The Suicide Motor Club (6 page)

Indiana

BUDDY'S LIQUOR LOUNGE PACKED IN A BIG CROWD ON A FRIDAY NIGHT. A MOSTLY
black clientele dominated Buddy's, but white guys from the hospital or from the university would come in twos or threes when a good band played and things mostly stayed peaceful. This particular evening, a scuffle broke out when a burly fellow named Jack claimed a skinny blond boy with long hair had pinched his ass. Actually, the boy
had
pinched him, rather hard, on the instructions of a tall, pale man in a ball cap who had promised him five dollars if he did it. Jack pushed the blond kid out into the parking lot, then pushed him down, kneeling over him with a fist cocked.

“You want to play sissy games? Huh? I'll play. How 'bout I whup your ass and call that playin'?”

Jack had worked all day on his hands and knees laying carpet for the remodel of the Indianapolis Power and Light building, getting told what to do by younger white guys who didn't have half his experience; getting fucked with by this scrawny kid with hair like a Meridian Hills cheerleader at
his
bar right at the start of
his
weekend was
not
on the menu. Buddy came out and pulled Jack Smalls up, asked the younger man what he did; he knew Jack and had never seen him steamed without a good reason. The kid went to explain about the guy with the cap,
but nobody else had seen such a man and this fresh nonsense provoked Jack a second time.

“Just once, Buddy. Just let me tap him once. I'll barely lean into it.”

“Don't waste knuckle skin on this fool,” Buddy said, helping the kid up, then giving him a less-than-friendly shove toward the street. “Go home, fool.” It all seemed funny to the ass-pincher, who was on his second mushroom cap and waiting for the main attraction to start in his head, but he made himself not laugh and so avoided his date with the head nurse in charge of stitches at IU Health Methodist.

Jack seethed. He neither heard the band (a cover band with a fat, coal-black front man who should not have sounded like Smokey Robinson but did) nor tasted his next four Buds. When midnight came around, he drove his cherry-red Nash Rambler home, trimming a few leaves off the hedge near the driveway as he parked. He went to the skillet and pried a disc of sausage from its bed of whitish grease. He turned on the TV and sat down, watching Johnny Carson telling fortunes with a huge turban on his head. Johnny Carson made him chuckle for the first time that night. He lit a cigarette and fell asleep, his cigarette burning a hole in the arm of the sofa but then burning itself out in a curl of smoke. He was dreaming about a girl he'd kissed in eighth grade and how she had strawberries on her dress. He never saw the shadows move into his driveway and up the sidewalk.

The knock woke him up at 1:15
A.M.

The television hissed with snow.

—

BETSY TRAUTMANN KEPT LOOKING AT HER FRONT DOOR. IT WAS AN UNREMARKABLE
front door, pine painted white with three little windows you could peep through to see who was knocking. On the outside a plastic wreath hung, bright with plastic flowers. That one would stay up through summer, replaced by plastic autumn leaves in the fall and
plastic holly in December. She knew the right wreath was on the door, but she had the impression she had forgotten something.

She cleared her plate from the table, scraped the fish bones and two shriveled green beans into the wastebasket, and put on her dish gloves. The water heater was set at 130 degrees, as it had been since the kids had grown up, so she scalded the hollandaise sauce off her plate, soaped it, washed it, rinsed it, and set it in the drainer. Outside, the shadow of the poplar tree that stretched long and longer while she cooked had now dissolved into general shadow. The sun had been down perhaps fifteen minutes. The streetlights ticked on. Somewhere a mother called for a boy named Tommy.

Saturday nights were hard for Betsy since she lost her husband. She taught typing and German at the high school. She liked teaching German even though she knew it was temporary; as soon as Herr Mueller's hip was healed, she would be back to typing, spending her two free periods smoking and reading in the teachers' lounge. Herr Mueller had grown up in Germany (although one didn't talk about what he had done there), so his German was better than hers, of course. Yet the children liked her more, she knew it. Mueller was a harsh, secretive man, and not one person on the faculty approved of his thick, walrussy mustache. Still, no girl from the prairie was going to out-German a native of Düsseldorf, so she tried to enjoy every minute of her time drilling the kids on verbs, helping them pair articles with nouns, sprinkling her lessons with anecdotes about her trips to Switzerland and Austria before the war. Not that children loved the anecdotes of their elders, but they certainly preferred them to drilling. Herr Mueller drilled them like SS soldiers, and, from what she'd heard, he just might know a little something about that. It was wrong to hope his hip healed slowly, but she did. It was so nice to have a break from the clacking of the typewriters, so pleasant to interact with the kids without some fussy old machine between them.
Schreibmaschine.
That was German for “typewriter.” And it was
die
, not
das
or
der
. It was always best to learn the sex of the article the instant you learned the word.

Tür
was the word for “door.”

She looked at the door again, but it just stood there, still and serene, as white as cake frosting. What did she expect? She went over to the door,
die Tür
, and peeked out the windows. Nothing out there, of course. Just a boy on roller skates, cruising by with a bright orange hula hoop around his waist. Probably Tommy.

Was she expecting somebody? She wasn't even sixty yet, too young to be getting senile. She turned the porch light on, slotted the door chain in. That relaxed her a little.

She opened the freezer and cracked grape juice ice cubes from the tray, plonked these into a glass. Poured grape juice a little too fast; a drop splashed up and dotted her white, flowered blouse.

She wondered what was on the television, but a noise stopped her hand before she reached for the
TV Guide
. Had something shifted in the attic? It was such a faint sound she was tempted to disregard it. And yet it had not been a creak or a groan or any of the normal sounds an old house makes. Something had shifted. A box? She stood still with her ear cocked up toward the ceiling for a moment, then reached for the
TV Guide
, shaking her head at her skittishness.

A creak now, coming from the second floor.

She moved to where she could see the door to the attic in the hallway above the landing. As she watched, a black, rectangular mouth opened in the ceiling and the ladder came down. Her heart beat fast. A pair of white feet came down the rungs. What to do? Dirty toenails on those feet. Call the police? Get a knife from the kitchen? That was ridiculous, she could never stab a person. Not even the woman with the mousy hair who was now walking down the staircase as a pair of dirty work boots started down the attic rungs. So
that
was where the
dirt on her rug had come from, she thought, realizing that her mind was fixing on anything it could to avoid the subject of the strangers in her house.

The girl went around now, weasel-quick, and pulled all the curtains. Something bad was about to happen. She was in a crime, a real crime. She should yell for help but couldn't. All she could make herself say was “What . . . ?” Her heart banged so hard in her chest she thought she might faint.

That was when she got a good look at the owner of the work boots.

She relaxed when she saw him, realized she recognized him, although it was hard to say from where.

“Hello?” she said.

The man answered. Was it that man? The man who didn't want breakfast? Her legs shook and she wondered again if she should go to the telephone, though now the woman had placed herself between Betsy and the kitchen.

She didn't look at the eyes of the woman, a skinny creature who smelled bad and looked like she'd have relations with anyone at all, but she did look at the man's eyes.

“Are you the man who didn't want breakfast?” she said.

He'd said he never ate breakfast, but it had been kind of her to ask.

“You were here this morning,” she said. “I let you in.”

He thanked her for doing that. Told her it was nice to meet somebody unburdened by suspicion. Asked her to sit down. She did.

She didn't know why her chin was wet, but it was. Now she saw a tall man in a ball cap helping a confused-looking colored down the attic ladder. The colored had something in his hand. The bald man with the work boots told him to walk over to Betsy, saying he wanted to make introductions. The colored took the steps slowly, his minder behind him, holding his shoulders steady. Now he stood over her,
swaying, empty-eyed, spit running out of his mouth. Should she get up and run? She wasn't a very good runner.

She remembered a little bit about these people. Someone had rung her doorbell at five in the morning; she remembered looking out the window to see who was there and then everything went hazy.

She had forgotten them, just as they asked her to, but seeing them again jarred them back into memory.

What had she done all day? Had she even left the house?

Now she saw the dirty girl rooting under her sink, saw her stand up with Betsy's biggest pot, the wide one she made pot roast in, saw her start walking toward the couch. A dark suspicion tried to form in her mind but she pushed it down. It came up again anyway, attached to a memory from the farm in Kansas. A huge, mottled pig hanging upside-down over a bucket, flies in the air.

She opened her mouth now, meaning to scream, but the bald man took the
TV Guide
from her hand, rolled it into a tube, stuck it in her mouth. He said she should hold it and bite down so she did, her saliva soaking the newsprint.

Now a big man with a neck brace had her ankles and she went upside-down, awkwardly bumping her head on the cushions. She nodded because she had been right about the pig, making the magazine go up and down. She saw carpet, shoes, the girl's bare feet, plumbed with eely veins. She saw the black man's faraway eyes, his shiny chin, then looked along his powerful forearm. His wrists were raw, like he'd been tied.

The bald man whispered in his ear, smiling.

The bald man had sharp teeth, like a dog's.

She saw what the black man was holding.

A carpet knife.

“Sorry,” he said, bending to her but not really looking at her. “I'm sorry.”

He said it the whole time.

—

THE RAMBLER WAS FOUND PARKED ONE BLOCK AWAY.

Jack Smalls remembered nothing that happened in the Trautmann house, not even how he got there, why he stayed in the house. He had been found at the kitchen counter eating bacon he had fried up himself; a neighbor had seen his dark face through a gap in the curtain. His public defender swung between hopelessness and exasperation. Bail was set so high even Buddy's Liquor Lounge wouldn't serve as collateral on the bond. Buddy told everyone who'd listen how Jack had been framed, that he was a good man, that something real fishy had happened, though his theories on what changed from week to week.

Betsy Trautmann was laid to rest that Thursday in a white casket, next to her husband. Six of her typing students got permission to come, though only two of them did. Erich Mueller attended in a wheelchair pushed by his teenaged son, the German instructor's mustache oiled for the occasion.

As dictated in her will, Betsy's headstone read

DEVOTED WIFE
GELIEBTE LEHRERIN

Missouri

“MY NAME'S NIXON, JUST LIKE THE PRESIDENT, BUT I'M NO TRICKY DICK. MINE
only knows one trick. Okay, two. My name's Luther, and that rhymes with . . . well, just Luther. If I were older than you, I could be long-in-the-toother. Huh? If your mom watched a play I might John-Wilkes-Booth-her. Huh? Right?”

Did this jerk really just talk about his dick to me?

Barb blinked once, slowly, letting her eyelids rest shut for a half second as if praying for the angel of removing nuisances to whisk this tiresome, pale man away from the sidewalk table she and her cousin had unwisely chosen. She pushed her fingers through the table's wrought-iron curlicues. She didn't know she was doing it. To Barb's horror, her cousin, Peggy, actually seemed pleased that someone was paying attention to her.

“Right,” Peg said to their guest. Now she nodded at the long red muscle car he had pulled up in not three minutes ago. “Nice ride. That yours?”

Peggy was actually
encouraging
the jerk. It wasn't as if she were desperate. Sure, Peggy was a little wide in the hips and tried too hard to look like the teenagers, wearing her pink lipstick and headbands, but she had a pretty face. Not like the man who had set his glass of boozy
ice on their table, as if by accident, responding to Barb's flinty gaze by saying, “Sorry, I thought you were my friends.” There was nothing pretty about Luther Nixon.

“Maybe we are your friends,” Peg had said, “only you just haven't met us yet.” It had been all Barb could do not to roll her eyes. Luther had wasted no time pulling up a heavy iron chair, dragging it on the bricks as if to make sparks.

Peggy was a lightbulb to the mothlike Luther Nixons of the world, and it was working Barb's nerves. She loved her cousin but didn't love these beery postdivorce forays into downtown St. Louis. Not that men bothered Barb that often—despite her svelte stewardess's build and high cheekbones, there was something hawkish and unattainable about her that steered men of small character away. Straight into Peggy.

“It
is
my car,” Luther Nixon said, nodding proudly at the machine whose tires kissed the curb near their sidewalk table. “Wanna ride?”

“No, thank you,” said Barb, even though the question was clearly not directed at her. She did not care for this man. She did not care for the one-size-too-small shirt he had stuffed his almost-muscular shoulders and chest into, nor for the weak, thin lips that jerked around the botched fence of his teeth. Nor for his baldness. Her pity for balding men extended to those who parked toupees upon their bare crowns and also to those who did not. Of the latter sort, the overcombers were most pathetic, followed by the au naturel types who allowed their remaining hair to congregate on the back and sides in a sort of fat horseshoe. Somewhat better, though too often criminals or sex fiends, were the glossy-domed full-baldies who razored it off in the shower. Better still, most noble of a sad lot, were the military types and realists who buzzed it close, as this man had done, reducing all of it to varying densities of stubble. Luther Nixon's stubble silvered at the temples, and silver shone in the odd little rogue hairs on his neck
that caught the streetlight unflatteringly. She didn't like it that he was close enough for her to note those fine hairs.

She let her eyes fall contemptuously on his bald pate, let a sneer seep onto her face, and he noted this. Damned if he didn't, but who cared? Perhaps he would be offended enough to leave. It was really all Barb wanted.

“What kind of car is it?” Peggy asked.

“It's big. And red,” Luther said, suggestively enough that it was clear he meant something else, but not so suggestively that Barb could call him out for it. Peggy laughed. “Besides being big and red,
that
is a super-cherry '67 Pontiac GTO with a cordova top. GTO stands for
Gran Turismo Oh-lookit-her-go
, but I just call her a goat. Four-hundred-cubic-inch V-8, but I done some things to it. It ain't what you'd call slow. Hood tachometer, Hurst shifter, but I don't want to bore you ladies with boy talk. Let's just say it's the meanest, sweetest piece of metal since the
Enola Gay
.” Barb fished in her purse for her Virginia Slims, turned her face deliberately away when Luther produced a lighter, lit it herself.

“Whoa, horsy!” Luther said. “That's a hot, sassy horse, there! Look over here, horsy.”

Luther grinned at her then, and, aside from the off-center gap or notch in his teeth, Barb remarked something odd about his smile. It blurred like a bad photograph. She had been about to say something sharp to Mr. Nixon, but the hazy quality of his smile stopped her short, made her forget the words. How could the teeth of a real, live man blur like teeth in a picture? She looked up into his eyes. She hadn't noticed how warm they were, how his fine crow's feet hinted at an inner kindness he covered with crude jokes and poor manners.
Don't believe him it's a trick he's like a devil look away look away he's gonna kill if you don't it's a trick trick trick trick.

“Would you like to see a trick?” he said, drilling harder into her eyes with his own.

“Sure,” Barb answered, confused about the word
trick
, but then remembering how kind this man's eyes were, this man whose dick knew two tricks. She tried to take a drag of her cigarette but noticed it was too wet. Her brother would have said she had
nigger-lipped
it, and, as much as she disliked that term, and her brother, she couldn't help thinking that every time it happened. Did that make her a racist? She hoped not, she didn't care for racists. Her mouth was really full of spit tonight; she tried catching the excess with the back of her hand, but it didn't work, and a strand blobbed out onto the table, pooling near the crumbs from the fried chicken she had eaten earlier. Luther handed her a napkin. Thought about it. Handed her a second.

“Thank you,” she managed. She glanced at Peggy to see if she had noticed her predicament, but her cousin was drooling, too. Drooling and smiling at Luther. She felt like smiling, too, so she did. “Sorry,” she said.

“Nothing to be sorry about. Everybody niggie-lips a ciggy from time to time.”

He plucked her drenched cigarette away, tossed it into the street, smiled again with his blurry teeth. He was drooling a little, too. How strange! Three droolers drooling away at a sidewalk table outside Honey's Bar and Grill. She laughed a little despite herself. She had been too hard on Luther Nixon. He offered her a Marlboro. She took it, suffered him to light it.

“The way you're feelin', that's called bein'
charmed
. Least that's what I heard someone else call it and it stuck. You didn't charm so easy 'cause you're kind of a cunt. This other'n fell off like a fat man off a pony. Know who doesn't charm worth a good goddamn? Injuns. I once rolled up on some wigwam gas station and country store, this was out in the desert some'ers, an' this buck said, ‘Nothin's on the house 'cept for family and you don't look Comanche to me—you gonna pay for that gas or what?' This's after I looked him in the eye and told him it
was on the house—I ain't paid for gas since I was takin warm shits. So I beat the fuck out of him with a can a' tomaters or something, just beat him till one of his eyes bugged. Don't think I kilt him, but if he wins a spellin' bee that'll be a neat trick.”

“Were you going to show me a trick?” she said. She felt like a four-year-old at a party, a very lucky four-year-old at whose table the clown had chosen to sit. She became aware of pressure in her bladder, wondered how much trouble she would get in if she wet herself, decided not to.

Barely.

“Right!” Luther said. He lit a cigarette for himself, then plucked a toothpick from the porcelain bee holder that smilingly offered a belly basket of toothpicks from its post between the salt and pepper shakers.

“Watch! It's magic.”

He checked to left and right to make sure nobody else was watching, then took a deep drag from the cigarette and held it. He displayed the toothpick as if inviting inspection, then, smiling all the while, poked it into the tough meat of his trachea.

The women gasped, delighted. Luther removed the toothpick, discreetly sheathed the bloodied end in a napkin. A drop of blood started rolling down his neck, making for the collar of his too-tight shirt. Now he strained, blowing first a fine, grapelike cluster of bubbles and then a plume of smoke from the prick in his windpipe. It sputtered and stopped as the hole closed and went away entirely. He caught the runner of blood with a napkin and wiped his throat clean as though nothing had happened.

“That's terrific,” Barb allowed, crying a little at just how rare and terrific it was.

“Yeah,” Peg echoed. “Really groovy.”

“Groovy,” he said. “Fuck, how I hate that word. I never want you to say it again.”

“Okay,” Peg said, smiling and starting to drool again. Luther wiped her chin, then licked his hand, staring straight at a waitress who saw the whole thing. She wrinkled her mouth in distaste and hurried a teetering plate of rib bones inside, dropping a fork with a
ting-tank
. The waitress thought she saw sharp teeth on him but wasn't sure, never told anyone, not even when she saw the papers in the morning. The police would ask her what she remembered about the man, but the truth was she remembered nothing about him. Several people who dined at Honey's that night offered careful descriptions of the women, right down to their pumps and the white piping on Barb's mod but tasteful crimson dress, but nobody could say who the man was or what he looked like. Only one remembered the car, though any who heard him start it might have said it grumbled like storms coming, like the beginning of a biblical plague, that it was a noise Pharaoh would have noted and hardened his heart anyway.

Luther Nixon stood up.

Barbara Atwater and Peggy McMullen stood up, too, watching him.

“You girls pay already?”

They nodded.

“You park close to here?”

They nodded again.

“Where?”

Barb pointed at a bottle-green two-door across the street and one block down.

“Chevy Nova. Small-block V-8. Sixty-three?”

Barb nodded.

Luther Nixon pointed at it and a large, hairy-looking fellow in a neck brace and sunglasses appeared from an alley and walked over to it, leaning against the trunk like it was his.

“Not too shabby. What's your name, sassy horsy?”

“Barbara.”

“Barb,” he said, leaning close so only she heard, “you nickel-plated bitch, I'm going to watch you shave all that pretty blond hair off your head tonight and then you're going to die, and die bloody. That cool with you?”

“Sure.”

“Groovy,” he said, flicking his cigarette at a passing car. “Let's go for a ride.”