“No,” she said. “This session’s over. Ma’am, those cassettes are on the house, too, y’all just go on now.”
“Man, this is some bullshit,” Bobby said.
“Y’all go on.” She grabbed a pack of cigarettes—Kings, like Chester—and withdrew one. As she tried to light it, I noticed her hands were shaking.
“Let’s go,” Kate said softly. “We got our money back.”
“Go on!” Ruby snapped.
Confused and unsure of what to make of all this, I rose from the table and stumbled towards the door. Kate grabbed Bobby and shoved him after me.
“Man, I can’t believe this…”
Kate cut him off. “Will you please shut up and get out of this lady’s trailer like she asked?”
Chester blinked at us as we descended the metal steps to the ground, but he didn’t say anything about the tapes in Kate’s hands. Maybe he heard, I thought. Then again, maybe he doesn’t need to hear; maybe he’s psychic, too.
I didn’t understand what had happened, and I didn’t get time to think. Kate pushed Bobby away from the table and the trailer, and Bobby pushed me. We made it about ten steps before Ruby threw open the door and called out to me.
“Kevin!”
I stopped and turned. Bobby ran into me, but I didn’t fall. Fat, gray-haired Chester looked from us to Ruby, Ruby to us, back to Ruby.
Her cigarette hand shook like mad. The smoking cherry on the end quivered in the darkness that enveloped the inside of the trailer, but she held onto it. She pointed at me with the index finger of her other hand. This one didn’t shake at all.
“Beware the Bald Man!” Her voice rose in a raspy cry above the shuffle and chatter of the flea market. All over, heads turned. From a tent full of stereo equipment immediately to my right, Terrence Trent D’Arby sang the praises of a wishing well, but Ruby outblasted him. “You steer clear of the Bald Man, Kevin!”
“We’ll do that!” Bobby hollered back. “Thanks for the heads-up!”
We left. And we returned to the business of killing time.
And only later, as I lay awake in my bed that night staring at the model airplanes dangling from my ceiling, did I realize I’d never told Ruby my name.
5.
Out in the gravel parking lot next to the building that housed the radio station, I paced back and forth as Craig leaned against my BMW, head hung low. I had exhibited behavior unbecoming a member of the largest law firm in Burlington—an old law firm, a well-regarded law firm, a law firm whose clients paid it large sums of money at least in part because the words Carwood and Allison, when placed together, evoked images of well-heeled, well-trained attorneys solving complex legal problems with class.
I had gone on the radio and talked like I’d just stumbled out of the trailer park across the road. I had invited someone to come fight me at the office tomorrow.
“I don’t know,” Craig said, raising his head. “Maybe there’s a positive angle to this. You sounded like an asshole; isn’t that supposed to be a good thing for a divorce lawyer?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t think about damage control or public relations or Carwood, Allison at all—I thought only of the Bald Man. But I couldn’t discuss this with him. If my recent behavior left any doubt in his mind that the softball bat to the head had scrambled my brains, talking about the palm reading would erase it.
“What was his problem?” I asked in a mutter. The leather soles of my shoes crunched in the gravel. Despite the coolness of this particular September night, sweat ran in rivulets down my face, my neck, and disappeared into my collar. I loosened my tie. “What does he mean, he’s going to show the world that I’m no hero? That’s a threat!”
Craig raised both palms. “Kevin? Chill.”
“Chill? Whatever! That guy threatened me on the radio!” My hands curled into fists and pounded against my legs. My trigger finger had begun twitching, and while I didn’t know if Craig would see it in the darkened parking lot, I didn’t want to risk it. “I want to know who that son of a bitch is! I want to know where he called from!”
“Kevin…”
“And then I want to march right up to his house or his trailer or his cardboard box or whatever the hell he lives in and tell him say it to my face!”
“Listen.”
I pivoted on my heels and marched back down the length of the BMW, fists clenched, shaking my head.
“There’s obviously something wrong with the guy, okay?” Craig said. “Strike One, he listens to Billy Horton. He sits around on weeknights and listens to AM radio, which tells you he probably doesn’t have a whole lot going on in his life. The other thing to remember is, you are a hero, okay?”
“Whatever,” I mumbled.
“You are. You really are. Everybody in Alamance County looks up to you. You faced their worst nightmare and you came out on top. So they admire you, they praise you, they put articles in the newspaper about you… and here’s this psychopath collecting disability in his rented trailer. When he’s not watching daytime TV, he fantasizes about doing something remarkable, being somebody special. Then Kevin Swanson hijacks his fantasy. So he gets pissed and he says, I’m going to take this guy down a peg. And that’s exactly what he does.”
Craig paused.
“He was screwing with you,” he said. “That’s the last you’re going to hear from him.”
“How do you know that?”
“I spend most of my time in District Court,” he answered. “I know all about crazies. I’m like the Jane Goodall of wackjobs.”
He picked himself up off the car.
“It’s getting late,” he said. “Let’s get you back before Allie sends a search party after your ass.”
I lived off Highway 62 in Burlington. Way off Highway 62. My house, old and stately and far larger than I needed, sat nestled among the rise and fall of cleared land that had once held tobacco, cotton, corn and wheat. Now it just held grass that a man with a Bushhog and a hay rake cut for me every month. A dirt road shooting off the highway curled into thick woods that screened the house from 62 even in the wintertime, when the leaves fell to the ground and the house concealed itself behind denuded branches and the topography of the land.
This privacy, this sense of removal from the rest of the world, had drawn us here when we went looking for a bigger house after Dad’s estate settled. With all our money then, we could have bought a place at the country club, but then we’d have had to look at our neighbors every time we stepped onto our front porch. Allie didn’t want that. She had grown up in the country in Pennsylvania, had enjoyed the privacy and the peace and the nature there and wanted to give Abby the same thing. In the age of automobiles, a person could mitigate the seclusion with a ten-minute drive up the road to Burlington. “You can always seek out people when you get lonely,” she had said. “You can’t make them go away when you get tired of them.” Out here, privacy abounded. Set back as we were from the highway and surrounded by woods, I could have walked out on my porch and drank my coffee naked and no one would have seen me. In the evenings, I could have stood in the driveway and screamed my frustration at the world and no one would have heard me. Good money bought a man square footage, acreage and freedom from the prying eyes of his neighbors.
But there existed a flip side to this coin, and I noticed it the day we moved in. A bottle of Heineken in one hand, the other arm wrapped around Allie’s waist, I stood on the porch and stared out at my land, my estate. “We’re isolated now,” I said then. “Do you realize that? We’re going to have a devil of a time getting pizza delivered out here.”