“Yeah, but he has a beard, and he’s wearing a vest stuffed with explosives.”
“You mean he’s a terrorist?”
I let him hang for a moment-watching people intellectually squirm is one of the few genuine pleasures life offers me. The fact that I never finished high school makes it particularly gratifying. “Do you get my point, Tim? This isn’t about what the guy ‘really is,’ it’s about you- about the traps everybody falls into when hearing or reading language. At each stage it seemed pretty clear, didn’t it-what the gunman was? But each time I complicated the background, he suddenly became something different.”
“So?”
“So, it demonstrates two things. First, that what words mean depends on the background we bring to them, contexts-and contexts can potentially go on forever. Second, that people are prone to jump to conclusions. You can’t see what you don’t see, so you simply assume that what you do see is all there is. That it’s simple, clear as day. The guy’s a robber.”
“But he is a robber, isn’t he?” Uncertainty had wired him, I could see that much. But whether he was freaked because he understood what I was saying or because he didn’t have the slightest clue, I couldn’t tell.
I looked away to the dance floor. Some old sunglass-wearing drunk had taken the place of the two heifers, smiling with rotten pride, dancing with his arms held out-to some Ozzy tune whose title I couldn’t remember because I had only read it. “Suicide Solution,” I think.
“So what?” Tim finally said. “You don’t believe anything?”
“I believe plenty.”
“Like what?”
“That you and I are sitting in a bar drinking beer, for one.”
A scowl furrowed his narrow face. He was taking our conversation seriously-dreadfully so. “No, I mean, like, you know, the big picture.”
I shrugged. “Big picture? Well, I believe that humans are survival machines, and that pretty much everything else is plumage.”
“What’s plumage?”
“Something for show,” I said in the quick way you use to dismiss a conversation. “You know what? I think I will take you up on the church pig roast thing. Check it out…” I made a show of rubbing the back of my neck. “I’ve been feeling a little, I dunno… hollow lately.”
It would be a free meal at least, and at most it would allow me to further penetrate Ruddick’s social marrow. Fucking church pig roast- hilarious. When you remember as many things as I do, you really come to appreciate little gems like that.
“Awesome!” he exclaimed. “You could hit the Reverend with that whole-whole context thing-let him sort it out.”
I winced at that, realizing that Tim was more than just a little naive. Everyone, but everyone, makes noises about being critical and open- minded-even extreme believers like Baars. But confirmation is really the only thing they’re interested in. People are as allergic to contradiction as they are to complexity and uncertainty-and none more so than those who devote their lives to bullshit.
I already knew how to get to the Church of the Third Resurrection, but Tim seemed to take so much pride in his knowledge of the town thatI listened like someone oblivious. I used my cigarettes as an excuse to bail after that. I kind of felt bad leaving him alone there drinking, but then I kind of felt jealous as well.
Truth was, I had completely slipped back into a working mindset. According to my cell, it was almost ten, which struck me as a likely hour for a high school administrator to go to sleep on a work night.
As good a time as any to stake out Eddie Morrow. I parked about twenty yards or so down from the Morrows’, in front of a house too dark not to be filled with sound sleepers. I spend quite a bit of my time in my old Golf, watching this or that residence-primarily waiting for husbands. Typically, I kill the time either banging my head to heavy metal (during the day) or arguing with my memories (during the night).
Talking to yourself doesn’t necessarily amount to anything. You can do it for years without experiencing any personal growth or cognitive decline. Listen to yourself long enough, however, and you eventually become a comedian, whether you want to or not. It’s the only way to stay interested.
Eddie Morrow slipped out his door at exactly 11:13. No porch light, as expected. A quiet tug to close the Saturn door, as expected. He had backed into his driveway so he could slip out without bathing the front of the house with light. Somehow I knew he wouldn’t back in when he returned. I found myself wondering whether Jill ever noticed that the car had done a magical one-eighty while they were asleep. I’d witnessed enough of these capers to grasp their furtive Gestalt. This was my eighty- seventh, to be exact.
But then, none of them had ever involved a missing cult member before.
I fired up the Vee-Dub, winced the way I always wince at its tractor roar and rattle, then began following him at a discreet distance. Ruddick was small enough that I didn’t have to follow him far.
He turned down an unkempt street, Omeemee, where every other house seemed abandoned-yet one more demographic relic of better days. Idling at the intersection, I watched his Saturn cruise through the glow of its lights, slow, then park before a low brick bungalow-a place that had an un-illuminated sign of some kind posted out front. I waited until he had disappeared into the building before turning to follow.
I did a cursory drive-by, caught enough of the sign in my headlights to read
MASSAGE-BY-JENNY
Registered Physiotherapist
Then I turned around and parked along the curb opposite the house. I rolled down the window, sparked a J, absorbed that magical combination of boarded windows and sixty-year-old trees. To tell the truth, it almost felt like home sitting there, periodically glancing at the hooded picture window, pondering the sordid shenanigans behind the drapes. Summer darkness surrounding an orange-glowing world.
Ah, Eddie… Did you lie awake in shame? Cringe from the enormity of your petty crimes? Think Oh-my-god-if-Jill-ever-found-out…
Or were you a different animal altogether? Had your appetites slipped their leash, compelled you to commit atrocities? To do things that convinced our ancestors we needed hell?
What about Jennifer, Eddie? Did you hurt her? Hide her? Eddie was definitely more relaxed leaving 113 Omeemee than he was 371 Edgeware. I heard feminine laughter as he bantered back and forth with someone at the side door. The fear didn’t climb back into his face until he climbed behind the wheel of his car. He pulled farther down the street, turned around in someone else’s driveway, then passed within spitting distance of me on his way back home. He had the clutched look of someone running through worst-case scenarios.
I cracked open my door, crossed the street, walked the narrow slot between the brick wall and the Ford F-150 parked in the driveway. I came to a screen door, which I knocked on because its wood companion was already ajar. I could see linoleum and half a kitchen hutch in dim light through the screen. Moths and gnats tapped at the light above me.
After a moment, a woman answered the door dressed in a tank and panties. Jenny-obviously and immediately. She was too petite to be a model, and she had a friendly, farm-girl face, but I found her horribly attractive. Eddie was making more sense to me with every passing moment.
“Do you take walk-ins?” I asked.
She looked me up and down, smiled, and rubbed her cheek into her shoulder like a kitten. When they look like you, her eyes said. But her voice asked, “Sore shoulders, honey?”
“Like I’m carrying the weight of the world.”
She welcomed me in with a swing of her arm-clipped enough to tell me she was sober. I really hadn’t known what to expect from the sex trade industry out here in the backwoods. A part of me had expected rotten teeth and hilly-billy diction-but Jenny seemed all right. The house was tidy, nary a single dirty dish on the ceramic countertop. The floors were slightly bowed: old houses tend to sag in the middle-kind of like people that way. The furniture was newish-veneer, but hey, who the hell was I to judge? Two massage tables dominated the living room; they almost looked like gurneys with the white sheets that had been draped over them. The couch, the flat screen, and the coffee table pushed beneath the picture window suggested that Jenny broke the tables down during the day and used the space the same way civilians did: to rot in front of the tube.