When Tommy came home from business school for the holidays that year, he called Sally and asked her to join him out at the Blue Moon Motel on the night of New Year’s Day to listen to their homegrown country star Will Henry celebrate the music of Duke L’Heureux and Patti Jo Rendine, who were that same night the feature attraction at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. Their songs had hit the top of the charts several times over, and three of them were still in the top ten that yule-tide season, including their famous tribute to the Moon itself, making the motel the newest country music Mecca. “Old Will sings like he’s got a sax reed up his nose,” Tommy said, “but it should be worth a laugh.” The night was fully booked, but his dad knew the owner, they’d add a table. She said okay, why not? Just the right night for such a reunion: day after the night before. She wondered what they would find to talk about. And then, in that week between Christmas and New Year’s, she was gifted with grisly openers. A child had gone missing and his parents said he often played around the old abandoned Deepwater Number Nine mine, which was no longer being guarded — kids liked to light the gas leaking out of the mine through vents in the fields behind the slag heaps, more than one had got his fingers burnt and hair singed — and they were afraid he might have fallen down the closed shaft somehow. He hadn’t (he was finally found out at the lakes, curled up beside his bike, lost and hungry, in the bird sanctuary), but the decayed unidentified corpse of a white male in his twenties or thirties was discovered at the bottom. All they could say about it was that it looked like it had been badly chopped up and had been there for a while.
So Sally asked Tommy over their first beer who he thought that body was, and he said he had no idea. Everyone’s attention was on the murder trials just getting underway at the time, the networks replaying all the most violent footage from that catastrophic day, and Sally asked if Tommy had watched any of it. He had. Tommy had helped to identify the red boots left on the hotel roof when they blew away the biker who was wearing them as belonging to his former high school classmate Carl Dean Palmers. They had APACHE burned on the inside of them, which was Carl Dean’s new chosen name, and that went along with the feathers and the red Indian makeup. But now that he’d seen him in the replays, Tommy said when Sally asked, that guy dancing on the hotel roof was definitely not Carl Dean. “That dude could have played basketball, but not Ugly. He’s more the squat wrestler type. When he jumps, his feet probably never leave the ground.”
“But then how do you think his boots got up there?” Tommy didn’t know, didn’t really seem interested. He was scanning the SRO crowd. Angela Bonali was there in a side booth, looking about ten or fifteen pounds heavier than the last time Sally saw her, squeezed in with Joey Castiglione and Monica and blind Pete Piccolotti. It was some kind of celebration. Tommy feigned bored disinterest, Angela excessive affection for her new partner, a loud gaiety. Sally watched from the wings. Will Henry was singing about a ghost in a graveyard. “That wasn’t the first time that week a guy’s feet got separated from the rest of him,” Sally said to the back of Tommy’s head. “A few days before, there was that dynamite explosion at the church camp which killed a bunch of people. One of the bodies was found without a head, another without its feet, which were discovered later out at the state park where the bikers were holed up for a night or two afterwards.”
“Hah,” said Tommy, turning toward her. “So you figure the guy was in a hurry and just cut the boots off with the feet still in them.”
“Something like that. But the body without the feet was identified and that wasn’t Carl Dean either. We know now how the boots might have got from the dead guy at the camp to the one on the roof. The question is: how did the first guy get them?”
Tommy stares at her a moment over his beer. “Ah, I get it. You think maybe the guy dumped down the mine was…?”
“He still had his feet on, but nothing on them except the tatters of rotting socks.”
“How do you know?”
“I asked. Forget the socks. I made that up. But they said, yes, he was essentially barefoot. So, all right: the day of the rape. You were waiting for Carl Dean at Lem’s garage, but he didn’t show up. His truck was packed and parked in front of the camp lodge. He was on his way out of there, but something interrupted him. Unfortunately, the cultists set the van alight; they thought it was the devil’s van or some such lunacy. The people I talked to last summer told me that both Aunt Debra and the Collins girl said Carl Dean was there at the rape, but they were confused about what part he played. They were both traumatized, especially the girl, so it was probably all just a blur. But Carl Dean was evidently in love with that girl and had come all the way back here to see her. And she was in trouble. What I’m trying to say is that it looks like your friend, whom everyone has vilified, was really a hero.”
“Brilliant, Holmes. Good for old Ugly. But a dead hero.”
“Longevity’s not a goal for most heroes. They’re going for something else. It’s why we remember them and not much of anyone else.”
“Mm. Poor old Pete over there’s another. I’ve been by the store a few times to see him. He says he knows they’re making a big deal out of what he did and everyone’s talking about how he sacrificed himself out of love for Monica and her kid, but actually that wasn’t on his mind at all. The ball was in the air, he said, and as soon as his feet left the floor, he was back on the court. Went up for the interception and follow-through jump shot and knew he had to sink it before the buzzer.”
“Wow! I know that feeling. When the thing itself takes over and you’re just its tool. Okay, here’s another, not so scary. You know that Olive Oyl wallflower who used to pull sodas in Doc Foley’s drugstore?”
“Beanpole Becky? Sure.”
“Well, she turned up on TV the other day to describe the killing of Doc Foley and her own near-death experience. She said in that flat deadpan voice of hers that the whole thing has affected her orgasms, making the interviewer’s eyes pop. He asked if she meant that it was, you know, interfering with…? ‘No,’ she said. ‘I mean they’re better.’”
Tommy thought that was hilarious, and the rest of the night, like Becky’s orgasms, went better. Trading hero tales was a good idea. Tommy turned his back on Angela’s party and over the next couple of rounds, in and around the over-amplified music, they talked about his mother’s wacky trip to Lourdes with Concetta Moroni, paid for by an old boyfriend; the Bali postcard the ex-mayor sent the city council; and Christmas week’s big news that Priscilla Tindle, who was back with her husband, had given birth to a daughter whom she was reportedly naming Mary after the child’s grandmother, though maybe that was just one of her dad’s jokes. Sally’s mother had visited the preacher in the mental hospital and found him neatly shaved and barbered, smoking his pipe again, and completely sane, so far as she could tell. It was like the Jesus in him had sort of boiled off, or dropped away like the husk of a seedpod. His wife — Sally’s “Aunt Debra”—was, and perhaps still is, in a women’s prison, where she was apparently becoming something of a spiritual leader, talking with the birds and creating her own pollyanna branch of Brunism, and her adopted orphan had had, in her mother’s words, “a very successful surgical intervention. Really, they’ve done a great job with the poor boy. He’s very relaxed and pleasant now and he doesn’t remember a thing about his mixed-up past. Of course, he doesn’t recognize anybody either.” Sally, her own brain wobbling a bit in her skull at the thought of this “intervention,” took a mental note at the time about magic spells: You only hear about those who break their spells. Most don’t.