Lost Echoes (22 page)

“Too many churches. Not enough Christians.”

“The school all right?”

“Pretty good.”

“You probably don’t know about it, but my dad died.”

“No. I didn’t. I’m sorry. He was a nice man. Recently?”

“A while back. Heart attack. Died at home.”

“You probably know about my dad.”

“Saw something in the paper.”

“Pink.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

When they arrived at Harry’s apartment, Kayla pulled to the curb. “It’s the one on top,” he said.

Kayla nodded.

“Maybe we could talk,” Harry said. “Have some coffee sometime. It’s been a while.”

“Sure.”

Kayla wrote down her phone number, gave it to Harry. “Old times,” she said.

42

His apartment seemed a place of long ago and far away, but it had been only a few hours since Harry had sat on the couch waiting for Talia’s call.

No sooner was he in the door than he stripped off the clothes Talia had bought him, draped them over a chair. He put the shoes and socks together and put them under the chair. He sat on the couch in the silk underwear she had bought him and decided to keep them.

He figured, what he’d been through, he’d earned that much. Besides, they were really comfortable. He decided if he gave them back, he was gonna make sure they had a skid highway in the back, something she could remember him by. But no. He was going to keep them.

There was a knock on the door.

Harry got up and went to the window and looked out by moving the curtain slightly. A big man was looking right at him, and next to him, in front of the door, was Mr. McGuire. Still in party clothes.

Harry dropped the curtain.

“Open up,” said McGuire. “We just saw you at the window.”

Curses, thought Harry.

“Open the goddamn door, or Jimmy here will kick it down.”

“I’ll call the cops,” Harry said. “Fact is, I’m doing it right now.”

“Go ahead. I know the chief. He knows I’m here. Count of three, the door comes down,” McGuire said.

Harry opened the door.

McGuire and the moose named Jimmy pushed inside. Unlike McGuire, the moose wore blue jeans and a flannel jacket over a T-shirt.

“What a crummy place,” McGuire said. “You brought my daughter here?”

“Actually,” Harry said, “she preferred the backseat of the car.”

McGuire slapped out at Harry, and Harry stepped back and the slap passed by, and Harry thought: Cool, I’m really starting to learn something. I knew that was coming. I got out of the way, smoothly.

McGuire slapped him with the other hand.

It hurt.

Harry put a hand to his face. Thought, note to self: When you do something smooth and cool, best not to become too caught up in it. ’Cause then you get decooled in the following moments.

“I want you to stay away from my daughter,” McGuire said.

“Hey, I’m through.”

“Others have said as much, and they kept coming around. I know she’s always in heat, but you keep your dog nose out of her ass. Got me?”

“Promise you. I’m done.”

“You’re not done. Jimmy here, he’ll make you done. Like way fucking overcooked.”

Harry glanced at Jimmy. Jimmy didn’t seem too interested. He looked as concerned about this meeting as a pig might be over the proper use of dinner china. He probably had an overdue date with a beer, a nudie magazine, and a handful of Vaseline.

“Jimmy can really fuck you up,” McGuire said.

Jimmy slapped a big fist into a big open palm.

“I don’t want to be fucked-up.”

“Thought not,” McGuire said. “And don’t be spreading lies about me killing someone in the shelter. Visions, my ass. You were trying to impress my daughter and it backfired.”

“I saw something.”

McGuire studied Harry. He put his face close to Harry’s.

“You saw shit. Now forget it. You go around saying things like that…well, I won’t bring Jimmy. I’ll just bring me. I like to have someone else do my dirty work, pay them well. But for you, I might make an exception. Dragging my name through the dirt, that isn’t good. And as for cops, forget it. I could kill your ass and throw you in the riverbottom, bury you out back of the fucking Coke plant, and no one would look for you, and if they found you, one word from the chief and they’d put you back. Got me, pencil dick?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Jimmy, show him something.”

Jimmy came forward quickly, and Harry thought, I ought to do something. I ought to do something Tad taught me, except mostly what I’ve learned so far is concentration and don’t fall over roots. And then Jimmy sent an upper cut into Harry’s belly, and Harry folded with it, tried to relax, and did. It was a good shot, and he felt it, but not like he would have before. He let his breath out and went limp and the punch picked him up some, and when it was over Harry straightened and took in a deep breath. He was hurt, but not destroyed.

Jimmy and McGuire both looked at Harry for a long, odd moment.

“Tougher than you look,” McGuire said. “But nobody’s as tough as they would need to be if I get after them. You got me?”

“I still got you.”

“Good. Now, no more business about the shelter, and stay away from my daughter. Buy you a watermelon, drill a hole in it, fuck that. It’s more fitting to your station in life, which is just under the fucking dirt, southwest of nowhere. Good fucking night.”

They went out then and shut the door, and Harry sat down, feeling the pain in his stomach. Kind of proud of himself, really.

“Nighty-night,” he said to the empty room.

Harry glanced at the suit pants, the fancy shirt on the back of the chair, thought, damn, there was my chance to return that shit. Then he thought: You were just a pet, you idiot. And not even a loved pet. Just a dog she liked for a while, got tired of, was ready to send to the animal shelter. She’s already, this very night, petting another spaniel’s head. A full-blood. Not some mongrel.

He asked himself: In the long run, what did I get out of it all?

Well, yeah. There was that. That was something.

Still, those memories didn’t make him feel as good as he would have liked to have felt. And, of course, seeing someone murdered in the past inside an old shelter—well, really inside his head—squeezing Talia till she hurt, that didn’t work out so well.

Of course, he had met Jimmy. He was starting to get out and meet people. That was a kind of plus. Getting punched by a hired thug. That was new in his life.

He felt emotions wind up in a ball and bounce off the inside of his head, and they weren’t his emotions. They may have been released by his own, but these belonged to time travelers of a sort. Banged and battered, murdered, and in some cases self-destructive souls, released by sound, reverberating in his skull, flashing at the corners of his eyes, knotting up his nerves, squeezing all the juice out.

He hung his head between his knees, then slowly lifted it.

He had done well for a moment there. Took a punch, avoided a slap. But now he was feeling weak. Feeling a lot like he had always felt. And he thought about the sounds lurking. More bad memories and painful emotions ready to leap into his head and ride around on his nerve endings.

Sucked.

He looked about, considered putting the cardboard and egg cartons back. Except he had disposed of them. Maybe he could get more, starting tomorrow. He would have to consult his book, maybe do some research, as he hadn’t been to the Wal-Mart lately, and out back of it was where you found all the good boxes.

But there might have been an accident somewhere near there, so he had to watch that.

He paused.

Nope.

Not going to do that. Won’t slip back into the old ways. No, sir.

I’m one with the universe.

Except for this little snag, of course. It’s not every night you can lose your girl, accuse her father of murder based on visions from the past, get arrested, released, get the cop’s number who drove you home.

That part wasn’t so bad.

Course, Kayla was just being friendly. Old times, she said.

Pink?

What did that mean? What was she talking about? Did he misunderstand her?

No. He was fairly certain she had said, “Pink.”

He thought on matters awhile, decided the thing to do was go for a walk. He got dressed and went along the way he knew best, way out along Pecan Street, strolling briskly, hands in pockets, a cool wind on his face. It was the long way to go, not the short way, but the last time he had checked, written in his book, this had been a pretty safe place.

He walked along the familiar route and came to the liquor store and stopped in front of it. He looked at his watch. The store closed in fifteen minutes.

Sometimes you had to break the rules.
Shit
. He had earned a drink, the day he’d had. He’d earned two drinks. Maybe a whole bottle. Bottles. Beer, that might be the thing. No gin, whiskey, anything like that.
Rio Bravo
, baby. He could handle it the way Dean handled it. Beer instead of the hard stuff.

He walked inside the store and the counterman looked up, said, “Hey, haven’t seen you in a while.”

“I know.”

“I was thinking you gave it up.”

“No.”

“What’s it gonna be?”

Harry stood his ground, looked around. All the bottles were so bright and inviting; it was like he expected to find a genie inside, one that could grant him the wish of oblivion.

One with the universe. Yeah. He got a few beers in him, that’s exactly how he’d be. Tad was wrong. He had been one with the universe when he was drunk. It was the sober part that fucked him up.

Harry picked up a six-pack of Bud and put it on the counter and took out his wallet. There wasn’t much inside. A few bucks. Enough for this, though. He looked up and the counterman smiled at him. He didn’t know the man’s name, but the man knew him, knew what he wanted. Over the counterman’s shoulder, he saw his reflection in a mirror on the wall.

He looked frantic. His tongue was sticking out of his mouth a little and his face was flushed, and the grin that was around his probing tongue looked to him to be the grin of an idiot.

“One with the universe, my ass,” Harry said.

“What?” said the counterman. “What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

Harry left the beer, turned, and went out and back along the sidewalk. He went a way he knew that led toward a little street that passed between a grove of pecan trees. He went that way because it was a shortcut that had always been safe, nothing horrible in any sound he had ever found.

Went along knowing that the street connected to another that would lead him to Tad’s.

Tad was the man. Tad had some answers.

Kayla unlocked the door to her little house on the shadowy end of the street, hoping that damn dog Winston wasn’t loose in the yard. He was big, a Great Dane, and he loved to stick his nose in her ass, as well as stand on her car. Anyone’s car or ass, for that matter. He must have thought he was a cat. If she didn’t like the silly dog so much, she’d turn in his owner for not keeping him on a leash.

Winston didn’t show.

She went inside, moved slowly through the dark. She didn’t need a light. There wasn’t much to figure out. Furniture was minimal.

When she got to the den, which she had transformed into an office, she turned on the light. There was a clutch of darts sticking up in a block of wood on top of a large carved wooden bear. The bear had been her father’s. He bought it for her when she was ten. They had been driving along on their way to visit relatives in Houston, and there it was, along with a bunch of other chain saw–carved critters. She had squealed so loudly he had pulled over and bought her the bear, right there on the spot, had to rent a truck later to come back and get it.

The block of wood fit right between the bear’s ears.

Kayla picked up the block, pulled the six darts out of it, put the block back between Harry’s ears. That’s what she had named the bear. Harry.

After all these years she hadn’t forgotten Harry, and of course he remembered her too. A little. Had asked for her number. Just to be friendly, most likely. A sort of I’ll call, we’ll do lunch. That wasn’t exactly what she had in mind. It wasn’t the way she dreamed things would be. She thought she would grow up and see Harry again and he would fall madly in love with her and they would marry.

Two interlocking pieces of the same great puzzle. Hadn’t that been the way they talked that time so long ago?

Tonight hadn’t quite been the vision she had imagined.

Course, she had a lot of other things in mind, and nothing had come of any of those either. Like solving her father’s murder for one.

Suicide they called it, not murder.

Well, strictly speaking, no one back then thought it was a suicide. Autoerotic accidental death. That’s what was thought. But her dad had been a cop, and the police force didn’t want that out, the stuff about the autoerotic business, and they spared her and her mother from having that in the paper.

Suicide.

That’s how it read.

It wasn’t.

And it was no accident either. She didn’t care what the cops thought or what it had said in the paper.

It was murder. She was sure of it.

There was a target on the door across the way and she threw the darts one by one at it. Three of the darts stuck in the door. She was going to have to replace that door pretty soon. It was pocked with holes. The landlord found out, he’d be pissed. Maybe, she thought, I can get some cork board, cover the whole door, that way I miss, no damage.

She collected the darts, tried again from a closer distance. She hit the board five out of six times. A couple of them landed in the general vicinity of the bull’s-eye.

When she gathered them up a third time, she picked up the block of wood, stuck the darts in it, replaced it between Harry’s ears.

So much for sports.

She turned on some music, doo-wop, her favorite.

She fixed a cup of instant coffee, heating it in the microwave. It tasted dreadful. She sipped it, standing at the kitchen sink, thinking about the events of the night, about what Harry had said about a redheaded guy, thinking this while she listened to the Tokens sing about the lion in the jungle.