Collecting Cooper

by Paul Cleave

  I drive out toward Brighton where the houses are a little more run-down and where there are fewer people to care. This part of the suburb on the edge of the beach is in need of one half-decent tidal wave to clean it up. I come to a stop outside the address I looked up, it’s a small worn-down house that can’t have many more than a couple of rooms, the kind of place where you’re being screwed if the landlord is charging you anything more than two figures a week. The lights are on inside, which means I won’t be waking anybody, but when I knock nobody answers. I knock a few more times and give it another minute before walking around the house, looking in the windows.

  Jesse Cartman is sitting in the living room staring at a TV set that is switched off. He’s completely naked except for a photo album lying on his lap, and two cocktail umbrellas lying on his stomach. His eyes are wide open and unblinking. I tap on the window and he looks over at me. He stands up slowly and the album slides off and hits the floor and he comes to the window close enough for parts of his body to press against it. The cocktail umbrellas have stuck to the sweat and gotten tangled in the hairs on his belly.

  “Detective,” he says, the word coming out so slowly it’s like he’s speaking underwater.

  “I need to talk to you,” I say.

  “Detective,” he repeats, just as slowly.

  I make my way to the back door. It’s locked but doesn’t hold up to much of a kick. I figure the landlord won’t notice the busted doorjamb the same way he hasn’t noticed the building getting ready to fall over. The house smells of cat piss but I don’t see any cats. Cartman is still standing in the living room facing the window staring out at the overgrown garden.

  “Hey, Jesse,” I say, and he doesn’t turn around. “You forget to take your meds?”

  “My meds,” he says, still staring outside.

  “Where are they?”

  He doesn’t answer. The house is small enough to find the bathroom in about four seconds. The floor is tiled with mold growing in the grouting. The bathroom mirror is cracked and the glass is pitted. I open the cabinet and find a couple of containers of pills. I read the labels and have no idea what they are.

  Back in the living room he’s still facing the window. He’s so close to it there’s no room to see his reflection around him. “You need to take some of these,” I say.

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Come on, Jesse, it’ll help.”

  “I don’t want help. I just want to forget.”

  “I need your help, Jesse.”

  He doesn’t answer. I walk over to him and put my hand on his shoulder and he slams his head forward into the window. It doesn’t break and he bounces back. This is not the same man I spoke to earlier today. That man wanted to take his medication to get better. That man was reminded about things and this is the man who can’t remember them. I lead him back to his chair expecting him to resist but he doesn’t.

  “Listen, Jesse, it’s very important you listen to me.”

  “I’m still hungry,” he says. There is a bump forming on his forehead that he doesn’t seem concerned with. I shake out a couple of pills and try handing them to him but he won’t take them. He doesn’t even look at them or seem to know they’re there. I’m not even sure that he knows I’m here. There’s a large bite impression on the inside of his arm that no doubt lines up perfectly with this teeth. He’s hungrier than I thought.

  “I need you to tell me about the Twins.”

  “She was so beautiful,” he says. “So innocent. I just had to taste her. Had to. It wasn’t up to me, but it kept saying to do it, over and over at night when I was lying in bed he’d tell me and so I did, it was the only way to shut him up. He lived inside of me, this monster with no name.”

  I look at the photo album. He’s talking about his sister. The picture of them staring up at me is nothing like the last time I saw him and his sister together.

  “So much blood,” he says, “and I hate. .” He stops talking. Just in midsentence he stops and he closes his eyes and starts slowly rocking back and forth, just little movements at first, increasing into bigger ones until he tips out of the chair and sprawls on the floor facedown. I jump onto his back and pull his head up and open his mouth and jam a couple of pills in there and hold his mouth closed and pinch his nose shut and he doesn’t resist. He swallows the pills.

  I sit him back in his chair and he stares ahead like nothing happened.

  “The Twins,” I say. “Were they actual twins?”

  “She tasted sweet,” he says. “Like candy.”

  Somehow I don’t think she did. “Jesse, listen to me, think about Grover Hills.”

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  “No Grover Hills.”

  “There were two orderlies there.”

  “The Twins,” he says.

  “Were they brothers?”

  “They were twins.”

  “Do you know their names?”

  “Buttons knows.”

  “What?”

  “Buttons,” he says, and he stabs his finger into his forearm. “Buttons was there too.”

  “Buttons is a cat?”

  “Not a cat,” he says. “Buttons,” he adds, then holds his fingers up to his mouth and pretends he’s smoking a cigarette before stabbing it into his arm. A moment later he tilts his head back, closes his eyes, and falls asleep.

  chapter fifty

  Adrian can’t sleep.

  One reason is his leg. The bandage has gotten bloody because the wound beneath it keeps itching and he can’t stop scratching at it. He keeps digging his fingernails into the itch trying to find relief only it doesn’t work. Cooper’s mother told him he’d need to get stitches, but he had stitches all those years ago when he was badly beaten and pissed on and he didn’t like them then and can’t see any reason why that will have changed.

  Another reason he can’t sleep is he can’t switch off his mind. He never did find the glue, even though he is absolutely sure he took it from the pocket of his last pants and put it into the pocket of the ones he took from Cooper’s mum’s place, but the problem is the more he thinks about it, the less certain he becomes, the more his memory of the event starts to change. He can remember setting it on the bed with his old clothes when he emptied the pockets, but nothing after that.

  He thinks about Theodore Tate and how he could easily have lost his life tonight if Tate didn’t have a bandage around his gun hand. That’s what slowed Tate down, he’s sure of it. He thinks about the Twins, he thinks about the people he met at the halfway house, he thinks about his mother and he thinks about his other mother. He can’t stop thinking of people and it’s keeping him awake. He thinks about the look on Cooper’s mother’s face as he played the tape. He only had to play a few seconds of it before closing the door, knowing what would happen next, but she deserved it. She was a bad mother. Bad mothers deserved what they got.

  The bed isn’t comfortable. One of the Twins-he isn’t sure which one-slept on this bed, and that’s another picture he can’t get out of his head, a man who treated him so badly would come here at night and roll in these sheets, his skin flaking into the creases of the bed, into the folds of the pillowcase, and now it’s sticking to his own body, making him itch.

  In the end it all becomes too much for him. The window is open and the curtains are moving slightly on the breeze, brushing against the windowsills. He turns on the light. His pajama bottoms are soaked in sweat and there is blood on the right-hand side. He tugs them off. The bandage has gotten loose and saggy. It’s across his thigh, about equal distance between his knee and hip. He holds on to it as he walks outside so it doesn’t slip down his leg. He doesn’t know what the temperature is, but it’s still warm. He knows it’s after midnight but not by much. Much warmer than usual for this time of night he suspects-not that he’s normally outside at this time of night. Back at the Grove he was locked in his room, which was always hard if you needed to use the bathroom, because you had to wait. At the halfw
ay house the only reason you’d step out the doors after dark was if you wanted to commit a crime or be a victim of one.

  He lowers the bandage. He scratches at his leg. More blood and more pain and something yellow oozes out, but relief from the itch for those few seconds as his fingers scrape over it. He could try to get Cooper’s mother to help him again, but he’s pretty sure she isn’t going to want to do that no matter how hard he tries. Anyway, he’s angry at her for not believing him. Her son was the one covered in blood, he was the one who put the knife into that girl, and yet he looks like the good guy. It annoys him. He didn’t think Cooper would do that to him. They were meant to be friends, weren’t they?

  He wishes he could work on the wound himself. It needs to be cleaned, he knows that. It may get infected. Sometimes infected limbs have to be cut off. He knows that too.

  He can’t help himself. He begins crying at the thought. He turns and sobs into the pillow, for the moment not caring about the last person who laid on it, only thinking of a future with one leg, pacing the room and struggling to end on an even number when you have an odd amount of limbs to begin with. When the sobbing dies down, he limps to the bathroom and goes through the medicine cabinet. There’s a lot in here, but on closer look he sees dates with exp in front of them. They must be explanation dates; the dates explaining when the medication is no longer any good. Many of the things in here went bad a few years ago. He doesn’t know if bad medicine just means it won’t work, or won’t work as well, or make him even worse. There is an antiseptic cream that was good up until two months ago, surely that’s okay. The painkillers all went bad a few years ago. The bandages must stay good forever. And there’s some kind of medical padding that looks like it’ll help. Some sharp scissors for cutting things to fit. A safety pin for securing the bandage. He closes the cabinet and stares at the mirror. His face is flushed and there’s a slight rash starting around the edge of his hairline, which he hopes is from the heat and not from some infection climbing through his body. He doesn’t want to die. Not now when life is so good.

  He holds the back of his hand up to his forehead like he’s seen people do and his forehead feels warm. A fever? Or just the result of stress and a very, very hot day? He cups his hands under the tap and fills them with water and splashes his face. He immediately feels better, but without his fingers pinching the bandage on his leg tight it slides down to around his foot. His tears become lost in the water on his face. He wishes his mother was here. Either one.

  He turns on the shower. He steps inside and lets the water run over his leg. He can feel the infection being washed away from the surface, but at the same time he can feel it inching its way through his body. He doesn’t have to see it to know it’s there. He scrubs at the wound with a facecloth. The gash is about the length of his finger and about as deep and as wide, a long furrow that an inch to the left would have had the bullet missing completely and an inch to the right have had it buried deep into his leg, severing one of those thick veins in there that would cause him to bleed out. It’s not bleeding as much as earlier, even with all the scrubbing, but it is still bleeding. The shower feels good. He has the water temperature set so it’s cool but not too cold. He spends enough time in there for the pads of his fingers to wrinkle, then he climbs out and dries himself down. The itch has faded, but he still needs to do something with the wound.

  He doesn’t want to lose the leg.

  Doesn’t want to die.

  Can’t go to hospital.

  Doesn’t want to lie down in the same bed as one of the Twins because the infection would only become more infected.

  He goes outside and holds a clean medical pad over the wound, carrying Cooper’s manuscript with him. He sits on the porch. There’s a wooden swing chair that would fit two people, he rocks it slowly back and forth and it relaxes him. It’s too dark to read yet, and he can’t be bothered going back inside to turn on the porch light. The fields around him look pale blue from the moon. In four or five hours the sky will start to lighten. He’s never seen that happen before, and suddenly he is desperate to watch his first sunrise, liking the idea that one day he and Cooper may sit out here on the porch enjoying it together.

  chapter fifty-one

  I hit the same string of drag racers. They’re going just as slowly, flashing their lights and tooting their horns and I have to drive alongside them at an intersection that I can’t get through because they’ve blocked it. I get boxed in and flick on my sirens, but it only makes things worse because then they purposely keep me trapped. It takes me fifteen minutes to get past them. The police radio spits out more news, mainly that there are now over two thousand drag racers on the roads, so far six arrests have been made and six cars impounded, and one pedestrian run over and in the hospital with minor wounds. Drag racers are outnumbering the police, outnumbering all the gangs in the country, they’re an epidemic for which there is no solution.

  I park outside the halfway house wishing I was armed. There aren’t any gang members walking any dogs up the street so I take my chances and step out. It’s still at least seventy degrees and the armpits of my shirt are soaking wet.

  Buttons is sitting on the porch out front with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. It’s almost one-thirty. He’s still wearing the same fedora and shirt and looks the same amount of out-of-place as he did when he answered the door for me earlier today.

  “You’re up late,” I tell him.

  “I don’t sleep much. Never have. I knew you were going to be coming back,” he says. “Ritchie is upstairs in his bedroom, most likely fast asleep. He doesn’t know much, you know.”

  “I’m not here to talk to him,” I say.

  “Yeah? You after the Preacher? He’s inside somewhere.”

  I shake my head. “I’m here to talk to you. Jesse Cartman said you’d know about the Twins.”

  “Jesse Cartman said that now, did he?” he asks, then takes a long drink. “What else did he say?”

  “He called you Buttons,” I say, looking at the inside of his arm where all the cigarette burns are lined up in a row, each about the size and shape of a button. “What’s your name?” I ask him. “Your real name?”

  “Henry,” he says. “Henry Taub,” he says, and doesn’t offer me his hand.

  “You were at Grover Hills?”

  “For nearly thirty years, son,” he says.

  “Preacher didn’t mention it,” I tell him.

  “He wouldn’t have,” Henry says. “He’s good like that.”

  “So you know everything that went on out there.”

  He smiles meekly. “Almost. You want to know about the Twins, right?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I always knew somebody would want to know. What did Cart-man tell you, son?”

  “That they were letting people die down in the Scream Room.”

  “You believe that?”

  “No, but there are some bodies showing up.”

  “Hmm, is that so? So, what do you believe?”

  “I believe they were doing something down there.”

  “You’d be right to believe that, but foolish to believe much else of what Jesse Cartman tells you. The boy’s not right in the head,” he says, tapping the side of his hat. “None of them are.”

  “And you?”

  “We all believe what we’re saying, son, but there’s a big difference: I’m believing things the way they actually happened.”

  “Then fill me in.”

  He takes a long swallow of beer. “I s’pose I could,” he says, “but the way I see it, you’ve been paying everybody else for their side of things. Why should I be no different?”

  “Because you seem like a man with some pride,” I tell him, “and not somebody who’d hold back when what he tells me could save the life of a seventeen-year-old girl.”

  “That’s true,” he tells me, “but a man still needs to know where his next drink is coming from.”

  “I’ll fix you up wh
en this is over,” I tell him.

  “Is that you believing what you’re saying, or you saying the way it’s going to be?” he asks.

  “That’s the way it’s going to be. I promise.”

  He takes another sip and then stares at me hard for a good few seconds, taking my measure as I’m sure he’d say. “Sounds good enough to me,” he says, finishes his beer, and opens another. “Can I get you one?” I shake my head. “It started out innocently enough, you know,” he says. “Way back fifteen years, give or take a year or two. Young fella came along. Real cocky little shit. Not much more than twenty. Could have been twenty-five, but no older. We all knew he wasn’t crazy, just mean, and mean and crazy are two different things, only the courts didn’t see it. He used to brag about how he fooled them. Used to tell us how clever he really was, and how he was going to be free in a couple of months. Courts placed him with us because he killed a girl. Just killed her because he felt like it, he told us. A young pretty little girl not much more than ten. He was with us a week when that girl’s dad came along. I can still remember seeing him outside in the parking lot. He looked nervous, like he was summoning up the courage to ask a pretty big question. You ever seen a man like that? The pain of what he wants to ask is written all over his face. I took one look at him and knew what he wanted. Then he just chose somebody. Saw somebody in a white uniform and went up to him, and that person saw the same thing I did. Never knew what he said, not exactly, but I knew what he wanted. We got TV in there. Some of us knew what was going on out in the world, and I knew who he was. The orderly he spoke to was one of the Twins. Back then the Scream Room was only a punishment. Bad things happened down there, but not real bad. The dad, he offered them money. Told them he’d like some time alone with the guy that hurt his daughter. The Twins, they sold him that time. The guy returned that night after most of the staff and nurses had gone. I saw him pull into the parking lot through my window and an hour later I saw him pull away. That boy, we never saw him again.”