I had to get rid of the Buick.
I headed toward my house. I wanted to know who the hell Besse was with back there. I was sick of this shit. I should have just plowed into them with my car, if I was going to hit anybody.
Neither Duke’s truck or Besse’s car were at the house yet. I pulled straight into the garage. I scrambled out of the Buick, slamming the door behind me, and raced inside through the garage entrance. The door was unlocked, which was unusual if neither of us were home. The house was dark and empty, but something seemed unusual, or out of place. I stood there, trying to sort out what was wrong. I thought I heard someone in the bedroom.
But I couldn’t have, because just then Besse walked in through the living room door. We never used the living room door. “Why are you using the living room door?” I asked.
“I always use the living room door,” she snapped, without much patience.
“Where’s Duke?” I asked angrily. I knew that Duke wasn’t with her. But I didn’t know who she had been with.
She shook her head just barely but didn’t speak. She was visibly upset.
I looked past her to see if anyone was with her. No one was there. Besse just looked at me, disgusted, like I was insane.
“Where is he? Are you with someone?” I asked, looking at her, where she halted mid-pace, opposite the room from me. There were still no light in the apartment, except spilling in from the garage or the street through the open doors. “Hah?”
“What the hell were you doing earlier?” she asked. “I saw you hit that car! You didn’t even stop!”
“What were you doing?” I countered right back. “Whose truck were you getting out of?”
“You’re going to get arrested,” she said, moving at last. She stepped to the window and pulled the curtain aside to peer out. “Jesus Christ, we have to close that garage door.” She turned from the window and walked through the kitchen door to the garage. “That guy called the cops, you know. And you just left your car right in plain view from the street. You didn’t even close the garage door. Like they’re not going to look here for you.”
I followed her out to the garage. “Is anybody else here?” I insisted, as she reached for the garage door. “The door was unlocked.”
“You better not take this car back out,” she said, glaring at me from the other side of the Buick, its right front corner smashed in. She slammed the garage door down, concealing my car from the road. “The troopers are going to be looking for you on the roads.”
“Is anybody else here?” I asked again and then just turned away, walking back into the apartment and toward the bedroom to check for myself.
“No!” she shouted, charging from the garage back into the house after me. “You watched me walk in the apartment. I just got back from the hospital, for Christ’s sake.”
“What?” I asked, stopping and turning around.
“Dad’s in the emergency room. He’s not breathing right.” She stood at the edge of the kitchen, in the beginning of the hallway. The door to the garage was open behind her, the living room stretched off to her side and the streetlight shone through the door past her shoulder. The light around her from both of those places dimmed into the shadow of her face, but I could still see it infected with sadness.
“Who were you just with?” I asked. “When you saw me hit that car?”
She sighed, her face tightening in the dark as she forced herself to be patient. “That was Cole. He works for Dad. He drove me and Dad to the emergency room. He dropped me off at Dad’s truck so I could bring it home.”
“And then what?” I asked.
“And then what, asshole???” she shouted, repeating me, her forced patience snapping, the shadows darkening. “I’ve been worrying whether my father is alright or not. I came here to get things and then I’m going right back there.”
“I suppose Cole gave you plenty of comfort,” I snarled.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she screamed, wanting to lunge at me but grabbing the wall to hold herself back. “Why don’t you trust me?” she cried.
“Because I know you fucked someone,” I insisted, jabbing my finger through the air to point at her down the length of the hallway.
“This is paranoia,” she said, clutching the wall and pulling her hair. I was finally getting to her. “Where is this coming from?” she asked. “Hah?”
“I can smell you lying,” I growled, standing straight up.
“And what about you, then, hah?” she asked, stepping toward me. “Where have you been for days now? And coming home really late? And drinking? You’ve been drinking again and I can tell. You were supposed to stop drinking.”
“Tell me you never fucked somebody.”
“Who have you been seeing, hah?” she challenged, stepping toward me again. Anger was the only buffer between us. “Tell me you aren’t seeing someone.”
I wanted to grab her, shake the truth out of her lying mouth. “Tell me who the fuck it was!” I ordered, my voice hoarse but tight with anger.
“Tell me you aren’t seeing someone!” she screamed right back, her voice shrill and harsh with anger and hatred and violence. “Who’s Elle? Hah? Tell me who Elle is.”
“Elle is Digger’s wife,” I lied. “I work with Digger.”
“I know who Digger is,” she said, her anger now sarcastic. “And his wife’s not Elle. Her name is Stell. I spoke with her once because she called here.” She paused for dramatic effect. “You left work early and were supposed to drop Digger’s check off. She was waiting for you. But you know what?” she asked, not expecting an answer. “You didn’t show up here or there for a long time.”
“I was doing Van a favor,” I told her.
“Bullshit,” she said. “I found a piece of paper with Elle’s name on it and that bar, Opey’s.” She breathed hard to relax, but that didn’t lessen her anger. “So don’t give me this shit, you’re the one fucking around here.” She nodded her head fiercely, getting in my face. “Is that why you’re paranoid?” she asked, pounding a fist onto my chest. “Hah? Is that why? Did you fuck someone?”
“No, I didn’t fuck anyone,” I barked, grabbing her hand and yanking it away to block her from striking me again. “I got fucked by you is all.”
“What?!” she roared, stepping back and twisting her arm free from my grasp, banging it against the wall.
“You heard me,” I told her. “Now tell me you aren’t fucking somebody.”
Her face recoiled in horror and rage. She hated me. And that’s what I wanted. To make her tell the truth, to make her not care if she hurt me. “Yeah, I fucked someone,” she wailed. “I fucked Logan. I fucked your best friend.”
I rocked back onto my heels, away from her as a stunned silence resounded between us now that she admitted it. I breathed a deep, important breath. The air was odorless. I pulled my breath back in but I couldn’t pull the blood surging through my veins back in. “I know,” I said, looking into her face, all shadows disappearing.
“What?” she asked. Now she was surprised. “What do you mean, you know?”
“I was here. I left work early that day, too.”
I had been in the cleaning closet at the factory, with the door closed. I had carefully unscrewed the cap in every single cleaner in there, and shoved my nose into the opening of each one and closed my lips on the ridges for the twist caps and breathed and breathed, inhaling the cleansing fluids, wishing they could purge me of my thirst and my anger at Besse and my insecurity over her and Logan, and all the trouble since the car accident and the electrocution last fall. Van found me eventually, and practically beat me back into consciousness, frightened and pissed off and confused.
Van sent me home halfway through the shift after that. I saw Logan’s bike in my driveway, and found him walking out of the garage as I walked in. I just looked at him, wondering what he was doing here while I was at work. This was well after Emily had moved out. We stared into each other’s eyes, and I saw he was scared of me. For
the first time in our lives. I wasn’t supposed to know he was here. I wasn’t supposed to catch him; half an hour earlier I’d have caught the sons of bitches fucking and I knew it right away. I saw it in his face in a second.
Besse trembled quietly in the darkness of the hallway, just inches from me now. I watched her panic. She couldn’t talk. All this time, she had no idea I knew.
“I met him in the driveway as he was leaving,” I explained to her.
Logan and I had frozen for a moment, caught in each other’s gaze. I made sense of it all right away, without words. I understood everything he wouldn’t tell me. He watched me realize. We hadn’t hardly seen each other since the hunting trip where Radar died, but I saw something even that day in Besse’s concern for Logan. I knew now that it wasn’t coincidence our paths hadn’t crossed since then. He was at my apartment when I wasn’t there. There was one more second of silence. Until he said, simply, “It wasn’t my idea.”
Besse gulped but couldn’t stop shaking, though everything else about her changed, as anger dissipated into horror. “It was the day he died,” she managed to whisper, as though it was reason to forgive her.
“I know,” I said. “I was there, too.”
There could be no forgiveness.
Logan had brushed past me after that, like I didn’t exist. He climbed on his bike and rode off. Seconds later I roared after him in the Buick, pushing it to accelerate faster. He raced out toward the flats of Route 68, past Old Plant Road, and I chased him relentlessly. My eyes fixated on his rearview mirrors, where he couldn’t seem to look away from me, and couldn’t seem to drive any faster than me. I never looked away, just stared into the mirror, into his eyes. He panicked and tried to speed up but my rage worked like a magnet. I had the Buick’s gas pedal pushed to the floor and the orange needle passed the unconquerable 80 line for the first time in probably a decade, when my bumper finally made contact with his back tire.
Besse stared at me in horror and comprehension. “You killed him,” she said, part question, part realization. “Didn’t you?” she asked, sounding hysterical. “I know you did,” she said, nodding with certainty, looking at my calm and expressionless face. “Look at you,” she gasped. “You did it.”
If it wasn’t his idea, wasn’t something he wanted to do, why did he do it? Why did he betray me? Why did Besse?
“You’re evil,” she said, backing toward the living room, through the room toward the open door.
I followed her.
“You’re crazy,” she said, reaching behind her for the door and the doorframe, so she didn’t have to take her eyes off of me.
I stopped at the edge of the living room. I had known this anger in me before.
“I’m getting out of here,” she said, backing slowly out the door, never looking away from me.
I watched her go from the end of the hallway. Her car started in the driveway. I heard the tires pull cautiously into the road. Still, I did not move. I stared at the open door. Her shadow walked repeatedly out of it afterwards, backwards, looking at me in shock and fright.
44.
I was aware of the sounds of fucking first.
When Besse’s shadow finally relaxed into the greater darkness outside the door, I closed it. I turned back to the kitchen and it seemed way too near to me. The smallness of my own living room struck me. I could cross it in mere steps – five from one wall to the opposite. I could stand in the kitchen within eight steps from the door and reach the back bedroom in less than thirteen. I could cross the bedroom within four steps. That was the farthest point away from the door in my home. Less than thirty feet. How could anybody keep secrets in a place this small?
I thought I would have known if someone was that close to me, if someone else was in the apartment.
I took those meager steps from my door into my kitchen. I stopped at one of the tall cupboards above the counter that Besse could never reach the top of. From behind the fruit roll-ups, I pulled out a bottle of beautiful Old Crow Kentucky Straight Cheap Ass Bourbon Whiskey, glorious and only half full. It was a risky hiding spot, but I gambled that Besse wouldn’t search for it there, knew it was out of her reach and sight, and that cupboard held the fondue maker and the vegetable blender and all of the junk we’d never use but couldn’t part with either. Except for one carefully hidden bottle of Old Crow. That got used. I never could stand Utica Club. I spun the cap off the whiskey and watched it bounce onto and across the kitchen tiles.
With only a short sigh to mark the occasion, I slammed a long draw straight from the bottle. But no matter how full it was, it was not full enough for me, and very quickly, it wasn’t full at all. I pulled my keys and wallet out of my front pocket and threw them into the change bowl on the counter. Pennies flew out over the edge and I noticed a bullet sitting loose on top of a few nickels and dimes, resting quietly next to a quarter, the only quarter in the whole damned change bowl.
I picked the bullet out from beneath the keys. Besse had cleaned the living room recently, I suspected, and found the bullet I threw down the hallway the night I came home and ended up wrestling with Duke on the front lawn, the day she pointed the pistol at me. I tossed it into the air. I closed my fingers around it when it landed in my palm.
“Oh nice,” a voice said from upstairs. The sound was muffled but still quite understandable, even if I couldn’t tell whether it was Geechie or Beulah.
I threw the bullet up in the air again. I watched it slowly turn over once, and then just a little more, before falling harmlessly back into my palm. The door to the garage was still opened. I kicked it closed right from where I stood. Tiny fucking kitchen.
“Right there,” she said above me. “Oh God, nice.”
I tossed the bullet again. My eyes, adjusting to the dark, followed its slowing ascent against gravity to the peak of its climb.
That’s when I heard someone in the hallway. I didn’t see the bullet hit my palm but I felt it land there, and closed my fingers around it again. I stepped in front of Elle, as she darted through the kitchen toward the garage door, surprising her. She thought I had left when the door had slammed.
“Hey,” she said, her voice weak and not loud at all.
I blocked her exit with my arm, and she stood barely an inch from it. I could feel her shaking.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, trying to sound calm, unconcerned even, glad to see her. But the words barely came out.
“Oh Jesus, please do it now,” Geechie or Beulah said from upstairs, the voice resounding even louder through the thick tension in the room.
“I need to talk to you,” Elle said. She didn’t move a muscle, except to tremble. “I came here to find you, the door was open. I was leaving but I heard someone coming and I hid. I was afraid it was your girlfriend.”
“Need to talk to me?” I asked, suspicious.
“Jesus … God … there …”
“I shouldn’t have given you the combination,” she explained quickly.
At this point, there was a long list of things that shouldn’t have happened, as far as I was concerned, and her giving me the combination was a pretty minor one to me right now.
“You’ll get in trouble,” she said, her eyes fixed on me. I felt the fear emanating from her down the length of my arm. One of her feet was barely resting on the ground.
“How do you know where I live?” I asked.
“From work,” she said. “And also, you wrote it into my appointment book. When you took it.”
“Oh god, no, no, not yet, don’t, wait, there …”
“Why would you show up here now, though?” I asked. “You’ll only get yourself in trouble. The police could be looking for me right now.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I shouldn’t have helped you. You shouldn’t have let me. But I liked you; I thought it was sweet that you had followed me.” She tried to relax, tried to sound friendly and cute
“You thought it was sweet that I followed you?”
“Hhh
hh … there … hh …now you … hhh …”
“I don’t know, you seemed harmless, kind of shy.”
“Shy?” I asked her.
“There … oh … see that … it goes both ways …”
“Are these people always this loud?” she asked suddenly, looking up at the ceiling, her voice emerging finally, managing a nervous chuckle, trying to distract me.
I laughed. I doubt it sounded anything but sinister, though. “I can’t figure out which of my neighbors makes that noise. There’s two women living up there,” I told her. “One’s a screamer.”
“It must drive you nuts,” she said, working to defuse the situation.
“I’d love to find out which one it is,” I confessed, but I did not relax. My arm still blocked her from getting to the garage door, though she could dart for the living room door still, I realized She didn’t dare to move, though, and we listened uncomfortably to the panting and the heaving and the cursing grow louder.
But then there was silence. Elle didn’t know how to respond. We’d run out of conversation, or out of small talk at least. I watched her inhale rapidly.
“Did you really kill your friend?” she asked, finally, realizing, perhaps, that the game was up.
Obviously, I wasn’t going to have brought that up. She had heard. She was hiding in the little bedroom the whole time. It was a small apartment.
Seeing Crows Page 16