And he was still there. The Pussy Man. The little girls was still singing their songs, their red faces upraised to the falling snow, their eyes sidling over uncomfortably now and then to where the beggar was calling out for money on toast. I was angry all over again.
I charged up to him as he swung his can along the arc of a passing shopper. I pushed at his shoulder.
“All right,” I said, “that’s it. I’ve had it. I’m calling a cop. I told you, ya stupid …”
I heard a voice behind me, calling, “Da-deee! Come on!” I turned toward the sound instinctively and, looking across the lot, I saw Frank Beachum. It had been about a month since I’d seen him, since we’d finished the interviews for the book I was doing. We had started them while he was still in prison, and then went on for a few more weeks after his release. There hadn’t been that much for him to tell me actually, since I had come to the story so late and was planning to write about only that part of it. And he was not a very articulate man and his feelings had been understandably muddled there at the end. No matter how many times I asked him, he could never really describe what he was thinking, feeling, especially at the very last of it, on the gurney. He didn’t remember much of that, he told me. “I just saw what was going on, that’s all,” he told me. “And it was real scary, believe me.” So that was something right there I had to guess at.
After a while, I realized there was nothing more I could get out of him. But I went back a few times, all the same. Just to keep it going, I guess. We’d sit around some bar and have a beer together. I’d ask him about Bonnie, and he would tell me she was off medication and was getting better and I’d say that was good and then we’d sit there nodding stupidly at each other. We just didn’t have much to say really, he and I. We didn’t have very much in common. He fixed cars, I drove them. That was a good joke once, I guess, but it didn’t get us very far.
I knew he was planning to leave St. Louis soon. He’d gotten a lot of job offers after the story broke, and he’d accepted one at a garage in Washington, somewhere outside Seattle. He wanted to wait until Bonnie was out of the psychiatrist’s care and he was hoping the state would settle some money on him too before he left. I thought it would be some time before the state made up its mind about that, but I was pretty sure it was going to be a nice big settlement. The judge on the case was Evan Walters, a very upright Christian gentleman with a very upright Christian wife and three very upright Christian children. For the last two months, I’d been going to the same hookers he went to, and I knew it, and he knew I knew it, and it was going to be a nice big settlement, I felt sure.
So Frank must have left town pretty soon after that day at Union Station because, as I say, I haven’t seen him since. Even that last time, we didn’t approach each other or speak or anything. I just looked up from where I was in front of the mall and got a look at him. He was standing on the sidewalk by the parking lot. His little girl, Gail, was tugging on his fingers, trying to pull him along, but he’d stopped where he was, because he’d spotted me. Bonnie was standing next to him, her head wrapped in a kerchief. From what I could see, she looked tired, but she was laughing and smiling broadly, and she seemed healthy enough.
“Come on, Daddy, come on!” Gail said again.
She tugged at him some more, but Frank stayed where he was another moment. Slowly, as I watched him, he raised his hand to me. He lay his finger against the shock of hair on his brow and then lowered the finger and pointed it my way. A salute, you could call it, or maybe a farewell.
I raised my cigarette and tilted it back at him, and he laughed. Gail was pulling him away, along the sidewalk. He wrapped his arm around his wife’s shoulder and pulled her to him and the three of them went off together toward the carousel.
I watched them moving off through the snow. I watched them until they passed out of sight behind the edge of the building. Then I glanced around.
The Pussy Man’s streaked red-and-yellow eyes were staring at me out from under the furry fringe of his elf’s cap.
“Shit,” I said.
I dug my hand into my pocket and pulled my wallet out. I snatched out a ten and stuffed it roughly into his tin can.
“You might as well take it before my wife does,” I said. “Now get out of here. Go drink yourself to death.”
“Hey,” said the Pussy Man. “A ten? You got more money than that, you got money on …”
I glared at him.
“Okay, okay,” he said. He plucked the bill out of the can, crushed it in his fist and stuck his fist in his coat pocket. “Thanks, newspaper man. I been out here two hours. I’m freezing my ass off.”
I shook my head. “What the hell,” I said. “For all I know, you really are Santa Claus.”
I tossed my cigarette into the gutter and started walking off across the parking lot toward my car.
What the hell, I thought. For all I know, he really is.