CHAPTER FOUR

As well as his eyes could see, which was a lot better than you would imagine for a man whose vision had gone to s**t at a relatively young age, the last of my blood he scrubbed out of the upholstery with a common household rag drenched in creek water. John was the kind of man who carried a cloth in his front pocket, and said cloth he would use to wipe away the debris the wind pelted onto the Mercury’s hood; this was on days when he drove downtown to let folks turn their heads and ooh and ahh at how “mint” (that’s what he called it when he described, in grand detail, what it had under the hood, how many horses it had, how it was all original, et cetera) it was. Every blemish, not a one he never wiped or buffed away, he saw vividly through golden-framed bifocals he kept hooked around his neck, unless he was asleep, of course.

Ryker’s Creek, from where he stood in the dim light of coursing snow, streamed east and channeled between a copse of dead birch, their roots unearthed and water-stained; and as my burlap coffin rowed down its narrow eddy, jostling over coarse sediment and rocks and broken limbs, the bag struck an embankment�"floated lifelessly for a time, and then sank into the depths of its numbing blackness.

John sighed, hitched his head up over the snowbank, and nervously checked for coming headlights.

Nothing.

He took in the horrendous crimes he had committed, and other than establishing a solid alibi to give to Valerie (and most certainly the police), he found that he was not much shaken by the whole ordeal. In fact, now that there was no evidence to be gathered, he could sit and dream something up on a whim and toss it at Valerie, and she would have to accept the information as it was bluntly given. And it would go like this: “Honey, I’m back.” “Where’s Mercury?” Valerie would ask. “You mean she’s not here?” “No, she went with you to the Dairy Barn to get shakes, remember?” “And a vanilla cone!” Maggie would chime in, face going sour when she saw he had neither a shake nor a cone to give her. “No, she didn’t. She told me she changed her mind, so before pulling out of the drive, I let her out.” “I never saw her come in,” Valerie would say. “Really?” he would say. And before the night was over, they would be on the phone with the Mill Shoals Police Department, who would jot down every detail of my missing-persons case, hair and eye color, to what I had been wearing the night I “never came in when my father dropped me off”. They would ask for a list of places I hung out in my free time, which was at home. I rarely went out with anyone from my school. I was a loner.

Luck would have it that the police in town immediately transferred the information my mother had given them over the phone to Dale Parsons, an investigator out of Chicago. From this limbo I watched him and saw he was finely in tune with homicides. He was analytical, so observant that his methods of cracking cases had baffled the other feds trying to solve the crime and bust the son of a b***h responsible. My mother had told my father how Mr. Parsons put on matching attire to that of the suspect who stabbed his own wife in Lincoln Park and acted out the scene himself, scaring the rookie, a man named Vinnie Marshall, whom he recruited to stand in as the victim. This led Dale to discover that the suspect, Dean Fulton, was right-handed and that the blade had entered Mrs. Jennifer Fulton’s chest at a forty-degree angle. Mr. Fulton had claimed that she was a victim of a stab-and-run, and that he had been laying shingles that afternoon over on Homan Avenue. It wasn’t until the next morning when Dale inquired Mr. Fulton to sign an oath that he would provide only factual statements regarding Mrs. Fulton’s violent death that he closed the case. When Dean signed his full given name, Raymond Dean Fulton, with his right hand, Dale immediately read him his rights and sent him to a cell in a pair of cuffs.

Sleep had not come for my mother that night. Maggie stayed up until four, but she eventually cried herself to sleep. My father, John, the b*****d, all these things I’ve referred to him as, the b*****d being my favorite, came home sporting a chipper attitude, and despite my mother’s persistent questions relating to my whereabouts, he walked into the kitchen as nonchalant as Bell had earlier that evening when “the best labrador in the world” came toe-padding her way out of the hall where one of my mother’s chewed-up house slippers lay a mess of wool and slobber, and made himself a turkey sub on two loaves of whole wheat bread. He even grabbed himself a complimentary Budweiser to wash it down with. After her bickering, the b*****d finally caved, and that’s when she had made the call.

          ***

“It came off the line in 1971,” John said the next morning. Him and Mr. Parsons had struck up a conversation about the red boat of a car bulking sullenly in our garage. He ran his hand gently over the hood and made way over the vinyl top. “When I bought her at sixteen, I paid a hundred bucks, worked out a special deal with the lady who owned her at the time. Yup, every penny, other than the hundred I had made mowing yards, was worked for.”

“Is that right?” said Dale, poking a Camel into the corner of his mouth. He lit it with a match he snapped alight at will. He shook it out and tossed it in the tin can that John had purposely put there to cover a large oil stain the Mercury had given the concrete floor so freely.

Dale looked the part of a big-time investigator. He wore a long brown trench coat with pockets on each breast, his hair salt-and-pepper waves roughly slicked with a fancy pomade: Murray’s Superior. His face was careworn. Haven and I guessed he was all of fifty, though I remember him telling my mother he was thirty-six. She had casually asked when he had pridefully basked about his rather large catalog of credentials. My mother found it astonishing that a man of his age had accomplished so much in so little time. She had craved him, thoughtfully calling him “eye candy”. My mother isn’t wrong; he’s very handsome, even for a man old enough to be my father. Upon his eyes, he wore the dark pair of Aviators that most of his kind were notorious for wearing. They gave him a hard-edged and business-like appearance. 

“Yup, gutters, windows and free mowing. I always told my children that the privilege of owning something feels much better if you earn it.”

“Boy, that’s the truth,” Dale said, kneeling at the passenger’s window and peering in.

My father’s gaze met him from behind the window of the driver’s door. He smiled adequately.

“Do you mind if I have a look?”

“Not at all,” said John.

Dale opened the door and found that the interior was as polished as the exterior. The black, leather bench seat had not a tear in its tightly woven fabric. The dash, youthful in its tan beauty, casted a perfectly smooth reflection in the overhead light of the garage. The radio dial was of luxury, silver and healthy as if it had never been tuned into any of the local stations that had clear enough reception to serenade those listening with the velvet voice of Etta James, or the upbeat rhythm of The Backstreet Boys (not that there had ever been any Backstreet Boys playing in John Bernz’s car; he was an old soul and not a fan of these new bands, those whom he said had no “soul”). The upholstery, an enriched Gainsboro grey with not a lump to be seen, was pristine and deemed elegant in Dale Parson’s gaze, not obviously observant. John feared he would be observant but couldn’t tell in the least. He marked it as distracting, Dale having taken interest in his ‘baby’, something he had said when Dale had asked to see his car: “Is that your Marquis in the garage?” “Sure is, that’s my baby.”

“She’s a beauty,” Dale said, removing his cigarette from the interior. He had gone on to say how he appreciated the attention to detail when the words had suddenly died on their way out. His eyes shot to the floorboard, and just below where the seat met the adjustment track, something gold glistened in his pupils.

The broken zipper of my High-Rise blue jeans.

“A REAL BEAUTY!” he said, suddenly pulling back and closing the door softly. He hoped John wasn’t onto him, what he had just seen. He searched deeply for all the possibles: a piece of a broken necklace, a chip from the golden rearview, a diamond sliver from expensive jewelry. But Dale, having worn a great number of pants over the years, knew there was no mistaking it for anything anyone’s mind could reasonably draw up. It was definitely a zipper.

“Why, thank you, Mr. Parsons,” John said, leaning over the roof and talking as smooth as he could to someone he wanted no suspicion to arise from. “You know, I’ve always been a man who really appreciates the finer things in life.”

“Old cars?” Dale said, silently insinuating how non sentimental he believed John’s love for his car to be.

“Oh, no, not just cars, family… I guess that’s why I can’t seem to get rid of her.” He gave the roof a hearty tap. “My wife and daughter, little Maggie in there. They love it. And for it, I love them.”

“What about your other daughter, Mr. Bernz?”

John looked across the roof at a man whose expression had all of a sudden turned wise. His gaze was a statue, solid and unchanged as he waited for his response. “You mean Mercury?”

“I suppose so.”

John looked left and right and then back at Dale. His own gaze matched the haughty investigator staring him down on the other side of the car. “Oh, yeah…” he paused, grimacing slightly, “she loved it. You bet.”

“She did,” Dale said, hesitating as he took a drag of his cigarette, "or she does?”

Silence.

Just then my mother came into the garage holding an envelope full of my pictures, minus the one she had pulled from the stack to show the locals around town. That one was taken the prior May, just before I graduated Junior High. I remember she was angry that I hadn’t brushed my hair after P.E. and nearly threw every copy in the trash. My mother, Valerie when she was overtly critical, Valerie when she had a hissy fit over anything that wasn’t just so, though often short fused, was always prompt about giving Maggie and I what we called “the feathers”, the hearty dusting of her hand through the front of our hair to lighten our glum moods. She had taken a lot of pictures while I was alive. She had used up every roll of more than a hundred Kodaks from the time I was born up until the night I was murdered.

“Officer Parsons, here are some photos of Mercury. These two,” she said, indicating with a decisive finger, “are recent, taken last year.”

Dale flipped the lenses of his shades with a peculiarity that both amused and impressed her. Haven and I believe it was because, partly, it had been the first time she saw the color of his eyes: hazel with smoke-colored tint branching around the most beautiful black irises, oh, how she nearly melted and became like the oil stain on the b*****d’s garage floor, and because he looked to her much like one of the characters she had read about in a Chester Gould comic called Dick Tracy. He was only missing a top hat with a black band and a big silver badge with the words: Ace Detective. A comic turned to life. A rugged, manly, gorgeous comic turned to life. 

Dale gandered at the photos, finding his heart light in the dark abyss it wallowed in for thirteen years. The abyss had suddenly taken on vision and life and memories of a fatherhood death had stolen like a thief in the night. My resemblance to his daughter, Emily, clasped a similarity so profound that his mind failed to decipher my picture from hers. With fragile fingers, he traced my hair down to my blush cheeks, and from his eyes teardrops fell. 

My mother couldn’t believe it. Here before her was this tough, macho man who had walked the dirty streets with some of the world’s most dangerous criminals; he had looked down the barrel of many a gun and came eye to eye with bullets that did no more than the Chicago breeze that whipped across his brow. My, how the mighty have fallen, she thought, and without consideration of marital repercussions, she lent her hand to him in a way she couldn’t lend her hand to my father. Not even in the throes of Maggie and I’s conception long, long ago; not even in the youth of their Honeymoon phase; not even if the happiness begotten by a terrible dream shattered the line between nightmare and reality.

John’s fists clenched and dug two bald patches under the Mercury’s clearcoat. His mouth filled with saliva, and he longed to spit it on the pig whose muddy mitts had trespassed onto private property. Infuriated, he glanced at the Craftsman tool chest alone in its own corner of the garage and dreamt of removing the knife he had hidden beneath a ratchet set my mother had bought him for Christmas one year; its blade was still wearing my blood. The b*****d didn’t like this kingshit cop. Sure, he gave him the go-ahead run when he had first taken interest in his precious cherry, but that was sour grapes now that he had taken interest, a very strong interest, in the cherry he popped in 1977.

Dale had mindlessly placed my pictures on the roof of the Mercury, and, like a friend whose fondness for my mother was as rampant as smallpox in an Indian village, took hold of her with a comforting touch.

Emily had a brain tumor and died when I was three, but I never knew her. And I haven’t seen her in our limbo. 

In the b*****d’s malicious dissection, his knife disemboweled the pig intruding in another’s sty. The pig squealed in pain and death, and within a lair of dark secrets, John the pig turned cannibal and ate the other pig like the Donner Party when their provisions ran low in the Sierra Nevada. He dreamt of eating his hands first, starting at the fingers that found refuge on the small of Valerie’s back, then working his way up to his wrists until all the flesh and muscle was gone; and he would then suck the remaining juices from the bones in animalistic pleasure.

A loud knock! on the roof broke them apart, causing awkward silence to ensue. Dale cleared his throat and hadn’t spent a second longer to read the clarity of destruction on the b*****d’s face. He peered through the glass of the passenger’s window and eyed the zipper in the floorboard like a child standing at a claw machine filled with all the stuffed figures they desired so.

“Uh hmmm, thank you. Just one will do. I’ll keep in touch,” he said, my mother his ongoing view of a fondness they both casted aside for lust as if the moment had been spellbound. Dale had heard wives tales of such adulation that turned serendipitous. The feeling he had once had with his first wife, Janet, whose craving for Dr. James Leland devoured their sacred bond fifteen years before. Dr. Leland was her OBGYN. A kind man with more money than Dale could ever talk about. Dale Parsons was not a man of good fortune when it came to the crazy little thing called love. In addition, he was not a man keen on knowing Janet left him for her gynecologist, who, factually, knew more about her vagina than he did. With the goings-on before him, and behind him, he presumed it natural that he ascertained the idea of them f*****g during her womanly visits. Dale wasn’t an expert in the field of gynecology, but even the simplest of man or woman knew the average rate of appointments was once per year, unless of course a woman presented with pregnancy or cervical cancer, which did not correlate at all to Janet’s b***h-ish behavior, as he rightfully labeled it. She wanted a new dick. A very wealthy, three-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year dick because his eighty-six-thousand-dollar-a-year dick wasn’t wealthy enough.

But to be a fly on the wall of the garage that morning. To see and hear what all you could’ve seen and heard would have blown a fly’s brain out of its head. Haven and I agreed that it was wonderful, though it hadn’t mounted to a hill of beans in regard to what the b*****d deserved.

“Thank you so much, Mr. Parsons,” my mother said. “I’ll walk you out.”

“Thank you, mam. Mr. Parsons,” he said, nodding a poor impression of approval. 

My father watched them disappear through the connecting door to the house, and in his solitude, he turned placably towards the Craftsman tool chest once more.