Smiley

by Ezell, Michael

  Squeaky brakes outside.

  LaSalle killed the lights and pushed the curtain open a millimeter. A police unit at the light up the street. Maybe the chief had his boys watching him? He didn’t really seem like that kinda dude. When the patrol car pulled away, LaSalle relaxed and put on his long coat without turning on the lights.

  In his rented Volvo, the traction control made the winding highway up to the rest stop an easy drive. A yellow Mack with no trailer and a Peterbilt hauling lumber were the only two trucks in the parking lot. Both had their heaters running, but no one up front. They were probably sleeping, and this deep in redneck country, no way was he poking his head in somebody’s truck window this time of night.

  He knew that before he came out. He didn’t drive up here to drop off fliers. He stood there in the dark and smelled the pine on the cold mountain air. Deep woods loomed dark and close behind the brick building housing the restrooms. Through the trees, the moonlight glistened on an open field maybe half a mile down the slope.

  On that night back then, did the guy who did the cutting run down there? Have something waiting? Four-wheel drive maybe?

  The clip-clop of high heels to his left— A skinny girl wobbled out of the ladies room on four inch Walmart specials. She pulled up short for a second when she saw LaSalle. Her eyes darted toward the Mack truck.

  “Hello,” LaSalle said.

  “Um, yeah. I’m kinda already...” Again, she looked at the Mack.

  “That’s not what I’m about, girl. I’m just looking for someone who went missing.”

  She took a polite look at a flier, but her eyes skimmed right over the face. Nothing.

  “Nope. I never seen her. That’s so sad. Sorry, mister.” She took another look at the Mack truck. Now LaSalle saw a dim outline, the pale moon of a face behind the window.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “Thanks for taking a look. You, uh, you got somewhere to get warm, right?”

  “Oh yeah. I got a road daddy. He’s takin’ me all the way to Florida.”

  “Is that right? No money, just a ride?”

  “Well, you know, he takes care of me and everything.”

  “Uh huh.”

  She shivered so bad her teeth clicked. Her bare legs stuck out of a man’s goose-down coat, and LaSalle figured she didn’t have much on underneath. He pulled a folded Benjamin from his pocket and extended it between two fingers.

  “Take this. And keep it, you hear?”

  “Uh. Wow, thanks.” She made the money disappear.

  “Now get your skinny ass out of the cold.”

  He turned back toward his car. Time to get his not-so-skinny ass out of the cold.

  “Hey, Mister.” She stopped halfway back to the truck. “I really am sorry about that poor girl. Have you shown her picture around the truck stop?”

  “Yeah. Heard from a trucker who saw her before, but it was over a year ago.”

  “Oh, too bad.” She thought for a second. “Did you see an old guy down there, like a forest ranger or something?”

  “A forest ranger? No, I don’t remember that.”

  “He might know her. He eats at the truck stop sometimes and he’s always staring at us. Never tries to hook up a party or anything, kind of creepy if you ask me. But if anybody knows who’s around, it’ll probably be him.”

  “Thank you, young lady. Where are you from?”

  “Lawton, Oklahoma.”

  “You ever tried to go back home?”

  “Wouldn’t work out. Too many issues,” she said.

  “Yeah... I hear you.”

  Sitting in his warm car, watching her climb back into the truck’s cab, LaSalle imagined another cold night, Britney Santini climbing into a truck. Or out of one? And then she vanished like a magician’s assistant who never came out of the magic cabinet again.

  ***

  Smiley threw another hunk of wood on the fire. One thing Papa did right was build this big old fireplace. Kept the whole front half of the house warm when a body put in enough work to stoke it right. A scratchy old recording played on his mother’s antique reel-to-reel. Supposedly a bootleg of Hank Williams singing in a honky tonk, somewhere. Could’ve been anybody, sure, but the mournful soul who slurred out the lyrics to “Hey, Good Lookin” spoke to Smiley’s heart.

  The fire popped and flared up and Smiley wondered if the thing under the barn appreciated the space heater he left on down there.

  He pushed the thought away and set about making Angela’s bed. He tucked a down comforter into the couch cushions and threw another one over the top, tucking the edges in to make a nice warm cocoon.

  “Smiley, I’m done.” Angela came into the room in her pajamas, her long blonde hair hanging wet around her shoulders. “I let the water out and everything.”

  “Just in time. Your bed’s ready. Should we get you a snack before nighty-nite?”

  “Nah, I brushed my teeth already and things taste funny after toothpaste is in your mouth,” Angela said.

  “I’d have to agree with that, darlin’.”

  “Will you brush the knots out of my hair?”

  She handed him a red sparkly brush, the kind that probably came with a matching barrette and a little tube of lip-gloss.

  “Yeah, turn around here. If I can curry a horse, I’m sure I can get some tangles out of a girl’s hair.”

  Angela giggled and whinnied like a horse. Smiley laughed out loud. It sounded odd bouncing off the hardwood floors. Not much laughing went on around this place when Angela wasn’t here. He brushed the hair away from her neck and froze. He could see down the back of her loose pajama top as far as her delicate shoulder blades. And the long, straight-edged bruise running diagonally between them.

  If Angela had been facing him, she would have wondered where Smiley went. A dead mask dropped into place, the warm smile banished like a criminal.

  The smell of the barn is hot in his nose, skinny seven-year-old wrists burning where the rope holds him to the whipping post, swish-crack swish-crack of the leather strap.

  — Please, Papa, stop. I’ll be good.

  — Shut up, you son of a whore, you sorry little shit. You shut your mouth and take what’s due to you!

  Swish-crack swish-crack.

  “Smiley?”

  He’d stopped brushing. He snapped back to the present and drew the brush through her hair. Gentle, tugging the knots free without pain.

  “Yes, darlin’?” he said.

  “You had a funny face. You okay?”

  “Sweetheart, ol’ Smiley’s just fine. Right as rain. You sure you don’t want a little ice cream before bed? You could rinse the toothpaste outta there with root beer.”

  She gave him a conspirator’s smile that melted his heart.

  “Okay. Don’t tell Momma.”

  “I won’t,” Smiley said.

  Later, when Angela settled into the deep breathing of sound sleep, Smiley left the baby monitor in the living room and went out to the barn.

  Once inside, he locked the doors behind him and walked around the stack of hay bales near the back wall. He pushed away a bale on the floor, deciding he’d better come up with another way to hide the trapdoor soon, before he got too old to move bales on his own.

  He found the familiar knot in a floor plank and stuck his index finger in the hole. His fingertip found an eyebolt and pulled it gently. The trap door sighed open on hydraulic hinges he ordered from an online auto parts warehouse. Usually, these went on the fancy trunk lids of upper end cars.

  He went down to the latest girl. Angela’s bruise burned in his mind like a mental road sign. Danger Ahead.

  That son of a bitch boyfriend of Misty’s. Smiley didn’t have to ask. He’d known Misty since she was smaller than Angela is now. Always a gentle, caring girl, Misty would never lay a hand on Angela. Bradley, on the other hand, had all the signs of a classic little shit. Put more money up his nose than he ever put into Misty’s pocket for groceries, rent, all the things a man should be taking care of.<
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  Smiley’s dentures ground together so hard he feared he’d pop them out of his mouth. He had to release some of this rage or he wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight. He’d just lie there with Bradley’s long rat face in his mind like the burning bush of old, telling him to do horrible things.

  The blackthorn cane felt heavy in his hand, good and smooth. He beat on the girl for five minutes before the tremors got the better of him. Though he took good care of himself, his old heart still fluttered in his chest like a bird with a broken wing.

  He sat in the antique dentist’s chair he modified to hold his trophies still while they were alive. This trophy lay there on the floor, flat eyes staring at him through dirty strands of hair. The beating had taken the edge off, but it wasn’t the same when they were dead.

  Nope. Just not the same.

  He had to try to maintain discipline, though. The last few years, it seemed his will had become weaker. It grew harder and harder to wait in between. He’d already heard about a colored fella in town asking around, looking for a missing girl. Men had come through before. Private investigators looking for girls no one around here would ever miss. They all left eventually. Smiley could wait this one out, too.

  5

  Garrett wore a charcoal gray suit to the funeral. The same one he wore to Michelle’s funeral, and his Dad’s funeral.

  Since Tom had served in the Marines before becoming a police officer, an honor guard from the local Reserve station performed the twenty-one-gun salute. Garrett closed his eyes through the rolling crackle of rifle fire. The sound carried across the Artemis cemetery, echoing off headstones of other soldiers and Marines, some with dates all the way back to the 1880s. Country boys had a way of ending up in military graves.

  Afterward, the Marine color guard folded the American flag draped over Tom’s coffin and brought it to Garrett.

  Though he stood with his remaining officers and Shirley, he felt apart from everyone here. Tom’s wife, Junie Poston, sat motionless through the whole thing, refusing to look up when Garrett offered her the folded flag at the end. Tom’s mother took it, her lips tight, her eyes holding an accusation.

  He’d heard the rumors already. Some people were saying he shouldn’t have gone out there, shouldn’t have been on Robert Lee’s property with something so flimsy. Then the whole thing never would have happened.

  The fresh deer carcass investigators found in the barn didn’t really seem to matter. Folks around here didn’t cotton to law enforcement intruding on someone’s private property.

  There were some who thought of Garrett as a big-shot LAPD cop, back from Los Angeles looking for action in a small town that had none. His reputation preceded him when he came back for his Dad’s funeral. Lamar Evans had bragged to everyone about his son Garrett being on a special robbery team, how his boy “won” five deadly shootouts with dangerous felons.

  If only these people understood how much Garrett wanted to leave that behind, how much he dreaded the thought of having to draw down on yet another human being. So he bore the sidelong glances, the stopped conversations when he walked by, and got the hell out of there as soon as the casket sank into the ground.

  Without thinking about it, he drove to Tracy’s house. Out on the western side of town, close to the highway, the Ellsworth place had once been a small dairy farm. The accidental fifth of five kids, fifteen years younger than her closest sibling, Tracy had been the only one who stayed in Artemis. She’d inherited the place by default.

  He didn’t bother checking the house. With the light bouncing off the snow like this, Garrett knew where she’d be. He parked between the house and the barn and went on foot.

  She stood under a special overhang she installed behind the barn to act as her studio. It kept the snow or rain off her while she worked, but allowed her to see the woods and open fields.

  To Garrett, Tracy felt like the only unspoiled thing about this place. After coming back from LA, everything else seemed old. Or small.

  He stood there watching her paint. It gave him a calm center, still waters where he could float and do nothing. No worries, no guilt, no feelings of panic. Just Tracy. Painting. With her wild red hair spilling over her jacket, squinting at her canvas and chewing on the end of her brush. All the brushes beside her palette bore tiny tooth marks on the end, like the brushes of an artistic mouse.

  She would have heard the Mustang pull in, so she knew he was there. She turned with a smile and came to him smelling of oil pants and turpentine.

  “I thought maybe you forgot the way here,” Tracy said.

  “No, I couldn’t do that—” His voice broke and she hugged him. Not like a lover. Like a friend who knew how desperately we all needed to be held now and then.

  In fact, they weren’t lovers, and never had been. They’d somehow managed the delicate balance that lets a man and woman be friends as long as they had.

  (He’d been with one woman since Michelle died and it was so disastrous he hadn’t done it since. He cried after. Not silent bitter tears on his pillow, but braying sobs she couldn’t ignore.)

  “I’m so sorry about Tom,” Tracy said. “You guys were just doing your jobs.”

  She stepped back and waved at her easel. “What do you think?”

  The painting featured the snow-laden woods across the field from them. Though it was only some skinny birches, a few pines, and snow, the muted light she chose made the whole thing haunting. Between teaching Art classes at the community college two towns over and selling her paintings online, she managed to make a living at it.

  “It’s pretty good,” he said.

  “Pretty good?”

  “I mean, it’s nothing like the giant penis you painted for Mrs. Simms.”

  She laughed and punched him in the arm. “That was a turkey with a long neck, damn it. And thank you for comparing my recent work to fourth grade Art class.”

  Her smile worked like a poultice on his soul, drawing out all the poisonous shit he’d stored up. She invited him to stay for lunch and he helped her pack up her canvas, easel, and paints and put them away in the barn.

  “You won’t believe what I thought about yesterday,” she said over red beans and cornbread in her warm kitchen.

  “That time Lenny Brewster snapped your bra and all the toilet paper poked out the front?” Garrett said.

  “I try to never think of that, so thank you. No, I saw Greg Sewell down at the grocery store—“

  “Oh no.”

  “Oh sure, you can bring up my bra-stuffing tragedy, an event which scarred me for life, but I can’t bring up Greg and Lucy?”

  She giggled at the look on his face, her laugh light and quick, flashing blue eyes catching and reflecting her mirth in a mischievous way that made his breath catch.

  “Your old man was soooo mad at you,” she said.

  “Yeah, I don’t even think it was him being the police chief, and all that. Later, when everything settled down and we were all alone, he said, ‘Son, there’s no woman ever worth pickin’ a fight over. If she’s gonna go sweet on another guy, kickin’ his ass won’t change that.’”

  “Unless you punch him out in Typing class, right?” she said.

  “Shut up.”

  They ate in silence for a while. Sometimes when he came by, they hardly talked at all. He’d watch her paint, or they’d walk around her wooded lot while she took reference photos. It was good between them, and he didn’t want to fuck it up. Relationships were tricky enough in a small town without one half of the equation being stuffed full of emotional dynamite. (The volatile half being him, of course.)

  She wrangled all the leftovers while he rinsed the dishes and put them in the washer.

  “I heard there was some kind of private investigator in town,” Tracy said.

  “News do travel fast ‘round here.”

  “What else are folks going to talk about? The latest road kill Smiley scraped up?”

  “Did anyone describe him to you?” Garrett said.

&
nbsp; She gave him a look. “You know they did.”

  “He seems like a decent guy. Rough around the edges, for sure, but he’s been looking for this missing girl for two years. Dedicated to his job. Maybe I’ll bring him by for dinner if he sticks around much longer.”

  “My, my. Wouldn’t Nadine and the old gals down at Artemis First Baptist have a time with that? Two single men in the home of that liberal hussy. Just give me a call so I can go to the store first.”

  “How about if I bring the groceries?” Garrett said.

  “Sorry, sweets, but you have the palette of a fifth grader. We’d be knee deep in macaroni and cheese, chicken fingers, and bacon.”

  “And?”

  “Let me worry about the menu, Chief. You just bring a decent red.”

  They bundled up in their coats and she walked him to the Mustang. He hugged her again, still smelling the paint in her hair. She brought out the teenager in him and he almost swapped ends trying to spin the Mustang’s wheels for her.

  Embarrassing, but he did get the beautiful ring of her laughter to take home. In the coming days, he’d need it.

  ***

  Garrett wore his Chief’s uniform to the City Council meeting, even though he felt like a little boy playing dress-up. The closed session had been called by Samuel Redding, the senior member of the three member council. Samuel and Dorothy Martin were both in their seventies, but Samuel had been on the council longer.

  They were in the private chambers, with two rows of folding chairs shoe-horned before a long oak table with three microphones and padded swivel chairs behind it. The faux wood paneling on the wall had been installed when bellbottoms were the rage.

  The three remaining officers on the Artemis Police Department, Lyle Hampton, Dougie Armstead, and Whit Abercrombie, sat in the front row of the stuffy council chambers, all in formal long-sleeve uniforms. Lyle, the youngest of them, gave Garrett a sorrowful look. What was that for?

  He didn’t have to wait long to find out. Samuel gaveled the meeting to order, and Fonda Morrison, the only council member south of forty, examined a piece of paper before she spoke.