Molly, on the other hand, was pure PG.
Not only had Jill and Eddie seen Dead Jennifer before, they had seen her the night she disappeared, walking down Highway 3, the road that led out of Ruddick proper, through the industrial park, toward the Framer Compound—sometime around twelve, she thought. Apparently they were coming back from seeing old work friends in Pittsburgh: Eddie Morrow was a former program component designer—which meant he got paid to jerk off to internet porn, or so I assumed. Jill had taken a job as a high school administrator in Ruddick, which was why they had moved.
She became progressively more anxious the longer we talked, especially after I told her that she needed to talk to the Chief. The time had come to go.
“Whatdid you do after?” I asked her on a whim as Molly and I retreated from her foyer.
“My husband dropped me off. ”
“Ah, where did he go? ”
A momentary hesitation, pretty much inexplicable when you considered how forthcoming Jill had been otherwise.
“He’s at a conference in Pitt. Software design thing. ”
“No, I mean after he dropped you off.”
Blank look.
“To grab some cigarettes from the Kwik-Pik.” A nervous shrug. “Smoker... You know. ”
I could tell I had pushed too far with my questions. The last thing you want to do, I’ve learned, is ask people questions they themselves have buried. No one likes the living dead. Wives especially. There’s a reason they always decide to go to bed when the zombie movie starts.
“Sorry,” I said. “I can be a nosy prick sometimes. ”
Then I was back in my room, blinking to the noise of the baseball game. Crowds roaring. Some guy with a massive ass had just belted a home run. With thighs that thick, I imagined his dick must look small.
Eddie, I thought. I needed to dust the snow off Eddie Morrow.
If I were to be terribly honest, which I rarely am, I would have to say that I prefer talking to people this way—after the fact, in the humid terrarium of my mind. There’s a power to it that sometimes strikes me as almost authorial, the way I can freeze-frame and fast-forward, pause and replay things like the juicy bits of a porno. It’s a kind of TiVo, only without the monthly fees. TV you can really crawl into.
Of course, I can’t change anything that gets said, but I can lance it with angle after interpretative angle, squeeze it until it gets inflamed with multiple meanings or dries up and heals.
And then there’s those 558 women ... All beautiful, even the ugly ones.
The harem that is my soul. Every curse has its upside, I suppose.
The second person in the memory queue was Tim Dutchysen. He was the kind of kid I had seen in the mirror a thousand times before the army muscled me up and straightened me out. Twenty-two or so. Skinny, possessed of a kind of bodily insecurity, limbs devoid of a resting position. Eyes that bounced like India rubber, especially when he was agreeing with something. Good teeth. A grin too clownish not to be 110 percent sincere. Even when he stood absolutely still, he seemed to be moving—as if he were too thin not to be running from fat all the time.
And he was a real talker, the kind of guy who was always more honest than he planned, especially when he was full of shit.
“The guys all call me Dutchie. ”
“Dutchie it is then, Tim. ”
He worked at the local Kwik-Pik—an assistant manager, no less. Not only had he been at Legends the night of Jennifer’s disappearance, he openly admitted to watching her with his friends ...
“Oh, man, you have no idea how hot she was. The way she danced with that black guy. And the way she dressed ... Jeezus! I mean, no offence, but I bet you there’s a bunch ofus who only went to Legends because ofher. I mean, when she went missing and all, don’t get me wrong, I actually volunteered to go searchingfor her, and not just because everybody in our church did. I had, like, the biggest crush on her. I mean, you should have seen her. But I always thought she needed to be, you know, more ... more, like, careful. I mean, I appreciated the way she did herself up and all, but the way it got everyone talking. What with, you know, all the orgies and shit they get up to at their Compound. That’s just a rumour, I know, and I’m not someone who goes spreadingrumours, but the others, even guys from my church, they kindofget carried away sometimes, you know? In what they say, I mean. There’s no one I know who would actually do anything—I mean, we all stared at our beers whenever she looked in our direction! Jeezus, I think I forgot how to walk a couple times when she passed me!”
Molly shot me a covert ding-a-ling-a-ling look at the height of this monologue. I imagine she understood that men are pigs in a general sense, most women do, but thanks to the daily subterfuge that polite society forces upon the homelier sex, she lacked the ability to discriminate between men who truly are sexually troubled and kids like Tim, whose horndoggery plum got the best of his manners now and again.
“What’syour church, Tim?”
This was actually a significant question. Because rape had always been the unspoken assumption, and because Ruddick seemed peculiarly devoid of known sex offenders, I had hoped to find someone like Tim all along, someone who could steer me toward the local pervs and abusers— many of whom like to hide in the shadow of Jesus.
“Church ofthe Third Resurrection. ”
“Oh ya. I remember passing it. The white fame place, right?”
“We’re having a pig roast this Saturday aft, if you’re interested. Everyone’s welcome!”
This was the conversation that marked Molly’s conversion, the moment when she finally grasped the genius behind my kooky MO. Striking up relationships with people is as easy as can be, especially people who harbour a secret loneliness, like Tim or Jill. All you really need is a pretext. Once you’re attached, it’s simply a matter of creeping out along their six degrees of separation.
Like selling life insurance.
Friends, as Sean would say, beget enemies. And that’s what every good case needs.
A bad guy.
“Oh ... One last thing, Tim—er, Dutchie. What time does the Kwik-Pik close on Saturdays?”
“Midnight... Why?”
I tapped the pack of Winstons in my cargo pants. “Smoker ... You know.”
“Nasty habit,” he said, raising two nicotine-stained fingers in a peace symbol.
I called Nolen shortly afterward, around 9 EM.
“Whatare you doing?”he asked after our mutual hellos. He was chewing something, and I could hear a television droning in the background. I saw this image of him and his family hunkered down in their living room, their faces blank and blue, their eyes reflecting some televised atrocity.
“I’m at the library, going through microfilm,” I lied.
“Library? What time is it?”
“I’m in Pittsburgh. Researching the Framers.”
“Oh,” he replied with a shamefaced laugh. “No rest for the wicked, huh? ”
I snuggled back into my pillow, blew a stream of pungent smoke at the idle ceiling fan. “No rest for the wicked.”
I told him about the Morrows’ encounter with Jennifer the night of her disappearance. “My gut tells me there’s probably nothing to worry about, but I got the sense that you were a man who minded his Ps and Qs.”
“That I am,” he said with daft pride. “Thanks for this, Disciple. “
More crunching on his end—chewing. Some people, I’ve noticed, keep their eyes glued on the screen while watching the tube and talking on the phone. Others look down and out, to better concentrate on what is being said. Nolen was obviously the former.
“Not a problem.”
A crunching, crackling pause while he chewed. The bugger had used my reply to sneak another chip into his yap.
“We’re going to do this, aren’t we?” He swallowed, then added, “We’re going to save this girl. ” Sure, I thought. One potato chip at a time.
Track Seven
YOU PEOPLE
Thursday ...
The thing that kills me about you people—and by that I mean everyone but me—is how you’ve built the world to compensate for your shortcomings. Everything, but everything, has to always be the same. Same Exxon. Same Kwik-Pik. Carbon-copy brands in carbon-copy stores on carbon-copy streets in carbon-copy towns. As bad as an old Deputy Dawg cartoon.
Sure, you complain about this too. And yet you keep queuing up, keep ordering your Chicken McNuggets with two too many sweet- and-sour packets—just to be safe. You talk a good game when it comes to the unexpected, and yet you keep paying for more of the same. One of the great gifts of forgetting, it seems to me, is that it absolves you of the need for any consistency between your words and your wallet, not to mention your Scripture and your porn collection.
It all comes down to the bottom line, doesn’t it? You childproof your existence to better secure your illusion of control, and so continue gliding on autopilot while you focus on your appetites and your vanities. All of it—the mass-production franchises, the shake-and-bake blockbusters, the commercial-jingle pop songs, the seen-one-seen-them-all subdivisions—is simply an extension of your sloth and your amnesia. Stretchy pants for the fat ass of your soul.
Did I tell you I was a cynic?
I say this because I want you to understand why I was sick of Ruddick before I had even arrived—and why I found walking from door to door, across lawn after neat, orderly lawn, so painful.
Fawk.
Why sometimes simply breathing bored me to the point of contemplating suicide. And why the hairy tongue of my soul had been numbed beyond the ability to taste, let alone to crave or appreciate. The contents of the world are like words: repeat them enough and they lose all significance.
Even Molly, as young as a college diploma, as fresh as only a wannabe can be—even she was beginning to bore me. She brought her laptop with her to breakfast, eager to show me her small capsule story the Post-Gazette had printed for that day’s edition. “Page A13,” she said with a shrug, “beneath a story about a mad cow hoax in Amish country.” She bounced her head back and forth with a grin. “Imagine being beat out by a cow.”
“My sister was quite the heifer,” I replied with a What-are-you-going- to-do? squint.
She laughed in that way women use to tell you you’re being mean and they love it. “Here,” she said, sliding her laptop around. “Check it out.”
Cult Member Still Missing
Ruddick, PA—Jennifer Bonjour, a 21-year-old member of a small New Age cult called the Framers, went missing last Saturday. She was last seen leaving a local bar at approximately 11:30 P.M. Despite extensive searches of the surrounding brownlands, authorities report no leads. Anyone possessing information regarding her whereabouts should contact the Ruddick Police Department.
“Huh ...” I said.
“Not much,” she admitted, crinkling her nose. “I fairly screamed at Cynthia, my editor, to include the term ‘female’ in the header, but she pooh-poohed the idea. They usually hate it when hacks try to upsell their stories.”
“It would have been better if they’d run a larger photo,” I said, “one that showed her wearing a tank or something like that. But it’s the cult stuff that’s the real hook. Trust me, they’ll be back for more.”
Molly pressed a sheepish face into her forearm. “God, I hope so ... “
For whatever reason, door after door went unanswered that day—as if we had stumbled upon the gainfully employed subdivision or something. It was pretty much a waste of time, as the ever-helpful Molly pointed out on more than one occasion. I had resolved to return to the Framer Compound, of course, but I wanted to steep myself in the town that encircled them first. Like I explained to Molly, it’s hard to figure out a fish when it’s flopping around on the dock of your assumptions. You gotta get wet.
I was also waiting for Albert to get back to me with his research.
Because so many doors ended up being duds, the two of us had ample opportunity to talk, about Dead Jennifer some, but more about ourselves and our “aspirations.”
Molly possessed an optimism that could only be called young. Had she been in her thirties, I would have said stupid—or maybe naive if I happened to be in a forgiving mood. But she was still smoking the bong of possibilities, and had yet to hit the hard bottle of fact. She wanted, wanted, wanted. Prizes. Fame. Ultimately she hoped to work for none other than The New York Times, the newspaper of selective record. To live in Manhattan, where the beautiful go to enjoy the labour of the ugly.
Otherwise, she was pretty much the product of what you might expect. She had a west coast education to correct her east coast reserve. Her siblings lacked her vision. Her friends were, like, the coolest ever. Her parents sunburned easily.
Every once in a while she even said “Daddy.”
She admitted that her motives were probably as crass as could be when it came to Dead Jennifer. A cousin of hers who worked as a trainer for the Pittsburgh Penguins had caught wind of the story for some reason, and she had thought, “Eureka!” Jennifer Bonjour had all the elements that made news news, which is to say, a missing blond hottie, a crazy cult leader, and no relevance whatsoever to the lives of those who would be interested.
Her rationale was that she could only help.
To which I replied, “Really.”
“I’m helping you, aren’t I?”
“Nip down to the doughnut shop and get me a coffee, will ya?”
She laughed as if I had been joking.
All in all, we got along pretty well. After I had bludgeoned her finer scruples to death with a barrage of clever crudities, she even began to laugh. I only genuinely pissed her off once, when I bailed between radio stations in the middle of this incredibly sappy tune.
“So let me guess,” she said, her eyes fluttering in irritation. “You hate Kelly Clarkson too.”
“Not at all,” I replied. “She makes me want to light some candles, draw a steaming bath, and shave my vagina.”
That earned me several minutes of fuming silence. But I’m pretty sure I caught a head-shaking smile reflected in the passenger window.
Now, a career counsellor would tell you that a job like mine is “soft- skill intensive,” which is just a fancy way of saying you need to be a “people person” of some description to do it well. As you might have surmised, I am not a people person. I tend to hate people, as a rule. What I am good at is disarming people, getting them to say things they might not otherwise say. I have a gift for manipulation, or so Dr. Ken Shelton told me on June 11, 1999.
I mention this because the more people I asked about the Framers, the more troubled I found myself. You see, by this point I was pretty much sucking on the idea of the Framers like oxygen. Like I said, I had never worked a cult member’s disappearance before, and I fell on the novelty of it all like a homeless guy on a half-smoked cigarette.
This probably made me a little more sympathetic to their cause than I should have been. Surround a guy with enough smiles and he’ll prize the first angry asshole he meets—sure as shit. So I found myself poking the unsuspecting citizens of Ruddick with the fact of the Framers, mentioning them the way I might note a strange-looking mole on their skin—you know, with that You-should-get-that-checked-out tone—just to see what kind of reaction I would get.
And I discovered that for a goodly number of the good inhabitants of Ruddick, the Framers were a matter of rote, reflex—as simple as simple could be. Guilty, probably. Symptom of some social malaise, certainly. Otherwise, they were a bunch of dangerous fools.
Of course, this made me think they were harmless.
Only Xenophon Baars kept me guessing ...
The day was pretty much a strikeout as far as Dead Jennifer was concerned. Sure, there was old Dane Ferrence, who insisted that God was simply trying to tell the Framers to turn to Jesus. And there was sixteen-year-old Sky Armstrong, who had taken swimming lessons with Jennifer at the local YMCA the previous summer. “She was weird,” she said in that tone people
reserve for declarations of peer-group solidarity. Then immediately contradicted herself by saying, “She was really normal, though.”
But otherwise, nobody knew nothing.
Rather than return to our rooms, Molly and I drove directly to Odd- Jobs—to spare me the embarrassment of dodging traffic on foot as much as anything. For a time we just stared at our menus in that witless way, soaking in the damp hum of summer exhaustion. The tailings of what counted as rush-hour traffic in Ruddick roared up and down the road beyond our window. Nolen walked in almost the instant after we had placed our order: the turkey surprise for Molly and a BLT for me.
He looked like a man run ragged, too skinny for his police shirt, too fat for his uniform pants. But true to type, he smiled and laughed at nothing when I hailed him. I introduced him to Molly, whom he thought he recognized. He sidled in beside her without a wisp of embarrassment: he was used to being welcome, I could tell.
“What’s that I smell on your breath?” he said, fixing me with a smiling frown. He must have caught me exhaling or something. Either that or he was just fucking with me, which would mean he was more clever than I had credited.
I shrugged and said, “Mint?”
He had this way of laughing, hands held close yet flared out like a magician, and a stiff-necked backward lean. Adolescent self-consciousness hardened into adult habit.
“So you talked to the Morrows?” I asked.
“Yeah ... But first I have to ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“What’s this I hear about you, um, taking a, ah, collection?”
I could feel Molly’s eyes boring into my profile. Funny the way their stares cut so much deeper before you’ve slept with them.
“Just part of the cover, Caleb.”
His frown made him look like a mascot for some kind of mattress or furniture company.
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