was Katy’s ex. Now, I suppose, first ex is more accurate. Not that I had anything against him. On the few occasions fate had thrown us together, he had been more than cordial, friendly really. He was a stand-up guy who cared so deeply for Katy that if another man made her happy, well then, that was okay with him. They had been high school sweethearts. Katy grew out of it, but Joey never did. As Katy said, she agreed to marry him for all the wrong reasons. He was loving. He was handsome. He was a good provider. It was time.
“You don’t marry a man because he scores well on some stupid test,” Katy had said many times. “Marriage isn’t about a checklist. It’s about passion.”
I wondered if she would still feel that way when she got out of the hospital and took stock of the last twenty years of her life. In any case, there wasn’t any passion left between Katy and Joey by the time they took their vows before Father Blaney. And moving into his parents’ house right after the wedding hadn’t exactly enhanced the chances of their rekindling any dormant high school sparks. Their divorce had been relatively painless, at least for Katy, and had come as a relief for the both of them.
Francis Maloney loved to use Joey to get under my skin.
“He still loves my daughter, you know,” my father-in-law jabbed at a family barbecue, Katy and Joey chatting happily at the opposite end of the backyard. “All she’d have to do is say the word and that boy would take her back, no questions asked.”
“Except she’s never going to say the word.”
Then Francis would smile that smile at me, raising his glass of Irish. “Ah, don’t be so sure, lad. Do you believe in ghosts?”
He’d always find some excuse to ask me that fucking question. I never quite understood what he meant by it. I did now, of course. Back then, when I didn’t answer, Francis would have a private little laugh at my expense. It was a laugh with red fangs and talons.
“Are you laughing now, you prick?” I shouted out the window.
Joey Hogan’s impeccably restored Victorian put a lie to the adage about the contractor owning the worst house on the block. Man, with the spindle work, wrap-around porch, clapboards, rows and rows of fish scale and diamond siding, a lot of trees had given their lives to let that house live again. Between the turrets and gables, between the asymmetry and compound angles, there was enough visual noise to keep my eyes busy for a week. And forget about the color scheme. Only on a Victorian could you use twelve different colors-including lavender or purple-without getting arrested. But I guess maybe that’s why I liked Victorians. They could break all the modern rules and still look beautiful.
I halfway pulled into the driveway and stopped, the ass end of my car sticking out into the street. Around here you could get away with that without getting the rear of your car sheared off. Truthfully, I didn’t think Joey had a thing to do with what had happened at the gravesite or with torturing Katy. Even if he wasn’t as comfortable with another man having his ex-wife as he let on, I knew as surely as I knew anything that he could never hurt Katy. I guess it was possible that he might hurt me, but he wouldn’t use Katy to do it. Nor did I think he had much in the way of information that could shed light on who might actually be hurting my family, but based on proximity alone- his home was less than a quarter mile from the entrance to the cemetery-I had to talk to the man. Yet, for some reason, I couldn’t quite bring myself to pull all the way down the driveway.
I was afraid. I was afraid that Joey Hogan might accuse me of fucking up Katy’s life. I was afraid that he was right. But it wasn’t Joey Hogan who accused me. Christ, I wasn’t even fully into the man’s driveway. My own guilt accused. Guilt and me were usually strangers. Like jealousy, guilt was a cancerous waste of time. The world was only too happy to beat you up, so why do it to yourself? Anyway, I was suspicious of the eagerly guilty. They stank of martyrdom.
“Responsibility and guilt are not the same things, Mr. Moe,” Israel Roth used to say. “We all do wrong things for all kinds of reasons, mostly they’re not worth losing sleep over. Besides, what does guilt change? A real man, a mensch, he knows when to feel guilt. When you’ve done what I had to do to survive, you know guilt. I can see in your eyes, Moses, that you too know guilt. For this you have my pity and my respect.”
Because guilt and I were usually estranged, because it was not my first instinct, I knew when I felt it, that it was right. I felt it now and it was right. It was to laugh, no? One lie, a lie that wasn’t even mine to begin with, still impacted lives in ways I could never have anticipated. I thought of Katy lying in the blood and broken glass. I thought of her lying so still in bed and imagined Joey Hogan’s face as I tried explaining myself to him. I backed out of his driveway and drove away as quickly as I could.
Located several miles outside Janus in sort of a municipal no man’s land, Henry’s Hog was on the wrongest side of the tracks. When my tires crossed the pair of tracks on Industry Avenue, I could swear that the sun’s light became more diffuse and the air got thicker and smelled of burning oil. The dust and decay, however, were not products of my imagination. Industry Avenue, once a meaningful designation, had long since given way to irony. Even before my first and only visit here, the area factories had already been abandoned. Now the only industry around here was of the cottage variety: meth labs and warehouse marijuana farms.
Henry’s Hog, an old wood frame house that had been converted into a bar, hadn’t much changed. The joint was as welcoming as a stuffed toilet and its windows were as yellow as a smoker’s fingers. The desolate paint factory and auto body shop that had once bookended the place were now masquerading as empty lots. There weren’t any bikes parked outside, but I tried the doors anyway. Pessimistic about success, I nearly fell inside when the door swung open.
Age hadn’t much improved the interior of Henry’s Hog either. The aroma was a vintage blend of black lung and beer piss. I wondered if the lazy fly that buzzed me as I stepped in wore a nicotine patch. A broad-shouldered woman in a Harley tee and black leather vest leaned over the bar, reading the New York Post. Her body jiggled as if she were laughing, but I can’t say she made any sounds that I recognized as laughter. And because she had her head down, I couldn’t see much of anything but the top of her short gray hair.
“Excuse me, I’m looking for Tina Martell.”
When she raised up to face me, I knew I had found who I was looking for, but not all of her. Tina Martell had once been the girl most likely to fuck you because she felt like it. She liked sex and didn’t dose it out like saffron or gold dust the way the other girls in town had. That hadn’t won her a lot of close girlfriends back in high school, but it made her pretty popular with the boys. When I met her, she was thick-bodied and big-breasted, but she had a cute face with a friendly mouth. She was tattooed and pierced a good two decades before every suburban kid came with a nose ring and ink as standard equipment.
Now part of her neck and throat were missing and ugly scars obscured her tattoos. A flap of white material covered the front of her throat above her collar bone. She sort of resembled a Salvador Dali painting, the entire left side of her face drooping down toward the scarring. Although her shoulders were still broad, Tina’s breasts were much smaller. Seeing her this way, I understood Vandervoort’s sad smile and his confusion over Patrick and Tina. She raised a clenched right hand to her throat.
“Who is… looking?” she asked in a robot voice, pressing her other hand to the white flap of cloth.
“Throat cancer?”
“Breast cancer… too,” she said, with an unexpected smile. “I’m thinking of getting… skin cancer and going… for… the trifecta. Wait, you look… familiar.”
I explained that we had met once, many years before. She remembered.
“You bought mea…beer.”
“That’s right. You told me to go fuck myself.”
She liked that, giving herself the thumbs up.
I explained about what I was doing there. The last time we’d spoken, Tina Martell hadn’t been particularly sympathetic to Patrick’s plight or mine. Not that I blamed her. Patrick had gotten her pregnant and asked her to marry him just as he had later done with Nancy Lustig. For all I knew, there were other women with whom Patrick had danced that dance.
She shook her head a little bit, eyes looking into the past. “I don’t know what to… tell you. I never wished no harm to… come to him. Wished harm on some, but not… him. Lotta tragedy in that family
… lotta tragedy. Too bad about Frank Jr., he was… hot.”
“So you don’t know anything about the desecration of the graves or about-”
“I got my own… problems, mister. Don’t need to cause none for… others.”
“You know anyone else who might have it in for the Maloneys?”
“The old man… maybe. Someone might’ve had it in… for him. He was a bona fide… cocksucker.”
