The Last Kind Words (37 page)

“Guess there’s a backlog.”

“We got a nice one, did your ma tell you?”

“No.”

“Not sure how to describe it. Big. Square but rounded at the top. Has a kind of silhouette of his face on it. The profile. Not really his face, just sort of his face. Who the hell would want that face on marble? Not him. Nobody. And no angels, nothing like that. But … well, anyway, it’s nice.”

“Right.”

My father stood before his treasured figurines. He seemed to be showcasing a couple of new ones. A Japanese boy pulling a wagon. And a rooster just standing there. I looked at the rooster and tried to figure out why any artist skilled in making porcelain figures would make a rooster just standing there and why anyone would want it.

I wanted to tell him I’d heard voices that night, but I didn’t know how it might help. I sat in the garage, watching him at his hobby, cleaning the pieces and rearranging them, and I could feel the waves of fury coming off him. I thought, One of these days he’s going to pick up a hammer and smash the shit out of each one of those pieces. In a week, in a month. He’ll destroy the display case and it still won’t be enough. He’ll cut himself. He’ll be slashed and bleeding and won’t even notice. There will be a thousand pounds of glass on the ground and he’ll stamp on it. He’ll take the hammer to the walls, to the windows, and he’ll keep at it until he’s too tired to hold it anymore. It’ll fall from his sweaty, bloody, trembling hand and he’ll drop to his knees but he won’t weep.

My mother will find him like that and go to him and hold him, and they’ll both continue to carry their burdens separately and together. They’ll bandage his wounds and clean up the shards and continue on with their day. She won’t cry either, not in front of him, but when she’s in the laundry room, a week or a month later, she’ll drop and sob into a
dirty towel for maybe twenty or thirty seconds tops, and she’ll finish throwing in the fabric softener and then go make lunch.

“Should I show up?” my dad asked. He was moving the rooster around. He tried it on one shelf, then another.

“Show up?” I said. “To what?”

He dipped his chin, shuffled more pieces about. “You know. The execution.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “No. Don’t do that.”

“Collie shouldn’t be alone.”

“I’m going.” I hadn’t realized that I’d been planning to attend, but there it was, and it was the truth.

“You don’t have to,” my father said.

“I think he wants me there.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means something, Dad.”

He finally settled on where the rooster should go. He closed the case. He appeared to be extremely calm. I looked over my shoulder at the workbench and thought I should hide the hammer. “To you or to him?”

“Maybe to both of us.”

My old man placed a hand on the back of my neck and pulled me into a half hug, the same way Mal had done outside the Fifth Amendment.

We walked back into the house together. My father went to change. My mother was cooking. Dale stood waiting for me. While our parents were busy she took my hand, drew me in to the living room, and said, “Something happened to Butch.”

“What do you mean?”

Her grip tightened. “He fell while he was stoned. Banged his head up and broke his ankle. He doesn’t want to call an ambulance, and I don’t want him driving himself to the emergency room with a bad foot. Plus he’s got no money or insurance and … well, his license is suspended and doesn’t have his current address on it. Will you drive me over there and help me get him squared away at the hospital?”

“Sure. Where’s he live?”

“I’ll show you.”

I went to one of my caches in the house and pulled out two grand. It should cover the emergency-room costs. Dale got into the car. So did JFK.

She said, “God, does this dog have to always drive around with us? What if someone sees me?”

“They’ll think better of you being with John F. Kennedy than with Butch.”

She pulled a face. “You don’t know my crowd.”

“No, I don’t.” I decided to ask her the question that was still going around in my head. “Do you love him?”

Dale grimaced, her lovely features falling in on themselves. “Are you nuts? Hell no. But he’s sexy. In a dumbass kind of way.”

“I thought he was your beau?”

“I’m getting a little tired of his shit, to be honest.”

I liked hearing it. I hoped it was true. I tried to imagine her studying hard and nailing the SATs and worrying about university acceptances, but I just couldn’t do it. There was still time for her to break away from the rest of us.

“Did you get the role?” I asked. “Blanche?”

She twisted a lock of her hair and drew it over her ear. “No, but I’ll be helping out as stage crew.”

I squinted and almost chuckled. She was lying to me again. Toying with her hair was her tell, I could see it now that I knew what I was looking for. She’d gotten the role and turned it down. It was an act all right, for our mother’s benefit. Dale knew Mom came to watch the audition. Now my sister could mislead our parents and say she was at rehearsal while she was really out with Butch. It wasn’t a big lie. It was a rather average lie, the kind any teenage girl told her family.

I nodded. I took a breath.

“Let’s talk about Mal.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I think we probably need to.”

Dale pressed herself as close to the passenger door as she could. She burst into tears.

“I don’t want to talk about Mal,” she said.

“I need to know if you saw anything.”

“I would have told you!”

“You told me that you thought someone has been following you. You said it was just a feeling.” She still had her face turned from me, the back of her hand to her mouth with tears dripping across her wrist. “Were you telling the truth?”

She screwed up her face and regained some control. She sniffed hard and gasped for air. Then she glared at me.

“No,” she said. “I just wanted a knife.”

“Why?”

“Protection, Terry. Even before Mal was murdered in our backyard, I could feel things slipping.”

“What does that mean?”

She weighed her words carefully. “Dad sneaks out at night sometimes. Grey is hardly ever around. Mal stole some money from Danny Thompson. We lived in this house with Collie Rand, Terry. What if he was home in bed when he decided to go on his rampage?”

I’d had similar thoughts myself. “Right, but that was five years ago, Dale. He’s—”

And then I understood.

My brother’s legacy was to make us all suspicious of one another. To worry that at any minute any one of us could be overwhelmed by the underneath.

“You wanted to protect yourself from me,” I said. “The knife was for me.”

Her tears were completely gone and she sat straight up. In typical Rand fashion, her expression was nearly blank and her eyes empty of emotion.

“I’m sorry, Terry.”

“Don’t be. It was a smart move.”

She nodded.

I had to be careful not to make turns until she gave me the proper directions. We pulled up in front of Butch’s place. Before we climbed out I handed her the cash and said, “Here.” She took the money without counting it and pocketed it. She said, “Thank you,” and kissed my cheek.

I stepped into his apartment and tried to act like I’d never been there before. Butch was on the couch with two squares of toilet paper stuck to the back of his head. His foot was up on the table atop a pillow leaking stuffing. He was angry with himself and kept saying, “I’m so stupid. I’ve fouled up everything.”

“No worse off than you were before,” Dale said. “Except you’ll have a limp for a while.”

“No, babe, no. I don’t even know what I did. I can’t figure it out. What’d I trip over? Where’d I bang my head?”

“Maybe now you’ll listen to me when I say you smoke and drink a little too much.”

Butch checked the toilet paper, looked at the small spot of dried blood, crumpled it, and tossed it on the floor. “Don’t start.”

He put an arm around each of us and hopped while we carried him down to my car.

“Jesus, you brought the dog?” Butch said. “Why’d you bring the dog? I need to lie down back there.”

“The dog isn’t going to bother you,” Dale said.

“He’s already bothering me. He won’t move. Can you get him to move?”

I snapped my fingers and JFK jumped into the passenger seat. Dale and Butch sat in back, sort of cuddling while he groaned and she whispered. There was a strange kind of music to it. It was a song I knew. Halfway to the hospital I looked at my sister in the rearview. She had Butch’s head in her lap. He had shifted to moaning but not too loudly.

“You’ll need a ride back,” I said. “I’ll wait for you.”

“Don’t bother,” Dale told me. “We’ll get a cab.”

“If I survive,” Butch said.

“You’re going to survive, honey.” Dale shushed him and made gentle noises like she was singing him a lullaby.

“I’ll wait,” I said.

She glanced out the window. We passed some jocks jogging past and she watched them. I had worried about what being a Rand was going to do to her. She was a popular, beautiful girl. She was a teenager. She was fickle. She was scared. She was smart not to trust strangers, even if they were her own blood. She was mature and harder than she should be. She was going to be all right, but she’d made a misstep with Butch. She wasn’t in on the heist, but just hanging around a crew stupid enough to have Butch along might bring the brick wall down. With Butch out of the way, she was going to be safe for the time being. Maybe she’d turn her sights on the team quarterback. Maybe she’d go after some other badass. I’d keep watch.

She turned her head and her brunette hair brushed the glass. She caught my eye in the mirror and said, “What?”

The
dead don’t drift. They’re rooted, irresolute, and inflexible as your own past. Sometimes your ghosts chased after you every minute of the night, and sometimes they just couldn’t keep up. I saw Butch back to his apartment and my little sister back home.

Another day passed. Collie was that much closer to his death. I got up early and followed Gilmore to the station, then sat in the parking lot for an hour, watching the cops come and go. I no longer had even a gut feeling about him. He simply reminded me too much of my brother and I couldn’t let a crazy idea go. I wondered if this was Collie’s plan from the beginning, to run me so ragged that I’d explode the way he did. Was it possible that he hated me that much? To wind me up and let me spin out of control over the edge? And then I thought, Yes, it was. It had to be, because I had no other answer.

I started the car and drove without direction. I had no idea where I was going, but my autopilot seemed to have all the usual destinations mapped out. My stomach was still twisted up. I still didn’t know if Collie was telling the truth. I went by the high school, the lake, the Commack Motor Inn. I wove in a wider and wider radius but always returned to the same pattern. I drove past Kimmy and Chub’s house. I never broke 40 mph. I eased along and the hours passed. I put three hundred miles on the car. I thought no one, not even my brother, was wasting his life as badly as me.

I parked across the street from Eve’s house. She wasn’t home yet and I was glad for it. I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I noticed she’d had the window fixed. The lethal lawn gnome had been moved back out in front of the bush.

I played the radio low and listened to some oldies station and my
mind went along with it, rolling on the tide of another time. Whenever some image hit me, I pressed it away. There seemed to be no good memories. Everything brought pain. A man should be composed of more than his heartaches, his failures, his missed opportunities and regrets. Even Collie knew love. I turned the radio up. I nodded for a bit.

When I opened my eyes, I saw a little red Mazda come zipping into the driveway. I watched a young woman get out, dressed in blue scrubs covered with pictures of different breeds of dogs and cats. She dropped her purse and stooped to pick it up. It was Eve’s daughter, Roxie. She had curves in all the right places, her long brown hair swaying lightly in the breeze as she grabbed her sunglasses, cell phone, iPod, and stuffed them back into her purse. She looked the way I imagined her mother had looked twenty-five years earlier. But, more than that, she looked pissed.

She took another step toward the front door and her cell phone rang. She answered, angled her face down, and listened for a moment. She said, “Well then, why don’t you just go fuck yourself?” Her voice carried to me as clearly as if she were in the backseat.

Roxie fumbled for the disconnect and stared at the cell phone like it was the face of a lost lover. She tried to stuff it back into her purse and dropped it again. The phone hit the walk and she gave it a nice kick that catapulted it into the garage door, where it broke to pieces.

It was the kind of thing only your first and greatest love could make you do. This would be the pain and passion by which all other pain and passion would be measured through the rest of her life. I thought of what kind of scars and marks Butch would leave upon Dale’s understanding of men. I thought of my eternal draw to Kimmy, Gilmore shattering over Phyllis, and Grey’s never-ending heartbreak at being left at the altar.