“What makes you want to suck the dick of a teenage boy? Can’t be I was just born this way? I mean, I don’t know about you, Joel, but I wasn’t diddled by neither my old lady or old man. Yeah, sure, my old lady slapped me around a bit, but no more, probly, than I deserved.”
“You were planning it all along, weren’t you?” Pataki seemed deflated, as if over the course of their conversation, he’d miraculously shed weight, the extra pounds that with the help of Dr. Atkin’s Diet he’d been unable to lose. Joel recalled a line from the Cole Porter tune Love for Sale…appetizing young love for sale. “To extort me?”
“Extortion is a strong word, Joel.” Jordy pressed a finger to his temple, as if thinking. “As strong, maybe, as statutory rape. Or sodomy.” Jordy grinned. “Maybe even pedophilia. How old was I when you started licking me; fifteen, maybe?”
“Who put you up to this, Jordy? Seamus Mcteer?”
“That bucket of shit? He’s a photographer, not a blackmailer.” Jordy pulled himself from the sofa. “You know, all this time you been playin’ me for a dumb nigger.”
Joel said, “No.”
“Okay then, have it your way; a dumb kid. Well, I really been playin’ you.” Jordy pointed.
“I knew it; it’s why Missy introduced you to me in the first place. You planned it from the beginning, to set me up.” Joel’s eyes brimmed with tears. “I’m glad she’s dead.”
Instinctively, Jordy flexed, the muscles in his body becoming taut. He crossed the floor to stand close to Joel, smelling, Pataki thought, faintly of marijuana and cheap after-shave.
“Ten to fifteen, princess, hard time; really hard time.” Jordy grabbed his crotch, jiving. “They might not all be as big as me in da’ joint, but ya’ gotta’ know they won’t be as gentle wit’ you neither. Wit’ a fiiine booty like ‘dat,” he said, caressing Joel’s buttocks, “they gonna’ pass you ‘round da’ shower like a bar a soap. You’ll be shitting blood for weeks.”
His eyes were noncommittal, belying the malice of his words. Two minutes later, Jordy was gone, closing the door softly behind him. Pataki hoped a truck—or something—might hit the boy on his way home.
…
Later the same afternoon, Jordy met with his friends in the municipal cemetery: that only two weeks ago he considered himself the peerless and self-anointed head of this destructive rabble never occurred to him, Jordy anxious, lately, about being seen in the company of this ragged collection of juvenile delinquents. For now they provided a source of ready if relatively paltry sums of petty cash, Jordy injudiciously dispensing, at liquidation prices, what remained of a dwindling stash of pot, ecstasy, amphetamines and prescription and over-the-counter drugs. It would keep them smiling stupidly well into the following month, by which time Jordy hoped to be trolling the bright light, big city streets of Times Square.
Among those in attendance was Jenny Kubiak, ill tempered, acting as if she were on the rag. Jordy said as much.
“I—we—don’t see you anymore. What’s up?”
“Don’t be an idiot, Jen,” he said testily. “The cops are all over my case.”
“What do you expect?”
“Don’t go down this road, Jen, you won’t like where it takes you.”
“I’m not saying anything, Jordy. Only that the guys, well, you know. They feel abandoned.”
Jordy gestured toward the assembly. “They feel abandoned? Them? They’re half fucking conscious. How can they feel anything?”
Jenny stepped forward. She was as tall as Jordy, but wider. “Okay,” she said. “I feel abandoned. I text, you don’t reply. I call, you don’t answer. Who the fuck do you think you are, bailing on me?”
Jordy didn’t flinch. Instead, he said, “I haven’t bailed on you. It’s just that everyone’s avoiding me like I stepped in dog shit. They think either Eugene or my old man killed Missy.”
“I’m not. I don’t care who did it. I may be the last friend you have, Jordy. You’d better not piss me off.” Jennifer slugged Jordy in the shoulder, hard enough to hurt.
“Has your old man said anything to you? About who he thinks done it?”
“Art doesn’t say fuck-all to me about anything. We don’t talk.”
Jordy shuffled his feet, kicking up the dirt beneath his powder blue sneakers. “What about them?” he asked, referring to the gathering. “What up with them?”
“Like you said; they can’t think anything,” Jenny said. “Seriously, they’re pissed. At Missy, at you, at everything; especially you.”
“Why me?”
“She was your cousin, man, you should have taken care of her.”
Jordy thought for a moment before replying. “Is that a trick question?”
“I’m only saying that lately, the two of you were tight, real tight. It doesn’t look so good, you know.”
Jenny dragged deeply on her cigarette. With her dark eye make-up applied heavily and her oily hair and pale skin, she resembled a corpse. The look was a contradiction of styles: punk, heavy metal and Goth, Jenny as confused about her appearance as she was about her character. She didn’t want to feel for Jordy, but in the absence of any credible alternative had no option. Art and Rena Kubiak were too preoccupied with the limited prospects for their dying daughter, had been since Jen could recall. She had never enjoyed the company of an extended family, over time immediate relations becoming disaffected by the oppression of the Kubiak’s unforgiving circumstances.
Jordy and she had begun chumming in grade school, drawn by a common interest in the raucous music that filtered from each of their open bedroom windows and by the spiritual hollow recognizable in some, only to those who experience it themselves.
Always cautious, for years the relationship served a surrogate purpose to both: until the introduction of Missy Bitson into the triangle. Jordy was clearly smitten with his young cousin, even at an early age, before the girl turned ten. At first, in a protective, almost brotherly fashion, later Jenny suspecting it had evolved into something more. She resented, though didn’t blame, Jordy. Missy? Jenny both blamed and hated her, considering the dead girl to be the sole source of Jordy’s total disaffection.
“Fuck,” Jordy said now, “I gotta’ get outta’ here.”
He turned from Jenny, walking along a footpath that led deeper into the wooded seclusion of the graveyard. He ignited his own cigarette, pondered his escalating addiction, though more in terms of its impact on his pocketbook than on his health. Jordy hadn’t been sleeping well lately, or eating. He’d ridiculed Joel Pataki over the prospect of possibly going to prison, but in truth, Jordy was scared shitless himself.
“My grandmother is buried here,” said Jenny. She pointed to a row of weathered headstones. “Over there, I think.”
“The one who died last year?”
“You remember?”
“Sure,” Jordy said, “you had a party.”
“Not a party; a wake.”
“Either way, you didn’t seem too cut up.”
Jenny laughed. “Yeah, I asked Rena if she’ll have a party when Luba dies.”
Jordy said, “What did she say?”
Jenny chuckled. “Smacked me upside the head.”
Where they walked, the soil was spongy beneath their feet, still saturated from the spring melt. The day was a mix of sun and cloud, though what little sun there was failed to penetrate this deep through the trees. The air smelled like rot. Jenny imagined it would smell this way underground. Suddenly, she regretted the certainty with which she knew Luba would soon die.
“What will you do?” she asked Jordy.
“Fucked if I know,” he said. “I got cash.”
“You run, they’ll suspect you.”
“Fuck it; I don’t, they will anyway.”
“You’re right,” she said.
They had come to a burial plot over which the soil was freshly turned. Jordy stopped walking.
“Didn’t like her, did you?”
Why bother to lie? She said, “No.”
>
Jordy said, “That’s okay; she never liked you, neither.”
Jenny crushed her cigarette beneath her heel. “Fuck off, shit-head,” she said. “Fuck off and die.”
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
THEY FILED INTO the church, alone and in pairs, as couples and in groups, each attending as much from curiosity as to pay their final respects. Family, friends of family, solitary mourners and schoolmates gathered together in clusters, as if unwilling to bear the burden of the proceedings alone.
As is typically the case with any large assembly and despite the gravity of the circumstances, there seemed that day to be a spontaneous and unexpected atmosphere of almost carnival-like levity. People spoke too loudly, laughed inappropriately or too often and greeted each other as if attending a wedding rather than a funeral. (But in keeping entirely with what the Reverend Cassie McMaster would later in the service describe as an occasion to Celebrate a life! rather than to mourn its passing, as if in her thirteen short years Missy could be said to have had a life.)
Inside the church, immediately to the left of the altar, two pews had been reserved for the family. Earlier, an assortment of floral tributes had been removed from the Shuttleworth and Brown Funeral Parlor and transported to the chapel. Like oil in water, the sweet scent of roses, carnations and lilies mingled with the indelible odor of candle wax and incense to create an evocative, though not necessarily unpleasant, bouquet. Sunlight filtered like a kaleidoscope through a solitary stained glass window.
Though most would not be able to name it, the organist played The Dream of Gerontius, an Elgar composition commissioned by the Birmingham England Festival Committee and first performed in October of nineteen hundred. Based on the poem by Cardinal John Newman, it had been the welcoming hymn at the funeral mass at St. Albans for Cardinal Robert Alexander Kennedy Runcie, former Archbishop of Canterbury. Cassie McMaster had attended that event, having applied for and received, at the time, a special dispensation to finance the trip from church funds. In both music and words it was a fitting tribute: to Cardinal Runcie, and likewise to her niece.
One week to the day she was discovered in the alley behind her father’s store and lacking sufficient cause not to, Abby Friedman released the body of Missy Bitson to the care of Shuttleworth and Brown Funeral Home. Though degradation was apparent it was not yet severe.
Working all-day and late into the evening, by Monday morning the principals at Shuttleworth and Brown had effected a reasonable, if not exact, representation of the dead girl, thus saving the aggrieved parents the added indignity and inevitable innuendo of a closed casket ceremony. Missy’s complexion was off, commented some, and her cheeks too wide, noted others. The nose was much too flat (serving to highlight her African American roots), but in all, most agreed that Missy appeared peaceful and life-like, contrary to the circumstances surrounding her violent death.
On the church steps, Kubiak smoked. Sara shuffled her feet restlessly while Christopher Burke scanned the gathering as if searching for visible evidence of apparent guilt. Anticipating a crowd larger than could be accommodated within the church, Cassie McMaster had ordered loudspeakers to be erected outside, in order that those wishing could accompany in song and prayer those sitting inside.
“Just like the movies,” Burke said. “Do you think the killer is here?”
“Odds are,” said Sara. “Half the town is here, Chris.”
The casket had not yet arrived. Christopher was right, Kubiak thought. Not so much like a movie, but the nightly network news, the scene reminiscent of images of the post Columbine tragedy or Sandy Hook, and the subsequent burials, attended in the hundreds by visitors acquainted only remotely with the deceased.
“Should have called in the Highway Patrol,” said Kubiak referring to the street and a scrum of haphazardly and illegally parked vehicles.
When it arrived, it was necessary for Burke to clear a space for the hearse to park, together with the limousine transporting immediate family members. Regardless of her mortal popularity, in death Missy Bitson had certainly managed to draw a crowd, confirming to Kubiak once again the legitimacy of the six degrees of separation. (Or is it Kevin Bacon? Inwardly, for the first time that day, Kubiak smiled.)
Among the pallbearers was Jordy Bitson. Wearing a dark suit with white shirt and dark tie, Jordy appeared somber, though not exactly stricken by grief: diminutive yet somehow menacing, Sara observed. Maggie Bitson followed her daughter’s casket, unsteady, supported on one arm by Eugene, on the other by Mandy. Backlit by the bright sunshine, Sara noted that Mandy’s dress appeared to be navy, not black. In the afternoon light and at the right angle, her silhouette showed provocatively, and while Mandy wore panties she undoubtedly had not thought—or chosen—to wear a slip. (What is her mother thinking? Sara thought, unconsciously recalling her own mother’s admonition: you shouldn’t be looking.)
Inside, standing with Sara at the rear of the church, Kubiak appeared ill, as if afflicted with flu. “Sit, Art, before you collapse,” she whispered. Kubiak waved her off even as he felt himself waver. Burke scanned the crowd, still searching diligently for visible evidence of apparent guilt, his attention mostly on Eugene, as if the double whammy of grief and contrition might force him to fall wailing upon his daughter’s casket in a combined plea for mercy and salvation. (Burke would like to prove Eugene guilty, if only to contradict Art.)
Cassie McMaster stood at the altar, administering to the victim what Burke assumed, but couldn’t precisely be sure, was the equivalent of Last Rites. At almost six foot, she was imposing, the sermon authoritative in both timbre and intent. Did Cassie wear clothing beneath her vestments, he mused? If so, was it street clothing or merely panties and bra? Burke imagined her naked beneath her devotional garb. His libido stirred. He sensed Pridmore beside him, watching disapprovingly, as if reading his thoughts. Unbidden, he imagined a three-way including Sara and Cassie; as a Catholic in an Episcopal Church, Burke was inclined to experience neither guilt nor shame.
They had reached The Commendation. The congregation was ordered to stand while Cassie read: “Our sister has fallen asleep in the peace of Christ. We commit her, with faith and hope in everlasting life, to the loving mercy of our Father, and assist her with our prayers. In baptism she was made by adoption a child of God. At the Lord’s Table she was sustained and fed. May she now be welcomed at the Table of God’s children in Heaven and share in eternal life with all the Saints.”
When finished, Cassie asked the congregation to be seated while the organist played, The Lark Ascending, by Ralph Vaughan Williams. She considered this piece to be one of the twentieth century’s most evocative Pastorals, described by Williams himself as an English landscape transcribed into musical terms. Outside, feedback reverberated from the makeshift speaker system, for Cassie somewhat tarnishing the effect.
Placed four rows back from the Alter and physically removed from his immediate family, Leland McMaster sat with his wife, the death of his granddaughter apparently unable to breach the schism borne of emotional estrangement and time. Sitting in her wheel chair, Helen partially blocked the center aisle: younger than her husband by a dozen years, she was now ravaged, looking a dozen years his senior, her body an image of premature decay.
Alcohol had wreaked havoc on the physiological body and spiritual soul of Helen McMaster. Kubiak recognized the signs of acute drink. A habitual DUI, Kubiak recalled how, on many occasions as a young deputy, he had been called upon to detain the forty-something Helen for driving her Cadillac recklessly about town while under the influence. Often at the request of her husband—Leland unwilling to subject his reputation to the humiliation of having to do it himself—Kubiak was summoned to retrieve the drunken wife from a local bar, to rescue her from the groping and clutching grasp of a drunken stranger. Generally on these occasions, Kubiak himself was forced on the drive home to resist Helen’s alcohol fueled sexual advances.
With her bottle blonde hair askew, lipstick running in a splotch of wild col
or from mouth to cheek, and with her skirt hiked well beyond the point of decency, Kubiak wondered why Leland didn’t simply divorce the woman and have done with it. She was, after all, a nuisance and a disgrace. She could not possibly be an accommodating partner or able mother to her young family. Only later did Kubiak understand that for Helen, alcohol was a symptom of a more insidious disease.
Afterward, at the home of Maggie and Eugene Bitson, there was food and drink. Believing it would at best be unsympathetic and at worst an unnecessary provocation, Kubiak decided neither Pridmore nor Burke should attend.
As a neighbor, though six blocks (six degrees?) removed, Kubiak attended as a private citizen. He mingled among the mourners, as if by telepathy hoping to feel their pain. Kubiak helped himself to refreshments; beer, mini-sausages, buns, assorted cold cuts, cheese cubes and sliced vegetables with some type of creamy dip that Kubiak feared might upset his stomach.
The Body In The Water Page 30