B004XTKFZ4 EBOK (23 page)

“All right,” I said. “I’ll come in.”

He was delighted, his crooked grin bursting forth. We got out of the car.

“Ain’t had a visitor in a long time,” he said, “other than those people who bring my groceries. An’ they never stop to chat.”

“That’s too bad,” I said.

The shack was a single dark room. An oil lamp sat on the table. The shack was only slightly cooler than outside; I was sweating through my shirt.

“You don’t have electricity?” I asked.

“Nah. Got a propane tank out back. Keeps my hot plate goin’. Fan, when I need it. Sit down, sit down,” he said.

I did. We positioned ourselves at opposite ends of the single table. In the far corner of the room was an old bed, rumpled and sagging. There was a shelf that held a few knick knacks, a shortwave radio, the aforementioned fan, a few miscellaneous magazines.

“Ain’t much,” he admitted, noticing me looking around.

“No,” I agreed.

“All I need now, though. I’m eighty-one years old. Don’t need a lot.”

“No.”

We sat in silence. He popped open one of the beers he’d bought at the store. I declined his offer of one.

“Like to drink ’em when they’re still cold,” he explained. “No fridge.”

“I see that.”

“Ain’t had a visitor in a long time,” he said. “I told you that, didn’t I?”

“Yes. You did.”

Lucy, just go home.

“Forget a lotta things now,” he said quietly. His held his beer in two hands and yet it still quivered as it made its way to his lips.

“Do you?”

“I’m an old man,” he said. His voice was breathy, a hall of whispers. “Remember things that happened when I was little. Remember a dog I had, golden retriever. Bucky. Named him after Captain America’s sidekick.” He grinned crookedly. “Remember a lot of things like that. Way back. But lots is gone. Just disappeared. When they had me in that place they did things to me. Don’t recall exactly what. Bright lights, like a burnin’ in my head. They were gonna burn out the bad stuff, they said. Don’t know what that was. I just recall the burnin’, the burnin’. Brighter in my head than that desert out there.”

“Do you remember,” I said, my breath short, “Lucy Sparrow?”

“What’s that?”

“Lucy. Sparrow. Do you remember her?”

“Who’s that?”

“Or Maria Sanchez? Or Trista Blake?”

“Is one of them the lady that’s supposed to bring my groceries?”

I looked at him. His eyes were distorted behind the big glasses. He wasn’t lying, wasn’t pretending, unless he was the greatest actor of all time.

“Your name isn’t Jones,” I said. “It’s McCoy. Mike McCoy. And those are the girls you killed.”

“What’s that?”

“Lucy Sparrow. The other two. You killed them. You took them down to your basement and you tortured them and you murdered them.”

His face looked concerned, confused. “I did?”

“You did.”

He shook his head. “You know, I kind of think—it’s like there’s stuff buried back there, stuff that wasn’t totally burned out—it’s—but I can’t imagine. Why would I do that?”

“I was hoping,” I said, “that you would tell me.” My throat was dry. I’d been in this shack for five or ten minutes but it felt like hours, hours of roasting hell.

“I don’t,” he said, shaking his head, “I don’t remember none of that.”

“Think,” I said. “Lucy Sparrow. A big blonde girl. She wore T-shirts and blue jeans. You met her at the Red Ball gas station where you worked. You met me there, too.”

“We know each other?”

“I was Lucy’s best friend.”

He shook his head again, face concentrated with thought. “Can’t remember nobody named Lucy.”

“You must remember your basement,” I said. “Your basement in Quiet, California. Your tools. Your dissecting table. You must remember killing those girls and hacking their bodies up with your bone saw and dropping their—their
parts
in the riverbed.
You must remember that.
”

He looked frightened now. I realized suddenly that I’d stood up, was leaning across the table, looming over him. He recoiled, his expression suffused with fear. He said nothing. His mouth hung open. He quivered.

I strode away from the table, the heat causing my head to pulsate. I marched to the shelf and lashed out, knocking the magazines everywhere and sending the radio skittering across the floor. There was a small kitchen area where he stored his food and I saw a butcher knife there. I grabbed it, turned to face him.

“Do you remember what you did?” I said. “Do you?”

He couldn’t speak. His face had gone an ashy white. I walked up to him, stood there with the knife in my hands.

How’s it hangin’, lovely ladies?

You girls like to shoot pool?

C’mon over. We’ll have us some fun.

“Where’s your pool table?” I said.

“What?” he whispered.

“Pool. Pool. Don’t you like to play pool?”

“Ain’t shot pool in years.”

“How about girls? Have you hacked up any girls?”

“Ain’t—ain’t shot pool in years. The other—it’s—”

“It’s
what
?”

“It’s—ma’am, what kind of a man would do those things? It’s nothin’ a decent man would do.”

I looked at him for a long time. His dark eyes began to seem familiar behind the glasses: the broken blood vessels, the heavy old lids. But the energy in me dissipated then. I dropped the knife, collapsed in the chair next to him.

“Ain’t sayin’,” he murmured, “ain’t sayin’ I didn’t do it. Maybe I did. I heard about this before. There were people before came here. Maybe I did do it. Guess I’ll—guess I’ll go to hell if I did. Guess that’s where I belong. It sounds like an awful thing, a terrible thing. But ma’am, I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I don’t remember nothin’ from back then. Only remember ol’ Bucky. Did I tell you about Bucky?”

“Yes,” I whispered, “you did.”

“Bucky was my golden retriever.” He was proud of this, of remembering this. “Named him after Captain America’s sidekick. Bucky. Beautiful dog. We used to swim together in the creek in the summers.”

I stared at the floor. It felt as if all my energy, my focus, were ebbing away. As if life itself were departing my body, leaving only emptiness.

“That was back in the peach time. Had peaches on our property. Used to pick ’em with my uncle. Paid me by the basket. Worked all day sometimes, got so I couldn’t stand no peaches. The grass was long there, and green. And…”

Tears had begun trickling down my face, I realized. I made no move to wipe them away.

“And we used to play, Bucky and me. He had a ball, like a rubber ball, he liked. Used to throw it for him, have him fetch it through the peach trees. Dog loved that ball. He…”

I was sobbing now, uncontrollably. I hadn’t cried since I was a child yet now the tears came, a flood of them, pouring from my eyes and over my face and running down my neck. My throat was thick, sour. I could hardly breathe.

“Oh, ma’am,” he said, suddenly realizing. He stood, went to his sink, ran some water into a glass. He set it on the table beside me. “Ma’am, don’t do that. Don’t cry. Ain’t no reason to cry ’bout nothin’.”

But I didn’t stop. Not for a long time. I drank the lukewarm, bitter water. He stood near me nervously, obviously a stranger to him, a stranger who’d accused him of horrible things and who’d undergone an emotional collapse in front of him for reasons he didn’t understand, for reasons he couldn’t even imagine.

“I appreciate,” he said quietly, “your takin’ me to the store. I surely do.”

I nodded finally, wiping my eyes, standing shakily.

“It was—nothing,” I said.

I made my way outside again, into the blinding sun. McCoy stood there in the doorway, hunched over, all but dead.

Stepping into my car, I started the engine. I sat there shivering, tears trickling down my face, staring through the windshield at the nothingness before me.

“’Bye, ma’am,” he wheezed. “Good luck to you.”

“Goodbye,” I whispered, after a moment. But far too quietly for him, or anyone, to hear.

I drove away.

When I got back to Tucson I called my editor in New York, got him to agree to a three-month delay on the newest Flat-Head Fred story, and checked myself into a hospital. There isn’t much to be said about it except that when I checked out again forty-five days later, I no longer drank.

The world looked different when I left the hospital. The colors weren’t as bright, the sounds not as vivid. And yet everything was clearer than it had been in a very long time.

I wondered what I would do with myself now, especially in the evenings, alone in the house. Naturally the first thing I did on returning home was to pour all the remaining alcohol into the kitchen sink. Then I opened every window, sat down, and let the dry Arizona breeze fill my lungs.

Okay, Lucy, I’ll come with you,
I imagined myself saying.
Let me put on my shoes.

Loss. So many once here, now gone.

I was in a foster home when I learned what had happened to Lucy, but by then it was later, the flashing lights had come in the night and the police had taken away my parents while Alba held me in my bedroom and said
Don’t look, don’t look.
I was in another town, not far from Fresno but an intergalactic distance from it for a child. They were a couple, they had other kids; their faces, their names are blurred now. I was with them for a few months, then I was with others: a succession of others, an army of others. It came on the news one night when I was sitting in the corner of someone’s living room, drawing. I’d turned thirteen. No one had told me anything. Neither my aunt nor my uncle had ever called or written. If there were any legal repercussions to my having assisted in the theft of a VW Bus and its subsequent damage, I never heard about it; a steel curtain had slammed down on my life in Quiet, California, and now, eight or nine months later, I hardly remembered it. I hardly remembered my parents. I hardly remembered anything at all. And so when a familiar name from what seemed my distant past, Mike McCoy, was spoken, I looked up. There he was, being led into a courtroom in a prison outfit. I heard the names Maria Sanchez, Trista Blake, Lucy Sparrow. But there were no photos, and the story was over practically before it had begun. I understood that he had murdered those people, but the name
Lucy Sparrow
seemed to have almost no connection with me. She was someone I’d once known long ago, briefly been childhood friends with. The memories were gone, seared away to oblivion.

Where are we going, Lucy?

My life after that a long smear of pain. I never saw my parents again; they were in prison for years, then died in an auto crash shortly after they were released. People flitted in and out of my life: caregivers, teachers, friends. I learned to smile a lot, show my dimples. When I smiled people stopped asking what was wrong, stopped saying,
Cheer up, things can’t be that bad!
I was an automaton, saying the right things, smiling on cue. I did very well in school, all schools, and there were many: three or four different high schools, in fact. Sometimes I noticed looks of pity being directed at me, usually by female teachers. I despised them. But I smiled.

Let’s go to Mike’s,
I heard her say in my imagination.
I wanna learn how to play pool, Franny-Fran.

And I drew. Drew and wrote stories. Eventually I was in college, where I also did well. Flat-Head Fred and Mary the Motor Scooter date from those years: they were two among dozens of characters I created then, in rough prototype form. To escape my childhood memories I ended up creating works that would generate memories for other children. Perhaps there’s some good in it.

No, Lucy, I don’t want to go there. Let’s just stay under the pepper tree together. In the dark. And in the morning they’ll wonder where we are and we’ll just be here, right here, safe and sound.

The faces, the voices: thirty years gone. Have I remembered it correctly? Was this really the way it was?

Okay, let’s do it. We’ll just stay here. I won’t go to Mike’s at all.

Lucy, have I written it right?

Let me brush your hair, Lucy. I’ll brush it all night.

…Or am I still a spaz?

We’ll just stay here ’til the sun comes up. Then we’ll see what’ll happen tomorrow. There’s always tomorrow.

Lucy, I tried to save you. When you came to my window, we could have stayed together; we could have done anything we wanted to do. We still had that night, that one final night. There wasn’t any tomorrow. None at all. Lucy. Lucy.

I knocked softly on my daughter’s bedroom door.

For a moment there was no response.

She knew I was coming; I’d talked to Donald about it, about the possibility of my stopping by their house, seeing her for just a few minutes. Alone.

I don’t have any right to ask, Donald. But…