Glass Houses (20 page)

What made Bennie stop and stare was this: he knew Henry Tyder. He didn't know him the way you'd know a friend. Bennie didn't have any friends.
He hadn't had any in school, and he didn't have any now. He knew Henry Tyder all the same because Henry was one of the men who came to the back door of the Underground Burrito when the weather got cold, looking for food. This was one of Bennie's boss's pet projects, and it drove Bennie completely around the bend. The bums didn't cause violence, no, but they caused other kinds of trouble and they brought trouble with them. There was the hygiene problem, and there was the problem of the boys who followed them, waiting for them to pass out.

Okay. Bennie had to admit it. He had rolled a few drunks in his time. Especially when he was younger, when he was still living at home. It was one of the few things you could get up to as a teenager that didn't carry five years in jail. He'd been no good at stealing cars, and he'd even then had that rule about not doing things that would make his brain go. Rolling drunks was a surprisingly lucrative hobby, though, even when the drunks you rolled were like Henry Tyder. It was incredible how much spare change these guys could accumulate in a single day.

Having those bums at the back door was like advertising for muggers. The muggers were there, just out of sight, and they wouldn't stop with the bums if they saw another easy target in the vicinity. Bennie hated it when Adrian went on and on about how important it was to take care of the “least among us” and then got to fingering that crucifix around his neck as if it were some kind of magic charm. As soon as he started doing that, it was only a matter of minutes before he got into one of those long monologues about his life, about how he had come from Mexico as an illegal wetback when he was only fourteen, about how he had worked the very kinds of jobs Bennie was working now, about how he had saved his money and gone hungry just to put something in the bank every week, without fail. Bennie was sure it was a very uplifting story. Some poor sap who didn't know any better would hear it and get religion. He wasn't some poor sap, and he didn't want to hear it again.

Still, there was no denying it. Henry Tyder was one of the men who came to the back door in the winter when Adrian put out food. He hadn't just wandered in once either. He'd been there every single time this year.

The television he was staring at was in the bar at the Underground Burrito, which was packed to the gills. This was a restaurant, not a place to get boozed up. Eight o'clock was their prime busy time, along with noon, when they got a rush of secretaries out on their lunch hour.

Bennie wiped his hands on his apron.

“Bennie,” Adrian said, coming by. “You're supposed to be working. Stop watching television.”

“It's the guy who used to sing,” Bennie said. “Look.”

Adrian turned to look. He was a short, square man, not fat but almost
obscenely muscular, in spite of the fact that Bennie had never seen him work out or heard of him doing it either.

“It's the man who used to sing,” Bennie said again, as the news show flashed yet another film clip of Henry Tyder being taken into court to be arraigned. “He used to come to the back door and sing. You've got to remember him.”

“I remember somebody singing,” Adrian said. “In the back, yes. But I don't recognize his face. Should I? He wasn't one of the ones who liked to talk.”

Adrian talked to the bums sometimes. Some of them were weepy. He talked to them about God and the Blessed Virgin. Adrian was convinced that the Blessed Virgin could solve all the problems of the world if people would only listen to her.

“Go in back,” Adrian said. “Go to work. We can talk about the Plate Glass Killer later.”

Bennie let himself be pushed toward the kitchen. “He came to the door every single time we put food out this year,” he said. “Every single time I've been working anyway. And he would sing. Sing and sing. Strange stuff. Stuff I'd never heard of. Harvest moon.”

They were in the kitchen now. Adrian had come in right after him. The two cooks were working so fast, Bennie was surprised they knew what they were doing. The waitresses looked frazzled.

“The dentist guy is back again,” Maria said when she saw Adrian. “He stuck his hand up my skirt when I was taking the order, and I got Miguel to cover for me. I mean, for—” The rest was a blur of Spanish.

“ ‘Shine on harvest moon,' “ Bennie said. “That's how it went.”

The older of the two cooks looked up and sang, “ ‘Shine on, shine on harvest moon. For me and my gal.'”

“That's it,” Bennie said.

Adrian looked nonplused. The older of the two cooks was an Anglo named Mike. Bennie had never understood how he ended up at the Underground Burrito.

“Why are you singing harvest moon?” Mike said.

“He used to sing it,” Bennie said. “The guy at the back door. He'd come for food and he'd sing.”

“Oh, I remember him,” Mike said. “Don't you remember him, Adrian? He was okay. Didn't smell too bad. Didn't get drooly or throw up. What's the matter? He die of alcohol poisoning?”

“They just picked him up and charged him with being the Plate Glass Killer,” Bennie said.

“What?” Mike said.

“There's too much distrust in this country,” Adrian said. “These are the
Philadelphia police. They're smart people. They're not taking bribes. They know what they're doing.”

“They just want to make an arrest,” Bennie said. “The city is all upset about the Plate Glass Killer. Nice ladies are afraid to come out of their apartments. They want to make an arrest, and he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The way I was the other time.”

Adrian made a dismissive motion with his hand. “That wasn't the same thing. They didn't charge you with being the Plate Glass Killer. They just brought you in and let you go.”

“He can't be the Plate Glass Killer,” Bennie said. “He's brain damaged. He's a moron. He sings and he makes no sense. And he pisses in the gutters.”

“They all piss in the gutters,” Mike said.

“And none of them can be the Plate Glass Killer,” Bennie said. “Serial killers aren't like this. They really aren't. Serial killers have to be smart or they wouldn't get away with it for so long. Think about BTK. They cops never caught him at all. He turned himself in. If he hadn't, he'd be at home right now, drinking a beer and laughing his head off at them.”

“You got to wonder what drives guys like that,” Mike said.

Adrian shrugged his shoulders. “If they don't have the right man, they'll find it out. It's got nothing to do with us. Go back to work, Bennie. We need dishes.”

There were plenty of dishes. There were enough dishes to seat the restaurant four times over before they had to wash even one. Adrian went back out to the bar. Bennie opened one of the big industrial dishwashers and started to pull out clean plates and put them into stacks.

Suddenly, the room around him felt closed in and tight. It was as if the air itself had gotten thicker. The waitresses looked as if they were moving through ether. Mike had his mind on a plate of nachos the size of an extra-large pizza.

“You know,” Bennie said. “There'll be another Plate Glass Killing. Just you wait. There'll be another woman in another alley, and then what will they do? They'll have their bum in jail. He won't be out and around to blame it on.”

Bennie looked around to see if anybody had paid any attention to him, but they hadn't. They rarely did. He put the stack of dishes onto one of the over-head stainless steel shelves and went back to the dishwasher to unload some more. Here was a question he couldn't answer. How smart was the Plate Glass Killer, the real one? Was he smart enough to hold back until this Henry Tyder was convicted and sent to jail? Or would that be smart at all? Maybe it would be smarter to kill again, right now, so that his reputation wasn't ruined by the sight of this pathetic old wino being held up to the general public as the Plate Glass Killer.

The dishwasher was empty. There was another dishwasher to be unloaded, and this one to be loaded up again.

Maybe the smartest thing would be for the Plate Glass Killer to wait years and years and years, until Henry Tyder was executed before starting up again. Then he'd have the last laugh on everybody.

I
t had been years
since Alexander Mark had been in the kinds of places he now went to on a regular basis just to see if Dennis Ledeski was there. What was worse, he hadn't liked those places to begin with, and he liked them even less now. Alexander was amazed that red-light districts didn't put an end to sex altogether, heterosexual or homosexual, vanilla or otherwise. If there was ever a brilliant demonstration of what was wrong with the human animal when he considered himself nothing but an animal, here it was. It went beyond the simple ugliness of bodies desperately trying to rid themselves of their minds, or the ultimate ugliness of bodies that had actually managed to do so. It was the narcissism Alexander couldn't stand. Here were people who existed in the world's first version of virtual reality. There was nothing for any of them outside their own heads. That was how grown men could justify ruining the souls of barely pubescent boys. That was how other grown men could justify ruining their own. Alexander didn't care what Chickie said. Too many gay men ended up in places like this, and their natural compatriots were not people like Chickie—or even like Alexander himself—but the Dennis Ledeskis of the world, not gay, just damaged. And wrong.

Actually, it had been blocks and blocks since Alexander had left the Zone. He just hadn't been able to get it out of his head. He realized he hadn't been paying attention to where he was. He looked around and saw that he was only three and a half blocks or so from Saint Bonaventure's, which was where he had been going anyway, and only a little bit farther from the one bus stop he knew of where he could take a bus directly to Hardscrabble Road and Our Lady of Mount Carmel monastery. He hesitated for a moment—the conversation was better at Our Lady of Mount Carmel; he didn't know who or what Sister Maria Beata had been before she left the world, but she had a first-rate mind and a first-rate reputation—and then opted for Saint Bonaventure's. Intelligent though Sister Maria Beata was, Alexander still couldn't imagine telling stories of the Zone to a nun in a full-bore traditional habit.

He picked up his pace and tried to get his mind clear of what he had been looking at for the past two hours: the men who all seemed to be hunched into their jackets so that nobody could get a clear look at their faces; the girls who were tired and pockmarked before they were fifteen years old; the boys who
were worse. It was one of the great blessings of his life, a true grace, that he had never ended up on a street like that one when he was still in high school and finding his way. He wondered about places like the Zone, about how they had started and what made them still exist. Had there been an equivalent of the Zone in Philadelphia at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence? Chickie and other men like him said that places like the Zone would disappear if society would only accept gays and lesbians for what they really were, instead of stigmatizing them as sinful and psychologically damaged for being what they were born to be anyway.

Here was one of the things Alexander found himself in disagreement with when he talked to most of the men he knew in Courage. He did think that many gay men, if not all of them, were born that way. He surely knew that he himself had been. He couldn't remember a time when his desires had fixed on girls instead of other boys. He couldn't remember even a single sexual fantasy in all his years of growing up that had involved a human female. It wasn't that he disliked human females. Given the ramped-up tendency of straight men to act like Neanderthals just to prove they were straight, Alexander had come to like women more and more over the years. He just didn't want to sleep with them.

He got to the block where Saint Bonaventure's was and was glad to see that the front steps of the church were lit up as if there were going to be a midnight mass. Saint Bonaventure's was good that way. Father Harrigan liked to keep the place open twenty-four-seven. He even refused to make any concessions to the age of armed robbery, and half the time the Host was exposed on the altar in a gold monstrance with only some little old lady kneeling in the pews to keep it company. Alexander had never heard of anyone coming in and stealing it. Even the crack addicts seemed to want to leave it alone.

He went up the steps and into the vestibule. He could see through the glass-topped inner doors that the Host was indeed exposed and that the only guardians were two middle-aged men, pudgy and dark, having trouble staying on their knees. He took Holy Water on the tips of his fingers and made the Sign of the Cross, but he didn't go into the sanctuary. Instead, he headed to the left, opened the door there, and went downstairs. He'd made a study of it once, in the long year when he'd made up his mind to join Courage and live the way he lived now. Every society at every time, in every place where there was writing to leave a record, recorded the existence of homosexual men. That, as far as Alexander was concerned, was all the proof that was needed, that homosexuality was as “normal” as it was possible to be. He understood why some gay men wanted to deny that. He understood less well why straight men and women wanted to deny it. It didn't matter. What was, was. He didn't need to deny who and what he was, or pretend to be something else, to make a decision to live differently than he might have been expected to.

Besides, he thought, there was the other thing. There was the fact that God was here, and that men were obliged to go to God and not the other way around. He wondered if men like Chickie knew that God was here, too, and just refused to come; or if they honestly didn't see it, or saw God somewhere else. Theology said that at the end of time, everything would be explained. Alexander hoped that was true because he had a lot of questions he wanted answers to. Sometimes he even wrote them down.