The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams (13 page)

“You mean
today?”

“I mean everything, my
whole life. It’s like my whole life went by when I wasn’t looking.
It’s like, I’m standing here, I’m running out of
memories.”

There was no drama in his
words. He was somber, reflective, low energy. He was in his dormant
phase.

Past the lake, we moved
through a crazy Paumanok mix of tupelos, red maples and wild
raspberry bushes. The air was diamond clear.

“I’m thinking too much,”
he said. “There’s too much pondering going on, too much
cerebration. And the things I’m thinking about, I can’t believe
it.”

“Like what?”

“You don’t want to know.
Shit, I don’t even want to know.” He took three more steps, eyes
down on the pine-needled trail. “Growing up. Been thinking a lot
about being a kid, the growing-up days.”

“Nothing wrong with
that.”

“In my case, best not to
bring it up.”

I told him again about
Jen, the woodsy I’d met, how she was trying to get along after the
death of her father. Nearly a minute went by without him saying
anything.

“My mother,” he said.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about her.”

“She still
around?”

“No. She passed a long
time ago, I was 10. Cancer. Only I didn’t know it at the time. No
clue. That’s mostly what I’ve been thinking about.”

“Bad time to
go.”

“I knew something was
wrong. I knew she was sick with
something
. I asked my father, the
shithead. He tells me oh it’s nothing, she ate some bad swordfish.
To this day I’ve never touched swordfish again. Then she starts
losing weight, starts losing her hair. She’s fucking bald around
the house. I ask my father what’s going on. Nothing—she was wearing
a defective hat and that’s why the hair. I
still
won’t wear a hat.”

“Was it just
you?”

“No. Me, my brother and
sister. I was the oldest. We didn’t know shit. My mother starts all
this weirdness. She starts eating Vaseline. Eating it right out of
the jar with a spoon. We don’t know why. We got a Christmas tree
that year. We get up one morning, she’s taken all the dirty socks
out of the laundry and hung ‘em on the tree. I go to my father. He
says nothing’s wrong. She’s fine—what’re you talking
about?”

“Dementia, from the
treatment.”

He nodded. “Bout a month
after that she went away. Who knows where? He hired a woman to take
care of us. I figured he was going to see her everyday, but he
wouldn’t say a thing about it. One afternoon, I’m coming home from
school, I see him pull up. I could see by his face that something
had happened. I say how is she? He tells me she’s dead. Just like
that—she’s dead. I say
what?
He says you knew what was going on—she’s dead.
But I didn’t. I didn’t know. I had no idea it was anything like
that. And he walks in the house and doesn’t say another thing. He
never said a word about her again. I just stood there. I just stood
there like a stone.”

He kept walking, head
down, showing no emotion for once. He was a plane wreck of a man,
and I was looking into the black box of his soul.

“He didn’t know how to
deal with it,” I said. “A lot of people don’t.”

Wooly shook his head. “It
was more than that. It was a lot more than that. He was just a
bastard. He was a cold, no-heart bastard. One of my earliest
memories of him, I was about 3, I’m sitting in the back seat of the
car while he’s getting a blow job from a hooker in the front. I
didn’t know what it was at the time—it was years later when I
figured out what so to speak was going down, but that’s what it
was. What kind of father does that to a kid? But that was him.
That’s what kind of son of a bitch he was. He was just a bastard is
what it was. Just a selfish, miserable bastard. After my mother
died, I can never remember having a meal with him. You know,
sitting down eating, the four of us? Just as a for instance? I can
never remember anything like that. Maybe it happened at some point,
but I can’t remember.”

“He still
around?”

“No. He took a stroke
years ago, kicked off. Bon voyage. He jacked me up, he really did.
Let me get you told—he jacked me up good. The things he did, I
don’t know. I just don’t know. Why am I even talking about this? I
have no idea.”

We were here. We’d come to
an ordinary 20-foot oak that one night was nested with thousands of
fireflies and lit up like the most incredible Christmas tree in the
world. We went past the tree and through the brush on the other
side and there it was, there it was. The thing looked as impossible
as ever—a gigantic 100-ton boulder squatting with complete
equilibrium on a circle of small stones. If somebody who was 300
feet tall and blessed with extreme accuracy had dropped a stone
turd, this is what it would look like.

And here comes the rush
again. Only it wasn’t a rush per se, not an onslaught of feeling,
but a slow undertow, a soft pull on the mind. It just came out of
nowhere. Whatever was in the air here—an intense concentration of
geomagnetic energy, whatever—whatever maybe drew the Algonquins to
this spot hundreds or thousands of years ago, whatever it was, it
worked.

Wooly seemed calmer, and
somehow suddenly smaller. “You know something? What’s supposed to
happen in three days? I know it’s going to happen.”

“Don’t talk that
shit.”

“No, I know. I can tell.
My life is starting to make sense to me. That’s gotta mean I’m
going to die. Everything feels
destined
, you know? Everything’s
falling into place. Looking back on it all, the things I’ve done,
there’s a reason for it. Not a good one, but there’s a reason. It
can’t be a good sign.”

“Life’s a bitch and then
you die?”

“Something like that,
something like that.” He nodded heavily. “How old do you think that
life’s-a-bitch saying is? How long’ve people been saying
that?”

There was no sound out
here—no sound in the woods, no sound in the universe.

“It’s as old as our
tongues.”

“I can believe
that.”

>>>>>>

MONDAY JUNE 18, 11:00
p.m.

FOCUS

We’d never made love like
this before. Things went biological as soon as we got into her
room. She ripped her top off in one motion, ripped my shirt open in
another. She tore into me like a hungry animal, never saying a
word. Her nipples were already stiff, her pussy was already
wet.

Her eyes stayed open as I
pinned her on the bed—eyes like chocolate smoke—her arms tight
around my shoulders, saying just fuck me fuck me fuck me, and I was
fucking her like I’d never fucked before, I was fucking her with
every breath and pulse my body was ever going to have. It was
frantic sex, it was almost panicked sex. It was like she believed
that if we fucked hard enough, everything around us would be pulled
into focus.

But it didn’t seem to
work. As we were lying next to each other, it felt like we were
further apart than ever before. Her body was still, but I could
feel her mind moving away from me, leaving the bed, going someplace
where I would never be able to follow.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

CHAPTER 6

KILLERS AND
CONFESSIONS

>>TUESDAY JUNE 19 (2
days to go)

TUESDAY JUNE 19, 7:35
a.m.

HEART-WHIPPED

I was dreaming when the
cell went off. I was dreaming that I’d woken up in a room
surrounded by hundreds of digital clocks, all flashing
glowing
12:00’
s
in the dark, as if a power surge had knocked them all out. I
answered the phone. It was Jen. I jumped.

“You see something?
Somebody’s here?”

Nooo.

“Somebody’s by the
house?”

No, nobody’s here. It’s
quiet.

“Are you all right?
Anything wrong?”

I’m fine. Thank you. Is
this too early to call?

“No. No, it’s
fine.”

I’m a morning
person.

“It’s okay.”

I’ve been, I’ve been
thinking about something. I think I need to talk to you.

She told me to take one of
the paths that twisted away from Wooly’s property. I couldn’t see
anything until I was walking past a bush cluster with tiny leaves
that somehow smelled purple and she called my name. Jen was
standing in the clear middle of the brush. She had a rust-ridden
shopping cart with her, filled with can and bottle empties and a
pink plastic lawn flamingo. Somebody was throwing it out, she said.
She was keeping it for company.

I didn’t like the way she
looked. The under lids of her eyes were dark, and her face was so
pale the freckles stood out like birthmarks.

“You sure you’re all
right?”

She nodded, pushed her
hair back. “I’ve been thinking. I was up all night thinking about
something, and I guess I kind of came to a decision in my
mind.”

“Okay.”

“You asked me to watch the
house? Wooly Cornell’s?”

“Right.”

“I know something about
him. My father told me a story once about him. I guess it’s
something I should tell you. It’s something I need to tell
you.”

“It’s okay, you can tell
me.”

She lowered her eyes.
“Something terrible happened.”

“You can tell me, don’t
worry.”

“My father, he grew up
with Wooly. They went to school together. Anyway, I guess they were
about nine, there was this boy in the class. He was smart, very
smart. My father said he
had some dome on
him—he could think twice to anybody’s else’s once.
Any question the teacher would ask, his hand was
up. And he was very polite, like extremely polite. Always stood up
when the teacher called on him, even though he didn’t have to.
Always wore a dress shirt and tie to school. My father said
kid’s like nine years old and he’s churched-up
everyday
.”

“He was
different.”

“Very different. Always
with the ties, different tie each day of the week. Everything was
yes ma’am, yes sir. My father called him a faggot though I don’t
think he meant anything about sex.”

“I know what you
mean.”

“Anyway, a kid like that,
you know he’s gonna be a target. You know he’s gonna get ranked on.
Everybody was all over him, my father included. They’d laugh at
him, make fun of him, knock him down, trip him up. Everybody was
giving him some torment, making his life a little hell. You know
kids, you know how they are.”

Yes, my 15-year-old
friend, I did. I thought about my daughter—what would happen if she
got heart-whipped like that?

“Mostly it was a teasing
thing,” said Jen, “that’s all they were doing. But man, Wooly
Cornell? Or Willie—that’s what they called him back then, for
William. My father said that was before he got to puberty and
sprouted all that hair. Wooly, shit, he went ugly on that boy. He’d
yell at him, spit on him, leave dead mice in his desk. He put a
beating on him more than a few times. It was a lot more than
teasing. It was brutal.”

“You know the boy’s
name?”

“Ralphie. Ralph. His name
was Ralph Freeny.”

The name meant something
to me, but I couldn’t get at it right now.

“Nobody knew what Wooly’s
problem was. But Ralphie, this poor kid, he started showing signs
of it. He stopped wearing his shirts and ties, stopped speaking up
in class. Then he stopped, like, taking care of himself. Stopped
brushing his teeth, stopped washing himself. One point he like
started smearing dirt on himself, mud and shit—it was
pathetic.”

“Anybody do
anything?”

“Well, the rest of them,
they backed off. They let the boy alone. I mean you could see. But
Wooly, Wooly kept right at it. No let up in him. My father said you
could smell the meanness on his breath. Got to the point this kid
Ralphie actually started shitting in his pants. He started
shitting
in his own
pants—that was the only way he could get sent home early and not
get a beating from Wooly. Went on like that for a whole week or so.
Can you imagine? Can you imagine being like that?”

Jen pulled a handful of
hair under her nose, breathing its odor like an alcoholic taking
the first drink of the day.

“Then one day he didn’t
come to school, didn’t show up at all. Later in that day, around
lunchtime, they found out why. He’d hung himself. Happened at
home—his family found him. Hung himself in his closet. Hung himself
with one of those neckties of his.” She stopped for a moment,
fingering her hair but not drawing it across her face. “My father
said he’d never forget that, standing there in the playground. One
of the other kids told them. The family’d called the cops, word was
going around. They were all standing there listening to this piece
of news. Then Wooly came over, what’s going on? Somebody told him.
You know what that motherfucker did? He laughed. My father said
he’d never forget it, out there in the playground. The motherfucker
just stood there and laughed.”