What does a man do when he stands on a highway waiting for a car or truck that never comes?
He stumbles back across the restaurant parking lot.
If only Randall Haussen had let himself out of the passenger door.
But his head lay against the dashboard, blood jagging through the vinyl. Yellow fluid pooling in his ear.
Again, I bent to vomit. Couldn’t.
So I dragged him from the seat and hoisted his body into the trash dumpster. I chucked his gun in after.
My hands – black with rain and blood and the dark night.
I wiped them on my shirt.
Realized what I’d done.
Stripped off the shirt and threw it into the dumpster.
Realized.
Always a step behind.
I climbed into the dumpster with the rats and the rancid Kung Pao chicken and Haussen’s body. I wiped down his gun with my shirt. I threw the shirt toward my car. I tumbled out and lay on the pavement, wishing the rain would wash me downriver.
Scared boy that I was.
Foolish boy, answering the door, picking up the phone, shooting a man in the head.
I’d killed a man.
Self-defense being only self-justification. Dead being dead.
I drove toward the Cardinal Motel but turned at Emerson and, after the railroad tracks, pulled into an open-air, self-service car wash. Open all night, but lights off except the business sign, which said, CAR WASH.
I put my pistol in the trunk, opened all four doors, and sprayed the inside of the car with the pressure hose. The water tore chunks from the vinyl, soaked the seats, ripped the last fabric threads from the inside roof. Flakes of paint and dirt floated in the footwells and cascaded from the car and into the car wash drain. The passenger window had cracked where Haussen’s head hit it. His hair and blood stuck to the fracture. I punched out the glass with the hose nozzle.
I wet vac’d the water out of the footwells and off the seats. I scrubbed the stains with my shirt, hosed the car again, and vacuumed again.
Sometime during the early hours, the rain weakened to a drizzle and then, as the first sunlight grayed the clouds, stopped entirely.
I dug in a garbage can for a plastic bag and stretched it over the punched-out window. I dug for another bag, wrapped the pistol in it, and stuck it under the front seat.
Then I drove to the motel, let myself into my room, and locked the door. I lay on the mattress and stared at the ceiling.
I’d killed a man. That was a fact, final and irreversible. Did that fact – that act – make my story of myself – as a man who would fight for himself with laws or a sharpened spoon but would never take another human life – a nasty fiction? I’d had a choice – to kill or be killed – and I had killed. Too easily, it seemed to me. Too automatically. With the instincts of a natural killer, the deadly reflexes that Higby said he saw in me.
What did that make me?
A fist knocked on my door. My heart pounded. Outside, my neighbor Jimmy talked to his girlfriend Susan, saying something about me. The fist knocked again, and Jimmy spoke. ‘You all right?’ After a while, they went away.
I peeled myself from the bed and climbed into the shower with my clothes on. Haussen’s blood and the filth from the Chopstick Charley’s parking lot ran from my shirt and pants and runneled into the drain. I stripped then and cranked the water to cold and stood until I shivered.
As I put on dry clothes, Jimmy and Susan came back with Bill Hopper. The fist knocked. The fist knocked again. I went to the door and listened to them.
Hopper’s pass key rattled in the lock.
I yanked the door open.
They stared at me.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Jimmy said. ‘We thought you were dead.’
‘I did,’ Susan said.
‘No,’ I managed to say. ‘Not me.’
‘A guy shot you last night,’ Jimmy said. ‘In the parking lot. I watched—’
‘Shot at,’ I said. ‘Missed.’ I asked what I had to ask. ‘Did you call nine-one-one?’
‘’Course not,’ he said.
‘But someone did,’ Hopper said. ‘The cops came. I had to let them check your room.’
Susan glanced at my car with its bagged-up window and steamed windshield. ‘What happened?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing happened.’ I tried to close the door.
‘You all right?’ Hopper asked. ‘You look like someone—’
‘I’m all right,’ I said. ‘Tired.’ I closed the door.
Sweating.
I couldn’t stop sweating. I lay on my bed. I paced from my door to the bathroom, and I couldn’t stop sweating.
Voices spoke to me.
Sounds spoke.
The trigger snapping, the gun shell exploding, Haussen crashing into the glass. The pleasure of it. Only a fool would deny it.
Be that kind of fool. No one saw the bullet boring into Haussen’s head. No one knows.
Jimmy and Susan know. Bill Hopper knows.
The cops came.
But only to the motel.
If no one saw and no one knows, it didn’t happen.
It happened. It’s in my sweat.
At seven thirty in the morning, I called Jane’s cell phone. It rang four times and bounced to voicemail. ‘Christ,’ I said to the recorder, hung up, and tried again. Again, it rang four times and bounced to voicemail. I hung up and tried Hank’s phone.
He picked up on the third ring. Still sleeping, mostly. My call, a waking nightmare.
I said, ‘Haussen came last night. I—’
‘Franky?’ – my words not yet penetrating.
‘Randall Haussen,’ I said.
‘What? What about him?’
‘He came to the motel last night. I—’
‘What the hell are—’
‘I did. I—’
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Jane and I spent most of last night filing emergency appeals for Thomas LaFlora. The courts will ignore them. The governor will. At four this afternoon, we’re driving to Raiford. We’ll stand with the others at the vigil. We’ll be there when the announcement comes out that LaFlora is dead.’
‘I—’
‘The last thing we need today is more of your bullshit.’ He hung up.
I lay on my bed and closed my eyes.
My mind raced. I thought I would never sleep again.
Then, as if a hammer smashed me, I slept.
I dreamed of the day my sideways-moving friend Stuart died in the exercise yard.
He’d gone back to the bench press for the first time since he returned from the medical center where the doctors wanted to cut off his diabetic leg. He’d sometimes done sets with three hundred pounds before he got sick, but now he did two-fifty and just five reps before he let out a chestful of steam, dropped the bar on the support, and laughed. ‘Hell,’ he said, and shoved himself up from the bench. He took two steps, swayed to the side, and crashed to the ground.
When I got to him, his eyes were already stone, and white froth came from his mouth. I thought he’d had a heart attack, and I yelled at the guards to get the nurse. They pointed their guns at me. They pointed them at Stuart on the ground. They pointed them at the other men in the yard. They told us to line up, backs against a wall, as if they were a firing squad.
Then they called the nurse. He ambled and shambled across the yard and stood looking at Stuart’s big body.
One of the men yelled, ‘He ain’t breathing.’
So the nurse ambled and shambled back to the medical center and got an oxygen tank. By the time he came back, ten minutes had passed. He fidgeted with the valve and the mask, and something was wrong with the mask, so he threw it on the ground and started back to the medical center to get a new one.
I stepped out from the wall and said, ‘Let me.’
The guards aimed their guns. The other men stared as if I’d yanked down my pants.
But the nurse spat on the ground and said, ‘You want
to put your lips on that motherfucker, have at it.’
I took off my shirt and wiped Stuart’s face. I gave him mouth-to-mouth.
After a minute, something rattled in his chest. His eyes got a kind of soft focus, and he looked at me – then up at the sky – with the gentlest expression I ever saw.
His eyes went white then, and his chest let out another load of steam. He died on the ground by the bench press. The nurse checked his pulse and found none. The guards ordered us back to our cells. I never saw Stuart again.
But in the dream, he turned his gentle eyes to me and said, ‘It’s all right. It’s all right because it’s the way it’s got to be. You beat yourself up and all you do is give yourself bruises and a black eye, and then the girls don’t love you. It’s all right. You man enough.’
‘Enough for what?’ I asked.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You cry all those tears for what? You making an ocean of your own now? What you going to do with that ocean except drown?’
‘I’m not crying,’ I said. ‘I wish I could cry.’
That afternoon, I skipped my appointment with Dr Patel.
That evening, I didn’t pick up Cynthia from the Cineplex.
That night, the executioners threaded a needle into a vein on Thomas LaFlora’s left leg, and, as Jane and Hank chanted and prayed outside the gates at Raiford, an innocent man died.
TWENTY-NINE
At seven the next morning, another fist – a little one – knocked on my door. Cynthia’s voice said, ‘Franky?’
I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling. Sweating.
She knocked again. ‘Franky?’
I thought, No one home.
‘Franky?’
I rolled over. Sweating.
She knocked and knocked. ‘Franky?’
No one.
‘If you don’t answer, I’m calling the cops.’
No.
‘Because I’ll know you’re dead. If you don’t answer.’
I got up, my vision draping and darkening from the sides.
When I opened the door, Cynthia said, ‘Christ, Franky. What the hell?’ She pushed past me into the room.
Then she smelled my hours of sweat, the fumes of my rot. ‘Jesus Christ!’ She came back to the door and fanned it open and shut. She slammed it, raised the blinds, and slid open the window.
She stared at me. ‘What the fuck, Franky?’ She looked at my bed, as if I’d hidden a dead rat, then shoved me into the bathroom. ‘You’re pathetic,’ she said. ‘Gross.’ She tugged my shirt to my chin, and I lifted my arms and let her take it. She undid my pants. She pushed me into the shower and turned it on. She squirted a snake of shampoo from my shoulder down my left leg. She slathered the shampoo over my body, said, ‘Turn,’ and slathered my back. ‘Stay,’ she said, and went into the bedroom, as if she couldn’t bear it.
When she came back, she saw the pile of clothes I’d worn when Haussen snatched me. She picked up the shirt, held it to her nose, and threw it into the trashcan. She picked up the underwear and threw it in on top of the shirt. She picked up the pants and put them in the sink.
She turned off the shower then, gave me my towel, and took the bathroom garbage outside to the bin.
She returned as I was threading my belt through a clean pair of jeans.
She said, ‘Now, what the fuck?’
I told her. All of it.
By the time I finished, she was sitting on the side of my sweated-up bed. ‘You had to do it,’ she said, her anger gone.
‘I know.’
‘But you’ve got to report it.’
‘No.’
‘Self-defense. They’ll—’
‘No!’ Sweating.
As if I’d broken something inside her, she said, ‘All right.’
‘Don’t you see?’ I said. ‘Eight years ago—’
‘I see,’ she said. ‘I understand.’
‘I can’t.’
‘OK.’
But she insisted that we drive past Chopstick Charley’s to see if the cops had found Haussen’s body. When I said I couldn’t do it, she said, ‘You’ve got to. Or else you won’t know what’s coming at you.’
So we stretched my bath towel over the damp seats in my car and went down past the Walmart to the restaurant. Tire trenches remained in the grass where I’d swerved from the highway, but a day of sunshine followed by a rainless night had dried the storm water. An old white Chrysler New Yorker was parked near the front door. There were no police cars or evidence vans, no crime scene tape.
‘Turn in,’ Cynthia said.
‘No—’
‘Turn.’
I turned on to the driveway.
‘We need to see him,’ she said.
‘No.’ But I drove along the side of the restaurant to the dumpster. As Cynthia got out, I said, ‘Why?’
She lifted the dumpster lid.
Bile rose in my throat. I got out. The sun, rising over the highway, already had heated the morning. I peered into the dumpster.
It was empty.
I stared as if I’d watched a magic trick.
Cynthia asked, ‘Are you sure?’
The look I gave her.
‘OK, OK,’ she said.
We went back to my car. As we pulled on to the highway, she said, ‘A garbage truck must’ve picked it up. Haussen’s probably in a dump by now.’
I just drove.
When we got to the stoplight at Emerson, she asked, ‘So, you’re OK?’
I would never be OK. I said, ‘You should go home.’
She gazed at me, concerned. ‘I think I’ll hang out with you this morning.’
The light turned.
She said, ‘Are you still going to talk to Eric Skooner?’
‘I don’t think so.’
I drove us back to the Cardinal Motel and pulled into the parking spot by my door.
She said, ‘I was scared when you said you were going to talk to him. I’m more scared now when you say you aren’t.’
I got out of the car and let myself into my room. She followed me in.
She said, ‘If he killed the Bronsons and the others, he’s also taken eight years of your life. He’s made you what you are. You wouldn’t even have known about Haussen except for the situation he put you in. He set your life up to make that happen. If you let him go, you’ll be giving yourself to him. Can you live with that?’
I said, ‘Your dad burned you. You’re scarred forever. You live with him. You live with it.’ I meant my words to anger her – to send her away so I could lock my door.
But she said, ‘Don’t talk to the judge for yourself. Do it for Steven and Duane Bronson. Do it for their mom. Do it for that runaway and the Mexican kid. Do it for Rick Melsyn and his roommate. Do it for Lynn Pritchard.’
I said nothing.
‘Do it for Thomas LaFlora,’ she said.
I glared at her.
She said, ‘Do it for me.’
I still said nothing.
‘Fuck it then,’ she said, and she went out the door into the sunlight.
I looked at the bed. I looked at the door. I wanted to close my eyes and sleep. I wanted to forget and keep forgetting. I wanted the fishhooks of blood that were tearing at my mind to disintegrate.
But Cynthia’s appearance at my door – and her words to me before she left – had sharpened and barbed those hooks. There was no escaping.
I went out the door and got into my car. Cynthia was crossing Philips Highway toward the bus stop when I pulled alongside her. I ripped away the plastic bag that covered the passenger window and said, ‘Get in.’
She kept walking.
I drove alongside her on the shoulder.
‘I’m going to talk to the judge,’ I said.
She kept walking.
‘I love you,’ I said.
She came to the window. ‘What’s that supposed to mean? What’s it supposed to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘You k
ick me out, and then you come after me. I don’t know what that even is.’
‘I don’t either.’
She shook her head.
‘Get in,’ I said. ‘Please.’
She did.
The county court would open at nine, which meant we should have time to catch Eric Skooner at home or as he left his house. I drove to Byron Road with Cynthia staring out of the broken window, pulled past Higby’s house, and turned through the gate on to the Skooners’ driveway.
Cynthia and I went to the front porch, and I rang the bell.
A minute passed before footsteps approached.
Andrew Skooner opened the door, wearing only a pair of pajama shorts. He looked as if we’d awakened him. The bruises where Higby punched him were gone. Only a red blemish remained over his upper lip from the stitches. But along with his old scars, he had new dime-sized welts on his chest, as if someone had poked him with a stick. ‘What do you want?’ he said.
‘I need to talk to your dad,’ I said.
‘You missed him,’ he said. ‘Early meeting.’
‘I’ll look for him at the courthouse,’ I said, and I turned to go.
But Cynthia eyed his welts and said, ‘What’s it like to live in a house like this?’ Her voice had the same combative boldness as when she teased the jewelry store salesman and vitamin kiosk clerk on our first afternoon together – but now there was an edge to it.
Andrew Skooner just stared at her.
She said, ‘What we really want to know is, what’s it like to live with your dad? My own dad is a challenge. Some people think he’s kind of a bastard. I could show you the scars. I don’t mean emotional or psychological. I mean the real thing. How about your dad? Would you say he’s a good man? You’ve got scars too.’
Andrew Skooner looked at me, as if I might rein her in or explain her behavior. When I didn’t, he said, ‘I know girls like you. They’re brash and talkative and in-your-face. But it’s just an act they put on to hide their insecurity.’ Then he closed the door.
‘He’s messed up,’ Cynthia said, and rang the doorbell again.
The door opened. ‘What?’
Cynthia said to me, ‘Your turn.’
I frowned at her but I did have a question. I said, ‘Last time we talked, you told me that, as hard as my life has been, you’ve had it harder. What did you mean by that?’
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