Billy’s fat face turned white and he grabbed his microphone. He made a cutting motion to Dylan or William, who didn’t see it because he was busy staring at me.
“And you know what?” I continued, “You’re batshit crazy. How could I make up a story like that?”
“You tell me,” Thomas from Mebane replied, emotionless. “You’re the one who did it. You’re truly a coward, Kevin. You’re a sniveling, worthless coward who…”
“Coward? Why don’t you come on down to my office tomorrow morning and I’ll beat your ass? And hey, what’s your real name? Too pussy to share that, you little bitch?”
Now Billy lunged sideways to push Dylan or William out of the way. The boy hit the floor at the same instant as Craig’s right hand fell on my shoulder, pulling me backwards exactly as his left pushed the microphone away from my face. Billy began furiously fingerstabbing buttons on Dylan or William’s console.
Thomas from Mebane’s voice glistened with amusement at the commotion he’d caused. Classic psychopath. “Oh, that’s not important,” he said. “Why don’t you just call me…”
Pause.
“…the Bald Man,” he finished.
At that moment, Billy found the button that ended the call. He slid back over to his own station to announce a commercial break, ostensibly to give everybody time to get me under control, but he needn’t have bothered. Every joule of anger had drained from my body just as the blood had drained from my face. I found myself sitting in shocked silence as Dylan or William climbed up off the floor and Billy tore off his headphones and Craig was saying something in my ear about what was I thinking, saying ass and shit and pussy on the radio? What was wrong with me?
I didn’t answer him. Three simple words—The Bald Man—and all my hot water turned cold. Because while nobody else could have known it, not even Allie, I’d heard those words before.
4.
I’d like to say that I’d reached this station in life—job at my city’s largest law firm, big house out in the country, BMW, beautiful wife who didn’t have to work for us to live—through nothing but the strength of my own character. But I can’t. I grew up in a house on the golf course of the Rock Barn Country Club in Conover, North Carolina, right outside the larger city of Hickory. My father, a prominent cardiac surgeon, made sure that my family never had to worry about money. The closest my brother Bobby and I ever came to the school of hard knocks was attending public school, which meant that we mixed with the proletariat.
But life can suck in any number of ways. In our case, we never had to worry about subsistence issues only because our father worked his ass off, meaning he stayed gone all the time. He left us in the care of our mother, who had this nasty habit of clocking out every day before lunch. We only saw her in the mornings, a red-eyed, irritable presence that burned the toast, overcooked the eggs, never smiled and occasionally fled into the first-floor powder room to vomit. On days when my father left before breakfast, we had to burn our own toast because she wouldn’t even get out of bed. Every afternoon, I’d find her lying down either in her bedroom or on a couch.
“Your mother’s depressed,” Dad explained. “Leave her be.”
“Our mother’s a sorry drunk,” Bobby explained. “Want to order some pizza?”
We spent our afternoons and evenings watching television, playing Nintendo, eating junk food and occasionally doing homework. When Bobby reached driving age, we’d cruise around Hickory in Mom’s Mercedes with Kate, the girlfriend who would later become his wife, and look for reasons not to go home. A lot of my memories of childhood take place in that Mercedes, or somewhere I went in it, with Bobby and Kate. By virtue of the location of her parents’ single-wide trailer in relation to the Rock Barn Country Club, she and Bobby met in kindergarten. They became such good friends that we actually took her on vacation with us. I remember my mother and father arguing about her once when I was really little, on the way back from one of the rare family dinners out that Kate didn’t attend.
“We’ve got two kids of our own,” Mom protested in response to something Dad said. “Two. Not three.”
“What are we supposed to do? You saw how they live.”
“They’re her parents.”
“They’re sorry drunks,” Dad snapped. “They lay around getting plowed all the time and it’s shameful. You know that? They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Those aren’t parents, those are sorry, worthless sacks of alcoholic trash. I have absolutely no respect for people like that.”
My mother fell silent. The conversation ended there.
One Saturday morning during Bobby’s 12th grade year and my 8th, we went to the flea market at the fairgrounds on Highway 70. This wasn’t special in and of itself; the fairgrounds always hosted a flea market on weekends, and that Saturday wasn’t the first time we’d gone there to kill time. But I always remembered that particular Saturday, because that was the day we went to the palm reader.
The flea market had always reminded me of a scene from the first Star Wars movie, where Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi navigated the hardscrabble streets of Mos Eisely on Tatooine. Closely-packed clumps of Hmong jostled for space with Mexicans, Cambodians, everyone chattering in the indecipherable—to me—tongue of his or her people. We saw white people, but they were different from us—they wore tattered jeans, denim shorts, T-shirts, arms and necks tanned leather-brown by the sun and nicotine. They also seemed to speak a different language, perhaps because they didn’t all have their front teeth. They sold; they bought. They haggled to save a dollar here, a nickel there. They inspired a deep, strong desire to finish high school.
We didn’t go with the expectation of consulting the palm reader. We ended up at a table under an awning on the back lot, rifling through the seller’s offerings with no particular retail goal in mind. The table had grabbed our attention because of the brace of rifles and shotguns standing with a steel cable running through their trigger guards, threaded there to keep anyone from stealing them. Bobby and I picked up and inspected the weapons like we’d been handling them our whole lives—barrel’s in good shape on this one, Bobby commented, to which I responded with a yeah, it is, as if I knew a decent barrel from a crappy one.
The seller also had a box of cassette tapes from bands whose music had reached that difficult age where albums tend to migrate from cars and bedrooms into cardboard bins at flea markets just like this one. Kate busied herself separating out the wheat from the chaff. When she found one she liked, she’d open the case and inspect the tape itself, looking for bends or discoloration, winding the spools with her index finger to see if they actually turned or if one of them would bind up the moment she popped the cassette into the dashboard. If it passed muster, she’d set it aside. Suddenly, she stopped rifling through the tapes and stared at a small placard displayed in a card holder on the table next to her box of treasures.
“Are you a palm reader?” She asked the seller.
The man looked sixties-ish but could have been any age behind his gray beard shot through with flecks of black. He wore a red trucker’s cap advertising some tree removal service out of Conover and a red tee shirt with a pocket on the left breast that read “Marlboro” but held a pack of Kings. Steel wool covered his forearms. He opened his mouth to reveal a set of teeth that appeared relatively intact but bore the telltale stains of too much tobacco and not enough toothpaste.
“Naw,” he said, “That’s my missus. She’s in the trailer.” He pivoted his head a half-turn on his fleshy neck and shouted, “RUBY! YOU GOT CUSTOMERS!”