Waltz of Shadows

2

I finally got the family home and swapped the van for my pickup, I drove over to Sleepy Time Tourist Courts. It was about two o’clock then.

Beverly hadn’t been too happy about me saying I was going over to see Bill, and threatened me with castration with the edge of a credit card if I loaned him any money.

The only thing I felt good about right then was driving my truck. I love that ugly bastard. It’s old and grey and scratched and runs like the proverbial scalded dog. Has a gun rack against the back window that sports a double barrel twelve gauge and a baseball bat, a loaded. 38 in the glove box.

Before I started out for the illustrious Sleepy Time Tourist Courts, I had put the shotgun and the ball bat on the right side floorboard and thrown my old man’s hunting coat over them. The coat lived in the car, same as the twelve gauge and the ball bat.

I didn’t hunt anymore, not since I was a kid, and I didn’t carry either the shotgun or pistol out of fear, but I had a respect for those guns, as well as the baseball bat and the old hunting coat.

The coat, truck, guns, and baseball bat had been my Dad’s, and it was the all of my inheritance, that and the skills of a woodsman, which had now grown dim and rusty, but were still appreciated.

For his inheritance, my brother’s boy, Bill, Mr. Hard Luck, had gotten three-hundred-and-sixty dollars and thirty-eight cents, long spent.

Arnold, half-brother and redneck, had inherited my dad’s six bird dogs, ten acres of land and a mobile home, a fishing shack on two acres out at Imperial Lake, and my Dad’s bad temper. Except for the temper, you could say Arnold got the best deal, but then, the way my Dad saw it, he owed Arnold more.

· · ·

Sleepy Time Tourist Courts didn’t strike me as a place you/divali d get much sleep. Unless you’re talking about the permanent kind. It’s on the side of Imperial City where the poor people live, made mostly of blacks and Mexicans and poor whites, and on some nights, especially summer nights when the heat’s way up, and the desperation gets so high a fellow can hear himself sweat, guns and knives come out and someone gets hauled away to a pauper’s grave. I pulled up in front of the place and got out and locked the pickup.

The motel had been built in the fifties and remodeled to fit the more modern motel concept of the mid-sixties, which was about the last time I figured the rooms had been swept out. The place was painted asshole pink and the pink was peeling. It dripped and scaled all over. All the curtains on all the windows were drawn, lest a little sunshine get in.

Room forty was upstairs. I could see the door number plain enough from where I stood by my truck. It was one of the few rooms that still had a number on it. The metal railing shook as I climbed. Pigeon shit was all over the landing and there was a used prophylactic lying beside a hypodermic needle. Come next hard rain, however, things might be cleaner.

I knocked on the door and Bill answered. His dark blond hair was rumpled and greasy and his face was oily and set with lines.

His shirt was stuck to him and his pants had a snotty shine. He was banged up and a little bloody.

“Goddamn, Bill,” I said.

“Get in,” he said. “Hurry up.”

I went inside and he closed the door. It was dark and the odor of his body in there was strong enough to go buy groceries and lube my truck.

“Turn on a light,” I said.

“I prefer the dark,” he said, “but I’ll give you a little light.”

There was an old stuffed chair by the window, and I went over there and sat down. At my elbow, on the table, was a lamp with a towel draped over it. Next to the lamp was an open bottle of cheap wine with most of the wine gone. Next to that was a stack of newspapers.

Bill turned on the lamp, almost knocking over the wine in the process. The light, muted beneath the towel, looked like the glow from a jack-o-lantern.

“What now?” I asked. “Spooky noises, a flashlight under our chins?”

“I’m depressed and scared, Uncle Hank. Too much light makes me feel kind of sick. Don’t jack with me, all right?”

“What have you done?” I asked. “Cut through the bullshit and get to it.”

“It’s not that easy, Uncle Hank. There’s a lot to it… First, look at this. Tell me what you think it is.”

He went on the other side of the bed and picked a long, narrow, black photo album off the nightstand and tossed it to me.

I caught it and looked at it. There was no writing on the outside. It had a copper-colored clasp holding it together, and I unsnapped that.

Inside were cellophane windows and about a third of the book w Cof eigas filled with photographs. Two wide, six deep. At the top of the page was a photograph of a young man smiling, and beside that photograph was another of the same man, only he wasn’t smiling. He had a small hole in the center of his forehead and his right eye bulged out of its socket. His face was as white as bleached rice. His mouth was closed, but one broken top tooth hung over his bottom lip like a stalactite.

Below those photos, on the left, was one of a middle-aged man, very much alive. On the right was, I presume, the same man, only you couldn’t tell for sure. His face was a hole. A human jelly doughnut. Shotgun blast, I figured.

Below those, an elderly sour-mouthed woman sitting in a wheel chair, and on the right, the wheel chair overturned, the woman beside it in a pool of blood and scattering of brains.

Next page, a man’s face on one side, the other a close up rear view of a naked man with his ass facing out, something jammed up it. A poker, or a thin, lead pipe maybe. I couldn’t make it out. The object and the guy’s ass were smeared with blood.

The rest of the book was the same sort of thing.

I said, “What in the hell is this?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Bill said. “It’s how I got it that’s important. I mean, does that look like special effects to you?”

“No.”

“Because it isn’t. That woman on the bottom of the first page. Recognize her?”

“No.”

“Mrs. Maude Page.”

“The heiress?”

“Yeah. Remember, she was murdered? Pushed down a concrete embankment about a mile from her house. The house was burglarized. Happened a year ago.”

“I remember something about it. But why is her picture in here? Wait a minute! I know. This is a book of shots from the newspaper morgue. Or more likely the police morgue. Somebody is collecting this stuff. A ghoulish personality. Maybe had a contact at the police department. Gets them to steal the stuff for them… Isn’t you, is it?”

“No. That’s not what it is.”

“Well, what is it?”

“First, will you help me, Uncle Hank?”

“I don’t know. I’m getting a little nervous here. Tell me how you came by the book.”

“I been taking a few classes over at the college-”

“I paid for them, didn’t I?”

“I’m trying to get an education, Uncle Hank. Do something with my life.”

“Like when I paid for that goddamn trucker school for you.”

“I thought it was a good idea, but those trucks get boring.”

“You never made a run, Bill. You didn’t even finish the cour Cnisff for se. And remember when you were going to raise those Australian birds? What were they?”

“Emus. There’s a growing market moving into East Texas. Ten years from now everyone will be eating Emu steaks.”

“Not raised by you.”

“Want to hear this or not?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Tell it.”

“I guess it begins with Sharon.”

“Figures. A woman.”

He sat on the edge of the bed, shook slightly, as if chilled, got a cigarette out of his shirt pocket, put it between his lips, produced a folder of matches from his shirt pocket, peeled off one, scratched it to life and lit up.

“Since when do you smoke?” I said.

“Since a pretty short time ago.”

He took another deep drag and held it in for a long time before he let it out. The cigarette was burned half way down.

He began to talk.