Skewed

by Anne McAneny

  They stayed silent for a while, both half-dozing off, until a sharp rustle in the woods made them jerk awake and sit up.

  “Shit,” Jack said, swiping away the cigarette that had fallen onto his jeans. “What was that?”

  Janie frowned, looking at the tall tower of ashes on her cigarette, piled like a stack of fanciful wishes. She crushed them into a roof shingle. “You ever see things in those woods, Jack? Think maybe someone’s watchin’ us?”

  “No. Do you?” Jack gave her a cautious, questioning look.

  “Just a feeling I have sometimes. And it’s always about those woods.”

  “Could be reporters, but they’re pretty scarce lately.”

  “Maybe.”

  Jack narrowed his eyes. “You think he’s still after us?”

  “Who?”

  “The Haiku Killer,” Jack said.

  Janie pshawed. “Grady McLemore made up that story.”

  “What if he didn’t?”

  Janie pictured Grady McLemore rotting away in a cold cell, breathing through a single tiny hole, one teenager-on-a-dare’s finger away from his air supply being cut off. “He made him up. He had to.”

  “But what if? What if he was in our house that night and he’s decided to come back for us?”

  “Stop talkin’ crazy, Jack.”

  Janie swallowed away the sick feeling in her gut and lit another cigarette. The match’s flame quivered in her hand.

  CHAPTER 26

  I drove three miles to confront a guy who’d surely be less reliable than a blind drunk with a cockeyed imagination and grudges to settle. Come to think of it, that was a pretty good description of Mickey Busker, whose rusting trailer loomed in front of me.

  One of my mother’s plain-talking aunts once told me a story that she swore came straight from my mother’s lips. She said Mickey reveled in the greasy cacophony of the diner kitchen because he didn’t have to watch his mouth and could pinch the waitresses’ asses out of sight of the customers. After Bridget’s first week there, she’d arrived home with a stain on the back of her uniform resembling an infinity symbol—Mickey had branded his property with thumb and forefinger in a highly inappropriate place. Bridget knew she had to take a stand if she wanted a finite end to the infinite sleaze. The very next day, with a full tray in one hand and a soda pop in the other, she caught sight of Mickey’s dirty fingers approaching her backside, so she spun around and tossed that pop right in his face. He tried to make some macho comments, but Bridget got up in his business, as close to his stained teeth as she dared, and delivered her warning in a whisper. “Next time, Mickey, it’ll be acid. But there won’t be a next time, will there?”

  I remembered my aunt adding a luscious detail that, in retrospect, was highly inappropriate to share with her sixteen-year-old niece: “Of course, Mickey needed to get to the bathroom anyway, to take care of the burgeoning hard-on in his pants. Just the way he was, I s’pose. Rejection erection, we called it. But at least your mama redefined their relationship that night and he never touched her again. You keep that in mind, Janie, if any boys ever give you trouble.”

  I hadn’t been sure which part to keep in mind, but suffice it to say that my ass remained unbranded. After that story, I’d understood why Mickey never looked Jack or me in the eyes when we were children. I used to think it was regret over letting Mom close the diner alone, but it had to be shame through and through. At least, I hoped it was. Either way, I’d been under strict instructions as a child to never be alone with the guy.

  I was about to break all the rules.

  I knocked on his trailer door.

  A woman answered, an unlit cigarette in her hand. She looked like an actress who’d been freshly tousled for a spent-hooker scene in a Hollywood shot—parched hair pointing in six directions, great skin made sallow by off-color makeup, big eyes made tired by dark bags—but with no director or makeup artist around, I assumed the look was her own and that it was permanent. She introduced herself as Glassie, held the door open for me to enter, and made no effort to move the barrel-chested pit bull blocking my entry. The place was small and smelled like grease. Maybe the diner had permeated Mickey’s pores and become part of him.

  Glassie pointed behind her, but it wasn’t hard to find Mickey. He was lounged out in the space to my left, watching old reruns. Apparently, the same director who’d ordered Glassie to look worn-out and defeated must have ordered zombie for Mickey. Just grab a dead guy, prop him up, and paint some half eyes on ’im, the kind you see on a late-night fast-food worker who doesn’t give a damn if you want fries with that.

  Mickey turned his head, easy and calm, as if people came and went all day, paying him social calls.

  “Shit,” he said in a gravelly voice. “You look just like her, but not as pretty.”

  “Mickey, you dumb fuck,” Glassie said with less judgment than one might expect with that brand of sweet talk. “You don’t say that to a lady.”

  “Guess I shoulda said it to you, then.”

  Glassie frowned, then padded back to the kitchen in her faded blue slippers, lighting her cigarette on the way. It smelled minty and I wished she’d wave it around Mickey to mask his odor.

  I sat, without being invited, on the edge of a faded aqua ottoman and faced my repellent host directly. Last I’d seen him, about fourteen years ago, he’d been in his late forties, but he’d aged in dog years, putting on at least seven for every one of mine.

  His eyes stayed glued to the TV while I gave him the bare preliminaries. He finally muted the idiot box and looked at me. “So, Mickey,” I said, “tell me everything you remember from that night.”

  His eyes shifted to an even lower gear, and he grumbled before he spoke. “I don’t know. Who remembers a thing from that far back?”

  “You do.” I decided to treat him like a sideshow hypnotist’s mark. I’d seen some of the guys at the station do it with drunk witnesses. I kept my voice steady, the phrasing repetitive. “An employee you had the hots for was killed that night. You’ve thought back real hard to that night. Bet you could draw me a picture of the diner that night if you wanted to, with every customer in place, every employee in the kitchen, and every order on a plate.”

  He waved away my comments. “I was in the kitchen most of the time.”

  “But you came out some, didn’t you?”

  “Nope. Only went out to have a smoke after that Grady feller showed up. I liked smokin’ in the fresh air, but I saw that ever-complainin’ Abner Abel leanin’ against his truck smokin’, so I went back inside to avoid that preachin’ prick.”

  Interesting. “What else do you remember?”

  “Nothin’. Don’t remember nothin’ else ’bout that night.”

  I kept up my entrancing tone. “We remember trauma, Mickey, and maybe joy. The rest fades into a kaleidoscope of glossed-over garbage, but we remember the things that leave a scar.”

  “What the hell you talkin’ ’bout?”

  “The bad stuff gets vaulted in our brains so it can’t go away. But you know the combination to your vault, Mickey. Couldn’t forget it if you wanted to. And we both know that Bridget Perkins getting killed was bad stuff for you. It’s why you never looked Jack and me in the eye. It’s why you never spoke to our family. You feel guilty about something, don’t you, Mickey? Ashamed. Tell me about that night.”

  He almost leaned forward, but the demand on his flaccid abdominal muscles was too much. He settled for a quick lurch, followed by his usual recline. “You know how much I drunk between that night and today? You got any idea?”

  Yep. A shitload.

  “Talk to the poor girl, Mickey,” said Glassie, appearing at the entryway, her cigarette now half its original length. “It ain’t like you got a reputation to protect. Tell her how you was watchin’ her mother that night. Tell her.”

  Watching? Where? When? I held my que
stions—and my horror—while Mickey went mute and shaky, seeming to undergo a set of DTs despite smelling like whiskey and clutching an open beer. Was he reliving the evening? Was he on tape delay? After half a minute of crushing silence, he wheeled—as much as a seated drunk can wheel—on his woman. “Shut yer trap, Glassie. ’Tain’t none of your business nohow.” He sucked on his beer. “Why don’t you take that goddamn dog out for a walk ’fore he pisses the floor again?”

  Glassie, unfazed by Mickey’s bravado, shook her head and grabbed the leash.

  I stayed focused on my mission. “When were you watching Bridget, Mickey? Were you watching her that night?”

  He chucked his beer can across the room and looked like a sullen child.

  “I know you liked to watch her, Mickey. And the police have uncovered new witnesses who are implicating you and putting you at the scene. It’ll be a lot easier if you talk to me now.”

  “What witnesses? Is it that damn Lucinda runnin’ her trap? She was always such a pain in my ass.”

  “I’m not at liberty to say, but I can tell you the sooner you come clean, the better. Come on, Mickey, you remember. When were you watching Bridget?”

  His hand squeezed at empty air, craving his tin can back.

  “After,” he mumbled, his head sinking, rolling around his chest.

  “After her shift?”

  “After my shift. Wasn’t the first time, neither. Sum’n ’bout her bein’ pregnant. I dunno. Women give off different hormones when they’re knocked up. She was so full, and sum’n ’bout the way she smelled, and her face was . . . I dunno. How’s a man s’posed to control himself, that’s all I’m sayin’.”

  If my fetal presence in my mother’s body had made her more attractive to this letch, I really needed to paste his picture above the medicine cabinet of every woman in the country, with the caption Don’t Forget Your Birth Control. Then again, maybe it hadn’t been my mother’s pheromones, but rather the scent of a bathed woman, that had done it for him. Hard to imagine he’d been around many.

  “Did you control yourself, Mickey? What did you do? Did you threaten her? Did you follow her?”

  He jerked away as if I’d grabbed him. “What are you talkin’ ’bout? I ain’t never said that to no one.”

  “Just because you didn’t say it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

  “Don’t go tryin’ to confuse me with fancy talk. I been interrogated for all sorts of misdemeanors, mostly drunk, and they ain’t been able to trip me up yet.”

  Mostly?

  “When did you watch Bridget, Mickey?”

  He stood up with tremendous effort, shoved at the air like it was biting him, and turned his back to me. “I was in the parkin’ lot, that’s all. I done it plenty o’ times. Didn’t hurt no one.”

  “You liked to watch her when she was alone in the diner, on the nights she was closing?”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  Normal people. Nonperverts.

  “Didn’t she see your car? Didn’t she know you were out there?”

  A tight fear gripped my chest. Fear for my young mother, laboring in the spotlight, unaware of her starring role in the porno in Mickey’s head.

  “How stupid you think I am? I rode my bike. Wasn’t but a mile or so from my trailer.”

  He whirled then, suddenly angry at me for making him admit to something he was ashamed of. His close-set eyes became two enflamed slits. Combined with the red veins traversing his nose, they reminded me of a bloody sheet, stretched thin as a desperate man wrung it out, trying to hide the evidence. But Mickey couldn’t hide anything anymore. Any character he once possessed had been whittled down by alcohol, his moral fiber shredded into wispy filaments barely holding him together.

  I could see the moment when he changed his mind, when he decided to wallow around in his guilt and go for the shock factor, to make it my burden instead of his. A single spark lit his eyes.

  “Heh, this must be eatin’ you up ’cause you were there that night, weren’t you? I guess in a way, I was gettin’ my jollies off of you, too. And it was sweet. All I needed was my spyglass and a tree to lean on.” He held up his right hand, its palm remarkably clean, and shoved it toward my face. “And this, of course.”

  So Mickey was a voyeur, getting off in the parking lot with a pregnant waitress as his muse. Was that all he was, though?

  “You ever done it standing up?” He was on a roll now. Might as well get it all out. “It’s harder ’cause your legs get weak, and you gotta stay upright at that moment when all you wanna do is collapse and explode. I mean to tell you, shit. Ain’t never had it as good as when I was young. And your mother . . .”

  If he dropped his pants right here and started whacking off, my surprise meter would jump to zero. But since I had no desire to stand in for my mother in this particular role, I shut down all emotional attachment to the situation and tried to bring Mickey back to cold reality. Cold-shower reality. With a lie.

  “And then you followed my mother home and broke into her house. That’s what the police think, Mickey. Did you know that? They wanted to haul you downtown to talk to you, but I begged them to let me handle it first.”

  The police barely knew Mickey was alive—except when they were failing to befuddle him with their fancy talk—but I needed to find out if he knew anything about the third man, or, God forbid, was the third man.

  Mickey looked hurt, like my comment had blunted the erection struggling to form in his trousers. “How do they know I followed her home?”

  Holy shit. The shock I swallowed formed a lead ball in my stomach. Mickey really had followed her home? Why did I keep ending up alone with the unstablest people in town? I glanced around for support. Where was Glassie? How long did it take to walk a damn dog, for God’s sake? You let it pee, you bring it home.

  “Who told you?” he shouted. “No one ever knew I was there.”

  “The police told me. They have new photos that don’t look good for you,” I said, letting him infer what he wanted.

  “I knew it! I knew someone was takin’ pictures. What else could those flashes have been?”

  Inside, my stomach performed wild gymnastics, but I stayed calm, not wanting to halt the flow of information. Mickey turned oddly contemplative, his intellect perhaps stimulated for the first time since he’d had to decipher a thorny episode of The Simpsons.

  “Who was taking pictures?” I said, my own intellect on edge, along with every nerve in my body.

  “I dunno.” He shrugged, looking like he could transition into a nap with minimal effort.

  “Mickey, this is important. Who did you see taking pictures?”

  “I didn’t know who it was back then. I sure as hell ain’t gonna know now.”

  “Are you talking about Grady McLemore?”

  “No, the other guy.”

  My eyes went wide and I became as still inside as I’d ever been. Finally, an eyewitness to the mysterious third person—and it turned out to be this vermin?

  “Pretty sure I saw that Grady feller, though. Came in with a gun.” Mickey cackled, but it caught in his throat and turned into a wet cough. “Wasn’t long before that haughty bastard was down for the count.”

  “You saw another man at my mother’s house that night and you never told anyone?”

  “Right,” Mickey said, lacing the word with sarcasm. “Like I was gonna tell the police I was at Bridget Perkins’s house jerkin’ off in a tree the night she got shot. What are you, stupid? Yer mother sure as hell weren’t stupid. She kep’ secrets and stuff real good.”

  “Yes, I’m sure she wishes you gave her eulogy.”

  His eyes went to half-mast as he sat back down and reclined, the confession having lifted a burden from his wrecked soul. Meanwhile, his inexcusable silence had wreaked havoc with mine. It had kept Jack and me from having a father. It had kept
Grady in prison. It had allowed another man to go free. I could barely process the unfolding tidal wave of implications as I saw the pages of my life flipping backwards from this moment to my birth, each page with an alternate floating just out of reach in some unattainable abyss, containing a story that could have been written, a story that could now never be told or experienced. Even in a man like Mickey, the consequences of his inaction must have created a fetid hollow in his heart, one he’d been trying to fill with alcohol ever since. I couldn’t help but wish it had already drowned him. But my rage had to wait, at least until I got more information.

  The next sentence in my mouth tasted like bitter fruit. “You mentioned a tree at my mom’s house, but I thought you were . . . pleasuring yourself against a tree at the diner.”

  “I was, but then yer ma was gettin’ ready to leave, so I hightailed it to her house before she could get there. I was in good shape then. Wasn’t no big thing to bike a few miles. Hell, I had nothin’ to do and I’d done it once before, besides. Used that big tree in her backyard. Easy climbin’ and lots of places to . . . get comfortable.”

  I wanted to curl up and make myself so small that my brain couldn’t function, with all memories squeezed out and destroyed. Because no way could I process the image of Mickey Busker jerking off in my favorite magnolia, the one where I’d hidden from Jack, where I hosted make-believe parties with imaginary friends and magical fairies. When I envisioned how my mother’s old bedroom could clearly be seen from that tree, it was all I could do to keep from knocking Mickey unconscious and setting fire to his trailer.

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “By the time you biked to the house”—I couldn’t think of it as my house for the moment—“and climbed the tree to get a good look, Grady McLemore was already there?”

  “He was just gettin’ there. It was him, your mom, and some other guy I never did get a good look at. I couldn’t tell what all was goin’ on, and I was wonderin’ what in the hell Grady McLemore was doin’ there in the first place, when all of a sudden he crashed to the floor. Looked like that other feller bashed him in the head or sum’n. Then a gunshot went off and that’s when I started scramblin’ down those branches ’bout as fast as a hunted squirrel. Right after, some headlights shot into the backyard and I knew I had to hightail it outta there, and just as I’m ready to jump to the ground, that’s when I seen them flashes go off.”