Last Call for the Living (5 page)

He decided to clean his duty weapon. More an excuse to go on drinking than a necessity. He got out bore cleaner, some gun oil, and a .40-cleaning rod and brush.

Lang listened as the local news from Atlanta followed the race. Rote and depressing as always, the broadcast led off with a rash of carjackings, preceded by a story about a couple who had jumped from the roof of a flaming apartment. Someone drowned at Lake Lanier. A school bus driver exposed himself to fifth graders. A big drug bust on the city's Southside. The Braves lost their seventh straight.

Lang switched to beer. Empty bottles began to clutter the tabletop as though he were erecting a small city. He left the gun loaded and holstered on the kitchen countertop.

Opened another beer. And another.

Hours later Lang lurched around his house. At the mantle he eyed framed pictures. His fingers came away dusty when he touched them, the glass retaining his prints from other times.

There were photos of his ex-wife and three children. One photo taken years ago at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, when the kids were still in high school. He'd had a nice life once. Sold the land his folks had left him to send the girls to college. The boy had gone off to Los Angeles to become an actor. Tommy's wife had remarried and moved to Orlando.

Said to Lang:
We don't want anything, Tom. All we want is to not have anything to do with you.

It occurred to him that their marriage hadn't ended because of some catastrophic event or unforgivable offense.

It was just a slow deterioration.

And it had begun with the girl, he speculated. But no, earlier, when crystal meth invaded Jubilation County.

Lang had never seen such devastation. Families torn apart. Lives ruined. There was no recovery from a drug like that. Cooks had set up shop in the woods, sometimes in abandoned trailers or vans. Some dealers even drove around in their cars, mixing ingredients on the go like kamikaze chemists. Often the only knowledge the Sheriff's Department had of their location was from the fireball produced when a makeshift lab exploded.

Fed up and thinking of future elections, Lang initiated a task force. Put some local pharmacies under surveillance, popped a gang of addicts smurfing SUDAFED for the dealers up in the hollers. He exhausted himself, but he got results and still managed his home life okay. At times he felt impervious, with a firm grasp on his political life—law and order restored—and a loyal, loving family waiting for him every evening.

Until the girl.

Tourists from Connecticut, older couple hiking the Blue Ridge Mountains, reported it first. They saw a man walking with a little girl, off the trail, before disappearing into the woods. The couple swore that the man had been leading the girl on a leash.

And that the little girl had been walking on all fours.

Lang and two deputies investigated. Deep in the woods they came upon a trailer. They heard cries from inside. The door was unlocked.

There was a cage in the bedroom. Looked handmade. About six feet square. The little girl was naked and filthy, covered in her own shit and piss. There were bowls full of scraps on the floor, baby food, tainted water. The girl howled when Lang approached the cage. He asked the girl for her name, but she could only grunt and squeal.

She had ticks under her arms as big as raisins.

They waited.

The parents drove up in an old pickup.

The girl's father shook his head. Shrugged his shoulders. As if he really couldn't believe it was wrong to keep his daughter caged. The mother only leered, clutching at her husband's arm. It was immediately obvious to Lang that she was feebleminded.

And it took all the restraint he could muster to keep from shooting them both dead.

*   *   *

Lang continued to
excel at his job. Failed miserably at home. He drank to forget the little girl. Meaningless arguments with his wife were countered by long stretches of silence. Months of this. They stopped sleeping together, but they kept up appearances.

Pure theater.

In private she cried in the bathroom. Lang more or less moved out, the living room couch replaced by a corner table at Kalamity Bibb's beer joint.

His nerves went from bad to worse, and he had recurring nightmares about the girl. He'd step out of his cruiser and there she'd be, naked, on all fours. Then she'd open her mouth to scream and her tongue would drop from her head like an expelled placenta.

Awake, sleeping, the look in the little girl's eyes disturbed every concept he'd had of right and wrong. Of human decency. Lang once thought of himself as a protector of good people. A righteous agent of the civilized world.

But he'd lost his faith in the accountability of human behavior. Lang now viewed his former family, his job, even himself, as a cruel and pointless experiment.

He knew Sue longed for something better. The mother of his children, a loyal woman who had designed election posters and directed his first campaign for Sheriff. His wife was the first girl he'd kissed. Halloween, thirteen years old in the corn maze after the Autumn Harvest Dance. His father officiated at their wedding five years later. Then Diane, Donna and Danny arrived. The good years.

He wanted to tell Sue, rehearsing the words one night after nine beers of a twelve-pack were gone.
Just go,
he imagined saying.
I can't cut it anymore. I'm miserable. I need to be alone. Move on with your life while you still have one. I'm a terrible husband. A terrible friend. I'm haunted. I drink to forget awful things. I need help you can't provide.

Just go.

Three days later Sue left him. She called from her brother's place in Florida. Lang couldn't remember the speech he'd rehearsed.

In the closet he kept shoe boxes labeled
Christmas
and
Birthday.
Periodically Lang pulled a couple of them out and rifled through some cards. He was still close with his elder daughter. She had a job at a TV station in Tallahassee and was engaged to the owner of a coffee shop. Diane called Lang at least once a month, sometimes sending long e-mails instead, taking it upon herself to update him about the others.
Danny auditioned for a TV show. Got a bit part. Donna went back to school to get her graduate degree. Mom took up golf, says she's writing a romance novel.

Diane was compelled to keep Tommy in her life and for that he was grateful. If it hadn't been for her he'd never know.

But his daughter was the only one who forgave him, never judged him as harshly as the others. The oldest of the three, she was always a daddy's girl. Raised by two loving parents still unfazed by life's complexities. He knew she and Sue talked often. He imagined long, tearful conversations of which he was the main subject. Knowing his wife had depended on their daughter as the marriage fell apart.

Lang depended on Anheuser-Busch.

*   *   *

Lang tripped in
the dark, dropping a full beer and losing half to the bedspread. He rolled on his side, tried to get his shoes and socks off, feeling the wetness of the beer-soaked sheets. There were empty bottles on the nightstand. Lady growled from her corner of the bed. He managed to find the remote and turned on the television. Dribbled beer down his chin when he took a sip. His white undershirt was stained, stretched and crinkled around the neck.

Lang's mind churned.

He wondered if doing his job was worth it anymore.

There was that one stretch of his life when Lang really believed he could accomplish everything he tried. Remembering when he and Sue kissed in the corn maze.
Anything you put your mind to,
they agreed. All those clichés and platitudes. The youthful motivations and dreams.

His eyes closed. His breathing grew heavy, wheezy, his lungs thick with years of abuse. Lady snored next to him. Moments later Lang joined her in sleep.

 

Brushy Mountain ain't no place for a man like Jim.

 

FOUR

Charlie opened his
eyes and saw through a pall of smoke foothills thick with pine. He was in a different vehicle now. An old truck. A snake was sunbathing in the road, stretched out on the asphalt like a leathery stick. The driver of the pickup accelerated.

Charlie felt the snake die beneath the wheels in two sequential bumps.

He worked his jaw, feeling sluggish, dazed, disembodied. He wanted to scream but couldn't muster the energy. From the corner of his eye he saw a tattooed hand on the steering wheel. A cigarette pinched between two fingers. He didn't want to look at the driver, who Charlie sensed wasn't wearing his mask now. The sun was bright on the windshield. Charlie closed his eyes against a starburst of pain. Minutes later the truck turned. Another road, uneven and bumpy. Ascending.

Intimations of what could happen kept him conscious.

Another road, another turn. The driver lit a cigarette and yawned.

*   *   *

Charlie was dreaming
about the thrust and drag coefficients of one of his favorite model rockets—the Viper III. He was turning the Viper over in his hands, inspecting it, on some cloudless day when the rocket began to play music.…

He woke up in a room, a radio blaring somewhere behind him. He heard voices. Looked around, slowly focusing, realizing quickly he was tied to a chair, his ankles and wrists bound. There was a mattress on the floor, a moldy-looking rug beneath it. Newspapers had been taped over the only window. He didn't know if it was day or night. The room smelled of cigarette smoke and something else. Something acrid, chemical. The wallpaper was curled and peeling, water stains looking like giant Rorschach blots.

Someone had put tape over his mouth.

Charlie tried to move. He swayed, right then left, before he tipped over in the chair, falling face-first to the floor.

He stared sideways into an open closet littered with dirty clothes, shoes, cassettes, crumpled cigarette packs. Someone had taken apart a portable stereo, the parts scattered here and there. A stack of what looked like schoolbooks leaned against the door frame. Charlie watched a spider scurry across his field of vision, disappearing among the detritus in the closet. Then he felt one crawl over his ear, across his cheek and up to his nose.

He shook his head, working the tape loose on one side. His mouth filled with vomit. He spit it out and blew his nose, snot getting all over his lips.

Charlie listened to the voice in the other room for a while. Heard cans clinking together. He took deep breaths, his mind droning from concussion. He was overcome by a feeling of helplessness. Like an infant left to fend for itself. He tried to picture the model rocket from his dream—attaching the fins on that Viper III, sanding the nose cone, launching it at sunset. It was the only thing that provided some comfort. But the thought returned, a notion that'd been eating away at him since he opened his eyes.

What a terrible place this will be to die.

*   *   *

Hey, sweetheart. For
Chrissakes. Come help me get 'im up. Motherfucker done throwed up. I swear I'll break a bottle over your head ye don't put that pipe down, get off that couch and help me. Grab his legs and git him up on the bed. That's right. Boy sleeps like the dead. Go on get me 'nother beer. And a wet cloth. I'll stay.

Poor thing never had a gun pointed at him, Hummingbird said. Never been tied up.

These things happen, Hicklin replied. These things happen.

*   *   *

Charlie lifted his
head. He was back in the chair, having been moved in his sleep to the main room. Someone had taken off his dress shirt. Wiped him down. His white undershirt was soiled. Only his wrists were tied at the moment.

“What's your name?”

Charlie looked in the direction of the voice. A woman sat on the couch Indian-style, wearing jean shorts and a tank top. He was pretty sure she was the one who'd asked. The woman raised a pipe to her lips and lit the bowl. She inhaled deeply, holding the smoke in her lungs for a moment before exhaling. A chemical smell not unlike burnt plastic filled the room. She turned her head slightly and favored Charlie with a smile. There was a saucer-shaped sore at the corner of her mouth. She scratched herself, a behavior that appeared involuntary.

“Water?” Charlie said.

She uncrossed her legs.

“Your name's
water
?” she said with a giggle, a juvenile glint in her eye.

Hicklin reached down to a cooler at his side. Grabbed a beer and opened it. Charlie saw bottled water in the cooler, but before he could ask again the lid was closed. The woman had picked up a remote control, but Charlie didn't see a television anywhere. She was eyeing the remote cautiously. Then she put it down and hopped off the couch like a chimpanzee, mysteriously energized.

Inches from Charlie's face, she said, “He talked sweet to you. But he was just drunk. He don't talk when he's not drunk.”

Charlie saw a mouth full of bad teeth. He winced.

“I asked your name, but he says we can't say our names because, well … how come we can't say our names?” she said, looking back at Hicklin.

But Hicklin ignored the question. He took a sip from his beer and watched them indifferently.

“You can call me Hummingbird,” the woman said to Charlie. “I used to be a schoolteacher. What's your name?”

“Ch-Charlie. My name's Charlie.”

“Charlie? Charlie. Charlie!” she said, as if swirling the name around in her mouth.

Hicklin hustled a cigarette from a yellow hard box. He rolled it between his fingers to loosen the tobacco and then lit it. He wore black jeans. No shirt. Seemingly at ease in the hot, shabby cottage. For a moment Charlie thought the man to be flexing. His torso and arms had hard ropes of muscle hidden under sleeves of green ink. An upper body covered in tattoos, some crude and amateurish, others rendered in amazing detail. The symbol of the Luftwaffe on a trio of Stuka dive-bombers. Junkers Ju 88s and twin-engine Messerschmitts soared over a shoulder, crossing his chest in formation. Elsewhere there were Nordic symbols. Spiderwebs. Swastikas. A pair of lightning bolts prominent at the pit of his neck.