“My friends call me Smiley,” he said. “You’re Hugo Tillinger, and you have been very bad. I do not like people who do what you have done. Can I use your bathroom. Blink your eyes for ‘yes.’ ”
Tillinger stared at him like a statue. Smiley dropped his ice cream carton into the wastebasket and went to the bathroom to relieve himself and flushed the toilet and washed his hands and pulled on latex gloves, then returned to the bedside and gazed down at Tillinger. “This might hurt a little.” He peeled the tape loose from Tillinger’s face and lifted the steel wool from his mouth. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? Comfy now?”
Tillinger twisted his head and spat soap and pieces of steel wool on the sheets. “What are you doing in my room?”
“You killed your family.”
“I did not.”
“Lying will not help you.”
“How’d you know I was here?”
“You called an uncle in Denver. Somebody was listening. You should have run far away and not made that call. Why do you remain in this area?”
“Because I wanted to find a black woman who tried to help me. But somebody killed her. You’re a hit man?”
“No. You’d better not call me that, either.”
“Then what are you?”
“I get rid of people who hurt children or who hurt me. You burned up your family. I saw pictures of their bodies.”
“You some kind of ghoul?”
Smiley removed a funnel from his black bag and unscrewed the cap on the Liquid-Plumr. Tillinger pulled against the ligatures, his brow oily with sweat. “I don’t know who you are or why you’re after me, but I didn’t kill my family,” Tillinger said. “No matter what happens here, you get that straight, you little shit.”
“You’re making me mad.”
“See what happens if I catch up with you later, gerbil boy,” Tillinger said.
Smiley stuffed the Brillo pad back into Tillinger’s mouth and stretched a strip of tape across his cheeks, letting the roll dangle on the pillow. He took a ballpoint from his shirt pocket and clenched it like a dagger. He stared down into Tillinger’s face. In his mind’s eye, he saw a female caretaker in a Mexico City orphanage strike him full across the face. He disconnected from the image in his head and went to the window and looked outside. The Gulf was black and roiling and strung with foam and moonlight. The waves on the jetty made a sound like someone shuffling a deck of cards. He felt tired, his sense of mission gone, his arms as flaccid and useless as rolls of dough. The release he sought in his work was becoming more and more elusive. Why couldn’t he be free?
He walked back to the bed and ripped the tape loose from Tillinger’s mouth. “Call me names again and you’ll wish you were dead. You’re a cruel man. I want to do horrible things to you.”
“It was an electrical short,” Tillinger said. “I tried to save them. You seem like you got a brain. Why do you think you turned out the way you did?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I was on death row with guys like you. They all got a bad story. Here’s the funny part. Their stories are true. That’s how they ended up freaks like you. It’s not y’all’s fault.”
“You need a lesson.” Smiley removed an electric drill from his bag and hunted for the wall socket. He could hear Tillinger fighting against the ligatures. He inserted the plug into the wall and squeezed the trigger on the drill. It whined and vibrated in his palm. “Open wide.”
“Don’t,” Tillinger said.
“You killed the deputy sheriff, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“The colored lady on the cross?”
“Anybody who says that is a damn liar.”
“Let me put this closer to your eye. Don’t blink. Would you say that again? Want to call me a gerbil now? You want me to start on your eyes or your eardrums or your nose? Tell me what you want. What’s that sound I hear? Are you going wee-wee in your pants?”
Tillinger’s eyes were bulging, his face quivering. “Kiss my ass.”
Smiley grinned. “Bad boy. I just want a tiny nick. So I won’t feel guilty about not doing my job.” He touched the drill tip to Tillinger’s earlobe. “There. A little red flower on the pillowcase to remember me by.”
Tillinger’s lungs seemed to collapse. Smiley clicked off the drill and pulled the plug from the wall, then wrapped the cord around it and placed it and the Liquid Plumr in his bag. He took a switchblade from his tennis shorts and pushed the release button on the blade.
“What are you doing?” Tillinger said.
Smiley sliced one of the ligatures in half. He stepped back from the bed and folded the blade into the case, all the while gazing at Tillinger.
“I don’t get it,” Tillinger said.
“Did you ever make your daughter cut a switch?”
“What’s that mean?”
“Make her participate in her own punishment. Make her hate herself.”
“The man who does that isn’t a father.”
“I need to talk to the people I work for. They will be angry with me when they hear what I have to say.”
“What people? Angry about what?”
“You get to live. That’s because somebody has lied about you. Don’t be here in the morning.”
“You’re talking about wiseguys in New Jersey or Florida washing money, something like that?”
“They’re from everywhere. Maybe I’ll see you again. You could be my friend. Most of my friends are colored people.”
“Why colored?”
“They accept you for what you are. They’re hated and made fun of, just like I am.”
Smiley opened the door and filled his lungs with the salt in the wind. He gazed back into the room. His expression was vacuous, his eyes lit with a blue glow, as though the moon were shining through a hole in the back of his head. “You’re my friend now. Don’t betray me. Nobody had better ever betray me.”
He pulled the door shut behind him and walked away, a mindless smile on his lips.
If you’re a real drunkard, you don’t need alcohol to mess up your life. A real drunkard knows his saloon is available inside his head twenty-four hours a day, and he can light up his viscera and give free rein to the gargoyles in the basement and access the whole drunkard’s menu — alcoholic psychosis, unprotected sex, messing with guns and knives and dangerous people, all of it as fast as you can snap the cap on a bottle of brew. Or let me use another metaphor. You simply turn yourself into a human pinball, bouncing pell-mell off the flippers and crashing into the bumpers while electrified thunder roars and bells jingle and jangle and all the colors of the rainbow flash in celebration of your self-destruction.
Sunday afternoon Bailey Ribbons invited me to her house for a barbecue. I shined my loafers and put on a pair of gray slacks and a long-sleeve dress shirt and a tie and drove to her house in my truck. A pink balloon was tied with a ribbon to the mailbox by the road. The shale driveway leading to her cottage was an immaculate white against the freshly clipped deep green St. Augustine grass. Through the oak trees I could see the bayou glinting in the sunlight, the smoke from a barbecue pit rising into a hard blue sky that you could scratch a match on.
I thought others had been invited, but the only vehicle on the property was her compact, parked in the porte cochere. I twisted the bell. She answered the door almost immediately. She was wearing huaraches and khakis that accentuated her long legs and a purple blouse and an apron and light lip gloss. “You didn’t need to dress up,” she said.
“I thought it was a formal lawn party,” I said, stepping inside.