Dirtbags (27 page)

He saw her at the door and knew the score. God said angels will come in all disguises, and he’d seen Rhonda Cantrell in many of them. He put a hand to the door to brace himself, then realized immediately he needed to act. He was surprisingly fit for an old man, and well-disciplined in diet and regimen. He slammed the door, quick as he could.

***

Rhonda Cantrell was no less taken aback. At the sight of him, she gasped to draw in a short breath. Despite having been a lifelong resident of Lake Castor, Rhonda could count on one hand the number of times she’d seen Grimm Menkin up close. Sure, his face was a fixture on the television as of late, but she’d only been in his company twice during the campaign, once on one of Brutal’s court dates, and lastly at the 809. Yes, Judge Grimm Menkin had once visited Club 809 and that, in her opinion, had set the entire ball rolling.

Late one night, he walked in. She recognized him right away. She knew him from his reelection campaign where she and her husband rang doorbells, passed out brochures, and answered telephones. He was usually around, but rarely without his entourage, a group of fat, sweaty old men who told him to do this or that or stuffed papers in front of his face to sign. She remembered him a severe man, one who wore suits and buttoned his shirts all the way to his throat and never loosened his tie, not even at the end of the day. Not even when he walked into the 809 that night.

Politicians, or what passed for them in that part of the world, were no strangers to the 809. She personally had dry-humped two councilmen and given a hand-job to the mayor of Whitfill, two towns over. But nothing could have prepared her for seeing Judge Menkin darken those doors.

She watched him talk to Big Jack, then hand him money. Menkin looked out of place, lost. He wandered into the room looking detached, fascinated, and curiosity about everything around him. Sinnamon, topless and bedecked in pasties, approached him with the glitter-lined coffee can and asked him to chum in for the jukebox.

“The jukebox?” he asked.

“Yeah, we can’t play no music unless we got money in the jukebox,” Sinnamon explained. “If there ain’t no music, then there ain’t no dancing. And if there ain’t no dancing—” She smiled cute as a button. “—then there ain’t no
titties!
” She jiggled what she had and waited for the judge to fill the coffee can. He thumbed out a dollar and dropped it in.

Rhonda remembered how conflicted her thoughts were that night. Her husband loved working the judge’s reelection campaign, and she watched him inflate with a sense of pride she’d never seen in him or, for that matter, many other men in her walk of life. Calvin had such trouble finding real work, and what he could find was usually some bullshit gig that somehow managed to make him feel worse than when he wasn’t working.

On the other hand, she and Calvin had been on the lookout for a big fish and what bigger fish could there be than Judge Grimm Menkin? She imagined the look on her husband’s face when she came home and told him she’d gotten her hooks into the judge, what with his political career and how much he would have to lose . . . She checked her reflection in the bar mirror, teased her hair, and hopped to it.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” she said. She arched her back, but he maintained eye contact. She fiddled with her hair while he shifted nervously.

“Do I know you?” he asked.

“We haven’t officially met, but we know each other.” She smiled. “My name is Rhonda. Around here, they call me Miss Kiki, but you know me better as Rhonda.”

“We know each other?” Menkin sounded shocked.

“Me and my husband volunteer for your reelection campaign,” she said. “We’re so excited. He just loves working for you.”

The music stopped. The jukebox switched from Golden Earring’s “Radar Love” to Pink Floyd’s “Young Lust.” Mercedes replaced Passion on the stage and got to bucking.

“Your husband?” Judge Menkin asked.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “Calvin Cantrell. You got us walking door to door, passing out pamphlets. We did six whole neighborhoods last Saturday. Calvin’s got a system on canvassing them neighborhoods that you really should check out. I think you’d be mighty proud. I know I am.”

Judge Menkin looked this way and that. At no point could he be confused for someone
comfortable.
Rhonda put her hand on his arm.

“You want a dance?” she asked.

“A what?”

She stepped closer to him. “A private dance. I can give you one if you want.”

“And what is involved in a private dance?” he asked.

She smiled. “We can talk about that when we get in the private room.” She stepped close enough to whisper in his ear, but with the music, there was no whispering. “Typically, we just sit on your lap and, you know, dance. But seeing as it’s you and this is your first time here . . . ”

The way he looked at her made her wish she had a shirt handy. She’d throw it on and button it all the way to the top and maybe even slide into a jacket for good measure. But she held her ground. She smiled best she could and felt him slipping.

“I don’t believe so,” he said. He removed her hand and retreated two steps. For the first time, he looked her up and down and, as if she were diseased, he contorted his face. He shook his head, then dismissed himself.

She stood there, watching after him, her mouth open wide enough to catch flies. He spun on his heels, crossed the room, and was out the door in no time. Bubba Greene, who had been observing from the bar, stormed over to her.

“What the hell, Rhonda?” He pointed after the judge. “Do you know who that was? What in blue-eyed shit did you say to him?”

Rather than answer, she raced in the direction he’d departed. Out the door and into the sand and red clay parking lot. He was nearly to his town car when she caught up to him.

“Judge Menkin,” she called, “is everything okay, sir?”

He stopped at his car door. Noting that she still wore no top, he quickly turned away. “Miss . . . Miss, do you not have anything to cover yourself with?”

“What gives, your honor?”

He turned but did not face her. He looked out beyond her, at the still horizon swathed with tobacco fields ready for trimming and cotton bursting from their hulls. He looked above her, behind her, anywhere but at her. “I came here to see for myself.”

“See what?”

“To judge sin is difficult,” he said. “Especially when you have lived your life so far removed from it, as I try to do. I have always known of this place and the wicked seeds it sows, but not until tonight have I witnessed the full extent of its depravity and iniquity. You have shown me such.”

“I didn’t show you nothing,” she pleaded. She stepped closer to him, and he backed away. “I didn’t say nothing, your judge. Really, think about it. I didn’t say nothing.”

“‘We are all infected and impure with sin,” he said. “‘When we display our righteous deeds, they are nothing but filthy rags. Like autumn leaves, we wither and fall, and our sins sweep us away like the wind.’“

“Do what?”

“That’s in Isaiah,” he said, looking her full in the eyes. “Chapter sixty-four, verse six. Good night, ma’am.”

She watched him open his car door and climb inside. Quickly, she ran to his side. “What about the campaign?” she asked. “What about my husband?”

“Have a good evening, Mrs. Cantrell.” He tried to close the door, but she held it fast.

“I’ll do anything you want, sir,” she said. “Please . . . anything at all. Do you like it when a woman uses her hand? No, you like it better with the mouth, don’t you? I can do that. I can do whatever you like.” She struggled to climb into the car, to mount his lap and do what she could with what she had, but Judge Menkin wouldn’t have it. He held her at bay first with his hands, then used most of his upper body to shield her from entry into the town car. Finally, he pushed hard enough to knock her to the ground. Sticky, cold clay spackled her breasts and stomach and she laid still a moment, not yet rising from the muck.

“Forgive me, Mrs. Cantrell,” he muttered. He did not get out of the car. He closed the door and rolled down the window an inch.

“Please don’t tell my husband,” she said. “Please don’t do nothing.”

Judge Menkin's eyes were tired, but he never blinked as he glanced up at the window separating him from her, then back down into the parking lot.

"I enjoy a reputation," he said evenly. "I sing in the church choir at First Methodist, which I don't expect you to know. I raise money for charity and serve on all the important boards and committees around town. I am a man of honor and a man of my word."

"But don't none of that mean nothing if you're the type of man who sits still in his car while a woman lies fallen in the dirt," Rhonda said. "Stripper or no stripper."

He drew a deep breath and held it.

"It does if you're the one who put yourself there," he said. He rolled up that inch of window and before Rhonda could ask him again, he was gone.

***

That night, when Rhonda got home, she didn’t tell her husband about the judge’s visit. She said nothing the next day when Calvin was summarily dismissed from volunteer duties on the campaign. Nor did she tell him two days later when the judge began a much-publicized crusade to rid the town of filth and sin and destitution. And she certainly kept quiet as they arrived at the judge’s house to return him to his Maker.

Menkin slammed shut the door, but she knew it would be too late. Her job had been to ring the bell, to bring him around to the front of the house. While they both expected the judge to be occupied by her appearance a bit longer, Calvin didn’t need much time to jimmy the back window and slip inside. For a brief, fleeting moment, she wondered if she had let down her husband yet again—hadn’t given him enough time—but she heard two gunshots from inside the house and felt she’d done her job well enough.

Then two more gunshots followed, both of which from a different gun.

Rhonda threw a hand to her mouth. Gunfire. Shots fired from within the house. Calvin screamed out, then laughed like a maniac. She heard grizzled shouts from Grimm Menkin. More gunfire. She dropped to her knees there on the front porch. Someone who passed might have thought she was praying.

The side and backyards opened into a tiny thicket. There were no fences, no gates, no anything to separate the judge’s property from whatever wilderness it opened into. She recalled that just beyond this part of town was Old Man McCarthy’s land, land that, when he died, was supposed to have been bequeathed to the state for a park or a preserve but, due to some legal issue or another, became a highway and a feeder road. Just a little thatch of it remained and, if memory served her right, was just on the other side of Judge Menkin’s backyard.

As she listened to the gunfire inside the judge’s house, she calculated she could be down in those woods in a matter of seconds. Into the wilderness and down the holler and back up it and out on the road where she reckoned she could flag down a motorist and say, “Just drive!” and be out of this town forever, never look back, leaving Calvin to his own demons, leaving Bubba simple and tied to the chair, leaving the judge to his God and Glory, and leaving behind anyone and everyone who had ever heard of Rhonda Cantrell or Miss Kiki or Brutal McCloster’s daughter and, instead, focus only on the road that lay before her.

Those were her thoughts as gunfire erupted, and the world ended inside the house beside her. She knelt at the back door as the windows shook and wood paneling splintered as she thought only of her future and just what it could hold. She traced out possibilities because, for Rhonda, they had never much existed. Life had been on the end of a string, and she simply followed the string. There were a set of rules, but she’d long figured if she played by them, then she would be nothing but damned straight to hell, so why bother?

She could do anything. Calvin had shown her that. If his dreams could come true, what stopped her or anyone else from seeing the fulfillment of their own?

Up and down the street, lights clicked on in houses. Dogs barked. It was only a matter of time before the night filled with the wail of sirens. Another window broke somewhere on the opposite side of the house. She looked again to the woods. There was an awful lot of ground to cover in the open between her and that thicket. From inside, Calvin screamed an awful scream, one full of guts and teeth and everything damned in his throat and soul.

And the shooting stopped.

She knelt there. Waited. She listened best she could for signs of life inside. Glass crunching. Curses muttered. But nothing. Behind her were the neighbors. She heard their voices, but did not turn to face them. She remained there on her knees and listened.

Such was her fate. She rose from her knees, took a deep breath, and entered the judge’s house. The interior was an Apocalypse. Her eyes had long adjusted to the darkness, and she could see the Armageddon fought inside, chairs overturned, holes in the wall. Blood. Blood everywhere. She found each puddle with her feet, and by the time she’d arrived close enough to the sounds of labored breathing at the back of the house, she’d quit minding the gore.

“Calvin?” she whispered.

“In here.”

His voice was touched with something sick. A painful tinge that she had only heard one other time in life. Sitting next to Brutal in his bed, the last moments of the cancer taking hold, but not nearly as strong a hold as did the poison he’d drank to keep him from it. His hand, shaky and weak, reaching out for her, as he was unable to see. He brought her to his face to whisper how much he loved her, but he couldn’t manage over the pain clinging to his words.

She stepped into the master bedroom and found Calvin on the floor, propped up on Judge Menkin’s midsection, trying his best to work the knife into the old man’s chest.

“Calvin,” she whispered. “We need to go. The police . . . the neighbors will have called the police.”

Calvin didn’t care. He continued to struggle with the old man’s lifeless chest. “It ain’t like carving into a beech tree,” he said, gritting his teeth. The dark red circles in his back grew larger and a deeper shade of purple. “The top layer goes pretty quick. But if you want to leave an effect, you really have to bear down. Get into the muscle. When you hit bone, then you know you’re leaving a tattoo.”