“There’s dead for me,” he said, “and then there’s dead for you.” I sat paralyzed while he watched me with those fucking he-he eyes of his.
“What’s that?” I finally asked, looking down at the hockey bag.
“Good question.” He leaned forward, smiling at me, squinting against the smoke of his cigarette as he grabbed the zipper and tore it open. He peered into the dark maw, shook his head with a Southerner’s slow- motion disgust. Sean had grown up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he had started drinking Jack Daniel’s (where his father worked) at the age of nine.
“Aw, hell,” he said, shaking his head in a blue-stringed haze of smoke. “She’s all busted up.”
“She…” I repeated in horror.
“Shiyit. What a nasty piece of work.”
“Who?” I cried.
He had this way of frowning, as if wincing at a pain that was all yours.
“Yah, you know. Dead Jennifer.”
Her name still comes up in my dreams, rare as they are. Dreams of doom-as bad as anything from the war. Without exception I bolt from my blankets, grope the night table to palm my Zippo and cigarettes. I smoke in the dark, watching that orange jewel hover above the shadow of my hand.
And I wonder what it would be like, burning the world from both ends. Wednesday… Pretty much everyone loves spring, except those winter-loving mutants who are generally too cheerful not to die of cancer at some point. I love spring as well, but for reasons peculiar to me. Most people love the retreat of the snow and cold, the dawning of things green and alive. Me, I love the way the thaw exposes all the hidden garbage, from soggy coffee cups to pockets of dog shit.
Winter is a season of forgetfulness. Spring is a kind of remembering, in all its splendid ugliness.
And so spring reminds me of me-the one thing guaranteed to bring a smile to my face.
What does this have to do with Ruddick in the dry height of summer? Because for me, anyway, the town was locked in wintry silence. It needed to be thawed.
My breakfast with Molly was uneventful. She tried to strike up conversation, but I’m too much of a prick in the mornings to trust myself with small talk. Coffee-coffee-coffee-need I say more?
I didn’t so much explain my MO to Molly as demonstrate it. I had her feed me directions from my town map as I rattled around in my Vee-Dub diesel. Once I got a feel for the communities adjacent to the Framer Compound, I began canvassing. I grabbed the flyers that Kimberley had printed for me using the photo of Dead Jennifer that the Bonjours had provided. I parked on a strategic corner, then, with the quizzical redhead in tow, began going door to door with an official-looking clipboard and envelope held like an accountant’s ledger in my arms.
“Hi, ma’am. Sorry to trouble you. I’m going round town to take up a collection for the Bonjour family, to help pay for a private investigator to look into their daughter’s disappearance.”
“Oh. Oh my. Yes, I saw that on the news… Horrible.”
And then I did what I always did: I struck up conversations.
My version of a spring thaw. “What are you doing?” Molly finally cried in a shrill Enough-is-fucking- enough voice.
She had seemed placid enough sitting there in the passenger seat, watching me empty the cash from the envelope and load up my otherwise lean wallet.
“Read between the lines,” I said, enumerating my take: 174 bucks. Not bad for a morning’s work. “You’ve heard that before, haven’t you?”
“What?What? That doesn’t even make fucking sense!”
“Not to you, obviously.”
She made this face.
Because I have this problem when it comes to forgetting, I carve the world along different joints. I literally see things you would call ephemera as objects unto themselves, so to speak. So passing expressions that you simply notice then forget have an existence all of their own for me-to the point where it sometimes seems like it’s the person who’s ephemeral.
In Molly’s case it was Classic Feminine Disgust: a subtle yet heady blend of exasperation, frustration, and a kind of why-me outrage, as if the problem wasn’t so much men as the fact that they couldn’t stop loving them-us. As it so happened, Classic Feminine Disgust was an old friend of mine, so much so I caught myself saying, “How you doing?”
But she was gone, replaced with Atypical Bewildered Fury-another old friend. She almost rolled her eyes back into her head, made a mouth that said Hide the knives, honey.
“How am I doing?” she cried. “How am I doing? I’m stranded with a psychopath who’s conned me into being an accessory to fraud. How the fuck do you think I’m doing?”
Redheads. Sheesh.
“Fraud? This is how I work all my missing persons.”
“I suppose you call this ‘fact-finding.’ Is that it?” The sarcasm she poured into her air quotes stung for some reason. I’m never surprised when I’m misunderstood-Christ, I’m rarely surprised period. But the resentment never seems to go away.
“Fact-finding. Sure. Good a name as any.”
“So where’s your tape recorder? Huh? Where are your notes?”
I shot her a nose-crinkling look, pointed to my bean.
“Please,” she said. She had the air of someone realizing they’ve been conned after signing the papers.
“Seriously. I remember things.”
“Oh yah,” she said in that Whatever-you-lying-son-of-a-bitch voice.
I shook my head, reached back to pull a joint from my rucksack. With so many old friends dropping by, I figured we should turn it into a party. I sparked the thing while she watched in horror, took a deep and most gratifying haul.
“You don’t believe me,” I said in that voice tokers use to keep their cough pinned to the mat. I offered her the joint, but her look was a lethal Get-that-shit-out-of-my-face. Up. Tight. Oh well, more for me. I really needed to be stoned at that instant. I mean really really…
“No, Disciple. I do not believe you.”
And so, my brain soaking in sweet-leaf lubricant, I showed her. It’s remarkable when you think about it. I mean, if people can recognize a thing like a conversation, it means it has to be a// in there somewhere, doesn’t it? Which begs the question: where does it all go, our intelligence? I gave her names and addresses, then a verbatim recital of what was said. I even mimicked the way old Mrs. Toews raised a self-conscious finger to cover her old-maid-stache, or how Big John Recchi always wagged his head no as he was agreeing with you.
I’m not sure dumbfounded is a heavy enough word to describe the expression on her face.
I grinned my best Ubermensch grin, tapped my temple with a witty-witty finger. “Wait till you see my dick,” I told her. I wasn’t kidding.
But she laughed anyway-laughed hard.. She kind of sounded like a horse, but it was intoxicating all the same. I decided that I liked Molly Modano.
She had good taste in men.
Molly had a million questions. They always do. She had this way of rolling her head as she talked, kind of like an animated holding pattern, neither a nod nor a shake, but endless prepping in the in-between. Her eyes flashed green and blue.
There were several You-mean-absolutely-everything?s. A couple of God- my-brain-is-such-a-sieves. And of course the inevitable Too-cools.
To which I eventually replied, “Not really.”
Then suddenly she said, “Ohmigod. You’ve heard all this shit before, haven’t you? Like a million times-only you don’t forget, do you? It must sound so… so stale…”
And there it was, another old friend staring out from her face, just as female as all the others: Pure Feminine Compassion.
“No wonder,” she said, turning to gaze out the passenger window. “No fucking wonder.”
I simply stared at the street, signalled and turned, signalled and turned.
Some friends demand silence. I always expect most of the doors to be dead when I do this on a weekday. But the fact is, a tremendous number of people actually stay at home all day long. How they make their living is a mystery to me- one of the government’s infinite entitlements, I suppose. Disability. Unemployment. Social Security. Alimony. Cyber-crime. You would expect them to be rude, treat door-to-door cold-callers with the contempt they deserve, but a substantial proportion of them actually seem to be pleased. It gets pretty lonely scratching your balls on the couch all day, I guess.