by Thom Whalen
* * *
I awoke to knocking on my bedroom door. “Wha’?” I said.
“There’s someone here to see you,” my mom shouted through the door.
“Wha’?”
“Someone’s at the door for you.”
“Ooo?”
“I don’t know. A man.”
“Be ri’ there.” I yawned and stared at the clock by my bed, trying to force my sleep-caked eyes to see the black and white digits. Seven-thirty-six. As I stared, the rightmost digit flipped over with a soft click. Seven-thirty-seven.
On workdays, I set my alarm for nine but this was my day off so my alarm wasn’t set at all. I expected to sleep until noon. Who would come looking for me at the crack of dawn on my day off?
I dragged a tee shirt over my head and climbed into a pair of pants then padded out to the living room in my bare feet.
Randal.
I stared at him with bleary eyes and stifled a yawn. “Hi.”
“Ready?” He sounded wide-awake. I suspected that Randal never sounded tired or sleepy, even if he hadn’t slept for days.
“Ready?” I sounded confused.
“Daylight’s burning. We got places to go; people to see; things to do.”
When he told me that I was his door gunner, he forgot to mention that we were on dawn patrol. I yawned. “I gotta shower. Gimme five.”
I took ten before I came back out with wet hair, minty teeth, and shod. I was cleaner, but only marginally more awake. I’d been watching Dick Cavett until one last night, as I did every night. A young soldier back from Vietnam named Kerry had been talking about what was wrong with the war. A lot, apparently. He thought that we were losing the war despite what the government kept telling reporters on TV.
He should know. He’d volunteered to stay over there for four years and had been awarded three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a Bronze Star.
I’d paid attention because I knew that Randal had been over there for a year and a half. But this guy made Randal look laid back.
Randal led me to a little red pickup parked in front of the house. Japanese. Chrome letters on the side said Datsun 1300. I’d never seen a truck that small. It looked to me like it could fit in the bed of an F250.
“That yours?” I asked.
“Hop in,” he replied, leaving my question about ownership unanswered. Maybe it was an insensitive question.
The door was unlocked. I guess he didn’t worry about anyone stealing it. If it wasn’t already stolen.
“Where do we start?” he asked.
I frowned at him. Why was he asking me? I was just the door gunner. He was the pilot.
He said nothing for a minute.
I was thinking furiously. Finally, I said, “We have to start from where we’re at.”
He nodded like I’d said something profound.
If I had, it was by accident.
“Where are we at?” I asked.
“Wemsley, New York,” he said. “Where Billy Paul was killed last week and where I’m about to get arrested for murdering him.”
“Because you have his bike.”
“Because he needed killing and nobody had better reasons than me to do that favor for the world. Billy was married to Gwen a few years back. She was nineteen and he was twenty-four, twenty-five, something like that. She got pregnant and he was the daddy so she married him. He was a shiftless, faithless, abusive husband and no kind of father at all. A year later, she was pregnant again. The day she went into labor, he run off with a stripper from Buffalo and left her with two babies and a pile of maxed-out credit cards.”
“I didn’t know that she had kids,” I said.
“Boy and a girl. Nice kids. They do good in school and they don’t tear up the house when she’s out working. It’s a blessing that Billy ran off before they got old enough to know him and learn his dirty ways.” He shook his head in wonder at the way that the world works out sometimes. “Her life ain’t been no bed of roses, but she’s doing good, now. Then Billy showed up again a couple weeks ago. I don’t know why he came back but there’s something bad going down. He’s not the kind to sleep on the ground if there’s a feather bed around. Camping out at Smoke Pond like that, he was hiding from someone, sure as I’m standing here.
“He came into Elsa’s the other day looking for Gwen. He told her that they’re still married so he’s moving back in. Technically, I guess he was right about the marriage. She didn’t know where he was to divorce him and didn’t have the money to do it, anyway. So he figured that he still got marital rights. He told her that. He said that he’s got a legal right to live in the same house with his wife. She knew that he wasn’t talking about just her house. He figured he had a right to her bed, too. She told him that he could stuff his marital rights where the sun don’t shine. She told him that hell would freeze over before he set foot in her house again. That’s when he dumped her tray.”
“And then he gave her a black eye a few days later.”
“He came around and tried to impose his marital rights on her.”
I didn’t want to know if he succeeded so I said, “How do you fit into this?” I knew from Katie that he’d gone with Gwen for a while, but I wanted to hear how he described their relationship.
“I been working with Gwen since I came to Wemsley and got a job at Elsa’s. I like her.”
“A lot?” I prompted.
“A lot. We dated for a while. We don’t any more, but that’s mostly because she doesn’t have the time. Between working and raising her kids, she don’t got a spare minute.” He looked at me. “And because of me, too. I’ve got issues. I’m not the man that she needs. Not that way.”
“Since ‘Nam?” I was being bold but he seemed to be open to discussion for once.
“To the guys who’ve been there, ‘Nam’s not just a little piss-pot country on the other side of the world. It’s in them like a piece of shrapnel stuck too deep for a surgeon to take out again. ‘Nam’s a piece of psychic shrapnel that gets stuck in a guy’s soul forever.” He looked at me hard. “If I start talking crazy about ‘Nam, you get far away from me and stay away until I come back to earth again. You got me? I’m not kidding. When that piece of shrapnel starts digging at me, making me think I’m still back there, you can’t be anywhere around me for a while. It’s not safe.”
He was scaring me. “How much does Chief Albertson know?”
“About me and Gwen? Not much yet, I don’t think. But he’ll figure it out. He’s not stupid, just a little slow. After he hears about Billy’s wife and me, it’s only a matter of time until he arrests me for Billy’s murder. That’s why we got to find out the truth first. We got to tell him who did it so he stays off my back.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“You’re the genius. You tell me. Where do we start?”
“We start with Billy.” It was the only thing I could think to say, but it sounded right. “We have to find out who else wanted him dead.”
“That’d be just about everybody who had anything to do with him. From what I know about him, Billy never lacked for enemies.”
“This wouldn’t be a casual enemy. It’d be a mortal enemy who’d be willing to risk the death penalty to put Billy in his grave.”
Randal nodded. “I hope that narrows the field.”
Me, too.