Black House (62 page)

“Come on,” he tells himself. “No time for this shit.”

He gets out of the truck and starts up the cracked cement walk. There’s a fading hopscotch diagram there, and Jack swerves to avoid it without even thinking, knowing it’s one of the few remaining artifacts which testify that a little person named Amy St. Pierre once briefly trod the boards of existence. The porch steps are dry and splintery. He’s vilely thirsty and thinks,
Man, I’d kill for a glass of water, or a nice cold—

The door flies open, cracking against the side of the house like a pistol shot in the sunny silence, and Beezer comes running out.

“Christ almighty, I didn’t think you were
ever
gonna get here!”

Looking into Beezer’s alarmed, agonized eyes, Jack realizes that he will never tell this guy that he might be able to find Black House without Mouse’s help, that thanks to his time in the Territories he has a kind of range finder in his head. No, not even if they live the rest of their lives as close friends, the kind who usually tell each other everything. The Beez has suffered like Job, and he doesn’t need to find out that his friend’s agony may have been in vain.

“Is he still alive, Beezer?”

“By an inch. Maybe an inch and a quarter. It’s just me and Doc and Bear Girl now. Sonny and Kaiser Bill got scared, ran off like a couple of whipped dogs. March your boots in here, sunshine.” Not that Beezer gives Jack any choice; he grabs him by the shoulder and hauls him into the little two-story on Nailhouse Row like luggage.

23

“O
NE MORE
!” says the guy from ESPN.

It sounds more like an order than a request, and although Henry can’t see the fellow, he knows this particular homeboy never played a sport in his life, pro or otherwise. He has the lardy, slightly oily aroma of someone who has been overweight almost from the jump. Sports is perhaps his compensation, with the power to still memories of clothes bought in the Husky section at Sears and all those childhood rhymes like “Fatty-fatty, two-by-four, had to do it on the floor, couldn’t get through the bathroom door.”

His name is Penniman. “Just like Little Richard!” he told Henry when they shook hands at the radio station. “Famous rock ’n’ roller from back in the fifties? Maybe you remember him.”

“Vaguely,” Henry said, as if he hadn’t at one time owned every single Little Richard had ever put out. “I believe he was one of the Founding Fathers.” Penniman laughed uproariously, and in that laugh Henry glimpsed a possible future for himself. But was it a future he wanted? People laughed at Howard Stern, too, and Howard Stern was a dork.

“One more drink!” Penniman repeats now. They are in the bar of the Oak Tree Inn, where Penniman has tipped the bartender five bucks to switch the TV from bowling on ABC to ESPN, even though there’s nothing on at this hour of the day except golf tips and bass fishing. “One more drink, just to seal the deal!”

But they
don’t
have a deal, and Henry isn’t sure he wants to make one. Going national with George Rathbun as part of the ESPN radio package should be attractive, and he doesn’t have any serious problem with changing the name of the show from
Badger Barrage
to
ESPN Sports Barrage
—it would still focus primarily on the central and northern areas of the country—but . . .

But what?

Before he can even get to work on the question, he smells it again: My Sin, the perfume his wife used to wear on certain evenings, when she wanted to send a certain signal. Lark was what he used to call her on those certain evenings, when the room was dark and they were both blind to everything but scents and textures and each other.

Lark.

“You know, I think I’m going to pass on that drink,” Henry says. “Got some work to do at home. But I’m going to think over your offer. And I mean seriously.”

“Ah-ah-ah,” Penniman says, and Henry can tell from certain minute disturbances in the air that the man is shaking a finger beneath his nose. Henry wonders how Penniman would react if Henry suddenly darted his head forward and bit off the offending digit at the second knuckle. If Henry showed him a little Coulee Country hospitality Fisherman-style. How loud would Penniman yell? As loud as Little Richard before the instrumental break of “Tutti Frutti,” perhaps? Or not quite as loud as that?

“Can’t go till I’m ready to take you,” Mr. I’m Fat But It No Longer Matters tells him. “I’m your ride, y’know.” He’s on his fourth gimlet, and his words are slightly slurred.
My friend,
Henry thinks,
I’d poke a ferret up my ass before I’d get into a car with you at the wheel.

“Actually, I can,” Henry says pleasantly. Nick Avery, the bartender, is having a kick-ass afternoon: the fat guy slipped him five to change the TV channel, and the blind guy slipped him five to call Skeeter’s Taxi while the fat guy was in the bathroom, making a little room.

“Huh?”

“I said, ‘Actually, I can.’ Bartender?”

“He’s outside, sir,” Avery tells him. “Pulled up two minutes ago.”

There is a hefty creak as Penniman turns on his bar stool. Henry can’t see the man’s frown as he takes in the taxi now idling in the hotel turnaround, but he can sense it.

“Listen, Henry,” Penniman says. “I think you may lack a certain understanding of your current situation. There are stars in the firmament of sports radio, damned right there are—people like the Fabulous Sports Babe and Tony Kornheiser make six figures a year just in speaking fees, six figures
easy—
but you ain’t there yet. That door is currently closed to you. But I, my friend, am one helluva doorman. The upshot is that if I say we ought to have one more drink, then—”

“Bartender,” Henry says quietly, then shakes his head. “I can’t just call you bartender; it might work for Humphrey Bogart but it doesn’t work for me. What’s your name?”

“Nick Avery, sir.” The last word comes out automatically, but Avery never would have used it when speaking to the other one, never in a million years. Both guys tipped him five, but the one in the dark glasses is the gent. It’s got nothing to do with him being blind, it’s just something he
is.

“Nick, who else is at the bar?”

Avery looks around. In one of the back booths, two men are drinking beer. In the hall, a bellman is on the phone. At the bar itself, no one at all except for these two guys—one slim, cool, and blind, the other fat, sweaty, and starting to be pissed off.

“No one, sir.”

“There’s not a . . . lady?”
Lark,
he’s almost said.
There’s not a lark?

“No.”

“Listen here,” Penniman says, and Henry thinks he’s never heard anyone so unlike “Little Richard” Penniman in his entire life. This guy is whiter than Moby Dick . . . and probably about the same size. “We’ve got a lot more to discuss here.”
Loh more t’dishcush
is how it comes out. “Unless, that is”
—Unlesh—
“you’re trying to let me know you’re not interested.”
Never in a million years,
Penniman’s voice says to Henry Leyden’s educated ears.
We’re talking about putting a money machine in your living room, sweetheart, your very own private ATM, and there ain’t no way in hell you’re going to turn that down.

“Nick, you don’t smell perfume? Something very light and old-fashioned? My Sin, perhaps?”

A flabby hand falls on Henry’s shoulder like a hot-water bottle. “The sin, old buddy, would be for you to
refuse
to have another drink with me. Even a blindman could see th—”

“Suggest you get your hand off him,” Avery says, and perhaps Penniman’s ears aren’t
entirely
deaf to nuance, because the hand leaves Henry’s shoulder at once.

Then another hand comes in its place, higher up. It touches the back of Henry’s neck in a cold caress that’s there and then gone. Henry draws in breath. The smell of perfume comes with it. Usually scents fade after a period of exposure, as the receptors that caught them temporarily deaden. Not this time, though. Not this smell.

“No perfume?” Henry almost pleads. The touch of her hand on his neck he can dismiss as a tactile hallucination. But his nose never betrays him.

Never until now, anyway.

“I’m sorry,” Avery says. “I can smell beer . . . peanuts . . . this man’s gin and his aftershave . . .”

Henry nods. The lights above the backbar slide across the dark lenses of his shades as he slips gracefully off his stool.

“I think you want another drink, my friend,” Penniman says in what he no doubt believes to be a tone of polite menace. “One more drink, just to celebrate, and then I’ll take you home in my Lexus.”

Henry smells his wife’s perfume. He’s sure of it. And he seemed to feel the touch of his wife’s hand on the back of his neck. Yet suddenly it’s skinny little Morris Rosen he finds himself thinking about—Morris, who wanted him to listen to “Where Did Our Love Go” as done by Dirtysperm. And of course for Henry to play it in his Wisconsin Rat persona. Morris Rosen, who has more integrity in one of his nail-chewed little fingers than this bozo has got in his entire body.

He puts a hand on Penniman’s forearm. He smiles into Penniman’s unseen face, and feels the muscles beneath his palm relax. Penniman has decided he’s going to get his way. Again.

“You take my drink,” Henry says pleasantly, “add it to
your
drink, and then stick them both up your fat and bepimpled ass. If you need something to hold them in place, why, you can stick your job up there right after them.”

Henry turns and walks briskly toward the door, orienting himself with his usual neat precision and holding one hand out in front of him as an insurance policy. Nick Avery has broken into spontaneous applause, but Henry barely hears this and Penniman he has already dismissed from his mind. What occupies him is the smell of My Sin perfume. It fades a little as he steps out into the afternoon heat . . . but is that not an amorous sigh he hears beside his left ear? The sort of sigh his wife sometimes made just before falling asleep after love? His Rhoda? His Lark?

“Hello, the taxi!” he calls from the curb beneath the awning.

“Right here, buddy—what’re you, blind?”

“As a bat,” Henry agrees, and walks toward the sound of the voice. He’ll go home, he’ll put his feet up, he’ll have a glass of tea, and then he’ll listen to the damned 911 tape. That as yet unperformed chore may be what’s causing his current case of the heebie-jeebies and shaky-shivers, knowing that he must sit in darkness and listen to the voice of a child-killing cannibal. Surely that must be it, because there’s no reason to be afraid of his Lark, is there? If she were to return—to return and haunt him—she would surely haunt with love.

Wouldn’t she?

Yes,
he thinks, and lowers himself into the taxi’s stifling back seat.

“Where to, buddy?”

“Norway Valley Road,” Henry says. “It’s a white house with blue trim, standing back from the road. You’ll see it not long after you cross the creek.”

Henry settles back in the seat and turns his troubled face toward the open window. French Landing feels strange to him today
.
.
.
fraught.
Like something that has slipped and slipped until it is now on the verge of simply falling off the table and smashing to pieces on the floor.

Say that she
has
come back. Say that she
has.
If it’s love she’s come with, why does the smell of her perfume make me so uneasy? So almost revolted? And why was her touch (her
imagined
touch, he assures himself) so unpleasant?

Why was her touch so cold?

After the dazzle of the day, the living room of Beezer’s crib is so dark that at first Jack can’t make out anything. Then, when his eyes adjust a little, he sees why: blankets—a double thickness, from the look—have been hung over both of the living-room windows, and the door to the other downstairs room, almost certainly the kitchen, has been closed.

“He can’t stand the light,” Beezer says. He keeps his voice low so it won’t carry across to the far side of the room, where the shape of a man lies on a couch. Another man is kneeling beside him.

“Maybe the dog that bit him was rabid,” Jack says. He doesn’t believe it.

Beezer shakes his head decisively. “It isn’t a phobic reaction. Doc says it’s physiological. Where light falls on him, his skin starts to melt. You ever hear of anything like that?”

“No.” And Jack has never smelled anything like the stench in this room, either. There’s the buzz of not one but two table fans, and he can feel the cross-draft, but that stink is too gluey to move. There’s the reek of spoiled meat—of gangrene in torn flesh—but Jack has smelled that before. It’s the other smell that’s getting to him, something like blood and funeral flowers and feces all mixed up together. He makes a gagging noise, can’t help it, and Beezer looks at him with a certain impatient sympathy.

“Bad, yeah, I know. But it’s like the monkey house at the zoo, man—you get used to it after a while.”

The swing door to the other room opens, and a trim little woman with shoulder-length blond hair comes through. She’s carrying a bowl. When the light strikes the figure lying on the couch, Mouse screams. It’s a horribly thick sound, as if the man’s lungs have begun to liquefy. Something—maybe smoke, maybe steam—starts to rise up from the skin of his forehead.

“Hold on, Mouse,” the kneeling man says. It’s Doc. Before the kitchen door swings all the way shut again, Jack is able to read what’s pasted to his battered black bag. Somewhere in America there may be another medical man sporting a
STEPPENWOLF RULES
bumper sticker on the side of his physician’s bag, but probably not in Wisconsin.

The woman kneels beside Doc, who takes a cloth from the basin, wrings it out, and places it on Mouse’s forehead. Mouse gives a shaky groan and begins to shiver all over. Water runs down his cheeks and into his beard. The beard seems to be coming out in mangy patches.

Jack steps forward, telling himself he will get used to the smell, sure he will. Maybe it’s even true. In the meantime he wishes for a little of the Vicks VapoRub most LAPD homicide detectives carry in their glove compartments as a matter of course. A dab under each nostril would be very welcome right now.

There’s a sound system (scruffy) and a pair of speakers in the corners of the room (huge), but no television. Stacked wooden crates filled with books line every wall without a door or a window in it, making the space seem even smaller than it is, almost cryptlike. Jack has a touch of claustrophobia in his makeup, and now this circuit warms up, increasing his discomfort. Most of the books seem to deal with religion and philosophy—he sees Descartes, C. S. Lewis, the Bhagavad-Gita, Steven Avery’s
Tenets of Existence—
but there’s also a lot of fiction, books on beer making, and (on top of one giant speaker) Albert Goldman’s trash tome about Elvis Presley. On the other speaker is a photograph of a young girl with a splendid smile, freckles, and oceans of reddish-blond hair. Seeing the child who drew the hopscotch grid out front makes Jack Sawyer feel sick with anger and sorrow. Otherworldly beings and causes there may be, but there’s also a sick old fuck prowling around who needs to be stopped. He’d do well to remember that.

Bear Girl makes a space for Jack in front of the couch, moving gracefully even though she’s on her knees and still holding the bowl. Jack sees that in it are two more wet cloths and a heap of melting ice cubes. The sight of them makes him thirstier than ever. He takes one and pops it into his mouth. Then he turns his attention to Mouse.

A plaid blanket has been pulled up to his neck. His forehead and upper cheeks—the places not covered by his decaying beard—are pasty. His eyes are closed. His lips are drawn back to show teeth of startling whiteness.