior high.
Bucky’s whole body was moving in time to the music. His nightshirt swayed. The cone of his nightcap flip-flopped.
Jack reached for Bucky’s hand.
Bucky dropped the shotgun and, grabbing Jack’s hand, jitterbugged with him.
On the radio came the song’s claps, catcalls, shouts.
Jack released Bucky’s hand and slipped away into the dark toward the junkers.
Bucky sang along with the radio, dancing alone in the junkyard.
The two Dobermans stood, their heads cocked as if baffled at their master twirling under the moon, his white nightshirt and cap making him look like a rock-and-roll ghost.
3
The moon streaked the roofs of the broken-down cars. Jack wandered through the jumble of cars, peering into windows, looking for Stickman or signs of where the boy slept. But all he saw was sprung seats, animal nests, a condom where some teenagers had used a car to fuck.
Could have been Stickman, but Jack doubted it. If the kid was using that much coke, it was unlikely he’d be able to get it up.
And wherever Stickman was sleeping would have, Jack assumed, a blanket, something to indicate more than a brief tryst.
In the distance from the shack, Jack heard Thurston Harris singing “Little Bitty Pretty One.”
Jack wondered if Bucky was still dancing. Or prowling after him with the over-under.
Jack tried to ignore the music and listen for footsteps.
Nothing.
He continued his search among the junkers.
In the back of a Nash Rambler, the same era as the rock and roll the radio was playing, Jack found two crumpled Walmart blankets, Day-Glo green and orange, and three blue-striped pillows without pillow cases. The front seat of the car was filled with old beer cans, cartons from Long John Silver’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, empty Chinese food containers, their wire handles reflecting moonlight through the window. The car smelled rancid: stale grease, human sweat.
The floor of the station wagon was littered with drug paraphernalia: tiny plastic vials with colored caps, empty crack containers; a few broken glass tubes; steel wool; used propane torches.
Outside the car were crusts of dried vomit. Beyond that, but not far beyond, were pools of Stickman’s runny shit, stinking and buzzing with blue bottle flies.
No signs, Jack noted, of toilet paper.…
It looked as if Stickman had been here recently.
Jack held his hand over his nose and mouth as he circled the car, looking for other signs of the boy. Something that might indicate where Stickman might have gone. About five feet away from the car, Jack saw a sneaker, a worn Nike, lying on its side.
Jack walked toward it and, tripping over something, an overturned orange crate, he brushed his forehead against … what? Jack stepped back and glanced up where he saw, foreshortened, one bare purple foot so swollen there were no creases in the skin on the sole, and another foot so swollen it billowed over the edge of the other Nike, swollen calves, also dark-streaked from the blood that had settled to the bottom of the body, pale white thighs dangling from piss-and shit-stained boxer shorts, the left thigh crusted with dried semen. The red and blue veins marbling the bare chest looked like Bucky’s tattooed arms, and the skin looked pockmarked, as if some kind of bird had pecked at it.
Jack retched.
He didn’t need to look at the face to know it was Stickman.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
1
“So this gal picks up this guy at a bar and takes him home, and, when the guy goes into her bedroom, all he sees are fluffy animals, fluffy animals on the bureau, fluffy animals on the TV, shelves and shelves of fluffy animals. So what? The guy thinks. The gal’s got great tits, a great ass—fuck the fluffy animals. After they make love, the guy turns to the girl and asks, So how was I? And she says, You can take anything off the bottom shelf.”
Jack sat on the bumper of a junked Honda Civic watching two patrolmen sip coffee from cardboard cups and trading jokes.
“A doctor tells this guy he’s got maybe a day at most to live,” the second cop said. “The guy goes home and tells his wife the bad news. She gets all bent out of shape. Weeping, the whole nine. In bed that night, the guy says to his wife, Honey, since I’m going to die why don’t we mess around. The wife says, Of course, darling
. And they fuck like crazy. One in the morning, the guy wakes his wife and says, Honey, since I’m going to die, would you mind if we did it again? The wife says, Of course we can, darling. And again they fuck like crazy. Three in the morning, the guy wakes his wife and says, I’m sorry to bother you, honey, but since I’m going to die, you mind if we go one more time? The wife sits up in bed, pissed, and says, Look, you don’t have to wake up in the morning.”
The police photographer, a gawky kid, tall, just out of Columbia-Greene Community College, moonlighting from the local newspaper, took pictures of Stickman’s body, still hanging from the tree branch. The flash lit up the corpse. Its fingertips as fat as balloon animals. The hands swollen, dark from pooled blood. The forearms as big as sausages.
Like Popeye, Jack thought.
The knot of the noose above the bulging Adam’s apple forced the dead man’s chin up. Lines of saliva from the corners of his mouth down his chin made his jaw look like a ventriloquist dummy’s. From his nostrils, which were crusted with cocaine, tracks of bloody mucus gave Stickman what looked like a painted bandito mustache. His open eyes had black rims, more pooled blood, at the bottom. His swollen, congested face had squared off like an Incan idol.
“Looks like one of those Mutant Teenage Turtles,” a Crime Scene Unit technician said.
“Those freckles on the face,” the County Coroner said to no one in particular. “Punctuate hemorrhages. Tardieu spots. Due to hydrostatic rupture of vessels.”
The corpse’s tongue, black from dried blood, poked between fat lips as if Stickman were French-kissing Death.
Another photographer’s flash lit the face horribly.
“Don’t touch the body,” Sciortino said to one of the local deputies who had just put his arms around the dead man’s legs. To lift the corpse down. “’Til CSU gives you the go ahead.”
The deputy opened his arms wide and skipped back, tripping over the orange crate. Which Stickman could have used to stand on when hanging himself.