The girl’s expression had been half-amused, half-impressed, and cataclysmically dumb. Even as a child Frank had recognized that black hole of incurable stupid. It amazed him and left him flabbergasted. Later, when he saw it in other faces, it would come to scare him, and anger him, but he was awestruck then. Stupid like that had its own gravitational field. It pulled at you.
Only Elaine wasn’t dumb. You couldn’t get farther from dumb than Elaine.
Elaine knew what it was like to be followed around a department store by some white kid who didn’t even have a GED, playing like he’s Batman and is going to catch her shoplifting a jar of peanuts. Elaine had been cursed by protestors outside Planned Parenthood, consigned to hell by people who didn’t even know her name.
So what did she want? Why inflict this pain on him?
One nagging possibility: she was right to be worried.
As he went after the green Mercedes, Frank kept seeing Nana moving away from him, kicking her neatly arranged pieces of chalk and tracking through her drawing.
Frank knew he wasn’t perfect, but he also knew that he was basically good. He helped people, he helped animals; he loved his daughter and he would do anything to protect her; and he had never put an abusive hand on his wife. Had he made mistakes? Was the famous wall punch one of them? Frank admitted as much. He would have stated it in a court of law. But he had never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve to be hurt and he was just going to talk to the Mercedes guy, right?
Frank pulled his truck through a fancy wrought iron gate and parked behind the green Mercedes. The front fender on the left side was road-dusty, but the right side was sparkling clean. You could see where the sonofabitch had taken a rag to it.
Frank walked up the slate path connecting the driveway to the door of the big white house. Garden berms planted with sassafras lined the path, and the canopies created a corridor. Birds twittered in the branches above him. At the end of the path, by the foot of the steps, was a young lilac tree in a stone planter, near full bloom. Frank resisted the urge to uproot it. He climbed to the porch. On the face of the solid oak door was a brass knocker in the shape of a caduceus.
He told himself to turn around and drive straight home. Then he grabbed the knocker and banged it over and over against the plate.
It took awhile for Garth Flickinger to extricate himself from the couch. “Hold on, hold on,” he said—pointlessly: the door was too thick and his voice too raspy. He had been smoking dope non-stop since he returned home from his visit to Truman Mayweather’s stately pleasure trailer.
If anyone had asked him about the drugs, Garth would have made it a point to impress upon the questioner that he was merely an occasional, recreational user, but this morning had been an exception. An emergency, in fact. It wasn’t every day that you were taking a whiz in your drug dealer’s trailer and World War III broke out on the other side of the flimsy shithouse door. Something had happened—crashing, shooting, screaming—and, in a moment of incomprehensible idiocy, Garth had actually opened the door to check out what was going on. What he saw would be hard to forget. Perhaps impossible. At the far end of the trailer was a black-haired woman, naked from the waist down. She had hoisted up Truman’s Arkansas buddy by his hair and the belt of his jeans, and was pounding him face-first into the wall—whomp! whomp! whomp!
Picture a siege engine, slamming a massive tree against castle gates. The man’s head was awash in blood and his arms were ragdoll-flopping around at his sides.
Meanwhile, there was Truman, slumped on the floor with a bullet hole in his forehead. And the strange woman? Her expression was horrifyingly placid. It was as if she were just going about her business with no particular concern, except that her business was using a man’s head as a battering ram. Garth had gently closed the door, hopped on the toilet lid, and climbed out the window. He had then sprinted for his car and driven home at the speed of light.
The experience had shaken his nerves a bit, and that was not a common occurrence. Garth Flickinger, Board Certified Plastic Surgeon, member in good standing of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, was usually a pretty steady-handed fellow.
He was feeling better now, the rock that he’d smoked had helped with that; but the banging on the door was unwelcome.
Garth navigated his way around the couch and through the living room, crunching through a small sea of fast food boxes on the way.
On the flatscreen, an extremely sexy reporter was being extremely serious about a bunch of comatose old ladies at a nursing home in DC. Her seriousness only enhanced her sexiness. She was an A-cup, Garth thought, but her frame begged for a B.
“Why only women?” the reporter on the flatscreen wondered aloud. “At first we thought just the very elderly and the very young were vulnerable, but now it appears that women across age groups—”
Garth rested his forehead against the door and slapped it. “Stop! Quit it!”
“Open up!”
The voice was deep and pissed off. He tapped some reserve strength and lifted his head to peer through the spyhole. An African-American man stood outside, mid-thirties, broad shoulders, face with terrific bone structure. The man’s beige uniform momentarily caused Garth’s pulse to accelerate—cop!—but then he noticed the patch read ANIMAL CONTROL.
Ah, you are a dogcatcher—a handsome dog of a dogcatcher to be sure, but a dogcatcher nonetheless. No fugitive canines here, sir, so no problem.
Or was there? Hard to be completely sure. Could this fellow be a friend of the half-naked harpy from the trailer? Better to be her friend than her enemy, Garth supposed, but far, far better to avoid her altogether.
“Did she send you?” Garth asked. “I didn’t see anything. Tell her that, okay?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about! I came here on my own! Now open up!” the man yelled again.
“Why?” Garth asked, adding “No way” for good measure.
“Sir! I just want to talk to you.” The dogcatcher had made an effort to lower his voice, but Garth could see him twisting his mouth around, fighting the need—yes, a need—to continue yelling.
“Not right now,” Garth said.
“Someone ran over a cat. The person was driving a green Mercedes. You have a green Mercedes.”
“That’s unfortunate.” Meaning the cat, not the Mercedes. Garth liked cats. He had liked his Flamin’ Groovies tee-shirt, as well, which was balled up on the floor by the stairs. Garth had used it to clean some blood off the fender of his car. Tough times all around. “But I don’t know anything about that, and I’m having a difficult morning, and so you’ll have to leave. Sorry.”
A thud and the door shook in its frame. Garth backed up. The guy had kicked it.
Through the spyhole, Garth could see that the cords on the dogcatcher’s neck were taut. “My kid lives down the hill, you dumbfuck! What if that had been her? What if you drove over my kid instead of that cat?”
“I’m calling the cops,” Garth said. He hoped he sounded more convincing to the guy than he did to himself.
He retreated to the living room, sank into the couch, and picked up his pipe. The bag of dope was on the coffee table. Glass began to shatter outside. There was a metallic crunch. Was Señor Dogcatcher molesting his Mercedes? Garth didn’t care, not today. (It was insured anyway.) That poor junkie girl. Tiffany was her name and she was so ruined and so sweet. Was she dead? Had the people who’d attacked the trailer (he assumed the strange woman was part of a gang) killed her? He told himself that Tiff, sweet as she was, wasn’t his problem. Better not to fixate on what couldn’t be changed.