The Bones (39 page)

"I'm not gonna do that."

"Oh, yes, you are!" That comes out wrong. She realizes this and follows it up with a shrill "We really miss you!" which does
not fool him for a second.

"I'll come home when I'm done."

"And that's going to be when?"

"I'll let you know." He snaps the phone shut, jamming it in his pocket without saying good-bye and, inwardly lamenting the
years he has spent married to his wife, feels his body temperature rising to an unacceptable level. Stacy could do that to
him. There were times Lloyd was convinced being married to her was literally killing him, and when he experienced that, it
incensed him further, the whole dynamic a nasty circle.

Since Lloyd arrived in Tulsa he has been looking for ways to connect with Frank and appear to the other man as something more
than an opportunistic hanger-on with literary pretensions. It is important to Lloyd's endeavor that Frank view him as a peer
in a personal way, Lloyd calculates, since then Frank will be more inclined to reveal aspects of his inner self. Sensing he
can use his recent discussion with Stacy as a way to connect on a primal male level, Lloyd decides to share the story while
it's

Hastily pulling on his jacket, Lloyd walks down to Frank's room accompanied by the cacophonous sounds of the firecrackers,
which uncannily reflect his own troubled interior landscape. He has finally succeeded in fully objectifying Stacy, now more
a source of material than a spouse. Like his emotions, his wife has become important primarily for her comedic value.

The door to Frank's room is caught in the jamb and is not closed entirely, so Lloyd assumes no sex is taking place and he
is free to cross the threshold. Ordinarily, he would knock and wait, but eager to do his material and wanting to make an entrance,
Lloyd knocks and doesn't wait, pushing the door open.

He is immediately confronted with an alarming sight.

Frank is kneeling on the floor of the motel room with the barrel of a revolver in his mouth. Clay Porter stands in front of
him holding the gun. Both of them look at Lloyd, and of the three men now in the room it is a toss-up as to who is most surprised.

Two minutes earlier, Mercy had just gone to the bathroom. Frank was lying on his bed watching the Shopping Channel when there
was a knock at the door. "Come in," he said, having had four shots of Jack Daniel's, his normal level of paranoia lower than
it should have been. Clay Porter stepped into the room, closed the door behind him, not noticing when it caught in the jamb
and didn't close all the way.

"Hi, Frank," he said blandly. "Nice to see you."

Frank looked at Clay with unconcealed disdain and said, "Didn't I scrape you off my shoe yesterday?"

"Get up from the bed, please. I'm gonna have to frisk you." Cool, didn't want to get into a snapping contest with Frank.

Frank hesitated, looked toward the bathroom, where Mercy had gone to take a leak. "Don't you need a search warrant to be here?"

"This is just a friendly visit. Tell you the truth, I'm not sure it was you . . . I think we may have moved too quickly. The
wife said Mercy pulls a knife on Tino the day he croaked, and Mercy told us the wife and him were going at it like cobras
the same day . . . Come on, just let me pat you down."

Frank thought about what Clay was saying. Could these things be true? Were the police about to move their investigation into
another area and deliver him from the purgatory in which he'd been living? He inwardly cursed Robert, whose tender mercies
had sent him on this illstarred comeback, and shifted his weight, buying time. Then, he rose from the bed and glanced at Clay,
now what? With an upward tilt of his chin, Clay indicated Frank should put his arms against the wall, but Frank wasn't looking
at him any longer so Clay had to say, "Assume the position," which Frank did. He wanted this encounter to be a bad memory
as quickly as possible. Clay patted him down and said, "Sorry, just a precaution." Now Frank turned to face him. His slack
features radiated a strange brew of hope and contempt. "We're looking for a videotape and we think your friend Mercy might
be holding it. Now you talk to her and get us this tape, and I'm gonna pretend you didn't buy a gun this afternoon."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

The firecrackers banged away in the background,
pop pop pop pop pop.

"You're sitting in a car when Lloyd Melnick comes into Chet's Sporting Goods over by Oral Roberts and buys a Beretta. We ran
Melnick, Frank. He's some kind of Hollywood asshole, probably can't find his dick with his hand."

"What do you mean you
ran
him? Guy's got no record."

"I Googled the guy, Frank."

"You Googled Lloyd? That's what you've been doing? Googling?" Frank had to strain to keep from laughing.

"Never mind how I spend my time. We know who the gun was for and we want to talk to your friend Mercy about that videotape."

"I don't know anything about a videotape."

"I want you to talk to her and find out where she's got it."

"Why don't you Google her? Maybe the information's on the net."

"You think this is funny?"

"Why would she tell me?"

"A gun's a serious thing, Frank." As if to underscore this point, Clay removed his own police-issue sidearm from its holster
and looked at it. "Guy like you, two-time loser . . . don't think this isn't going to interest the judge at the trial." Clay
noticed Frank had looked away again and, suddenly, without warning, smashed the gun into the side of his head and sent him
sprawling to the floor. Frank's hands went up in a belated and useless effort at protection. "I ain't here to have a discussion,"
Clay said as he stood over him. "If you don't get it, you can go back to jail until your trial."

"I'm not going back to jail" came from the quivering heap on the floor.

"Then please pick up the phone and call her."

Frank rose unsteadily to his feet. The pain on the side of his skull was acute, but the alcohol made it more bearable than
it would otherwise be. He realized it was not inconceivable he could be beaten to death in this motel room. Frank looked at
Clay and said, "No."

Clay whipped a punch into Frank's face that snapped his head back and caused him to fall once again to the floor, where he
noticed the metallic taste of blood in his mouth.

"Want another love tap?" Clay thought he was being clever.

Frank got up to his knees and through bloody lips told him, "Blow me, as Noel Coward said in another context." The room not
being up to his level never something that stopped Frank.

Clay Porter's response to this mid-twentieth-century theatrical reference was to shove the barrel of the gun into the kneeling
man's mouth. He said, "Think about it. I got all night."

This is the tableau Lloyd beheld when he opened the door prepared to regale Frank with some fresh material about his crumbling
marriage.

Now he stands there, his eyes and mouth widening, tequila tamping his fear and allowing the irritation he's feeling to intensify
at the sight of Frank's victimization. Clay removes the gun from Frank's mouth and says, "Well, well, well, Mr. Melnick,"
which freaks Lloyd completely, since he has no idea how this guy, this armed thug, whoever he is, knows his name. "Come on
in!" the man tells him with a feral smile. Lloyd hesitates a moment, thinks about backing out, but knows if he does, the all-access
pass to Frank is revoked in perpetuity with no hope for appeal. Hesitating only long enough to draw a shallow breath, he steps
into the room, closing the door behind him. Lloyd watches Clay contemplate the next move. He feels the weight of his gun in
the holster, his jacket open. "So you bought a gun for Mr. Bones here. You could be in a lot of trouble, son."

"Why don't you go home, Clay?" This from Mercy, who has stepped out of the bathroom. Clay's head swivels to get a look at
the latest arrival. "There's nothin' you want here," Mercy says.

"I want you, girl," Clay says, still affecting the cool.

"Drop the gun." Now Lloyd is pointing the Beretta at Clay, holding it with two hands and trying to keep them from shaking,
the tequila running through his veins, his mouth cotton, still wondering,
Who the hell is this guy?

Clay smiles at Lloyd, completely in charge of the situation. "Don't do that, son, it's a bad idea. Put down the weapon." Clay
slowly turns from Frank and Mercy and walks toward the panicking Lloyd, whose twitchy response to this ratcheting up of the
tension level causes a spasmodic tightening of his muscles that leads to the unfortunate result of the gun discharging, the
blast deafening in the small room. Clay looks considerably surprised when the bullet from Lloyd's gun rips into his chest
with a force that knocks him to the floor. The sound of the gunshot is immediately followed, a call and response written in
gunpowder, by another round
of pop pop pop pop pop
celebratory firecrackers detonating at poolside.

Chapter 16

Lloyd's left leg begins to shake uncontrollably, and it is this sensation he is most aware of when Frank's dead-calm voice
intrudes on the silence that has enveloped the shrinking room in the wake of the gunshot.

"I think it's time to go."

The three of them look down at the prostrate Clay, whose eyes are roiling back in his head in a way that does not portend
good news for anyone. Mercy grabs the gun from his now open palm and quickly checks the load. Safe to say, if the currently
recumbent Clay had pulled the trigger a moment ago, he would have blown off the back of Frank's head.

"It was self-defense," Lloyd says, trying the thought on for size. Looking at the trembling man on the floor, he is fleetingly
reminded of how he feels when he utters something particularly hurtful or insensitive and wants to retract the words as soon
as they're out of his mouth, that sensation one has of sliding down a muddy hill unable to stop the inexorable descent toward
a sticky and unavoidable end. Alas, bullets, unlike words, cannot be retracted. Shooting someone cleaves to the neurotic perpetrator
like bad reviews, which is why someone like Lloyd, a ditherer in far less charged circumstances, should never carry a firearm.
"Should we call the cops?" Lloyd hears himself say.

"He is the cops," Mercy informs him. "A detective."

This fact smacks Lloyd in the face and a weak "Oh, God . . . " gurgles up from the depths of his throat. It's all he can manage
upon being apprised of the exact nature of his current situation, the Paxil powerless against this kind of reality.

***

None of the College Christians look up from their uncorrupted revels as the three Children of Mammon quietly leave the room,
walk along the balcony unmolested, and disappear into the stairwell that delivers them to the parking lot and the safety of
Mercy's car, the one determined to be least likely to attract unwanted attention.

Mercy's in the driver's seat, Frank's in the passenger seat, and Lloyd's squeezed in back. She starts the engine, then says,
"Where are we going?"

"Dinner and a movie?" This from Frank, to Lloyd's amazement, the man shrieking in the tempest.

"Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God" emanates from the churning vortex into which the creator of
Happy Endings
has been sucked. It is mumbled like an incantation and marks the totality of Lloyd's contribution to the conversation up to
this point.

"Frank?" Mercy's voice intrudes on Lloyd's cataleptic daze. "What are we gonna do?" The car is still idling. They haven't
moved from the parking lot. Firecrackers can be heard through the open windows.

"We're going to Mexico," Frank says.

"Do you have any money on you?"

"About nine bucks."

"That's more than seven million pesos. We're in clover."

"Are you gonna come?"

"Hell, yeah."

"You don't have to. You can just lend us your car. If we get caught, I'll say we stole it."

"I wanna come."

"Mexico?" Lloyd inquires, snapping out of it. "Is the cavalry chasing us? We're making a mad dash for the border? What are
we, Butch and Sundance? Who goes to Mexico anymore?"

"If you got a better idea, let's hear it," Frank says.

At the moment, Lloyd does not have a better idea, which deflates him. Looking out the car window as they leave the parking
lot, he sees streetlights, fast-food franchises, service stations feeding lines of big gas guzzling American cars with their
lurid colors, reds, blues, yellows, greens, purples, oranges, on down the unnatural rainbow softened by the late hour but
still vivid in the night, and has the thought that this could be the last time he sees any of this. For all of his caterwauling
about the degree to which he is not savoring his existence, it is not a thought he finds himself embracing.

The back door of Club Louie opens and a hard beam of light illuminates the interior of a hallway. Mercy is holding a flashlight
and steps quietly into the club, followed by Frank, who has taken the gun, and Lloyd, who has no desire to be left in the
parking lot with his morbid thoughts. The guys, Frank on a bold new adventure and Lloyd trying to keep from imploding, flow
in Mercy's wake as she leads them to the bar area, saying in a whisper, "Tino's wife was always bugging him about money so
he used to give me envelopes full of cash to hide."

"How come you didn't split to Vegas and book yourself into a suite at Caesars with a male escort?" Frank asks.

"Because I'm an honorable person," she replies, kneeling behind the bar and pulling up a floorboard.

Lloyd peers around the bar, remembering his first night here, seeing Frank's act, making notes for his book. His book! The
ludicrous memory of his aspirations! The cloak of innocence and naïveté that has led him to this terrible moment has now completely
unraveled and blown away, leaving him to face his true self, naked, blanching at what he sees.

Frank's helping himself to a bottle of whiskey, saying, "You know, when I'm about to be indicted as an accessory to murder,
I like to take a nip. Lloyd?" Frank extends the bottle to Lloyd, who can only shake his head mutely, ruminating on how his
life could possibly have reached this juncture. Mercy pulls a manila envelope, the one Tino had given her the day Frank arrived,
out from under the floor along with a handgun. She jams the gun in her belt with an ease that indicates she's put that kind
of hardware in this particular place before. Holding the flashlight in her armpit, she aims it at the envelope, which she
tears open with both hands, then pulls out the videotape Clay Porter died for, showing it to Frank.

"Where's the money?" he asks.

"All's that's here is this tape."

An hour later, most of which has been spent in silence, Frank, Mercy, and Lloyd are passing through Bristow on 1-44 headed
for Oklahoma City. Once there, the plan is to sprint due south on 1-35 for Mexico, rather than drive in the direction of Frank's
house on the Pacific coast, the thinking being just get the hell over the border as quickly as possible. Frank looks back
at Lloyd, saying, "I like how you brought it back there."

"Where?"

"The way you smoked that guy, Lloyd. Mothafucka had a gun barrel kissing my tonsils, coulda taken me out right then, but my
man Lloyd . . . " He says
my man Lloyd
with the blaccent he uses when intending to convey singular approbation and continues in the same vein, liking those three
words so much he repeats them. "My man Lloyd smoked the mothafucka! Wouldn'ta guessed ya had it in ya, but, dang, you dropped
his ass like a sack of potatoes!" which comes out like
pah-tay- tuhs.
Now Frank reaches toward his new hero in the backseat with his fist, offering it to be tapped in the current universal sign
of hipster solidarity. Lloyd says nothing and halfheartedly reciprocates.

I shot a cop and he's acting like I just won a People's Choice Award, congratulating me! Frank is giving me the Black Man
Fist Tap because I accidentally
—
and please let me stress that word
accidentally,
please!
—
I
shot someone, a cop no less. I don't care that he was acting like maybe he's had one or two civilian complaints filed against
him. Is this the functional definition of irony? Am I being consumed by an irony so grand it will literally kill me? For days,
no
—
months
—
months? Who am I kidding
—
years! Yes, years
—
I have craved the approval of the Bones, this sociopathic miscreant, who I glorified in some adolescent way, as if I were
fifteen years old, zit-faced and stupid and didn't know any better, and now that I've shot someone I've earned it? What kind
of cosmic joke is being played on me? I've just sailed off the edge of the world at a terrible velocity with someone who inhabits
an alternate universe, and I have no idea how I can possibly get back on solid ground. Would death be a relief right now?
I may need to think about it. I can't think like that. I have to get to Mexico; Mexico's a good idea. I'll get some clarity
down there. It was an accident. I didn't mean to pull the trigger. The man had a gun in Frank's mouth. Who puts a gun in a
person's mouth? I didn't know he was a cop. For all I knew it was some kind of shakedown. Why couldn't I have stayed on the
phone with Stacy? The only time in my life I cut one of our phone conversations short when I'm out of town and I walk into
someone else's bad dream with a loaded gun. I'd let her yell at me for a thousand years if it would get me out of this disaster.
I wonder if an insanity defense will fly? I'm out of Paxil. I took my last Paxil right before I shot that guy. That should
count for something, along with the tequila. A good lawyer, a five-hundred-dollar-an-hour guy, should be able to make something
out of a tequila and drug combination. I want to see my kid. Maybe I should turn myself in. No, that's a bad idea. I shot
the sheriff. But I did not shoot the deputy, no, no, no. Stop it! Stop it! What are Bob Marley's lyrics doing here? I want
to be back in Jamaica. I wonder if Dustin would like it there? Maybe we could . . .

While Lloyd's mind is whirring, fracturing his thoughts like some kind of demented Cuisinart, Frank looks over at Mercy, who's
driving.

"You didn't shoot him, did you?"

"Who?"

"Tino."

Lloyd glances toward the front seat from between spread fingers, roused from his downward spiral by this exchange. He's trying
to unravel the puzzle of recent events, using Frank's situation as an anchor for his own free-floating anxiety. He didn't
believe Frank had done Tino; despite his violent history, a killing didn't fit. But Mercy? He hadn't even considered the possibility.
Trying to sort this out would give him a break from his own miserable projections.

"Damn, are you outta your mind?"

"You were waving a knife at the guy when we met," Frank points out.

"I'm not the one with the colorful rap sheet, Frank. I didn't pull a gun onstage or drive a Hummer into Lloyd's living room
after a high-speed police chase. I'm not the one Tino pulled a gun on that night and the cops didn't find a weapon in a car
I was driving. If anyone should be suspicious . . ."

"You think I did it?"

"Hell, no! But jeez Louise, give me a break, all right? I didn't shoot him!" When this is met with silence, she says, "Look,
Frank, I'll get out of the car right now if you don't trust me. No one's gonna be looking for me anyway. They're gonna be
looking for Frank Bones. So you and Lloyd can take the car and—"

At this, Lloyd leans forward and places his hands on their shoulders. "Mom? Dad? No fighting. It upsets me."

"I mean, what the hell's the matter with you?" she asks, ignoring Lloyd, who is impressively masking his perfervid mental
condition. "I got the milk of human kindness running in my heart and you're treating me like I'm a suspect. It's like you've
never seen someone who's true."

Frank thinks about this a moment and quickly realizes she's right. He hasn't seen someone who's true. Lloyd is now true, of
course, since he's shot a cop on Frank's behalf. But he correctly assumes Mercy is talking about women. He looks at her, chastened.
"I'm sorry" is all he can manage, but from the slight smile she gives him he knows it's not bad. Sensing an opening, he says,
"I'm a little upset is all. I didn't move to New York City when I was a kid so I could die in Texas. The idea was
not
to die in Texas."

Touching his arm, Mercy says, "You won't."

Lloyd, for his part, is not so sure as the car roils south through the increasingly black night, toward Texas, toward Mexico,
toward . . .

Mercy's car is flying down 1-35 south of Waco as dawn creeps in on bobcat feet. Mercy is driving, Frank in the passenger seat
in a fitful sleep. Lloyd has been wide-awake all night ruminating on how he has arrived at this point. If his sojourn in Tulsa
was a way to put distance between Stacy and himself, it has worked far better than anticipated. Lloyd had not simply left
his wife and son but left his life entirely. What had been a quiet suburban existence marked by children's birthday parties,
backyard barbecues, preschool fund-raisers, lunches with guy friends where they would complain about their wives and their
work, dinners with couples, the conversations focusing on kids, vacations, and real estate, long days at work ending in silent
evenings of desperate contemplation; in one brief moment, all that had become a hellish plunge into a bottomless pit. If they
are caught, Lloyd realizes, his life is effectively over. The bullet in Clay has his name on it, and Lloyd knows he does not
possess the tools to evade the highly motivated police dragnet that ensues whenever an agent of social control buys it in
the line of duty. He will certainly be apprehended in short order, and after a quick trial during which he will spend a gigantic
sum of money on a phalanx of well-known lawyers, the best he can reasonably hope for is life in prison. No one will care that
he gave generously to charity; that he is a respected professional in an important industry will carry no weight; that he
tried to be a good husband and father will mean nothing. All that will matter is the terrible crime he committed.

Life. In. Prison.

Prison clothes, prison food, and worst of all, other prisoners. Lloyd can only imagine the murderous dregs, the scum, the
malodorous human flotsam with whom he would be consigned to spend the reminder of his years on earth doing penance for a crime
he had never intended to commit. He thinks about his purchasing the gun, his ridiculous posing in front of the motel-room
mirror, his deeply unfortunate decision to remove it from its holster, and he sinks further into his seat. However evil Clay
Porter was, he was still a cop, Lloyd had shot him, and if he was caught, he was going to pay—unless they made it to Mexico.
And yet . . .

What am I supposed to do in Mexico? Work on my tan? Don't know anyone, can't speak the language. The tourist areas are out.
That's where they'll be looking for me. Is it possible to eke out some kind of marginal existence doing menial work? Yeah,
that's a good plan. Dig ditches. My back would go out the first day. So how am I supposed to eat? The food's no good anyway.
I can't live on it. The food in Oklahoma was bad enough. I think I'm getting nauseous. Probably just nerves. Nerves and a
parasite. Won't be able to contact Stacy. Can't trust her. Can't see Dustin. If I try to reach him, I could be traced and
they could catch me. I'll never be able to stop running, a gringo nowhere-man lost in some vast, violent Catholic country
I'll never begin to understand.