The Wrong Man (13 page)

14

T
hree
months
flew
away
in a moment. They were happy times for the most part. Jill and I found a one room apartment in
Del
Mar and I walked onto a construction site back in Blackmer, where a new movie theater was going up, and got a job cleaning up lumber scraps for ten bucks an hour. Then the foreman called me over and said to show him how I used a skillsaw, so I did, and he had me cut fifty studs down to ninety inches. Then he gave me an old tool belt and lent me a hammer and had me nail metal straps for a day, so the building wouldn’t fall over in an earthquake. Then he had me frame in a small closet in the theater’s office, inspected my work, and bumped my pay to fourteen dollars an hour and found another grunt to keep the jobsite clean.

By then Jill had begun showing, of course, and I had begun worrying her. On certain nights I didn’t come home after work. Grandpa Art was quite sick by then, and I would stop in once or twice a week and have dinner with him and my Grandmother since I was in town. I stayed at their house late, usually, talking about nothing and everything with my grandfather, hoping to give him the impression, by my presence, that his life had meant something. For his part he said frequently that he would remain alive at least until my child was born, but I had trouble entirely believing it.

I left after eleven usually, but on these nights I never went directly home. I took to parking my car on
Valencia Street
, pulling a knit cap down to my eyebrows and making excursions into the part of Conejo that lies just across the bridge, just a short walk from the burgeoning homeless encampment. In the thick of night these bars and alleys are something lower than an underbelly of this town; they are the underbelly’s lower regions, its unwashed, vermin-ridden groin. This is where the smokers of chiva—black tar Mexican heroin—live out the high points of their days. If you have the nerve to push open the door and order a beer in the decayed barrooms—as I once did—you can spot them pretending happiness like ghosts reliving lost moments of pleasure, their waxy gray faces shimmering with the sick neon light. This is where inhuman appetites are gorged, where the ten dollar whores turn ten tricks a night, not even bothering to cover their scab-riddled arms. It’s a never-cleaned filter, accumulating the lost souls from
Mexico
, the people who came to work the fields and fell to depression and disgrace, their bodies rancid, their faces horrid, puffy and purple with alcohol, their brains eaten to pieces by hard cheap drugs.

I had heard that Rich was a full-fledged addict now. He had fallen, fallen, fallen and finally struck rock bottom here, wallowing in the filth of it for endless, sleepless nights and crawling out again in daylight, materializing half sober in bars in more reputable parts of town or finding his way back to his father’s, where he’d beg or steal money and catch a shower every week or two. The degeneration had been rapid, and I liked to think that his beating from Owen and my turning on him had somehow nudged him over the edge, into that final freefall, but that wasn’t the case. His descent, I knew, had begun at some point when his personality was being formed; his trajectory was set back in childhood with loneliness, neglect and corruption, and his course wasn’t going to be altered by any chance encounter this late in the game.

But his course could be ended.

I was not surprised when I saw him—and then I was. He was slinking out of a tiny, windowless place with a tattered green awning and a handmade sign next to the door that read El Gato Feliz—The Happy Cat. He had his arm slung over the shoulders of a creature that was supposed to be a woman but wasn’t. It was a special animal that flourished in these blocks, the low-budget shemale with a purple dress from the discount store that only accentuated its bulky shoulders, and a ratty, frazzled bleach-blonde hairdo that was appalling as it framed that dark, Neanderthal face with its large shaded jaw.

I turned away as they crossed the street, and listened to them communicate across the language barrier, Rich using his few dozen words of Spanish, the shemale nodding and answering with a grotesque, girlishly-inflected broken English. “Yes,
mijo
, I
have!
I
have!
” it said and Rich said, “Okay, okay. Just making sure,
bonita.
I need it.
Yo necisito mucho!”
—I need it very much.
 

I swung along after them, hands in pockets, feet kicking out like any guy on an evening stroll. But my eyes were attached to, crawling all over, the backs of their heads. They crossed the street, walked over the bridge and then cut right, down off the sidewalk and onto a dirt trail that snaked toward the levee. It was a chilly night with a dome of thick, dark clouds over the city, and the shemale tried to snug itself up against Rich and he actually squeezed it against him like he was fond of it. Contrasted with the short, stout frame, Rich’s long legs and good proportions were evident. It was an old, old story, I realized. He was prostituting himself for a fix. They were walking faster and faster and I knew their business was to hunker down in some secluded place and break out a hypodermic needle. Get Rich into his heroin euphoria while the shemale did god-knew-what to him.

I looked behind me, I was thirty or forty yards from the sidewalk now and I broke into a run. My fist was wrapped around the brass knuckles and my vision jolted up and down with each loping step. The dark shapes drew up, flew at me.
 
I felt myself enter their world, saw them become aware of my presence, stop and turn, but I had already cocked my arm back and was yelling, “Police!
La policia!”
 

Rich went down from the blow, crumpling onto his face in the tall grass, and the shemale turned to me, still doing its impression of a woman, eyes wide, voice simpering.
“Vete!”
I said.
“Vete de aqui, maricon! Yo soy policia!”
and it nodded, turned around, and moved down the trail in an open, manly sprint.

I stood over Rich. Waiting. My chest rose and fell. Cars whooshed over the bridge behind me but I knew nobody could see us. There was nobody else in the world. I kicked his leg. He stirred and rolled over, his hand clutching the back of his head.

“It’s me Sam, Rich. Sam Schuler.”

“Sam,” he said. “What the fuck. Did you—?” He had sat up now. He was still holding the back of his head, giving a little shudder from time to time as if trying to shake off cobwebs. His face, as much as I could make it out, looked the same. I could see it was clean shaven by the highlight on his jaw. His black hair was parted and shiny. It occurred to me that he had prettied himself up to trade his body for a fix.

“Jill,” I said.

“What?” Now he looked up, blinking with all the muscles of his face.

“My girlfriend, Jill. You went to my apartment, you and your friend. Don’t even fuckin’ try to tell me you didn’t.”

“Fuck,” he said. “Dude, you’re living in the past—”

I hadn’t known I was going to kick him until the toe of my tennis shoe dug into his eyebrow ridge. The anger was a hot orange thing that filled me up in a heartbeat. He toppled over backward and held his face, then rolled and finally pushed himself up on his hands and knees, positioned like he was going to get up and run down the trail.

“How’s
that?”
I said like an idiot. “Is
that
living in the past?”

He stayed down there before me. His breathing was loud. He didn’t move. He said, “Sam, that shit, you know, it wasn’t my idea. My friend, Johnny, he was all about it so I went along with it, you know what I mean?”

“You knew where I lived. He didn’t. So
you
went along with taking some piece of shit to my place, and you—
you
went along with raping my fucking girlfriend?” The rage was flaring up again, I was almost choking on it.

Rich was sitting on his legs now, he had turned and was looking up at me, still rubbing his eye. He said, “Listen, dude. I know how you feel—” and I almost laughed and it dawned on me that there wasn’t quite a real person inhabiting his body anymore. The drugs had left him detached from the rest of humanity, semi-retarded even. He didn’t know when he was or wasn’t making sense.

“—I mean,” he said, “I fuckin’
liked
Jill, you know? And when that happened
 
. . . Oh, no, you’re not doing
that.
”

There wasn’t going to be any remorse from Rich. He wasn’t going to feel the jagged, tearing teeth of mine or Jill’s tragedy and horror. Just the tragedy and horror of his own death. I had the thirty-eight pointed at his forehead.

“Sam!” he said. “This is me here—Rich Channing, dude! Junior high, man. Fucking second period break, remember? You always bought me shit, remember? Remember snagging all that shit from the Vietnamese store?”

I centered the barrel and he didn’t flinch.

He said, “I’m your
friend
, Sam!” and I shot him through the bridge of his nose and watched him go over. Then, as I’d read in some crime book, I cocked the gun again, went to one knee and placed it over his heart and fired again. The shots were everything and then they were gone and my ears were ringing. I looked up the trail to the bridge and saw nobody. The trail down to the levee was empty as well. I stood up and started walking, throwing one last glance. Rich was like part of the earth, like clothing stuffed with rags flung out onto the damp ground. I began running through the grass. following the river to where I could connect with the next street, where I would walk, slowly, easily, back to my car and drive home.
       

15

T
his
is
how
the
whole thing ended:

Rich had an accomplice and I had the guy’s license plate number and first name—Johnny—but I didn’t have the heart to seek him out. If I had known more, if I could think of some direct, logical course of action, I might have been more inclined to pursue it. But Johnny the rapist was just a few odd scraps of information, another faceless subhuman predator in a jungle full of them. Day by day the impulse toward blood-letting waned, and only occasionally did I lie awake, conscious of Jill’s mountainous belly beside me, and curse myself for not hunting the motherfucker down.

The truth is, I almost let it go. I almost let him get away with it. I might have never gone back to Blackmer again if it wasn’t for Grandpa Art.

And the little people.

Grandma Anne called me one Sunday, said I should come over soon, but wouldn’t say why. The construction job had ended and it had been, I realized—wincing with guilt—nearly two months. I had developed a mild terror of the visits. Living and working—now at the Chevron on
33rd Avenue
—in a different town, with Jill’s pregnancy marching toward completion, I had walled myself off from the reality of my grandfather’s decline. If you’ve been forced into the company of the very old, with their failing bodies and minds, you may know what a dreaded prospect it can become. You may understand how an afternoon visit can feel like three or four hours of your life being amputated in slow motion, with a dull saw.

But really, when you’re all these people have, there’s no excuse.

I got there in the late afternoon. It was fall now and the heater was cranked so the house’s interior was at oven temperatures. I was yanking my coat off, half panicked by the sudden tropical climate as soon as the door closed behind me. I hung the coat up, cursing, and then I saw him hunched in his armchair under the front window and I felt those uncontrollable chills you get sometimes when listening to ghost stories.

He looked like the near-corpse that special effects artist concoct for certain movie scenes—scenes where the aging process is accelerated to a year a second until the figure begins decomposing before your eyes, crumbling to dust and finally blowing away.

He wasn’t moving. I stepped closer, wondering if he could be dead already. He wore one of his signature T-shirts. A sun-bleached pale green thing I knew well, with peeling letters spelling out, “I’m
not
arrogant
, I’
m
just
better
than
you
.” His body was hardly more than a skeleton underneath it. The chalky flesh of his arms sagged like popped balloons and his face was a caricature of an old, old man, thrust forward, mute, the wrinkles gathered on top of each other and deeper than ever before.

It was a slow panic I felt. My eyes stinging, my throat constricting, my heart shocked. I dropped to one knee, placed a hand on his white-fuzzed wrist.

The ragged eyebrows shifted upward, the rinsed-out eyes found me.

“Hello, Sam.”

Christ, it was so much like a corpse speaking that I almost drew my hand away. But I cleared my throat and met his gaze.

“Hey, Grandpa Art. How have you been?”

He grunted. “Just great. Just great.” He had a heartbreaking slur, and I swallowed at a growing lump. “ ’Cept your grandmother thinks I’m going crazy. She doesn’t hear them. She doesn’t see them.” He made a dismissive gesture.

“Doesn’t see who?”

His eyes sharpened and he studied me. He said, “Now you’re not gonna turn on me too, are you? Not you, Sam! They’re right there! You see that?” He pointed to the entryway of the hall. “The son of a bitches just went into my goddamned office. That’s what they do when you come around, or when your grandmother comes around. They go inside the goddamned computer. Or, you may not believe it, but they dive right down the heating vents.”

“Inside the computer? But—who?”

“They’re kids. Irritating goddamned kids, or small people made up to look like kids. They know enough to hide when other people come around but I’m gonna kill one of the little fuckers one of these nights and we’ll see who’s crazy then, won’t we?”
 

You can laugh or you can cry. Or you can sit speechless, which is what I did.

“They’re filming everything,” he said.

I was overcome as I squatted there, sweating like an animal, my face on fire, pushing thumb and forefinger into my eyes as if I could stanch the tears like blood-flow
.

“Hey.” He frowned. “Don’t worry about ’em, Sam. They’re punks. Every last one of ’em. I’ll tell you,” he slurred lower, his voice confidential now. “Sometimes they wear these skimpy dresses—and not the girls either.” And without warning I began to laugh. Cross dressing little people in the heating vents! I was thinking of telling Jill about this, and shit, Grandpa Art—the real Grandpa Art—would have doubled over laughing about it if he was here, so what the hell.

“It
is
funny, isn’t it? It’s funny as shit!” he said, his face breaking open in a smile.

“Sometimes all you can do is laugh, right?” I said, blinking the tears away.

Grandpa Art was nodding, looking smug. “Long as those fuckers leave me be, I’m happy.”

But the point is that I went back to Blackmer twice that week, just doing my penance, putting in my time with the old people. And I went again the next Sunday and stayed until after dark, and as I was leaving town, it happened.

I’d been trapped longer than I intended. The sunlight was gone as I waded out of town and I closed my cell and turned almost randomly into the
Baron Square
shopping center. Jill had called me and ordered a frozen pizza and a pre-mixed salad. I didn’t think too much about reopening wounds,
Baron Square
just happened to be on the way back to the freeway. Rolling into the lot, I found that all my other memories of this little sprawl of real estate had become obscured and dreamlike, and the shopping center existed for me as the place Tommy and I had sat and waited to follow and kill what turned out to be two men.

Vanguard’s big windows were lit up and cut out of the gathering darkness, and Rancho Bonita seemed to be doing decent business for a Sunday night. I craned my head and gaped at the buildings as I passed, but I was going over to the grocery store so I finally turned away. And then there was a buzz in my skull; strange pressure in my temples. I blinked and frowned. For a long moment I didn’t even recognize the source of the horror I felt or entirely understand why my feet were lowering down on the clutch and brake pedals.

Headlights pressed up behind me as I stopped, but I ignored them. I looked slowly over. A little red Japanese go-cart was pulled up to the run-in-and-grab-something spot, right in front of Vanguard’s doors—facing me so I could see its gray-primered fender.

There was a gentle horn tap from the car behind me and I took my foot off the brake and then the clutch, began rolling again and made the first right into a row of parking spaces.

I killed the engine, sat there in my darkened car and stared. And then I started moving, yanking the door handle, rising out of the car. I was preparing to sprint across the black pavement to Vanguard when I thought,
What in the fuck are you doing, Sam?

What would I do when I saw him, saw his face, and imagined him in that apartment with Jill? I was getting sick with rage just seeing his goddamned car. I had taken the gun apart after
 
. . . Rich. And then I had wiped down the pieces, lost them all in different places. The brass knuckles were in the bottom drawer of my dresser. Inside a fucking sock. So
what?
 
Would I try to kill him with my bare hands, draw witnesses, get arrested, tie it in with Jill’s rape and Rich Channing lying dead down by the levee?

I settled back into my car, closed the door and waited. And there he was exiting the store, glancing left and right like he was guilty of something.

From a hundred or so yards Johnny the rapist was nothing special. His skin didn’t even look especially dark from here. He was just the garden variety Mexican-American stoner that lives in every crack and shadow in this town. He wasn’t too tall but I could see he had a gym membership. His shoulders and chest were like football padding under his blue T-shirt. But he also had the gut and waist of the shameless connoisseur of the modern American diet. Except for a Marine-type haircut and a small mustache, that was all I could say about him as he dropped into his car, pulled the door shut, and the headlights came on like eyes opening wide.

I twisted the key in the ignition and shoved the Fairlane into first and pulled through an empty space, crawling toward the go-cart as it began to move. I would find out where Johnny lived. That was all, that was all . . .

Jesus, he wasn’t going home. He parked in the far corner of a dark public lot beside a small crumbling park with weeds splitting the pavement and graffiti on every possible surface. There were basketball courts featuring backboards with the chunks broken out of them and hoops without nets. There was a patch of lawn that might barely accommodate a touch football game and, off to the side, there was an entrance to a bike trail.

The trail wound down through the swamps at the edge of town, found its way to the
Conejo
River
and then gave exercise enthusiasts a ten-foot-wide asphalt strip to labor up and down from here to
Del
Mar. I rolled by on the street and slid the Fairlane up to the curb. I got out, taut and nervous, eased the door closed and laid my weight against it until it clicked.

I had a view of him through chain-link and shrubbery but he might have been alone in the universe for all he bothered to look around. He was little more than a silhouette. A living shadow amid dead ones. I watched him throw a cigarette away and immediately light another one, and I thought of him smoking all those cigarettes he got for free from Rich and the hatred flared inside me.

The town was settling quickly, everyone inside their caverns, windows glowing yellow, eating dinner, flipping channels, going to bed early. Blackmer had to work tomorrow and Johnny had the outdoors to himself. He dragged on his cigarette a moment, enjoying it, and began walking.

To the bike trail.

And it came to me as if nothing else in the world could happen. As if I’d been planning this for years. I found myself instantly behind my car, the key in the slot, the trunk clinking its release and sighing open. I looked around. A dead street. The sky a serene purple blanket. Every soul retreated into a home or apartment. I looked back down and I could make it out.

Jill and I lived in a one bedroom apartment, so I used my trunk to store some things. There was a battered red metal toolbox loaded with my old greasy socket set, end wrenches, pliers and so forth. And beside it was my construction belt. With my 24-ounce framing hammer. I had come across the tool at a yard sale and picked it up for four dollars shortly after my wage had been raised at the construction job. I was proud of it because it seemed a sort of status symbol. Something a professional carpenter might own. It had a yellow fiberglass handle and a rubberized grip, and I had gotten so I could set sixteen-penny nails and sink them with two good whams from it. Now I snatched it up and reached for the trunk lid. But before I closed the trunk I thought again, pushed the tool belt aside and got my leather work gloves from beneath it.

I moved briskly through the shadows, thinking hard about Jill and that night, feeling the inevitability of what was about to happen, feeling myself lusting for it.

And, hell, it was easy. Or at least part of it was. There are foot trails that wind off the main bike path, and at the end of the foot trails are benches, situated in clearings where some delusional city planner imagined people sitting in silent peace, communing with nature, reading fucking Dickens maybe. And of course the bushes around the benches are always crowded with empty pint bottles, disease-ridden hypodermic needles, used rubbers and so much random garbage it looks as if someone has upended a public trash bin.