Darkness peering (12 page)

"She knows when Daddy's here." He set his daughter down and guided her
toward the eighteen-wheeler, where he placed her hands on the auxiliary
tank.

"Hello, truck!" she said, slapping it heartily.

"Truck says hello back." He smiled proudly as she headed clockwise
around it, touching the semitrailer's mud flaps, the sliding tandem
wheels, the marker light. She reached underneath the bed to pat the
auxiliary tank and support leg crank, then paused a long while above
the kingpin to caress the embossed name, Long Ranger, with her
fingertips. Giggling, she tugged at the front of her overalls.

"What's so funny, pumpkin?"

"I'm not a pumpkin, Daddy!" Her breath came out in puffs: ah-ah-ah!
"I'm not round and cold like a pumpkin!"

"No, but you smell like wheat paste." He gathered her in his arms
again and hugged her tight until she squealed, then lifted her into the
cab. He turned to Rachel. "Ever been to the Drop Off?"

She frowned. "We need to talk in private, Ozzie."

"Don't worry," he said. "Where we're going, Colette has lots of
friends."

ozzie couldn't imagine what it was like to be blind, although he'd
tried. He once squeezed his eyes shut and wandered around the house,
where suddenly points and hardnesses leapt out at him, where the chalky
feel of paint on the walls shocked him, where creases in the surface of
his old wooden desk became ruts, ditches. The refrigerator was a tall,
cold monster, the can opener a jutting weapon, newspapers spread across
the floor slippery traps. He barely lasted five minutes, and even then
he kept cheating, opening his eyes in surprise and alarm. It was so
freaky, like drinking hot coffee with a mouth full of Novocain.

Ozzie transported farm equipment from one state to the next, sometimes
moonlighting as a mover, but every Friday afternoon he picked up
Colette and took her to the park, then out to dinner. Back home, she'd
hunker down on the couch and giggle at the things he handed her--peach,
stick of chewing gum, a fuzzy new toy. They'd spend the evening
together and the whole rest of the weekend, then he'd drop her off at
his ex-wife's house on Sunday night before heading out on another run.
He'd miss her the entire week until they could be together again.

Ozzie was so proud of his daughter, he could burst. She knew the truck
forward and backward, knew the fuel tank and battery boxes, the
compressed-air tanks and every single lug on each of the hubcaps. She
circled her hands over the headlights, played the grille like a harp,
smacked the hood, plied the windshield wipers; and once he got a ladder
and showed her the tractor hood with its cab lights and air horn, its
vertical exhaust. Slowly, very slowly, he was teaching her to check
the oil and water, to fill the

tanks with fuel. Anxious to learn, she'd ask him, "What's this for,
Daddy? Daddy, what's this?" In her coveralls and shitkickers, she
seemed like a natural.

When Colette was a little girl, Ozzie would come home exhausted from a
long haul and she'd probe his face and hair and throat, sniff his neck
and clothes as if she were trying to memorize him all over again. He'd
hand her a doughnut or a sticky bear claw wrapped in wax paper, and
she'd hunker down on the floor to devour it, his chocolate-faced girl.
With her animal nose, just a bud of a thing on her face, she'd attack
the knees of his jeans during supper, his caked sneakers, sweaty socks,
the pens in his pockets, his worn leather wallet, handkerchief, silver
coins. Her darting tongue knew the taste of aluminum, dust, rubber,
balsa wood. And those ears, two pink flaps. And the milky unknowing
ness of her eyes.

She would dart beneath the table and zigzag between the straight back
chairs, worrying around the house with her constant touch-touch. She'd
clack the furniture with her wooden cane, its tip as sensitive as a
tongue. She smelled things long before anyone else could, like the
fire that took the Garsons' house, or the dead mouse in the cellar, or
what her father'd had for lunch that day.

When he tucked her in at night, he would bury his nose in her neck and
snuft and huffle. She had that little-girl odor, her smelly toes and
belly button lint, earwax coming out in yellow clumps on the Q-Tip,
jagged white-blond hair full of sand and sweat and whatever else she'd
gotten into that day--her mother's perfume, her mother's soap, bananas
from her fingers. Mae used to cut her bangs and they would come out
crooked because Colette refused to sit still. She'd grit her teeth and
shake her head, not wanting a haircut, determined to have her own
way.

"Daddy's girl," he'd whisper.

There were nights, long ago, when the three of them would sit

out on the porch, long summer nights with the mosquitoes out, and the
fireflies glowing green. The growing darkness would absorb them into
it, along with trees, grass, awnings, rakes, mailbox, porch. The night
would dissolve Mae's face, and she'd become part of the cricket noise,
the whirling of gnats. Without any moon, they'd all three be blind.

And Colette, sitting between their feet, would get up and move with
grace as if the day were still broad with light; she'd pace between her
parents on her little footpads, playing some sort of private, foolish
game. Pad-pad-pad, she touched her mother's knee, then her father's,
back and forth, while a crow cawed somewhere in the hidden landscape,
and Holsteins grazed in the alfalfa fields, and far off, swimmers
splashed and shouted in the public part of the lake.

Mae with her full lips and a lisp so soft, you'd suspect you'd imagined
it, and those too-large eyes, that gentle accepting smile, and that big
bottom, short legs, and the amazing way it all fit together. Her hair
was short, with French bangs cut like a suburban dust ruffle over
bedroom eyes.

During long-ago summer nights, they lay naked in bed, their clothes
scattered across the floor, their little girl sound asleep upstairs,
wrapped in her blindness. Colette dreamed about whatever she'd touched
that day, whatever she smelled or tasted, maybe even what she imagined
she saw--shapes so strange, no scientist could figure them out.

Lovely Mae, wrapped in her sweat and smelling of the iced tea she made
with mint from her garden, store-bought lemons, Lipton tea bags, and
water from their well. On her hands, his skin smell; on her breath,
zucchini and cucumbers; on her face, specks of dirt from her busy day;
and that exhausted, trapped odor between her legs would come at him
like a knife thrown by an expert. He'd hold her as if he were falling
out of a boat.

The well-house pump would click on and hum its dutiful churn.
Tomorrow, he would push his little girl on her tire swing. Teasing,
he'd snatch something away, like the accordion straw she sucked her
soda through, or her little red cane, or a favorite toy--and she would
squeal until he handed it back. Then she'd scurry behind a chair, or
else beneath the piano, or in the dark space between the kitchen
cabinet and refrigerator where he thought no little girl could fit.

There was a picture of Colette on her birthday pony. He kept it in his
wallet. Four years old, she straddled the dappled mare, kicking her
heels against its sides, but that horse wouldn't move, would not budge.
Colette's hands were drawn crablike toward her chest and her head was
lowered, and you wouldn't know it, but she was smiling.

In another picture, she sat at the kitchen table before half a dozen
cupcakes Mae had baked, a birthday candle stuck in each. Her eyes,
illuminated by the candles' flames, did not see a thing. In the
picture, she blew a crooked birthday wish, and Ozzie, behind her,
appeared anxious for every single candle to go out.

Now Ozzie, Colette and Detective Rachel Storrow were seated at a square
table that trembled whenever Colette patted its gold-speckled surface.
The Drop Off was a real greasy spoon, knife and fork. Ozzie bent down
to slide a wad of napkins under one of the shortened legs, his shirt un
tucking from its waistband. As he sat up, red-faced, Suzi with an i
swiveled over to their table and wet a sharpened pencil with her
tongue. A well-preserved sixty-year-old and lifelong waitress, Suzi
loved Colette like her own granddaughter.

"Well, hello there, Cocoa Puffs," Suzi said, her gaze sliding coyly
between Ozzie and Rachel. "How's my favorite customer?"

Colette made a musical, high-pitched sound and reached for Suzi's hand.
"Got any ice cream, Suzi?"

"Well, honey. We just may have a few Dove Bars kicking

around in the freezer." Suzi winked at Ozzie. "Mind if I kidnap your
daughter?"

"Yay!" Colette slid out of the booth.

Suzi wiggled her hips with exaggerated impatience. "And what can I get
you folks?"

"Two coffees."

She smiled as she sashayed away from them. "C'mon, Colette, let's go
bug Earl."

The diner smelled of bacon fat and confectioners' sugar, a weariness
wafting in from the street. Ozzie's shoes pinched and his bones ached
from his long week on the road. He'd been a truck driver for fifteen
years but still wasn't used to hurling himself toward unknown
destinations marked on gas station maps. The hot, gritty highway took
him places he'd never been before, numbing his brain with the constant
state of passing through. He took little white pills to keep him awake
during long night shifts through towns called Sleepy Hollow and
Tallulah. There was beer to comfort him, and roadside diners, and
waitresses with beauty-queen smiles and sagging bottoms. There were
hash browns and the CB and Smokey to watch out for. The delirium of
too much road, the merging of broken white lines, the bored faces of
nighttime travelers in their low-slung cars. From his cab, Ozzie would
catch an occasional glimpse of dirty business going on inside a passing
convertible; the gleeful head of a dog outside a car window, its floppy
ears akimbo; the faces of too many children smeared across the back of
a station wagon window like insect splatters.

"Well," Rachel began clumsily, hesitantly. She'd always had a generous
face and wry humorous eyes that were right now rather dull and serious.
She hardly wore any makeup--just a little plum-colored lipstick, maybe
some blush. She might be a cop, but she was as pretty as a peach.
"Your daughter is adorable."

"She's something else."

Another waitress brought their coffees. Ozzie could see Colette and
Suzi through the half-open kitchen door. Colette was touching Earl the
chef's face--that big bear of a man became putty in her sticky hands.

"I'll get right to the point," Rachel said. "I'm reopening the Melissa
D'Agostino case."

"Oh." Ozzie stared down at his coffee, which he liked with lots of
cream and sugar. He thought for some strange reason that maybe she
wanted to see him because she'd had a dream about him recently.
Sometimes he had dreams about people he hadn't seen in ages, and that
made him want to talk to them again.

"I need to ask you a few questions, Ozzie."

"Shoot." He caught himself and winced. "Oh gosh, I'm sorry."

"No, don't apologize ..."

"I'm always sticking my foot in it."

"Forget it." She smiled kindly. Sweetly. He'd always had a little
crush on Billy's sister, and it shocked him when she'd gone off to the
police academy, shocked him even more when she returned nine months
later a full-fledged cop. Now here they were, and he wondered where
her suspicions lay.

"Ask any question you want," he said, trying to be cooperative.

"I've been reading the case file," she began, "and it really bothers me
that this cat bell was found in the victim's fist. You know what I
mean? Suspicion points to that earlier incident, the incident with the
cats."

"Yeah." He nodded sheepishly. "The cats."

"You boys ... you killed those cats. You confessed to that. But it
was never resolved who decapitated the animals after they were dead."

"No." He shook his head. "That was never resolved."

"You don't know who did it, do your"

He blew on his coffee, then took a careful sip. They had a tendency to
overheat the coffee here, and sometimes it tasted burnt. "No," he
said. "I'd swear on a stack of Bibles.

"I know," she said. "I believe you. But I'm trying to figure out if
there's some bit of information ... some tiny detail you may have
forgotten to tell the police at the time."

"No," he said. "I confessed to shooting those cats, but I don't know
who went back and decapitated them."

"Wait..." She was staring at him. "Went back?"

"What?"

"You said, '... went back and decapitated them." How do you know
somebody went back?"

"Are you trying to trick me?" he asked angrily. He didn't have to
talk to her.

"No. I'm just saying--"

"Because this is something that was resolved years ago. I mean, we got
our misdemeanors, we confessed. We paid for what we did. I went
through a whole bushel of bullshit over that one. My dad beat the crap
outta me. I don't know why I said 'went back' just now. It's a figure
of speech. The cops ... your dad tried to paint me into a corner with
that one, but I swear to Christ, Rachel, I told him the truth. I told
the whole fucking truth and nothing but, pardon my French."

"That's all right," she said. "I speak French fluently.

He had to smile. "Look," he said, "I was a jerk back then. All
screwed up. Dad was one tough bastard. That's what we used to call
him. One Tough Bastard. He had a hide as thick as cement. You could
never get through to him, didn't matter what you said or did. I guess
I just wanted to piss him off, you know? Remind him I was there."

She nodded. She hadn't taken one sip of her coffee yet.

"I was always getting into trouble. Shooting those cats ... I have to
tell you, that was satisfying. This may sound sick, but I honestly
thought every living organism on the planet was against me. Have you
ever felt that way? Like the whole wide world hates your guts?"