Man of Wax (15 page)

So I decide to leave the party, but first I want to try to find John to tell him I’m headed off, since he’s Mario and I’m Luigi (though we make terrible Mario Brothers, the fact neither one of us is Italian), but I can’t find him, he probably went to another party or is selling his stuff right now to a few happy upperclassmen. So I drop my cup in the trash and head outside, where the sky is dark and cloudy and the temperature cool. Across the way a house has been toilet papered, white lines drooping everywhere. It’s enough to at least make me grin and I start off through the grass, taking the short cut toward my dorm.
 

That’s when I hear the shouting coming from the side of the building I’ve just left, a man’s heavy voice shouting and cursing and a woman’s soft voice begging him to stop. I hurry toward the noise, my shoes getting wet in the early evening dew. I’m not drunk at all, only a little buzzed, and what I’m hearing now has sobered me up. I glance down at myself, realize just how ridiculous I look, but then I’m around the corner and I’m seeing it.
 

Please, stop, don’t, the girl shouts, pleads, cries.
 

Her name is Michelle Delaney and she’s dressed as an angel, wearing a long white dress and white wings and even a small glowing halo. She’s being dragged out of the same building I’ve just come out of but from a different exit, she’s being dragged out by her boyfriend who’s wearing—surprise, surprise—a devil costume. He’s on the football team, his arms cannons, his shoulders broad, and his face is screwed up in anger, in fury, in rage. He’s bellowing at her, calling her a slut, telling her nobody cheats on him and she sure as hell ain’t gonna to be the first, and she’s pleading with him, trying to pull her arm away, slapping at him with her other free hand though it makes no difference in the matter, no difference at all.
 

Please, Mike, she sobs, and even in the dim light I can see the tears in her eyes. Please don’t, I’m sorry, I swear I am, I’m so sorry.
 

Shut up, cunt! he shouts, and slaps her—and like that, my body jumps, feeling the slap too.
 

I want to say something, to do something, but I just stand there, helpless, as helpless as Michelle Delaney. Hey, I try to shout, but I have no voice, I don’t even think I’m breathing. I just stand there alone, the only witness to what Mike the Devil’s doing right this moment. He’s beyond drunk, staggering as he drags Michelle, and she keeps on hitting him, trying to get away, trying to free herself. She’s crying and sobbing and even screams when he squeezes her arm too tightly.
 

Please, she keeps saying, keeps pleading, but Mike doesn’t seem to hear her, or if he does he doesn’t seem to care. He jerks her forward, trying to keep her walking with him, but when she pulls back once more he finally has enough. He turns and throws her to the ground, falls on one knee and just starts raining down punches. Her face, her stomach, her arms—every place of her body is kissed by the rough touch of his fists, and she does her best to cry out for as long as she can until she’s exhausted her voice, until the blood gushing from her nose gets caught in her throat and she can do nothing else but gurgle her pleas.
 

Do something, my mind tells me, and I do want to do something, I really do. But I just continue standing there and watching as Michelle Delaney is beaten into unconsciousness, beaten by her drunken boyfriend who saw her talking to another guy and thought they were sleeping together so of course in his own mind his actions are reasonable, of course they are just.
 

Pluh, Michelle Delaney gurgles, her last attempt at pleading her case, before she falls silent. And still Mike the Devil continues punching her, kicking her, calling her a bitch and a cunt and a whore while she just lays there, her body now motionless, taking it all.
 

Do something, I tell myself again. Help her.
 

But I just stand there and watch. I can’t do anything else. I can’t even move.

28

I spent all Wednesday driving. I got up around eight o’clock, shaved and showered, then went out looking for clothes. I found a Walmart and got the essentials—new underwear and socks, a new pair of jeans, two T-shirts, and a sweatshirt. I even bought a winter jacket, which from its bulk promised to keep me warm in case the Taurus broke down and left me stranded in the middle of the desert at night. Later, after a good and hearty breakfast at a nearby diner, I was back on 80 and headed east.
 

It took me four hours to reach Cheyenne, where I stopped for lunch and to gas up. It had also started to rain, which was a change, and I began to tap my fingers to the constant back and forth of the windshield wipers. It continued to rain the entire way to the Nebraska state border, where it stopped all of a sudden and the clouds broke and the sun shined down again.
 

The radio kept me company, as did the Marlboros and the snacks I stocked up with at the gas stations. I’d even picked up some sixty-four ounce plastic cups to piss in so I didn’t have to stop. The urge hit me twice and I kept putting it off, knowing Simon and whoever else was watching, but after everything I’d already done so far I thought fuck it and unzipped my pants. It’s difficult taking a leak in that position while you’re doing seventy miles an hour, but I managed and then set it aside, to dump out the next time I stopped for gas.
 

I began ignoring everything that wasn’t the highway or the cars in front of me. The road signs, the billboards, even the horizon—it had all entered into a background that was eclipsed by my inexorable desire to win back my wife and daughter. A tractor-trailer, doing at least ninety, passed me and I followed in its wake for a good twenty miles or so, until it got off onto 76 at Big Springs. Then it was just me again, driving and driving and driving.
 

The cell phone chirped outside of Paxton, telling me its battery was low, and I changed it, not wanting to miss it when Simon called. It was strange—as much as I hated his fucking voice and seeing his fucking grin in my mind, I felt lost and directionless without him.
 

By the time I passed Kearney it was close to eight o’clock at night. I was sick of driving and stopped for something to eat. I chose the first restaurant that didn’t look like a complete dive, and I sat at a booth, staring down at my plate of meatloaf and mashed potatoes and gravy and cranberry sauce. I’d asked for a cup of coffee which the waitress did a good job of coming back again and again to refill. She was an older woman, in her late-fifties, early-sixties, who had a smoker’s voice and skin like a lizard’s. Her name tag said DAWN and she seemed pleasant enough, the kind of woman you wouldn’t have minded having as an aunt around the holidays, because you knew she would bake the right kind of cookies and pies and volunteer to do the dishes while everyone else sat in the living room watching TV or listening to music and enjoying themselves.
 

“Long day at work?” she asked me, when I declined dessert, and I glared up at her, told her with my eyes I wasn’t in the mood and that she would be wise to just walk away. She didn’t take the hint, or maybe she did and wanted to leave me with some final words of wisdom. Whatever the case, she slid into the other side of the booth and leaned forward, glanced around at the other patrons at the tables and booths to make sure no one was watching. She whispered with her mid-western twang, “You know what I find works? Go home and draw a nice hot bath. Even put in some bubbles if you like. Then just sit yourself in there and close your eyes and lose yourself to the soak. Relieves all the stress, believe you me.”
 

She gave me a wink, still oblivious to the rage in my eyes, to the desire to punch her in the face, and leaned forward.
 

“Yeah,” she said, smiling, her teeth stained from coffee and nicotine, “looks to me like a soak’s all you need and everything will be just right.”

29

Simon called early that Thursday morning. I’d stayed at the Days Inn of Lincoln that night, had thankfully had no dreams. It was close to eight o’clock when the phone on the bedside table rang and I answered groggily.
 

“Everything’s set for the next part of the game,” he said. “Are you ready?”
 

I slowly sat up. I grabbed my glasses from off the bedside table, then Jen’s ring which I had placed there last night before falling asleep. I held it in the palm of my hand, thinking of her, thinking of Casey, thinking of all the things I would change if I could go back and do it over again. Then I remembered what had occurred to me for the first time last night—how it was possible Jen was being denied her medication.
 

I asked Simon about this.
 

“Her Paxil?” he said. “What about her Paxil?”
 

“She needs it.”
 

“Yes, I’m sure she does. But at this time I’d suggest you not worry yourself about that. Her mental well-being is far less important than her physical well-being, no? Now listen closely, Ben, because I’m only going to say this once.”

•
   
•
   
•

I
T
TOOK
ME
less than three hours to get to Creston, Iowa, so I got there just before eleven, when the sun was beginning to reach its apex in the sky. Once there I headed directly for the Amtrak station, found a place to park, and went inside. Came out five minutes later, carrying a black leather briefcase that had been waiting for me in a locker, its key hidden in the bottom of (what else?) a Snickers box on the candy rack at the newspaper stand. The locked briefcase beside me on the passenger seat, I headed straight for 34.
 

It took me close to another four hours to reach Illinois, and at roughly three-thirty I passed through Burlington and drove over the Mississippi River. Eventually I got onto 67, followed that south all the way past Roseville and Good Hope. I came into Ryder, what looked to be just another small American town surrounded by farmland. An ornate sign posted on the way into town educated anyone who cared that it was named after some corporal in the American Civil War.
 

 
I found a place to stop at a gas station and parked. I cut the ignition and then just sat there, staring at the plate glass window. There was a rack in front of it filled with propane tanks. A couple minutes passed where I was beginning to think this might not work, but then the cell phone vibrated.
 

Simon asked, “What are you doing?”
 

“I want to speak to my wife and daughter. I won’t go another mile until I do.”
 

“You’re hardly in the position to negotiate. But I did promise you before that I’d let you talk to either one of your family members. And besides, I think by now you could use the extra motivation, am I right?”
 

I said nothing and just waited. The presence of the briefcase—which wouldn’t open, just like Simon had said, no matter how much I tried—and whatever was inside it was as palpable as Jen’s wedding ring in my jeans pocket.
 

“All right,” Simon said, almost sighed, “one moment.”
 

There was a silence that seemed to last an hour. I wanted a cigarette but put it off.
 

After about a minute there was noise again on the phone. A voice said something, a single word that I couldn’t make out completely. But it didn’t matter. I recognized the voice at once.
 

“Casey?” I said, almost breathless. My heart had begun beating rapidly in my head, my body had started shaking. “Casey, are you all right?”
 

“Daddy?” she said again, her voice so soft and so weak, yet so alive, that I wanted to start crying right there on the spot. “Daddy, I—I’m scared.” Her voice trembled and she sounded like she was about to cry, which was the last thing I wanted to hear right then, the very last.
 

“No, baby, it’s okay,” I said, feeling like the liar I was every time she cried out in the middle of the night and I went to her room, comforted her and told her everything would be all right—and then instead of going back to bed would go down to the den and log onto the Internet, watch some naked women do some naked things.
 

It sounded like Casey was going to say something else, but the phone was taken away and it was Simon’s voice I heard, Simon’s goddamned happy voice.
 

“Better?”
 

I was silent for a very long time. A pickup had pulled into the gas station, parked right beside me. Its driver, who looked like a farmer but who may have been a teacher or plumber or the town’s mayor, gave the Taurus a curious look, probably hesitant about the Nevada license plate, before heading inside.
 

“Much,” I said finally. I could feel the tears beginning to creep past my eyes. I closed them, wanting to see only darkness, wanting my mind to show me a happy image of my wife and daughter in that void.

30

The Hickory View Retirement Home was a four-story brick building that sat near the southern end of town. On the outside it had a homey feel to it, the kind of place anyone might decide to settle down in when they reached their sixties and knew it was time to start collecting social security. A flagstone walkway leading up to the entrance, benches spread out around the leaf-strewn lawn, some hidden in the shade of hickory and white oak trees. An occasional bed of flowers against the building, what looked to be mostly withered mums, and shrubbery that would never lose its green, no matter how cold the weather.