Leather Maiden Read online

  “It’s from the eighteen eighties. Gravestones were knocked over, buried. People in the community paid to have the place cleaned up, the stones set in place. Boy Scouts go out there and pull weeds, keep it clean. I guess the place just got lost. But I figure I was a mother I could find some other way to entertain my daughter than to go out and lie down on graves and look at the stars…Hey, you hungry?”

  “Mom’s fixing me a sandwich.”

  “Good. I want one too. ’Course,” he said, patting his belly, “I could probably skip one now and then.”

  He put his arm around me and walked me out of the garage, across the yard and into the house.

  5

  We ate our sandwiches and had some apple pie, talked until the sun went down, and then we watched TV. We found some boxing and watched that. Mom decided she had things to do in the kitchen, which turned out to be reading her newspaper.

  Dad talked some about the new lake house they had bought on Lake o’ the Pines with my brother and his wife, and about how they wanted to go there this summer, and I was welcome and all that. I explained my job would probably keep me where I was for a while.

  Boxing finished, we watched a bit of news until Dad saw the war news was making me uncomfortable. We went out back and sat on the stoop of the back porch with a can of Diet Coke apiece and talked some more.

  It was just simple chitchat at first. Finally Dad cleared his throat like a cat coughing up a hairball, looked away from me, toward the backyard fence and our neighbor’s rooftop as if something in that direction held his attention, said, “You still buddies with that guy, what’s his name, Snot?”

  I laughed. “Booger.”

  “Yeah, him.”

  I had written Dad about Booger when I was in the sandlot over in Iraq. I was honest about the guy. I was guessing Dad was hoping me and Booger had parted company.

  “I guess I am friends with him,” I said. “But I don’t want to see him that much. Fact is, I sort of think I just said goodbye to him for good. He’s great at war, but back here at home, I’m not sure he’s a fellow I ought to stir up. He’s in Oklahoma. He runs a shooting range and a bar.”

  “Well, it’s good to have contact with people who have a similar history. That can help. But your letters made him sound a little strange.”

  “He’s not bothered by stuff that would get to you and me. So even though we’ve done some of the same things, we don’t have the same history. History is in the eyes of the beholder, and Booger’s eyes, they’re a lot darker and flatter than mine.”

  “That’s an interesting way of putting it.”

  “I meant it when I said he was good at war. He didn’t care what the cause was or if there was a cause. He just wanted a weapon in his hand and an enemy in his sights. He’s kind of scary, actually.”

  “Next question is why are you friends with him?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know the answer to that. Here, he’s like a shark out of water. Over there, I liked him by my side, in front of or behind me. He throws in with you, he’s there all the way. He doesn’t throw in with many people, and he’s not a man of regrets. He once told me a good center shot and a trashy woman with dirty underpants were about it for him.”

  Dad nodded. “I’ve known some folks like him…. The job. It gonna be all right?”

  “I don’t know yet. I found something a little curious.” I told him about Caroline.

  Dad nodded. “I remember that. Never solved, least not so far.”

  “Still, after Houston, newspaper-wise, it seems pretty bland around here. The Caroline Allison thing may be the only interesting thing I’ll ever write about. Even Timpson seemed the most excited about a skunk in Wal-Mart.”

  “Don’t fool yourself, son. This isn’t Houston, but it’s got its own blood and grits. You’ll find that out soon enough when you go to work for the paper. Trust me, there’s plenty goes on, and Timpson knows it.”

  “Like what?”

  Dad raised his eyebrows. “Black and white tensions.”

  “I thought we were past that.”

  “There’s this black preacher and politician, Gerry Judence.”

  “I know who he is,” I said. “Snappy dresser, quick-witted and full of shit. I’ve seen him all my life on televison.”

  “There was a time when he was a serious civil rights leader. Marched with King, did good things. But as the nature of civil rights changed, he had to find a new way to keep himself in the spotlight. Recently, members of the black community decided that a school should be built down in the black section of town.

  “Idea was some of the rich black folks, some rich whites too, would try and raise the level of the kids in that area by building a school. Most of the black people in town, and people in the white community, were for it. Judence threw a monkey wrench in that. He’s got antennae for that kind of thing. Some assholes down in the black community made it out to be some white man’s plot to change them from being black to white, and Judence latched on to that. It got him back in the news.

  “Some of the kids down there don’t even have birth records. Drugs are an everyday thing. Lot of those kids have never been inside a school. They need a chance. Education isn’t white. It belongs to anyone who’ll reach out and take it.”

  “I hadn’t heard about this.”

  “It’s ramping up as it gets closer to the time when the school is supposed to be built. Judence is doing a lot of talking up in New York, where he’s from. Getting lots of camera time. He’ll come down here a week or two before the ground for the school is supposed to be broke, make a big speech, and it’ll get people fired up. And to make matters worse, to make him seem more the hero, there have been death threats from racist groups saying Judence is an outside agitator, which, in fact, he is. But calling a black man an outside agitator is old racist language for ‘uppity nigger.’”

  “And that fires things up more.”

  “School was proposed to be built where the old black Baptist church stands, partially burned. Someone set it on fire a year or so back. Rumor was it was white racists. Those who support the school want to build it where the church stands as a kind of gesture of spirit. Judence is telling the community that whites are trying to segregate them again.”

  “Sounds like segregation to me, Dad.”

  “I don’t want segregation, and the school wouldn’t technically be segregated, but building it in that community shows there’s a chance for students to be educated there, and with good teachers, mostly black, it could happen. It would be a special school, privately funded, better than our public schools, which are just warehouses for warm bodies.”

  “Could it be some of the investors hope to run for office of some kind?”

  “There’s that. But the whites who don’t want the school are strangely enough on the side of the blacks who don’t. The idea there might be a school in the black community with the potential to be better than the schools their children attend annoys them. They say, well, the black people don’t want it, so don’t give it to them. But there are a lot of local black leaders, lots of parents down there that do want it. Most, I’d say. It’s the loudmouth few, black and white, who are kicking this bee’s nest around.

  “There’s this white group that calls themselves the League for the Advancement of Christian Thought. Crackers that get upset to the bone if they see a black man shake hands with a white woman. Think homosexuals are some kind of abomination against God, that they’re trying to wrestle straight white men to the floors of public restrooms to suck their dicks. They’re not that crazy about Jews either, since they think they killed Jesus. Can’t get it in their heads Jesus was a Jew too. And illegal immigrants, that makes them gnash their teeth. Liberals and Democrats and moderates don’t float their boats either.

  “The big mullah for all that stuff, the local agitator, the white racist bastard stirring his side of the pot, is a Baptist preacher right here in Camp Rapture. Reverend Dinkins. He’s head of that organization. Spou
ts racist mess on TV like he’s talking about something truly Christian. They prey on poor screwed-up white kids who are nothing more than angry rednecks without a pot to piss in. All they need is some preacher like Dinkins to tell them they’re on God’s side, or someone like Judence to come down hard on whitey, and BLAM! It all gets set off.”

  Dad paused and turned the soft-drink can around and around in his hand; he was really giving that aluminum a workout. He said: “Judence will come here and give a speech and have a rally at the university so he can go home with a few copies of his appearance on DVD. He can lie around at night and watch it and jack off, claim he kept the whitey school out of the black section of town. Dinkins and the League can brag they kept things status quo. The blacks who didn’t want change can feel like they’ve saved the world from white domination, and the blacks that did want change will throw up their hands in frustration and give up. Everyone loses but the rats and the cockroaches and humankind continues its slow march to oblivion, but with a wide variety of ice-cream flavors and television shows to choose from…What would really straighten the human race out is a good plague.”

  “I suppose that would clean things up,” I said.

  “By the way, did you drive by where Gabby works? I was wondering because she called me and said she saw a car that looked like your old wreck go by there a couple of times real slow, and the guy driving it, she thought he looked a lot like you.”

  “The road runs by there, Dad.”

  “But the speed limit there is forty-five, not a crawl. Not trying to pin you or make you feel bad. You’ve always been somewhat obsessive. Do you remember when you counted your steps?”

  “I counted ceiling tiles too. I counted and arranged my comic books incessantly. I did a lot of things.”

  “You moved those obsessions to Gabby. Add the war, what you saw there, how it affected you—”

  “I’ m all right,” I said.

  “What’s the doctor say?”

  “I said I was all right.”

  Dad nodded. “Good. Have you seen your brother?”

  “Not yet.”

  Jimmy was a university professor. His wife taught grade school. They were pretty close to being the perfect couple.

  Dad crushed the Diet Coke can, said, “I’m going to bed.” He stood up and paused on the steps and put his hand on my shoulder. “Good to have you home.”

  “Good night, Dad.”

  I sat on the back steps for a while and finished my Diet Coke. The night air was nice and cool and soft as velvet. I heard a frog bleat. The smell of mowed grass was like a perfume.

  I leaned back and looked up at the stars. They were shiny and bright, and there was something right about the heavens that made me want to live forever. I had had that feeling before. It never lasted.

  6

  Each morning I awoke with the fresh point of view that things were going to change and that Gabby and I would get back together. I could sit down and think this over and realize just how stupid it was, but the thought wouldn’t go away, and I clung to it like a fading movie star thinking just one more film would bring it all back.

  I took off my clothes and went to bed just wearing my underwear. The bedroom was the one Jimmy and I had shared growing up. All the things we had loved as kids were still there. It was like stepping back through time, entering the past. The only major difference in the room between now and then was that the bunk beds were gone and there was just the one bed for guests.

  After lying in the dark for some time, eyes wide open, I began to see the room more clearly, the outlines of things. I looked up at Jimmy’s model airplanes hanging from the ceiling on wires, looked over at his desk where the frogs and mice he had practiced taxidermy on had started to lean against one another. The stands on which they rested, some kind of glued wood, had begun to come apart and the creatures had fallen together into a gruesome pyramid of arrested decay. I could see the outline of his Eagle Scout sash hanging on the wall. There was a long couple shelves of books, and I could make out a lot of the titles more from memory than from sight.

  I got up, turned on the light and sat at my old desk. It was smaller than I remembered, the chair was uncomfortable. I opened one of the desk drawers. All my comic books were still there; at least my favorites were. I took out one and read it. I got up and walked around the room, turned out the light and went to the window and peeled back the curtain and looked out at the street. It was starting to rain, a slow, sweet summer rain. The pavement glistened in the streetlights, and then Jazzy appeared, wearing only a T-shirt and underwear, walking down the street in bare feet, the rain washing over her.

  I watched her for a while. She walked until she came to the end of the street, where it met the highway, then she turned around and started back. I pulled my chair over and sat at the window and watched her through the crack in the curtain. I thought about calling Child Protective Services, and then remembered Dad had done that.

  I thought I might call anyway. I watched her walk back up the street, lifting her head to the heavens, spreading her arms, enjoying the rain like some kind of nature nymph. She stepped onto our lawn and crossed to hers.

  I couldn’t see her after that, but I had an idea she might be climbing the elm, making her way to her platform in the boughs while her mother and her new daddy did whatever it was they were doing in the bedroom. Being uncharitable, my guess was they were passed out drunk. I started to go out and talk to Jazzy, to tell her to go to bed, that trees draw lightning. Or perhaps I just wanted to have her keep me company. But I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything but watch the rain until it wasn’t raining anymore.

  Finally I stood up and went over and looked at the shadow shapes of the taxidermy frogs and rats my brother had fixed up, and remembered how it had all smelled out in the garage when he was preserving them. Even then, as a kid, I thought it was a shitty hobby. I reached out with a finger and gently pushed at the heaped-together dead things. They tumbled over and one of the rats fell and went behind the desk. I didn’t bother to pick it up. Way it had been pumped full of chemicals, way the skin had been treated, it could lie there without odor for a century.

  I looked up at his sash again. I had made Life Scout, not Eagle. I had gotten in a fight with the scoutmaster’s son and kicked him in the teeth, knocking a couple out, making myself persona non grata at the Scout hut. My swift kick didn’t affect Jimmy’s scouting at all. He was the kind of guy who could have shit in the middle of the Scout hut, set the crap on fire and burned the place down, and before anyone would say anything bad about him, it would have been blamed on arsonist rodents. He had the knack, Jimmy did.

  I went to bed and thought about some of the things Dad and I had talked about, closed my eyes and went to sleep and dreamed immediately, saw all the dead I had seen in the war. Americans and Iraqis were lying in the middle of a blood-soaked street. There were so goddamn many.

  As I watched, all of them crawled together into a bloody and mangled heap, made themselves into a zombie-style pyramid of writhing bodies, many of them missing limbs, dripping blood the color of oil. They wrapped their arms and legs around one another to hook up and form a moving mass, wide at the bottom, narrow at the top, with a headless baby at the peak; a pyramid of bloody, rotting flesh, acting as one, stalking toward me.

  I awoke, sat up in bed, sweating. I got up, turned off the alarm, went into the bathroom with my suitcase, showered and shaved and brushed my teeth taking my sweet time.

  I put on a loose blue shirt and some new blue jeans that I had to pull the tags off of. I went back to my room and put on my socks and shoes and sat at my desk and looked at my watch frequently and watched it grow lighter through the curtained window.

  It had rained some more in the night and because of it the morning broke off cool. I went outside and enjoyed the cool as the sun came up and began to pour color into everything. Then the sun climbed up higher and it got hot and the wetness on the road in front of the house began to evaporate and ris
e up in a warm damp mist. There was a balmy, lethargic wind that came with it, and in a short time it blew the mist away. Then there was nothing but the heat, a kind of slow broil that turned everything sticky as the crack of a fat man’s ass.

  I drove to work, made it there at a quarter to nine.

  7

  Belinda had done something different with her hair. It was evenly cut and short and she had dyed it honey blond. Something about that light blond hair and those freckles made her look like strawberries and cream.

  We exchanged pleasantries, and I went to my desk.

  I immediately turned on the computer and tapped into the file on Caroline Allison. It was the same thing I had already read, of course, and it wasn’t much, but it whet my appetite again. Francine’s intent had most likely been to write a breezy little column about the missing girl and how horrible it was, and move on to how to make tuna casserole with olives the next week. Article-wise, I had something similar—but a little more intense—in mind, though I didn’t intend to follow it with tuna casserole.

  I hated to do it, but I got up and went over to Oswald’s desk.

  When I told him what I wanted, he pointed, said, “The morgue. I’ll call down and introduce you.”

  The newspaper morgue was tucked around a corner and down a few steps, in a kind of basement with lighting that might have been bright during the ice age on a starless night, but for modern times it was a little dim. Like Timpson’s office, unless someone told you where to look, you might never know the place was there.

  It was a small room with a low ceiling and file cabinets and computers and little clear plastic boxes full of computer discs. There were old outdated machines that allowed you to flick through ancient newspaper text. There was dust in the air and the smell of slightly mildewed newspapers. I could imagine dust mites making their way up my nostrils the minute I entered, bringing in furniture, checking out the backyard.