Читать книгу Dead Girl - Craig Nybo - Страница 11

Chapter 5

I’m a good judge of character. That’s why I bought a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon from the only market in Bridgewater--a groaning structure of cold brick and even colder customer service. I put the beer in the back seat of my Grand Fury and fired her up. My green bomber only backfired once during my drive back to DeeDee’s next-door neighbor, Bob Shuler’s house.

I checked my watch as I arrived; it was half past eight. I had nearly three hours before DeeDee’s appointment at 11:50 PM. I pulled up on the gravel drive and killed the rattling engine. I snatched the beer and walked toward the front door.

On my way, I glanced over a fence into the backyard. The corpse of an old car rusted there. An overfed mutt came out of the rotting metal turtle shell and growled at me. I guessed the animal to be part Rottweiler, part pincer, and part demon.

I mounted the porch, which canted heavily to the left. Much of the concrete had worn to gravel. A Pair of oversized terracotta pots stood on either side of the screen door, a tarnish encrusted slab that hung slack on its hinges, probably left to slam during storms. A quartet of spent propane tanks completed the porch’s décor.

A strip of ancient masking tape over the doorbell read, “please knock” in fading magic marker. I pounded on the bygone wood and waited.

I heard footsteps, accompanied by a diatribe of muttering. The door opened a couple of inches, just enough to reveal a stripe of Bob Shuler’s unshaven face. “What do you want?”

“I think I owe you the truth. I’m a writer and a friend of DeeDee’s family.” I thumbed over my shoulder toward DeeDee’s house. “I’m working on a new story and want to get a feel for small town life. I was wondering if I could come in for a little chat?”

“I’m not interested,” Shuler said.

“I brought libations.” I held up the case of Pabst. Shuler’s eye flashed wide in a micro-expression of anticipation. He shut the door. For the briefest moment, I felt abandoned and discouraged. Shuler released the security chain and swung the door inward. The smells of charred toxins, both sweet and bitter at the same time, accosted me. The scent of ammonia bit into my senses, almost causing my eyes to water. Shuler had been busy in the kitchen with a mixture of solvents and chemicals, undoubtedly using the propane to cook up an illegal concoction. I wondered if Shuler was a dealer or if he was just a crank-head supporting his own habit.

I forced a smile, which, should Shuler have been looking at my face rather than at the case of Pabst in my hand, would have insulted him.

“I suppose I got a spare hour,” or two or three, I thought. What else do you have going, pro wrestling and a TV dinner?

Shuler invited me in with a one-handed threshold sweep. I ventured a step into his domicile, then two. Stacks of newspapers took up much of the floor space. I spotted box after box of junk, one full of rubber balls, one full of old McDonalds happy meal toys.

Bob led me to a green couch, shelled with some form of hardening crust. I grimaced and sat down. A stack of National Geographic magazines rested on the coffee table in front of me. The topmost bore a photograph of a group of nude aborigine women, their breasts flopping in the fly infested air. “Oh, don’t mind these none,” Bob said, throwing a newspaper over the magazines. Was he blushing? He sat down in a wicker chair across from me.

I put the Pabst on the coffee table, tore open the box and hooked out a can. “What do you say we get started?” I offered the beer to Shuler. He took it with an eager smile and popped the top.

“One thing about ol’ Bob Shuler,” he said, taking his first pull on the can of Pabst, a long drawn-out affair. His Adams apple bobbed as if repeatedly diving for treasure and coming up for air. In, I counted, six swallows, Shuler retired the entire can. “--is when friends come to visit, we are sure to finish something.” He smashed the beer can on his forehead, leaving a red ring on the skin below his greasy hairline. He chuckled and sat the empty on the corner of the coffee table. “There we go: finished.”

I reached into my attaché and fumbled around.

“You don’t got a gun in there, do you?” Shuler asked jokingly.

“Of course not; what? Do you think I’m crazy or something?” I smiled, reached around my .38 and took out my micro recorder. “Do you mind if I tape this conversation?”

Shuler rolled his finger and nodded.

I started the recorder and put it on the coffee table.

Shuler reached for his second beer. I smiled. A couple of beers would loosen his lips.

“So what can I do you fer?” Shuler asked, repositioning his bulk in the wicker chair across from me. To my relief, he didn’t repeat his frat trick of putting his second can down in one pull. I wanted him loose not inebriated.

“As I said at the door, I just want to get a feel for small town life. Why don’t we start right here, with your neighborhood? What’s it like to live here, in this house, next door to DeeDee?”

Shuler looked both ways as if making sure nobody was listening. He leaned forward and set me with an expression that I’m sure he only saved for special occasions when he had something particularly dirty to say. “That DeeDee Corelis and her old man--God rest his soul--have bats in the belfry. Oh, sure, she’s a nice enough old gal and all, but I’m telling you, as I have lived here--and I have lived here since I got back from Nam back in ‘72--two tours in the bush blowing the balls of those sons-of-whore Gooks--I have watched that batty old broad and her old man go more and more crazy every year.”

I took off my ivy cap and put it in my lap. “Crazy in what way, Mr. Shuler?”

“Mr. Shuler’s my father’s name. You can call me Bob.”

“Fine, Bob. Tell me, why do you think Mrs. Corelis is crazy?”

“Well, maybe it was too much isolation. This town’s like a sequestered back-alley in all-is-forgotten-ville. Nobody actually lives here; they just exist. They walk around. They eat. They shit. They go to bed. They wake up. They start all over again. That’s about it.” He sipped his beer.

“I appreciate your candor when it comes to small town living, but I’m interested in DeeDee; just what is it about her and Stan that you find unusual.”

“Like I said, isolation. DeeDee and Stan got no friends. Stan chummed around with just a handful of fellas. In fact I’d say he had only four or five friends in the world, old guys, used to come over to his place all the time. They’s all dead now.”

“Do you know their names?”

“Lets see, there was Ben Stitching, DeLoy Tillman, and that damn car of his.”

“What about the car?”

“Those three fellas used to work on that car constantly. It was like they was obsessed. Every once in a while I’d walk over there and have a gander through the window. She’d be in some state of repair, sometimes with a dented-to-hell fender, sometimes with her motor lifted out, sometimes near to pristine. But always in a state of repair.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Better part of forty years.”

“And they’ve been working on the car the whole time?”

“Sure as I’m sitting here.”

“I’d like to have a look at that car.”

Bob looked both ways for eavesdroppers. “They gets her looking cherry around this time of year. But every fall Stan and his loony friends gets together and has an Easter-bombing party; that’s the best I can figure it.”

“What is an Easter-bombing party?”

“All I can say is, one night that car would be pristine, like you say, cherry. The next day she’d be torn to scrap. It was like Stan and his old friends was paying penance for something--which wouldn’t surprise me; Stan had the crazy eye. I couldn’t talk to him for three shakes without getting the willies. Anyways, I’m getting ahead of myself. Stan and his friends, they was like that guy in ancient Greece who keeps pushing the rock up the hill only to let it roll down again. Then he has to go back to the bottom of the hill and start a-pushing fresh, like it was the first time.”

“Sisyphus,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“Sisyphus, he’s the king, punished by the Gods to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity.”

“Yea, Stan and his friends, they was like Syphilis.”

“Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

Bob reached for another can of Pabst. He popped the top and pushed himself up as high as he could in his chair. He drew a long swallow then sat the half-full can onto the coffee table. He leaned forward and used a chilling look on me. “I live here, next to DeeDee and Stan, God rest his soul, because I have to. I can’t do no better. But for a young buck like you, you got choices. Stay away from that batty old woman. There’s bad blood in that house, I’m telling you. When I say old man Stan and his friends had the crazy eye, I mean it. There was a look to ‘em, something I saw back in Nam over and over in good soldiers once they turned to the black side. Blake Elroy, a good kid from Oklahoma, one of my friends was the best damn soldier I knowd back in the bush. But something got him, a hard spirit is the best I figure. He got the crazy eye. Next thing I knowd, he’s collecting Gook trophies, ears, fingers, toes. He’s stringin’ them out and making necklaces. He even cut a Gook kid’s head off and mounted it on the front of our Jeep as a hood ornament. That was the last straw; he got sent home. And I was glad to see him shipped off.

“Stan and his friends had the same look in their eyes as Elroy. There’s bad blood in that house, and bad blood in that car of theirs. If you go poking too hard, you might get something that you can’t likely get rid of.”

“Like syphilis?” I asked with a smile.

“That’s right. Stan and them’s all like syphilis, a’pushin’ that boulder on up the hill.”

“DeeDee seems like a nice enough gal.”

Shuler smirked. “True enough. She don’t have the crazy eye like her old man did, but the whole while Stan and his friends were doing their business, she just looks the other way. She just stays, how do you say it, aloof. Ain’t nothing wrong with that in most cases. But I suspect something horrible evil went on between those four men. And DeeDee ain’t done nothing about it. That makes her dangerous.”

I picked up my micro-recorder and snapped it off. “Well, Bob, I think I have what I need. I’m starting to get the picture. You mind if I cite you as a source?”

“Now that the old man’s gone, you can use my name anyhow you want. Jist don’t make me out to be some kind of backcountry fool.”

“You got it. I appreciate your time.” I put the micro recorder into my attaché, stood up, and made my way through the clutter maze back to the front door. I heard Bob pop the top of another can as I reached for the tarnished doorknob. “Oh, there is one more thing,” I said. I turned and caught him scratching his crotch with one hand and tipping his beer can with the other. “You might want to check that kitchen of yours, I think I smell something burning.”

Shuler clambered, lowering his beer can, glancing both ways, and forcing an uncomfortable smile. “Ain’t nothing burning in here. They’s probably paving the road nearby, you’re probably getting a whiff of the new tar.”

“Yea, that’s probably it.” I smiled and winked.

As I stepped outside, I caught the end of an argument coming from DeeDee’s house. Torre stormed out the front door, DeeDee in tow.

“Torre, I’d rather you didn’t go out tonight.”

“You’re not my boss.” Torre stalked down the porch steps and walked to his purple rice-burner, fumbling through his keys.

“You’re not going to that damn bridge are you?” DeeDee stopped at the railing on the porch and hugged herself from the cool. She watched her grandson unlock the car.

“It ain’t none of your business where I go.”

“Don’t go to the bridge, it’s dangerous, especially this time of year.”

Torre fired up his rice-burner. It’s fat exhaust pipe coughed up a cloud. Torre dropped the car into reverse and gunned it. The car patched backward along the gravel drive-strip, shooting pea-stone like shrapnel in all directions. When the car met the road, Torre engaged the emergency brake and cranked the wheel, skidding the car around, a maneuver that, no doubt, he had practiced many times. The rice-burner patched away at 20 miles-per-hour better than the speed limit.

DeeDee watched Torre’s car jet away. After the rice-burner’s tail lights winked off into the dark, she turned and stared at the barred up cinderblock garage. Her eyes narrowed. She stood that way for a moment, both enraged and defeated. I watched her from the shadows. She uttered something pointed, a curse or an epithet. I couldn’t make out her words. She wheeled around and went into her house.

I had seen two bridges when I had driven into town. They lay side-by-side over the same river, one condemned, the other built as a replacement. I checked my watch. It was nearly a quarter past nine; I had nearly two hours before I was due back at DeeDee’s for her mystery appointment. I decided to head to the bridge incognito to see exactly what DeeDee had said was dangerous.