With the death of Angie, the visitations ceased. But, demoralized, humiliated, Shelby left him. She did not divorce him at once. She demanded a house, and he provided it. She asked for severance pay at the office, and got it. And by degrees they separated. They spoke through lawyers until it was final, and he was alone.
Ray is not surprised when, one night, he is awoken by a clatter, as of someone hurrying in darkness. It is a familiar sound. He awaits the visitation, hoping it might make him less lonely. Perhaps it is Angie, who has come to mock him. He hopes to beg her forgiveness. No, it is not Angie’s voice. It is Shelby’s, and it is triumphant. But the body, the hag’s face, is his own.
Rangers
“YOU’LL HAVE TO excuse us,” the young woman said at the rounded pulpit-like curve of the gleaming bar. She wore a low-cut blouse and had been listening intently, as though taking an order from the man beside her, who turned away to speak on his cell phone. “We just got married. Plus, we’re new here.”
Her sudden blurted candor silenced the drinkers. There was only the low bubbling sound of the TV. The woman’s face was pink-blotched and hot with exertion. She repeated what she’d said to a smiling man in a camouflage jacket and cap by the cash register, who had also been talking on a cell phone. He said “Doesn’t that call for a drink?” to the barman next to him ringing up a sale.
“Just a Coke for me,” the woman said. “I found out today I’m expecting.”
A bottle of beer and a shot of whiskey were set before the man next to her. He smiled past his phone and nodded his thanks.
“It’s Leon’s girlfriend. I don’t care — can I call you Sarge?” She tugged at her blouse, shaking her breasts loose at the barman. “I’m Beanie.”
The barman leaned closer, open-mouthed, holding his fat hands back as you would restrain a pair of puppies.
“That’s enough of that,” Sarge said. “And you just married.”
“Anyone ever tell you your husband’s got your eyes and your coloration,” a nearby woman said. “I’m a cosmetologist.”
“He is also my best friend,” Beanie said, but didn’t smile.
“I’m making a donation to the jar in your name,” Sarge said. Then, solemnly, “Beanie.” The jar was a large clear glass flask, with a colored Stars and Stripes label pasted on and a handwritten sign hung on its neck, For the Troops. The plugged and slotted lid was padlocked. You wrote your name on a ten-dollar bill. “More than two thousand in there. For the troops.”
The cosmetologist said, “Funny how camo makes you conspicuous, rather than the other way around.”
“Desert camo,” Sarge said. “Ranger camo.”
Seizing the barman’s attention again with her breasts, Beanie said, “Like them?” and rattled a yellow plastic pharmacy container of pills. But the barman’s face was unreadable.
They were back the next night, the serious man Leon and his cell phone, the woman Beanie drenched in light, showing her breasts and the pills, saying, “I don’t even care!”
Sarge greeted them, then said to the barman, “But I’m not going alone,” and at closing time, to Beanie, “My friend here and I are joining you for a party. You gave him a thrill up his leg.”
Later, in the empty parking lot, under the light, the four of them were silent but for Sarge, who, taking a pistol from Leon, said, “Here’s what I want you to do for us, buddy,” and the barman looked up at the three severe faces.
Talking softly, the three approached a house with the sign on the lawn For Sale by Owner, and when the muscular young man answered the door and said, “I was expecting the married couple, like you explained,” Leon said, “This is our friend.”
“Can we talk to the owner?” Sarge said, frowning under his cap brim.
“You’re looking at him, soldier,” the young man in the doorway said, pleased with himself, and folded his arms as though to emphasize his tattoos.
“We don’t want to waste your time.”
“I was military too. I know about wasted time.”
“Because you didn’t embrace the suck,” Sarge said.
“What’d you learn?”
“I learned there’s more ways of dying than ways of living.”
The man leaned back from the words. “You said something about scoping out the house.”
They loped from room to room, the young man striding behind them, praising the features. In his confident voice he said, “You two look so much alike.”
Beanie said, “He’s like a brother to me.”
Sarge said, “I don’t think this is the one.”
“Hardly gave it a chance.” And the man pushed his sleeve up further to show the rest of the tattoo, a shapely blue mermaid. He said, “Rapture of the Deep.”
They visited three more houses, For Sale by Owner, walking to the front door, full of compliments, seeming eager to move in. “Got a car?” Sarge asked at the first one.
“Out back. What’s left of it.”
The others were short visits too.
The fourth, a farmhouse off the road, lay in semidarkness.
“You mustn’t mind us, we’re both a little deaf,” the old man said, letting them in. An old woman squinted from her chair and looked futile. She said, “Married sixty-two years.”
Beanie murmured, “Awesome.”
“But somehow it seems longer than that,” the man said.
“Them are old. Them are nice,” Sarge said of some objects on the mantelpiece — silver, some porcelain, a clock.
“Family stuff. Mother keeps saying we should insure them.” The man smiled at Beanie. “What do you look so worried for?”
“Hope your car’s insured, nice-looking ride like that,” Leon said.
“I’ve always had a Caddy.”
“Tell me about it,” Sarge said. Then, “Let’s see that cellar of yours. Maybe we can convert it.”
Rolling down the window of the Caddy — Leon beside him, Beanie in the back seat — Sarge said to the skinny woman in white boots leaning against the door, “That’s not sufficient. You need to turn a few more tricks, Suzie.”
“Melba.” The woman’s smile set one of her eyes twitching. “But anyway, how about you? Feel like a party? What about your friend there?”
Beanie said, “You should do yourself a favor and get an intervention.”
“You got his features,” the woman said, as though trying to make a friend.
“I’m intervening,” Sarge said. He crumbled a pill in his palm. “This here’s for you. You can snort it or use it the other way, as an innuendo.”
Leon said, “She’s wasting our time.”
“Give her a break,” Beanie said.
But Sarge said, “Hop in, Suzie.” And to Leon, “Regular cash flow. She’s sitting on a gold mine.” And when the skinny woman hesitated, and Sarge snatched her wrist hard, it was Beanie who let out a cry.
In the back seat, moved by the infant depicted on the box next to her, the woman said, “I used to have one of them baby monitors.” Her eyes brimmed with tears.
That week they worked out of a motel, Beanie bringing men, one at a time, from the bars in town and turning them over to her. With the woman in a stupor they drove to the coast and set up in a condo near the harbor, Beanie managing the johns, saying to Leon and Sarge, “This is women’s work. Keep off.”
At the condo, Beanie said to the man she’d brought, “I want to introduce you to my sister,” and unlocked the too-warm and dimly lit back bedroom. “And no rough stuff.” Sarge, and sometimes Leon, listened for trouble, and stepped into the hallway to collect the money afterward from the startled man.