“That’s OK.”
“I mean, I was just trying to protect your family. You know?” Though as soon as he’d said it, he wished he hadn’t. Defensive-sounding. Like, see what a good Deppity Dawg I am? Nice and dumb. And how automatically and dismissively she came back with, “I appreciate it, Burris.”
OK. That’s enough. Just get out of here.
But still. He couldn’t go. “If you have any more thoughts, or any more questions, you know where to call me, right?”
“Yes.”
“Call me at home, though, OK? I’d like to keep this completely under wraps.”
What a boneheaded remark! The lady’s not calling you anywhere, any time, you fool. Just get out of here!
He went to the door. “See you later, Nell.”
“All right, Burris. Don’t let John Murphy out.”
As he opened the door he used his toe to push John Murphy out of the way. There was something tender and pitying in the way the cat let Burris forklift it away from the door. This house of Nell’s! How much life there was here! And to think he’d never entered it once in these forty years, and probably never would again. He turned back to Nell one more time. Her eyes told him she was as lonely as he was. He was certain of it! He ventured, “Hey you know, there’s a Turkey Shoot at the American Legion on Saturday. You ever do that? It’s not real turkeys, it’s just targets. It’s fun. You want to come?”
A nervous smile appeared on her face. She walked right up to him, scaring him to death — but then she reached down, took the cat off his foot, stood up straight and said, “Burris. You gotta understand something. I don’t want to be your girlfriend.”
How uncalled-for! “Nell, I was just asking if you’d like to come to the Turkey Shoot. I wasn’t —”
“The answer is no. I don’t want to go to the Turkey Shoot with you; I don’t want to go to the church picnic with you; I don’t want to donate blood with you. OK? You keep asking me do I want to do things with you, and you always know the answer. You asked me, did I want to go to your niece’s baptism? I didn’t. I like your niece —”
“Nell, that was years ago —”
“I like her a lot, and I like you too, but will you please get it through your head that I don’t want to be your damn girlfriend!”
A minute ago he’d thought he’d reached the bottom of his life. But not at all. Now came a level of mortification and despair that he’d never guessed existed. Like when a sinkhole opens up and swallows people alive. “OK,” he said. He went and stood by the door. “I get it now. I’m going. So there’s really no need —”
“But you don’t get it. You told me once that you loved me, and you asked me if I could love you back, and I said no I couldn’t. And ever since then, you keep suggesting that maybe the reason is because you lack something. Like you’re not ambitious enough. Or you’re not the county sheriff. Or you’re not clever enough, or you’re too bald for me, or you’ve got jowls or something, none of which is true! Do you understand? Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
He said, “Yeah. I guess.”
But then he thought, so long as we’re going down this road, I might as well take it the whole way. “So why don’t you love me?”
She stared at him. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I really want to know.”
“You’re asking me that? Why I don’t love you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well that’s the silliest goddamn question I ever heard. In my life. How should I know? I don’t know why I love or don’t love anything! Why do I love my singing trophy head? Why do I love the three little fishies in my goldfish pond? And my six cats and two parakeets, when one of ’em’s always sick and every time one dies I gotta spend half a year mourning, which means mourning is how I spend most of my life? I don’t know why I don’t love you, Burris — I have no idea!”
He said, “You might shout a little louder, so that everyone in Brunswick will know your opinion of me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Just to make my humiliation complete.”
“I’m sorry.”
They stood there a moment, squaring off. Then she sighed. “But I gotta go now, OK? Gotta get these animals to bed.”
“All right. That’s perfectly, that’s a reasonable thing.”
“So good night now.” Then she was shutting the door again.
“Wait,” he said.
Her utter exasperation. “Oh come on. What?”
“One more thing.”
“Burris go home.”
“I mean, something I would’ve said a long time ago, except you broke up with me over the damn phone.”
She glowered at him. “Are you talking about high school? For God’s sake. I’ve gotta go!”
“Twenty seconds! That’s all I need.”
“OK, what?”
“You won’t give me twenty seconds? For the love of God, twenty seconds out of a lifetime —”
“I’m giving you your damn twenty seconds.”
“You are?”
“Yes.”
“Well then. Then it’s very simple. I just wanted to tell you, I mean I never really told you before because —”
“Twenty seconds are up.”
“Oh Jesus Christ! For the love of God, I just want to tell you! What I would have told you forty years ago but you hung up on me. But, the thing is, I mean forty years, or two hundred years, or forty thousand years, I see you, Nell. I see you in a way nobody else in this world can. That’s all. You can try to hide from that, but it’s still true and I wish you’d just open your damn heart!”
But she was hardly listening. She’d been increasingly distracted by the cat in her arms, who wanted to go outside and who kept struggling to get free. She was trying to hold it tightly so as to allow Burris to finish. But she was clearly relieved when he was done. She nodded and said, “OK, then.”
“Just wanted to say that.”
“OK.” The cat took a swipe at her neck. She cried, “Ow! You little bastard!” and threw it down and it ran under the table. She turned back to Burris. “I gotta go.”
“All right,” he said.
He turned and walked away, went back to his Taurus. And he must have gotten in and started it up and driven off, because a few minutes later he found himself on Rt. 17 heading home.
Well.
There it was.
The moment he’d been waiting for. The moment he’d been climbing toward for forty years. Climb up, your whole damn life, make an asinine speech which gets interrupted by a squirming cat, then go tumbling down into hell forever and goodnight.
Shaw was ecstatic. Dancing with the young pilgrims around the campfire, amid the flying sparks, inexhaustible. When he finally took a breather, a girl approached him and said she’d been here all day, and that she thought he was wonderful. She said her name was Cheryl. She was blushing. She reminded him, “The clerk? From Chummy’s?”
“Yes!” He looked into her eyes. “Didn’t I hear you were calling me a liar?”
“I was,” she said. “Before.”
“And now?”
“Now I know who you are.”
Her cheek was glistening in the dark. She was crying; she was shivering. He supposed he could have fucked her right then if he’d wanted, but he didn’t want — he didn’t want anyone but Tara. And he’d soon have her. She was holed up in her room but Shaw knew that her walls were crumbling and it was only a matter of time. And meanwhile he had his flock to watch over, and the sick to heal, and a fortune to give away, and the sparks were rising up amid the fireflies and the stars, and the pilgrims were dancing, and the universe from one end to the other was his.
Nell went to bed but of course she couldn’t sleep. Wondering what had gotten into her? Burris Jones wasn’t a bad man, wasn’t a stalker, wasn’t even much of a pest: whatever had possessed her to launch into him with such vicious cruelty?
Trying to be merciful? That’s what I call mercy? H
oly crap, what a selfish bitch I am.
And the other thing: why had his news upset her so? Maybe because it was true?
Because there have been some fishy things about this deal.
Like why hadn’t Mitch told them all right away he was splitting the jackpot with Shaw? And how come he seemed so glum at the press conference? And also, come to think of it, why hadn’t he come into the water the other day? He loved to seine. So what the hell was that all about?
How could he win all those millions of dollars and seem so damn morose?
Maybe Tara was lying. She couldn’t lie at poker but maybe that was because poker meant nothing to her. She just came here, really, to spend time with her granny. They could have been playing Parcheesi for all Tara cared.
But if she was trying to protect me, Nell thought, that was something altogether different.
But, Lord. That flirty look she’d given Shaw while teasing him about that bobtail straight: could that have been a lie?
No! She was Nell’s baby; Nell knew her through and through. And Burris had always been an excitable fool, and this was just another proof of it. And for scaring her like this she would never speak to him again. Everything was fine with Mitch and Tara. Although just to be on the safe side, first thing in the morning she would call Chief Andrews, get his opinion. The Chief was young and always charming to her and seemed to know a lot: she’d let him put her mind at ease.
Burris loitered a while at Chummy’s — not the jackpot-ticket Chummy’s by I-95, but the one on Gloucester. He went there because that was the only place still open except the Huddle House, and at the Huddle House someone would have tried to talk to him. He could have gone home, of course. But home was just a swamp of stagnant time.
He got coffee. He sipped it slowly, while staring at the headlines on the newspapers. He didn’t read them — just stared. The clerk started to get nervous with this deranged cop just standing around staring at the newspapers. Finally Burris gave the man a break and left him alone. He went driving. He drove around and around as if on patrol. He saw two colleagues, Buzz and Lou, parked in the Rt. 17 median near G Street, and he paused and said hello to them.
Said Buzz, “What up, homey?”
“Hey, not much,” said Burris, his voice carrying in the night air.
He drove on knowing they’d be talking about him till daybreak, but so what? Leave me alone. He went down Riverside Road because he knew he could park at the end of it without anyone bothering him.
On the way, he passed the place where he’d seen Zderko burying the animal. He recalled the odor of putrefaction that had jumped out from that bag — and how, according to Zderko, the creature had been dead for less than forty-eight hours.
Forty-eight hours, thought Burris. Man or beast, in heat like this, you’ll start to stink. In forty-eight hours you’ll give it up to your essential stench. Think you’re good-looking? Or sweet-smelling? Watch what forty-eight hours will do.
Thoughts like this suited his mood, and he’d have gone on thinking them — but there was a little memory that kept tugging at his attention. Something else that Zderko had said. Burris kept ignoring it, but it kept tugging. Finally he attended to it.
Hadn’t Zderko said something about Wednesday? About running the animal over on Wednesday?
Burris parked in the little sandy place at the end of the road. He looked out at the marsh. Wednesday? He couldn’t have said Wednesday. Wednesday didn’t work. Burris took his Olympus voice recorder out of his shirt pocket, and switched it on, and worked back through the recordings till he came to Friday afternoon, to that first encounter with Zderko.
He heard himself asking, “How long’s it been dead?”
And Zderko saying, “About forty-eight hours. What’s today, Friday? Well, Wednesday night, I was coming down through North Carolina? And I hit this thing and it must have been thrown up into the wheel well somehow, but I didn’t even know it till a little while ago.”
Now he thought about this.
Wednesday night was the night of the jackpot drawing. Shaw McBride claimed that on Wednesday afternoon he was here in Brunswick, giving Mitch the money to buy a jackpot ticket. But how could he have been, if he was still up in the mountains with his buddy Zderko, running down that unfortunate animal?
Which meant either McBride or Zderko was lying. And Burris had a feeling which one.
He checked his watch. 5:15.
Was he making some mistake? Was he leaping into bone-headedness again?
He replayed the exchange.
His only mistake was in taking so long to see this.
Because now he had just a few hours left till the Chief heard about his meeting with McBride and fired him.
Though if he was lucky and evasive, maybe he could keep his job till noon.
And now here was something to take his mind off Nell. Could he take this bastard down before noon?
TUESDAY
Burris hit the seediest motels first. At the Blue Pelican there was no one in the office, but he stepped up to a little rat-colored door behind it, and hammered with the side of his fist. Kept hammering till a voice shouted, “WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT?”
Burris said, “Come out here.”
“Who’s that? Dawg? It’s the fucking middle of the night!”
“Roque. Come out here.”
Finally Roque appeared. Bloodshot eyes. Squashed apricot of a nose. “What’d they do this time?”
Burris showed Roque the license photo of Romeo Zderko. “You know this guy?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Look closely. If I find out you’re lying to me, I’ll knock both of your teeth out.”
“Wow, what is with you today, Dawg?”
“Last day on the job.”
“You retiring?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“We’ll miss you, Dawg.”
“Call me that one more time.”
“Whoo. I’m impressed, motherfucker.” Roque studied the photo. “Still, I never seen him.”
Burris judged that he was telling the truth. He moved on.
At the rathouse called Golden Isles Villas, it took the drunk behind the desk a while to focus on Zderko’s mugshot. But just by the way he shook his head, clearly not giving any kind of a shit, Burris concluded he wasn’t lying either.
Blackbeard’s Motel had a camera above the reception desk, so Burris made the clerk step outside before warning her, “Becky, you lie to me about this one, I’ll confiscate your whole drugstore — you understand me?”
“Oh, stop it, Burris. Just show me your mugshot.”
He did. She said, “Oh yeah, I seen this character. Last week.”
“When last week?”
They went back in and she checked her registration book. Found it right away: “Romeo… Zydeco? Is that how you say that?” She turned the book so he could look at it. It was for Thursday night.
“You remember him?” Burris asked.
“Sort of. Kind of a nothing little fucker. With some other guy. They checked in kinda early.”
“On Thursday?”
“That’s what it says. Can you read?”
“Seen him since?”
“Once. Like the next day or so. He came in asking about the missionaries.”
“Who are the missionaries?”
“These two girls. They was staying here. But they left.”
“Why do you call them missionaries?”
“That’s what they was. From Missouri.”
“Where’d they go?”
“Dunno. They still around though. I heard they ain’t missionaries no more. I heard one of ’em’s stripping.”
“Where?”
Becky shrugged. “That I didn’t hear. But you know, it’s not endless fucking choices either.”
Romeo, first thing in the morning, called Pirate Pete’s Swap Show and described the Tercel, and said he would sell it for six hundred dollars.
Soon he got a call from a cracker with a mo
uth full of stones. It sounded like the guy was saying, “Beat me in the gutter, tie your shoe?”
“What?”
“Meet me at the Goodyear Tire store?”
Romeo drove there. The guy was goateed and had a puffy white head of hair, and wore a Monster Truck Showdown T-shirt. He also wore heavy shades so you couldn’t tell where you stood as far as bargaining. Not that it mattered to Romeo — he didn’t want to sell the Tercel anyway. He was just doing this because Shaw had told him to.
They drove around the block a few times and the guy seemed to like the car OK. But he asked, “Does it got any problems?”
“Pulls to the left, I guess.”
“What do you mean, I guess?”
“It won’t pull if you don’t go fast. I don’t go fast.”
“Why does it pull?”
“Alignment. I guess. I ran something over and maybe that screwed up the alignment.”
“I gotta pay for a fucking realignment?”
“No, not really,” said Romeo. “You don’t have to pay for anything. You don’t have to do shit.”
“I’ll give you three hundred.”
“OK.”
“You caught the turtle?”
“What?
“You got the title?”
Of course Romeo didn’t have the title, but they went over to the DMV where they were told that the Tercel was old enough that Romeo could just sign over the registration. So he did that, and took the money, and the guy gave him a lift to Tung’s Auto on Norwich Street. When the Tercel drove away, Romeo was heart-stricken. In his life, he’d never owned another car. The Tercel was not a glamour car. It was about as exciting as doing your taxes. But he’d owned it for years and it had never given him any trouble; it had served him faithfully and in return he’d changed the oil and cleaned the points and plugs regularly, and he’d always been, quietly, proud of it. He was still feeling mournful when one of Tung’s salesmen came out to see what he was doing standing there in their lot. Somehow he let the guy talk him into buying, for only seven hundred dollars, an old Chevy Bel Air, baby’ s-breath blue. A huge car, an aircraft carrier. The kind of car his grandfather used to drive (Romeo remembered him tooling around Dayton, whistling at the girls, looking like a maniacal leprechaun in his fedora and Ban-lon shirt). It was an impulse buy, this Bel Air, and Romeo regretted it the moment he pulled out of the lot.
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