Retribution

4

I was thirsty. Lonsberg hadn’t asked me to stick around for lunch or have a glass of beer or a Coke. I headed for the Texas Bar and Grille on Second Street.

The late-afternoon crowd was just beginning to fill the place that was meant to look like an authentic Old West bar and eatery but looked more like a set from a John Ford western. Round wooden tables and simple wooden chairs. Wooden pillars of no distinction. A bar without stools. There was a buffalo head on one wall, authentic western weapons mounted all over the place. The prize displays were a carbine authenticated as the fifth ever made and a shotgun with a butt plate saying it was the official property of Buffalo Bill Cody. It was dated 1877. This had also been authenticated by Ed Fairing who served the best burgers in town, no competition. His specialty was a one-pounder with onions and mushrooms grilled inside the burger. His steaks were all served the same, rare in the middle, burnt on top, and his chili dared all but the most adventurous. The Texas was a success. It might well survive the onslaught of what passed for this year’s Sarasota culture quickly surrounding it. My guess was that it would gradually change from a hangout for hard hats, nearby CPAs, and lawyers who wanted to sit back, eat food that would kill them, and swap stories. It would fill with tourists. It would become “the place you’ve just got to see.” There was already some of that. Ed would even make money, but it wouldn’t make him happy. He had moved south from an office job to become a western barkeep, not the proprietor of a chic luncheonette or a tourist attraction.

And so, Ed greeted me glumly as I moved to a space at the bar, which even sported a rail for the rare booted foot. Ed was big, heavy, with a head of bushy black hair with long sideburns, deep black eyes, and the face of a world-weary barkeep.

“Busy,” I said.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Beer and chili?”

“Beer and burger, half pounder,” I said.

“With the works?”

“With,” I said. “Ames back?”

“In the kitchen,” he said. “I’ll tell him you’re here.”

Ed plopped a bottle of Miller heavy on the counter and moved toward the back of the bar. I took a drink and looked around. I picked up a little, a couple of guys in their thirties in suits, collars open, ties loose, loudly arguing about what the defection of Hardy Nickerson to the Jaguars had really meant to the Tampa Bay Bucs, a trio of paint-stained, T-shirted guys growing bellies and telling jokes with four-letter words, a man and woman in their fifties leaning across bowls of chili and whispering so that I caught only “there’s no other way” plaintively from the man.

Then Ames appeared.

Tall, lean, shaved, serious. As he always did, he held out his hand. His grip was firm. We shook and he moved next to me. His gray pants were worn cotton. His shirt was long-sleeved and blue. I thought he had done some trimming of his brushed white hair.

“Wasn’t there,” he said, moving next to me. “Mickey at the Burger King. Hasn’t been at work for two days. Full name’s Michael Raymond Merrymen. Lives with his father in a development called Sherwood Forest out on McIntosh just off Bahia Vista.”

“I know the place,” I said. “You get an address and phone number?”

“Yes.”

He reached into his shirt pocket and handed me an envelope. The front of the empty envelope told the recipient that he might already be the owner of a new house, a new Lexus, or ten thousand dollars. The back of the envelope told me in Ames’s penciled hand where Mickey lived with his father.

“Thanks, Ames,” I said. “Beer?”

“Coke,” he said.

When Ed came back with my burger and a Coke for Ames, Ames and I moved to the table the quiet couple had just left. We pushed their dishes aside.

“Girl’s in trouble?” Ames said.

“Looks that way,” I said.

“What kind?”

I told him everything. He listened, drank slowly, nodded from time to time, and when I was finished said, “I don’t hear the why of it.”

“I don’t either,” I said. “Maybe we’ll find out when we find Adele. Let’s try Mickey the burger prince.”

We put Ames’s scooter into the trunk of the Cutlass. Ames was good at figuring out spaces, what would fit where. Also, the scooter was no vooming Harley.

I drove down Fruitville. Ames sat at my side and said nothing as I listened to two talk-show guys trade giggles and bad jokes much to their own amusement. We passed the Hollywood Twenty Cinemas parking lot, the Catholic Church with the Spanish welcome on its white sign, the Chinese Star buffet where you could get a decent lunch for five dollars, and made the turn to the right on McIntosh Road just past Cardinal Mooney High School. The Jewish Community Center was on our right. McIntosh Middle School was on our left and then on our left again was a sign that said, “Sherwood Forest, Deed Restricted.”

We drove down a tree-lined street of well-maintained single-family houses, mostly the two- or three-bedroom variety, no two quite alike. A heavy old woman was walking a tiny white dog. She waved her pooper scooper at me and pointed the scooper at a sign that said, “Maximum Speed 19 MPH.” To remind us of the seriousness of the statement we hit a yellow speed bump that felt as high as a low hurdle. The Cutlass scraped the ground when we hit and I slowed down.

We found the house of Mickey Merrymen at the end of a cul-de-sac between two other larger houses. There was a late-model blue Chevy in the driveway and the house’s night lights were on.

Ames and I got out and went to the front door. There didn’t seem to be a bell and there was no knocker. So I did it the old-fashioned way. I knocked.

The man who opened the door was somewhere in his forties, lean, with recently barbered dark hair. He wore a determined scowl, a red sweatshirt, and a pair of khaki pants. He was barefoot and had a baseball bat in his right hand.

“We’re looking for Michael Merrymen,” I said as Ames stepped forward.

“You found him,” the man with the bat said. “I’ve been waiting for you for hours.”

He stepped back to let us pass. When we were inside he walked ahead of us into a living room with one of those long gray couches that form an “L.” A shorter matching couch faced it and a low coffee table covered with magazines and books sat in the middle of the brick-walled room.

“You’re the Michael Merrymen from Burger King?” I asked as the man motioned for us to sit on the L-couch. Flo had described him as a kid. This was no kid. Flo’s sense of youth might have been a bit warped.

I sat. Ames stood. The man with the bat paced.

“Yes,” he said.

“You know why we’re here?” I asked.

“It’s about her,” he said, stopping. “That little bitch.”

“We’re looking for her,” I said, keeping my eyes on the bat that shifted from hand to hand.

“She’s not hard to find,” he said angrily, pointing in the general direction of his kitchen. “She’s right next door.”

“Right now?” I asked.

“Right now,” he said. “You want to hear my side of this or are you just going to sit there?”

“Your side,” I said.

He let out a deep sigh and stopped pacing to lean on the bat and look at me and Ames. Then he looked at Ames again and said, “You two are the best they could get. An old man and a little guy.”

“Your side of the story,” I repeated.

“Okay, it started when I moved in,” he said. “I had my land surveyed. The neighbors on both sides were on my land. A few inches on one side. Almost a foot on the other. Hot tub right over the line on one side. Tangelo trees on the other.”

I looked at Ames who folded his arms and waited to see where this was going.

“Okay, I thought. Live and let live, but no tangelo tree dropping fruit on my property and no lard ass dipping almost naked in her hot tub and spying on me. Are you following this?”

“Yes,” I lied. “Go on.”

“Okay, then came the mailbox,” he said. “Deed restricted community. My mailbox didn’t meet their rules. They turned me in. I was given a written order to move my mailbox back and get it repaired. But that’s not what you want to hear.”

“No,” I agreed.

“You want to know about her,” he said, tapping the bat on the floor. He reminded me a little of Fred Astaire tapping a black cane before he went into a dance.

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, I got the dog,” he said. “No restrictions on dogs. Only have to clean up after them, keep them leashed if you walk them. I got a dog. I got a pit bull. Staked him in the yard so he could reach the property line. He could go right up to that fucking hot tub. So she started the calls. Got a lawyer. Said the dog smelled up the neighborhood even though I cleaned up after him. They are out to get me and you have to stop them. I can get a lawyer too.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Ames asked.

“The bitch next door,” Merrymen repeated. “I called to get her to shut up and that’s why the fuck you’re here for Chrissake.”

“You’re Michael Merrymen?” I asked.

“Yeah, funny,” he said. “My son and me are the Merrymen of Sherwood Forest.”

“Your son?” Tasked. “He’s Mickey?”

“Michael Junior,” he said. “Works for me at the Burger King. I’m the manager. What the hell are you talking about? Did they make an Internet search for the two dumbest deputies in the county and come up with you?”

Ames looked at me. He had a low boiling point but he didn’t show it. He looked calm. He always looked calm even when he was gun to gun with someone who might want to end his life. This time the someone had a baseball bat, but Ames didn’t care. Loyalty and dignity were important to him above all things and I had the feeling though he was giving away about thirty years and a baseball bat, Michael Merrymen might be in trouble.

“We’re not deputies,” I said, pleading with my eyes for Ames to stay put. “We’re looking for your son.”

“My son? What the hell for? And who are you?”

“Your son is friendly with a girl named Adele Hanford,” I said. “She’s missing. Her foster parent doesn’t want to call the police so she asked us to find her.”

Merrymen laughed and shook his head.

“Mickey is among the missing,” he said. “We don’t get along that well. He goes for days at a time. Usually to his idiot grandfather.”

“Your father?” I asked.

“My dead wife’s father,” he said. “I don’t know who else he sees or what he does.”

“Your father-in-law’s name?” I asked.

“Corsello, Bernard. Why?”

“You’ve never met Adele?” I asked in return.

“No, and I don’t give a shit about her or what Mickey is doing with her,” he said.

“You’d best watch your mouth,” Ames said evenly.

“I’d best… this is my fucking house,” Merrymen answered, pointing the bat at Ames.

The fat end of the bat was inches from Ames’s chest. Merrymen’s chin jutted out.

“If you’ll just let us look at your son’s room, we’ll go quietly,” I said.

“No,” he said, smiling at Ames who didn’t smile back.

I got up to leave. Merrymen walked across the room to a door off the kitchen. He opened the door and the dog came running in. He was big for a pit bull though not as big as Jefferson, but this was a pit bull and Jefferson was just a dog.

The pit bull looked at Merrymen and Merrymen made the mistake of pointing the bat at Ames again. The dog knew what he was supposed to do, but so did Ames and Ames was smarter than the dog. He yanked the bat from Merrymen’s hand and as the dog leaped toward him, Ames flipped the bat and took a full swing at the animal that was in the air flying toward his throat.

Ames connected. A line drive. The dog flew across the room, hit the wall with a yelp, and turned to attack again. Only now there was something distinctly wrong with his right front leg. He growled and limped forward. Ames readied the bat and then swung it once four feet in front of the dog who squealed, turned, and headed back for the door from which he had come.

Ames walked slowly over to the door and closed it.

“You son of a bitch,” Merrymen said, reaching for the bat.

Ames held out his arm warning the hysterical man to stay back.

“You break in…”

“You invited us in,” I reminded him.

“You attacked my dog. In my house. You bastards. She sent you, didn’t she?”

Merrymen pointed toward the kitchen again.

“We’re looking for your son,” I reminded him. “We’re looking for a girl named Adele.”

“You’re looking for jail time,” he said. “I’m calling the police. What are your names?”

“Hal Jeffcoat and Glenn Beckert,” I answered. “Now we’re leaving.”

I moved toward the front door. Ames backed away with me and dropped the bat on the tile floor. Merrymen took a step toward his fallen club.

“Best not,” Ames said.

“Go, go report to the bitch that you almost killed my dog,” Merrymen shouted. “I can get another dog. Two of them.”

“Just be sure you clean up their manure and yours,” said Ames.

We went through the door. Ames pushed it closed behind us.

“He might have a gun,” I said.

“Might,” Ames agreed.

We hurried to the Cutlass and got in. Merrymen’s door didn’t open. I made a circle in the cul-de-sac and headed away from the far side.

“You know how to swing a bat,” I said.

“Played some,” Ames said calmly.

“In high school?”

“Farm team. Pittsburgh Pirates. Didn’t have the temper or talent for it,” he said. “Long time ago.”

I checked my watch. I still had an hour and a half before I met Sally and her kids for dinner.

“You’ve got some time?” I asked.

“Whatever the Lord if there is one is willing to give,” he said.

I pulled over to the Walgreen drugstore at Tuttle and Fruitville. Walgreens drugstores seem to be about half a mile apart throughout Sarasota. The phone book was reasonably intact and I found a Bernard Corsello on North Orange. We drove, said nothing. I turned on the radio. A talk-show host I didn’t recognize was on WFLA talking about serial killers. The NPR station had the market report. I switched back to AM and found WGUL, the oldies station.

A woman was singing, “Let me free.”

“’Let Me Go, Lover,’” Ames said. “First song written for a television drama. Don’t know her name.”

The woman on the radio was just singing, “If you’ll just let me go” when we pulled in front of a one-story house just north of Sixth. The neighborhood was a couple of notches below middle class. The houses were small, in reasonable shape with neat green yards.

A half-moon and bright stars. A nice evening. On the cool side. Some kids on bicycles, two black, one white, the kids purposely came close to hitting us and zipped away jabbering to each other.

There was no driveway. The concrete walkway was narrow and cracked. There were lights on in curtained rooms on both sides of the door. I found the bell, pushed it, listened to it ring inside, and waited. No answer. I rang again. No answer.

I tried the door. It opened but not much, about three or four inches. It was hitting something.

“Mr. Corsello,” I called through the crack.

No answer. I pushed the door again. It gave. A little. Ames pitched in. Whatever was blocking the door gave way enough for me to stick my head in. I saw what was blocking the door.

The body was facedown, head toward the door. There were two reasons to think he was dead. The floor in front of your front door is an unusual place to take a nap. I’ve known stranger ones, but the blotch of blood and the hole in his back took whatever hope I might have had.

“Dead man,” I told Ames.

He nodded as if he were accustomed to finding dead men on a daily basis. I stood trying to decide which way to take this. I looked around the street. Nothing. No one. A small red car with a bad muffler zoomed down the street.

I thought about the missing Mickey and Adele and I motioned for Ames to help me push some more. When there was enough room, we slid through the door. I closed it behind us. There was a light on in the entryway. From where we stood we could see the entire place. Small living room with an old overstuffed chair placed about four feet away from a giant television screen where an old episode of Jeopardy! was going forward silently. It was an old show. Alex Trebek, with no gray hairs, played with the cards in his hand.

Beyond the living-room area was a kitchen with a table and four chairs. To the left were three doors. Two were open. The closest one was a bedroom with a neatly made bed, a big dresser, and a giant Jesus on the cross over the dresser. The second open door was a bathroom. No light was on in there.

“Don’t touch anything,” I said, kneeling at the body for a number of reasons.

First, I wanted to confirm that he was really dead. He was. Completely. The body was cool. The dead man was wearing a robe. It was pulled high enough so I could see the only other thing he had on, a pair of underpants.

I guessed the dead man had been in his late sixties, maybe older. I guessed he was Bernard Corsello. I wondered about a lot of things.

“Quick look around,” I said. “Touch nothing.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Something that says this has something to do with Adele. Something I don’t want to find.”

Ames strode over the body and into the living room. I went for the open bedroom. On the table next to the bed was a flat and warm glass that seemed to have about two inches of some liquid in it. I smelled it. Cola. Next to the drink were two pens, a pad of paper, a telephone, a wallet, and some change. I picked up the wallet, opened it, and found sixty-two dollars. I rubbed off my prints with my shirt and put the wallet down. Nothing else in the room seemed interesting except for the hanging Jesus who looked down on me. I didn’t say anything to him. I hadn’t since I was a kid.

I went into the bathroom. Nothing of interest. The third room, the one with the closed door, I opened with my shirt as a mitt. The lights were off. I hit the wall switch and wiped away my print.

This was clearly Mickey Merrymen’s home away from home. The drawers were open, and nearly empty except for a few T-shirts and a single pair of underpants with a hole in them. A CD player sat on the small dresser. The bed was a mess. There was a small bookcase next to the bed. There were only a few books in it, all horror stories, Straub, Koontz, King, Saul, McKimmon. What made it clearly Mickey’s room were the three photographs tacked to the wall above the bed. They were small. One was on an angle. Adele was in all of them. From the holes in the wall around the three photographs I guessed there had been more, lots more.

Adele was alone in two of the photographs, both outdoors. Adele from stomach to head. The other of her alone was also outdoors. In the first she was smiling. In the second, she pursed her lips with a pretend kiss for the camera. She looked like any other pretty sixteen-year-old. Her past didn’t show. In the third photograph, Adele was leaning against a tall young man who reminded me of both Michael “the bat” Merrymen and a young Anthony Perkins. His arm was around Adele. He was grinning. I liked his white button-down shirt. I liked his smile. I didn’t like having Adele’s photographs on the wall. I took them down, dropped the tacks in an empty wastebasket, and pocketed the pictures. There was nothing else I could find to link Adele to the house. I doubted the police would go over every print in the place, but there was nothing I could do about it.

I found Ames in the kitchen looking at the refrigerator. There were magnets holding up three messages. Each magnet was a photograph, Einstein, Marlon Brando, and Hank Aaron. One message was a simple grocery list. The second message read: “Insurance due first Tuesday of the month.” The third message was, “Remember to call for pizza for Mickey and the girl.”

I pulled the pizza message from under Hank Aaron and said, “Anything?”

Ames shook his head “no” and we headed toward the corpse and the door.

“Didn’t take his money, the television, CD player,” I said.

We moved past the dead man and Ames stepped out of the door. I should have hurried after him but I looked one last time at the dead man and the thought came. That was the way I wanted to see the man who had run down my wife four years ago on Lake Shore Drive. He had left her bleeding, dying, barely alive. It took at least five minutes before someone went to help her. It was too late. The driver had gone on. What was that murderer doing now? Was he haunted by what he had done? Had he been a drunk who didn’t remember the life he had taken? I looked back at Jesus in the next room expecting no answer or solace.

“Best be going,” Ames said.

I looked back at Corsello one last time, wiped the door handle, went into the night, and wiped the outside handle.

“Now?” asked Ames.

I looked around. The street was almost empty. Half a block down to our left an old black woman was laboring under the weight of two heavy shopping bags. We got into the car and drove.

I dropped Ames and his scooter back at the Texas Bar and Grille.

“We’re looking for Flo Zink’s white minivan,” I said as we maneuvered the scooter out of the trunk. “This kid,” I said, pulling out the photograph of Mickey and Adele, “is probably with her.”

“I’ll ask around,” Ames said.

Neither of us said what we were thinking. Adele had killed before. She had killed a man who deserved killing. Adele, in short, knew how to pull a trigger. If something had happened, something… I gave up.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said.

Ames nodded, locked his scooter, and waved as I got into the Cutlass.

It had been a busy day. And it wasn’t over.

I called the police from a pay phone on Main Street. If I leaned back I could have seen the downtown police headquarters. I hit 911.

“How can we help you?” a woman asked calmly.

I told her, with my best James Mason imitation, that a man was dead. I quickly gave the address and hung up before she could ask for my name.

When I got to the Bangkok, the place was packed. Sally saw me making my way through the crowd. She was seated at a booth with her two kids, Michael, fourteen, and Susan, eleven. Sally raised a hand and I moved to the booth.

Sally and Susan sat on one side of the table. I sat next to Michael on the other.

“Someone hit you,” Susan said, pointing to my cheek.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I brought her bad news.”

“It happens,” Sally said.

Sally is and will always be a year older than I am. She is solid, ample, and pretty with clear skin, short wavy hair, and a voice that always reminded me of Lauren Bacall.

“Ready to order now?” asked a beautiful Thai waitress in a yellow and white silk dress.

“You look terrible,” Michael said, turning toward me.

Neither of Sally’s kids disliked me. I think I puzzled them. I never made jokes, didn’t work at making them like me. And I’m sure they wondered what their mother found in the soulful, balding man who reached for the tea and said, “You guys?”

“Crispy duck,” said Sally.

“The same with a Thai iced tea,” said Michael.

“Another one. Thai iced tea too.”

“I’ll have the tofu pad thai,” I said.

The pretty waitress smiled and walked away.

“So,” said Sally. “How was your day and how can you afford this?”

“New clients,” I said. “Two of them.”

“Your cheek?” she said.

“Someone slapped me.”

“You deck him?” Michael asked.

“It was a woman,” I said.

“Did you deck her?” asked Susan.

“She was a lot bigger than I am,” I said.

“Most people are,” said Susan. “That doesn’t mean you should let them hit you.”

“It’s part of my job,” I said. “I slap people with a summons. They slap me with their hands.”

“It’s more than that,” Sally said, looking into my eyes.

Yes, I thought, I’ve just come from discovering a dead man, almost certainly murdered. I not only found him, I pounded his head three or four times when I tried to open his door.

“There’s more,” I said. “Later.”

During dinner, Susan did most of the talking, mainly about a friend named Jackie who may have decided she no longer wanted to be friends with Susan. Jackie’s transgressions were numerous. I know one was that Jackie had begun sitting at a different table at lunch. I don’t remember the others. I don’t remember eating. I sort of remember paying the check with some of the crumpled bills from Marvin Uliaks. I sort of remember Sally asking the waitress to pack up the pad thai and rice I hadn’t touched and put it in a little white carton for me to take home.

I do remember being in the parking lot where Sally told the kids to go to her car and she walked me to my rental and handed me the brown bag of rice and pad thai.

“What is it?” she asked as we stood in the parking lot.

Some kids came running out yelling and laughing from the 7-Eleven at the end of the small mall. I looked at them and back at Sally.

I had been seeing Sally for a few months. We were friends. Well, maybe we were more than friends, but nothing intimate, not yet. I couldn’t. I hadn’t been able to find a safe place for the memory of my dead wife. I didn’t know if I ever would even with Ann Horowitz’s help.

And Sally had been a widow for more than four years, too busy for men, not interested in becoming involved, not really being pursued. We were friends. She was also a family therapist and at the Children’s Services of Sarasota. Adele had been and officially still was one of her cases.

“Adele,” I said.

I looked over at Michael and Susan quarreling over something in the backseat of her decade-old Honda.

“What happened?” Sally asked calmly.

“You know about her and Lonsberg?” I asked.

“What she told me. What Flo told me,” she said.

“Adele’s missing,” I said. “It looks as if she ran away with a kid named Mickey Merrymen. You know the name?”

“No,” she said. “What does this have to do with Lonsberg?”

“Adele and Mickey may have stolen a roomful of Lonsberg’s unpublished manuscripts.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it gets worse. I’m not sure you want to know the rest.”

“I’ve got to find Adele,” she said. “I need to know whatever there is to know.”

“You don’t have much free time to search for missing girls,” I said. “Not with your caseload.”

“I get a little help from the police when I need it,” she said.

“And from your friends,” I said. “Mickey Merrymen’s grandfather is dead. Murdered, I think. Ames and I found his body about an hour before I came here.”

“Which accounts for your lack of appetite.”

“Which accounts for my lack of appetite,” I agreed. “Can you forget this conversation for a few days while I look for Adele?”

“No,” she said, glancing over at Michael and Susan who were now looking at us impatiently.

“They thought you were coming over for Trivial Pursuit,” Sally said.

“Not tonight. Can you forget?”

“No,” she said. “But I can lie and say we didn’t have this conversation. I lie a lot. It’s part of my job. Sometimes, too often, you have to lie to kids to give them a chance to survive. Call me. If you don’t, I’ll call you.”

She moved forward and kissed my cheek slowly, the side that hadn’t been slapped by Bubbles Dreemer, and then she headed for her car.

I drove back to the DQ parking lot, the smell of Thai food battling with the odor of a decade of indifferent cleaning and those little yellow cardboard things that you hang from your mirror to override whatever has been dropped or invaded the upholstery.

It was definitely a Joan Crawford night. I was always ready for Mildred Pierce, but tonight I’d go for Woman on the Beach. I knew just where the tape was in the pile next to my television set.

The DQ was still open but I didn’t feel like doing any more talking. This had already been the kind of day I had been trying to avoid for the last five years. I told life to leave me alone. It refused to stop knocking at my door, calling me on the phone, and slapping me in the face.

I walked up the concrete steps and moved along the rusting metal railing on one side and the dark offices on the other. When I came to my door, I found an envelope stuck into it with a push pin. The only word on the envelope in penciled block letters was “ FONESCA.”

I dropped the envelope in my brown bag, opened the door, turned on the lights, and moved to my desk where I put down the bag and opened the envelope.

The single white sheet inside bore a simple, short message in the same block letters as my name on the envelope.

STOP LOOKING FOR HER. ONE INNOCENT PERSON IS DEAD AND GONE. LET IT BE AN END. LET THIS BE A WARNING.

It was unsigned. I put the brown paper bag on the ledge of my office window and went into my small office, which was really what passed for home, a single cot, which I made up every day with an old comforter and two pillows. A chest of drawers. A tiny refrigerator. A closet. A fourteen-inch black-and-white television with a VCR and a stack of tapes and a folding wooden television table. It had taken me minutes to move in three years ago. It would take me ten minutes to move out when the time came.

I found Woman on the Beach and did my best not to think, not to think about the murdered man, not to think about Adele, not to think about the pleading face of Marvin Uliaks. I succeeded when the tape came on. The dream world on the tube was mine. Swirling behind it in my mind, deep but hard and always ready to scream, was the image of my wife being hit by that car on Lake Shore Drive. I hadn’t been there but I had imagined, dreamed about what it had looked like, about what she might have had time to think, to feel. Each dream was just a bit different. I wanted one solid one to hang on to, but my imagination refused to cooperate, to tell me the truth or a lie I could believe.

Joan Crawford smiled, but there was a troubled look behind that smile. I knew why. I had seen this picture many times. It never changed. Only my dream changed.

I took off my clothes while I watched and hung them in my almost empty closet. I lay in my underwear. Joan was in for pain, lots of pain, lots of anguish. That was her job in film. She bore it well. Better than those of us who have to live it.

I couldn’t sleep. I listened to the whishing of cars going down 301. There weren’t many of them at this hour and I normally tuned them out, but tonight I listened. I lay there for a while in the dark, then got up and turned on the light.

I reached for one of Lonsberg’s books. Maybe a random passage would put me to sleep. When I married, when I had a wife, I always kept books at the bedside, books I could nip at randomly. The Holy Scriptures weren’t bad. Poetry, if it wasn’t too abstract, was fine. History, popular history, was particularly good. William Manchester was perfect, but I seldom went for fiction. I sat cross-legged in bed in my shorts, scratched my chest, and opened my battered book. I flipped to about the middle of the book and started to read:

Foreceman was angry. Foreceman was mad as hell. Foreceman was ready to tear off arms or heads, to take a bomb to the top of the Barnes Hospital, throw it off, and destroy all of St. Louis except the part and people he cared for. Luckily the Cardinals were out of town. Foreceman knew way down deep where even he couldn’t find it that he wasn’t going to tear off, blow up, or destroy anything but his own sanity. He had lost everything. Ellen, the factory, the house, the car, two fingers off of his right hand, and three toes, thanks to bad luck, diabetes, and some conspiracy between heaven and hell. He was on his own, a fat little man in a fat world.

He sat in his apartment looking out the window at the thin layer of snow on the street below and the snow that was still falling from a sky he couldn’t tell had a beginning or end.

Okay then. Why was he laughing? What was so damn funny? He didn’t own a television set. Not anymore. Not since Ellen and Vickie. He didn’t read the papers. He didn’t listen to the radio or records. His day was worked out. Get up, shave, eat two fried eggs and white bread. Wonder bread or Silvercup. It had no taste but he wanted no taste except the flabber of egg and the heavy muck of Miracle Whip.

Check the mail. Throw it away unless his check came that day. Walk, walk, walk. He was the fat walking man, hands in his pockets, serious look on his face or sudden unexplained smile. People avoided him. Store clerks didn’t meet his eyes. Eggs, hot dogs, cans of sloppy joe, bread, cucumbers, butter pecan ice cream. Walk. They called him the fat walking man. He knew it, heard it. Maybe he didn’t hear it. Maybe he imagined it as he made his plans for destroying St. Louis, Nashville, New York, Asheville, places he and Ellen and Vickie and… what were the names of the others? What was his father’s name? His mother’s? Hers was Denise, but his? His father pitched horseshoes in the park with old men who had once been young old men.

At night, just before dark and hot dogs and a half of unpeeled cucumber, Foreceman had his talk with Ellen. She was a kinder Ellen, a more patient Ellen than the one who had lived, but sometimes they argued and she asked him the questions he didn’t want to hear. And he answered.

Ellen: What do you want to do?

Foreceman: Erase the past.

Ellen: You can’t.

Foreceman: I didn’t say I could. I said I wanted to. I want to strap on a gun belt, get a machine gun, fill my pockets with grenades, put on a helmet, and lead a charge.

Ellen: Against who?

Foreceman: The past. I want to destroy the past.

Ellen: Why?

Foreceman: Because it won’t come back. If it won’t come back, it doesn’t deserve to live.

Ellen: You are very crazy.

Foreceman: I know, but that’s all I have. Ellen: The children.

Foreceman: I never had them. Are they alive?

Ellen: Find out.

Foreceman: No. They’re part of the past.

Ellen: Or the future.

Foreceman: They hated me. They ran away.

Ellen: They did. And they were right.

Foreceman: They were right. I screamed. I ignored. I think I even beat them. Did I beat them?

Ellen: No.

Foreceman: You’re not real so you won’t tell me the truth.

Ellen: You beat them.

Foreceman: Did I… do things to them? I don’t remember.

Ellen: You didn’t do things to them. You never did anything to anyone, not to yourself, not to me.

Foreceman: Let’s play gin. Let’s play Monopoly. Let’s play chess. Let’s play Yahtzee. Let’s play pinner baseball. Let’s play pin the tail on the donkey. Let’s pretend you like sex with me. Let’s take a bath, a hot bath that burns and makes the air cold when we get out.

Ellen: We never did those things.

Foreceman: Then what? Then what the hell what?

Ellen: The children.

And then Foreceman turned her off, had some butter pecan ice cream in one of the two Fiesta ware glasses that were still left, and went to sleep thinking of the destruction of the world, thinking of the destruction of the world of William Clamborne Foreceman.

I put the book down, wondered for a few seconds about the man who could have written this, and fell asleep.

In my dream I did what I had done every weekday morning of my married life. It was part of our marriage agreement. I had been warned by her and her friends. She needed a cup of coffee before she could function even minimally. I wasn’t a coffee drinker, but I had always been an early riser.

In my dream as it had been in life, I got up quietly, staggered through the apartment into the kitchen, took a bag of gourmet coffee beans out of the freezer, opened the cabinet next to the refrigerator, and pulled out the small coffee bean grinder. I put a filter in the coffeemaker and filled the plastic tank with tap water.

It was a beautiful dream. The sun was coming through the slightly frosted windows. I could see Lake Michigan between two high-rises as I opened the coffee and began to pour beans into the grinder. Routine. Comfortable. And then it happened as it does in dreams.

The bottom of the bag fell out. Brown beans rained onto the cool tile floor spraying the kitchen, bouncing off cabinets, the refrigerator. The bag should have been empty but the beans kept falling, crashing like a driving rain. The floor was turning pebbly brown and barefooted I danced feeling each small bean under me.

I was panicked. She had heard the thundering beans. She came in. Her hair a morning disarray, her eyes half closed. She saw the mess and tiptoed in slow motion carefully making her way to me, finding clearings in the layers of brown hail.

The phone was ringing.

The smell of coffee rustled through her hair as she touched my cheek.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

The phone was ringing.

She smiled and shook her head as if I had failed to understand some simple truth.

The phone was ringing.

I didn’t want the dream to end, but she stepped back and I was awake.