A Self Made Monster (6 page)

Jimmy leaned forward in his chair, elbows on his knees. “Where did you hear this?”

“I heard her talking about it between classes with, uh, with…” Don feigned forgetfulness.

“That girl Tracy,” Don said. He knew of no Tracy.

“I’m not sure if I know Tracy,” Jimmy lied. He also knew of no Tracy. “Whatever. I’ll play it cool.”

“Yeah, don’t let on you know. Let her come out and, you know, confide in you.”

“I’ll play it right.”

Jimmy played it wrong. When Ellen did not come to the frat party at nine, as she usually did, Jimmy started drinking heavily. Ellen arrived at eleven, a striking, olive-skinned girl in a red and blue winter coat.

“I’ll take your coat,” Jimmy offered, but the offer sounded like a drunk’s threat.

“I’ll keep it.” She pushed by and joined a group of friends.

Working his way through the crowd, fending off elbows, biceps, and beer cups, Jimmy approached Ellen.

“Get you a beer?” he demanded.

She frowned at his glazed eyes and unashamed leer. “I’ve got one.” She held up her cup.

“Well so have I!” Jimmy snorted.

“Looks like you’ve had one too many.”

Jimmy noted the foam on her mustache. Her mustache, he thought, is thicker than mine and I’ve been trying to grow one for six weeks. He wiped at his upper lip, wondering if he too was foamed.

Ellen was self-conscious enough about her mustache. Her free hand darted at her upper lip as if fending off a bee. Now her mustache was two-tone: black on the left half, white on the right.

Jimmy had turned away, revolted by the foamy mustache, when he felt beer running down his head and back.

He cursed her. She laughed at him.

Jimmy’s rage was instantaneous. He wondered how he could have hoped to spool her: that mustache!

“You bearded slut,” Jimmy growled at Ellen. “Suck on this.” He tossed his beer into her face, and he cackled at her shock: brown wide eyes, mouth contorted into a howl, foam fading into liquid that dripped onto her tomato red blouse.

“And you suck on this,” a voice behind him countered.

Jimmy turned to see a large fist rocket down at him. He tried to duck, but only fell drunkenly into the punch. Ellen not only was still engaged; her boyfriend Francis had just entered through the back door. Seeing his bride to be, he had waved and navigated through the crowd. As he moved to embrace her, he accidentally spilled his beer on the head of a short person. And even as Francis apologized, the short person threw beer into his fiancé’s face.

Don’s attention was wandering. He played idly with his empty beer can, staring into space. He was remembering how funny Jimmy looked after Ellen’s boyfriend had flattened him: Jimmy on his back, surrounded by feet and legs that must have looked large and long to such a little drunk guy.

Jimmy told Don about the disappearing maintenance man.

“A disappearing maintenance man?” Don asked. He had been only half-listening.

“That’s right. Last night. Looks like he got nabbed.”

Don was skeptical. He wondered if Jimmy had learned of his deception about Ellen. Was the little creep planning revenge? “Do you think there’s anything to it?”

Jimmy cracked his fifth can of beer. “Seems that way. But I guess even a dweeb like Edward Know It All would make up a story just to impress Holly Dish.”

Don settled deeper into the battered chair, rested his feet on the fraying ottoman. “Who’s she?”

“You know, Holly.” Jimmy carved two breasts in the air with his hands.

Don acted nonplused.

“C’mon. Holly. Big jugs.”

“Oh yeah. A bit on the thick side, though,” he teased.

“That’s crap! You’d kill to spool her deep dish tits.”

“She’s solid, all right,” Don admitted. “She belongs on one of those swimsuit magazine covers, with a bikini string up between her cheeks.”

“You’d kill to spool her deep dish tits!” Jimmy repeated, vicious.

Booze did not flatter Jimmy; it reminded him he was short, cynical, and manipulative. He responded to these realizations by standing over people (when possible) and becoming more cynical and manipulative. “I’ll be spoolin’ her and she’ll be eating jelly off my—” Jimmy gestured emphatically, and beer spilled over his hand onto the floor. He was shouting directly into Don’s face.

Don decided to get Jimmy some fresh air. The little guy was about to blow a gasket. “Let’s check out the crime scene.”

“Check it out?”

“Before Edward Sherlock Holmes finds something and runs to show Holly Deep Dish.”

Alex punched the dashboard several times. It was not enough that he murder the wrong person, drink ill blood, and suffer a titanic headache. No, he had to leave evidence at the murder scene.

After sleeping off his Bushmill’s, Alex sat at his kitchen table drinking coffee and chain smoking Dunhills. Soon he was out of pocket matches. He thought he had picked up a big book last week at the Blue Flamingo; a talkative bartender insisted on giving them to Alex.

A maddening fifteen minute search recovered several kitchen matches, loose in a kitchen drawer. He lit one by striking the match head against his thumb nail. He noticed some gray fabric under his thumbnail, then saw that the fabric was under all his nails.

Tired of striking matches with his thumbnail, he searched his jacket for matches. Still no matches. But more gray fabric was embedded in the right elbow of the jacket.

Alex then remembered striking Marty with his right elbow, and he remembered how he yanked the wool cap over the victim’s face to muffle any shouts. Alex searched the house twice for the wool cap. After a few minutes of futile searching, he decided to search the shed, where he had stuffed Marty into the plastic bag. If the cap had been left behind, Alex reasoned, perhaps so had a book of matches. The odds of being connected to an errant cap or a lousy book of matches were remote in the extreme, but at this point, Alex believed he could not be too careful. The stakes could simply be no higher.

Now, parked in the small faculty lot of the gymnasium, Alex lit a Dunhill, stuck a flashlight in his pocket, and followed the sidewalk around the gym to the abandoned utility shed.

Inside the shed, he searched the cement floor with the flashlight. The beam revealed cracks in the cement, oil stains, dirt, a rusty nut and bolt. A fraying broom rested under the window. Alex leaned against the creaking workbench. The beam scanned the floor a second time. Nothing.

Alex next walked slowly around the shed, directing the beam to where wall met ground. The frosted ground glimmered and sparkled under the beam and crackled under each step. No wool cap or matches.

He had circled the shack when the flashlight beam revealed an object: the ski cap. He picked up the cap; the top of it was pinched between the hinged side of the door and the ground. An easy tug freed the cap, and Alex shoved it into his jacket pocket.

Alex guessed that the cap had fallen from Marty’s head just as Alex stepped into the shack, and the cap got caught as Alex closed the door. And Alex had not even noted the missing cap, a potentially very serious error! Alex congratulated himself with a Dunhill, shut the door. He felt enormous relief. Screw the matches, he reasoned; they were innocuous now that he had the ski cap. And Jesus on his throne, Alex told himself, calm down…you’re panicking about every little thing because the stakes are so high…so very high.

The beam of another flashlight stopped him.

Alex hurried behind the shed. Thankfully, the night air was clear, and he could make out two figures among the oaks. One figure searched the ground with a flashlight, the other supervised.

“No, we already looked there this afternoon,” the supervisor complained.

“What about over there?” The flashlight beam jumped ahead toward the railroad tracks.

“Yeah,” the supervisor answered.

“How about over there?” The beam pointed toward the shed.

“Why would you search over there?”

The supervisor sounded irritated. “Mr. Know It All said he always took this path.”

“Okay, okay.”

“And he didn’t stop to enjoy the fine ambiance of an abandoned maintenance shack.”

“But he was a maintenance man, so I think we should check it out.” Don headed toward the shack. Jimmy stayed behind for a moment, swearing, then caught up.

Alex grinned. Despite his poor memory, he often remembered people whom he disliked, and he instantly recognized the supervisor’s voice.

“We’re wasting our time!”

“Just shut up for a minute.”

Alex waited until the footsteps were close: he heard the crunching of frost under the snoops’ steps. The snoops were about to turn the corner. Alex ate the spent cigarette’s butt and pulled the cap over his face.

“This is way off the path,” Jimmy asserted. “It doesn’t make sense that—” Jimmy collided with a thin man in a ski mask. Jimmy yelped like a frightened puppy.

The thin man stood impassively, hands in jacket pockets.

“Watch it, buddy.” Jimmy said.

The man nodded an apology and stuck a fresh cigarette into his mouth. “Light?” The request was muffled through the mask’s mouth hole, and the eyes narrowed behind the eye holes. His request was a command.

Eager to obey, Don fumbled with the matches he had found on the trail. “Pretty cold for a walk tonight, eh?”

Alex extended a gloved hand. “The matches,” he queried in a low Southern accent. “I wonder if I might see them?”

“Sure. I found them just now, on the ground.”

Alex accepted the matches, looked at the cover. “The Blue Flamingo,” he read tonelessly, though he wanted to laugh. His luck tonight was a blessed marvel.

“It’s a bar downtown,” Don said. “A dive, really.”

Jimmy studied the thin man. Must a have a long nose, Jimmy thought. His nose is stretching that mask like a hard on. “You’re welcome. For the matches.”

Unfortunately, the ski masked man had quit talking, and Jimmy did not know how to react to his silence. The silence made the confrontation absurd. If the man carried a gun, it might fire a colorful flag that proclaimed “Pow!” Or it might fire dumdums.

Jimmy wanted to shout. Or punch. Or faint. He finally stepped back. He tried to study the contours of the man’s features behind the ski mask, but the light was poor. “Well, you’re sure talkative!” Jimmy blurted.

Alex nodded, and Don told Jimmy that they should get back.

“Why?” Jimmy snapped at Don. “We’re not done yet.” But Don was already twenty feet away, eager to get home for more beer and his warm room.

Feeling mischievous, Alex stepped forward and drew his gloved hands from his jacket pockets. Then, as Jimmy’s eyes bugged, Alex theatrically ran a forefinger across his own throat. Jimmy sprinted across the frozen ground and crunchy, brittle leaves. He imagined that the man chased him in an erratic, demented gate while fanning the air with a knife. His strides felt slow and weak, as if he were running through water. At one point, he stumbled and fell, sliding ten feet on his face.

“You fuck!” he shrieked at Don. “Wait for me!”

Don turned. When he saw that Jimmy’s face was covered with muddy snow, he laughed.

Back in the frat house, Jimmy berated Don for abandoning him with the killer. Don laughed, told Jimmy to stop fantasizing. “That guy’s just some townie. Some bum.”

“He’s said I’m next!” Jimmy insisted.

Don was reduced to helpless laughter, and Jimmy stomped angrily from the room. When Don called for Jimmy to come back, Jimmy threw an empty beer can at him.

The headaches had first come in waves, but not like waves that lap the shore. The waves were heavy and their impact was painful. Every thirty seconds, it seemed that a refrigerator dropped on him.

Now, by Wednesday, the waves had subsided to a dull, seamless ache. His right eye no longer watered, and his forehead was no longer knotted in wrinkles.

Alex muddled through his first three classes, often stopping to gather his thoughts. Walking into Modern British Literature, however, his spirits rose. He looked forward to seeing little Jimmy Stubbs.

But Alex did not call Jimmy a dwarf. Instead, he followed his lecture notes, which his secretary had kindly retyped while Alex was ill, and concluded class with a reminder.

“Our field trip to Chicago begins Thursday afternoon. We leave campus from the library parking lot at 5:00 and arrive at our hotel around…” He consulted his itinerary. “…Yes, around 9:30.”

Some of the students looked surprised. Their wrinkled foreheads and slack jaws revealed that they had forgotten about the field trip. Others snickered and smirked with one another. The field trip let them miss Friday classes without penalty.

“Don’t forget to bring some heavy clothing. The wind goes right through you on Michigan Avenue. And if the wind is strong and you’re along Wacker, you could get blown right into the Chicago River.”

Jimmy rolled his eyes. He figured that most of his classmates had not been to Chicago. He, however, had grown up in Worth, a Chicago suburb. I’ll show Holly around the city, Jimmy thought. And I’ll be her special guide to nightlife.