Disciple of the dog

MASSAGE-BY-JENNY

Registered Physiotherapist

Then I turned around and parked along the curb opposite the house. I rolled down the window, sparked a J, absorbed that magical combination of boarded windows and sixty-year-old trees. To tell the truth, it almost felt like home sitting there, periodically glancing at the hooded picture window, pondering the sordid shenanigans behind the drapes. Summer darkness surrounding an orange-glowing world.

Ah, Eddie… Did you lie awake in shame? Cringe from the enormity of your petty crimes? Think Oh-my-god-if-Jill-ever-found-out…

Or were you a different animal altogether? Had your appetites slipped their leash, compelled you to commit atrocities? To do things that convinced our ancestors we needed hell?

What about Jennifer, Eddie? Did you hurt her? Hide her? Eddie was definitely more relaxed leaving 113 Omeemee than he was 371 Edgeware. I heard feminine laughter as he bantered back and forth with someone at the side door. The fear didn’t climb back into his face until he climbed behind the wheel of his car. He pulled farther down the street, turned around in someone else’s driveway, then passed within spitting distance of me on his way back home. He had the clutched look of someone running through worst-case scenarios.

I cracked open my door, crossed the street, walked the narrow slot between the brick wall and the Ford F-150 parked in the driveway. I came to a screen door, which I knocked on because its wood companion was already ajar. I could see linoleum and half a kitchen hutch in dim light through the screen. Moths and gnats tapped at the light above me.

After a moment, a woman answered the door dressed in a tank and panties. Jenny-obviously and immediately. She was too petite to be a model, and she had a friendly, farm-girl face, but I found her horribly attractive. Eddie was making more sense to me with every passing moment.

“Do you take walk-ins?” I asked.

She looked me up and down, smiled, and rubbed her cheek into her shoulder like a kitten. When they look like you, her eyes said. But her voice asked, “Sore shoulders, honey?”

“Like I’m carrying the weight of the world.”

She welcomed me in with a swing of her arm-clipped enough to tell me she was sober. I really hadn’t known what to expect from the sex trade industry out here in the backwoods. A part of me had expected rotten teeth and hilly-billy diction-but Jenny seemed all right. The house was tidy, nary a single dirty dish on the ceramic countertop. The floors were slightly bowed: old houses tend to sag in the middle-kind of like people that way. The furniture was newish-veneer, but hey, who the hell was I to judge? Two massage tables dominated the living room; they almost looked like gurneys with the white sheets that had been draped over them. The couch, the flat screen, and the coffee table pushed beneath the picture window suggested that Jenny broke the tables down during the day and used the space the same way civilians did: to rot in front of the tube.

“So what can I do you for, handsome?”

“The works,” I said, fishing out the wad of fives and tens I’d scored over the course of the day. What can I say? Sex is just one of those horses I ride backward. “That… and… some questions.”

She did her best not to roll her eyes. Hookers generally don’t like guys-guilt-ridden nerds, mostly-who ask a lot of questions. All the questioners want is to get fucked, and yet they go through all the motions of “empathizing with the plight” of the women they’re fucking as a way of servicing their moral debt. I actually knew this one hooker who had CASH ONLY tattooed above her shaved pussy. “Read the sign,” was the only answer she would give to questions. “Money ain’t the only thing that talks,” she told me once, “un-fucking-fortunately.”

“Well, really, I only have one question.”

Jenny had already grabbed my hand and pulled me into the living room gloom. “Shoot.”

“You know that guy who was just here?”

“Yeah, sure,” she said, undoing my belt and tearing open my button fly. “Brad.”

I smiled. “Brad. Exactly.”

“What about him?” She said this while palming the crotch of my boxers. The auto-tease. Most hookers are as mechanical as a car wash.

“Did he swing by here last Saturday night, say around midnight?”

She stopped, took a confused step back, which was kind ofembarrassing because she had peeled my jeans down to my knees. “You mean when that girl went missing…” she said. “The other Jennifer.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you a cop or something?”

“Hell no. Just a private dick. Her parents hired me to assist the police.”

I could tell she had already guessed as much. It was pretty obvious that the two of us had come from the same side of the tracks, even though I was urban and she was country. The side that called cops “pigs.”

“Do you think they’ll find her?” she asked.

The way she said this told me she had been following the story closely. I supposed it was unnerving having someone with your name vanish in a town this small-especially doing what Jenny did for a living.

“No,” I said with a what-can-you-do shrug. “Not in one piece, anyway.”

“I think so too,” she said, her look wandering from sharp to vague to sharp again. “I just have this feeling, you know?”

Fucking feelings. Only do you any good in the movies.

“So what about Brad?” I pressed. Otherwise known as Edward Morrow.

“Brad? Oh. Yeah-yeah. He was here last Saturday around then, you know…” A fatalistic hitch of the shoulders. “Balling me.”

“I figured as much,” I said with a sly glance at my dropped drawers. “Just needed to be sure, you know?”

She sidled back up to me with a husky chuckle, pulled my jeans to my ankles with the palm of her right foot. “So they hired you, huh? Her parents?”

“Yeah,” I replied, pressing my boy against her midriff. “I’m famous.” Afterward, I quizzed her more generally, knowing that she, more than anyone, would know who the town freaks were. We had pushed the two massage tables together for the purposes of our transaction. She answered me with her chin on my chest. Periodically her hand would crawl down to my groin to tweak and twiddle. I chalked it up to force of habit.

When she had heard about Jennifer-or “the other Jennifer” as she called her-the same questions had occurred to her. Some of her clients liked the rough stuff, but they tended to be the ones she thought the least likely to do anything “wonky,” as she put it.

“No one much fucks with me,” she said, tossing a negligent thumb in the direction of the hall that led off the kitchen-to the bedrooms, I suppose.

“Why’s that?”

“Because my brother’s always out back, playing his video games.”

“Brother?”

“Well, stepbrother. Jerome. Nobody fucks with Jerome.”

“Could you introduce me to him?”

“Not unless you want to fuck wi-”

That was when the riff from “Back in Black” began wailing in miniature from my pants where they lay crumpled. My cellphone.

“Sorry,” I said, peeling myself from Jenny’s sweaty side. “I’m on the clock, you know.”

She just snorted. “Me too.”

God, I love hookers. Almost as much as I love the drugs that make them hook. It was making my skin itch just knowing that somewhere near, beneath the couch or in a cupboard or drawer, there was a bag of goodies.

According to the display, it was Molly. “Yep,” I said into the phone.

“Disciple. Disciple! Where are you?”

“At a rub-and-tug,” I answered in a querulous Where-else-would-I-be tone.

“A rub and what?”

“A rub-and-tug. You know, a jack shack.”

“Spare me the bullshit, Disciple,” she snapped, all, like, time-is-money and shit. “You need to meet me at the corner oflnkerman and Kane. “

“What? Why?”

“Nolen. He’s found a severed finger. “ A classic pan-in-zoom-out moment. Molly, it turned out, owned a police scanner, an item I had thought about getting several times but had just never seemed to muster the scratch for. Bad dice and the odd Jenny will do that to you, I suppose. Apparently while I was out busy investigating my vices, she was in her room watching CSI reruns and keeping tabs on what the state-sanctioned professionals were doing.

“Wait,”she snapped. “Wait!”

I could hear her scanner squawking in the background…

“Shit-shit-shit,” she gasped, her voice taut with genuine fear.

“What? What’s going on?”

“Another one,”she exclaimed. Frantic. She was genuinely frantic. “They found another finger just a couple ofblocks away!”

“How?” I asked, hopping with one leg in my jeans. Jenny’s laughter told me I had forgotten to put on my boxers. Bouncing around, my dick flopping like a tassel. Fuck it, I would go commando. “Did they say anything about how?”

“I can’t talk now, Disciple,” she called over my stream of muttered curses. “I gotta be out there. I’m going. I’ll meet you, ’kay?”

“Molls!” was all I managed before the line went dead.

It’s strange. I had no bonus arrangement with the Bonjours, so it really didn’t matter whether I was instrumental to what happened or not-I would get paid no matter what. And yet, beneath the move-move-move urgency, there was this crushing sense of failure…

I had known that she was dead all along, hadn’t I?

I kissed Jenny full on the lips, left her standing naked with the full roll of bills in her left hand and my boxers hanging from her right. I suffered a pang of remorse driving away. I had really liked those boxer shorts: a National Geographic number depicting The Whales of the World. They even sported a blue whale arching across the fly, boding the appearance of the purple.

Forgotten gauchies. As good an excuse as any, I supposed, to find my way back to 113 Omeemee. My phone began riffing literally the second I shut the car door. It was Albert-and about fucking time.

“Heeeey! ” he cried over the sound of music and voices. “Disciple, he- heee… Didn’t think I would catch you. What you doing so late, man?”

He was more than a little drunk, I could tell.

“Jerking off to War and Peace. I always get wood when the French are defeated. You?”

Breathless laughter. Great, I thought. Albert was one of those guys who became cool on a blood alcohol gradient. His cat’s-ass tone told me he thought he was pretty much the coolest thing going, which meant he’d hiked a good distance up shit-face hill.

“Impromptu grad party,”he said. “Talkingbullshit. Scoping hotties-you know how it is… ”

“So what di-”

“Smoked the last of that green,” he interrupted. “If you know what I mean.”

A mental frown. “I’m sure I can hook you up.”

“Bonus! You put the Weeeee! into weed,, you know that? ”

He found this pretty funny. Over his laugh I heard a young feminine voice say, “Is that your guy? Is that your guy?” in the background. “He’s a riot! “ I heard Albert reply.

“And you put the Hurray! in shut-the-fuck-up,” I said, not at all comfortable with being Albert’s “guy.” “Have you been telling people about our little arrangement?”

Another guffaw, as if I had been joking. “Seriously, though. Dude. I meant to call earlier, but I fucking forgot… so I thought, heeey! I’ll just leave him a message! You’re my favourite round-eye bad-ass, you know that?”

“And you’re my favourite gook-geek. What did you find out, Albert?”

“Yah-yah-yah, sorry. I called this oldbuddy ofmine who did a philosophy post-doc at Berkeley. Baars was already gone by then, but apparently he was still big news…”

Like most drunks, Albert overestimated the drama of his stories, and so kept decent people hanging with trivia.

“And?” I said.

“Brilliant. Eccentric. Divorced…”

His tone told me he was saving the juicy bits. “And?”

“Rumour was he knocked up one ofhis sophomores…”

That was interesting, at least. But I knew there was more. “C’mon, Albert. Cut me a fucking break over here. What else?”

“Well, it seems he taught a course on cults… Cults, Disciple!”

He fairly shouted this, so I knew he thought it was significant, at least.

“So?”

“Soooo, think about it, dude! The guy knows…”

“Knows what?”

“All of it. The psychology. The sociology. The history. Which means he knows how to act, how to organize, what kind ofclaims to make… “Music and droning voices swelled to fill the silence. “There’s just no way, Disciple. ”

“No way what? For him to believe his own guff?”

“Sure, there’s that. But there’s also no way for him to not be manipulating these people. It’s at least as bad as L. Ron Hubbard. Worse! “

I drove in a state of blank absorption. It made a kind of dreadful sense, to be sure.

“Hey… about the weed,,”he said, signalling super-cool, drunk Albert’s return. “You wouldn’t happen to have a… you know, a number I could call or anything? ”

“Try Kimmy,” I said, knowing I needed to shrink-wrap this latest twist, save it for some future lull. “She should be getting off about now… I’ll text you her number.” I found Molly looking smart and forlorn on the corner of an intersection that seemed surprisingly urban. Three Ruddick cruisers blocked the street at angles, bathing the bricked-in spaces with rolling lights. A thin crowd of onlookers had gathered in clutches here and there on the sidewalks. But otherwise things seemed surprisingly sedate. Only one uniform was visible.

The first words out of her lips were, “Jack shack, huh?” “I’s got needs,” I said.

“Why do you do that? Why do you always lie when people ask you where you are?”

“Keeps me sharp,” I replied, surprised that she would have anything other than this latest twist on her mind. “Reminds me I’m a captive of the facts as the world presents them.”

“Weird, you know that?” she said, shaking her head. “You gotta be the strangest man I’ve ever known.”

“We should all be so lucky,” I said. Then, intentionally shifting gears, I added, “So which fingers are we talking about?”

“The index and bird fingers,” she said.

“Bird finger?”

“Yeah. You know.” She flipped me the bird.

I sometimes have this fear that the women I’m interested in are actually psychic, that they can see the truth of me all the way down to the grimy bottom but just play along because they like the attention. The superstition struck me like a bolt right then.

Molly filled me in on the rest of the details. The first finger had been found just a couple of blocks over, in the backyard of an old amputee-a Vietnam vet or something. Apparently by sheer dint of coincidence, the second had been called in less than an hour after, found by a bunch of high school kids who had “wandered into” the abandoned warehouse looming before us, “looking for a lost dog.”

One of Nolen’s men-a guy so tired he had to have been dragged off the day shift-barred the way, and refused to even discuss the matter with us, let alone let us past. So we just stood there, every bit as tired, cooling our heels. I studied the small crowd of onlookers, knowing the chances were good that our perp would be keen to survey the social consequences of his handiwork first-hand. I described the males to Molly in a low murmur, just to be sure they would stick…

“Skinhead dude with forehead wrinkled like scrotum…

“Soccer coach dreaming of teenage ass…

“Punk who should sell me whatever it is he’s smoking…

“Guy who looks like BO… Yeesh, that fucker is ugly.”

It didn’t take much to get Molly laughing. Always makes me feel smug, killing two birds with one stone.

When Nolen finally came out, he looked ragged and more than a little shell-shocked. Dust feathered his left shoulder, and he seemed to have lost his cap. “The fingers are bagged,” he said, holding a hand out to pre-empt our questions. “We’re sending them to Pitt to get them DNA typed-just to be sure they belong to Jennifer. We also need to know whether they were cut from her while she was, ah, you know, alive… But the doctor…” Something caught in his throat, something that demanded to be swallowed. “Um, he seems to think the cuts were, ah… well, post-mortem.”

This occasioned a moment of silence. Laughter warbled from a group of kids assembled on a nearby corner.

“What about the scenes?” Molly pressed. “Could you let us check out the scenes?”

“Scenes? You mean where we found the fingers?”

“Ofcourse,” she said, with enough exasperation to earn a gentle elbow in the ribs from me. You have to be careful with people like Nolen, I had learned, not because they could be prickly, but because they were unlikely to take offence. Some people are so dispositionally agreeable that the urge to take liberties is well-nigh irresistible. The sad fact is that people primarily harass others not because the others deserve to be harassed but because they can. The easier a guy is to bully, the more likely we are to invent reasons why he needs to be bullied. Often our fuse is long or short depending on what we unconsciously think we can get away with.

“Not much anything to see,” he said, scratching the back of his head.

“So no notes?” Molly asked.

“Notes?”

“Yeah.” Again the telltale impatience. “You know, like ransom demands or anything.”

“‘Fraid not. Just fingers in these queer little cages.”

“Cages?” Molly asked in a ragged voice. Things were just beginning to sink in for her, I could tell.

Nolen shrugged. “Yeah. You know, like to keep them from getting snatched by wildlife or something.”

“To make sure they would be found,” I said.

Fawk. Guitars crunched from my pants pocket. Another call. Kimberley this time, probably calling to bitch me out for telling Albert she could hook him up. I didn’t answer. As it was, Molly was all over me about leaning on Nolen to let us check out the two places-as bad as an ex-wife carping about child support.

“Get used to it,” I said. “This is the way it works for people like you and me. Most of the time you’re stuck on the outside looking in.”

“But what if there’s any, you know, clues?”

The thing about popular misconceptions, I’ve found, is that they typically involve people knowing more rather than less. We always know less than we think. We always control less than we hope. Even forensics is so hit-and-miss that there’s a real question as to whether it should be called a science.

“You were watching CSI again tonight, weren’t you?”

I took the fact that she said nothing as a big fat yes.

A moment of silence passed between us, one that seemed to cement the fact that we were stranded on a cracked sidewalk, walled in by dead brick buildings. Funny, the way you can just sense things, like how late it is by how cool the cement is… I felt a distinct absence of daytime heat.

“What are the chances?” she asked in a numb voice I had never heard before. My second therapist once told me that this was why I womanized-not because I was carrying out some ancient evolutionary program to spread the sperm, but because I could only love women when they were new.

I found myself gazing at Molly, arrested by her profile in the oscillation of red and blue lights. “Chances?” I repeated.

“Yeah,” she said, blinking tears before turning to me. “You know… that the fingers belong to Jennifer.”

“You’re serious?” I asked. I managed a sombre shrug even though I wanted to laugh. “A town this size?… Things ain’t looking so good, Molls.”

“So she’s… shes…”

“Of course she is.” We were dog-tired by the time we got back to the motel. Call me weird, but I found the act of driving with her in separate cars powerfully erotic-like road rage turned on its head. Road lust. My heart muscled through the seconds we spent saying nothing while standing in the gap between our motel room doors. I couldn’t resist grinning yippee! when she followed me…

She made an act of it, as though she were just too goddamned tired to resist my relentless advances. But the fact was, she wanted it, maybe even needed it. Who’s to say? Most of the time I’m just stumped when it comes to the reasons women-especially beautiful ones like Molly- condescend to sleep with me. Whatever it is, it certainly doesn’t have any staying power.

We kissed, in that long way that makes magic of fumbling hands and fingers. There’s glory in feminine yielding, in the shyness of a woman still unnerved by her desire. We flopped like two tangled ropes across the bed. I pressed her onto her back, snuggled my pelvis between her legs, and without warning she gasped, “Wait-wait! What’s your favourite band?”

“Um… huh?”

“You can tell a lot about a man,” she sighed.

Believe it or not, I was utterly unsurprised. It could have been the exhaustion, I suppose, but the fact was I had been asked plenty of things by plenty of women the moment before first contact. Loopy things.

“Monster Magnet,” I said.

“Never heard of them. What’s their thing?”

“I dunno. Comic books and metaphysics…”

She frowned in a This-feels-too-too-good way. “I’m… I’m not sure… What’s your second favourite band?” “Tool.”

“Tool? Eew. I… ah… hate… “

I was grinding against her now, slow and languorous. “But Tool loves you,” I said, grinning like a cat pinning a budgie. “Tool loves you long time, baby.”

She laughed, groaned. “You idiot… How can you…” She exhaled, like I was a birthday candle or something. Score. I woke up in the middle of the night, the way I always seem to do. Molly lay tangled in the sheets, splayed like her parachute had failed to open. I clicked on the TV with the volume muted, scrounged my bag of weed. I sat upright in the surgical light, watching the drip of soundless images across the screen while rolling a fat one. Her voice startled me. “What’s it like?”

Her face was still squashed into her pillow. For all the world I had thought she was sleeping.

“Sticky,” I said, spinning the doob into a perfect cylinder. “Skunky… Everything weed should be.”

The pillow scrunched her smile into her cheek. “No…” she said, rolling onto her back. She brushed her hair from her face with a groggy hand. “What’s it like being you?”

I inhaled. Like cigarettes, joints buy you several seconds to cook something up when a chick asks you a hard question. Time I squandered for some reason.

“Hard… sometimes.”

“Why?” she asked, staring at the ceiling. Televised colours danced across the cheap stucco swirls.

I exhaled a ghostly horn of smoke across our legs, shrugged. “You know the radio, how they play the same hit parade over and over?”

“Sure. That’s why I got satellite in my rental.”

“Well, I have a hit parade all my own.”

She turned to gaze at my profile. “Memories,” she said. “You mean memories.”

“The thing is, it’s the bad ones that stick. And I don’t mean like a hazy flash of images, but moments of… of reliving, I guess. With the smells, the surge of emotion… like a miniature dream or something.”

“Can you give me an example?”

I was afraid she was going to ask that.

“Like… well… your eyes, they remind me of my mother, so sometimes when I look at you, I’m also sitting in my folks’ kitchen, and my mom, she’s at the sink grabbing me some tea. And there’s this fly walking across the window’s reflection in the counter, you know, like it’s pacing out a treasure map in fast motion, fifteen paces this way, stop, twenty paces that way, stop. And Mom,, she’s smiling-she always had a sunny disposition, my mom, always giving me the gears about being negative-well, she’s smiling and looking out the window, and I notice there’s tears in her eyes. So I say, ‘Whazzup, Mom?’ and she turns to me, blinks a couple of diamonds, grins her best You’re-such-a-good-boy grin, and says, ‘I have cancer, Disciple. They say I have only a few months.’”

“Oh gawd…” Molly whispered.

“And that’s one of the love songs.” Track Eight