“You don’t have to justify yourself to me, Claudia.”
The smile crept away. “That what you think I’m doing?”
“I don’t know.”
She finished the root beer, pushed away from the refrigerator and placed the bottle on the counter. “I’ve been on my own since I was twelve years old. I’ve lived most of my life like a fucking animal. Worse. Animals have standards. They’re better than us. All that superior species hype’s a bunch of bullshit. We’re the fucking mistakes, man. We’re the deformities, the abominations of evolution. Any fool knows that. But I don’t apologize for nothing and I don’t explain myself to nobody. Know why? Because I didn’t make the fucking rules and I don’t owe anybody a goddamn thing, that’s why.”
The level of natural intelligence she possessed was surprising, and I couldn’t help but wonder what she might have accomplished had her life been different. “I didn’t mean to infer—”
“‘Course not.” She walked slowly along the front of the counter, her eyes never leaving me, the heels of her boots clacking on the tile floor. “I’ve been a junkie and a whore and a whole lot of other things you don’t want to know for so long it doesn’t seem real for me to be anything else. But I am. I am something else now. It’s still a fucking mess but I’m working on it. And I’m leaving soon.” She pointed at a tattered and stained poster on the wall advertising Florida, a bathing suit clad couple with their backs to the camera running hand in hand across a beautiful stretch of sand toward the ocean beyond. “Never been, always wanted to go. Now I’m gonna do it. This time I’m really gonna do it.” She eyed the poster for a few seconds. “Ever been there?”
“On my honeymoon, a long time ago.”
“Does it really look like that?”
“In parts, yeah.”
“Gonna get some stupid waitress job or something, and every day off I’m gonna lay on the beach and go swimming and all that shit. It’s all about the forgetting now.” Claudia snapped out of her dream and leaned back against the counter. “Point is, I ain’t gonna be around here much longer. I been where you’re going—and like I told you, I don’t want nothing to do with it anymore.”
“I understand.”
“This conversation and the one we’re gonna have never happened. You were never even here, got it? And if you go to the cops I’ll—”
“I won’t.”
“You do and—”
“I won’t. For Christ’s sake, I have to trust you too. You could just as easily go to the police after I tell you what I know.”
“Yeah, well, you know us junkie whores.” She grabbed the front of her shirt, pulled it away from her chest and blew down between her breasts. “We ain’t too reliable.”
“I’d say you’re taking less of a risk in trusting me than I am in trusting you,” I told her. “We are what we are, right?”
“Oh, that’s fucking deep, Plato.” Claudia let her shirt go. I followed it to the curved tops of her breasts. “Only problem is most people don’t have clue-one about who they are. They know even less about the world they’re living in. All sunshine and picket fences and ice cream and roses, right? Cockeyed motherfuckers. I’ve seen the shit out there no one ever wants to see. I’ve been treading water in swill since I was a kid, and I’m still here. I’ve seen and done things, and had things done to me you couldn’t believe even if I proved them. Your mind couldn’t get around them. You think you know what hell is? I’ve fucking lived it, and through it all, I’m still here… what’s left of me anyway. You want to put your trust in something? Put it in that.” She dug her cigarettes from her pocket. “You want to know what I know? Fine. You first. I ain’t saying shit until you tell me what you know.” Like a cloud slipping past the moon, a condescending look appeared, rolled across her face and was gone. “What you think you know.”
“I knew Bernard from the time we were little kids,” I heard myself say with a fondness that made me uncomfortable. “Since he died I’ve done nothing but think about things, back on things, and none of us ever suspected him of anything because we didn’t take him seriously. One thing you never did with Bernard was to take him seriously. He was always kind of weird, but—but we were used to it—it’s just the way he was, the way he always was, so none of us ever gave it much thought. What might have been red flags for most people didn’t mean anything when it came to Bernard. He used to lie a lot. He’d exaggerate everything and always make himself out to be something he wasn’t. At least that’s what we thought. You never really knew what was true and what wasn’t. He’d make so much shit up you never knew for sure, but it—as strange as it sounds—it didn’t matter. Bernard was just Bernard. I always thought he told his stories and went on and on because in reality he had nothing. In reality he was alone and hadn’t accomplished much of anything with his life. We got good at letting things go, at looking the other way when it came to him. We were all different, Donald and Rick and Bernard and me, but in a lot of ways we were the same, too. None of us were perfect, who the hell were we to judge Bernard or think less of him for being himself, for stretching the truth now and then or making a fantasy world for himself where he wasn’t the brunt of jokes, the weak one, a person no one other than his friends would ever give a second look or thought to?”
Claudia nodded. “If you want to sweeten it up while you walk down memory lane, that’s your problem. But remember, I knew him too. Maybe the side I saw was different, but it was just as real. He was a lying sack of shit most of the time, but the thing with Bernard was that he’d tell just enough truth to make you think, to make you wonder if what he was saying was real. He’d lie and lie and lie and then throw in a truth, but you never knew which was which. And the few times I questioned him, I was wrong and he had been telling the truth. He’d prove it. You want to still make excuses for him, go ahead, but Bernard was a trickster, and he’d been one for years. He was evil.”
“He was human,” I said softly.
“Partly.”
What bothered me most was that she meant it. “Partly?”
She dismissed me with a look. “You were saying?”
I ignored the smells hanging in the stagnant air as I took a deep breath and tried to organize my thoughts. “Not long after he died, I started to think back about things, like I said, and some things from the past I hadn’t thought of in years came back to me and took on new meaning. One of those memories led me to a woman who lived in Potter’s Cove with us when we were kids. I found out that Bernard raped her while he was still in his teens. It destroyed this woman, and she’s been in and out of institutions ever since. She claimed there was more to Bernard than met the eye even then.” The look of disgust on Claudia’s face made me think there was a response coming, but she remained silent. “God knows what else he did before that. Later, after high school, we thought Bernard had joined the Marines,” I continued. “He came back saying he’d torn up his knee in a fall during basic training, and that he’d been discharged, but we found out after he died that the entire thing was a lie. He’d never been a Marine and went to New York City instead. He claimed… He didn’t exactly come right out and say it but he claimed he had started killing women there.”