A Dark Matter (17 page)

“Talking to a knife, that’s what he was doing,” Don said. “And singing to it.
Singing
. He was standing in front of a table, picking up this big knife, kind of fondling it, and putting it back down. The whole deal struck me as really creepy. Who sings to a knife? In a locked shed?”

“Hayward was a disturbed guy, that’s for sure. I’ve been looking through some … No, I can’t talk about it yet.”

“Hey, Chief, that’s up to you.” Don slumped in his chair and pushed aside his plate. We had lingered at the irregular slab of dark-gray stone that served as the kitchen table. “Is it too late for a nightcap?”

“You know where the bottles are.”

Olson slid out of his chair and began to move toward the liquor cabinet.

“Oh, hell,” I said. “Get me another beer out of the fridge, will you?” I felt an underlying heaviness tugging at my voice.

“You got it.”

Olson handed me a beer and sat down again. His story had excited him, and he would be damned if he would go to bed: Donald Olson was still only a few days out of jail, he was dressed in new clothes, and he had his mitt around a glass of the finest tequila he had ever tasted.

“How’s the Eel?”

“Excuse me?”

“Is her conference going well? Or whatever it is?”

“It is, yes. In fact, she told me she’s going to stay in Washington for another week. There’s plenty for her to do there.”

“She knows I’m here?”

“Yes. You can stay a while longer, if you like. There are a few ideas I want to explore, a couple of things I’d like to suggest.”

“Okay. And here’s some actual good news I was saving up. From now on I won’t have to sponge off you anymore.”

“You scared up some money? How’d you do that?”

“Called in a few favors. Maybe you could give me a hand setting up a new bank account, arranging for a checkbook, stuff like that?”

“How much are we talking about?”

“If you really want to know, five K.”

“You raised five thousand dollars with a couple of phone calls?”

“A little more, actually. If you like, I can pay back your five hundred.”

“Maybe later,” I said, still amazed. “In the meantime, let’s get you down to the bank tomorrow, deposit that money.”

The next morning, I walked Olson to the Oak Bank and used my long acquaintanceship with its officers to ease the process of setting up a checking account in the amount of $5,500 for my houseguest. Three separate checks had been made out by persons I’d never heard of: Arthur Steadham ($1,000), Felicity Chan ($1,500), and Meredith Walsh ($2,500). Olson wound up with a temporary checkbook and five hundred dollars in cash. When I declined to accept any money, Don tucked half of the debt into my breast pocket.

I thought Olson would write checks until they started to bounce. The credit card company was going to get burned, because Don would see the card as nothing more than cash in instantly available form. To establish credit, he would pay his first month’s bill. After that, everything was uncertain.

Feeling like the midwife to a criminal career, I accepted Don’s offer to buy me lunch at Big Bowl, the Chinese restaurant near the corner of Cedar and Rush. After we ordered, Olson surprised me. “You’re going to ask me to drive to Madison and visit Hootie Bly with you, aren’t you?”

The chopsticks nearly jittered out of my hand.

“Let me go you one better. How would you like to talk to Meredith Bright? Meredith Bingham Walsh, as she is now.”

“What are you saying?”

“If you’re interested, I can probably arrange for you to meet Meredith. Hootie isn’t going to say anything that makes sense, but Mrs. Walsh might give you something useful. I don’t know, I’m just guessing here.”

“The vampire married to the senator? How can you do that?”

“It’s a long story,” Don said. “I think I amuse her. She sent me one of those checks.” He watched me as he sliced a soup dumpling in half and lifted one of the halves out of the bowl. “I guess you’re really
into
finding out what happened out there in that meadow. It’s like you think everyone saw the same thing, like all of us had the same experience. Is that what you think?”

“I guess I did, yes. Once. But not anymore.”

“What changed your mind?”

“A couple of years ago, I ran into Boats on the sidewalk outside the Pfister. This was even before I started getting interested in the Ladykiller.” An extremely specific memory returned to me. “He was carrying a suitcase.
Uh-oh
, I said to myself.
He’s really still at it
. That suitcase probably had a lot of other people’s cash and other people’s jewelry inside it. Plus whatever else he felt like stealing.”

“You gotta give him this,” Don said. “Man has a hell of a work ethic.”

“Seen one way, I guess. Anyhow, we recognized each other and he felt like talking, so we went inside and sat in that lobby bar, that lounge. With the big tables, and all the staircases? I thought he’d be nervous, but he said it was actually a very safe place for him to spend the next half hour or so.”

Olson laughed, and said, “Good plan.”

“So we were sitting there, just talking like two normal guys, and I realized that he might actually tell me something about that day. Back then, he barely even looked at me in the hallways. Hootie was in the bin. Lee refused to say anything. And you were off God knows where.”

“Right down the street, at least for a while.”

“Anyhow, when we were in the Pfister’s lounge, I brought it up. ‘Didn’t you talk about this with your wife?’ he asked, and I said, ‘Well, I tried.’ ’No way, huh?’ he said. Then he said that a lot of time had passed, and he might be able to tell me something. ‘It was horrible, though,’ he told me. And he said you were the only other person he had ever spoken of this with.”

Olson nodded. “Four, five years ago, in Madison. He has a little hideout there, a crummy room near the stadium, and he just waited for me to come through town. We got together after one of my initial meetings with the students, like that one you didn’t go to at La Bella Capri. He was shook up—couldn’t get it out of his mind. That picture.”

“A tower of dead children, he said. With little arms and legs sticking out.”

“And some heads, too. Did he cry, when you were talking?”

“He cried with you, too?”

Olson nodded. “It was when he tried to tell me that most of the dead kids were sort of folded over. ‘Like tacos,’ he said. And after that, he couldn’t keep it together anymore.”

“Amazing. That’s just what happened with me. ‘Like tacos,’ and boom, he’s in tears, he’s shaking, he can’t say another word for about five minutes, he just keeps making these ‘I’m sorry’ gestures with his hands.”

“Hell of a thing to see,” Don said. “But he didn’t see much else.”

“No. Just a big tower made of dead children. And a lot of blinding red-orange light, light the color of Kool-Aid, streaming in.”

“That’s what I said to
him!
He’s such a thief, he steals other people’s words. Anyhow, that light was really foul. Streamed in on us like through some crack in the world. One of the worst smells ever. I’m sure we all went through that. Unfortunately for you, I never managed to see a lot. There was one thing, though.”

“Yes?”

“Well, two things, actually. The first one was this dog, standing up inside a little room with a rolltop desk. He was wearing a dark-brown suit, two-tone shoes, and a bow tie. You know how guys with bow ties can sometimes give you this
look
, like you just farted and they hope you’ll go away before they have to ask you to leave? Pity and contempt. That’s the way he was looking at me.”

“Oh, that poster,” I said.

“No, not that poster Eel’s dad gave her. He wasn’t anything like those dogs. He wasn’t cute, not at all. This guy was sorry to see me, and he wanted me to go away.”

“But there was something else, too.”

“Jesus, have a little patience, will you? I’m getting to it. Mallon grabbed me by the elbow and yanked me away, but just before he pulled on my arm I saw that the dog was trying to hide something from me—things I was not supposed to see. These things were more like men, but bright, almost shiny, as if they were made of mercury or something. And they scared the shit out of me. One of them was a woman, not a man, a woman like a queen, and she had this stick in her hand, and I knew that the stick was called a distaff. How I knew I had no idea, but that’s what the thing was called. The whole thing scared the shit out of me. It terrified me. No, it
horrified
me, it filled me with
horror
. If Spencer hadn’t yanked me sideways, I would never have been able to move.”

“You told this to Boats, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. He was a lot more interested in his dead children. He asked me if I thought it could have been real. I said, ‘It was probably real somewhere, Jason.’”

That evening we made several necessary telephone calls, and after that secured reservations at the Concourse Hotel. The following morning, we drove 150 miles north to Madison. For 140 of those miles, we were on I-90 West, for most of our journey a highway with little to recommend it but simplicity and ease of use. Exits for villages and small towns, mileage signs, and billboards appeared, but the towns themselves did not, nor did the restaurants, motels, and roadside attractions advertised in the billboards. From the highway nothing was visible but the few farmhouses and fewer hills that punctuated a wide, flat landscape of fields and trees. For long stretches, three or four cars moving in a huddle fifty yards ahead were the only other vehicles in sight.

Don Olson said, “Slow down, damn it. You’re scaring me.”

The speedometer revealed that I had been stepping along at eighty-eight miles per hour. “Sorry.” I took my foot off the accelerator. “It snuck up on me.”

Olson caressed the top of the dashboard with a bony hand. “Man, everything you have is beautiful, isn’t it? Me, I got nothing at all. That’s fine with me, by the way. I had your stuff, I’d be worried sick about trying to protect it.”

“You’d adjust after a while.”

“How fast does this old baby go, anyhow?”

“Around two o’clock one night, I was all alone on the highway. Bombed out of my skull. I got it up to a hundred and thirty. Then
I
got scared. That was the last time I ever did anything like that.”

“You hit a hundred and thirty when you were drunk at two in the morning?”

“Stupid, I know.”

“It also sounds very, very unhappy, man.”

“Well,” I said, and offered no more.

“Spencer used to say, everybody runs around looking for happiness when they ought to seek joy.”

“You have to earn joy,” I said.

“I’ve known joy. Long time ago.” Olson laughed. “Spencer once told me the only time he experienced absolute joy was in the meadow, just before everything exploded.”

Olson was still sitting sideways, facing me, one leg drawn up onto the car seat, almost grinning.

“This is out of left field, I know.”

“All right,” Olson said.

“Did you ever sleep with Lee when we were all back in high school?”

“With the Eel?” Laughing, Olson held up his right hand, palm out, as if taking an oath. “For God’s sake, no. Me and Boats and Hootie, we were all madly in love with Meredith Bright. Give me a break, man. You’d have to be a rat to go after another guy’s girlfriend. I had more principles than that. Anyhow, I always thought you and the Eel were doing it on a daily basis, more or less.”

I must have displayed rubber-faced amazement. “I didn’t think anybody knew that.”

“I didn’t
know
it … but I sure had the feeling that, you know.”

“We tried so hard to—”

“It worked, man. Nobody in our school knew that you and the Eel were having more sex than the rest of us combined, faculty included.”

That was probably true, I supposed. Lee Truax and I had progressed to actual intercourse on our fourth (or according to her, our fifth) get-together—encounters too informal to be called dates. At a party during our freshman year, we, by then long an informal couple, had wandered into an empty bedroom and followed our history of kisses, touches, partial disrobings and revelations, to its natural conclusion. We were stunningly, amazingly lucky. Our first experiences of sex were almost totally pleasurable. Within weeks, the mutual discovery of her clitoris led to her first orgasm. (Later, we referred to this day, October 25, as “the Fourth of July.”) And we knew from the first that this miracle depended for its survival upon silence and secrecy.