The Extinction Event (11 page)

“Coke hallucinations?” Caroline asked.

“The doctor wasn't about to get out a Ouija board,” Jack said. “Wasn't about to do any more tests once he realized how much blow, God-knows-whatever stuff, Jean was doing. A real humanitarian.”

3

At Caroline's, dried off, the smell of fresh coffee from the kitchen, Jack watched while Caroline searched for Jean's symptoms on the Internet.

Caroline wore a blue terry cloth robe. Her hair was pinned up with a big red plastic clip.

“It sounds like she had serious neurological damage,” Caroline said.

“Drugs'll do that,” Jack said.

Caroline printed out the research. Each page crisply slid from her printer. Jack could smell the hot ink and paper.

“I was married,” Caroline said, belatedly answering Jack's question from the car.

She collected the pages from the printer, not looking at Jack.

“For three years,” Caroline said. “Until two years ago.”

Jack sipped his coffee. It burned his lips. But he kept sipping.

“I still see him,” Caroline said. “Occasionally.”

“Do you still make love?” Jack asked.

“That's the question you want to ask?” Caroline said. “That's the question?”

Jack sipped the scalding coffee.

“Why do you want to know?” she asked. “You've got no reason to ask something like that.”

As Jack stared at her over his coffee cup, the steam from the hot coffee made his eyes water.

“I was infertile,” Caroline said. “Well, not at first. A tubal pregnancy. Four months. Sixteen weeks. How could I not know? But I didn't. I always was irregular. I always had lots of cramps. Lots of cramps. The tube burst. Internal bleeding. Very messy situation. The doctors took everything. Hollowed me out.”

“That's why you left him?” Jack asked.

“He left me,” Caroline said. “I needed time and assumed he'd understand. He didn't.”

Jack sipped his coffee.

“I've had seven lovers,” she abruptly said.

“Like Snow White?”

“Most were taller than five feet.”

“Go figure,” Jack said.

Part Two

CAROLINE

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

1

Outside, Jack walked toward the river. The sky was clear. The stars bright as pain.

Twenty years earlier, Jack met a woman with hair as red as fox fur and luminous green eyes that rarely blinked. She had freckled breasts. Pale skin. And long, almost prehensile toes, which she used to pick up dropped hair bands, quarters, socks. Penny Robartes.

“Find a Penny, pick it up,” Penny said to Jack after they made love for the first time, “and all the day you'll have good luck.”

A month after they met, they moved into a farmhouse in Vermont. South of Brattleboro. A broken-down two-story building with peeling 1950s wallpaper—large yellow and red and white blossoms in the dining room; a repeating blue-and-white design of pagodas that looked like electric towers in the living room; Jack and Jill with their water pails walking up and tumbling down a green hill, a pattern of repeated failure, in the bedroom.

On the second day after they took possession of the house, they hired a local handyman to mow the backyard and weed the overgrown gardens. The handyman arrived as the sun was rising. When he started work his breath in the chill billowed from his steam-engine mouth as he mechanically moved through the yard, ripping out weeds, hacking away roots. By midmorning, beads of sweat riveted his forehead. At two, he'd come to the front door; and, having lost his larynx to cancer, he'd hold a device to his throat and ask, robot voiced, for his wages.

Penny owned a mutt, Sweetie Pie, who was a crotch dog. To keep him from burying his snout between her legs in the morning—they slept on a mattress on the floor of a bedroom with a bricked-up fireplace—Penny would strip off her panties and throw them to the dog.

A week after the handyman had started working for them, Penny stripped off her panties as usual and wandered through the house looking for her pet. Figuring the dog had gone out, Penny stood, naked in the kitchen doorway, left hand holding open the screen, right hand waving her panties, as she called, “Sweetie Pie? Oh, Sweetie Pie, come and get it.”

From the flower bed in the backyard, the handyman watched Penny calling and waving her panties—“Oh, Sweetie Pie, come and get it…”—and came around to the front door where, holding the device to his throat, he told Jack, “Your girlfriend needs help. I quit!”

When, after a year, Penny left him, Jack vowed he would never fall in love again.

And he didn't.

Until that night he left Caroline.

2

The revolving police car light flickered on Jack's face red, blue, red …

“What's it this time, Al?” Jack asked. “I drop a Mounds wrapper back there or something?”

“Or something,” Sciortino said, leaning across the passenger side through the open window. “Want a lift?”

“Is
no
an option?” Jack asked.

Sciortino's face was in shadow. A strip of light illuminated his eyes like a mask. His pupils were big. He blinked.

“Not tonight, pal,” Sciortino said.

The police car door handle was so cold Jack felt a ping in his right wrist. As he slid into the car, he rubbed his hands together.

“This official?” Jack asked.

“Are you in cuffs?”

“So unofficially what's up?”

“Seems to me, Jack, you've got enough on your plate. What the hell you doing back at the buffet?”

“Who's talking to me?”

“Okay, so I'm a ventriloquist. A medium. Channeling people who don't like you for starters. And can hurt you bad.”

“And you want—”

“To make sure you stay on the right side of the tracks.”

“Al, you know, that's not where I feel comfortable.”

“Next time I see you—”

“It'll be official?” Jack asked.

“It won't be polite,” Sciortino said.

Jack opened the door.

“I appreciate the warning,” he said.

“Be smart,” Sciortino said.

The sound of the slamming car door was hollow in the cold night.

Sciortino watched until Jack turned down toward the Hudson.

“Fuck me,” he said and slowly drove away.

3

Jack's house creaked in the wind. Through the cracked window opposite the foot of his bed, Jack watched the sky change from black to gray to purple to streaky red. He heard an owl hoot. In the distance, a truck downshifted. The damp morning air held a whiff of skunk.

Dragging the quilt off the bed and pulling it around his shoulders like a cloak, Jack, feet arching from the cold of the bare wood floor, walked across the room to the window and gazed out at the mist rising from the damp earth.

Through the cracked window, almost motionless in the rising mist, Jack saw two rabbits fucking.

One rabbit hunched over the other, which made spasmodic motions.

The rabbit on top had its teeth fastened to the back of the bottom rabbit's neck. Like cats. When they fuck.

With a shiver of revulsion, Jack realized he wasn't watching two rabbits fucking.

He was watching a weasel killing a rabbit.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

1

Jack parked in front of the lodge at Hague Fish & Game.

The hall smelled of freshly waxed floors. Stale popcorn, rancid butter. The grain of the knotty pine walls made swirls: galaxies, cyclones.… The room was filled with hunting trophies—a red fox with reflecting glass eyes posed on a birch log; the head of a six-point whitetail over the stone fireplace; a feral hog, its flat snout looking like industrial tubing; a huge walleye on a plaque; two raccoons; a bobcat snarling.

Guns and bows were hung on the wall to the right of the entrance. A couple of old couches and easy chairs faced the big flat-screen TV next to the fireplace. In front of the couch, on a coffee table made of a huge spool for electric power cables, were gun, hunting, and fishing magazines. A couple of old
National Geographics
. Some out-of-date Albany and local newspapers.

Weaver—a retired Sears appliance salesman; Jack couldn't remember his first name—was getting himself a cup of coffee from the stainless steel twenty-cup urn on the bar counter.

“I'm looking for my brother,” Jack said.

Weaver nodded at the urn. “Help yourself, Jackie.”

“I'm okay, Ned.” Weaver's name came to Jack.

“Bix's on the trail,” Weaver said, “fixing up the targets. Likes to keep them trim.”

Jack nodded and left the lodge.

2

Jack walked up one of the trails behind the lodge. Here and there, leaves had begun to turn, yellow or tipped with red. To the left and right of the trail, deep into the woods, half hidden—if you didn't know to look, you might miss them—were life-size targets of rabbits, bobcat, bear, squirrels, deer, a curious wolf, halfway up a tree a porcupine.… A few of them, newly touched up by Bix, looked glossy. The air midtrail was touched with paint and turpentine.

Jack whistled two notes, high and low, their childhood signal.

From somewhere ahead, Bix whistled back. He emerged from a stand of pines, carrying in each hand three paint cans by their wire handles. One of the cans, empty of paint, held a quiver of paint brushes.

“You look like hell, baby brother,” Bix said.

“I keep running into things,” Jack said.

“Maybe instead of running into things you should be running away from things.”

Side by side, they walked back up the path toward the lodge. Sunlight through the branches dappled their heads, shoulders. Over their heads came the metal-on-metal
whan-whan-whan
of a nuthatch, which seemed to keep pace with them, the call sometimes behind, sometimes ahead. A snake rippled out of the dappled path. Jack heard it whisper away into the underbrush to their right.

“Tell me what you need,” Bix said.

“I need backup,” Jack said.

“Over lunch,” Bix said, “you tell me what kind of trouble you got in since I saw you the other night, okay?”

On the way to the Chief Taghanick Diner, at the intersection of Routes 203 and 66, Jack blinked his lights at a car heading the other way, which was about to make a left turn in front of Jack's car.

“What're you doing, Jackie?” Bix asked.

“Letting him”—indicating the turning car—“know to go first,” Jack said.

“Where you been, kid?” Bix asked. “Can't do that anymore. We got Pakis up here now. You flash your light at them, they think you mean
you try to cross in front of me, you son of a bitch, I'll ram you, kill you, your family, anyone in your car
.”

“
As I was pulling away from the house,” Robert had said, “a car was about to turn the corner. I flashed my high beams. You know, what truckers do. To let him know I'd wait. He could turn first. He flashed back. So I started across the intersection, and the son of a bitch hit his accelerator. He almost broadsided me. In the rearview, I saw him park in front of Jean's building and go in.…”

“Pakis,” Bix said. “Crazy SOBs. We can't even drive like we used to.”

“Let me give you a rain check on lunch,” Jack told Bix. “I think I'm going to find something I've been looking for in our local Paki community.…”

3

The half a dozen Pakistani families in Mycenae lived together in a derelict 1950s motel off Route 9G, halfway to Kingston. Four generations, uncles and aunts, cousins, about fifty people all together, spread out in thirty-some rooms on the two floors of the old L-shaped building. In places the green stucco had flaked away from the concrete blocks beneath. The shadow of the second-floor balcony angled across the first floor façade. The empty pool had a scarlike crack in the bluish concrete. Old cars and trucks filled the parking lot. The motel office had collapsed in the middle as if a giant had stepped on it. The broken neon sign tilted, the arrow that used to point toward the rooms now aimed up past the electrical power lines at the sky.

“It's haunted, you know,” said Kipp, the young Pakistani, who seemed to be the clan spokesman, a tall man with a neat mustache in a peach-colored V-neck sweater and chinos. “By the ghost of a little girl. Six, seven. In jeans and a T-shirt. Once, twice a week, she roller-skates down the halls, singing
Hound Dog
, you know the Elvis song.”

In a sweet tenor, standing in the parking lot, one hand on the top of the chain-link fence around the ruined pool, Kipp sang the song's opening. Various relatives watched from the balcony. When he finished, they clapped. He mock bowed, right, left.

“The ghost got a better voice than me,” Kipp said. “But loud. She wakes people up. Ever since we moved in last June. No one gets any sleep. Pain in the ass.”

Jack showed Kipp the photo of Jean from the local newspaper clip about her death.

“I seen her,” Kipp said. “With my nephew, Hussein, we call him Stickman. 'Cause he's so thin, you know. 'Cause he does so much drugs. He only comes home when he runs out of money. He only runs out of money when he's too strung out to rob some 7-Eleven. I say, Why you robbing 7-Elevens? Boy's crazy. He'll get caught. He'll want my help. Not me. I won't lift this finger. Petty larceny. I read the law books. Take night courses at Hudson Valley Community College. My family needs a lawyer. This country, every family needs a lawyer. Lawyer, doctor, teacher. And someone to slap the kids back in line. My brother, he's a big guy, tried to slap Stickman back in line. That's when he leaves. Good. What this family don't need is a thief.”

“I want to talk to him,” Jack said. “About this girl.”

“This dead one?” Kipp said. “You think he can tell you how she died?”