The True Detective (8 page)

“I think you better not say any more,” Leon says. “Any second now I’m going to get violent.”

“You go right ahead—you motherfucker. Don’t think you can intimidate me. You asshole! Don’t ever think that. You fucking hick. You fascist! I’ll fight you to the fucking
death,
you cock-sucker, you!”

When Leon has no response to this, Duncan, swigging beer himself, adds, “You can dish it out, but you can’t take it, can you? Truth gets to you, doesn’t it? I’m a little surprised. Since I moved
in here, I see you collecting all those shit magazines, I thought it was kind of funny. Strange-funny, you know. I thought: I call him on it, he’s straight, he’ll laugh. He gets defensive? Ooh, something funny in there, man. You and Spot here, your faithful companion.”

“That is funny. Ha ha.”

“Too late, Leon.”

“Fuck you. I happen to know I’m normal. And fucking looking at
Playboy
and jacking off are normal, too. Okay?”

“You are so pathetic,” Duncan says.

Leon is drinking his beer. “No,” he says, indicating Vernon, who hasn’t moved in this time. “That is pathetic.”

“As soon as I can, I’ll move,” Vernon says.

“Please do,” Leon says.

“You’re not moving anywhere,” Duncan says “You move, I’ll move. Know something?” he adds, turning back to Leon. “I was warned about coming here to school. Go to a small private school, people told me. Know something else? This is the first—serious—question we’ve taken on since we’ve been here. The
community college
I transferred from—we sat around a fucking dirty cafeteria
every
night and had good arguments, good discussions. And we all thought—dumb-ass bozos that we were—we all thought that
real
student life existed elsewhere. We were wrong. All you do here is play. Me, too. It makes me want to cry. My God, to respect
Playboy
—which is nothing but a jack-off magazine that you are rube enough to buy. Know something else? It makes you a joke. It makes me want to walk in front of a fucking truck. There was a time, man,
I was hungry to learn things,
and you have the fucking gall, you do, you have the fucking gall to make fun of New Jersey.”

“You’re drunk,” Leon says.

“You’re fucking right I’m drunk,” Duncan says. “That doesn’t mean I’m wrong. It means I’m telling the truth—you fucking turd.”

Vernon thinks to leave, to go to his room, but he stands there, as do the others, as if caught.

Leon, a catch in his voice, seems about to cry. “I’ll tell
you
something,” he says. “I love this school. Say what you like. I love it.”

There is a pause. Duncan, face down, looks to actually be weeping, too, although tears of another kind. Vernon walks between them and across the kitchen to his room. The pause continues. Closing his door, standing inside in the late afternoon shadow, he senses the three of them on the other side.

There on his desk is his magazine in the manila folder, looking untouched. He returns the folder to his desk drawer.

Do I have to move? he wonders. Do I? Is that what happened?

Sitting on the side of his bed, he sees no answer to his question; nor does he have any idea what to do or what to think. What is it? he wonders. What is happening to him?

An outburst of laughter comes from the kitchen and startles him. All three, it seems, laughed at once.

There on the metal bar of his cot are socks he washed by hand and hung to dry a day or so ago. He takes them down, mates and rolls them into pairs. He has underwear in the bathroom on a small drying rack he bought—and is taunted over, as he is for the regular hand-laundering he does in the bathroom sink—but he has no intention of retrieving anything now. Only in his weeks with Anthony did his sink-laundering fall out of rhythm.

Socks rolled, he remains sitting on the edge of his bed. He has realized he is crying, but he doesn’t know if it is one thing or another. He seems to know only of the aloneness around him.

Moments later there is a light tapping on his door. He looks over but doesn’t say anything.

“Duncan,” a voice says. “I come in?”

The door opens several inches.

“You okay?” Duncan says.

Vernon nods; he would say yes, but the kindness is confusing and the word doesn’t come out.

“You know,” Duncan says. “You’re the one might think of going to a different school. I say that as a friend. There are schools that are more—well, I don’t know—that aren’t so base, you know.”

Vernon only looks back at him; the suggestion would be generous except, as Duncan should know, it is Vernon’s last semester.

“The animals are going out,” Duncan says. “So am I. You wanna go?”

Nor can Vernon say no, as he moves his head back and forth.

“I understand. See you later, man.”

Closing the door softly, Duncan is gone. Vernon sits there, wishing he had said yes. He seems to listen to the house, or to the sky. He doesn’t know if what he hears is within his head or without.

They all leave. He hears the cabin door out there open and close; a car starts up, backs around, and drives away. Vernon feels some relief to have them gone. Then, at once, the familiar aloneness is within him again.

To avoid the feeling, he goes ahead and carries his scant laundry bag of socks and underwear to the bathroom. Lights are on in the kitchen, to his left, and a stillness there takes him back to childhood, when his mother left him alone so many times in the evening.

He wishes not to think, but he thinks that washing his clothes like this is a strong thing to do. Shaking detergent on the sinking socks, pressing them into the water, his mind keeps looking to the question of how he is going to get through the night. His odd life. He won’t be able to sleep. Will he live?

Looking into the mirror, it occurs to him that he will go out. He should go out, this early evening, and do something. Maybe he should go somewhere and let himself be picked up. Is that how it’s done? Go somewhere, degrade himself if he can. He will bathe, and dress in clean clothes, he thinks. He’ll sprinkle talcum powder over his stupid heart, and soul, and go out and give himself away to anyone who will take him. In degradation, maybe his aloneness will fade.

“T
HAT CARD WASN
’
T FROM
F
RIEDA
,
WAS IT?
” C
LAIRE SAYS
,
AS
they approach the Legion Hall.

“Heck no.
Gosh.
”

“It’s okay if it was,” she says in a moment. “And it’s okay now or any time, if you have a girlfriend. Or a friend who is a girl. You don’t want to let your brother’s teasing get in the way of that.”

Maybe he nods, as they continue walking. In her glance at him, she wonders what is in his mind, what he knows. Is she
doing all right by him? she wonders. Is it guilt that has her acting so affectionate? Having him walk her to work? Well, the main thing, going to work on Saturday night and leaving him alone? Was that it?

At the same time, the twenty or twenty-five or thirty dollars she earns long ago became a necessity. And when she returns home and Eric, counting her tips at the kitchen table, announces the verdict, they both seem to know a kind of satisfaction. It always seems right then, when the week’s lunch money for all three of them is in hand.

Besides, she’d have to admit, she enjoys the few hours she puts in each weekend waiting on tables. It’s the only chance she has to act like a hostess, a wife almost, serving food and drinks to people who are in a good mood, who are having a good time and know her by name.

L
EANING AGAINST A BRICK WALL
, M
ATT OVERLOOKS
B
OW
Street and Ceres Street, the sheltered lee in the harbor around which are taverns and glassed-in terrace cafés, tugboats and yachts. And out-of-towners. The sunless air on the horizon is dusty orange, and for the first time he feels an allure here. The feeling of Vanessa keeps coming up in him. It fills, like a balloon. A moment later it fills again.

From where he stands, the Interstate 95 bridge is in view. He gazes for some time in that direction. Perhaps he has never looked to the horizon before, or within himself. The bridge arcs through the sky like something more modern than the city, and in reverse focus he imagines the view of Portsmouth below, its buildings and houses, the wide river, its lobster boats, and at last—would he be visible?—himself standing here. No, he thinks. But what an idea. Does it mean he is in love with a black girl? Boy, are you losing it, he says to himself.

He strolls some. Sleek cars slide by here, close to the restaurants around the harbor and the Theatre-by-the-Sea. He watches a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce drift by. Women passing are different, too, and he strolls, eye-searching both for European cars and for the appealing droop of free-flowing breasts. In his mind this early evening, breasts uncontained look to be presenting themselves, ready in their faint sag to be lifted and held like kittens in his hand, to have their noses touched by his thumb.

What if he called her again. No, he thinks. Too uncool. He said he’d call tomorrow. Or sometime. That’s what he had to do. Be cool. That was the way to make out with a girl. He could see why, too. Calling her now would be the uncoolest possible thing anyone could ever do. Talk about being a twit.

“G
OODNESS
,
TWICE IN
one evening,” Vanessa says. “Is this getting serious or what?”

“You still eating?” Matt says.

“All done,” she says.

“Could I meet you somewhere? Can you come out?”

“Tonight?”

“Right now.”

“Gee, I don’t know. I know I can’t be out past nine. Is something wrong?”

“No.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m still in town. I just been hanging out.”

“I can meet you, I guess. But I have to be back by nine. I’m sort of on probation.”

“Where could we meet?”

“The Mall? I could have my father drive me there. He thinks the Mall’s cool.”

“Where in the Mall?”

“By the plants, in the center?”

“Okay. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

Leaving the translucent telephone shell, Matt is all at once surprised. What are you doing? he asks himself. What is all this?

P
ARKING HIS CAR ON THE SIDE
,
WALKING AROUND TO THE
door on the highway, entering into a noisy crowd, a true crowd, he is trembling with apprehension. He pauses a moment. Disco music is playing. It sounds like
Saturday Night Fever,
and so it is. So many people are lined up, packed along the bar, he has to reach and step sideways between customers to achieve a view of the other side. Then, when a bartender, a young man with
smooth hair and a black bow tie, pistol-points an impatient finger at him, Vernon isn’t ready with something to say.

The finger shifts. In the crush, not giving up his place, Vernon pulls two dollar bills from his wallet. Within the near roar of talk and music, he overhears a voice call out, “Chablis on the rocks,
mon cher.
”

Ready, he holds out his money. “Chablis,” he says when his turn comes. “On the rocks.”

Two-fifty. Drink in hand, held shoulder high, his two dollars gone, he has to work with his free hand as the bartender waits. He retrieves another dollar, working one-handed, extends it between shoulders. Two-fifty for a glass of wine! Is that what these places cost?

Quarters in hand, the drink in his uncertain left hand, he slips—“pardon me”—away from the bar to a less-crowded opening. Pocketing his change, shifting the heavy glass, he sips and glances above the glass edge around him.

It occurs to him that he fears rather than anticipates someone approaching him. He is wondering, as he had when he drove into the parking lot, if the police collected numbers in such places, kept tabs, filed reports. Should he use a name other than his own?

Five minutes at least have passed and nothing has happened. How does it happen? he wonders. This all seems so ordinary, even happy. Will someone wink at him?

Sex. It has to be the compelling force, but he feels nothing of its call himself. Not now. He wonders, not at all for the first time: Is he really what he seems to be? Does he know what he is?

He sips, widens his gaze. No one bothers him or seems to notice that he is standing there alone, sipping modest swallows of white wine from a large glass. Do they know that he is here to offer himself?

Feeling he is standing on air, a thought runs through his mind of driving home to see his mother. It’s a thought he seldom has anymore. Might they reconcile at last? Might he drop out of school and go back home and do everything over again? Start over again? Be a child again and make himself over?

All around there is smoke, movement, laughter, and music. And talk. Red, orange, and blue strobe lights flash from the doorway, exclaiming, it seems to Vernon:
You! You are here! This is life! This! There is no turning back!
Sipping, he remembers a remark he read somewhere, attributed to a woman: “Going to a gay bar informed me for the first time that I was not alone.”

He shifts a couple steps, glances. There is an occasional woman in the crowd, and there are signs of intimacy, a hand on a shoulder or on a forearm, a person standing within the invisible shadow-embrace of another. Do we lose fear in pairing up? he wonders. He recalls a boy in grade school whose father, every time he saw him, had his hand around the boy’s shoulder or on his neck. Did the absence of that affection then, he wonders, have anything to do with its presence now? Close to his ear, almost into his thoughts, a voice says, “Some crowd.”

Turning, Vernon sees a man in a suit, tie, and vest, looking nothing other than conversational. “Yes,” Vernon says. “It is.”

It could be an exchange in a bank line. The man wears glasses, has thinning hair, looks to be in his thirties. His face looks lightly tanned.

Through the noise, the man says, “First time here?”