The Parallel Apartments (44 page)

“Bag.
Check your
bag.”

“Oh.”

Justine handed him her purse, and he gave her a laminated tarot card (two of cups) with a clothespin stuck to it.

“Title.”

“Uh, well…”

“Author?”

“I…”

“Genre? Publisher? ISBN? Editor? Color? Format? Thickness? Odor?”

“All I know is that it's about the Frito murders…”

“No such occurrence. No such book.”

“It's over there,” a voice behind her said.

Justine turned. Behold, an extraordinary creature, dressed in white shorts and a red-and-blue-striped FC Belize shirt, pointing into the distance like a sylph in a bas-relief by Saint-Gaudens.

“In the true crime section,” said the extraordinary creature. “Behind the papoose straps. Author's Witt MacKaraher.”

“You think you know everything, Rose,” said the welcome man, a subtle, die-sunk anger in his eyes. “You haven't even been here six months.”

“You don't even know where fiction is, Matt,” said Rose, who then turned toward Justine. “I've been here seven months, just so you know. Follow me.”

Justine did. At the back wall of the first floor, near the elevator, the extraordinary creature Rose crouched down and pulled a paperback off a bottom shelf.

“This is what you want. Check out this guy's crazy haircut.”

Rose flipped to a fuzzy halftone photo in the middle of the book and showed it to Justine.

“Gilley Dade,” said Rose. “I went to Austin High with him, in the mid-nineties. Heard of him?”

“Me, I'mn hisoom. Him. Rhoo. Oom.”

“His room? At the Frito?”

“Yp.”

“That's creepy. Does it smell like blood?”

“Np.”

“The murders were awfully gruesome. Here, the book tells it all. Start at the beginning. What's your name, anyway?”

“Justine.”

Rose smiled, said Justine's name, and disappeared.

Justine was just about to sit on the floor to look at the pictures but realized that Rose might disappear forever before she got another look at her. She might clock out and then decide on her way home to quit Crammed Shelf without notice and move to Oatmeal, Texas, or maybe she'd get seduced in the parking lot by a magnificent stranger and embark on a shut-door, phones-off, windows-blacked erotic safari and then marry him, or maybe she'd get the flesh-eating disease later today and be too ashamed of the ravages of the bug's predation to engage the public or jump into a long-term affair with anyone ever again.

With her book in one hand Justine paced the aisles, looking for the Pernambuco hue of Rose's skin or the red/white/blue of the weird, shiny soccer ensemble, all the while trying to avoid squashing underfoot any of the unpredictable members of a modest plague of crickets that had colonized the store.

“Rose works in receiving,” said a voice behind her. Justine turned around. Matt. “She only comes downstairs to annoy me, or to try to set me up with somebody. Rose thinks she's a matchmaker.”

“Oh, I'm not looking for her. I'm—”

“Of course you are. Everyone is. I can tell.”

“No, I'm—”

“You can't go up to receiving. You'll have to wait until Rose's shift is over.”

“Wh—”

“Nine.”

“Is she—?”

“Not a she.”

“You
said ‘she.'”

“I am not an unprivileged out-country gawk—”

“I'm
from
Austin. Why are you being mean? I don't even kn—”

“—like yourself.”

“Do you—”

“Rose does not—”

“—ever let anyone finish a sentence?”

“—ID. And you should've known the title and author of your book before you came in.”

“IthinkyouhaveacrushonRose,” said Justine. “That's what I think.”

“I like girls, not dykes or men or ungendered persons. Or butter-haired women.”

“I am not butter-haired. My hair is ‘wheat.'”

“Butter.”

“Oh. Okay. I'm going to sit down now.”

“Rose is in a relationship. Go home to your crime scene.”

Justine could never be a lawyer. She never won arguments or contests of wits or verbal recontres. She couldn't yell very well or hurl clever invectives or even tell jokes. She hated Matt because he was mean and because she couldn't tell him go to hell like she wanted to. She could only turn red and steamy and say: “No.”

She plugged her ears against whatever riposte Matt was composing and ran off to find a comfortable spot in which to pass the next four hours.

She found a chair, sat down, and opened the book at random. The imagery made her quickly forget about Welcome Matt. It even made her forget about Rose.

It was a mug shot of a grinning, blood-soaked Gilley Dade. He was wearing his apparently infamous bird-of-paradise hairdo—seven inches tall,
according to the height chart on the wall behind him. And opposite the mug shot was a photo of the inside of a room, #233, according to the caption. Her room, at the Frito. The walls were covered in professional-wrestling posters that were in turn covered in blood. The floor was disordered with uncategorizable lumps of some kind, also glazed in blood. At the bottom of the page was a gallery of four separate pictures, a woman and three men, all unnamed. The woman was shelved with muscle and snarling with thespian menace. The three men were distinguishable only by Vandyke density.

Justine had always thought there was a property of photographs of people that, even out of context, communicated the subjects' current vital status. Justine was sure that the four people at the bottom of the page were no longer vital, and she thought it fairly likely that they were the ones who sourced all the blood and lumps.

Justine hunted through the rest of the pictures looking for more shocking stuff, or at least something explanatory, but apart from a kind of blurry image of a cop dangling a shiny brown sawed-off shotgun from his pinkie by the trigger guard, most of the pictures were of florid deputies, sleepy judges, unhinged relatives, and silvered-haired, fiftyish attorneys with neat parts and open mouths half obscured by bubbly fences of reporters' microphones.

Justine would have to read the damn book to find out what had happened.

Before she started she checked the clock on the wall over the elevator that Rose would emerge from after the shift. Justine sighed to calm the whipping butterflies between her lungs, then began.

According to the book, Gilley Dade, along with his girlfriend, Kate the Chin (née Heather Keeton), the semiprofessional wrestler well known and deeply unloved for her ability to reduce to a crawling shiver even the gristliest of opponents by lustily driving her mallet-hard chin like a wedge into their bodies, had enterprised to make a few extra bucks by renting a room at the Renaissance Hotel downtown and inviting people to drop by and, for a fee, either wrestle Kate, bet on the outcome, or both. Gilley, her manager, advertised only by word of mouth.

Apart from having to find a new hotel room somewhere in Austin every few hours (due to evictions or environmental breakdowns), their enterprise was working out great.

But Kate, unbeknownst to Gilley, had begun another venture. It was similar to her and Gilley's racket, except Kate's venture added nakedness and sex: if you beat her, you were allowed to do it with her. She occasionally faked a loss if she was wrestling a cute guy, partly because Gilley was rotten in bed and smelled like pickle juice, and partly because an occasional defeat would bring in the business.

Kate hosted matches just once or twice a week, on her days off, in out-of-the-way motels, with clients she was sure had no knowledge of her “day” job with Gilley. But as her venture became popular, it seemed inevitable that Gilley would find out.

So she decided to quit—after one more match.

Of course, Gilley did find out. And he drove out to a little back-lot hut on Burleson Road where his granddaddy had collected a stash of guns and fertilizer-bomb materials for the Texas secession bloodbath he was planning. Gilley picked out a greasy break-action, then sawed the barrels off so close to the chambers that the shotgun was really more of a directional mine. He pulled one arm out of his T-shirt and lifted the bottom hem over his shoulder. In this improvised baby sling he wrapped a hundred buckshot shells. Then he drove out to the Frito.

Kate had also added required nudity to her big match, so when Gilley crashed through the window of the motel room (instead of blasting open the door—he wanted to use as many shells as possible on soft targets), he was met with a room full of men with boners pointed at the sweat-primed interlocking of Kate and a certain fellow later identified by a shoe as one Kurt Kane.

The book analyzed in detail the facts of the two or three minutes that followed Gilley's ingress. Justine was disgusted with her lust for these details, but she didn't stop reading. Later, all she really recalled was that there were four fatalities—Kate and the three similar men—but that the dozen or so survivors had lost limbs and parts and chunks while escaping. Kate and the three unlucky men had been shot over and over, dozens of times, so that very few recognizable human elements remained.

Eventually Gilley ran out of recognizable targets and so took off east down Concordia Avenue until he found refuge in a forsythia bush. But it was false harbor; he was easily caught because of the trail of blood. Gilley was now on death row. In Texas, a state that liked to execute. Gilley would not be around much longer.

Justine looked up. It was 9:22. She was sure she hadn't missed Rose coming out of the elevator. Or had she?

“You missed her,” said Matt, catching Justine jog-walking through the aisles.

“I don't like you.”

“Here's your tacky bag. Gimme back the tarot card.”

Justine headed home to the Frito Motel to lament and examine her room more closely, and perhaps peel some wallpaper.

But when she arrived, she simply lay on the bed and went immediately to sleep. She dreamed of hummingbird eggs, of David Beckham, of pools of melted iron a hundred thousand miles deep, of horses made of grass, of stalled and crowded freight elevators, of crushed ice in empty Dr Pepper mugs. Of Mariarosa Balaguer, bookseller.

There was no way Justine was going to go back into that store to be molested by Matt or to get caught sneaking glances at Rose, by Rose. And since there was no practicable spot from which to spy on the front door to wait for Rose to emerge, Justine decided she would first find Rose's car—if she had one—with the idea of secretly following her home after she got off work. Justine's courtship methods had always centered around the discipline of gentle, distant stalking, so the plan seemed comfortably consonant.

Of course, she had to find Rose's car. Justine was pretty sure that retail employees were required by the retailer that employed them to park as far away from the entrance of the store as possible so as not to fill a parking spot that might be taken by a viable shopper who otherwise might flee to another store and spend their money there. And since Justine was sure Rose was a responsible employee, possibly even devoted, Justine began her search for Rose's car at the remotest reasonable location: the top tier of the Crammed Shelf/HealthMuffin: Organic Grocery Adventureland parking garage.

The structure's aphelion car was a college-guy Jeep arched with roll-bars and macho-ed with a fluorescent Titty Bingo bumper sticker. Justine continued on, watching for an automobile whose form was taking shape so quickly in her mind that by the third tier she was certain that it couldn't be anything but a dented light-blue Celica on a pronated chassis, its paint all sun-crisped and its tires so treadless from wear they looked like
Scooter Pies;
futbol
bumper stickers and, should Justine dare to get out and look, blankets and shoes and soccer balls in the backseat. In the front, on the floor, tapes. Not CDs, tapes. Caseless, tantalizingly unidentifiable TDK-60s.

No such car appeared, nothing even similar, and soon the garage disgorged Justine and her Meagre. She went home and tore off the exorbitantly cute Urban Outfitters smock she'd bought just in case she ran into Rose by surprise, and placed it on top of the TV.

The next day, the same outfit, the same grade-school-caliber stalking, the same unbreathable disappointment. She came home to the same frond of peeling wallpaper, the same talcy knoll of poison in the ashtray, the same long night of TV's engineered realities.

The following week, all the same. Rose obviously had no car, or else something
had
happened to her. Maybe Justine had even caused Rose's misfortune simply by imagining it. Hopefully it wasn't the flesh-eating disease—that really seemed unbeatably awful.

On Bastille Day, instead of constructing a fetching outfit, Justine stayed in bed. She reached down and grabbed a big Jerry's Artarama bag off the floor and dumped the contents into her bedspread-covered lap. Foam board, glue sticks, squeeze bottles of rice starch paste, Rapidographs, a spectrum of gray Pantones, rulers, razor blades, a lazy Susan, silhouette scissors. Another big bag contained a bunch of magazines she'd quarried from the Dumpster of a big Half Price Books on South Lamar. She poured these out next to her and began to thumb through them, snipping out bits of red and white imagery she planned to accrete into an abstracted bloodbath with overtones of youthful, Milton Bradley–style innocence. It was to be a hinged mourning diptych to go on top of the TV. It would take, Justine figured, about two weeks to complete, during which time, she promised herself, she would exorcise Rose, she would forget her stupid family, and she would decide about the baby's life. And her own.