Empire Falls (49 page)

“I know you would, Dad.”

“You got enough money?”

“Yeah.”

Jimmy Minty nodded, then slipped him a twenty anyway. “Take this. You can give it back if you don’t need it.” Which would be a first. Not that he minded, though. Jimmy didn’t want a kid of his to be short, like he’d always been at that age. Getting a bent nickel out of his father had been an all-day job.

“You stay out of trouble. This is a bad night for you to be going to Fairhaven, after that game. You get thrown in jail for fighting, I’ll let you sit there.”

“I’ll remember.”

“Do.”

“I’m going now, okay?”

“How are you and that Roby girl getting along?”

“Oh, she’s being a cunt as usual, pretending she doesn’t like me.”

Jimmy considered telling him to watch his language, then decided against it. He’d used that word himself, in reference to the boy’s mother, who
was
one and who deserved it. Like most of them did, when you came right down to it. “Well, she wouldn’t be her father’s daughter if she didn’t need to come down a peg or two. Don’t take any shit is my advice.” He was just about through taking it himself, actually.

“I won’t be late.”

“You wreck that Camaro, I’m not going to give a good goddamn whose fault it was,” Jimmy said, feeling the need for one last warning.

“We could switch, if you’re worried,” the boy said, wiseass.

“Go on, before I give you a ticket for double-parking.”

Zack nodded. Before crossing the street, though, he went around the cruiser and retrieved the plastic horn from the gutter, then trotted over and handed it to the driver of the pickup.

T
HE MOST OBVIOUS EXPLANATION
for the bloody bed, he’d figured as he sat there with his eyes clamped tightly shut, was that he was still dreaming. After all, he’d been tormented by one terrible dream after another all night, their fragmented contents coming back to him now in flashes. This must simply be the latest installment. When he opened his eyes again, he’d be back in bed, maybe even his own bed, hungover but safe and sane. Except that when he tested this theory, he found himself still seated at the base of the wall in some stranger’s dorm room. The only difference was that he’d begun to whimper. Clearly, a terrible thing had happened here in the night, and since he was alive to witness its aftermath, it stood to reason that the act had not been done
to
him—though he now noticed that his own skin, here and there, was crusted with blood—but rather
by
him. For a long time, probably since he was fifteen or sixteen, he’d been indulging dark, violent fantasies before going to sleep at night, and one of these, it seemed, had somehow come to life. He’d persuaded some girl to come up to this room with him last night, and then she’d pissed him off, and he’d killed her. He vaguely remembered trying to convince several different girls to have sex with him the night before. As far as he could remember, none of them had been even remotely tempted, but one of them must’ve said yes. Once again he felt his stomach heave.

Despite the psychological plausibility of this scenario, Jimmy Minty took some solace from the lack of supporting physical evidence. If he’d killed some poor sorority girl, then where was she? He got onto his hands and knees and crawled over to where the bedclothes were balled up at the foot of the bed and lifted them up. No girl there. He then padded around to the other side of the bed. Still no girl. Next he checked out the closet, which was full of all manner of shit
except
a dead girl. Was it possible he’d tried to kill her and she’d somehow managed to escape? He poked his head out into the hallway, half expecting to see a trail of blood. There was a large foamy stain on the wall, but that almost certainly was beer. He closed the door again.

Okay, so maybe he hadn’t killed anybody after all. But
somebody
had bled like a stuck pig all over the bed. Much of the blood was already dry and crusty, like the spots on his knees and stomach and chest. In other places it was still sticky and moist. Sitting down on the edge of the bed, Jimmy thought for a moment, then reached down and took a clean corner of the top sheet and wiped a spot of dried blood off his knee, surprised that it stung when he did so and that bright beads of blood began forming slowly along what he now recognized as a tiny cut.

How wonderful to discover that the blood was his own, that his whole body was covered by tiny, razor-thin cuts! True, it made him weak to consider that so much blood should’ve leaked from his own person, but at least he wasn’t a murderer. He’d planned on applying to the Maine Police Academy, and it wouldn’t look good on his application if he’d gone and killed some girl at a frat party, even if he explained that he was drunk at the time and didn’t remember. It had taken him the better part of a year to come up with the police academy idea, and he didn’t want to have to start all over, even with the leisure of a lengthy prison sentence to develop other career possibilities. No, if the blood was his own, it meant that he could still be a cop—and what the present circumstance called for, it occurred to him, was some detective work. How on earth had he managed to wake up covered with cuts he didn’t remember getting? It was a puzzle.

He’d heard plenty of stories about wild frat parties, about a bizarre ritual called hazing that the older members inflicted on the pledges. Mostly the pledges were just driven out into the country someplace, their clothing confiscated, and left there to make their humiliating way back to campus. Or else they were forced to drink until they passed out. Maybe something along these lines had happened last night. It was his understanding that in order to be hazed, you first had to pledge the frat, but who knew? Maybe he’d been mistaken for a Sigma Nu pledge. Of course no one had forced him to drink until he passed out. He’d done that all on his own. But he’d awakened completely naked, and that was suggestive. Was it possible that all these tiny cuts had been inflicted on him by drunk frat boys playing a prank? Good Lord, there was even one on his dick!

The good news was that his clothes were wadded up among the bedclothes, and Jimmy climbed into them gingerly. Movement of any sort opened the various cuts and made them sting all over again, but there was no help for it. The house was still quiet, everyone drunkenly asleep, he assumed, so the thing to do was slip out quietly before anybody else woke up and wondered who the hell he was and what he was doing there. The question was, Should he take the bloody sheets with him? On the one hand, they weren’t his, and he didn’t want to be regarded as a thief. On the other, removing them would be a kindness to the owner of the room, who would therefore be spared the shock and mystification of all that blood. Besides, the whole damn fraternity would probably be convinced a murder had taken place, and when they sobered up somebody might remember it was Billy Barnes’s weird friend they’d let crash in there. That would take some explaining, and Jimmy Minty doubted his ability to do so convincingly when he only partially comprehended what might’ve happened himself. So, best to swipe the sheets.

When he began to strip the bed he noticed glinting, as if the bloody sheet had been sprinkled here and there with stardust. On closer inspection it turned out to be shards of paper-thin glass. Jimmy studied a tiny shaving that embedded itself in the tip of his thumb when he tried to pick it up. He sat back down on the bed to think it through and, after a minute, raised his head to look at the ceiling. Directly overhead was an empty light fixture. No, not empty. A ragged piece of thin glass jutted out of the socket, all that was left of the exploded lightbulb. No wonder his sleep had been restless. He’d been sleeping in a bed of broken glass.

The mystery solved, he decided to leave the sheets after all and see if anybody else could follow the clues and solve the mystery. Down the block he found his car right where he’d left it the night before, and he slid gingerly behind the wheel, his buttocks a grid of nicks. Right in front of him was another frat house, with two Greek symbols displayed above the door. This got him thinking. The frat he’d gone into the night before had
three
symbols above the door. “Sigma Nu” was what Billy Barnes had said when he gave Jimmy the address. Would that be two symbols or three? Sig Ma Nu. Three.

The drive back to Empire Falls was uncomfortable, but Jimmy Minty smiled the whole way, confident he’d make a hell of a fine policeman. He was also glad he’d visited the University of Maine. It took most kids a full four years there to discover their true vocation, but he’d figured it out on his own in just one night.

T
HE POLICE CAR
, parked in plain sight across the street, was the first thing Miles saw when he returned from the Whiting hacienda. Ignore it, he told himself. The restaurant looked every bit as busy as it had been last night, which meant they could use his help inside. He drove around back, parked in his usual spot beside the Dumpster, and started toward the back door, then thought again, heading around the building and out into the street. Jimmy Minty had opened the door and gotten out of the cruiser before Miles even stepped off the curb, and he looked pretty surprised when Miles stuck his hand out. Maybe a little disappointed, too, because he was none too quick to take it.

“I’m sorry about this afternoon, Jimmy,” Miles said once they’d shaken hands. “I don’t know what got into me. I’m tired, I guess.”

“Well, it’s good of you to apologize. I guess I figured this thing between us was going to get worse.”

“I wouldn’t want that,” Miles said truthfully. “You were right. I don’t need any enemies. I certainly don’t want to make one of you.”

Jimmy nodded warily. It took him a minute to satisfy himself that there wasn’t any irony or sarcasm in what Miles was saying. “Why don’t you come around and set a minute? Sit, I mean. You were right. I always get that wrong. ‘Sit’ and ‘set.’ Old Lady Lampley used to mark it with her red pen. You remember her?”

Miles nodded. “I can’t stay long,” he said, going around to the other side of the cruiser. “It looks like the restaurant’s full.”

“You afraid they can’t handle things without you?” Minty said when Miles slid in and he himself had settled back behind the wheel.

“No.” Miles shook his head. “I’m more afraid they
can.”

Jimmy nodded, as if this wisdom was too profound to swallow whole. After a beat he said, “This is more like it. Me and you, just talking. Not getting bent out of shape.”

Miles nodded back. Unless he was mistaken, this was an offer to apologize a second time. Or perhaps to offer a fuller, more satisfactory explanation of their confrontation.

“So what
is
this thing between us?” the policeman asked, confirming Miles’s suspicion. “I mean, I understand tired. But that this afternoon? That didn’t seem like tired. It was something, all right, but it didn’t seem like tired. And before with your dad? That didn’t seem like tired either.”

“What did it seem like?” Miles asked, both curious and hopeful that whatever Jimmy Minty came up with wouldn’t be too close to the truth.

“That’s what I’ve been parked here trying to figure out.”

“Look, I shouldn’t have corrected your grammar, Jimmy. That was condescending and mean-spirited. You’re right to be pissed off.”

The other man didn’t say anything for a second, but then threw his hands up in the air so unexpectedly that Miles flinched. “Ah, to hell with it. You said you were sorry, right?”

This, Miles noted, was a third opportunity.

“I saw the kids earlier,” Minty said, regarding him carefully. “Mine and yours. Bunch of others. Heading over to Fairhaven for pizza. Or so they claimed.”

“I’m not so sure that’s a great idea.”

“Exactly what I said.” Minty nodded once more. “Then again, two more years and they’ll both be off in college and we won’t have a clue what they’re doing, am I right?”

“I guess that’s true,” Miles pretended to agree.

“You ever wish you were young again?”

“Never,” Miles said, glad he could answer at least one of these questions with unadorned truth. “It was awful.”

“Oh, I don’t know—”

“We were stupid,” Miles said, surprised by the depth of his conviction. “
I
was, anyway.”

“You know what I was thinking before you showed up? I was remembering how Billy Barnes had me come up to UMO that time. Must’ve been the year after him and me graduated.” He went on to tell Miles about the frat party, or at least the part about the boy with the naked girl over his shoulder. “Boy, that made me mad,” he concluded. “At the time I didn’t even realize.”

“Well, it was a horrible thing,” Miles agreed, trying not to imagine his own daughter at her first college kegger.

Jimmy Minty looked at him blankly. “Oh, the girl?” he said, blinking. “Yeah, I guess that was pretty shitty, but what really pissed
me
off was those frat boys. How they all knew what was going on. The way they treated you like some fucking idiot because they understood and you didn’t. Was it like that where you went?”

Miles couldn’t help smiling. “I went to a tiny Catholic college, Jimmy. You saw more in your first five minutes on campus than I did in three and a half years.”

“I don’t mean that,” Jimmy Minty said, growing visibly irritated at not being understood. “I’m not talking about pussy. I’m talking about the way they all make you feel. Like they belong, and you don’t. Like they don’t even have to look at you. Was it like that with the Catholics?”

Miles studied him carefully. Dusk was falling, and even in the dim light of the front seat, Miles could see that the man’s face was red with recollected outrage. Something about the combination of innocence and urgency in his question suggested the latter stages of intoxication, though the policeman displayed none of the other symptoms. It was as if Minty had posed the question in his mind all those years ago and hadn’t had the opportunity to ask it until now. For this reason Miles took his time answering.

“There were times when I felt out of place, I suppose,” he admitted. “Times I felt inadequate, especially at the beginning. There were lots of kids from Boston, even Portland, big-city kids who knew plenty of things I didn’t. But then at some point you realize you don’t feel so incompetent anymore. One morning you wake up in your dorm room and think, this is
my
bed I’ve been sleeping in. That’s my desk and those are my books and this is my world. After that, it’s home that starts feeling strange.”