GRAVEWORM Page 14

  Bang. It went to a jobber outfit out of Calumet City that Frank heard through the grapevine was owned by the rich guy’s brother-in-law who may or may not have been connected to some very unpleasant people in Chicago. Of course, that was just a rumor. But if you were in the contracting business, you heard a lot of rumors like that and especially when you were nipping at the heels of the big firms around Chicago and Milwaukee.

  Regardless, strike three.

  So that’s the sort of day it was. It could have been raining tit and Frank would have caught a cock in his mouth. After he learned that he had struck out, he drove around for two hours in his pick-up, wondering if they needed a frycook over at the Dairy Queen, fully realizing that there really were two types of people in this world: those who had it going on and those who didn’t. In his mind, there was no doubt which bucket he was pissing in.

  Since gas wasn’t real cheap and the feds hadn’t gotten around to taxing the shit out of booze the way they had with tobacco, at least not yet, he went into the Jolly Roger, grabbed a stool at the bar, ordered a long-neck Pabst and prepared to cry in his beer. As fate would have it, he looked down the bar and there was Steve Crews, apparently well into his cups. He was putting away shots of Wild Turkey like they were mother’s milk and carrying on a loud conversation with the Australian-rules football game on ESPN.

  Well now, wasn’t this peachy?

  Not only had Frank been screwed out of his livelihood today, but here was the guy who had screwed him out of his girl too. Mr. Fucking Whiteshoe Accountant. Frank figured he had been real patient with the guy. All he asked was that Steve and Tara stay well away from him because they both headed off his shit-list which was quite long and quite comprehensive.

  Frank pulled off his beer, minded his own, and was seriously thinking of making for new environs like Pauly’s or the French House down the way.

  That’s when he felt, rather than saw, Mr. Steve Crews’ eyes lock on him.

  “Here we fucking go,” he said under his breath.

  Steve kept staring at him, but Frank refused to acknowledge any of that because he just wanted to drink alone and be depressed in peace which was the God-given right of every American, he figured.

  Finch came down. He poured a shot of Wild Turkey, set it down on the bar. “Guy down there,” Finch said. “Said it’s for you.”

  Frank sipped his beer. “I don’t want it.”

  “He paid for it.”

  “Pour it out.”

  Finch did as he was told. Didn’t much matter to him, one way or the other. What was paid for was paid for. He went down the bar, told Steve, went back to the game.

  Frank felt himself tensing up inside because he could feel old Steve really watching him then. Guy didn’t have the sense to know when to quit. Some guys were like that. And here Frank thought he’d been real gracious about the whole thing. Steve taking Tara or Tara taking Steve, however it was, and him not getting hotheaded about it and slugging the guy or anything crude, rude, and high school like that.

  Now Steve was figuring that wasn’t enough.

  Frank took another pull, feeling the tension between them arcing up like somebody had just plugged it into the wall. He thought momentarily of seeing Steve on Cross Street that afternoon, that look in his eyes like something bad was going on.

  Steve was coming down now.

  Sure, he was an easy-going guy, mellow, but now the alcohol had changed all that. He’d grown a set and he wanted Frank to see how big those suckers were.

  Frank lit a cigarette, blew smoke out through his nostrils. “Leave it alone, Steve,” he said. “I’m leaving you alone. Just leave me alone.”

  “I just bought you a shot, Frank. It wasn’t a goddamn insult.”

  Frank still didn’t look at him. “Just being friendly?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, I don’t want it so peddle it somewhere else.”

  Steve did not move. Frank could smell the booze on him, smell something else beneath it. Something mean waiting to happen. “You’re an asshole, Frank.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “No wonder Tara got sick of you.”

  Frank looked at him now. “Same way she’s sick of you, Steve?”

  “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  That same look was in his eyes again, just like it had been on Cross Street today: pain. Real deep-set pain like maybe his best friend had not just died, but had killed himself and made Steve watch.

  “I come over, I’m trying to be friendly, I’m trying to be adult and you… you gotta play at this long-suffering bullshit. I didn’t steal Tara from you, you fucking asshole. Tara left you. That’s all there was to it. Why can’t you just accept that and go on?”

  “I have gone on, Steve,” he told him. “Now, turn around and get away from me because the sight of you makes me fucking sick.”

  Frank knew right then that he honestly didn’t hate Steve. No, his mouth was saying things and his pride was hurting and the day was pressing down on him and he was just taking it out on the poor guy. He recognized that, but he could not bring himself to tell Steve as much. He just wanted to be left alone. He didn’t want anything more than that.

  Finch was watching it real close now. The Jolly Roger had had its share of scuffles in its long past. Nothing new there. He’d seen plenty of fistfights and it wasn’t always the guys doing it. One time he saw a girl use another lady’s head to open the bathroom door with. People drank, sometimes they got crazy. Finch didn’t put up with that, though. Fights meant breakage and breakage meant money and if someone got really hurt then you were talking the police and sometimes even lawsuits.

  Frank said, “Well, if you aren’t leaving, I am.”

  Which was a pretty good idea, but something had amped up inside of meek and mild Steve Crews and it wasn’t going to be that easy. As Frank tried to pass, Steve hooked him by the elbow and spun him around and Frank saw red and gave him the back of his hand across the face. It made a loud, clapping sound. Steve fell back against the bar, but did not go down.

  “Hey!” Finch said. “Not in here! You do that shit, you do it outside! In fact, you do it in the street and off my fucking property!”

  Good old Finch. That was a mouthful for him. More than he usually spoke in a good week.

  “We’re not taking it anywhere,” Frank told him. “It ends right here. I’m leaving and that’s all there is to it.”

  He pulled his coat on, kept his eyes off Steve and stepped outside. The air was cold, pushed by a strengthening north breeze and going right through him like it was made of sharpened steel. There was his truck. Twenty seconds and he’d be behind the wheel and away from this clusterfuck and that was all he wanted. And that was exactly what he knew he wouldn’t get. He walked across the gravel lot, listening to the leaves blowing up the street, oddly aware how dark the night sky was.

  And that’s when he heard the door to the Jolly Roger open.

  And that’s when Steve came barreling across the lot.

  “I’m too old for this,” Frank said under his breath, crushing out his cigarette under his boot.

  “Hey,” Steve said. “I wanna talk to you.”

  “We’re done talking, Steve. I’m tired. I’m going home. You should do the same.”

  Frank felt it then: something inside him getting ready for action, getting ready to fight as it had so many times in his past… in the Navy, on construction sights, that time in Chi when that skinny little shit tried to take his wallet. It felt like his chest was expanding, his arms thickening, his skin going tight over what lay below. He only wanted Steve Crews to go on his merry drunken way and leave him alone.

  That’s all he wanted.

  “Listen, goddammit,” Steve said, ice in his voice, “I wanna talk to you.”

  Frank faced him. “No more talking, Steve. I don’t like you and I never have. You took my girl and you sure as hell won’t take my fucking dignity. Now get the hell out of
my face, you little fucking faggot, or I swear to God you’ll be picking your teeth up out of the gravel.”

  Steve probably didn’t know what came over him. Once the alcohol had settled in deep and started to burn, your inhibitions gone to cinder and primitive drives asserting themselves and filling your belly with cold metal, you rarely did. Steve shouted something, took two quick steps, and swung at Frank. He was no fighter, but you couldn’t have convinced him of it at that particular moment.

  He swung hard.

  His fist just missed the tip of Frank’s nose and the force of the blow almost carried him right down with it. Frank brought his fist up in an almost perfect arc and caught Steve in the cheekbone, spinning him around and putting him right down in the gravel.

  “You fucking prick!” he said. “You fucking hit me!”

  “And I don’t want to hit you again,” Frank told him.

  Steve was so pathetic, breathing hard, coughing out clouds of vapor, that Frank felt sorry for him. Jesus, they were both grown men going at it like fucking kids after school. It just wasn’t right. Not right at all. He went over there, something softening in him, and helped Steve up.

  And then Steve swung again.

  Frank took a glancing blow across the chin that was hard enough to made him see a few stars and then he gave Steve a quick shot in the belly that folded him up, put him to his hands and knees where he proceeded to vomit out the night’s spirits in a frothy, gushing stream that steamed in the cold. Frank looked back at the Jolly Roger and there was Finch, right in the doorway, watching it, maybe making note of what happened in case the law got involved. Frank didn’t blame him. The bar was his livelihood and he had to protect it.

  Steve was on the ground, gasping with dry heaves.

  When those stopped, Frank helped him to his feet.

  He thought Steve would take another poke, but instead he said, “Goddammit, I’m so fucked up.”

  What happened then which Frank found unbelievable later, was that he helped Steve to his truck and got him inside. Then he climbed in himself and off they went.

  “You hit me pretty hard,” Steve said.

  “You didn’t give me much of a choice.”

  Steve didn’t argue with that. Together, they drove up Elm and didn’t say a word and in retrospect the whole affair was almost surreal it was so damn odd. But Frank found himself warming to the guy. And it had taken a fight in a parking lot to bring that out.

  But then, friendships had started on stranger notes.

  36

  The bandshell.

  The box.

  Tara.

  The night.

  That’s all there was. After a bit of searching on the stage where the city band usually performed on summer nights, she found the box. It was small and silver. She opened it and there was a gun inside. Not a big gun, but one that was small and fit easily into the palm of her hand. She brought it over to the phone booth and looked at it in the light. It was blue steel with black grips, a snub-nosed barrel.

  She stood there, holding it.

  All her life she had been offended by guns and was the first to vociferously debate gun control. Gun owners were always the first to say that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. They plastered it on their bumpers next to their NRA stickers. But Tara had always disagreed with that. No, guns don’t kill people, they just make it a hell of a lot easier.

  But now… yes, she almost liked the feel of this one.

  To look at it, it almost looked like a toy… so small you could keep it in a shirt pocket, but she could feel the weight of the thing, feel the deadly promise it offered. Power. That’s what it was. The gun gave her power, a thrill of raw power.

  The phone rang.

  She answered it. No hesitation. “Yes?”

  “Do you have it?”

  “I have it.”

  “Do you know how to use it?”

  “No.”

  The boogeyman apparently was well-versed in such things. He explained to her that what she was holding was a .25 caliber Beretta with a seven-round magazine in the butt. He explained to her how to pull back the slide to jerk a round into the chamber. That’s all there was to it beyond pointing and pulling the trigger.

  “Okay. Now what?”

  He didn’t speak for a moment, but when he did he described exactly what she was supposed to do at this stage of the game with an almost breathless, erotic fascination. Tara listened, did not interrupt, knowing she should have been offended by what he wanted of her but somehow she wasn’t. And she wondered if there would ever be anything again that she would flinch from or be incapable of doing.

  When he was done, she said, “When do I do it?”

  “Go over there now. Go home afterwards,” he said, almost whispering now, filled with a secret boyish delight at what they were sharing and what bound them together. “And be careful, Tara. Don’t give the game away.”

  “And my sister?”

  “If you do what I say, I’ll let you talk to her.”

  “She’s buried, you said.”

  He chuckled. “Yes, but I’ll dig her up just for you, darling.”

  37

  Later, Frank Duvall did not know what possessed him.

  What made him want to help out Steve Crews, the guy who had been a thorn in his side for so long now. He should have left him in the parking lot, vomiting his own guts out and maybe gave him another shot to the head for good luck. That’s what he should have done. And that was exactly what had always played out in his mind in his revenge fantasies, particularly right after Tara left him and he was still burning inside.

  But now?

  Now he felt sorry for the kid and all that old hatred and anger in him was just gone and he wondered if it had indeed been gone for a long time now and it took something like the scrap between them out in the Jolly Roger’s parking lot to make him see that. He wasn’t sure how he felt about things now. Maybe good. Maybe at ease. But mostly just surprised… at how likeable Steve was and how he himself had changed now.

  Steve was pretty fucked-up when he got him in his pick-up.

  Fucked-up and in pain.

  Frank figured that pain was none of his business, but then Steve started saying a few things about Tara that made no sense whatever and he tracked that pain to their relationship and he figured it was his business. Because he still cared about that girl and he was starting to care about her boyfriend. If nothing else, he wanted things to be right between them. He’d been through too much pain to have the two of them throw in the towel now.

  If that made any sense and he wasn’t sure it did.

  He could’ve dumped Steve back at his place, but the kid was hurting over what was happening between Tara and he and Frank knew pain like that, he knew how it got inside you and owned you and squeezed all the righteous things from you until you had to numb it any way you could. And booze was always the first thing you reached for. So if he dropped Steve off, dumb shit would probably go to another bar, get more fucked-up, mouth off to the wrong guy and wake up in the ER on a regimen of soft foods.

  So Frank did the unthinkable: he brought Steve to his place.

  It wasn’t much, just an apartment at the end of Elm right above a storefront that had once held a pool room, but now held a used book store on one side and a chiropractor on the other. Things change. Things always change.

  He put Steve on the couch and got him some black coffee, fried up some eggs and bacon and made him eat. He ate with him and for some time there was nothing but a lot of chewing going on. But when that was over, Steve drank more coffee and then he started to talk.

  Rubbing that ugly purple welt on his cheekbone, he let it all out.

  Frank listened, uneasy and excited at the same time to have a window into Tara’s personal life again. He expected the usual, but that’s not what he got at all. In fact, what he did get made him almost sick inside.

  According to Steve, Tara had changed. She was not right and he did not know what had
taken possession of her, only that he figured it was something really ugly and really grim and he could not say that she was not losing her mind. Or maybe that he was losing his. Because something had happened here, some dark shroud had dropped over their lives and he could not put his finger on what shape it was taking and he wasn’t really sure that he wanted to. He related his visit with Tara that afternoon and how when he’d left he’d practically ran right out of there because whatever was active inside her, well, it scared the shit out of him. Frank did not mention that he’d seen him drive past on Cross Street and he figured it didn’t need mentioning. He let Steve talk, let all that poison drain right out of him. He repeated some of the things Tara had told him about monsters and all that and how you had to be ready because they were out there, waiting, just waiting and they would take you if you weren’t vigilant.

  It was crazy shit, all right.

  Frank knew Tara pretty damn good and he knew she was driven, headstrong, had a tendency to be a little on the obsessive side… but this? Well, shit, he just couldn’t wrap this up in the girl he knew. It was way out there. But he knew that Steve wasn’t making it up. The guy was practically in tears as he related it, his eyes like two bleeding eggs jutting from his face, his mouth set in a straight stiff line. He was pale other than the welt Frank had given him.

  “And I know I shouldn’t bring this to you,” Steve said when he had said his bit. “But I’m here and you’re here and you know Tara.”

  “And this ain’t Tara.”

  “I don’t know who it is, Frank. Can you believe that? Lady I been in love with for two years and I can’t say that it’s her.”

  Frank cringed a bit, at him saying he was in love with Tara. He knew they were in love, sure, but to hear him come out and profess that love, well it made him cringe. Made him feel like his own feelings for the woman had been somehow violated.