“But it’s Sunday, man. Don’t you give it a rest?”
“I don’t got time for rest. I’m a firm believer in spreading my seed, man.”
“You’re gonna end up in a fuckin’ wheelchair,” I said. “Only if I do it right.”
“How do you do it?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine living the way he did at his age if I had to deal with the consequences.
“I do it like I do it,” he said. “The key is not to save anything for tomorrow. Tomorrow may never come, Marley. Every night may be your last, know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I hear you,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, brother.”
I got in my beat-up, piece-of-shit truck and went grocery shopping.
I drove over to the big Elroy’s supermarket down on Grove Street. I quickly loaded up the cart with the essentials—coffee, hot dogs, tuna, and milk. I kept my diet very basic because it was cheap to do so.
I found myself in the bread aisle with the purpose of buying some hot-dog buns, but before I even knew what was going on, I saw that my hand had grabbed a loaf of rye bread off the shelf and was about to drop it in my shopping cart. It wasn’t me loading up on rye bread; it was one of the dead ones.
I broke the spell that my hand was under and dropped the loaf of bread on the floor. As I bent down to pick it up I noticed that there was a little Asian girl with her mother a little farther down the aisle. The little girl was looking at me like I was crazy. There was some fucked-up part of my mind that immediately thought that she and her mother were VC. It scared the shit out of me, so I turned the cart around without getting any bread at all and flew down the next aisle.
I soon found myself in the produce section, and it was there that I saw Alice. She was wearing a pair of blue jeans and some beat-up sneakers. A thin, formfitting sweater showed off her natural curves, and her silky blond hair was hidden under a baseball cap. There were earplugs in her ears, attached to a Walkman on her belt. I wondered what she was listening to.
She had a cart full of fruits and vegetables. Near the bottom was a container of orange juice and a steak, or maybe a piece of fish, I couldn’t tell. I was always curious about what she ate at home. I wondered if she was good in the kitchen.
I wanted to come up behind her and put my arms around her. I wanted to say, “Guess who,” and upon hearing my voice, I wanted her to smile. I wanted her to like it. I wanted her to be happy running into me in the supermarket of all places, and then maybe we could go cook something together, some family recipe that only she knew. But that’s not the way it was. It wasn’t the time, and it certainly wasn’t the place.
I knew she wouldn’t appreciate my going up to her, maybe even if it was just to say hello, so I got on line without having picked something out for dinner, paid, and went out to the parking lot.
I saw her Honda, almost as certainly as she would’ve noticed my truck. I thought about putting a note under the windshield wiper, but decided against it. It wouldn’t be right. That’s what she’d say. And I would rather have lived with the fantasy than the reality of hearing her upset, or … I don’t know. Embarrassed. So I got in the truck and went home.
It had been a long time coming at that point, but as I drove, I felt so low that I thought about drinking. I felt very low indeed.
That night I called Pearce.
I sat down in my living room, which was still furnished with all of the dead lady’s stuff. I took a seat in the dead lady’s recliner, which was crinkled and cracked with age. Still, it was comfortable enough to fall asleep in, even if it smelled like a hundred mating cats.
I finished with my cigarette, that way he wouldn’t have to hear me smoking on the phone, and put it out in my naked-lady ashtray, which was in the shape of a swimming pool and had a topless broad sprawled out at the rim. Only a sick man would put a cigarette out on the actual porcelain girl.
Anyway, his wife picked up the phone and said, “Pearce residence.”
“Hey, Martha, what’s shaking?” I said kindly.
Martha was seven months’ pregnant and wasn’t a big fan of mine. She didn’t like it that her upstanding citizen of a husband associated with a wretch like me.
“I’ll get Danny,” she said, and she slammed the phone down hard enough to make it sound like a gunshot. A second later, he got on the line.
“Pearce.”
“Danny, how are you?”
“Christ,” he said, “I’m freaking out, Marley. I need a cigarette.”
“No you don’t. You can’t be smokin’ around the, uh, embryo and all that, you know what I mean?”
“It’s not an embryo, Marley. She is a fucking baby.”
“Sorry.”
“Is this why you called? To torture me?”
“I just wanted to say hi.”
“Hi.”
“There’s a girl that disappeared in Edenburgh the other night.”
“Do you want to confess?”
“It was in the papers today. Did you hear about it?”
“No. You got a funny feeling about it?”
“Yeah.”
“Your funny feelings scare me, Marley.”
“On that note, I was also thinking about the Bill Parker thing. How are you feeling about the Bill Parker thing?”
“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.