Reversible Errors (18 page)

Larry tipped his chin down so he took on an inquisitorial look.

"You're going to marry this guy, aren't you?"

It was two o'clock in the morning. And Larry, whatever he was, deserved nothing less than the truth. Functionally, she had been dating for nineteen years, trying on men as if they were dresses, hoping all the while that she would look in the mirror one day and recognize herself. She was sick of it. She wanted the other side of life now -kids, stability, the sense that she was good enough to matter to somebody worthwhile. Talmadge excited her. He had a life she craved to be a part of. She shared his need to act eventfully, to have consequence. He was funny. He was rich. He was nice-looking. And he counted in the world -enormously.

She peered across the table. It was always a shock to her to find she cared so much about Larry, that there was not only a sensual buzz but sympathy and connection. And knowledge. More than anything else, they shared the same intuitions, as if they had both been wired the same way in the factory. Years from now, she realized, she'd identify this as the moment she'd made up her mind.

"That's my best guess."

Larry sat straight back against the blackish planks of the booth. He'd just told her what she was going to do, but he looked astonished.

"Yeah, well," said Larry at last, "the rich guys always get the girls."

"You think that's the attraction, Larry?"

"I think it's the whole scene -rich, famous, powerful. Talmadge can do a lot for you."

T his conversation was a wrong turn from the beginning. Muriel looked away rather than answer.

"Don't tell me no."

"No," she replied.

Larry's wide face ground through a series of self-containing expressions. Despite his efforts, he was about to say something else, but Joh
n a
rrived with a plate of steak and eggs for each of them. After asking if anybody minded, John stole one of Muriels cigarettes from the pack on the table and smoked while they ate. He remained unsettled, pulled at his earring, bit at his fingernails, and couldn't stop asking questions or adjust to the idea that the killer was finally caught. What seemed to bother him most was that it wasn't some ghoul who crawled out of a sewer, but a guy John had frequently seen in here.

"I mean, what's blowing my mind is, I mean, Gus thought the guy was funny. He was a pain. But for my dad, chasing this screwball away was kind of entertaining. If I'm remembering, there was one time my old man went after him with a butcher knife and a sandwich. He gave him a hamburger and then told him he'd kill him if he ever came back. It was a contest. For both of them. This guy-Gandolph? -he'd look through the window to see if my dad was around, and come sauntering in like he owned the place, then run like hell if Gus came out of the back. That went on in here once a week."

John kept going over it, and Muriel and Larry slowly tried to explain the pure accidental nature of these calamities.

"Look, it doesn't make it any better," Larry said, "but you know, your dad probably did like this guy. And if Squirrel hadn't taken a big dose of wack and didn't see this lady he had a yen for sitting right here, it would have been the usual dance steps. But it wasn't. Not that night. That night there was all this shit Squirrel wanted that he couldn't have, a lifetime of it, and he went off. It's the same thing as if the gas main blew up under this restaurant. I mean, this is dumb, but it's true, John: it's life. It doesn't always work out right." She noticed that Larry stole a glance her way when he said that.

it was nearly four when they left Paradise. Larry was so damn beat that he felt he was unraveling from the edges, the slouching demons and unseen locales of dreams already sneaking at him from the periphery. Across the street the great highway roared. Urgency put you on the road at four in the a
. M
. -truckers who wanted to make a quick pass through the city, futures traders with an eye on the overseas markets, lovers who'd left somebody's bed in the middle of the night in order to stop home before morning. That universe of special needs went zipping by overhead.

Inside the restaurant, Larry had tried hard to console Gus's kid in order to comfort himself. It hadn't worked. John was still talking about all the tough guys his old man had faced down -mobsters who wanted to force him to take kitchen linens, and gangbangers who tried to stick him up -and standing here with Muriel, Larry still felt like his heart had exploded.

"Muriel," he said in the same plaintive tone heel heard from himself outside the jail, "I need to talk to you."

"About?"

"About Talmadge - " He threw a hand through the air in frustration. "About everything."

"I don't want to talk about Talmadge."

"No, listen to me."

He was weary enough to feel dizzy and a little sick to his stomach - but he was ill mostly with himself. For several days, he'd known why he'd been pouring energy into this case like a medic trying to revive a dead body, until he finally had. For Muriel, for Chrissake. Yet even seeing that much, he hadn't seen it all. He didn't just want to hang with her and trade snappy lines. Or get another shot at her in the rack. No, in his mushy, teenaged brain, until a little while ago some horse opera had been playing. He'd lasso the bad guy, and with that, Muriel would come to her senses and recognize he was the best fella around. She'd shuck Talmadge and her march to glory. Recognizing his own devices, too late and so clearly, he was crushed. Some great detective, he thought.

"I want you to listen," he said again.

Their cars were in the parking lot, near the spot where Gus's Cadillac and Luisa's and Paul's vehicles had grilled in the July sun for a day while their bodies had frozen. Muriel's Honda Civic was closer and they ended up sitting together on the front seat. Muriel wasn't neat. She used the floor in back like a trash bag-food wrappers, plastic packaging from things she'd opened, and personal mail from the office were slopped all over.

"You know how people always tell you when you're young to grow up?" Larry asked. "And you hear them, and it even seems like a prett
y g
ood idea, but it's like, what the fuck? What the fuck am 1 supposed to do? People tell you to get serious and you can't even figure out what you want."

As he spoke, Larry looked toward the unfaced brick wall in front of him. Years ago, an advertisement for a soft drink had been painted there and the spectral remains of some bountiful young woman with a glass in her hand were still apparent under the shell lights.

"I always wondered how in the hell I was going to figure it out. I mean, some people, like you, I think you've always known what you want and have been going for it since I met you. You know, to see your name in the sky. But I'm the other kind. I mean, I don't even know it's what I want until maybe I don't have it. Like when Nancy says, 'How about if I take the boys?' I mean, Jesus Christ, get real."

He found himself caught in a great swell of emotion as an image of his sons overcame him. He saw them following him around like puppies while he was cutting drywall, laying tile, working away at these houses. They loved to be with him. Darrell had a saw that he dragged across the dusty floors and Michael, with two hands on a hammer, was always driving nails at all angles into a two-by-four. Larry had to keep one eye on them every second, and even so, afterwards, in the middle of the night he'd wake, split by fear like a tree by lightning, sure he had not been careful enough and that one of them could somehow come to serious harm.

He pinched his nose, dwelling with the pain in the hope he would not break down. He had great suspicion of a certain type you often found on the Force these days, men-and some women-who gave in to every lame sentiment because they were so hard on the street, who'd weep buckets when their parakeet bought the farm, but, hours before, couldn't so much as shake their heads over a seven-year-old killed in a hit-and-run. The idea he had of himself was to have some handle on all of it, to be able to say, as he'd tried to tell John, it hurts like hell, that's life.

"So that's how I am, dumb enough to not know what something is till it's gone. There are people like that," Larry said. "I'm not the only one."

In the dark, he could not really see Muriel's face, just the keenest light on her eyes and her profile in silhouette. She was leaning against the driver's door, with her head of short, stiff curls held erect in a posture clearly suggesting alarm.

"Where is this going?" She couldn't stop being Muriel. She had to be at the end of the curve when everybody else was still at the beginning. As near as he could tell, Muriel had come from a normal white- bread family. But she must have been calculating in the womb. Like cows who always knew the shortest path to their destination, Muriel had a positioning system of her own that never failed to highlight the route to her best interests. Even when she was kind, as she often was, it felt a trifle remote, as if she'd also taken a second to figure out whether it was the right thing for her.

Summoning himself to answer, he glanced down and was surprised to see soil ground under his nails. Yesterday he'd been at another small house in the Point, his current project, getting some evergreens in while it was still time for fall planting. His mom had always hammered on clean hands, and it amazed him that he hadn't noticed the dirt until now, a sign of how focused he'd been on Squirrel since he woke nearly twenty-four hours ago.

"What if I told you I was sick of my own shit," he said to her. "Sick of looking for the life better than life. What if I told you I've actually started figuring stuff out." He showed her his fingernails. "I garden."

"Garden?"

"I mean, liking it. Growing things. Would that matter to you?"

"Larry," she said.

"I think I know what I need in my life. And what we have going- neither one of us has ever been very honest about it. There's a lot there-"

"There is," she said. She reached for his arm. "But, Larry." She was the one having difficulty now. She'd moved into the light and he could see her eyes close and flutter with the strain. "I don't think we can take this any further. I can't. I'm not there now."

He was hit hard again, worse perhaps than in the restaurant, and felt his breath burn in his lungs. Jesus, he thought. What a fucked-up creature I am. Making a play when the woman just told you she was marrying somebody else.

"I'm gonna feel like such a dip," he said, "if I actually cry."

She leaned across and touched the back of his neck.

"Come on, Larry. Jesus. This has never been for keeps. Come on."

"That's what I mean," he said. "It should have been."

"It's been good, Larry. It's been good in a zillion ways. But it's been a thrill ride, Lar. That's how we wanted it. Sneaking around. Screwing our brains out. You can't try to pretend it's a regular life. I mean, I love it for what it was. That was great." She laughed, an unconstrained sound in the dim car, full of earnest amusement in memory. She squeezed him around the shoulders and brought her face close to his. "We had great times," she said and laid her other hand on his thigh as a reminder. He batted it away, and she returned it. They went that round a few times, laughing all the while, both of them enjoying the moment of physical combat, and the relief it provided. He finally grabbed her hand and she took the other one from his shoulder and used it to lower his zipper before he pushed her away.

"I don't need one last trip on the roller coaster, Muriel."

"I do," she answered, in her usual fearless way and placed her hand where it had been. He thought he was beyond being stimulated, but he was wrong. She lowered her face to him right there, and he enjoyed it for one second before easing her away.

"We're in a parking lot for Chrissake," he said.

She threw her keys in the ignition and pulled around the corner, her free hand on his hard-on, pumping it now and then while she drove. When she stopped again, she went at him full time. Larry looked down the alley, realizing they were in the correct neighborhood for this kind of thing-behind these buildings, under these phone lines, amid the spilled garbage and rusted Dumpsters pleasure had often been purchased on the cheap and practiced on the run. Muriel was making a feast of it, taking her time, nuzzling the knob of him, running her tongue under the ridge and then bringing her lips over the top, again and again, watching attentively and understanding exactly the reaction each move inspired. That was Muriel, too. Bold. Looking at the thing and savoring the power a woman derived from being willing. He kept thinking, God, this is fucked up, I'm fucked up. When he came, it felt as if he cried out forever.

Chapter
13

may 22, 2001

Normal

"so you just couldn't stay away from me," said Ruthie, the correctional officer who'd escorted Gillian initially. With her stout form, she kept the heavy door into the guardhouse half open and beckoned to Gillian like an old friend, nodding to Arthur as well. "Thought you said you and Ernie were done talking," Ruthie said as they followed her into the dim corridor of stone and brick.

Arthur explained that the Lieutenant had demanded Gillian's presence and Ruthie laughed.

"There's some here," said Ruthie, "all the rules we got and they just have to make more." That surely was Gillian's experience. Prison officials were often in a class by themselves when it came to rigidity. And among them there were, inevitably, a few outright sadists, who were gratified to see people in cages. But at Alderson, Gillian also found many guards like Ruthie, good-natured souls who were there
because it was the best job they could find, or because they were happiest with people who had no right to look down on them.