John's Wife: A Novel (61 page)

Accustomed to the games Bruce played and prepared for the worst though John (the first one) was, he was still taken aback by the scene that confronted him up at the cabin when he finally arrived. The worst that he’d prepared for? That he’d find them dead. Nevada had suggested that Bruce could be thinking about “checking out,” and might take the kid with him. She’d also held off telling him about Bruce’s departure with Lenny’s child until he’d had a several-hour head start and in his new jet to boot, so whatever John found up there, he figured, would have to be old news. Unless it was all just an elaborate scheme, using a preacher’s daughter as bait, to mock John’s smalltown proprieties and lure him out of secular duty into holy play, a lesson Bruce never tired of trying to teach him. “At heart a religious man,” Bruce called him in his farewell note, “who sometimes lost his way.” Farewell? Yes. No bodies maybe, but John had no reason to suppose they were still alive, and Bruce’s final instructions gave him every reason to suppose that they were not or soon would not be. Why had he come up here then? To try to stop it, to save his friend from himself and so save a friendship he did not want to lose. John had been guilty of few futile gestures in his life, but this was one of them. Bruce’s plane was nowhere to be seen when he flew in, but the cabin, ablaze with florid light in the dark night (his landing beacon), was as though inhabited by a menacing presence, and John entered it with his cocked rifle gripped in both hands, by now supposing that Bruce had the rifle that was missing from his gun case. The cabin had been transformed into a kind of hothouse, brimming with flowers, piles and piles of them, heaped up so high one had to crawl through special wickerwork tunnels to move from place to place. It was like a kid’s back-garden fantasy house, except that there were niches along the way with pornographic photographs mounted in them, lit from behind, some little more than marriage manual posturings, others more exotic and violent. John himself was in one of them, that bastard. How’d he get that shot? Here and there: a shoe, a sock, a ribbon. In a mirrored niche, a pair of panties, a spot of dark blood in a bed of white petals. It was all a bit suffocating and John was glad to leave the flowers behind and emerge at last in the main bedroom, which felt like an amphitheater after the claustrophobic tunnels. He was less glad about what he found there: ropes tied around the bedposts, cuffs, whips, including ragged twists of thorny long-stemmed roses and a horse crop, blood-soaked sheets and towels, here and there other stains, more excremental. A flayed summer dress, once white, lay in grisly shreds on the floor and, in a corner, like a proxy for its former owner, a little overnight bag, lifelessly agape, its contents spilled out and crushed underfoot. On the chest of drawers: a sheaf of documents with Bruce’s personal cover note, anticipating John’s arrival, though perhaps in Nevada’s company and not so soon, for it spoke at length about the revised handwritten will, attached, and accompanying power of attorney forms and notarized instructions to be used as authority while the will, for probable lack of a corpus delicti, was contested. All of which clearly enriched their busy little troubleshooter. There was even an envelope of cash for Nevada which, Bruce suggested, should best be laundered before using. “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” he wrote, continuing the religious theme introduced in the opening lines: “As a religious man, dear John, you will appreciate what you see here as a sacramental act of extreme devotion and exaltation, and will accept it as guide and precept on your own irresolute route to sainthood. Many years ago, on the eve of your disappointing compromise with the profane world, in that wayside chapel known as the Country Tavern, you effected my own conversion, doubting Thomas that I was, by announcing that what was about to follow was in reality a church service in a holy sanctuary, and indeed it was, one of many such revelations I’ve been granted in your company. I have ever since been the voice of one crying in the wilderness, calling you back to your true vocation, your existence in nonexistence, your authentic life beyond the edge.” The nihilistic wiseass was insufferable, but the “Goodbye, John” at the end still hurt. John scanned the documents: many of Bruce’s women were rewarded but Jennifer was not, so probably bad news. Not much he could do about it. Nor about this place either. Finished. Should just burn it down, but he was too practical a man for that, he’d have to put it up for sale. Needed a good purging first, though, and John had a lot of tensions to work off, so he built a fire out in the incinerator, starting with the bedding, clothing, photos, overnight bag, and Bruce’s revised will. The flowers and all the rest would follow. He figured he’d be done in time to get home by dawn.

Which was not soon enough for Otis, now gathering his troops together in the lot outside what Bruce called “that wayside chapel.” The chief was into crunch time and could use his old team captain to help call the plays, but he could wait no longer. The town had been stripped out, power and phone lines were down, there’d been killings, and from the attacks along the periphery of Settler’s Woods—the motelkeeper had been shot, for example—he figured Pauline was getting dangerously hungry. The parking lot of the closed-down Country Tavern looked like a goddamned wrecking yard where she’d stumbled through on her last foray. Of course it often looked that way, junkers being the vehicle of no choice among the Tavern regulars, a lost lot mostly, from the wrong side of town. Otis’s side of town. He’d hung out here himself in the old days. The Tavern was popular with the school football team in the off-season, being a place they didn’t ask your age, a good hole for poker nights and stag parties and beery rough-and-tumble. A lot of famous events had happened out here, but they were not the sort of stories that ever made it into
The Town Crier
. Then came the army, and what furlough time Otis got he spent here, especially after his old man blew his head off. He was wounded in the war, discharged, came home depressed, took a job helping to build the new highway, and the Tavern became more like home than home. Drank too much. Got into too many fights. Might have got into worse, but John changed all that. Talked him into joining the police force. Built him up as a town hero and the promotions came along fast and steady with John behind him. He’d declared his true love out here on a tabletop and now John had helped him find its true expression. So Otis reduced his Tavern time to football afternoons and when he got married that stopped, too, coming out only when called out. Not often. Mostly having to do with what the regulars called tourists. Their own problems, they sorted out themselves. Some of these guys had, unbidden, joined his posse, drunkenly vowing revenge for the loss of Shag and Chester; Otis told them to go on home (they just smiled) and ordered up an ambulance for the victims. “You sure you want an ambulance, Otis?” one of his officers asked. “There’ll have to be an autopsy.” “But they’re—” “Don’t argue with me, goddamn it! Just do as you’re told!” He was very edgy, he knew that, couldn’t help it. He felt betrayed somehow. Otis hadn’t really thought about it until tonight, but the fact was, Pauline had been his best friend, the only real friend he had, and now, though it wasn’t exactly her fault, she was ruining it, threatening to turn his whole life since his Country Tavern days upside down, just by being who she was, forcing him to destroy what he loved to save what he loved. She made him feel like the wickedness he was up against was himself. What was worse, a lot of these other guys out here, he’d discovered, felt much the same way he did, only less guilty about it, and that burned him all the more. He’d heard someone waxing sentimental about knowing Pauline from the old Pioneers Day fairs, and before he could stop himself he’d drawn his revolver. Jesus. If he’d been able to see the prick, he might have greased him. Calm down. Remember the Blessed Virgin. He raised his bullhorn. “Okay, we got no time to lose. This is what we’re gonna do.” Pauline was dangerous, but Otis wanted to resolve the crisis without calling out the National Guard, though he knew he’d have to move fast or the problem would, literally, get too big for them. His tactics were simple: encircle and patrol the periphery with his own boys to try to cut off the escape routes, lead the deputized posse into the center himself, along with the mayor. “What do we do when we find them, Otis?” “Arrest them.” That was the official line. In truth, although he didn’t want to harm her, he didn’t know what he’d do with Pauline if she did surrender. “We gonna rassle them freaks to the ground, are we?” “From what you been sayin’, ain’t that sorta like tryin’ to bring a tree to its knees?” “Nobody said this’d be easy,” Mayor Snuffy yelled out. “Remember, to shoot a takedown, you can always win with a tough ride, but you gotta be aggressive!” “Sure, coach, you take the lady, I’ll take the other one.” “Maybe if we all stood there with our dicks out, she’d just go down—” “Shut up!” Otis barked. Someone asked who the prisoner was, so Otis, in a biting rage, flashed a light on his ugly mug and introduced them all to Pauline’s old man, explaining tersely that he was here because he knew how to track and handle her. Duwayne, his ball-cap on backwards, spat disdainfully through the gaps in his teeth, rattled his chains, and hollered out that the terrible Day of Rupture was upon them and there wouldn’t be no handling to it, just a lot of blood and tears and gnashing of teeth, Otis cutting off his wind with a rifle butt to the solar plexus and warning him he wouldn’t have any teeth to gnash with if he didn’t shut his goddamned trap. “Easy, Otis,” someone said, and he nearly hit him, too. He passed out flashlights and ammunition, asked the young car mechanic who was soberer than most to stay to the rear to cover their ass, ran radio and weapons checks, tossed his jacket in the patrol car: it was a close, sticky night. Must be a storm brewing. “Listen, have you talked this out with old Gordon?” someone asked. “What’s
he
got to do with it?” he snapped. But then he thought better of it. “Send a car to pick him up,” he muttered glumly. He stared into the ominous darkness of Settler’s Woods. Maybe he should have called out the Guard. Could have used a few choppers with heat-seeking missiles in his arsenal instead of this bunch of bleary-eyed clowns: already a couple of the rifles had gone off accidentally out there in the darkness. For Otis, at times like these, horseplay was a felony. “Okay, men, this is it,” he said through his bullhorn. “Let’s go.” But before they could cross over, the last of his squad cars rolled up with the news that the owner of the Ford-Mercury garage had been shot dead in his own office. “Goddamn it, I don’t have time to deal with that shit now!” Otis cried, feeling like someone had just thrown him an infuriating block out of nowhere. “What did they kill him with?” the mayor wanted to know. “One of those,” said the officer, pointing at the mechanic’s rifle. “Musta happened about the time we was at John’s place.” “That’s the bad news, Otis. The good news is the simpleton’s back home again. Big Pauline’s in there all on her lonesome.”

Of the many famous but unreported events that had taken place in Otis’s old stamping ground over the years, not least was the legendary stag party on the eve of John’s wedding, the night Bruce was first introduced to this “wayside chapel”—as were all of John’s other fraternity brothers, down from the uninursery (as Brains would say) for the grand occasion, among them doleful Brother Beans, he of the inimical wit, contest-winning wind instrument, and Swiss Army knife. Which he was still gripping in his fist when he awoke from a thumping nightmare, a gift no doubt of his thumping hangover, his face in sticky spilled beer and bladder ready to erupt. He’d been out hunting somewhere. In the nightmare, that is. Something gross. He’d had the uncomfortable feeling, he remembered, that he was around spooks of some kind. The Freudian content was inescapable, but Beans escaped it, a knack he had: nothing that entered his head stayed there for long, it was hello and goodbye. Time now, having helloed himself shitfaced, to say goodbye to the moribund Country Tavern. There were a few bodies around, but none Beans knew. Lights, music, movies, bar, all shut down. Beans considered giving the cymbals a crack, just to see if these dead might rise again, but decided his raw brain, which seemed to have got outside his skull somehow, couldn’t take it, nor did he relish commerce with any he might thus return, no doubt embittered, to the living. He staggered through the butts and bottles and other detritus of the prenuptial joys to the door and on out into the moonlight, worrying about the long sick walk to town and the critical decision he would have to make ere he set off: to wit, which fucking direction was it? First, though, weewee time. Beans was often deemed an impractical man, but not true. Now, for instance, he used his pee to hose down the dust-caked windows of the Country Tavern, yet another of his good deeds that history would fail to record, wondering as he did so about the peculiar feeling of déjà vu that came over him. Something to do with the absent Brains, his old pal, now greener pastured: faint recall no doubt of one of many such early-morning makings of water (not made really, just, like all of life, borrowed and passed on) they had, after immemorial nocturnal adventures, shared. Out on the lonely road, cranking the throbbing blob on his neck to one side, then the other, he discovered through his pain, just down the way a piece, an old battered pickup parked aslant on the shoulder, and he thought he could make out voices in the woods. He was not alone in the world after all! He picked his way over into the trees where, yes, he could hear heavy thrashing about and grunts and curses, the tenor of which led the ever-rash Beans to a rare exercise of caution before declaring himself: he watched from behind a tree as two men struggled toward a ravine with, what? a body? Yes, a body. Well. The walk to town—run, rather—would probably do him good. But now he worried that they might hear him as he made his characteristically graceless exit and marry the witness’s fate to that of their victim, now tossed rudely in the ditch, so he crouched down and, seriously ill but sobering up fast, waited for them to finish their business and take their leave. Their business included pummeling and kicking the body and then pissing on it. “Clean the whore up,” one of them tittered: Beans recognized him as Brother John’s scowly cousin, the other one being the sullen fat boy who’d organized the stag party. They both looked blitzed out of their skulls. The fat boy asked the other one how much he’d put in, and he said about thirty, forty dollars. “Here, you’ve just doubled your money,” said the fat boy. He tossed something down on the body, a single bill perhaps, pocketed the rest, and the two of them staggered out of there, hooting and snorting and singing “Roll Your Leg Over.” Beans waited until he’d heard the doors slam and the old truck grind and rattle away, then crept over into the ravine to examine the body. Naked but for a few wet tangled rags, ghostly white and motionless, but still warm. He put an ear to her breast and heard a beat: so, still alive. In a manner of speaking, for, though her eyes were open, she clearly couldn’t see him and she was limp as a rag doll. Just a little kid in dirty school socks with a five-dollar bill resting on her damp tum like a fallen leaf or a sale price tag. Familiar in some odd way, though he was sure he’d never seen her before. Somebody in the movies maybe. He was equally sure he’d never seen the old gent in the leather jacket and ballcap standing beside him with a shotgun either, though he was also weirdly familiar. Like somebody you might meet in a nightmare. “What you been doin’ to my little girl, you iniquitous transgressin’ sonuvabitch?” From his knees, Beans whispered: “I, uh, I heard noises and came over. Sir.” “Great Gawdamighty, Behold my accusséd affliction!” roared his interlocutor and poked the gun up Beans’s tender nose. He could feel the puke rising. “Her defilement’s in her putrid skirts, her temple’s been desecrated all to frickin’ hell!” Beans held up his hand asking to be excused, wishing badly he could have the old dream back. He’d been too hasty about waking up. “This unholy shit-soaked abombination has gotta be smited, Lord! Amen! It’s time to bring down the final reckonin’!”