Night Kills

19

Denise not only had hot chocolate, she also had a powdered doughnut and a ham sandwich on rye bread, with hamburger dills and mustard, and she had a tall glass of fresh skim milk. During all of which-or around which, actually-talking with her mouth full, she told him all about it. Everything. The guy in the wheelchair. Which was real weird because not even with the counsellor at the runaway shelter had she told everything. She'd skipped over the part, for example, where her dad got her older sister pregnant and where the sister had a breakdown and went to a mental hospital, where she wrote forlorn letters; and then Dad tried stuff on Denise, but Denise wouldn't let him, though she finally had to leave home to stop him, and how Dad always said it was Mom's dying that had made him this way, that he wouldn't have touched either Denise or her older sister if only he had a regular wife, like every other regular farmer he knew, and how it wasn't wrong anyway, really, because it was about love, it wasn't about rutting, groaning animal sex; it was about love, and who loved you more than your father (of course he was shit-faced whenever he started rolling along on that particular rationale), and by the time he was done trotting out his explanation for why he behaved the way he did, you started to get the idea that maybe by humping his own daughters, he was doing them a favour or something, for God's sake.

Anyway, Greg Wagner, the guy in the wheelchair, listened to all, never once getting glassy-eyed with boredom or smirking with superiority the way most people did. She even told him about the sleeping room she had and how everybody around her was a junkie-throwing up and sobbing on those long black nights when they'd had too much or not enough-and how, even though she didn't exactly believe in God anymore, she still said her prayers.

He said, "That's what I do, too."

"You don't believe in God, either?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "I guess not."

"But you still pray?"

"Yep. Because I figure it can't hurt."

And for some reason that cracked her up-she felt giddy, as she had the few times she'd smoked marijuana-just the way he said it.

And then he said, "You know something?"

"What?"

"I really like you."

She grinned. "You know what?"

"What?"

"I really like you, too."

"But guess what you could do to make me like you even more?"

"What?"

"Tell me what you were doing on the back porch."

She rolled her eyes. "Looking for this dude who tried to kill me."

"Kill you? Are you serious?"

"Yeah." She hesitated. "You know how I told you that I sometimes-you know, like, do the street-walking thing."

"Right. I remember that"

"Well, last night this dude picked me up and-well, he takes me out into the country, see, and I think he's going to try and do something really kinky, but what he does is, he tries to kill me. Tries to get his hands around my throat and choke me."

"God. Weren't you scared?"

"Terrified."

"So, what did you do?"

So, she told him all about it. Admitted lifting the guy's wallet; running till she was safe; talking to Polly about should she squeeze him for some money.

"What's the guy's name? In the wallet, I mean?"

"Brolan," she said. "Frank Brolan."

"Oh, it couldn't be!"

She was almost shocked by Greg's adamance. "Really?"

"He's a very nice guy," Wagner said. He kind of scootched himself up in his wheelchair. She could see that he was excited. But not in a good way. "What'd he look like?"

"The guy last night?" Wagner nodded.

"Oh, I don't know. Kind of ordinary. He had a beard."

"Brolan doesn't have a beard."

"Oh, well this guy did."

"See," Wagner said. "I told you it wasn't him."

She decided, at least for a time, to change the subject. Let Wagner calm down a little. It was as if she'd called one of his best friends a dirty name.

She looked around the room at all the mementoes of thirties movie stars. She loved stuff like this. Whenever she was staying somewhere that had cable, she always watched the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies. She loved how they danced. Ginger was so elegant, the way Denise wished she herself was.

There on the glass coffee table was a press book for a Betty Grable movie called Mother Wore Tights. Next to that was a colour postcard that showed the Cathay Circle Theatre in Beverly Hills on the night of April 4, 1936. How beautiful and sleek the fancy cars looked; how beautiful and sleek the movie stars themselves looked. The beams of floodlights criss-crossed against the soft silver night. Hundreds of people stood swooning as movie stars emerged from limousines to the bursting intensity of flashbulbs. "Boy," Denise said. "You've got a neat place here."

"Thank you."

"And I've never seen so many tapes." She nodded to his videotapes. "Do you have Ginger Rogers?"

He smiled possessively at his tape collection. "Do you prefer Ginger Rogers the singer-dancer in Shall We Dance?-or do you prefer Ginger Rogers the serious actress in Kitty Foyle?"

"She was a serious actress?"

"Yes, and a good one."

"Really?"

He smiled again. She got the feeling that he thought she was kind of naive, but that he found it endearing. He wasn't like a john. She wasn't trying to please, but she seemed to be pleasing him anyway. "Really," he said.

As he arranged himself in his chair once more, getting comfortable, she said, "Would you mind if I asked you about-you know, why you're in the wheelchair and all."

"Be my guest."

"I'm not trying to be rude."

"I know."

"Were you born that way?"

"Yes. And I was lucky."

"Lucky?"

He laughed. "Well, not lucky-lucky but luckier than the people who had spina bifida before I did. People like me didn't used to live very long. Not until thirty years ago."

"What happened then?"

"Somebody was kind enough to invent the brain shunt, which drains the cerebral spinal fluid. It allowed us to be reasonably self-sufficient and to live a lot longer."

"I'm glad they invented that, then."

He shook his head. "I keep thinking about Brolan."

"You really like him, huh?"

"Yeah. He seems like a real nice guy-and he's in a lot of trouble. Somebody's really trying to make him look guilty." He sounded as if he wanted to go on, say more, but he didn't.

She said, "You really don't think it was him last night?"

"Who tried to kill you? No."

"But why would somebody do that, then? Pretend to be him, I mean?"

"I'm not sure. Neither is Brolan."

Unable to help herself, she yawned. The warmth of the place, the comfort of the recliner in which she sat, had made her tired after such a long day of tension.

He said, "Would you like to watch a movie?"

"Right now?"

"Sure. We're waiting for Brolan to contact me. We may as well have some fun doing it. What kind of movie would you like to see?"

"You want me to choose it?"

"Why not? You're my guest, aren't you?"

"Then you're not mad at me-for being on your back porch?"

"Not anymore. I was. But not anymore." He nodded to the tape library. "Why don't you go pick one?"

"God, you're really nice."

"So are you."

She got up and went over to the tapes. You could tell by the way that he had everything alphabetized and colour coded that these movies were his life. He was a lot more than just a guy in a wheelchair. He was warm, and he was funny, and he was smart, and he was generous. Somehow, being in this place was like being in a retreat of some sort, a place where people couldn't get to you and hassle you and hustle you. And it was because of him-because of the careful, loving way he'd put this place together, layer after layer of things he loved, to protect him from a world that saw him as a freak. Having always felt like a freak herself, she knew just what he was doing.

"Hey, you've got Cat People," she said.

"You like that?"

"Yeah. It's really spooky. I saw it on cable."

"The man who produced it was named Val Lewton. He made some great horror pictures."

"Could we see that, Cat People, I mean?"

"Simone Simon? You bet."

"How come she had the same first name and last name?"

He laughed loudly at that one. "I'm afraid that's one of those great Hollywood mysteries that we mere mortals will never know."

She took down Cat People and handed it over to him. He flipped across the hardwood floor and put the tape in. "They really screwed it up when they remade it," he said. "Lots of blood and guts. And for no good reason. Did you ever see it?"

"I wanted to. This was back when I still living at home. But my dad wouldn't let me. He thought it would be too sexy." Greg Wagner looked at her, hitting the pause button on the VCR. "When's the last time you saw your sister?"

Denise felt sad. Whenever she thought of her sister, all she could imagine were stark white walls and bars on the windows and long, long hypodermic needles and people in small rooms lying on beds and sobbing and sobbing.

"They took her to a mental hospital. I've only been there a couple of times."

"How come?"

"Rochester's a long way away, I guess."

"Would you like to see her?"

"Sure."

"Good. Why don't we go up there next week?"

"Are you serious?"

"Sure, I've got this friend who's got spina bifida, too, except he's got this big Buick specially laid out so he can drive it. He loves to drive. He'll give us a ride. How would that be?"

"That would be great!"

"Good, consider it done." He turned back to the VCR and punched up the tape. "And now," he said, "for the mysteriously-named Simone Simon."

Denise plopped herself down in the recliner again and prepared herself to watch one good movie.