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Roni was great with a plan. She didn’t know caution or danger, only what had to be done. She’d toss her hair over her shoulder and get her hands dirty. And by the looks of the mess she’d gotten herself, and us into, I’d say dirty was exactly the word for what she’d done. She’d put on that high, never-care giggle of hers and work her way out of it. Her technique worked on Mick and me, worked on her folks and Cal. It even worked on Tate to a degree.
I think that’s what killed her. Something she couldn’t flip her hair out of the way of and something she couldn’t giggle her way from under.
“Dunc?” Mickey was across the room flipping the pages. “There’s a room.”
“A what?”
“Room.”
I stepped closer to him, knowing I’d need to lean over his shoulder so he could show me. Words never came to Mickey for explaining some things. It was a room to him and any other word was wrong for it. Just the one word. The right one and that was all.
“See here,” he pointed at a tiny square. “See.”
I shook my head.
“Look again.” He persisted.
“Under the eyes?” I asked.
“Yep. We gotta get in that bathroom.”
My exasperation with him, with all of this shit, must have shown on my face. I couldn’t even form the words. And there was Roni in my head, flipping the raven’s wing of hair out of her face and giggling.
I almost wanted to giggle with her. Mickey didn’t get much credit for being smart from too many people, but the truth was the more cryptic the more he understood it. These words in this ledger are simple, little puzzles to him. He just had to put them together. He’d always been able to do that. Broken down into small pieces, Mickey would get just about anything. It was the big picture that was simply too much for him to handle.
“Well we can’t just waltz in there,” I said, still not knowing what under the eyes had to do with a room, but certain he would eventually tell me when he was able to put more words to the thought and spit them out in one big lump rather than one at a time.
I got behind the wheel, fielding Mickey’s questions about why we had to go back to my mom’s.
“Because she can get into the bathroom at The Hive. We can’t.”
“But Dunc. Why would she go to The Hive? She never goes there. Won’t that be suspicious?”
“Because my dad knows people there and they could go together. He’ll do this for me. I know he will.” My dad wanted back in my life and I knew he’d see this as the chance.
Mickey squirmed in his seat like he had to take a piss, and pulled his collar up around him against the cool of the car. Mickey could whine without uttering a word. All of his body language did it for him. He fingered the bruise my mother had left on him once again and looked some kind of pathetic riding next to me, pouting.
“Roni would know what to do.” He kept right on squirming.
I took this as a scolding from him; that on some level Mick was losing his faith in me to solve this. So while I wanted to tell him that she wasn’t as smart as she thought she was, or we wouldn’t be doing any of this shit, I just took the jab quietly. He might have been right. I was losing faith in me too, but Roni’s way sure as hell hadn’t worked a year ago.
My God, did I miss her though. For all her madness she lightened me up, gave me small hopes, included Mick and me in her big dreams. Inside I always knew they wouldn’t work out, but she could suspend my disbelief better than anyone. My disbelief hung on those electric wires right next to all her other wishes – up and out of the way when she was around.
“Wait in the car,” I told Mickey when we pulled up to the house. We didn’t need a Mom versus Mickey scene; we just needed to get this done.
I went in and wasted no time with the psycho family reunion shit. Despite my mother’s efforts to twist and manipulate it into some success on her part, Dad managed to control her long enough so I could tell them what I needed from them.
“You sure are going through a lot of trouble, Boy,” Mom said.
“Wouldn’t you if someone was trying to kill you?” I spit the words at her.
My father stood in the doorway between kitchen and family room. “Your mother would probably just thank them and ask them to hurry and get it over with.”
He had a point.
He stepped forward though and said, “Let’s do this tonight.”
I pulled the ledger from the inside pocket of my coat and walked to the kitchen table. Moving aside an empty vodka bottle, a full ashtray and the rest of the everyday clutter of a drunken housewife, I lay it out for them to see.
Mom swayed over as though she was reluctant, spewing the same negative crap she always did, then became mildly interested, and finally she was reading over my shoulder as I pointed out the clues Mickey’d found.
“Under the eyes,” she said with some recognition in her voice.
“You know what that means?” I was stunned.
“Sure. There’s a linen closet in the women’s bathroom. They keep cleaning supplies and stuff in it.”
“The eyes,” I prompted. Fuck! Is this like pulling teeth or what?
“A poster. Two big eyes are watching the women in the bathroom all the time. It’s always been sort of a joke, Peeping Tom sees all. See? And the poster’s on that door.”
“Ok, so I guess when we go later, you need to go in that closet. For some reason Mickey says it’s a room. So maybe see if it has a panel that opens up to something else, or…I don’t know.” I shook my head, shaking loose the idea that it all seemed a little too far-fetched, and skeptical to me. I wasn’t able to handle a stretch like a secret panel in a linen closet in a dive bar’s women’s bathroom.
“And look for what? You think the murderer is hiding in the broom closet or something?” She snorted like I was the obtuse one, sloshed a bit of vodka to the floor and leaned into Dad, obviously for balance, though she tried to play it off as affection.
“Jesus, Mom. Do you recall ever being clever in your whole life? If you do, draw on that experience and try real hard to do it again.”
“Easy, Duncan,” Dad said, resting a hand on my shoulder, “I’ll have her sober enough to do this by later tonight. I will.”
He pulled the drink from her hand, sat her firmly in a chair and grabbed her by the chin.
“We’ve suspected that there’s not a maternal bone in your body for years. But, you better try to find one and get hold of it, cuz your son is going to die if you fuck this up. Do you understand?”
Her eyes filled up at first and I thought she might cry. I was struck stupid at the sight of them. He, the freshly paroled con, and she, the pathetic drunk. These were my parents, my role models, and tonight, my accomplices. What the hell was I doing?
Mom broke the spell and instead of crying she chuckled. “I can handle it,” she slurred, as she reached for his crotch, got a handful and said, “I’ll use this bone.”
His hand went up high above his head, meaning to bring it down and slap her, and at that she cackled like a fool.
“Be serious you raving bitch!” He deflated though, before the urge to strike was too overpowering. He lowered his hand and shook it off, closing his eyes and sucking in a deep breath.
I grabbed the book from the table and turned to walk out of the house and their fucked-up lives forever when she yelled to me, “Oh baby, come back. I was just making a joke to lighten the mood.”
“Not everything needs to be lightened,” Dad said.
“Get your shit together, both of you.” I pointed at both of them, and while I looked Dad straight in the eyes and he looked back solidly, Mom swayed to some brain music she’d found to escape to and looked away. “And be ready if you’re going to help me. If you don’t think you can, then tell me right now so I can do this another way.”
Mom tugged her kimono and pushed her wild hair from her face; Dad glared at her.
“Don’t you dare ruin this,” he said it in a low scratched whisper, through clinched teeth. Some inkling of paternal love possibly surfacing for the first time since I was a toddler.
When I got back to the car Mickey was slumped and rocking.
“They’re in,” I said. “We’re good to go tonight at eleven.”
He just kept rocking.
“Mick?”
He looked up at me then, “Dunc. I really gotta pee.”
I laughed big and loud for the first time in many months.
“Why you laughing like that?” He asked, looking at me like I’d come unhinged.
“Cuz I thought you looked like you had to pee earlier, but that you were just nervous and whiny.” I laughed harder and couldn’t stop. Tears filled my eyes. My sides hurt. I couldn’t take a breath in.
“Duncan?”
I just kept laughing. I really did come unhinged. For all the times the tears wouldn’t come with grief, they seemed to have found their escape through laughter. The uncontrollable seizure I found myself in scared the hell out of me. I laughed and cried and seized, my face wet with tears, my body full of anguish and nameless emotions pouring out. The butterflies escaped from me. I gasped and got scared that it might not ever end, this massive purge of fear and hate and love and grief, tears and laughter of things lost and found, and all the bubbles I’d created to contain them bursting and flying out of me at once.
Through gasps for air when the barrage started to ease, I told Mickey that no one was around and he could just pee next to the car.
Then we went to make the rest of the plans. My disbelief firmly hanging from wire somewhere in Roni’s world for the duration of the night. I needed her hope to get through this, because my trust and faith resided, by necessity, in three of the screwiest people I have ever known.
He started to cry just steps from my mother’s door.
“Mick,” I said, but didn’t have more words, so opted to squeeze his shoulder instead. My head was a jar full of fireflies, all sparking and buzzing. I was dizzy and started to feel sick.
Mickey sniffed and wiped his sleeve across his face leaving a trail of tears and snot that he transferred with a swipe to the back of his jeans. “Why’d they do that, Duncan?”
I wasn’t sure if he meant my parents or the people that trashed his house. I didn’t have an answer. Seeing my father, hearing his words, watching my mother’s sick display had robbed me of all of my sense. What I really wanted to know, though, was why Rhonda did it.
She filled our heads with hope of getting out of Rushville, only to abandon us at a train station, holding the bag and cleaning up her damn mess – and what a fine mess it had turned into.
I got in the car and when Mickey got in next to me, red cheeked and puffy, I felt even more alone. I could have lived with her doing this to me, but there was no good reason to get Mickey involved.
I guess she couldn’t help herself. She liked being the porch light and having us be her hovering moths. We made her the center of our universe, and who was she to stop us?
I started the car. It rumbled to life and I turned the knob of the radio to silence the announcer. Gripping the steering wheel, all I could do was sit there and stare out the window. As urgent as our situation was, needing to get to Mickey’s house, finding out who was behind it all before they got to us, all I could think about was Roni. She wasn’t who we thought she was. As much as I hated that my father could have been right, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was. We didn’t know her at all. I punched the center of the wheel and shook the ache away while Mickey watched doe-eyed.
“Did Roni ever give you anything? Leave something at your house? Did she leave something that someone bad would have wanted?” I thought about her game, saying she left something at my place all that time ago and wondered if she’d done the same to him.
“She never came over. Once or twice maybe, ever.”
“Think Mickey. Did she leave anything?”
He looked wounded. I was disgusted with them both, and I pulled away from the curb and headed to his house.
“Where’s Mae?”
“Aunt Mae?” He asked, still in some stupor I couldn’t figure out.
“No. Mae West.”
He looked confused.
“Yes, Aunt Mae. Where is she?”
“I. I don’t know. I haven’t seen her. That’s weird, Duncan.” He fidgeted, “Oh man. I haven’t seen her. I don’t know where she is. Duncan. Holy shit. I don’t know. Oh man. Oh.”
“Mick.”
“Oh shit, man. Oh shit.”
“Mick!”
He grabbed his hair and pulled. Punched the dashboard and rocked in his seat saying “Oh shit” over and over.
“That bitch. Look what she’s done to you.”
He stopped. “Mae?”
“No. Rhonda. This is all her fault.”
He was stricken with terror then. I’d never said a bad word about Roni. Not when she dated that creep, Paul, not on the numerous occasions she stood us up unexplained and strolled in all innocent and apologetic, but obviously lying. Not even when she left us at the train station. I didn’t curse her name when her brother tried to blame me for her death, for the fire, or any of the other crap that had gone down in the last year.
I pulled to a stoplight, two blocks from Mickey’s place and put the car in park. I leaned against the headrest and covered my eyes with my palms. My father’s words kept jingling in the jar like pennies saved. I didn’t know her at all, and now we were in this mess of shit.
“Dunc.”
I ignored him. I was dizzy and sick. I was hurt. Angry. Betrayed. Pissed. I rubbed my hands against my eyelids until my eyeballs ached and dug my fingers until I thought my scalp would bleed.
“Dunc.” He said more seriously.
I’d had it with him, too, my inherited responsibility then felt the sledgehammer of guilt for thinking it.
Roni got herself mixed up with the wrong people and dragged us down with her. We meant nothing to her. I was ill thinking of my mom and dad together again, the things he said about Roni. How true it all sounded. I was in the middle of some sick moment of truth, some vile and disgusting snapshot of how screwed up our lives were because of her. Stuck in this truth where the man behind the curtain is revealed in our trashy small town version of Oz.
“Duncan!”
“For the love of Christ, Mickey! What?”
“Look at the house.”
I pulled my hands away and he pointed. “At the house,” he said again.
Two cars in front of the house, a police car and a brown sedan.
“What do we do?”
“I have no idea.” I rolled the window down for air. I needed to think. Fireflies. The fireflies in my head. The penny-saved thoughts, all jingling and flashing, metallic and buzzing in my head. Porch light. Roni.
“Well we can’t go there, I don’t think,” I said and closed my eyes to the unraveling world.
“We have to.”
“Ok. I know. Just give me a minute to think.”
He squirmed in his seat then slumped down so he couldn’t be seen.
He was hunched down in the foot well, too big for the space. He looked like an oversized pillow shoved into a too small pillow case. “What are you doing?”
“Cop’s lookin’ this way.”
“And you think hiding in the foot well makes my car disappear? Get up.”
I rolled the car through the stop sign and two blocks up, pulled in behind the sedan.
“When you get out, pretend you haven’t been here and have no idea what’s happening. Do you understand?”
He nodded, and stepped out of the car, rubbing his hands on his thighs as he walked up to the officer.
“What’s happening here?” he asked, cooler in tone than I had expected.
“Do you live here?”
“Yes, sir. Is something wrong?”
I approached Mickey’s side, the officer looked at me and recognition crossed his face. “You’re Duncan Manning.”
I nodded.
The officer looked back at Mickey. “I’m Reggie Sullivan. Your house has been vandalized, young man.”
“Is my aunt ok?” Mickey asked.
“Your aunt?”
“Yes, sir. I live with my aunt. This is her house. Is she ok?”
“I haven’t seen her. We got a call from a neighbor. Was your aunt supposed to be here?”
“I-I thought so.” A question rose in his voice, on the brink of panic. “Can I go inside?”
Sullivan swung his arm wide toward the door; Mickey stepped forward, up the steps and into the open door.
“So Duncan,” he said once we were alone, “you had a little arson problem a few days ago, and we got the call about a similar break-in at your house. I thought you were still in the hospital. We sent a squad car there to talk to you about your house.”
I nodded to let him know I was aware of my own house.
“Have you seen your place? It’s a real mess but it doesn’t look like anything is gone. You need to do an inventory if you haven’t yet.”
All I could do was stare at him.
“And your friend, here. Do you want to speculate what might be the cause here?”
“I wish I knew.”
Mickey came out.
“Anything missing?” Sullivan asked.
“Nothing that I can see.” He answered.
Mickey walked to my left side and faced Sullivan. “So what do we do now?”
Sullivan said. “With nothing missing and nothing broken, just messed up and thrown around, I don’t really know what we can do here. No door damage. The neighbor that called in,” he checked his notes, “a Mr. Parks said he just saw the door wide open, went to check if everything was okay, then called.”
“What about Aunt Mae?”
“If she doesn’t turn up in the next day or so, and after you’ve talked to her friends and any other relatives, call us at the station and file a missing person’s report.”
“With this mess of crime surrounding you guys, eventually you’re going to need to tell us what motivation someone would have to target you. Think about that and call me if you think of anything.” He handed me a card with his name and number.
I almost told him to question Cal Eastwood. It was on the tip of my tongue. I almost told him to investigate Tate and that shithole, Hive, but couldn’t. The only information I could give about either of them was a hunch and a prison tale from an ex-con. All I could think about was what my dad said about Roni, and some sick part of me wanted to find out for myself – a sick satisfaction in figuring out what she’d got us into and getting ourselves out of it. And I didn’t know what the motivation was. I had no idea what she’d led us into and before I went talking to cops about it, I had to know what it was.
As the officer opened his car door, I yelled to him, “Do you know who this car belongs to?”
He stopped and stepped back to me. “This car? It’s not familiar to you? Doesn’t normally park on this street?”
“No it doesn’t.” Mickey answered.
“Well let’s have a look.”
He wrote down the plate number, peeked in the window and said if he came up with anything on it, he’d let Mickey know then reminded me to call if I thought of anything. I wanted to yell to him as he drove away, “Rhonda Eastwood. It’s all about Rhonda Eastwood. You find out who killed her and you’ll find out who’s doing this to us.” But the words didn’t come. They just buzzed around in my head – dizzy fireflies, trying to make light.
After Sullivan drove away, Mickey went inside and waited at the threshold for me to follow. “Can you help me?”
“Sure,” I said.
Mickey grabbed trash bags from under the sink and we began to fill them with the debris spread around the house. We put cushions back on the couch and righted overturned tables and chairs.
Two hours later, the house looked like it should again. Mickey went to his room to get a bag of things because he didn’t want to stay in the house alone. He said he’d come to my place and we could do the clean-up there. I waited in the kitchen for Mickey to come out.
“Duncan! Come here.” His voice rose with excitement.
He was crouched on the floor in his closet. “A box.” He’d excavated it from the floorboard. When we were younger, Mickey used to hide stuff, mostly a stash of magazines, a bottle of whiskey, and snapshots he didn’t want lying around for Mae to find under a loose floorboard in his closet. Most of the time he would forget stuff or lose something and only remembered it later. He’d dig in the floorboard and retrieve it. This was one of those times.
My heart raced. “What’s in it, Mickey?”
“Some pictures of us and Roni and”
I cut him off. “I don’t want to see them. I’m too mad at her right now.”
“Well you shouldn’t be. She was our friend. She loved us. She didn’t do anything wrong.”
But she had and I knew it.
“When I was getting my duffle bag from my closet, I got in the floor. I just remembered the box, and the stuff in it. So I got it. I got the box and knew you’d be so happy when I remembered it. Cuz I also have a book.”
“A book? What book? Did she leave it there? Let me see it!”
He pulled the dusty lid from the red Nike box and handed me a book, curled and rubber-banded into a tube and stretched it toward me. “Roni gave it to me and told me to keep it safe. It has a bunch of numbers in it and I didn’t know what it was. That was a long time ago. I stuffed it in the floor. I never even remembered I had anything in the floor this time. I thought it was empty, but figured I better look, cuz you’d be mad if I forgot, and there it was!”
I pulled the rubber band from it and the book fell open. “It’s a ledger from the Hive. I don’t even know how to read this thing. Let’s take it to Larson at the store. He does ledger stuff all the time. He can help us.”
Mick’s pride lit up his face and he reminded me again of the fireflies. The buzzing, dizzy feeling in my head. “You have my fireflies,” I said.
“Your fireflies?”
“Don’t you remember when we were little? All the fireflies in the neighborhood would be in your yard. They all followed you. It was the weirdest thing. We all chased fireflies, but they were all attracted to you. You didn’t have to chase them, they wanted to be by you. Remember?”
“Uh huh.” He sat on the floor and started tying his shoe. I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say, and he wasn’t really listening, but I kept talking.
“Well all day today I’ve had fireflies scrambling in my head, making me dizzy and sort of sick. They wanted out because they wanted to be by you, and look, you’re all lit up. I think they found you again.”
“What does that mean?’
“I don’t really know. I just know I feel better, and you look more like you are supposed to look. You’re bright again.”
He pushed himself off the floor and clapped my shoulder. He took the box from the bed and shoved it in his duffle, I think hopeful I would come around and want to see the pictures in the box. “You ready to go?”
“Yep. Let’s go.”
I watched every car pass with increasing paranoia. The cold breeze against my bare legs heightened my self-awareness as I wondered if I was being watched, perhaps even hunted. Sitting there so conspicuously in my hospital gown and coat, I may as well have had a bull’s eye painted on my back. The road showed no sign of Mickey, and without a watch, I had lost track of time.
Each person I saw became a suspect. A thin woman pushing a stroller seemed least likely, but as she eyed me with her own curiosity, my agitation made me feel as though I looked guilty, therefore I felt it.
My mind skipped like a tape that had been rewound too many times as I tried to piece together what had happened. My last full memory was the pictures; the last scraps I had of Roni were in that garage.
I had written my name on that cushion because she would slink into the seat by the armrest whenever I stood up. She laughed when I penned my name to it. I bounded onto the cushion with both feet, marker in hand, “Out of my way woman!”
Her photos lived in a box on a shelf. I had removed them from the house to get them out of sight. Signs of her were everywhere and allowed my grief to get a choke hold. I wanted them gone from view. The garage seemed to be where her memory lived the strongest anyway. Who would have known that later I would spend so much time there to be closer to her? I should have kept them in the house. If I had, they would not have been cooked to gray ash.
The garage also housed her Christmas ornaments; the ones we always used to decorate her stolen trees. When she first moved from her parents’ house to her own apartment, she could not afford a Christmas tree. We got one for her that Christmas and had every year since. This year she didn’t get one, and that tree ended up gray ash just like the pictures. I wished I hadn’t made that bonfire Christmas morning, that there was still something somewhere of her. The handsaw Mickey never seemed to remember was resting on the workbench, where I’d left it Christmas morning. I laughed to myself as I wondered why I hadn’t used it to smash the window. I would have saved myself a lot of blood and pain if I had. It had simply not occurred to me. Nothing occurred to me that day; not how to save myself, not to grab the photos. Hindsight may be 20/20, but it is also cruel.
As I fast-forwarded the tape, scratchy fades and blurs of smoke, and Mickey came to focus, but only briefly before the memory of cold snow on blisters, and blood frozen to my elbow emerged then vanished to be replaced again with Roni. The raven hair, the smell of shampoo and too-sweet lip gloss, the way she touched my cheek to draw me to her for a gentle peck of a kiss. She was the wish-hanger who lived somewhere above the Earth and was willing to jump from a cliff if it would allow her to feel the breeze like never before.
I remember thinking only of her and all the pieces of her that disappeared with my old garage. Then fast forward to the present, the strange visitor, my mother looking like death, and how each person bore a hole through me with stares as they passed by. I wondered which one of them was the failed assassin, and if any of them were Roni’s successful one. Maybe my arsonist/assassin and her killer were the same, and if this was true, I would have to find out what we had both done to deserve death. And I would have to live with the guilt that I had survived while she could not escape it.
An old man, hair grayed at his temples under a crumpled fedora, shuffled past. He slowed to stare at me with apprehension. His path arced when he neared me as though he feared I’d jump from my seat and attack him if he got too close. How deranged I must have looked. My appearance, while I hadn’t seen a mirror, was apparent in his raised caterpillar eyebrows and slack jaw. I raked my hair with my hand to tame what I assumed was a wild mess.
When he got past me, he shuffled faster with his eyes trained on me continuously, and made his way into a phone booth.
I rewound the tape again to the big men I had known in my life. The Martin brothers were certainly large, but Robbie and David only traveled as a set, never alone that I had ever seen. Tate was a Fat Albert, not an Arnold.
The nurse would have known Cal as a police officer and I wouldn’t have the need to play this guessing game if it were him. For a moment I wondered if Cal had tried to off me for his notion that I had something to do with Roni’s death – one more thing to investigate.
My father was a large man, but I hadn’t seen him in years. Last I heard he was still serving his sentence in the state penitentiary for a botched burglary. Fine role model. When Cal said my mother was a drunk and my father a criminal, he wasn’t lying. I couldn’t deny it, though I still believed that I was different than they were.
My grandmother used to say that the apple fell from the tree but rolled down the hill and across the road. I wanted desperately to believe her and Roni helped me to by telling me that Mickey would be my redemption. Mickey made me have to be a better person.
This Arnold-big man seemed to visit in close proximity to when my mom visited. I wondered if she would have maybe seen this person either coming or going. Once Mickey got back I’d have to pay her a visit, though nothing could be further from what I wanted to do.
She was never as happy as when I moved out of her basement; my father was already gone and she was free, having divorced him when he got sent up.
I was the child that forced her to be an adult. She resented me for tying her to a home and a husband that she did not want or love. Her visit, I am certain, was because of the publicity.
That I had to see her at all clinched my insides into fists. The idea of walking into that dingy house, stained with cigarette smoke and overwrought with the stench of unwashed dishes sickened me. The smoke alone was more than I could even consider as each breath was like swallowing broken glass. But if she knew something, I had to find out what. As much as I didn’t like living without Roni, I wasn’t ready to die, in a garage or otherwise.
Mickey would refuse to go with me to Mom’s. My mother’s wrongs against me were primarily those of neglect; she ignored my very existence whenever possible, particularly after my dad got sent away. It was easier to lose me once Dad wasn’t there. To Mickey, however, her wrongs were much more hateful, and he, much less capable of ignoring or forgetting them.
Once he was wounded severely enough, Mickey would finger the bruise anew every time he was reminded of it – reliving the pain and refocusing the blame. If he walked into that house he would poke and prod himself to find the sore spots and reclaim the ache and anger she had left. He would feel them all over again then sulk about it for days.
Once when he had come over to pick me up for work, she answered the door and spewed some horrible vodka-soaked words about him being unwanted.
“You again?” she slurred. “You’re comin’ here an awful lot lately.” She walked to the sofa and sat.
“You know what I heard? You were raised by your granny cuz your momma didn’t want a retard for a kid, then she run off with some man and never came back. Can’t say I blame her. We don’t wantcha either. Go on. Duncan will have to so-sociate with you outside of my house. You hear me? Go on. Get out. Go back to your granny. Oh, that’s right, she’s dead.”
She cackled a laugh that spurred her on and she opened her mouth to spew some more when I ran up the stairs and told her to shut up. I dragged Mickey away.
He didn’t speak for an hour then just kept repeating, “You don’t want me either? My aunt doesn’t want me. My Gram was the only one, now she’s gone.” He cried until his face had gone red, swiping at the tears, frustrated at their defiance to fall when he wanted them to stop.
I had to baby him for weeks afterwards to convince him that I still wanted him and that I was his family now. He stayed with me nearly every night those first couple of weeks, sneaking him into the basement when my mom was asleep after our shift ended at IGA, and out again when she was out of the house. But his aunt said she needed him to help her around the house and wanted him to come home. Mostly I think she wanted his income. She would send him out for groceries and to pay her utilities and sometimes even the mortgage without ever giving him a dime to cover the expense and she had him paying rent for his room.
My mother was a horrible woman when she was piss-drunk. I could forgive her what she’d done to me, and even appreciated that she ignored my existence but I struggled with ever speaking to her again after what she did to him.
I didn’t want to go to her house any more than Mickey would want to but I had to go.
Mickey ran to me, out of breath.
“Hey Duncan. I’m back.”
“So I see, Mr. Obvious.”
His cheeks flushed, “I parked over there where no other cars were around so I wouldn’t hit anybody.”
He leaned down and rested his hands on his knees trying to catch his breath. I stood to go with him.
“Wait,” he said. “When I went in to your house,” he huffed for breath.
“Take your time, Mick. What’s wrong?”
“When I went to your house, Dunc, the door was already open and all kinds of stuff was thrown all over. I grabbed some clothes but forgot ‘em. I wanted to get out as fast as I could.”
I cupped his elbow, looked to the hospital where someone was pointing toward us and told Mickey to run.
My plans to see my mother would have to wait until later. I had to see my house.
When we got there we walked into a disaster area.
My sofa was overturned, each shelf, drawer and cabinet had been gone through and their contents vomited onto the carpet. My bedroom had been ransacked as well; my closet was emptied onto my bed and floor.
I could only stare in surreal disbelief and did not know where to begin the cleaning effort.
Mickey picked up my clothes from the arm of the recliner by the door and thrust them into my arms. I stared at them unsure what I was supposed to do with them.
“Put ‘em on,” Mickey said.
I went into the bathroom, dropped my coat to the floor and took off the hospital gown. I examined my back in the mirror, then washed my face, and ran a wet comb through my hair. Once I was dressed I snapped the hospital ID bracelet from my wrist and walked to the kitchen.
Mickey sat on a chair at the table, ghostly white.
“What is it?” Because what more could have happened in so short a time?
He lifted something from the table and stretched it toward me. It was a picture of Roni.
“It must not have made it to the garage with the others,” I said.
“I didn’t want to see it,” Mickey said. “It makes me too sad.”
“Me too.” But I only mumbled the words.
It was a picture taken in the back yard. Summer time. We had cooked out on the grill for the fourth of July. She was in a bikini top and cut-off denim shorts. Her hair was pulled back to a ponytail. Her eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, but I knew from the size of her smile that her eyes would have been squinted. She held a bottle of beer to the camera in a toast.
Behind her in the photo, Mickey was watching her. His head fell to one side and I imagined that when he saw the picture in the mess on the floor, he remembered seeing her tanned skin and the thin blue tie of her bikini top, the indention of her spine and the curve of her hip above her shorts. No wonder he didn’t want to see it.
That day the grocery store was closed. Dean and Tom came by for a few drinks, and a couple of the waitresses from The Hive stopped by for drinks after we had eaten.
Roni got to my house first, helped set up, sliced tomatoes, shucked corn, and opened containers of pasta and potato salads.
We worked in tandem. I prepared the meat for the grill, got the fire going, iced the beer and two-dollar wine. She rolled past me to get to the fridge and slipped a hand around my waist for a slight squeeze.
I turned and brushed my hand down her bare back as she walked away.
Rushville always put on a good fireworks show and we could see them from the back yard. As darkness approached and mosquitoes started to swarm, she asked for a shirt.
“Middle drawer. You know where they are.”
She did the strangest thing then. She walked around to the front of the house instead of going in the back door. She returned without a t-shirt moments later, claimed to have gotten sidetracked then walked into the house to get it.
Our friends started to leave around midnight, a few hanging on until two with a pick-up card game at the kitchen table. I told Roni she could stay the night. Mickey was staying, too. But she insisted she needed to go and promised to return the shirt.
She said her good-bye with a tight squeeze around Mickey’s soft middle. He held her like a child would a kitten, resting his head against her dark hair and giving her a gentle stroke. She purred.
She gave me a playful wink, touched my cheek and instead of planting the slight peck of a kiss I usually got, she pulled my ear to her lips.
“A little game, Duncan. I left something for you. I’m not going to tell you where, or what, or even why. It’s a secret I need you to keep.”
The card game rolled on.
“Ante up, Manning”
“Go on and play,” she said.
By the time the game was over, I had forgotten all about her secret I was supposed to keep. She never spoke of it again. Until I stared at that picture, it wasn’t even a memory. She was always saying off-the-wall things. It had meant nothing to me at the time. Remembering it now gave me a chill. Something was going on with her way back then and I didn’t even see it.
Someone else knew about her secret, I was certain. The same person that went on a treasure hunt through my house, most likely.
I stared at the picture for a while longer, pressed it to my chest then shoved it in my coat pocket. A remnant of my girl had been found. I would not lose this one. I could keep her with me always.
“Let’s go.” I said to Mickey.
“What about this mess?”
“Later” I said, already walking to the door.
He trailed behind me. “I can’t go out there!” He ducked back.
“What is wrong with you?”
“TV truck. I already talked to them once. I’m no hero. I hate being on the TV. They say stupid stuff about me being brave, and then show me saying something dumb. I hate them. Please don’t make me go out there.”
“Go out the back door and run to your aunt’s house. I have to go somewhere by myself.”
“By yourself?” His insecurity clung to the words. “You need me to protect you, don’t you? Someone’s trying to hurt you. I don’t want you to be alone.”
“I’ll be okay. I’m just going to my mom’s.”
He shook his head gravely, then slipped out and bolted through the back yard.
What Roni hid in my house may still be here, or the people who broke in got it. Or maybe she’d taken it with her some other time. I wondered if it was the same thing that was in her plastic container.
The TV truck was gone.
I patted my pocket, feeling for her photo and walked out the door.
A broken spring in my cushion poked at me, but I preferred the pain of my idleness to movement. I told myself I wanted to feel it because I wanted to feel something, though I squirmed against it to get comfortable. The stack of pictures rested on the cushion beside me, and with every drink from my beer can, I attached another memory to each still life. When I got to the picture of the three of us, I was well into the six-pack. The cans I’d thrown toward the trashcan were scattered about the garage – I missed every shot.
Roni posed for the camera. Her arms wrapped over the shoulders of Mickey and me. I was looking at her with some sort of adoration and worship which creased the corners of my eyes and parted my lips. I liked to believe it was a picture that proved how much I loved her. Mickey had his chest puffed out – some big, proud moment. He looked at both of us. In whatever way we were individuals, it showed, but the way we were three was most evident from Mickey’s expression.
When I looked at the picture I saw that Roni loved herself more than she loved us. I didn’t hold it against her because how could she not? I saw that I loved her more than I loved anyone or anything else. And I saw that Mickey, looking at the two of us, loved how we were three. He looked at us as though Roni and I were his very own couple.
I threw my fifth empty can and bounced it off the rim, opened another and stared at Roni. Some quiet part of her was ready to pounce when that picture was taken. I could see it in the photo, though I couldn’t see it before.
She broke us when she walked into that train station carrying a thrown-together bag of her things, her container of rainy day money, and our dreams of getting out of Rushville.
As many times as I thought through the scene, I could never make sense of how it all came together. She always talked about getting out. What made that night different? Maybe I was looking at the good of her so much that I blinded myself to the warning signs that something was wrong.
I ran my fingers over the slick surface of the photo, around the edge of her face, and remembered the apologetic and relieved look she gave over her shoulder to us where we stood by the open trunk. I was holding Mickey’s arm to keep him from running to her. Something in her gaze seemed to crush under the weight of his outburst and she turned away, never to look back.
She had left me with the pieces of a tangled up Mickey, my own heartbreak, and what would soon be the guilt of not running after her.
From the moment Mickey panicked, “What just happened? Where’s she going? We have to go, Duncan! She can’t go without us. Why are you just standing there?” until four days later when Mickey and I arrived back in town to the devastating news of her death, all I could think about was what I was going to do next and how I was going to make it without her.
It had been all down hill since. Mickey wanted to go to Roni’s haunts and pretend she still existed. I wanted to wallow in her cruel absence. The void was pure misery, especially on days like this, where I hid from the world and drank away the pain, only to replace it with a broken sofa spring digging into the middle of my back.
I tried to dull her absence by creating my own.
I heard a thump outside and assumed it was Mickey. He always knew where to find me.
“I’m in here,” I yelled, but when the door didn’t open, I disregarded the noise as something random – a branch in a breeze or an animal scurrying.
I closed my eyes and thought over the details one more time. She never made it on the train. Her ticket was purchased, but she never boarded.
When she was found, she still had her bag of clothes, but the plastic container was gone. I wondered again what was in the container. Was it just money or a secret that needed keeping? If it was money, where did she get it and who had taken it?
The four days Mickey and I were gone were the days we searched. We drove from the station and stopped at the Hive for a drink. That’s when we decided to go back and find out where she had gone. The man at the ticket counter remembered her and told us she bought a ticket for Memphis. We drove after her.
“Mick, she had to get away, but what if she needs us? We should go.”
We spent three days in Memphis searching high and low for her, only to return home and find out she never boarded.
Her body was found in a field twenty miles from Rushville. The man at the station didn’t recall anyone else in the station. When he spoke to the police, he only recalled our return to find her. We were the faces he remembered, and then we had to explain our four day absence.
The alibis we had of people in Memphis who saw us, people at the gas station in town before we left, and Mr. Wilson, a regular at The Hive, were enough to keep us from further suspicion in the eyes of the law, though Cal had a different take.
I slipped into an alcohol-sleep, and in the dream that followed I could still see her waving. The last moment we would see her.
We were out of town and still unaware that we had lost her for good. We were not allowed to attend her funeral. Because our names had not yet been cleared with alibis, the family requested we not attend. And we never got our good-bye, only the spastic grope of desperation as she walked out of our lives. We never got to see the worry on her face fade.
I awoke gasping and gagging to breathe. The smoke was an overpowering wall of haze. I choked, and ran toward the side door closest to where I was sitting at the back of the garage. My drunkenness slowed my reaction and the confusion of the fire overcame any semblance of clear thinking. My vision failed in the gathering gray of the smoke pouring in, but I saw a flash of orange when a ceiling beam caught flame and the panic set in fully. I fumbled over the door and pulled the doorknob. It wouldn’t even turn.
I pulled my t-shirt over my nose and felt my way along the wall, dragging my hands over the shelves to my left to feel my way. Tools clinked to the floor as my hands shuffled across them. The rush and crackle of the flames grew more insistent.
At the end of the shelves were the workbench and the window above it. As I pulled my shirt off, the heat scorched my skin. I wrapped the shirt around my hand and smashed it into the glass.
When a shard stabbed me through the wrapped cloth, I realized there was no escape over the jagged edges of glass still poking up from the frame. And the fire raged more fiercely with the air I’d allowed in.
The flame swirled furiously in the beams above my head; licking upward, it devoured the wooden structure of the ceiling. I feared a collapse as the smoke funneled out the window. It, too, was nearly consumed.
It was only a matter of time before gasoline and other flammables would explode, and me with them. The billowing smoke burned my eyes and throat. I scrambled to the front of the garage, fumbling in the heat and smoke for the release to raise the car entrance door. My hand rested on the hot metal of the latch; blisters formed instantly.
I twisted the latch but the door wouldn’t budge. I would have to exit over the broken glass of the window and hoped the frame would hold long enough.
Then I heard Mickey yell from the back of the garage, “Duncan, are you in here?”
“I’m over here,” I yelled back to him.
“Keep talking so I can find you.”
My throat burned with every word, “the door latch. I’m by the latch.” I coughed to the point that I thought I would vomit.
I fell to my knees where I could breathe easier, and started to crawl toward his voice, sharp pain shot up my arm from the cut on my wrist. Blood pooled each time my palm pressed to the concrete floor. Ash and red hot embers began to fall from the ceiling landing on my bare back; I writhed against the pain but kept crawling, feeling the sticky warmth of blood under my hand.
Mickey gripped my shoulder. I wheezed as he pulled me to my feet and carried me through the garage to get me out the side door.
Sirens screamed toward us as he plopped me onto the frozen lawn. He took off his coat and wrapped it over my shoulders. We watched the garage burn beyond salvage.
“What the hell happened?” he asked. He bent down with his hands on his knees heaving air into his exhausted and smoke-filled lungs.
“I have no idea. I heard a noise outside and thought it was you, the next thing I know the whole ceiling is in flames.”
Mickey held up a shovel. “This was stuck in the dirt and the handle was lodged under the doorknob.”
The fire department showed up just as two small explosions burst from inside the now-consumed structure.
I lay down on the lawn, chest and throat raw from smoke inhalation, and cradled my injured arm over my chest.
I could only assume that someone believed I knew too much. I was prone to an active imagination. The one who murdered Rhonda was attempting to murder me, I thought.
A dull beep spidered into my consciousness as I slept and I struggled against its persistence to wake me. Once I opened my eyes, the soft gray tone of the hospital room eased me into reality.
Mickey was curled in the bedside chair, flopped to one side with his neck impossibly kinked to his shoulder.
I cleared my throat and he jumped, rubbed his neck, wiped a bit of drool from the corner of his mouth and smiled.
“You’re awake!”
“Hey buddy,” I said with a raspy ache in my throat.
“Someone tried to kill you, Duncan.” He stood and approached the bed. “They destroyed your garage.” He rubbed a hand over his hair and looked afraid with the wide eyes and high, wrinkled brow of a child.
I nodded and closed my eyes as I swallowed hard, grimacing with the pain.
All I could think about were the pictures of Roni I would never see again.
I heard a crash three aisles over and went to investigate.
“Shit!” Mickey cursed and chased the red cans like chickens around a coup. They rolled the length of the aisle in all directions. Mickey spun with them, as though he thought if he stopped them fast enough, he could undo their falling. That instinct to catch something before it falls had kicked in, only too late. And he was unsure where to even start picking them up.
“Shit again,” he said in a near-whisper, to himself and finally stood still.
“Mick, what’re you doing?” I stood at the end-cap with my hands on my head, smiling at my goofy friend.
“Oh hey, Dunc. I was just stocking this and tipped the box of Spaghettios. Help me?”
I laughed, “I’m just headed to the back. The frozen food truck is here.”
His posture sagged, “Oh. Okay, Am.”
Mickey took to calling me “Am” at work, ever since I got the Assistant Manager job at IGA. He used it to distinguish between his friend, Duncan, talking to him, and his shift manager talking to him. It’s how he kept the two of me straight.
He thought he was clever, and I didn’t discourage him. Rhonda liked that he gave me a nickname. With her, “Oh Mickey, it’s perfect for him,” I was stuck with it.
Since her death, she had become a new conscience in my head. My own, not so refined or defined, had been pushed aside, and a very distinct Roni set of values had transplanted in its place. I let him call me “Am” because she liked it when she was living. Now that she was gone, her conscience told mine it was the right thing to do, even if I thought it was silly. If I didn’t let him, her conscience would put mine in a guilt choke-hold. My own conscience still hadn’t recovered from the Christmas tree bonfire debacle. She slapped me around good for that one.
Mickey started to pick up the cans and I walked away, satisfied that he could handle it.
Stocking shelves at the IGA was a part-time job in high school that turned into a full-time job after graduation so I could sock money away for college. After a couple years of working, I realized I had no interest in more school. Mickey wasn’t going and neither was Rhonda. She started as a cashier with us at IGA. Then she got a better paying job for Tate, keeping the books for his restaurant and bar, The Hive. That Mickey and Rhonda were still in town was reason enough for me to stay, too. We were a package deal.
Rushville is a small town. There aren’t many jobs, so I stayed on at the IGA and used the money for rent so I could move out from my mom’s basement.
After three years of stocking shelves, they put me on third shift. The shipments would come in and we could stock the shelves through the night when we wouldn’t be in the way of the customers. Mr. Larson promoted me to assistant manager and it seemed it was going to be my career, rather than the stop-through I had intended it to be.
I pushed through the metal doors and helped the driver unload the truck. Dean came back from stocking the deli and helped me sort the pallets.
“Ok, looks good,” I said.
Dean pulled the pallets into the freezer, leaving the product, still to be stocked, accessible for stocking later and I walked to the floor to check on Mickey.
A stray Spaghettios can had rolled against the butcher’s case and I leaned down to pick it up. That’s when I heard the voices, and stopped mid-stoop, to listen.
“I don’t know,” Mickey said. There was a terror in his voice.
“Now, Mickey, I know that’s not true. Why don’t you just tell me everything you do know?”
“But…we already told ya everything. I swear.” Mickey stammered and sounded as though he may cry. I pictured his full face gone red, his eyes wet.
“I don’t mean to scare you. I don’t think you did anything wrong, buddy, but Roni deserves to have the people responsible for her death pay for it.”
Cal, the bastard.
I realized I was still hunched over an aisle away and stood, took a deep breath, and approached their aisle.
“Roni deserves it, Mickey. If Duncan did something to her, we need to put him in jail.”
“No,” Mickey said, “Duncan didn’t do anything. Roni just…”
“Hi Cal,” I interrupted.
Mickey was backed up against the shelves, grasping a box of Instant Spuds to his chest, his knuckles whitened by his grip, face red and pained.
Cal stood over him. He was taller than Mickey by a few inches. He used his extra height to bare down over Mickey, who was shrinking to the floor.
I walked to them, and rested my hand on Mickey’s shoulder. I felt him relax in my grip. Cal stepped back and I eased Mickey to me. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Get away from him.”
“I was just leaving,” he said. “I’ll talk to you again soon, Mickey. I know you have something to tell me.” He rested his hand on his holster, tapped his fingers against the black leather, then turned on his heels and walked away.
Mickey sniffled, still clutching the box of spuds.
“What did he say to you?” I rested my hands on his shoulders and made him look me in the eye.
“Just about Roni and you. He wanted to know about the night…” he had never been able to say the night she died, so rephrased, “that night last year.”
“And you told him…?”
“I told him nothin’, Dunc. I swear.” He looked panicked all over again. He stared hard into my eyes, pleading with me to be convinced he’d done nothing wrong. “At least I don’t think I did. Shit, I can’t remember. He scared the hell out of me.” He smacked his forehead, punishing himself.
“Okay, buddy, okay. Calm down. I’m not blaming you. He shook you up pretty good, why don’t you go on break.”
He relaxed. “It was just like that night, Duncan. Just like that night when he was yelling at us at her house. Remember? It freaked me out.”
“I know.” I squeezed his shoulders then dropped my hands. “Go on break.” Then I started stocking the shelves.
That night last year. It wriggled in my brain all over again. I pushed it away as I pulled the boxes of E-Z Potatoes to the front of the shelf. Damn Cal. He didn’t like us when Roni was alive; he hated us now.
Grief takes many forms. Mickey clung to me in his grief. Feeling like he could keep Rhonda near if he kept me near.
I spent hours staring at pictures, drinking too much, reeling from her absence, talking to the conscience she’d transplanted in my head. I took care of Mickey for her and he had grown to depend on me being both Roni and Duncan. I let memories of her consume me.
Even in defending Mickey tonight, with Cal’s threats hovering over him, he looked at me like he had looked at her so many times. She was his big defender. She was the one who had taken care of him. I was a sad surrogate in her place.
Cal turned his grief to hate and had spent the last year making certain we knew it was all aimed at us because we were the last people to see her alive.
***
Rhonda sat up and the wing of tangled hair more resembled a nest. She untangled and straightened it the best she could and pulled her feet from my lap. Mickey readjusted in his seat to make room for her to sit.
If you’re serious, then let’s go,” she said. “Right now.”
Mickey smiled but the uncertainty did not leave his face.
I said, “Okay, then.” We drove to her house.
Mickey asked, “Where to?”
Roni only laughed. The joy she felt presented itself as a glow that overwhelmed her face.
I took the laugh to mean she didn’t even know where, but she was excited to be going… wherever it might have been.
We pulled into her yard and filed out of the car. She dug keys from her pocket and slipped one into the lock, telling us to stay quiet with one slender finger to her lips. The glow had turned devious as her excitement grew.
Once inside, she said, “I’ll be right back. Stay here.”
We heard her banging around, then footsteps overhead. She was in the attic. More banging – drawers slamming. Mickey and I did not speak. My stomach had curdled though, and the sour taste of fear crept up. I felt like a coward; I was afraid of the unknown adventure she wanted for us.
She bounded down the hall with a suitcase, tilting to one side as she carried it. The weight of it nearly toppled her and she bounced off the wall of the narrow hallway.
She put it down by my feet.
“We’ll get your stuff on the way out of town. I just have one more thing to get,” she said, and escaped to the kitchen, returning in seconds with a sealed plastic container. She held it up to us, “Rainy Day Fund.”
Mickey picked up her suitcase while she turned off the light. I walked out the front door and held it open for them.
Cal pulled up just as we had put her suitcase in the trunk. “What are you doing?”
“We’re leaving,” She answered. The cool tone in her voice angered him.
“With these idiots? Are you kidding me? You’re not going anywhere, Rhonda.”
She approached him like a cat circling the legs of her owner. “Calvin.” She circled him. He stood still as she moved behind him and back to the front to face him. “Cal,” she said again. She was confident in her ability to shut him down.
He didn’t move. ”This town is killing me slowly. There is nothing for me here. I have to get out. My friends are taking me.”
He was not capable of saying anything to her in anger just then. A spell, I thought. The deep magic Roni had over everyone kept anger away.
Instead, he looked to us. “You assholes. What have you done to my sister? Put some stupid idea in her head that she has to leave. What are you going to do to her when you get away from here? You don’t even have a plan. I swear to God, you are not taking my sister anywhere! Do you hear me?”
He rushed up on Mickey and shoved him. “Hey Retard, do you hear me?”
Mickey tumbled to the ground.
I ran to his side. Cal kicked me in the ribs as I bent to Mickey.
“And you, Manning. Total loser. Criminal for a dad, drunk for a mom. No good. If you think you are going to go anywhere with an Eastwood, you’re in for a rude awakening.” He kicked again, knocking the air from my lungs. I gasped, and Rhonda pounced.
“Goddammit! Get away from them. Step away from my friends and go. It was my idea. I have to get out of here, now!” She swung at him with her purse. “These are the best friends I’ve ever had. They are my family now.”
Cal cowered under her rage with his arms raised to protect his face.
“Go, you ape!”
Mickey and I dove into the car, leaving the door open for Rhonda. She swung again, smacking Cal on the side of his face with her purse before she jumped in the car and we drove off.
Her urgency frightened me. This was not the wish-hanger of earlier that night. This was someone desperate. I hadn’t seen it before and I wondered what she was running from. She wasn’t just running to a freedom; she was also running from an enslavement. I worried, but took comfort that it would all be over soon. We would be gone.
Rhonda said, “Your place. Then we’re driving to Springfield to the train station.”
She turned to look in the rearview mirror, afraid her brother was in pursuit. When she saw that she was free of him, she rested her head on Mickey’s shoulder and made a soft apology for her brother.
Mickey stared out the window and seemed to address the night sky, “I’m not a retard.”
“I know, baby. I know. I’m so sorry,” Roni said.
I wanted to answer, as well; I wanted to reassure him, too, but I could never make him feel as good as Rhonda could. She was Mickey’s defender. On that night, she was even mine. It meant more coming from her, I thought.
In that dark moment as we drove away from her house, we shared a silence that made us more together than ever before. Not a silence of loneliness, fear, or even of discomfort. Our mutual silence bound us to the same moment and we each relished the first inklings of a new freedom. A freedom, first for Rhonda, and then for us.
***
We all handle grief differently. I not only grieved the loss of Rhonda, I grieved the loss of the dream she thrust upon us; the dream we reluctantly held – the dream that took root like so many pines – the dream that had died with her.
Thirty-five minutes had passed and the boxes were now empty. Mickey hadn’t returned.
First, angry with him for taking such a long break, I stomped to the break room. But once I saw he was not there, I went to the back room.
“Dean, have you seen Mickey?”
“Nope.”
I ran to the wide-open receiving dock door. “Mickey!” I yelled into the alley.
No answer. My fear for him, and the sense that I had failed Rhonda by not being there for him, swarmed around me. I could only imagine that Cal had gotten a hold of him.
I left the store in the care of Dean and went out into the cold February night in search of my friend, my surrogate responsibility. I went looking for Rhonda’s Mickey.
Mickey scrambled around my garage, lifting one tool after another and setting each one aside as he ruled it out in his search for the perfect cutting implement. I fell onto the couch in the corner and raised the bottle of wine to my mouth. The strawberry soda of wines had a tinny aftertaste from the screw-off cap. I’d grown to regard it as flavor you can only get from a $2 bottle.
A look of EUREKA streaked across my friend’s face then faded with my disapproval. “It’s two in the morning. We’re not using a chainsaw.”
I closed my eyes against the onset of dizziness and waited.
“We have to cut it down by hand?” He pushed some boxes aside and raised an orange handle. “Ax?” He swiped his shirt sleeve across his brow.
My non-reply answered his question.
The same scene, in different variations had taken place for the last six years. Each year Mickey searched for the perfect tool, only to arrive half an hour later at the same conclusion; we just needed a handsaw. I had always let him look though. In previous years it humored me that he hadn’t yet seen the handsaw and pieced together that it was what we used the previous year, and the year before that. But this year wasn’t nearly as funny.
“Handsaw,” I said with my patience at an end.
“Handsaw?” he asked.
I sat up, against the pull of the tattered green cushion. Though it was Mickey who donated the couch to the garage, it was my cushion, as it was the one I had written “Duncan” across the top of with Magic Marker. I raised my leg for leverage. Mickey skittered around the garage while I swigged from the bottle again. Once finished off, I tossed it into the metal garbage can in the corner. The hollow boom echoed through the can.
“Jesus, man. Are you trying to wake up everyone?”
This from the guy who wanted to use a chainsaw.
I grabbed a rope from the cluttered shelf, Mickey found the saw and we headed out to find the perfect Christmas tree.
We drove, looking into each yard we passed. Mickey scanned each one carefully with interest and hope.
“Nope,” he said as we came up on each home that didn’t have a pine tree in the yard. “Nope. Nope. Nope.” He did eventually stop giving the play-by-play on every yard, and unlike any other year, rode on in silence.
“It’s freezing in here,” he said at last.
“The heater isn’t working right.”
Mickey pulled his coat around him, paying particular attention to closing his collar high around his neck. I did the same.
He leaned his head to the window, no longer watching for pine trees, and stared upward.
“Looking at the telephone wires again?”
“Yea, man, how’d you know?”
“You do it every time you think of her.”
***
Rhonda used to hang her head out the window, lay back against the sill, sprawled across the seat with her legs across my lap and her back against Mickey, reclining across the front seat. She looked perfect like that. I followed the line of her from ankles, to hips, to her neck, curved and vulnerable. She peaked at the ivory white chin pointing skyward. I would rest my hand on her denim shin as I drove.
The last time she did it Mickey slid his hand across her belly; he was awed by seeing her that way – her midsection bared with the stretch of her body -and right in front of him for the touching.
She giggled. “Stop distracting me. I’m busy. I have to concentrate.”
“You’re looking at telephone poles,” I said. A question hung in my voice before it got doused in dashboard lights and extinguished by Robert Plant’s voice over the radio.
But she heard the unuttered question anyway. “I’m hanging wishes and memories on every one of them,” she said. “I’m decorating them like we always decorate the trees you bring.” She tugged her shirt back into place then wrapped her arms around her middle.
“I think I want go away for a while,” she said, after a long silence.
Mickey looked to me, and I to him and we both said, “Where?”
“Anywhere. Everywhere. I want to see the world.”
While Mickey found this all very fascinating and she was in her Own Private Eden, I could not help but think she’d overdone the whole free-spirit trip she was on. But she meant well, and somehow Rhonda had affixed herself, and all of her craziness, to Mickey and me.
“Duncan, my love?”
“Yes, Roni,” I answered, mimicking the soft dream-soaked tone in her voice.
She didn’t answer, so I looked at her. Her long dark hair cascaded out the window of the moving car – a raven’s wing in the breeze – and Mickey put a finger to his lips to quiet me. She’d gone to sleep.
***
“There!” Mickey shouted, jarring me back to the present.
I mashed my boot against the brake. We slid on the icy road before the tires ground to a stop.
The pine sat close to the road at the far end of the deep lawn. I watched the house for lights and movement. When it appeared no one was awake, we headed toward our victim. A six foot tall pine would become this year’s tree.
We approached the tree. I carried the saw and rope then dropped them to the ground.
I dug my hands deep into the base of the tree and pushed the snow away. The branches were weighed down from the first big snowfall of the season and there, on my hands and knees, I was subjected to the icy prickles of frozen pine needles. With every moved branch, I wiggled against the slingshot sprays of fine snowflakes as they infiltrated my jacket collar.
Mickey grabbed the rope and began tying the branches upward, “Shit! Is this how we did it last year? I don’t remember it sucking nearly this bad.”
“Yes,” I said, grunting as I leaned in deeper, trying to find the trunk of the tree under the lazy branches. “It sucked this bad.”
It didn’t though. This year was much worse.
I dug at the base, asked Mickey to hand me the saw and went to work.
Once I’d freed the tree from its roots, Mickey finished tying it off and we escaped the yard unnoticed; the snake-trail of the dragged tree erased our footprints through the yard. We were on our way to do our annual stolen tree delivery.
Lots of times we considered getting one that was already cut, but tree lot owners expect thieves and we didn’t want to pay. That wasn’t the point anyway; the point was tradition. We swore that even if we got out of this shit-town and made lots of money, we would come back every year, swipe a pine and deliver it. Each year we talked about not doing it anymore – the risk, trees don’t cost that much – but we did it anyway.
I opened the gate and drove through, winding down the path, with headlights off. “Is it that lane or this one?” I asked Mickey.
He scratched his head and presented me with a quizzical look and a yawn.
Two wrong turns and a right turn later, we pulled up to the spot.
“I should have visited sooner.”
“Me too,” I said. “Let’s get this over with.”
Mickey opened the back door of the car, climbed up on the door frame and released the tree from its restraints. I pulled my pocket knife and cut the ropes that bound the branches. The tree sprang back into shape.
“Now what do we do with it?” I asked.
“Shit, Dunc, I don’t know.” He pointed to the headstone. “Put it over there I guess.”
Mickey dove into the backseat and grabbed the bottle I’d left. “Whiskey,” he said, smiling like he’d won the lottery. His smile faded though, and I knew why.
“Roni’s favorite.” I said. I thought it was appropriate.
He unscrewed the lid, took a deep breath and drank. He then thrust it at me – his mouth still full, as though he had summoned the courage to pour it in, but hadn’t quite managed to summon enough to swallow it.
“For Roni” I said and slugged it back. “Ok, let’s do this.” I shook off the bite of the drink, replaced the lid and tossed it into the car.
I looked up at the bright white moon, then down at the twinkling snow, stars beneath my feet; I was calmed by the serene quiet of the world. I thought Roni would be, too, in her Earth Child Eden way. A wave of nausea (whiskey and wine?) swept over me. I steadied myself and picked up the tree in a bare spot opening between branches. It scraped against my cheek and my free hand went to the scratch protectively.
Headlights approached and I stopped before I could lean the sad little stolen tree against the stone that read Rhonda Joan Eastwood Daughter Sister Friend.
I squinted the light away, now in the high beams, then dropped my head back and closed my eyes when the cherries came on.
The fear of tickets disappeared though, and a new one set in when I saw who got out of the car.
“Duncan Manning?” he said, shining his flashlight in my eyes.
“Yes.”
“You’re not supposed to be up here after dark.”
He stepped closer, tilting his light down as he got mere inches from my face.
“Hi Cal.” Mickey said.
His badge glowed with the moonlight. He looked me square with his shoulders hunched forward, much like I’d imagine a porcupine would when his quills went up. I dropped the tree to the ground. It exhaled a soft rush of sound as it landed in a drift.
“You aren’t supposed to be here either.” He spoke to Mickey, never moving his eyes away from me.
“We just wanted to visit Roni.” Mickey said.
“Had to carry on a tradition.” I said, trying to clarify what Mickey was saying and hoping he wouldn’t ask where we’d gotten the tree.
“Let me make myself clear,” he said, waving his flashlight toward my face. I held my breath. “You are not to visit this gravesite. I haven’t quite figured out what you had to do with her death, but something. I am going to find out what it was. Now you step away from my baby sister’s grave, get in your piece of shit car and go.”
Mickey backed up toward the car, reaching in slow motion for the handle.
“I didn’t do anything.” I felt the tear-salt burn my eyes. “I loved her.” I looked to Mickey who had lowered his head with my words. A burst of white breath rose with his heavy exhale. “We both did.”
