“It’s like the American Dream made real,” I said.
“Maybe,” said Fran, “except Daddy never was the dreamy type.”
He was a hard man, he worked hard, drank hard, was hard on his family. If the children misbehaved, they got the back of his hand. If they spilled their milk, they got the back of his hand. If they breathed wrong after he had been drinking, they got worse than that. And he was harder on Maggie.
“It wasn’t really his fault,” said Fran. “He was just born in a different place. He didn’t know no better. He used to tell us that was the way his daddy treated his mommy, too.”
“But his mommy lived till she was eighty-nine,” said Jim.
“True,” said Fran. “Got to give her that.”
It might have been easier if Maggie just took it, like Jim and Franny took it, but that wasn’t her way. She had a temper, too, and she liked her drink, too, and as she got older, she turned more than sturdy. Sometimes they would go at it for hours, the fight ranging over the whole of the house, pots flying, vases, invective screamed in two languages. In the middle of it all, the children would hide in the darkness of a closet, peeking out the crack of a barely opened door, helpless as their world imploded in on itself. Jim had learned that if he got in the middle, he would get hell, not just from his father but from his mother also, so he kept out of it, and he kept the others out of it, too.
“It wasn’t so hard keeping Franny in that closet,” said Jim, “but Bobby, he was a troublemaker.”
Little Bobby was more like his mother. He wouldn’t simply accept getting hit by his father as would Jim and Franny. Instead he would reflexively strike back whenever his father smacked him, and even though his blows had no real effect, they only made his father hit back harder. He was the youngest, but of the three children, he was the most battered. And when the three were hiding in the closet, with the cage match going on throughout the house, he was the one who wanted to run out and defend his mama.
“The little fool was small for his age,” said Jim. “An eight-year-old midget thinking he was going to stop them two. You know, when they got like that, they weren’t aware of nothing but each other. They would of killed him, he tried to get in the middle. So I held him back best I could. Sometimes he struggled so much I had to tie a rope around him to keep him from running out and doing something stupid.”
“How long did this go on?” I said.
“Until it stopped,” said Jim.
A groan from upstairs, a banging on the wall.
“Shut up, you,” yelled Franny. “I’ll change your pan when I’m good and ready. Didn’t I tell you we got a guest?”
“He still can be demanding,” said Jim cheerfully. “But he ain’t forty no more.”
“Wouldn’t matter much even if he was,” said Fran, “the way half his body don’t work and he lost his speech.”
“Thank God for that,” said Jim.
“Why did it stop, the fighting?” I said.
“He killed her, that’s why,” said Jim. “Stuck a knife in her neck.”
“Sad,” said Fran. “It was Bobby who found her.”
Came home from fishing. To find his mother. Dead. On the floor. He was ten. This was just after the Cubs collapse in ’69, the last baseball season any of them cared about. He rode his bike home from the lake, pulled up to the porch, left it there as he pushed open the front door. And saw the blood.
“Daddy got out after twenty years,” said Fran. “Parole, on account of his condition. We was still here, still in the house. He moved right back in, thought it would be the same. But it wasn’t.”
A groan, a bang, and then a thump as if a sack of sand had landed on the floor.
“Sometimes he thrashes about so much,” said Fran, “he falls right out of his bed.”
“You going to go haul him back up?” said Jim
“I will eventually. But first I’d like some tea. Would you like some tea, mister?”
“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m really not thirsty, and I do have to be going.”
“You got what you needed?” said Jim.
“Pretty much,” I said, standing.
“Our Bobby passed the test?”
“Oh, yes.”
A groan from upstairs, a single fist pounding the floor.
“You’ll tell Bobby to visit, won’t you?” said Fran.
“Sure I will.”
“We’d love to see him. And I’m certain he’d like to see his daddy. It’s been a long time since he’s seen his daddy.”
“You tell him we think of Mama every day,” said Jim.
“I will.”
When I got to the doorway, I stopped and turned around. There they sat, brother and sister, watching the actors pretend to have lives on the television. I thought of their mother, dead and bloody on the floor, and I flashed on a photograph that had become all too familiar, a photograph of another woman lying dead and bloody on another floor.
“Can I ask one more question?” I said.
“Go ahead,” said Jim.
“Where was she when Bobby found her?”
“Upstairs,” said Jim, “in the bedroom.”
“On the same floor where Daddy’s lying now,” said Fran.
“There was blood all over everything,” said Jim. “The couch, the rug” – he indicated toward the parlor couch and rug as if they were the very same – “and then there was a trail of blood up the stairs. Bobby followed it up, followed it into the bedroom. That’s where he found her, sprawled dead on the floor. The knife was in her neck up to the hilt.”
“It wasn’t no mystery who done it,” said Fran. “They found blood on his clothes and his shoes. Daddy even admitted it. Almost like he was proud of it. She had it coming, he said.”
“But still, what Bobby found in her hand was pretty damn interesting,” said Jim. “Like she had climbed up them stairs just to fetch it.”
“A photograph of her husband,” I said.
“That’s right,” said Jim. “How’d you know that?”
Just then there was a groan from upstairs and a strange swishy sound.
“Oh, my,” said Fran. “Daddy wet the floor again.”
59
In the interstices of the American landscape, we have built our cathedrals. Upon useless wedges of real estate they sprawl, upon the trash-strewn boundaries between one exurb and the next, upon land fit neither for human nor for beast. Squat, rectangular, with cinder-block wall and steel door, the monuments of our age have risen to embrace the very stuff of the American dream. And what is that exactly? Why, stuff itself.
E-Zee Self Store sat just off a highway near the town of Exton, Pennsylvania. I stood before the red corrugated-steel door of unit 27 as the hiss and vroom of highway traffic rose and fell behind me. Weeds to the left of me, desolation to the right, here I was, officially nowhere. Exton. But behind the red steel door, I believed, might be a message from a murderer.
It was on the plane home from Chicago, with the stink of the Pepper household still in my nose and the certainty in my gut that Dr. Bob had killed Leesa Dubé, that I realized the message might exist. I was sitting back in the seat, arms folded, trying to figure it all out, the whole horrid story, when I felt this jabbing in my chest. I ignored it as best I could as I struggled to come up with an explanation for why Dr. Bob would murder Leesa Dubé. Had she betrayed him in some way? Had she rejected him somehow? Had she failed to floss?