Disconnection (26 page)

An image of Sandy’s red hair and soft breasts rose in Stuart’s mind as he strove to quiet his breath and remain as still as death beneath the trees.

“Shame on you, Stu. Shame on you for bitchin’ about her venison spaghetti. Poor woman worked all day on it, cuttin’ the juicy meat just right. No wonder she left you for your best friend.”

He was getting closer. Stuart could almost feel the stomp of Frank’s cowboy boots on the earth.

“I know where you are,” Frank sang with a sadistic tone.
“I know where you are.”

When Stuart saw Frank’s short frame just behind him, he did not take a breath before rising out of the dry leaves and jumping on the shorter man with all the strength left in his body. Like a meteor Frank hit the ground, the gun falling out of his hands. “Tinker’s fart, you don’t have to be so rough!” Frank cried when Stuart’s fists found the line of his jaw.

Stuart began beating him with all his might, stronger, more powerful than before. He was no longer a cowboy who had killed a Spanish dancer, but all evil incarnate. Stuart knew if he did not make sure that Frank was dead this time, the man would come back to kill him.

Go to hell
, he thought.
Go straight to hell. Do not pass GO. Do not collect two hundred dollars
.

“LMISHEMA’ ‘ADEN SHEMA ‘TANK WAK ‘AN ‘AYNIHAZTHAK!”
Frank screamed under Stuart’s impassioned hits.
“LMISHEMA’ ‘ADEN SHEMA ‘TANK WAK ‘AN ‘AYNIHAZTHAK!”

“Fuck you, too!” Stuart screamed, although he had no idea what the cowboy said. He punched the side of Frank’s head one last time, fracturing the man’s skull with a crunch.

“Oh Stuey, for shame, for shame, for shame, God will judge you,” Frank whispered before his head rolled limply to the side. Even in death, the man still carried the sick smile of evil on his face.

B
lood running from the head, blood running from the eye. Pain at the joints, pain in the back, pain at his temple. Every part of him was falling apart in some way. Dean watched his shadow move alongside him on Interstate 55, thinking that he looked a lot like Quasimodo, hunched over and moving slowly with jagged, labored gestures. He did not know how long he had been walking. Maybe hours now.

Sela’s words came back to him.
You murdered her. You murdered Chloe
.

As if he could ever kill Chloe. He had never even
met
Chloe. How the heck could he have
killed
her? That night at the Black Kitchen, all he had wanted was to meet her for the first time. She had seemed so vague, so strangely wonderful. She stood out in the Led Zeppelin Lovers chat room like a mermaid among fish. He had instant messaged her without knowing that she lived in the same city and went to the same school. After the first initial HEY WANNA TALK?, they began a correspondence that was borderline obsessive. So many things they had in common. Except religion. But Dean wasn’t expecting to meet a lot of Jewish girls in New Orleans anyway. The term “Bible Belt” had some credence to it.

Thinking back now (and it was hard to think back, hard to think of anything with the shockwaves of pain pounding through his head and the rest of his body), he had spent a hell of a lot of hours online with Chloe, a hell of a lot of stolen time between classes and before soccer practice, at night before bed and in the morning when he woke up. Sometimes they coordinated their meetings, sometimes being online simultaneously was mere coincidence.

They talked about everything. Dean wrote to her about his family—his rabbi father, his mother who worked as a pre-school teacher, his two younger brothers and his oldest brother who ran off to join the Israeli army at eighteen and who only came home on holidays. He told her about the Manhattan school he attended and how it had always stunk of mothballs and old paint from portraits of semi-great men, how on some mornings you could smell the cinnamon buns from the bakery across the street and how that used to drive the students wild. He told her about soccer and how he learned the game during summer trips to Poland—his father’s home country—and how he had become so good at it that the other kids at school hadn’t wanted to play with him anymore, and how his talent had paid off when he received a scholarship to Tulane University after nearly flunking out of Brown. Tulane was a college so far away from the strict rigors of his New York temple and school that he just had, just
had
, to give it a shot. A gamble, he wrote to her, that he thought paid off, because now he was here, in the same city, at the same school as she.

In return, she had told him about herself, about her hopes, her fears, her dreams. Her house in the Garden District where she had lived with her parents all her life. Her summers in Northern Ireland (“U C,” she had written, “we have our summers-in-Europe in common.”), which were the best times in her life, staying in a cousin’s home in Ballycastle, which the natives called Baile on Chaile, so close to the wild tides of the Atlantic Ocean, and the Stags of Broadhaven. In the east was Killala Bay where she and her family would picnic among the bell heather and purple saxifrage and point out the falmer puffins and black headed gulls floating back and forth along the currents of the sky. Her mother would play the piano at the local pub and the Irishmen would stuff pretzels and beer caps into her jar as they sang her praises along the green leather seats, Irish flags hanging from the ceiling. Chloe had written that she and her father would knock golf balls into the sea from the cliffs of Downpatrick Head and watch as they jumped two or three times before finally falling to their salt water demise.

Loneliness always came back to her, Chloe wrote, when she returned to America. The cause of her despair, she was never sure. Something about New Orleans always eluded her. It was if the city’s magical spell that pulled in millions of tourists a year had the opposite effect on her. She could never seem to live with it. There was always, she wrote, tension in her heart. She felt like an alien in her own city. A nervous bird wanting to fly away.

In school she had been accepted but never really popular. Her self esteem was so low that she gave her virginity to the first boy that came along, and she did not stop there. Any boy that had an interest could leave a calling card on her body, because she did not care. After high school she stopped believing in God. Her mixture of friends got heavier, wilder, crazier. Sporadic smokings of marijuana were replaced with everyday cocaine use.

She was out of that stage when she and Dean started talking because her mother had found a joint in her bedside table and had immediately sent Chloe to rehab. While she hadn’t totally reformed to the Jesus-hugging environment recommended by her Jesus-loving uncle (“A real holy roller,” she had written), she had managed to obtain a certain amount of spiritual enlightenment that made going back to her hell-bent-on-destruction ways a no-no.

But, she wrote, she still had her wild side. Her friend Lisa wanted her to go to L.A. with her, and just recently, Chloe had said yes. She wasn’t sure if she would follow through with her promise, though. Lisa used coke the way others drank Sanka. To leave with her would seem as if she were reverting back to her old ways. And Chloe was about to graduate with a degree in psychology, so she had a chance for a future, a good, solid future. “What do you think?” she had asked him.

“As much as I think those stars out there in Hollywood could use your psychiatric advice, I would rather you stay here,” Dean had written back.

The communication lasted two months before Dean finally decided that he’d had enough. It was time to meet. The night they had planned to get together, he had felt like he was walking on air. At last, a soul mate, or someone damn close. When she did not appear at the Black Kitchen, Dean thought it was a case of cold feet, and after a few Coronas and a shot of Wild Turkey, it no longer mattered that she had ditched him because he was drunk and horny and had met a girl that looked close to how Chloe had described herself, and damn it, he was twenty-four and could meet who he wanted, when he wanted.

He had not counted on liking Sela,
really
liking her, liking her so much that when he came home the morning after his night with her, it was hours before he logged onto the computer to see if Chloe had left him a message, which she hadn’t. He mourned her for a week, maybe less. Whenever she floated into his mind, Sela interceded. She was real and made of flesh and could make him literally clench his teeth with the impact of his orgasm and who, on an emotional and mental level, excited the same levels of stimulation as Chloe had over the computer. So Chloe had a disadvantage. She was just a group of letters spread out a across a screen, an interesting alphabet to be certain, but only letters all the same. Dean decided to forget about her. He stopped checking the Led Zeppelin Lovers chat room. Cyberspace love affairs were a thing of the past.

When the police had finally released the fourth Fishhook victim’s name to the public, Dean had been in his room, his fingers about to dial Sela’s number for what seemed liked the eightieth time—either she was never home or she was avoiding him, and why she would do that he had no idea, they’d had one hell of a wild night together. When Chloe’s face came on the screen, Dean did not have to look twice to know that the alleged Fishhook victim named Chloe Applegate was
his
Chloe, his cyberspace lover, his might-have-been soul mate.

Good God Almighty

She did not come that night because she was dead. When I was calling her a bitch in my head, she was drowning
.

He had cried for some time. He thought about the secrets Chloe had told him, how much they had shared together.

He had thought about going to the police, but decided against it. He had never even met Chloe, how could any information he give be helpful?

He had decided not to tell Sela. She did not deserve his misery. He stored it away in his mental filing cabinet as a shitty, fucked-up thing. In Heaven—where he was certain Christians and Jews and everyone else sat together, eating tomatoes and croutons from the same salad bar—he might finally meet her, and they might begin an acquaintance that they could never have on Earth. But for now, he had to forget and get by.

Now, stumbling along the road on the way back to New Orleans, his thumb held out for whatever driver was crazy enough to pickup a hitchhiker in his condition, Dean decided that he had made the wrong decision.

But how was I supposed to know Sela knew Chloe, and hell, why would it ever cross my mind she would accuse me of murder?

There were so many questions.

Just when Dean thought his right leg would give out, a cherry red Mustang pulled to the side of the road in front of him. Dean blinked hard, barely believing his eyes. It was his friend’s car, one of the guys from the soccer team. Stan. He and another guy from the soccer team, Owen, had been at the restaurant the night Sela’s car had been torched.

Dean limped to the opening passenger door. Stan was in the driver’s seat, Owen was next to him on the passenger side. They gave Dean a good once-over. Owen whistled low. “You look like shit, Wolf,” he said matter-of-factly. “Have you been playing soccer with Iraqis?”

“Very funny,” Dean said. “Can you just give me a lift to my car? It’s across the bayou.” Dean pointed in the direction.

“Sure,” Stan said. “But what the hell are you doing out here?”

“I’ll tell you about it in the car.”

But once he was relaxing in the back seat of the Mustang with a cold can of Bud Light from Stan’s back seat cooler in his hand, and Audioslave was pounding from the speakers with their melancholic yet somehow soothing tunes, Dean didn’t want to talk about his day. He wanted to rest. He wanted to stop thinking.

Dean surveyed the damage on his body. His eye had stopped bleeding; so had the wound on top of his head. All his injuries were a matter of soreness now. Especially his back—oh man, his back was killing him. He had landed on the shore pretty darn hard. Sela might weigh less than water, but the girl knew how to throw a mean punch.

He did not know what to think about Sela now. She could be miles away for all he knew. Maybe at the police station. She had left him for dead in the water. Left him for dead like a dog. His girlfriend—a girl he thought he was falling in love with, who now thought he was a murderer, had attacked him like a wild animal.

Dean shook his head. They should go on “Jerry Springer” for this one. Just when America had thought it had heard it all, along comes The Dean Wolf Story.

“Hey, we got a little stop we have to make,” Stan said.

Dean emptied the last of the beer in his mouth. “Yeah? Where to?” he asked.

“A pig farm.”

Owen turned to face Dean. “You ever been to a pig farm before?”

Dean shook his head. “Nope.”

Owen smiled and said, “I guess New Yorkers don’t get around to pig farms too much.”

“I guess not,” he answered, feeling a strong shiver of apprehension down his spine. Something about Owen’s smile Dean did not like. He could not pinpoint why he had distaste for it. There was just
something
off about it, like milk that had begun to sour.

“Well, then,” Owen began, his smile spreading wide, “this will be a new experience for you.”

Dean asked, “Why are we going?”

He must have heard Stan wrong, because what he thought Stan said was,
“We’re going to kill a pig farmer.”

Dean leaned closer to the front seat. “What was that? I couldn’t hear you properly, I think.”

“It’s a surprise,” Stan answered. “You like surprises, yeah?”

Dean shrugged. “Yeah. Whatever, man. Whatever you want to do. It’s your car.”

His hearing was going—Dean was convinced, because the next thing he heard Stan say was,
“Harold would love it if we brought a Jew to him.”

“Did you just say something?” Dean asked.

Stan glanced at him from the rearview mirror. “No. Why?”

“No reason. I think my injuries have affected my hearing. I keep hearing things.”