Girls (15 page)

The weekend was long and quiet and icy and long. Temperatures fell by Friday night to twenty-five below zero, and they didn’t rise more than twelve degrees during Saturday. We had long ago sealed the fireplace up with an insert, a small iron stove from Vermont, and Fanny and I carried in load after load of wood. We had the thermostat set high for the oil burner, and, in the back room, which was heated by electric baseboard units, we turned the thermostat all the way up. Fanny wore an old woolen shirt of mine under a thick wool sweater, flannel pajama pants under her jeans, and heavy ragg socks inside of her wool-lined moccasins. I wore the down-filled vest I used for outdoor chores in autumn. Nothing much helped. One of us was always looking through the kitchen window at the thermometer and reporting on how bad it was, or turning from the radio or television set to repeat a number always ending in below zero. The windows frosted up in fan shapes. On Saturday afternoon, when the temperature rose closest to zero, I started our cars and kept them running a good while. Then, shutting them down, I set old blankets and tarpaulins
over the engines to insulate the batteries and wiring. I ran a droplight on an extension cord from the mudroom, where we plugged in the washer and dryer, out to my old Ford, and I arranged the bulb to lie above the battery, under blankets, to provide a little heat.

The rest was moving slowly, going to windows to look at the threat, and sitting in the house near the stove and talking about the cold. We did not discuss the room upstairs, or our daughter, or the errand that Strodemaster invited me into, though we talked in general about the missing girls.

Fanny said, late on Saturday afternoon, when we drank chicken broth in mugs near the fire, “What if she ran away and she’s outside in this?”

“It would have to be hell in the Tanners’ house to want to be outside in this, wouldn’t it? I don’t know about him, but she seems a gentle woman. Strong person, you know, but gentle. I don’t know what in hell the preacher’s up to. Probably raping her every night.”

“They don’t quite rape them,” Fanny said. “They seduce them. Daddy
needs
you. Why are you so
beautiful
, I can’t stay away from you—so it’s the girl’s fault. It isn’t as violent as rape. But it’s also more violent.”

“You get them in the ER?”

She shook her head. “Not usually. They don’t come in hurt, as a rule. Sometimes they go wild, and they kill him, and
he
comes in all cut or bleeding or burned. Once, this was when I was in nursing school, they brought a guy in—his sister-in-law had done him. She waited until after he worked the daughter over and he was sleeping. She tied his hands and feet to the bed. He was on his back. And she hammered nails into him. She said he twisted a lot, and his wife kept trying to rescue him, and the nails banged off his ribs, but she did a lot of damage. She was trying to sink these big spikes, they looked like, into his heart. The wife kept saying she would press charges, she would press charges.”

“Against her sister, right?”

“Oh, of course.” Then Fanny said, “When you talk to Archie—are you his patient?”

Fanny was in the morris chair I had pulled over. She had her legs
up under her, and I’d put a comforter over her lap. For a while, she had looked relaxed. But now her brow, which had looked pale but relaxed, almost smooth, was a furrow of twisted parallel lines pushed up by her wonderful eyebrows, which had risen as I rocked. The dog felt the tension increase. He sat up, then laid his head on his paws and watched us.

“Not a patient. No. Sometimes, going in, when I stop at the Blue Bird to fill up on coffee, if I’m early, we have a cup together and we talk.”

“About us.”

“About the salary cap in the NBA. About campus politics that percolate down to the infrastructure people like me. About the weather. Sometimes—”

“It was the sometimes that I think I was asking about.”

“Sometimes we talk about emotions.”

“Because you’re such a garrulous fellow and you just can’t stop pondering out loud about the way folks emote?”

“Exactly,” I said. The lines on her forehead were slightly less bunched.

“Tell me.”

I closed my eyes so I could say it. “Sometimes I worry about if I’m smart enough, educated enough. I don’t know. Strong enough?
Something
enough. To be useful to you.”

I rubbed my face like I was tired. It kept my hand in front of me, and it kept my eyes shut.

“Useful,” she said.

I made the sound you make when you agree with someone.

She said, “Jack.”

We still didn’t talk about the wreckage upstairs in the room. Sunday night, we got Fanny’s car running, and her wheels squeaked off on the frozen road. In the morning, the dog wandered away while I worked on starting the Ford. The oil sounded like sludge and the starter sounded like a very weak cough, but it turned over, and I let the engine run while I stumped around on numb feet, trying to get the dog in. He burst up from the woods below the house with snow
powdering off him like water in the wake of a fast-moving ship. His head was high and his jaw was clamped. He was full of victory and pride, and he carried a loop of frozen blue-maroon intestines two feet long. He had clearly been to the mother lode of all sickness-provoking snacks for dogs, and he’d returned in glory. I let him run around the yard a few times, circling me to make sure it was understood that an event of major importance had taken place. Then, when he fell to his belly a few feet away to begin his meal, I made him drop it. I carried the guts in, put them inside a plastic bag, and hauled them out to the trash pails in the garage. I didn’t want us smelling them while they defrosted.

The dog escorted me and his fading triumph, and I thought of kitchens and rotten garbage, and I wondered again what Strodemaster kept beneath his sink. Probably it was a matter of how long he kept it more than what he kept. He was the kind of man whose wife had a long job description, I figured, and it included trash removal, pest control, and bathrobe cleaning. Now that his wife was gone, he couldn’t ask his girlfriends to shovel and sweep. Fanny had nothing but scorn for women like his wife who let themselves get run like appliances.

I thought of how I’d lied to Fanny and then told the truth. I couldn’t stay angry at Archie, because he knew too much about us. And because he’d worked so hard, with such delicacy, to help me out. I left early, apologizing to the dog, as I always did, for locking him in the kitchen for the day. I realized that I wanted to get to the Blue Bird and have an early cup.

His side of the window table was dusty with powdered sugar and crumbs and little crumpled sugar packages. He was wearing a huge, thick turtleneck sweater that had a collar that came almost up to his ears.

“Jesus,” I said, “you look like one of those U-boat captains in a movie.”

“I was told at home this morning that I look like Erich von Stroheim,” he said. “Have a pastry. They frosted them with maple this morning.”

I handed my thermos to Verna and I burned my mouth on coffee. I said, “Your pal Randy Strodemaster asked me to help out with something.”

“Something,” Archie said.

“This missing girl, Janice Tanner, you son of a bitch.”

“I take it that you don’t agree with me that talking with her parents would be beneficial.”

“Periodic discussions about dead girls.
Are Ex
,” I said, making the sign for a prescription in some of his pastry crumbs and spilled sugar. “Hang around the parents of a dead girl and exchange little recognition signs about misery.”

“So, then, you
don’t
appreciate the idea.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“But you said yes?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

I said, “Why?”

“Don’t stall,” he said. “Why’d you agree? I made the suggestion to Strodemaster. But I didn’t tell you to do it. I can’t make you take on chores. That part was your idea. Why?”

“I felt like I had to, I guess. I don’t know. I—to tell you the truth, I was—something about it made me want to. I couldn’t stay away. I hated it. I hate it. The idea—it was like stopping someone’s death, if I could. I’m a goddamned nuthead, aren’t I?”

“You sound pretty savvy to me,” he said. “If you’re not careful, you’ll sound healthy.”

I said in almost a whisper, “Fanny asked me if I was your patient.”

“What’d you tell her?”

“I lied.”

“Of course you did. But what did you say?”

“I said I didn’t talk to you about her.”

He stared at me hard, his beautiful piggy face dead serious, his little eyes focused. “You don’t,” he said at last. “You talk about you. A lot of you’s about Fanny. That’s all right. Because one of these days, you’re going to tell her, ‘We both need to talk to Archie,’ and because you ask her to, she will, and then you’ll have told her the truth.”

“And this is ethical?”

He ate a huge mouthful of something shaped like a cowpie filled with almond slivers and glistening raisins.

“Don’t you fucking worry about ethics,” he said. “You worry about your wife and yourself and
fuck
your quibbles.” Crumbs flew as he spoke. He paused, he sipped a big bubbly mouthful of coffee and swallowed it. He waved his thick, short forefinger between us and he said, “Somebody comes in bleeding, Fanny does what?”

“She calls the doctor.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Jack.”

“Stops the bleeding,” I said.

“That’s what we want to do. Then we can worry about correct behavior. Are you working?”

“You mean with Fanny?”

“Are you fucking at
work
on the little missing girl?”

I nodded.

“Tell me how you feel.”

“It isn’t—”

“Tell me.”

“I need to go, Arch. I’m late.”

“You piss artist.”

“I know.”

“You find me this week, the next couple of days, and you and I talk. Yes?”

He was sweating, and I had ruined one more breakfast for him. I was no better than any recidivist. You arrest them, try them, send them up, parole them, and they’re back inside in a week, habitual offenders. Granted, Fanny and I had grappled a little with—let’s say with us. But we hadn’t addressed the event, and we wouldn’t. That was what, for the sake of some kind of honesty, some kind of friendship, I would have to tell Archie Halpern one day. I wanted his help, but I could never—and I never would—do what he would advise.

When I came in, the dispatcher told me that Big Pete was in an interview room with a woman who had a complaint. I could hear her voice ranging low to high, then Pete’s even bass. His voice would enrage her. She’d think he was being calm on purpose, so she’d assume he thought she was being hysterical, and she’d be furious with him, and neither one would know why.

I asked the dispatcher to request, on the intercom phone, that he come out and see me. When he did, rolling his eyes and loosening his necktie, I suggested that he take my campus loop while I talked to the student. Since he had to do what I suggested, he did.

We had built two small interview rooms, each with chairs and a small table that was large enough for the student being interviewed not to feel like one of us was looming over. I left my coat hanging outside and when I went in, before I took the clipboard with the incident report from the shelf, I said, “Hi. I’m Jack. Who’re you?”

She was Niva. She was in her third year. She had a crew cut almost as flat as Archie Halpern’s, and she wore a little golden ring through her nose. It was hard not to talk directly to the ring. Her scoop-necked sweater was a hazy kind of purple and her pants had once been black. There were various colors of paint on them. She wore high thick-soled leather boots. Her hands and feet were big, and the rest of her was very skinny. She was almost copper-colored, and her eyes had a coppery touch to them, too.

The complaint was about a senior boy who no doubt called himself a man. His name was Roger Gambrelle. He shared studio space with Niva in a section of the arts building they let the kids use for what I guess was art.

“He plays this heavy rap,” Niva said.

“Too loud?”

“He’s trying to fuck me, Jack.”

“You mean—”

Niva didn’t smile. I’d hoped she would. Her face had deep frown lines and it seemed to live in a kind of scowl.

“That’s exactly what I mean,” she said.

“Right,” I said. “I’m trying to figure it out for this report. My associate has written ‘To promote sexual intercourse.’ ”

She smiled, but it went away too fast for me to enjoy it. She said, “That’s the fucking, Jack.”

“So, Niva, are you complaining about the moves he’s putting on you, or—this seems to be about the music.”

“He’s a stupid racist asshole. He thinks all people of color dig rap, and what you do, you want to get in one of us’s pants, you send the music up. Like perfume, understand? Like you’re laying flowers on a woman you want.
This
hyena is doing this mealy shit music can’t
no
one get into on account of it sours your
mind
, listening to it hour after hour. It’s antifemale, it’s violent, it brings us down, and I’m trying to move some paint on a surface to
mean
something. You understand.”