by Dan Bevacqua
VISITORS JULY 2014
8
THE PHONE CALL LUKE HUTTON received that morning came from a reporter at Star magazine, which was this piece of trash weekly his mother read as she lay dying. From her bed, she would ask him if there was anything in it about Molly, and since at some point his mother had stopped wearing her glasses, he’d have to flip through the issue. He did so carefully, slowly, because his mother listened for the sound of the pages turning. There was always at least one item, if only a picture, and Luke would either read the article aloud or describe Molly’s outfit. His mother found his powers of description disappointing. His inability hurt her. He didn’t know much about women’s fashion or how you were supposed to describe a haircut, except to say if it was short, long, or kind of in between. “It’s a red dress,” he might have said. “It’s not not tight. Her hair’s sort of up in this thing. She doesn’t look thrilled.”
When the phone rang, he was in the truck, driving to John Bit’s. Luke mostly screened his calls, hoping to avoid debt collectors and his ex-wife’s lawyer, who’d been harassing him all week about the alimony. And yet today had the potential to be different. He answered his phone for several reasons. He was first of all lonely for the sound of another person’s voice. Second, if John was serious—if he wanted Luke to pack up Molly’s house in California and put it all in storage—he could tell this to Ashley’s lawyer, who would inform Ashley, who would find it infuriating. She’d always felt he’d kept a secret flame going for Molly. It was an idea that Luke found both demeaning and backward, since Ashley was the one with the obsession.
His mind-set was this: his ex-wife should leave it alone. Molly was dead. It had happened. There was nothing to do. Just shut up. Stop it. Why mention it at all?
“Hello!” he shouted.
“Is this Lucas Hutton?” a woman’s voice—British—asked.
“That’s me,” he said. “Who’s this?”
“Bronwen Davidson,” she said.
He stopped at the red light where Main and Elm met, across the street from the movie theater and its small concrete rotunda. As part of its “Not in Our Village” anti-heroin campaign, the town had set up speakers in the trees. AM Gold blasted for fifteen hours a day through the moth-eaten leaves downtown. Nate Braun, a guy Luke had gone to high school with, stood in front of the theater with his shirt off. His defined abs were greased with sweat. A tattoo of a lion’s head growled across his chest.
“I’m with Star magazine,” Bronwen said.
“Never heard of it.”
“We’re a news organization.”
“News?”
“Correct,” she said.
Across the street, he watched Nate flex. This seemed to be the manner in which Nate would spend his entire morning. Without realizing it, Luke felt jealous, not only of Nate’s body, but of the life it seemed to represent: carefree, wild, stupid. Someone had shot him in the ass last year over an unpaid debt.
Once, in eighth grade, changing after gym, Nate had surprised Luke. “You’re gonna wanna see this,” Nate had said. Standing in only his boxers, Nate hoisted Luke up, and then they’d crab-walked across the top of the lockers to a crack in the wall while the other boys watched them, holding their breath. Nate closed one eye and stared through the crack. After a very long moment, he slid over to make room for Luke. He gestured with an upturned hand. Squinting, Luke peered into the girls’ locker room, and saw a naked Molly Bit—one terrific flash of her—before Nate shoved him (“Don’t hog her. I saw her first”) and that was it.
Luke’s engine revved as he pulled forward. Nate took this as a greeting. He stuck his hand in the air.
“How can I help you?” Luke asked the reporter.
“I was hoping to speak to you about Roger Michael Vincent,” she said.
He should have pulled through the light and gone straight up the hill, but instead he turned left and cut into the bank parking lot. There was a ten-foot-long giant plastic triceratops that he hardly noticed dumped near the back door of the movie theater. He parked at a diagonal across two empty spots.
“What’s your name again?” he asked.
“Bronwen Davidson. From Star magazine,” she repeated. “Is this Lucas Hutton? The Lucas Hutton who knew Molly Bit?”
“Depends,” he said.
“So you know the name? Roger Vincent?”
“Who doesn’t?” he said. “What about him?”
“I was hoping I could get a quote from you.”
“On what?” he asked.
“Him.”
He finally processed the triceratops. Nine years ago, the movie theater had burned to the ground. A teenage pyromaniac had started a fire in his bathtub in one of the apartments above. A door had opened. The fire had jumped. The whole block went up. For a year and a half they took donations on the rebuild, but it wasn’t looking good—not until an anonymous donor had sent in the rest. It hadn’t been difficult for everyone to figure out who it was.
For those first few days after Molly’s murder, he’d put a Google alert on his phone. He’d assumed it was the ex-husband. Everybody knew it was always that guy. Then they cleared Andrew Kessler, and Luke waited. Once or twice a minute his phone would buzz or ding. The news blasts and updates were constant. TMZ got to everything first. A television host showed a diagram of a generic body and said Molly had been stabbed here, and here, and here, and here… Luke found himself clicking on websites he hadn’t known existed. Before Molly’s murder, he’d never encountered a Tumblr blog. Other pages were littered with YouTube clips, one after the other, sometimes the same one five times, where the comment person wrote, Sorreee, too sad for words, OMG, HAD to repost this again. #RIPMB #Loveyouforever #diedtoosoon #greatestofalltime. He found a page that gave a complete history of Molly’s life starting with her probable moment of conception. There was a Google Maps image of her father’s house. There was a picture of the waterfall downtown. At a certain point, Luke stared at his own senior yearbook photo. The caption read: Lucas David Hutton. High School BF. Talk about a lucky guy.
“What about him?” Luke said into the phone. He couldn’t breathe right. He stepped out of the hot truck onto the hotter asphalt. He unbuttoned his collared shirt. Earlier, getting dressed, it had seemed like the thing to do. It would come off as respectful, wouldn’t it?
“Mr. Vincent was attacked,” she said. “He was stabbed. Did you know that?”
Nate Braun, from twenty yards away, seemed to sense what was going on. If he had any business at all, it was the business of making things worse. He walked over the way he walked, like a one-man-parade, arms and legs jangling loose, his chin way up and his chest puffed out.
“That’s good,” Luke said. “I’m glad someone stabbed him. Is he dead?”
“Is that a quote?”
From the curb, Nate shouted, “What up, Hut!” He wore his hot-pink Oakleys. His hand was on his nuts. “Somebody got a problem with you? Fuck those motherfuckers! I’ll get my gun!”
Luke put his hand up to Nate, and Nate understood.
“Okay!” he shouted. “I’m here! I got you!” Nate pointed to his right. “You see this fucking dinosaur? They found it in storage! Jurassic Park!”
“Mr. Hutton?” Bronwen asked. “Are you there? What is that? Is everything fine? Are you safe?”
“I asked you if he’s dead,” Luke said. “Answer me.”
In that moment, he shooed away, as if it were an invisible fly, a certain truth about himself—which was, of course, that Ashley was right, and he was obsessed with Molly. He could never admit this to himself, not in a hundred million years, because doing so would have been far too embarrassing and would have required serious excavation of the therapeutic kind. Luke didn’t go in for language, or for using his words, because language was for faggots, he’d actually once said to a college professor during her office hours, and he wasn’t going to sit around all day long talking bullshit on his mom and dad. As a result of this, when Luke tried to shape the how
s and whys of his hurt and disappointment into words, the frustration proved enormous, so that the only space he found comfort in was his own anger, the level and intensity of which never failed to correspond to how much shame he felt.
“He’s alive, as far as we know,” Bronwen said. “We were hoping to get a quote from someone who knew her and who isn’t a part of the industry. You said you were glad.”
“Of course I did.”
“Can I quote you as saying that? Can it read, ‘I’m glad Roger Michael Vincent was stabbed’? Would that be okay? It would really help the story.”
“I don’t understand why you’re calling me.”
“As I’ve said—”
“But why me? Why are you calling me? I didn’t know him. I didn’t know her, really, anymore. What do I have to do with anything? Did you talk to my wife?”
He heard a furious typing on the other end of the phone.
“I have not. I don’t know your wife, nor have I ever spoken to her. Should I? Would that be a better person to talk to?”
All that last year, Ashley would find him in the dark of their living room. After a certain point, he stopped pretending it was porn. Sure, he was searching on his iPhone. It was a tragedy. Why shouldn’t he be interested? No—he hadn’t checked on her before this. He didn’t think about her. Why would she ask him that? What was her problem?
“Do not call her,” he said. “Don’t you dare fucking do that.”
“Why would your wife have me call you, Mr. Hutton?”
“Ex-wife. I don’t know. It’s something she might do.”
“Did she know Molly too? Were they friends?”
“No.”
“Was that difficult for her? Knowing you had dated Molly? Was that difficult for you?”
Of course Luke had searched for Molly Bit before her murder. Molly had lingered out among his edges—not as a vision, or as a memory, but as a feeling he wouldn’t acknowledge. But now his obsession, mainstreamed into the fabric of his life, was out of his control, and as a consequence of this he was more than a little crazy from trying to act normal all the time.
“Get fucked,” he said to Bronwen and hung up.
He got back in the truck, slamming the door behind him. He actually thought about—he took the time to consider—punching the dashboard or the windshield. But then he remembered John Bit. He could not show up with a broken hand, and so he sat there pulling and pushing on the steering wheel until his arms, shoulders, and his entire body got into it more and more, and the whole chassis rocked.
Five minutes later, he walked over to the triceratops. It wasn’t something he encountered every single day. It was life-sized, made out of a low-density plastic that wobbled in the summer breeze. The skin was a grayish blue, its eyes were rheumy and sad, and some other, superior predator had torn several of its ribs out. It had been placed against a loading door. Next to its horns were three potted ferns. Staring down at it, he thought he might cry. It was ridiculous. The thing wasn’t real. It was extinct.
“He’s checkin’ it out,” Nate Braun said, walking over to Luke. “He’s givin’ it a look.”
“That’s true.”
“I remember this shit. I snuck in three different times,” Nate said. “Did you know that kids don’t go to the movies anymore? I met this high school girl the other night. She said she hadn’t been to the movies since she was seven. It’s all Netflix now. That’s where the action is.”
“High school?” Luke asked him.
“Yessir,” Nate said. He smirked and raised an eyebrow above his sunglass frames. Not since childhood had Luke seen Nate indoors. He was always out on the street. He lived with his mother, Luke guessed. Aside from his chest and arms, which belonged to a twenty-five-year-old athlete, he looked his age, which was forty. He had a number of prominent, missing teeth. The rumor was the guy who’d shot him was a reject from the Crips, somebody’s dumb-ass cousin they’d sent up from Hartford or New York to profit off the country market. Nate used to buy his drugs from the guy. No longer.
“I’m like Matthew McConaughey,” he said. “You know what I’m talking about.”
He was connected to Nate through the peephole. It was the single moment of any substance they had ever shared. All throughout high school, Nate had lorded it over him. “I saw your girlfriend’s tits before you did,” he’d whisper to Luke in between classes. And later, after Molly was famous (and half the world had seen her naked), Nate would still remind anyone who’d listen, “I scoped her out when she was prime.” After her death, Nate seemed to have stopped saying this.
Or maybe it was a grace period, Luke thought.
Or maybe it was only him.
“What was that about?” Nate asked. “You were gonna murder somebody.”
“Forget it.”
Nate took a few steps back and then he ran at the triceratops as fast as he could and kicked it in the head.
“Shouldn’t you be at work?” he asked.
“I got let go,” Luke said. “First man in. First man out. You know how it goes.”
“I hear that,” Nate said. “This place is cursed.”
“I guess so.”
“You bet your ass it is,” Nate said. He raised his arms out at a perfectly lovely town full of empty storefronts and a quiet madman in a Boston Red Sox jersey pushing a shopping cart across the street. “Tell me different,” he said. “Look at this shit and tell me it’s improving.”
“I’m moving down south,” Luke said. “I’m starting over.”
“Where to?” Nate asked.
“Texas maybe,” Luke said. “Florida. Dave’s in Tennessee. He says there’s work down there.”
“That’s a real statement,” Nate said. “That says so much. I’ve been hearing that from a lot of people lately. I know exactly what it means.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means you go down to paradise,” Nate said. “Meanwhile, I’m up here, living with the monkeys.”
* * *
Molly’s house was out on Skitchewaug Trail. Luke drove up East Hill, past the funeral home, and the closed-for-good-elementary-school, and the campground that was all third-growth pine and dark as a freezer. From the top of the valley, he cruised back down. On his right, across the tree line, he saw the foothills of the Green Mountain range. As it always had for him, the road curved left under an awning of maple trees. The Humane Society was still out here on a little knoll. He took the sharp right you had to be on the lookout for, down another hill, drove by the dairy farm where the Holsteins lay in mud, and then went up another short rise that veered, once again, right. He only knew one other family who lived out here, the Wallers. Luke’s father used to work random jobs on their farm. Fall cleanup. Tractor maintenance. The like. Their youngest daughter, Jilly, was what everyone called slow. When his mother died, Jilly had sent him a card that read, “I’m so sorry about your mother. First your dad then your mom. You are the only person left alive and that’s good. Good luck selling the house you grew up in.”
It was the only card he’d kept.
His phone started ringing again. This time he looked at the ID, and saw it was Ashley. He hit the side button to shut it up. A minute later, he played the message.
“Listen,” she said. “I saw John Bit at Shaw’s. He told me about—about whatever it is you’re going to do, Luke. It’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard in my entire life. It’s just plain stupid. He’s an old man. He thinks that because he’s had an idea, it should happen. Don’t go out there. Do. Not. Go. I’m saying this because I care about you. Not us. But you. And also—fucking asshole—stop calling me drunk at two in the morning. The next time I see you, I’m playing you the messages. They’re deranged. You sound totally deranged.”
Luke didn’t want to know what he’d said. He had no interest in hearing the messages. Whatever it was, it wasn’t the truth, because he could not remember it (he had not experienced it), which made it not quite real, and what wasn’t real, or not qui
te real (because he hadn’t lived through it) did not exist.
He was thirty feet from the mailbox when he saw a car reversing across John Bit’s lawn. It was a navy blue BMW with New York plates. It was going far too fast. The back end cut sharply to the left. Luke knew what was going to happen before it did, and so it did not register as a surprise exactly when the car’s rear bumper smashed into a tree stump, and its brake light erupted into a fountain of glass.
John Bit had built the entire house himself. It was one story. A large faded swatch of blue insulation showed from where the clapboards had either fallen off or blown away in the wind. It leaned very slightly to the right. In the field behind the house, Luke saw a woman. She was running as fast as she could back toward the house and what he assumed was the car. She had short blond hair that bounced. In her hands, she held a camera with a telephoto lens.
“We’re sorry!” she screamed. “We’re sorry! We loved her!”
A man stepped out of the car. He had greasy black hair down to his ears and he wore a very tight pair of jeans.
“Run!” he shouted at the woman.
“I’m running!” she screamed back. “Shut the fuck up!”
At the far end of the field, way back behind the running, screaming woman, Luke saw John. He seemed to be following the woman’s path through the high grass. He moved at a slow, deliberate pace. By its grip, he held a chainsaw. It was very much on.
“We just wanted to see where she grew up!” the man yelled over the small motor sound. “We didn’t know you were home! We didn’t mean to snoop!”
“Get in!” the woman screamed.
Luke watched the woman run around the side of the house, slide past the stump, and all but dive into the passenger seat of the BMW. The man was already in. He threw the car in gear and peeled out across John’s lawn, dirt and grass and pine needles spraying out behind the tires. The car squealed out of the drive, swerved to avoid Luke’s truck idling there, and accelerated gone.