I swallowed some coffee. “I don’t know if I can.”
He took a hit from his cigarette and heaved a smoky sigh. “I probably won’t survive my own monologue, but knowing that you’ll talk next might just get me through it.” He smiled sadly. “What did we do in those summers? I’ve thought so much about the fun we had.”
“We rode our bikes all over.”
“Yeah.”
“What a neighborhood,” I remarked.
“The river on one side, the tracks on the other, the Rouge down at the bottom—and the ghetto just around the corner.”
“It’s all ghetto now,” I said.
“You know why my parents sent me to camp, don’t you?”
“To make a man out of you.”
“Right. Oh, God. My dad had such a hemorrhage when he caught us with that eye shadow.”
“Yeah. I remember him yelling, Why couldn’t you kids play doctor instead? What’s wrong with playing doctor?”
“It was the primal cry of a father who suspected the worst. A Korean War veteran whose kid was a pussy. If he’d caught me raping you instead, I’m sure he’d have bought me that cello after all.”
He broke a madeleine in two and nibbled. I tried one and liked it. It went with the coffee: a light, soft sweetness against the coffee’s bitter strength.
“So I went,” said Duane. “I had no choice. I knew it’d be terrible.”
“And was it?”
“Yes and no. I was terrified of having to shower with the other guys, being a basic runt. However, I had a big ding-dong. That and that alone got me the respect of all the other runty guys, and the everlasting enmity of the bigger ones. They were like, A pygmy like him doesn’t deserve a big prick. The age-old story. They pushed me around until one day at mess I went berserk and slammed the biggest bastard over the head with my tray. I had no idea I was about to do it. Don’t laugh. The trays were steel. I actually cocked him cold in front of everybody, and after that I was extremely popular.”
He smoked and sipped his coffee. “The day they took me to Camp Kalkaska was the last time I ever saw her.”
“How long was camp?”
“Six weeks.”
“Oh, yeah, I remember us whining, ‘Six weeks apart?’”
“So my dad picks me up after camp is over, and he’s got a funny look. And I say, “Where’s Mom?’ We’re riding along in that shitty car—remember that diseased-looking Dodge we had?”
“Yeah, with the yellow quarter panels and all that rust. Lyndon Johnson rust.”
“Right. Lyndon Johnson rust.”
Duane and I had agreed that the rust field on the trunk lid looked like the silhouette of our thirty-sixth president.
Duane continued, “And I asked him again, ‘Where’s Mom?’ I hadn’t heard from them in six weeks. I’d at least expected her to send me some lousy cookies or something. I hate to admit it, but that camp did toughen me up. So I felt I was past crying over anything. But when he kept not answering me, I started to cry a little. I got a horrible feeling. I was sitting in the front passenger seat, in her seat, and I just got this clear, very clear feeling that she was in the worst kind of danger.
“My dad said, ‘Son, I don’t know where your mother is. She ran off.’” He reached for another cigarette. “Now, I knew there was no way my mother would have run off, especially while I was at camp.”
“You and your mom were close.”
“Yeah. But I was old enough to know that bizarre things happen to normal, ordinary people such as my mom and myself and my dad.”
The kitchen windows shone black, beyond them the urban night. Duane and I gazed at our reflection in them, two people sitting at a table with mugs of coffee, smoke swirling above our heads, our expressions yearning. He got up and lowered a series of matchstick blinds. They were done in an understated natural stain, which complemented the mahogany of the window frames. It really was a lovely home.
My friend resumed his seat. “I’m hoping you can help me, Lillian. In fact I’m practically praying it. You can help me look for her.” He pulled at his Adam’s apple. “So my dad says she ran off, and I start asking all these questions. And he says to me, ‘Didn’t you notice how strange she’d been acting?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know….’”
“But she hadn’t been acting strange, as far as you could tell?”
“Well, actually she had been, I mean, you know. Even kids know it’s unusual for your mom not to want to leave the house. She was fairly afraid of the world. I guess she was a strange woman in general.”
“But you loved her.”
“I loved her so much. I’d have done anything to please her. I probably would’ve gotten married to please her, if it’d come to that.”
“We could have married each other and then lived double lives of hot homosexual love.”
Duane said, “I would have wanted a divorce eventually.”
“I was kidding.”
“I admit, having a marriage under our belts would’ve given us ‘straight cred’ when we needed it.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I remember your mom. She was really nice. She was a cookie baker.”
“She was, yep.”
“And she gave us cookies and ice cream at the same time, both things together. At my house you could have one or the other, but not both at the same time. Unless Trix was baby-sitting. Remember Trix?”
“No.”
“She was the barmaid at the Polka Dot. She was great.”
“I never set foot in the Polka Dot, you know”
“Really? I thought…I remember…I remember your dad coming in all the time…and…didn’t you…”
“No, my dad made me afraid to ever go in. I mean, little kids didn’t just walk into taverns anyway, for Jesus’s sake. You felt normal walking in there because it was your home.”
“But you came over—I remember playing Stratego in my bedroom.”
“Yeah, but that was you guys’ apartment. I’d come up the outside stairs in the back and knock. The bar was this fearful mystery to me. It made you an exciting playmate—you had access to this adult world, this dangerous adult world. Dear God, the stories you used to tell me.”
“Al and Hiram.”
“Yeah, Al and Hiram.”
Duane ashed his cigarette with a sharp movement. The ashtray was a shallow opalescent thing. After one more drag he broke off the coal. We watched the coal smolder and go out.
I said, “So you’re riding home from camp and your dad—does he try to tell you why your mother ran off?”
He tapped out another Marlboro and lit it.
“My dad launches into this lame explanation of how my mom just got weirder and weirder, and one day while I was at Camp Kalkaska she walked out, wandered off, never to return. And I was like, ‘Well, we gotta go look for her!’ And he says he had looked for her, and he had a feeling she didn’t want to be found. He says, ‘To be honest, kid, I think she’s crazy.’ And he tells me we’re making a fresh start, and Lillian, we were on I-75, and before I knew it we’d blown right through Detroit, and I ask, ‘Where are we going?’ and he says Florida! We stopped at a party store in Toledo, and he started drinking beer and getting festive. He bought me all the junk food I wanted and said I’d have a new bike and my own room, which was strange, because I’d always had my own room. Being an only and all. You know how it is.”
“I always gave thanks for that.”
“I go, ‘Well, what about our house?’ and he goes, ‘It’s sold, gone, that’s it,’ and I say, ‘Well, what about my stuff,’ and he says, ‘We’ll buy you new stuff.’ ‘What about my bottle cap collection?’ ‘We’ll buy new bottle caps.’ ‘What about my Superior Potato Chip Space Coins collection? ‘We’ll buy new.’ But I soon found they didn’t have Superior Potato Chips in Florida, so that was lie number one.”
“Lie number one?” I said.
“Well,” Duane said, and fell silent.
I waited, and after a while he said, “I feel really horrible about
myself. About the way I was then.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was very into myself right at that time. Because it was at camp that I had my first—that I first messed around with another guy. And let another guy mess around with me. I was distracted.”
“Well…”
“My father takes me, uproots me, we move to Florida, he tells me my mom abandoned us, and I bought it. I mean, I let him convince me. I was so busy thinking about myself, and I guess I was sort of in shock, that I just let my mom go.” His eyes welled up.
I took his hand. “Duane, you were twelve years old. What happened when you got to Florida?”
He blinked back his tears. “There was no new bike, no room of my own, no house, no nothing. My dad rented us a room in this roachy motel in Miami, and he went out every day. I guess he got work somewhere. We ate junk food. I went out too. I walked down to the Greyhound station every afternoon and hung around.” He looked at me steadily. “I discovered I could make money too.”
“Oh my God, Duane.”
“It was as if something gave way inside me, spiritually.”
I couldn’t help asking, “Didn’t you miss me? You went to camp and I never heard from you again.”
Softly, he said, “I don’t know how to explain it.” He looked miserable.
I stroked his hand. “It’s all right.” I looked into his face. His eyes were dark and faraway. “Tell me more,” I urged.
“I went to school, a toilet of a slum school. I can’t even think about it. After a while my dad started to bring this woman around named Lynette. She was a waitress. They got married. We moved into a shitbox house. Lynette started out all right, nice and everything. She had no interest in disciplining me, which I appreciated. But I couldn’t really like her, let alone love her. My dad wanted me to call her Mom. I’m sure she sucked his brains out through his weenie. He thought she was fantastic. And on that vulgar note, I have to go to the bathroom.”
I got up too, and looked around, admiring the house. Duane had taste, all right.
The original interiors of the houses in Indian Village were nicely finished in plaster and hardwood. Their architects had crammed them with terrific built-ins like nooks and shelves and window seats. Duane had added some very hip touches, like the metals in the foyer. He’d kept the place fairly minimalist—he hadn’t gone and junked it up with a collection of kitsch or that lowbrow gay-guy art of winged penises and leather-masked cherubs. The fireplace surround looked new and grand—Pewabic tile, I guessed, in a muted mix of golds, oranges, and browns.
I gravitated toward a collection of photographs on the wall opposite the fireplace. There, illuminated by soft spotlights, were studio pictures of baby Duane, his mother and his father; grown-up Duane and three guys bare-chested with arms over one another’s shoulders in front of some beach club. I laughed out loud: There was a snapshot of Duane and me, posing on our bikes, holding the sharp sticks I insisted we carry against the threat of rattlesnakes and criminals. There was a picture of Duane at about age fourteen at a cookout, pretending to swallow a shish kebab. I noticed the photo had a ragged edge, as if part had been torn off.
Duane appeared at my side.
I asked, “Is this you in Florida?”
“Yeah.”
“The picture got torn.”
“My stepmother was in it.”
“Oh. You really hated her, huh?”
“I just—it wasn’t that she was all that bad.”
“It was just that she wasn’t your mom.”
“Yeah. Sometimes I almost liked her. But after it was all over…I just can’t stand to see her face.”
My morbid curiosity was aroused. “What was she like?”
“Well, she had the coarsest vocabulary you ever heard. From a woman.”
“I’ve heard some coarse ones.”
“Like she’d say, ‘I gotta take a leak.’”
I laughed. Duane said, “Only guys are supposed to say that. And she’d say, ‘I didn’t know whether to shit green or go blind.’”
I laughed harder. “Boy, I haven’t heard somebody say that since—since—” I stopped abruptly.
Duane continued, “And when my dad would get on her case, telling her to do this, do that, she’d yell, ‘Jesus Christ, what else do you want me to do—stick a broom up my ass and sweep the floor with it?’”
My mouth dropped open. I asked, “Did she ever tell your dad, ‘You couldn’t pour piss out of a boot’?”
He looked at me. “How’d you know?”
“What did she look like?”
“Well, she was…just regular, I guess, she was about five foot seven, my dad thought she was pretty—”
“Did she have blue eyes?”
“Yes.”
“Fair skin? A few freckles?”
“Yes.”
“Red hair?”
“No.”
I let out my breath.
His eyes widened. “Wait. Oh, my God. Yes. She dyed it. Yes! I always wondered why she dyed her hair brown, a mousy, ordinary brown, when her roots were this rich red that I thought would have looked great.”
“Her roots were red.”
“Her roots were red, and I thought, Man, if I had a head of hair like that I’d—”
Suddenly I felt weak, and I understood what people meant when they said “My head swam.” I put a hand out to the wall, but it fell away from me and I sank to my knees.
My old friend took my arm and eased me to a sitting position on the carpet. “Lillian, what is it?” His voice was steady but tight. “What’s going on? Do you want to lie down?”
“Oh, Duane.” He crouched over me anxiously. I said, “Where is Lynette now?”
“I don’t know. Like I told you before, my dad took off after we’d been in Florida for three years. I hit the streets, and I don’t know what happened to Lynette. Lillian, you’re scaring the hell out of me. I think she went to Las Vegas. She was always talking about going there, always talking about how lucky she was. I don’t care about her. Tell me. What is this?”
I looked up at him. “Duane, I could be wrong. But I don’t think I am. Lynette used to work at the Polka Dot, and she used to be called Trix, and she used to be dead.”
4
We staggered to the kitchen. Duane splashed water on his face at the sink and groped for a clean towel. He scrubbed his face. “I need a drink,” he muttered into the towel. “You?”
“Hell yes.”
He brought a bottle of brandy and two glasses to the table. He poured out generous shots. We raised our glasses.
“To, uh…” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
We drank. The brandy was smooth and pleasantly warm in my throat. I appreciated the brandy. It had a French label.
I said, “All right, Duane. We’ve obviously been connected in a deeper way, all this while, than we ever thought.”
“It was fate,” he said. “Talk, Lillian.”
I recounted for him my memories of Trix.
“It sounds like her,” he said. “It sounds just like how Lynette talked and acted.”
I told him about the night that unfolded after we said goodbye on going-to-camp day.
“It was the first hot night of the summer, and we had the windows open upstairs. My mom was teaching me to play cribbage, and—”
“What’s cribbage?”
“It’s a game, a card game that has a little wooden board with pegs that you move based on the points you score. It’s an old-timer’s game. Anyway, we were sitting in the kitchen playing cribbage and drinking Vernor’s on the rocks, and my dad and Trix were running the bar. My dad had just bought the deep fryer. He thought he could bring in more business if he could serve fried fish and stuff. My mom thought the smell would get on our nerves, but she wanted the bar to bring in more money too. I got to stay up late in the summers. My mom and I had a good time playing cribbage that night. We talked about stuff. It was good. When I went to bed she was putting on
a pot of coffee for when my dad came up after closing.
“I went to sleep. I woke up. There was this big loud noise in my ears, like the worst nightmare, like an explosion that goes on and on. It was pitch-black in my room, which wasn’t right, because the light from the alley always shone in. I couldn’t breathe, and I realized the place was on fire. My mom was screaming somewhere. I heard her screaming my name.”
Duane covered his mouth with both hands.
“I got up, breathed in, and fell down from the smoke. It was like breathing fur. I lay there for a minute. There was air near the floor and I gulped it in. Then I felt the floor get hot. I crawled to the window and started to climb out. I thought I’d have to jump into the alley. But a fireman grabbed me, he was right there on a ladder, ready to come in.”
I sipped, swallowed, and closed my eyes. The scene outside the bar came back to me vividly: the flames stampeding through the place, the windows glowing orange, the fire trucks shooting water that disappeared into the flames like nothing.
I opened my eyes. “They brought my dad out, and then they found my mom. They gave them mouth-to-mouth, but they were dead. It didn’t look like they were burned. Their faces looked normal, just slack and empty. My mother was naked. I couldn’t believe it when the guy unfolded the sheet and put it over her, covering her face too. Then he did the same with my dad. It was like this slow-motion show that wasn’t real. A cop took hold of me and wouldn’t let me touch them, and the guy who lived across the alley came and took me to his place until my Uncle Guff and Aunt Rosalie got there.”
“Oh, what a horror,” Duane whispered. “What a night of hell. I am so very sorry, Lillian.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m all right.”
“How can you be?”
“It’s been a long time…The next day they found Trix. She was burned up, beyond recognition. They identified her by her wedding band.” I took another sip of brandy. The fumes rose from my throat into my nose. I breathed them in. “So three people were killed in that fire.”
Duane said, “I guess we both grew up all of a sudden that summer.”
“Yeah.” I reached for his pack of Marlboros, shook one out, and lit it. I had the urge to hold fire in my hand, to control it. I watched the match burn down to my fingers, then blew it out.
The Lillian Byrd Crime Series Page 45