Waltz of Shadows (2 page)

On top of all that, he was a bullshitter and had no more true ambition than a frog.

I hated to get it started, but I said: “Tell me about it.”

Silence hung in the air for a time.

I sat down on the bottom step of the stairs and waited. Wylie got up again and ambled over, nodded his head in the direction of my crotch, but it was just a feint, to keep me honest. He laid down at my feet.

Bill said, “I got to talk to you in private. I don’t want to do it over the phone. I need to see you. Can I come over? I’ll have to take a taxi, but I think I can swing it. We can have a couple of drinks in the study.”

I thought about that one. I wasn’t in the mood to get Beverly stirred up. Telling her Bill was coming over was like telling her I was going to stack and store a wheelbarrow load of fresh pig manure in the house.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Beverly doesn’t like me, right?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Don’t have to. She talks to me like I’m a bill collector.”

“You two just don’t click.”

“We don’t click all right.”

“Look, what she’s got against you is ten thousand dollars you haven’t paid back. Ten thousand you don’t plan to pay back. Some of us work, Bill. Come over with the ten thousand in your hand, Beverly’ll meet you at the door in her panties playing a bass drum.”

“Uncle Hank, you know I’m going to pay that money back.”

“No, I don’t. You got a job? You’re twenty-four years old. It’s time you started footing your own bills.”

“Really, Uncle Hank. I’m not trying to borrow money. I need your help.”

I was going to tell him to find someone else, but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. All I could think of was Bill at seven years old, right after my brother was killed.

“Listen,” I said. “Here’s the score. I got plans this morning, and I don’t want to get in dutch with Beverly.”

“I hear that.”

“I’m gonna take a shower and take the family to lunch, then I’ll meet you at your place.”

“I’m not at my place, and I’m not going back there. And if I did go back, you wouldn’t know where to go, because I don’t live where I used to.”

“What?”

“The place I moved to is the place I’m not going back to… Forget all that, okay. I have to see you now.”

“After lunch, Bill, or get someone else. Call Arnold, see what he says.”

Silence again. Arnold was my older half-brother from my Dad’s earlier marriage. Arnold’s mom had died in childbirth. My father was young then and hadn’t done so well with Arnold. Arnold didn’t so much grow up as he got jerked up.

“All right,” Bill said. “Let’s do this. I’m at a motel. Calls itself a tourist court, actually. I got it on a match book here… Christ, how could I have forgotten a name like this? Sleepy Time Tourist Courts. I’m in room forty. This place is a hole.”

“I know where it is. Another year or two without paint and repairs, they’ll be holding that place up with a stick. Couldn’t you have found something better?”

“Money.”

“Yeah, well, you did okay then. Listen up. We finish lunch, I’ll drive over. Might be as late as two or two-thirty. We go by one of my stores and pick up a movie for the night on Saturdays. Sometimes we goof around a little. Run a few errands. I’ll move things quickly as possible.”

“What I’m talking here is more important than fucking lunch and a movie. I’m talking some desperate shit.”

“It’ll hold,” I said. “See you after lunch.”

I didn’t give him time to complain. I hung up. I didn’t really think what he had to say would amount to much, figured no matter what he said, in the end it would all come down to borrowing more money.

   I finally got the family home and swapped the van for my pickup, I drove over to Sleepy Time Tourist Courts. It was about two o’clock then.

Beverly hadn’t been too happy about me saying I was going over to see Bill, and threatened me with castration with the edge of a credit card if I loaned him any money.

The only thing I felt good about right then was driving my truck. I love that ugly bastard. It’s old and grey and scratched and runs like the proverbial scalded dog. Has a gun rack against the back window that sports a double barrel twelve gauge and a baseball bat, a loaded .38 in the glove box.

Before I started out for the illustrious Sleepy Time Tourist Courts, I had put the shotgun and the ball bat on the right side floorboard and thrown my old man’s hunting coat over them. The coat lived in the car, same as the twelve gauge and the ball bat.

I didn’t hunt anymore, not since I was a kid, and I didn’t carry either the shotgun or pistol out of fear, but I had a respect for those guns, as well as the baseball bat and the old hunting coat.

The coat, truck, guns, and baseball bat had been my Dad’s, and it was the all of my inheritance, that and the skills of a woodsman, which had now grown dim and rusty, but were still appreciated.

For his inheritance, my brother’s boy, Bill, Mr. Hard Luck, had gotten three-hundred-and-sixty dollars and thirty-eight cents, long spent.

Arnold, half-brother and redneck, had inherited my dad’s six bird dogs, ten acres of land and a mobile home, a fishing shack on two acres out at Imperial Lake, and my Dad’s bad temper. Except for the temper, you could say Arnold got the best deal, but then, the way my Dad saw it, he owed Arnold more.

   Sleepy Time Tourist Courts didn’t strike me as a place you’d get much sleep. Unless you’re talking about the permanent kind. It’s on the side of Imperial City where the poor people live, made mostly of blacks and Mexicans and poor whites, and on some nights, especially summer nights when the heat’s way up, and the desperation gets so high a fellow can hear himself sweat, guns and knives come out and someone gets hauled away to a pauper’s grave. I pulled up in front of the place and got out and locked the pickup.

The motel had been built in the fifties and remodeled to fit the more modern motel concept of the mid-sixties, which was about the last time I figured the rooms had been swept out. The place was painted asshole pink and the pink was peeling. It dripped and scaled all over. All the curtains on all the windows were drawn, lest a little sunshine get in.

Room forty was upstairs. I could see the door number plain enough from where I stood by my truck. It was one of the few rooms that still had a number on it. The metal railing shook as I climbed. Pigeon shit was all over the landing and there was a used prophylactic lying beside a hypodermic needle. Come next hard rain, however, things might be cleaner.

I knocked on the door and Bill answered. His dark blond hair was rumpled and greasy and his face was oily and set with lines.

His shirt was stuck to him and his pants had a snotty shine. He was banged up and a little bloody.

“Goddamn, Bill,” I said.

“Get in,” he said. “Hurry up.”

I went inside and he closed the door. It was dark and the odor of his body in there was strong enough to go buy groceries and lube my truck.

“Turn on a light,” I said.

“I prefer the dark,” he said, “but I’ll give you a little light.”

There was an old stuffed chair by the window, and I went over there and sat down. At my elbow, on the table, was a lamp with a towel draped over it. Next to the lamp was an open bottle of cheap wine with most of the wine gone. Next to that was a stack of newspapers.

Bill turned on the lamp, almost knocking over the wine in the process. The light, muted beneath the towel, looked like the glow from a jack-o-lantern.

“What now?” I asked. “Spooky noises, a flashlight under our chins?”

“I’m depressed and scared, Uncle Hank. Too much light makes me feel kind of sick. Don’t jack with me, all right?”

“What have you done?” I asked. “Cut through the bullshit and get to it.”

“It’s not that easy, Uncle Hank. There’s a lot to it… First, look at this. Tell me what you think it is.”

He went on the other side of the bed and picked a long, narrow, black photo album off the nightstand and tossed it to me.

I caught it and looked at it. There was no writing on the outside. It had a copper-colored clasp holding it together, and I unsnapped that.

Inside were cellophane windows and about a third of the book  filled with photographs. Two wide, six deep. At the top of the page was a photograph of a young man smiling, and beside that photograph was another of the same man, only he wasn’t smiling. He had a small hole in the center of his forehead and his right eye bulged out of its socket. His face was as white as bleached rice. His mouth was closed, but one broken top tooth hung over his bottom lip like a stalactite.

Below those photos, on the left, was one of a middle-aged man, very much alive. On the right was, I presume, the same man, only you couldn’t tell for sure. His face was a hole. A human jelly doughnut. Shotgun blast, I figured.

Below those, an elderly sour-mouthed woman sitting in a wheel chair, and on the right, the wheel chair overturned, the woman beside it in a pool of blood and scattering of brains.

Next page, a man’s face on one side, the other a close up rear view of a naked man with his ass facing out, something jammed up it. A poker, or a thin, lead pipe maybe. I couldn’t make it out. The object and the guy’s ass were smeared with blood.

The rest of the book was the same sort of thing.

I said, “What in the hell is this?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Bill said. “It’s how I got it that’s important. I mean, does that look like special effects to you?”

“No.”

“Because it isn’t. That woman on the bottom of the first page. Recognize her?”

“No.”

“Mrs. Maude Page.”

“The heiress?”

“Yeah. Remember, she was murdered? Pushed down a concrete embankment about a mile from her house. The house was burglarized. Happened a year ago.”

“I remember something about it. But why is her picture in here? Wait a minute! I know. This is a book of shots from the newspaper morgue. Or more likely the police morgue. Somebody is collecting this stuff. A ghoulish personality. Maybe had a contact at the police department. Gets them to steal the stuff for them… Isn’t you, is it?”

“No. That’s not what it is.”

“Well, what is it?”

“First, will you help me, Uncle Hank?”

“I don’t know. I’m getting a little nervous here. Tell me how you came by the book.”

“I been taking a few classes over at the college—”

“I paid for them, didn’t I?”

“I’m trying to get an education, Uncle Hank. Do something with my life.”

“Like when I paid for that goddamn trucker school for you.”

“I thought it was a good idea, but those trucks get boring.”

“You never made a run, Bill. You didn’t even finish the course. And remember when you were going to raise those Australian birds? What were they?”

“Emus. There’s a growing market moving into East Texas. Ten years from now everyone will be eating Emu steaks.”

“Not raised by you.”

“Want to hear this or not?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Tell it.”

“I guess it begins with Sharon.”

“Figures. A woman.”

He sat on the edge of the bed, shook slightly, as if chilled, got a cigarette out of his shirt pocket, put it between his lips, produced a folder of matches from his shirt pocket, peeled off one, scratched it to life and lit up.

“Since when do you smoke?” I said.

“Since a pretty short time ago.”

He took another deep drag and held it in for a long time before he let it out. The cigarette was burned half way down.

He began to talk.

   First of this semester, Uncle Hank, when you loaned me the money to start college, I decided then and there I wasn’t going to disappoint you this time. I started going to the University library to study nights.

Well, all right. I’m not going to bullshit you. It was a place to meet women. I admit it. I don’t think that’s so bad. I was doing some studying too.

So, I was sitting at a table near the elevator, eyeing the gals getting out of the car, and I saw this good looking blonde step out and start roaming the stacks.

I made my move, went over where I’d seen her go behind a stack of books, and as I was coming around the corner of the shelves, I came up on her. Just standing there. Not really looking for anything, you know. Just hanging.

So I keep going down the row, moving my finger over the book spines, working my lips like I’m reading titles, you know, and when I’m kind of close to her, she says: “You don’t give a fuck about books, do you?”

Well, I look at her with a full view, and man, she’s better yet. The fucking Goddess of Love. About twenty-two, twenty-three years old. Long, blond hair, kind of wavy. She was wearing this short black skirt that made you want to lie on the floor between her legs and worship.

I said something like, “Beg your pardon.” I don’t remember exactly, because I was, to say the least, startled. She said, “You aren’t looking for a book. You came down this row with one thing in mind. Me. Look at the bulge you got.”

I swear, Uncle Hank, she talked just like that, and it was turning me on. I mean, I had a dick hard enough to pop a tire off the rim. So I said, “Yeah, you’re right. I thought I could talk to you. I wanted to meet you.”

She said. “You thought you might get a little jelly roll, that’s what you thought.”

“That wouldn’t hurt my feelings,” I said, and she said, “Well goddamn it, let’s cut the crap and go over to my place and screw.”

She had this apartment off campus, The Village Apartments. Nice place. Kind of expensive. We went over there, and I tell you, there wasn’t any shucking or jiving or let’s-have-a-drink business when we got there.

Inside her apartment she hiked her skirt and got on the kitchen table, spread her legs and said, “Bon appetite.”

She wasn’t wearing any panties. I mean there was just the ole wet moon pie looking at me. I stuck my face between her thighs and started licking. After that I got her top off and my pants down, put the meat to her right there on the table. Half-hour later we were rubbing salad oil over each other and then we were in the bedroom rolling around on the bed. Fell off the night stand and broke the lamp. I got glass in my ass.