House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  Somewhere along the way, he lost interest in the entire enterprise of sex. The frequency of the one-night stands dwindled, replaced at first by occasional dalliances with women one step short of prostitutes—backseat blow jobs in exchange for a dime bag, massage-parlor hand jobs—then by his own practical ministrations, at last by nothing at all.

  He didn’t miss it.

  He drifted from city to city, job to job—mall security guard in Omaha, bartender in Santa Fe, bouncer in Austin—hanging on in each place until the booze and pills caught up with him. By the time Klavan bought him that shot of Maker’s Mark in San Antonio, Keel doubted he could have gotten it up even if he’d wanted to.

  Susan Avery changed all that.

  He met her at his first AA meeting: a lean no-nonsense forty-something with graying hair tied in a loose ponytail and teeth yellowed by years of nicotine, coffee, and booze. Five years sober, she’d sworn off everything but the coffee, and though she was nothing to write home about in the looks department, Keel, studying her across the circle, couldn’t help reflecting that it wasn’t as if he had a home to write to anyway. Besides, something in the smoky ring of her laughter reminded him of Lisa. And how long had it been since he had known someone to whom laughter came so easily?

  He struck up a conversation after the meeting. The conversation led to coffee in a diner down the street, and that led to lunch later in the week. In the days that followed she became his sponsor, and ultimately more than his sponsor: a friend. It had been a long time since he’d had one of those, too, and maybe that’s where it came from, the growing attraction he sensed between them: the product of her simple kindness, and nothing more. Things had come to a head one night toward the end of November when he dropped her off at her apartment after dinner. She had leaned forward to collect her purse, and somehow—how?—he found himself brushing her cheek with one hand, tilting her face to meet his own. The kiss lasted maybe thirty seconds, a minute at the most. The kiss lasted a lifetime. And when she drew away, Keel felt an erotic jolt charged with nearly three decades of loneliness and yearning shudder through him.

  Susan had smiled sadly, her eyes glistening in the dim interior of the car. She touched the back of his hand, still cupped along the line of her jaw. She brought it to her lap and clutched his fingers. “Me, too,” she said softly. “But you’re only two months sober, Fletcher, and we can’t risk complicating that. Not right now.”

  “But—”

  She laid a finger against his lips. “Shhh,” she said. “There’s plenty of time for that. We’ve got the rest of our lives.” She leaned forward and kissed him once again, on the forehead this time.

  Then she got out of the car.

  Watching her walk away, Keel felt as a castaway might have felt, watching a distant ship drop unhailed over the rim of the world. Yet his libido, newly awakened, could not be so easily assuaged. In the gym where he’d started working out, he took a fresh interest in the Lycra-encased flesh gyrating beyond the glassed-in wall where the aerobics classes met. And at the restaurant where he washed dishes, he suddenly found himself more tempted by the mid-afternoon crowd of sleek professional women in business suits than by the liquor bottles stacked in shining rows along the mirrored backboard of the bar. His breath caught at the rounded pressure of a breast against the silken blouse containing it, or a wisp of perfume wafted to him by some vagary of air.

  And so he dreamed of women—of Susan, of Lisa, of the uniformed attendant on the flight that had ferried him back to Dreamland, cocking the alluring arc of her hip at him as she bent to take a drink order; and, yes, of too-thin Lara McGovern as well, her boyish frame, her smooth white flesh. He dreamed of women, a kaleidoscope of shining eyes and slanting veils of hair, of lipsticked mouths, of buttocks and breasts. Lips that met his lips, painted nails against his stomach, the slippery lubricity of passage.

  Outside, the sun heaved a fiery red crescent above the horizon, bathing the ruins of Dreamland in blood. Keel cried out in his sleep as a wave of pleasure wracked him, and Susan Avery’s husky voice echoed through his dreams. Get away from that place, Fletcher, it said. Get away before it’s too late.

  2

  Prather was in the gym when Keel got there just after ten.

  Keel hesitated in the doorway when he saw him. He had woken after nine from dreams that once again eluded memory—though judging from the evidence they had been considerably more pleasant than the dreams that had sent him surging out of sleep that first night at Dreamland. Yet he felt strangely disquieted all the same, an uneasiness that pervaded his thoughts as he breakfasted alone on cereal and coffee at the table in the kitchen.

  Sweat it out, that had been Susan’s advice—advice he had more or less lived by in those first difficult weeks of sobriety, sometimes spending four or five hours a day at the gym, pumping iron or running the endless looping circuit of the indoor track until his muscles burned and fatigue closed around him in a gray fog. Whatever it took. The fog of exhaustion was preferable to the fog of inebriation: at least he could sleep.

  Only sleep seemed to be the problem just now, didn’t it? he thought, rinsing his dishes and loading them into the dishwasher. The exercise would help that, too, though. That’s what Susan would have said, anyway. And the truth was, he agreed. Sober, Keel had felt reawakening the long-dormant love of discipline that his father had sought to instill in him, and that his military and police experience had reinforced. Order, discipline, integrity—those had been the touchstones of his father’s life. Keel’s too, or so he had thought. Before Dreamland. Before everything came crashing down around him.

  Keel grimaced. That was the true touchstone of his life. That and the unbearable weight of betrayal, the shame his father had not lived to witness.

  God knows he had tried to redeem it. For five long years, he’d tried. But in the end he just couldn’t do it. The shame was there, woven into the fabric of his bones.

  And not all the exercise in the world would ever sweat it out.

  In his room, he threw on a pair of sweats and a San Diego State tee shirt with the sleeves hacked off. Draping a towel around his shoulders, he strode down the corridor to the gym—and that’s when he saw Prather, flat on his back at the weight machine, doing bench presses. Keel’s immediate instinct was to turn away. His second impulse—the one Susan would have endorsed—was the better one: make peace. There were days to go here, after all. They couldn’t dodge each other forever. Besides, he’d never meant to offend the guy.

  So he stepped inside, nodding a brisk acknowledgment. The gym wasn’t much—a secondhand Nautilus machine, a couple of treadmills—but it was adequate. And just being there, even with Prather present, took the edge off Keel’s anxiety. The regimen of the gym appealed to him: the comforting repetition of the exercises, the sharp odor of perspiration, the tinny blast of muscle-head music—testosterone-charged stuff like AC/DC and Metallica—on the sound system. It was as close as he’d ever come to recapturing the camaraderie he’d known in the army and during his brief career as a cop: that sense of men united by shared goals, with the skills and resolve to achieve them.

  He should have done this yesterday, he thought, slotting the pin high in the stack of weights. He warmed up with a set of light curls, watching Prather on the weight bench.

  “You got too much weight on there,” he found himself saying when Prather finished.

  Prather, sitting up, exhaled slowly. “What?”

  “You’re fighting yourself. It’s counterproductive. Here.” Keel circled the machine and knelt to readjust the pin. “Try that.”

  Prather lay back obediently, took a breath, gripped the bar.

  “Slowly now,” Keel said. “Watch your form.”

  Prather did ten reps, breathing evenly. The weight moved steadily, the braided steel line singing in its reel. He sat up and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. His brown skin glistened with perspiration. “It doesn’t feel like I’m doing as much, though.”

  “D
oesn’t matter.” Keel sat on the facing bench. “Form is everything. Plus, a guy like you, you’re not looking to bulk up, am I right? What you want to do is use light weights, lots of reps.”

  “You sound like an expert.”

  Keel shrugged. “Just trying to help.”

  It came out more abrupt than he intended. Uncertain how to undo the impression, he moved to the other side of the Nautilus, readjusted the weight, and did another set of curls. He could feel himself relaxing into the rhythm of the exercise, the hypnotic cadence of his breathing, the pleasant ache of muscles surrendering their poison. He did another set, moved to the next station, and began to work his lats, the knots in his shoulders unclenching. It was like drinking or pills or sex, exercise—the same sense of tension abating, the relentless rush of his thoughts dropping away into the simple physicality of the moment. Like Zen or something. He understood the role of endorphins in the process, but it felt like more than a glandular process, purer, almost spiritual.

  Prather broke his reverie.

  “How long you been working out?” he said.

  Keel extended his arms and released the bar, letting the line spin over the pulley. The weights clanked into place. “Years, I guess. I used to be into it pretty heavy. I laid off a long time, though.”

  “You wouldn’t know it.”

  Keel looked up, searching the phrase for some hint at reconciliation—a move, however awkward, to paper over the incident upstairs. “Yeah, well,” he said. “Some things just come natural. Like you. You’ve been writing all your life, I bet.”

  Something—it was hard to say exactly what—passed over the other man’s face. “Yeah. You could say that.”

  “You always lived in California?”

  Prather hesitated. “I was born here. I grew up in Santa Monica.”

  “No kidding. Santa Monica, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I spent some time in California. Long Beach, working on the docks. The late eighties, it would have been.”

  “I thought Lomax said you’d been in law enforcement.”

  Keel shook his head. “I was an MP in the army for a while and, then, when I got out, I worked for a year or two as a cop. That was a long time ago, though.”

  “Yeah? How long?”

  “You’d have been a kid then.”

  “What happened?”

  “It wasn’t for me, that’s all.” His voice held steady as he said it, but even after all these years, the sentiment rankled.

  “So what have you been doing all this time?”

  “This and that. Tending bar, construction, some private security now and then.”

  “This was all in California?”

  Keel forced himself to keep calm, forced himself not to think about how little of the last two decades he could even really remember. “I lived practically everywhere,” he said casually. “California, Texas, New Mexico. Even Vegas for a while. Vegas was a kick.”

  It had been, too—until the booze caught up with him the way it always did. He’d landed a gig at one of the casinos and had managed to keep himself reasonably sober for a couple of months. He’d actually started to think he might be able to turn things around this time, and then, boom, one night he took a drink and fell off the edge of the world. When he showed up at work a week later, still shaky from the binge, his boss, this beefy kid half his age named Frank, had merely shaken his head. Don’t get me wrong, he said, I like you fine, but the man says you got to walk, you got to walk. Nothing personal.

  But it was always personal, wasn’t it?

  “So what,” Ben said, “you’re telling me you just drifted for the last twenty years?”

  But it hadn’t even been drifting, had it? Most of the time he’d been running—from the past, from the charges still pending back home, from fresh trouble brewed up in booze-soaked binges. And that reminded him of why he’d finally left Vegas. That reminded him of—

  Keel shook his head, refusing the thought. He looked up, forcing himself to smile. “Got those wandering feet, I guess.” He did a self-mocking little soft shoe, surprising a laugh out of Prather. “A man’s just got to move.” Then, as if to prove his point, he walked to the next station—leg presses—and sat down. “What about you?” he said. “How come your family headed west?”

  “It was just me. I was adopted, actually.”

  “No shit? You know, there’s something I’ve always wondered about that. You mind if I ask you?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Did you know you were adopted your whole life or did your parents just up and tell you one day, or what?”

  Prather laughed again. “It wasn’t really an issue.”

  “No? How’s that?”

  “My parents are white.”

  There was a showstopper for you, Keel thought: the very thing they’d been dancing around all day yesterday, and here the guy just heaves it up on the table in front of him, like a sackful of anvils. “Oh.” Keel leaned forward to adjust the pin in the stack of weights, the faint gunmetal scent of the mechanism rising to his nostrils. Something—he couldn’t say for sure what—compelled him to continue. If Prather could talk about it, why couldn’t he?

  “About yesterday,” he said, without looking up.

  “What about it?”

  “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  Prather didn’t answer right away. When he did speak, his tone was cool: “Yeah, I know. That’s part of the problem, isn’t it?”

  Keel leaned back. He positioned his shoes on the footrests, took hold of the handles jutting up at either side of the seat, and gave the press a tentative push, lifting the stack of weights an inch or so before he let it settle back into place. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s so deeply ingrained most people don’t even realize it’s there.”

  “What is?”

  “The whole race thing.”

  Lightly, Keel said, “You calling me a racist?”

  “Who isn’t?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Let me put it this way. You were a cop, right? You see a black guy in a nice car, a Lexus, a BMW, whatever—what’s your first thought?”

  “Oh, come on,” Keel said.

  He stared at Prather for a moment, and then he shook his head. Taking a deep breath, he did a set of leg extensions, concentrating on his breathing. The muscles in his thighs and calves burned, but the exercise brought none of its usual clarity. Nor did it dispel the hostility Keel felt welling up inside him. The nerve of these people. It was nothing he hadn’t seen before—hell, you saw it every day, didn’t you? Nothing was ever good enough. More than a century later and every white man on the planet was still somehow personally responsible for slavery. Grunting, he clenched the handgrips and shoved himself back against the seat, muscling the weight to its highest point. He held it there a moment and let it drop with a crash, aware of the constant pressure of Prather’s scrutiny.

  “What?” he said.

  “The only reason you’re angry is you know I’m right.”

  Keel stood, reaching for his towel. “Bullshit.”

  “Why don’t you answer the question, then?”

  Keel turned to face him. “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you answer a couple questions instead?”

  “I don’t have anything to hide.”

  “How old were you when you were adopted?”

  “Four. I was four years old.”

  “You pretty much lived in Santa Monica your whole life, then?”

  “So?”

  “Well, it’s not exactly the ’hood is it?”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “What about your dad, he a lawyer or something?”

  “He was—he is—a stockbroker.”

  Keel snorted in disgust. “See, that’s just exactly what I mean. You know what my dad did? He went to Europe in 1944 and got his ass shot off in the Ardennes Forest. And then he came home and he took a job pushing a broom around a f
actory for the next thirty years ’cause that’s all he was able to do. And he never complained, not once until the day he dropped dead of a heart attack, right there with the broom in his hand. The man never complained.”

  “So what’s your point?”

  “My point is, you walk around this place slinging all this crap about solidarity with your brothers and the man keeping your people down, but you had everything handed to you. Everything. Nothing personal, you understand, I’m just saying.”

  Keel stopped abruptly, out of breath. He mopped his forehead with the towel. He glared at Prather. All he’d wanted to do was work out in peace, maybe mend a few fences, and what he had to do instead was, he had to listen to this crap.

  He shook his head in disgust.

  The thing was, he was right. And both of them knew it. “My point is,” he said, “when you get right down to it, you’re as white as any of the rest of us. Hell, the fact is, you’re maybe even whiter.”

  And then he turned on his heel and stalked out.

  3

  The hallway was deserted.

  Keel stood there, letting the anger dwindle to an ember inside him, and then he turned toward his suite, the enormous span of the day stretching before him: hours of time and nothing to fill them. He could always come back to the gym when Prather wasn’t around, but in the meantime …

  A shower, he supposed. Maybe some pool.

  Halfway to his room, a noise—what?—halted him in his tracks. His first thought was that it must have been the furnace clearing its throat: it had that same subaudible quality—the susurration of air in hidden ductwork or a murmur of faraway traffic, heard but unheard, the constant backdrop of your thoughts.

  His second thought was that someone had called his name: his real name, the one he’d been born with. It seemed to hang in the air—

  —John—

  —a sound that was not a sound but only its echo in the memory, musical and silvery: a woman’s voice.

  The hair along his arms prickled. He felt a stirring in his groin.