The Mentor (20 page)

He
whispered: “What do I do with this?”  

A tall
skinny cop walked us through the lot, leading the way several paces ahead of
us.  He said we could go in: get the tape but nothing else.  

“VIN
number,” I said and eyeballed the pencil and paper.  "You get the number
while I fiddle with the radio.”

Pavan’s
face twisted for a second then it finally hit him.  We didn’t have to
have
the van to get the number.  Just access to it.

My friend
hopped in spot for a second throwing his hands in the air like Rocky at the top
of the steps, and I smiled and pushed his arms downward, trying to calm him a
bit.  

“Rock,
dude!” he whispered.  

SURE, I MAY
HAVE been able to call Detective Clower or even just pop by the Department of
Motor Vehicles but that would trigger too many questions with no firm guarantee
I’d come away with a name.  Also, the DMV is bureaucratic and ritualistic
torture.  You can witness clear violations of the Geneva Convention three
steps into the place.  Even Comrade Stalin didn’t commission a DMV to be
built in the Motherland— true.  Too extreme.  So, no way I was going
there.  Instead, Pavan got the vehicles I.D. number to his half brother in
Texas.  

“Gary said
we owe him a case of beer for the guy’s name,” Pavan said.

He’d smoked
in his crappy car so long that when the sun was out and shining bright; it
looked like you were driving through the third act of a John Carpenter horror
movie.  

“How can
you see, man?”

Pavan
reached between the seats and grabbed a tissue, trying to rub away a clean area
to peek through.  He was just smearing the smoke residue around, making
rainbows in the glass.

“Pull over
here, next right,” I said.

“I’m good
on gas.”  Pavan pulled up to the convenience story and when he stopped, I
jumped out.  “If you’re going in, get me a Yoohoo, man.”  

Ten seconds
later I was back with a squeegee from the pump island.  Popping open the
passenger side door, I put the spongy part of the squeegee on the inside of the
glass—

“HEY MAN,
what the hell?”

--and
scrubbed away at the grime on the window.  Droplets of water fell like
fat, lazy rain onto his dashboard, which only collected into dustballs from the
silt.  Gray water oozed down the window into the vents and down my arm.

“Here,” I
said, tossing a handful of blue paper towels his way.  “You rub on that
side, I’ll do this side.”

In about
three minutes, we had the window and dashboard mostly clear.  I took the
squeegee back to the service station island and threw away a disgusting handful
of paper towels.

Pavan was a
bit steamed but he sometimes gets like that.  I’ve lived by the maxim that
it’s better to ask for forgiveness than it is permission.  In most cases,
it gets things done and the consequences are minimal.  Most.  Not
all.

“Sorry,
man.” I said and popped my door closed.  

“Look at my
dashboard.”

I ran my
hand across it and snapped my fingers.  “It’s called clean, dude.”

“Yeah,” he
said firing up the car again, pulling out.  “But now I gotta clean the
whole car otherwise it don’t look right.”  

Texas Gary
had gotten us the address of the van's previous owner from the VIN number.
 He worked at a low-rent insurance company—life insurance, house
insurance, car insurance.  Pavan pushed him to get me a card that
said
I had insurance, and he reluctantly said he’d work on it.  Wouldn’t be a
big deal, get insurance for a day, and cancel.  You still have the card
but you don’t have the big check to write.  Or insurance, for that matter.
 But I
would
have the card and hopefully that would be enough to
get the van.  Gary said he’d have it for us the next day and, we could
head to the library and get the scan out of my email.

Then it
would be the small task of getting the two-fifty together.  But, one
insurmountable task at a time.

“Where’s
your brother Gary live?”

“Dallas.
 Not actually in Dallas, just north of there,” Pavan said, watching the
signs as they whirled past the crystal clear windshield.  “What was the
street this person lives on again?”

“Durham
Hill Trace,” I said.  “You ever live in Dallas?”

“Nope.”

Ah, sore
spot.  Pavan’s not the one-word answer type.  So, since it would be a
few minutes before we got to Carroll McGaha’s home, I thought I’d press him.

“So how is
it you have a half-brother in Dallas?”

“My father
was a sperm donor.”

“No way.”

“Yep,” he
said, nodding to the street sign.  “Durham Hill Road.  That is
supposed to take us to Durham Hill Trace.”

“Sperm
donor?”

“Yep,”
Pavan said and looked at me from behind his K-Mart shades.  “One client at
a time.”  

“Bet he
even did free of charge,” I said.

“He did.”

“Helluva
guy, you’re dad.  He’s a giver.”

“Mom, she
had a different opinion.” Pavan said.  “And, good thing for Dad, bad aim.”

I watched
the streets go by Durham Hill Circle, Durham Hill Avenue, Durham Hill Road… the
neighborhood was lower-middle class and seriously lacking in street-naming
moxie.  

“Gary have
anything more on Carrol McGaha?”

“Nah,”
Pavan said stubbing out his cig.  “He only put in for the vehicle
information.  Coulda gone after more on this McGaha chick but, he said
that you can’t just look up people’s records like before.”

“This is
something you’ve done before, Pavan?”

“I refuse
to answer that question until at least the statue of liberations expires.”

It was
possible McGaha was the Mentor’s lady friend, but I wasn’t getting my hopes up.
 A lead, though, is better than nothing.

The street
came up on the left and a minute later we pulled up to the house.  It was
two stories, brick face, and green wooden shutters.  Of all the houses on
the street, this one had the most trees in the front.  Only brick in
front, the other walls had yellowed but most of that was hidden by four or five
massive trees in the front yard.  You couldn’t tell where one began and
the next ended.

Pavan
pulled up into the driveway.  The garage door was uneven and looked as
though it didn’t close all the way anymore.  A lot of junk but no car in
there.  

Very quiet
street.  No kids in the street or yards.  Either this was an older
neighborhood or the kids of the neighborhood were glued to videogames or
violent cartoons or whatever is at presently zombifying the current generation.
 

Nearby,
there was the pleasant smell of someone burning leaves and branches.
 There were a ton of sticks and limbs in the McGaha front yard.  In
fact, the lawn looked like
only
downed branches and dirt.  The
trees kept most of the sun away so any grass that would take a shot at poking
its head out likely had no chance.

Stepping
from the car, I made sure Pavan’s CD player was secure, clipped to my hip.
 Thumbing the ear bud deeper into my ear, some nasally woman was talking
about southwestern foliage.  

There was a
walkway running from the driveway to the front door, and as I stepped to the
path and into the shade the temperature dropped about ten degrees.

“There’s an
old crazy lady looking at us from across the street,” Pavan said, walking on
the balls of his feet.

“Probably
part of the neighborhood watch program.”

“She was
eyeballing me when we pulled up, the whole time in the drive and now… you’d
think, I dunno, you’d try and be less obvious about staring at someone.”

I looked
over and waved.  “Well, she’s got sunglasses on.”

The house
was in okay shape but about thirty years old, like most of the homes on the
block.  Mrs. Snoopitysnoop across the street has obviously had her home
painted three or four times in the time Carroll McGaha had done it. Here, the
shutters were less paint than wood, like the garage, and the exposed bits had
turned stone gray.

“Whoa!
 Dex, stop!”

I spun
around to see what had spooked him and Pavan pointed about four feet in front
of me.

The web
stretched from the large pine just off the sidewalk to the front of the house.
 This close, it looked thick like fishing line.  In the middle, well,
was the sort of thing that made you instinctively take a step in an opposite
direction.

“Holy
cats,” I said.

“That
spider’s gotta be big as my fist,” Pavan said, his voice rattling in his
throat.

“Yeah, but
you got small hands,” I said and looked to the door, then up at the big red and
black and yellow spider.  This low, there were only thick anchor lines to
the larger web above.  But we’d have to walk underneath; the crab spider
would be about two feet above our heads.

“No way,
man.”

“Come on,”
I said moving forward slowly, keeping both eyes on the bug.

“I’ll wait
by the car.”

“Pussy,
I’ll knock it down.  You’ll be fine.”

A voice
from the screen door said, “Leave Harry alone!”

The
darkened doorway made it difficult to see who’d called out.  After a
moment, he moved closer to the screen, giving us the full view of his scowl.
 The tall, old man hunched forward, possibly being pulled forward by his
faded suspenders.  His t-shirt was stained, but it was what he held in
front of the t-shirt which made me pause.  Through the dirty screen, the
rifle I saw very clearly.

“Listen
we’re looking for Carroll McGaha.”

“What for?”

“We… I
bought a van from someone who bought the van from her.”

“Her?”

“Mrs.
McGaha.”

He opened
the door and leaned on the butt of the rifle, barrel digging into the grit of
the cement steps.  

“There
ain’t no Mrs. McGaha, you idiot,” he said.  “I’m Carroll McGaha.  But
nobody calls me that.”

“I bet.”

“Everybody
calls me ‘Smokey.’  And I don’t want you getting anywhere near Harry up
there.  He eats the bugs that try to eat my house.”

I couldn’t
help it and said:  “Your house is made out of brick, Smokey.  What
kinda bugs you got out here in the sticks?”

“The eaves
are made of wood.  Those goddamn carpenter bees dig big holes in them and
every year I gotta take a ladder up there fillin’ in holes,” he said and
suddenly smiled a wide, broken smile.  “Harry doesn’t let them do that.
 Harry eats them.”

Impressively
floating backwards toward his car, Pavan
said, “Your spider eats
bees
, sir?”

“Can I just
ask you about your van?” I asked.

Smokey looked
at us and, now that we weren’t talking about Harry, the bee-killin’ spider, he
wasn’t much interested.  “Sold the van six weeks ago.  You’re outta
luck, son.”

“No, we
don’t want to buy it.  We bought it already… from the guy you sold it to,
Smokey.”

“Go talk to
him, then.”   He went inside, and the screen door slammed behind him.

“We don’t
know where he is, Smokey.  We don’t know who he is.”

It was
quiet for a moment and I looked up uneasily at Harry.  I felt we were
being watched, either by the spider or the old man.  

“How d’ya
not know who he is?” Smokey finally said through the screen.  “You bought
the van from
him
.”

“Listen, I
get the feeling we’re distracting Harry here a little.  It’s hard to be on
bee-watch when you got guys jabbering around you.  Might be hard for him
to hear… you know, the buzzing and stuff.”

The front
door closed with a slam.  I turned to Pavan who had not taken his eyes off
of Harry, the bee-slayer.

Looking
across the street, the neighborhood snoop was driving her garden trowel into a
patch of dirt but her eyes were still on the both of us.  I waved again
and smiled wide.

“Maybe
granny remembers who came over to see McGaha about the van.  We could
ask.”

Pavan
backed a few paces then turned, heading to the driveway.

“I wish I’d
never seen that spider, man.  I know I’m gonna dream about that big
sumbitch tonight,” he said, then groaned.  “Man, I wish I’d never seen
that thing.”

The garage
door suddenly jerked and rattled, and Pavan jumped three feet mid-air, running
about five steps before he stopped and turned.  The wood panels creaked
and crackled as it opened; the door’s overhead motor sounding like a
bulldozer’s engine.

Smoky was
standing there when the door came up, again leaning on the butt of his rifle.

“What is
this all about?”

I stepped
forward and shook his hand.  “My name’s Dexter and this is Pavan.  We
have your van now but the guy who we bought it from, we don’t feel so good
about.”