Late afternoon and the Inferno is empty and cold. It smells of dead fish and beer. Sick yellow sunshine filters through unwashed skylights. Two waitresses sit at the bar, bored and smoking cigarettes. They wear ill-fitting dominatrix gear: gleaming leather and vinyl and too much exposed flesh. Their faces are blank and humorless. A bartender dressed as a hunchback stands half in shadows. He is drinking a glass of milk. I circle through the bathroom and back to the bar. I don’t see any sign of Pooh. I realize I’m walking like a cop. I become a junkie and force myself to walk as if I have stomach cramps. It isn’t hard at all. I chew my thumb and stare at the floor. The bartender gazes at me like I’m a bug he can’t be bothered to kill.
You seen Pooh, I say.
Don’t think so, partner.
I need to find him. I need to find him in the worst way.
The bartender adjusts his hump and is silent. One of the women takes out black lipstick and a small mirror. She examines her face. The other one gives me a thin smile. Her eyes are blue and gentle.
You must be Christopher Robin.
I laugh like a chicken.
What’s the matter with you?
I’m sick. Can’t you see I’m sick.
The bartender sighs. I already mopped. I don’t need any junkie regurgitating his lunch in here so why don’t you get the fuck out?
There is a long silence. I scratch myself and cough. I stare mournfully at those soft blue eyes. Then turn and limp outside. I crouch down like a beggar and begin picking up wet cigarette butts.
After a minute she comes outside. I know what it’s like, she says.
I’m dying here, I say.
I know, she says. And you need to get a fix. Everybody looks right through you.
It’s like I’m a leper and my nose is fallin’ off. How could you not notice that?
My knees buckle and I’m sinking but she catches me. Her touch is tender. She digs through her handbag and comes up with a slightly mashed chocolate bar.
Eat this. The sugar will make you feel better.
I’m afraid I’m going to laugh. I cover my face and moan as if I’m sobbing.
You’re a nice person, I say.
I can tell you where Pooh lives.
The sun drifts behind a cloud and I look at her with my eyes open. She is dressed like a vampire, a cyberpunk whore. Her face is painted white. Her hair is an impossible black, almost blue. It must be synthetic. Her breasts are fake, round and plump as grapefruits. Her lips are bloated with fat taken from her ass. But her eyes are like pools of new rain. I eat the chocolate bar gratefully. I let her hold my hand and soon I am almost sorry for deceiving her.
thirteen.
My wife used to say I was a terrible liar, that it was the only time I smiled. But she was wrong; I smiled when I was telling the truth.
On a winter morning one year ago I told her, without smiling, that she wasn’t dead. She was sitting on the kitchen floor, crying. And she kept saying that she was dead. She wasn’t supposed to live this long and I could hear the boy still breathing in our bedroom. I caught them together and it was embarrassing. They were fully dressed watching television and their thighs were barely touching. I wanted to be furious but I wasn’t.
I don’t remember when she started bringing home the high school boys, but I had been aware of it for months and pretended not to be. The house was wired for sound and video. Hidden cameras in every room. I didn’t intend to watch her. I had been having blackouts and long episodes of sleeplessness and I didn’t trust my memory. I wanted to watch myself. I wanted to know what I was doing when I disappeared, and I found myself watching Lucy instead. She brought home boys who barely had pubic hair. She let them see her naked, the odd glimpse as she came out of the shower, the flash of a breast where her robe fell open. They hung around for the possibility of more. Lucy helped them with their homework, she combed their hair and let them watch TV in bed with her. She asked them about girls and cars and baseball. She asked them what were they afraid of, what they dreamed of, and she pretended they were her children.
I could not give her any children but sometimes I could watch myself fuck her in the middle of the night, when I was unconscious and dreaming of my former self. Her shrunken body crushed under mine, her bald head glowing like an egg.
I told her I didn’t care about the boys. Lucy borrowed youth and time and strength from them, things she couldn’t get from me. I told her I had problems of my own and I wanted her to be happy. I told her she wasn’t dead; the doctors were wrong and she had years to live. I told her I loved her and I didn’t smile, because I wanted her to believe me.
The boy in the bedroom had asthma and later I would sit in the dark and listen to his terrible wheezing on my headphones.
Pooh lives in a basement apartment. The windows are covered from within by greased wax paper. I can already imagine the smell. The door is easily forced open. There is one room plus a closet with toilet and sink. Television and mattress and refrigerator and strewn clothes. The carpet foul and stained. I squat in the center of the room and breathe his air. I gather saliva in my mouth and spit. In the refrigerator is a box of aged jelly doughnuts. I poke through his clothes and find only pennies and bits of tobacco and strands of hair. In a metal crate beside his bed are comic books. A small collection, perhaps a hundred. They are well cared for. Each is in a plastic sheath to protect it from dust and moisture and bugs. I pull out a Spider-Man from twenty years ago and light a cigarette.
Spider-Man is tangling with Doctor Octopus and getting the shit pounded out of him. He keeps the wisecracks coming and manages to slap a glowing spider tracer on Doc Oc’s leg before he gets away. Then the cops give him a hard time and he goes to see MaryJane and she’s pissed because he is two hours late and I’m thinking: She never sleeps with you anyway so why bother? Then he drags himself home and has soup and sandwiches with his feeble Aunt May before he has to go hunt down the Octopus.
Pooh followed me and Eve home from the Inferno the other night. He was stupid with drink and he wanted to do something to me. He fell asleep and when he woke up he was sober and there was bile in his mouth. He went inside. He told himself he was going to kill me but I doubt that. He just wanted to scare me, to squeeze me for some money but I was gone. Instead he found two girls naked and cuddling on the couch and he just went crazy. Pooh would certainly hate lesbians. They would offend his moral sensibilities. He screamed at them and waved the gun around and said he would cut out their tongues. Then he tied them up and preached hellfire and motherhood and how they hadn’t been fucked by the right fellow. He was going to leave but one of them said something to him. He took the little one and her smart mouth back to the bedroom and stripped her down and gave her a piece of Pooh.
I gave her a piece of Pooh.
*
The washed gray light before dawn. My head rests on Pooh’s pillow and I am clutching his ratty blue blanket in one hand. My clothes smell like Pooh. For a moment I think I am Pooh. I have a grim and throbbing erection and I’m sick to realize I dreamed of raping Eve. My watch says it is six A.M. and I must have slept over fifteen hours. I was underwater, unconscious. I wasn’t myself. I’m confused at first because I feel good. I feel rested. I go to Pooh’s little bathroom and piss in his toilet. I drink from his faucet and eat some of his toothpaste.
The Spider-Man comic still lays open on the bed. I glance at it once more before I leave. The pages are slightly faded and the corners are worn soft and I imagine Pooh has read this a thousand times. He washes his hands every time and is careful not to crease the pages.
I have to get out of here before I lose the taste for killing him.
I step out Pooh’s front door and there is Detective Moon. He is sitting on the top step with two cups of coffee. He looks tired and cold and slightly ill. His breath is white.
I was waiting for you to come out, he says. I thought it would be less complicated than trying to explain why you’re asleep in a drug dealer’s bed.
Is one of those coffees for me?
No, he says. I like to have two on a day like this. But I’m willing to share.
I sit down beside him and light a cigarette, glancing at my watch. The train leaves in a little over three hours and I’m going to be on it.
I don’t normally work rape cases, he says. They make my stomach hurt. But your description came up when the uniforms questioned the neighbors. A little old lady, somebody’s granny. She said you climbed out the window and looked exactly like a rapist. He laughs. What does a rapist look like?
He looks like a beggar, I say. A lawyer, a thief. He looks like somebody’s brother. He has a sister, a mother. He has a granny that loves him.
This particular granny watches a lot of TV. And she was hot to come in and work with a sketch artist. In about eighteen hours your happy face will land on a lot of desks.
I never wanted to be famous.
Your name is already dogshit at the station.
Listen to me, Moon. This isn’t connected to that other thing. Eve is a friend of mine. I’m just trying to find the guy who did this. Once a cop, you know.
But you aren’t a cop, are you? And you’re looking like a bad guy.
I’m not a bad guy. I’m not.
Let’s take a ride, Phineas.
I take the coffee from him and gulp half of it. It’s cold and too sweet and I dump it into ashen snow, splattering Moon’s feet. If he has my gun, why doesn’t he just say so? I can’t let him arrest me. I’m in no condition to fight, but I’m not going downtown. I will rip open my wrists with my teeth before he puts me in a cage. I don’t think Moon will shoot me but you never know. I shake my head. Moon openly stares at the green icebox I hold on my lap, and I realize it’s like a deformity, a third leg. Some people stare at it and others pretend it’s not there.
Have you found what you were looking for? he says.
Maybe.
There’s an unverified story going around, he says. Five days ago a beautiful woman with dark hair walked into an emergency room in Colorado Springs. She wore a long white coat and she was carrying a Styrofoam ice chest. She handed the ice chest to a nurse and walked away. She disappeared. The ice chest contained a viable human kidney. It was used to save the life of a little girl in Phoenix. Some people are calling the woman an angel.
That is a terrible story. It’s fucking nonsense. And it has nothing to do with me.
Moon looks to the east, at the colorless sky.
Every day, he says. The sun has to eat its way through clouds and smoke and poison.
Spare me, I say.
I danced with your wife once, he says. At the Christmas party last year. She told me you were in the bathroom and I danced with her. She said you were sick.
I close my eyes. She wore a little white dress. As smooth and tight as new skin.
Moon licks his lips and looks embarrassed. She told me her underpants were green velvet. This made me nervous and I offered to go see if you were okay. I thought you must have passed out in the toilet. She said you weren’t sick from drinking. She said you were sitting in the last stall with your gun in your mouth. She said you were losing your mind and every day you put the gun in your mouth and thought about it.
She was drunk, I say. The doctors said she wasn’t supposed to drink but she did.
She was dancing real close to me, says Moon. She was smiling and all I could think about were those little green panties and how it would be to slide them down around her ankles and I started to panic. I wasn’t like that. I went out in the parking lot and smoked a joint with some guys from the arson squad and they said they were going to the Black Heart to shoot pool and did I want to come. I was glad to go and an hour later I was lining up the two ball in the side pocket and it hit me. That maybe you were in that bathroom about to eat your own gun and I didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t try to save you from yourself or even go see if you needed saving because I was too busy trying to visualize your wife’s panties.
Moon looks at me. His face is miserable. A lot of guys wanted to fuck my wife. She was a terribly sexy woman. She could have fucked them, all of them. I wouldn’t have blamed her. But she never did. She waited for me to touch her again. I was too busy disappearing; I woke up next to her one morning and asked her who she was. I am tempted to put my arms around Moon and tell him not to worry, but I don’t. I want to know if he has my gun. I scoop up a handful of snow and pack it into a hard gray ball of ice.
I remember those panties. They smelled like eucalyptus.
She didn’t want me, he says. She was dying and she wanted you to love her.
I did love her. I loved her.
The next day I waited for my phone to ring, he says. For the voice that would tell me some poor bastard from Internal Affairs had blown his brains out and isn’t it a damn shame, ho ho ho.
Do you have my gun?
What fucking gun?
My registered weapon, a Browning nine millimeter. The gun that may or may not have killed Lucy. It disappeared from evidence, remember?
Is this some kind of confession?
This is a conversation. Let me put it this way. The gun disappeared from evidence and came into my possession. I had it, and now I don’t have it.
I don’t have your gun, Phineas.
I still have the ball of ice in my left hand. I give it to Moon and tell him to let it melt, to forget he saw me here. He doesn’t say anything and I know that he will let me disappear for now. But he will search Pooh’s apartment after I’m gone and he will question Eve. If he finds anything that points to me then he will forget about Lucy’s green panties. He will come after me without pity.
fourteen.
I ease the little Bug into the parking lot of Jude’s motel. There’s a red pickup truck parked crazily, sideways. It’s jacked up on fat tires with mudflaps that read: Jesus was a U.S. Marine. I don’t like the look of this but maybe it’s nothing. I’m breathing hard and the pain in my side has resumed its high-pitched whine. Moon made me nervous and my body is not well. I sit on the hood of my car to rest for a while and I find myself staring at the red truck. It’s a beauty. The phallic but nervously whiplike antenna for a police scanner and the requisite gun rack above the back windshield. A small animal skull hangs from the rearview mirror. The hood is painted to resemble the American flag, with Playboy bunnies in place of stars. I can’t wait to meet the owner. Then I notice the custom hood ornament: it’s Winnie-the-Pooh flashing a killer smile.
He’s with Jude. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner. Of course he would run to her. I climb the stairs to room 212. Air escapes my chest as if I’ve been punched. I sit down on the frozen steps. I don’t want to do this. I’m too tired. The taste of metal is gone from my mouth. When I saw Eve I wanted to kill him carefully. I wanted to use the tanto, to take him apart very slowly. Now I want to be done with him. I want him to walk out of room 212 with his hat in his hands and a big satisfied grin on his face. Then he will turn and see me, the gun in my hand. He will never hear the shot. And he will drop softly, like a scarecrow. The stuffing will come out of him and dogs will rise out of the snow to tear at his shoes. I feel unclean and I realize how badly I need a shave and a bath. I want to soak in painfully hot water and wrap myself in one of those thin white motel towels and lie down next to a woman. I want her to stroke my hair and whisper nonsense into my ear.
None of this happens. I sit there until I’m stiff with cold. I wonder what he’s doing in there. I can’t imagine Jude bothering to sleep with him. He’s so clumsy and foul. Of course, she slept with me and I’m hardly a prize. I smoke two cigarettes and watch the end of the sunrise. The sky turns the color of mucus streaked with dirt. Finally I knock on the door of room 212 and Jude throws it open. She is dressed for travel; her hair is sleek and pulled back. A white silk shirt buttoned to the throat with a big French collar. Dark red lipstick but no jewelry. Black pants that cling to her hips and thighs and flare at the ankles. She’s barefoot.
; Are you ready? she says.
I’m looking for Pooh.
He’s in the bathroom.
Her voice is flat and cold. As if she’s annoyed that I look like shit and I still haven’t kissed her. I hand her the icebox and smile. A gift, I say. She steps aside and I slip past her. I pull my gun and try the bathroom door. It’s locked and I glance at Jude. He likes his privacy, she says.
I poke the door. Pooh. Let’s go, boy. The bell tolls.
There’s no answer.
When did he get here?
I don’t know. Midnight, I suppose.
He’s not really in there, is he?
Kick it down if you don’t believe me.
She lights a cigarette, smiling. I lean against the door and look at her.
This isn’t a movie, I say. Doors are not so easy to kick down.
Jude rolls her eyes and sucks at her cigarette.
I talked to the cops, I say.
Oh, really.
They don’t seem to have my gun.
She smiles. That’s strange.
Someone has that fucking gun.
Who are you going to believe?
The door is compressed sawdust. I stab my knife in and wiggle it until the doorknob pops. Pooh is wedged naked between the wall and the toilet. His hair is wet. His skin is pale and turning blue. He sits in a small puddle of blood. There’s a wide gash on his left thigh; the femoral artery has been cut.
There’s not much blood, I say.
I did it in the shower.