“How am I feeling about the Bill Parker thing? I don’t know how I’m feeling about the Bill Parker thing. It pisses me off that things have to be so damn complicated sometimes.”
“I know. It makes your head hurt, doesn’t it?”
“Maybe yours, but not mine.”
“Well, I was just thinking that you shouldn’t be making a mountain out of a molehill. I mean, let’s say he hit a coyote, or a bear, or some fucking thing, and he shot it. Let’s say he was in shock and unknowingly wandered into the woods where he died. Maybe he was eaten, I don’t know. But that sounds good, doesn’t
it?”
“Yeah, Marley. It sounds like Beethoven.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know what you’re saying. I’m not worried about it. We’ll see what the lab comes up with, if anything. If we were in a big city we’d have the money to play with all kinds of equipment, but we got jack. Regardless, there was no damage to the front of the car. He didn’t hit a damn thing that night.”
“I hear you,” I said. Then: “I was also thinking about something else.”
“And what would that be?”
“You remember that old lady that got run over a little while back?”
“Yeah,” Pearce said hesitantly.
“Well, I remember you telling me she was hit by a white car. You could tell because of the paint chips on her … whatever you call it. A muumuu …”
“Housedress, Marley. Normal people call it a housedress.”
“Bill Parker had a white car. Since you have his car, you ought to test it, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah, Marley, I’ll do that first thing in the morning.”
“C’mon, man …”
“This isn’t some sprawling metropolis we’re living in here. We don’t have the money to have every little thing tested and analyzed because we feel like it. Listen, I gotta go. I’ll see you at the diner.”
“It’s not a …”
He had already hung up.
I put the phone back in its cradle and lit another cigarette now that I was off the phone. I had at least tried to tie the old lady’s death to the man who had killed her, but I wasn’t about to ruffle any feathers about it.
I did have a funny feeling about the missing girl over in Edenburgh, and it wasn’t just because I hadn’t come up with a target for the wolf to go after the next time the full moon came around. I still had time.
I cut the article about her out of the paper and taped it up on the wall in my bedroom. Doing this with certain articles was not unusual. It didn’t bother me, because I knew no one would ever see it. I never invited anyone into the house, and anyone who tried to gain entry would be met with certain resistance.
FIVE
I went over to Mama Snow’s place on Carpenter Street the following night. Ever since I had run into Alice at the supermarket the previous day, I couldn’t get her out of my head. While she would have said it was inappropriate to approach her at the store, seeing her at Mama Snow’s was always fine. It was where she worked.
She was a prostitute. And she meant a lot to me.
I was not a man who had ever frequented prostitutes, that is, until I met Alice. A lot of men enjoyed the company of prostitutes back in Vietnam, but I didn’t. In a way, I was too scared to, but more than that was the fact that I couldn’t possibly betray Doris. Doris was my great love, my soul mate, and she was back Stateside waiting for me to come home in one piece so we could live the rest of our lives together. I didn’t want to pick up the clap and bring that back to Doris as some kind of fucked-up gift.
The men in my company used to make fun of me for remaining celibate while we were in Vietnam, but joking around too much meant you weren’t paying attention, and if you weren’t paying attention, you died, just like that cat Krueger did.
It was my introduction to bloodshed, two weeks into my tour. This was in 1971. We were going north along this lightly worn path, and the tall trees were forming a double canopy. This blocked a lot of sunlight from hitting the path, but it also obscured the vision of our lieutenant colonel, who was monitoring us from the C&C ship. Slimy water was dripping from the leaves onto all of us, and this foreign liquid coating just made things worse—it was like it did the job of trapping all the heat in our bodies, like it wasn’t hot enough in that fucking country without getting rained on during a hot, cloudless day. Sometimes the humidity was all you could think about.
Some guys were strung-out. I came to understand that the number of addicted soldiers had grown exponentially since the late sixties. I couldn’t blame them—they called that place “the green hell” for a reason. Some guys were doing the dozens and talking shit in hushed tones, snickering about whores and children and knives, about blowing up livestock for no good reason, about getting action from each other’s mothers. Some guys were making fun of me for being what they called a “boy scout.”
Some guys—just a few—wore armbands and spoke out against what we were doing over there every step of the way. It was commonplace. More so than you would ever read about in the history books. But not a lot of guys were happy to be there, that much is fact, and there was only so much the sergeant could say about this thing with the armbands, and the “passive resistance” that some guys would offer up when they were asked to do something just a little bit above and beyond walking, and hell, there was maybe only so much he would’ve wanted to say as well.
We all kind of knew that if the shit hit the fan we’d protect each other, we’d be there. Just because some guys didn’t go along with things as much as other guys did didn’t mean they harbored hopes of seeing their brothers die. That’s what the fear of war did for most of us—it forged a bond between some of the men that can only be described as brotherhood.
Some guys were too wide-eyed and scared to join in on the verbal jab-fights, like me. What I was doing was watching the guys who didn’t say shit, the ones who just kept their eyes open and walked methodically, as if they’d dreamed about walking through that green nightmare all their lives, preparing for it, and they wanted to do it right. I figured if I kept my eyes on them, I’d have a warning a split second before danger reared its ugly head in the form of a half-buried claymore, a poorly disguised tripwire, a trapdoor. These careful men would at least see it coming, not like the lunatics who couldn’t shut up. Krueger was one of those lunatics.
Krueger seemed like the kind of guy who was born for combat, the kind of guy who was no doubt a bully from his first day of school on, and now that he was older and had an M16 (and an AK-47 strapped to his shoulder, taken from the burnt, dead hands of an NLF guerrilla), he had a whole nation of mostly unarmed people to fuck with. He was buff, and he shaved his head more often than his face. He had a big, white circle painted on the front of his helmet, and in the middle of that white circle was a red dot about the size of a quarter. He put that red dot there by rubbing in the blood of a farmer he’d killed just days before I met him. It was like he was asking for it.
Before long, that red spot turned brown, but the discoloration, the spot of human rust that decorated his head, just served to announce more clearly what it was, and what kind of man he was.
A scar decorated the left side of his neck, but it wasn’t from a firefight. The story he told was that a shoe- shine boy had set off a bomb in a nightclub one night during his first tour and killed a bunch of people. He was the only one to walk away, his only injury being a scrape from a piece of flying shrapnel that just missed his carotid artery.
“That’s the closest this goddamn yellow country ever got to me, and that’s only cuz I was drunk and getting handwork under my table.”
The whore had died, he said, her last act on this earth being the performance of a handjob on this lunatic Krueger. If you got him in the mood, he’d talk about the quality of it—the handjob—and how when he realized what had happened, that half his mates were dead and the little girl next to him was dead, he’d tried to loosen her grip on him but couldn’t.
He’d say, “I couldn’t get her to let go, but it didn’t bother me none. It was like even in death, she couldn’t get enough of me. To this day, her ghost goes crazy down there. And that, comrades, is why I’m always in such a pleasant goddamn mood,” and he’d laugh that crazy laugh of his.
