Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die (11 page)

Deputy Wendell Grasz turned the dial of his Police Band radio and listened to some state troopers nail a tandem diesel on the long grade outside Wiengart’s Junction. He cut it off and swung around to prop his feet up on the scarred battleship-gray desk.
Gahdam night duty
. He got up, walked to the open door, and gazed out across the asphalt lot. Spotlights glittered off the chain-link fence. The domed roofs of parked police vehicles glowed in the moonlight. He saw a flicker of heat-lightning on the southern horizon. A warm breeze carried a pungent musty odor from the settling pools outside the sewage plant. A real shit detail, he thought as he walked back to his desk. A harsh, peppery smell drifted through the square of mesh set in the steel door leading to the maximum-security block. He snagged the ring of keys off his belt, unlocked the door, and walked down the dark runway outside the three cells. The place was still as death; he could hear the plink-plink of water in the toilet.

He shoved his club between the bars and rattled it back and forth. “Bollinger!”

“Fuck you, Wendell.”

“Just checking.”

“I’ll check that club right up your royal red ass, Wendell.”

Wendell squinted into the lumpy darkness between the double-tiered bunks. “Sheriff said I should take you out
and frisk you if I thought you mighta been slipped a weapon.”

A dry chuckle came out of the impacted gloom. “Right, Wendell. Take me out and frisk me.”

A red coal flared on the bottom bunk. Wendell sniffed the acrid fumes of marijuana. “Where’d you get that?”

“Ask your ol’ buddy.”

“Colley gave it to you?”

“He wouldn’t give me the sweat off his balls in the middle of the Gobi desert. Thirty bucks an ounce I paid—for my own shit.”

Wendell felt a dull resentment. Share alike, Colley had told him. They’d never try Bollinger for grass now, so why let all that dope go stale in the impounding closet?
“We can always reseal the boxes …”

“Here, Wendell. You can have the roach.”

Wendell jumped back as the red coal arched through the air and lit with a spatter of sparks at his feet. He bent over and picked it up, then walked quickly out the steel door. He sniffed the butt, wrapped it in cellophane from his cigarette package and tucked it into his shirt pocket.
Whaddaya do with a guy who’s goin up for Number One? Hell, he don’t care about nothin’ …

His eye fell on a copy of Saturday’s paper.
Bollinger trial set for Oct. 20
. Bail was two hundred grand, so it was a safe bet that Bollinger would be a guest of the county for another couple months. Wendell started reading the story, wondering if they’d mention his name. No, by God. They’d put in about the sheriff and Miz Adams, but left out the fact that he was the one who went in there and dragged her out.

Just once
, he thought,
just once I’d like to see some credit go to the guy who does the dirty work
.

He walked outside and leaned against the building, letting the dormant heat of the concrete blocks soak into his back. He put the roach between his lips and lit it, drew quickly, and doubled over in a paroxysm of coughing. He straightened up as headlights flared on the gravel
road leading from town. The county jail was the end of the line, nobody came here on their way to anywhere else. The car passed the low brick structure of the sewage plant. Mercury vapor laps gleamed on the curving red fenders of a little MG. A lone figure sat behind the wheel with dark hair streaming out behind. Some chick coming to visit her boyfriend, he decided. Colley sometimes collected a ten-spot and then watched through the peephole while they screwed through the bars. Colley had a lot of nerve …

Wendell frowned as the car came faster, trailing a cumulous of gray dust. It churned through the open gate of the compound and made a wide turn, lights flashing on the chain-link fence. Wendell realized the car was headed directly toward him. He jumped back as the car swung past, peppering his shirt with gravel. It made a quick hook to the left, and skidded sideways to a stop.

The woman leaned back in the bucket seat and rested her hand lightly on the wheel. She wore a buckskin vest and a wide-brimmed gaucho hat, also of leather. Most of her face was hidden by octagon-framed dark glasses.

“I’d like to see Dan Bollinger,” she said in an impatient, demanding voice.

Wendell stumbled forward, brushing the dust off his shirt. “You can’t see Bollinger.”

Her pointed chin came up. “Who says I can’t?”

“Sheriff says so.”

“I’ve got a lawyer who says I can.”

“Lawyer don’t pay my wages.”

She looked at him for a minute, then swung open the door and stepped out. Her fringed skirt swung against her white thighs as she walked around the front of the car. Wendell breathed the odor of lilac soap as she stood in front of him. “Hold out your hand,” she said.

He felt the coolness of her hand, then the crinkly pressure of wadded paper. He smoothed out the bill and held it up to the light from the office. He saw two zeroes preceded by a “1” and stuffed the bill quickly in his pocket.

“You wanta talk to him from the walkway, reckon I could let you in for five minutes.”

Dan felt as if he were clamped inside a dark sweaty fist. A flash of light broke through and spread itself along the walkway in front of his cell. He watched Debra walk through the door and stand looking in. The light from the outer office illuminated one side of her face, leaving the other in shadow.

“What are you going to do now?” she asked him.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“You want me to put up the farm?”

“No. Don’t do that. Not yet.”

“I’ve got to do something.”

“Boots?”

“He wants to put us all on a plane and send us to Hawaii.”

“Not a bad idea. Avoid the tourists.”

“I won’t leave.”

He swung his feet to the floor and got up.-Putting his arm between the bars, he squeezed her shoulder and felt her bones sliding under his hand. “Let’s see your eyes.”

She took off her dark glasses and lifted her chin. Her eyes seemed to glow in the dim light; her face wore a drawn, spiritual look. He remembered the last time he had seen that expression, at his father’s funeral, the day he had flown home on a compassionate furlough.

She put her hand on his arm and said, with a strange kind of self-possession: “You remember, don’t you?”

“The funeral? Yes.”

“And afterward, when we went home, I put on Mama’s black chiffon nightgown, with nothing underneath?”

“A long time ago,” he said through dry lips.

“I want to do it now.”

He felt something like wind blowing through his bones—not a warmth or a coldness, but a feeling of non-materiality. She was a stranger to him, fragrant, soft and white. He could feel the warmth of her body through the bars.

“Listen …” He lifted his hand to her cheek, feeling the wetness of tears. “That never got us anywhere.”

“Where are we now?”

He exhaled slowly through his nose. “We’re in the maximum security block of the county jail. And there’s a bright-eyed deputy standing outside.”

“If I paid him he’d close the door.”

“If you paid him enough he’d leave the county and I could walk out of here.”

“How much would it take?”

The thought of freedom swirled in his brain: To walk without walls in front and in back, without wire mesh or iron bars dividing his vision into strips and segments …

With an effort he pulled his mind back to earth. “Forget it. We don’t have enough to buy off the whole pack. Wendell’s just a puppy dog. If you bought him you wouldn’t get much. Colley would take your money and bleed you dry—and then he’d turn me up. I dunno about the sheriff, but I want you to stay away from him. His pride might still be hurting from that butt in the belly I gave him. I don’t think he’d cry in his beer if he had to shoot me—and I’m not eager to give him a reason.”

“If I helped you … found a place for you to hide—”

“For the rest of my life? What are you thinking about? You’ve got a husband and two kids.”

“ ‘By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth; I sought him, but I found him not.’ “

His scalp prickled as he recognized the verse; she had quoted it in a letter after he’d gone back to Nam. There had been another quote, also from the Song of Solomon: “A garden inclosed is thy sister, thy spouse, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.” And he had written back, telling her she should find some decent guy and start thinking about marriage. A month later she had married Boots Virdon, a decent man in the eyes of the community, but an uncouth barbarian in private life. Debra had a talent for doing exactly what he said, in a way that made it exactly wrong.

He weighed his words carefully: “Look, if you want
to do something, there’s a staff psychiatrist at the fruitcake factory. Her name is Elizabeth Bodac.”

The words hissed through her teeth: “What’s
she
done?”

“Nothing, except that she believes a lot of the crap they dish out to patients. But they’ve got a head honcho there, Kossuth, who thinks I freaked out on my acid trips and committed mass murder.”

“Is it possible?”

“Maybe for some people. But I always knew when I was over the lne. And I just didn’t act.” He paused to study her face in the dim light. She wore a look of patient martyrdom, which meant that she didn’t understand, would not believe it even if she did. Suddenly it seemed important to convince
someone
.

“Look, when you’re over the line, you don’t kill people. They just aren’t real enough to bother about. You’re into a symbolic world. A cigarette isn’t a cigarette any more; it could be a piece of chalk or a snake, your associations get out of control, there’s no limit to your mind. That’s when you need some kind of ground, somebody you trust to tell you exactly what things are. You don’t want opinions, you don’t want somebody telling you about morality and how you shouldn’t do this or that. You wanta know things like: Who the fuck am I? Where do I put my feet, when the whole earth melts away? Everything is just styrofoam, or like these little plastic environments they sell the kids, with rocks and trees made of thin plastic. Underneath it, there’s the void; and underneath you, there’s the void. It’s inside and out and all around and there’s no getting away from it because that’s all there is. So …” He took a deep breath. “You sit. And everything fades out. Pretty soon you hear this voice laughing, laughing out of the steamy darkness. And you hear the sound of breathing,
shhhhh-huh, shhhhh-huh
, and it’s like somebody is standing right behind you breathing in your ear, no it’s closer than that, breathing right into your brain, and the voice swells up and says, ‘Don’t worry, everything’s all right.’ And you say ‘Wait, who are you?’ And the voice laughs. You want to stop and think about it,
but the voice says, ‘Don’t think.’ You want to sit and wait, but the voice says, ‘Begin the task.’ You say you’re too weak, and the voice says, ‘Strength will come.’ You want to rest up first, and the voice says, ‘You’ll rest when the job is done …’ “

“What is the job?”

He shook his head. “That’s the one thing I never found out.”

“Then how would you know you finished?”

He shrugged. “I think when you’re finished—you’re finished.”

“Dead?”

“Well … that’s how other people can tell you’re finished. But you know …
you
know. A lot of people finish up and then stay around afterward, but that doesn’t mean they’re alive. Medically alive, yes, but that’s all.”

The deputy called through the open door: “Hey, you guys about finished?”

He felt Debra’s arm slide around his waist; for a moment she clung to him like a magnet, and her breath was warm and moist in his ear: “Don’t worry, Dan. I’ll do what you said.”

He watched her go out through the steel door, then lay down on his bunk and clasped his fingers behind his head. The darkness against his eyes divided itself into hexagons, like cell patterns in a beehive. He felt the boundary of his flesh grow thin, attenuated, like a soap bubble about to pop …

She had been running in the woods.

How long?

Eternity. And there was no way to know which way to go. He might have circled around in front. He could be lying now in the next bush, the next clump of trees …

To see someone change that way …

When the dream started he had been a young man. As he leaned down she could see the touch of cinnamon which the sun brought out in his skin. His hand touched her breast and she felt the tingle in her armpit, traveling
up behind her ears and pulling the skin tight across her scalp.

And suddenly he was in her and the sun …
hot
. Looking down at the dead leaves under her eyes she felt his weight crushing her down, his rhythmic thrusts punctuated by the breathy grunts issuing from her throat. Then he went lumpish, and she was mashed like a marshmallow between the earth and his spent body. But she too was spent, the air crushed from her rib cage and her pelvis smeared like paste upon the white stone slab—

Elizabeth opened her eyes and looked up. Lights from the highway drifted across the familiar fleur-de-lis pattern of her ceiling. She rolled over and looked at the sheet. For a second it was a slick black pool of blood glittering on white, so real she saw it glisten

Then gone.

The sheet beneath her body smooth. She sat up and saw the polished brass bedstead gleaming faintly in the dim light; the wood grain of the oak-paneled walls stood out in sharp relief. The warmth of her peekapoo lay against her legs; she lifted him, felt his light little body quivering inside a fluffy ball of coarse gray wool. She let his tongue caress her cheek, then put him down and got out of bed. Walking across the thick red carpet, she felt the tingles start at the soles of her bare feet and climb up her thighs. She strolled into her kitchen, mixed a drink and carried it into the bathroom. Her feet left shiny prints in the soft nap of the magenta-plum carpet.

She looked into the mirror and saw her face, surrounded by purple butterflies which fluttered over beige-papered walls and ceiling. She touched the spray of hand-embroidered flowers between the bands of lace at the neckline of her gown, lifted the ruffled hem, and lowered herself to the stool. The fur cover caressed her bare bottom and stirred the erotic memory of her dream.