Going Nowhere Fast (7 page)

"So the Raiders wanted somebody to watch him," I said to Bad Dog.

He nodded his unruly head. "Yeah. At least until they left for Pittsburgh, anyway. All they wanted to do was make sure he got through the Cincinnati game without killin' himself, Cubby said."

"And Dozer went along with this?"

"Sure. He and I clicked up, we were homies. That's why Cubby picked me for the job. He'd seen us hangin' together at the club all the time, so he knew the Doze and me were tight."

"The Doze?"

"That's what all his friends call him, yeah. The Doze."

"And you're saying he didn't mind that you were going to be his baby-sitter. He didn't resent the fact in any way."

"Naw. In fact, he actually thought it was a good idea, havin' somebody around him all the time to tell him when he was about to mess up. He appreciated it, even."

"So what went wrong, then?" Big Joe asked him.

Our son was suddenly struck stupid. Or at least, more stupid than usual. "Huh?"

"You heard what I said. What went wrong? How did he end up messing up anyway?"

"Oh." He wriggled around on the couch like he was trying to dislodge a live hamster from his trousers. "Well, I guess because I tried too hard. You know."

"What do you mean, you tried too hard? You tried too hard
how?
''

"Well… by sort of outthinkin' myself, I guess."

"Outthinking yourself?"

"Yessir. See, the first night I watched him—Friday—I just followed around behind him. He did all the drivin', and I did all the ridin' , and we ended up goin' to all his regular hangouts, all the places Cubby said he liked to get in trouble in."

"And?"

"And, well, Cubby, was right. The Doze almost messed up two, maybe three times that night. He kept threatenin' to run off with this homie, or that, or the young ladies at one table or another. You know.

"So the next night, Saturday, I figured, maybe I should change his pattern a little bit. Like, change his routine, keep him out of the places he likes to go, and away from all the people he likes to run with. Protect him from any bad influences, like.

"So what I did was, I made him hang with
me
Saturday night, 'stead of the other way around. You understand? I picked all the places we went that night, not him, and they were all places he'd never been to before, places where he didn't know a soul. I thought that would be the best thing for him."

"But it wasn't," I said.

"No. It was the
worst
thing for him, the way it worked out. 'Cause around his friends, see, he was just one of the guys, right? But around strangers, he was…well, he was the
Doze!
The Man! Bigger than life, and all that. The brothers and sisters in all the places I took him to treated him like royalty, like he was a god from Mount Olympics, or somethin'."

"Mount
Olympus
," Big Joe said dourly.

"Mount Olympus, right. Like in the Thor comic books."

"Go on, Theodore," I said.

"Huh? Oh, yeah. Where was I?"

"They were treating him like royalty."

"Oh, yeah. Like royalty! Like they'd never seen a professional football player before, or somethin'. They were all over the man like white on rice, offerin' him this and that, buyin' him one drink after another. Seemed like every time I turned around, somebody was slippin' a business card into his hand, or askin' him to autograph a napkin. And the women! Pops, it was somethin' else. They wouldn't
stop
comin' over to our table! Offerin' the Doze their phone numbers, or bendin' over and pullin' the front of their dresses down so he could autograph their—"

"Never mind, Theodore," I said.

"Autograph their
what?
" Big Joe demanded.

"I said never mind," I told him.

He caught the fire in my eye and let the subject drop, but only after he and his son had exchanged a brief but purposeful nod, making a promise to each other I was not supposed to be sharp enough to pick upon:
We'll talk later
.

"So what you're saying is that you would have been better off going to all of his regular hangouts," I said to Bad Dog.

"Yes ma'am. Of course, he might've got just as jacked up goin' to his places as he did mine, but he probably wouldn't have done it so fast. 'Cause, see, you can get pretty wasted just payin' for
half
your drinks, bur when you don't have to pay for
none
of 'em. . ."

"We get the picture," Big Joe said.

"'What I don't understand is why you didn't intervene when you saw things getting our of hand," I said sternly.

"I didn't
see
things gettin' our of hand," Bad Dog replied, somewhat defensively.

"Why not? You were there, weren't you? You were watching him, weren't you?"

"Yes ma'am, I was watchin' him. But…"

"But what?"

"But I wasn't really
seein'
him. You know what I mean?"

"No.I don't." I turned to Big Joe. "Do you?"

My husband just looked at our son and said, "Tell your mother how many drinks
you
paid for that night, boy."

Of course, the answer was none.

"Lord, have mercy," I said.

"I hung with 'im for about three hours, then the lights went out," Bad Dog said. "By the time it occurred to me that maybe he was overdoin' it, man, I was too far gone to care. Last thing I remember, this brickhouse in a leather skirt was pullin' down the zipper on one side and askin' the Doze to write his phone number on her—"

"Don't you start that again," I said. "So you fell down on the job and let Dozer get smashed. The next day, he played a terrible game and got suspended from the team. Is that right?"

"Yes ma'am."

"And everyone blamed you for what happened."

"Yes."

"And that's why Dozer wants to kill you."

"Yes."

"Okay. So far, so good. That leaves us with only one unanswered question, doesn't it?"

"What's that?"

"How in the hell did he find you?" Big Joe asked, cutting in. "Way the hell out here at the Grand Canyon?"

Bad Dog bit his lip and tried not to meet my gaze directly, afraid to say another word.

"You didn't tell him you were coming here, did you?"

I asked, already certain that I knew the answer.

"Moms, I
had
to," Bad Dog said, his eyes pleading for forgiveness. "He was gonna destroy me! I had to say I was gonna do
something
to make things right for him again!"

"So you told him you were going to get his fine money from us. Is that what you're telling me?"

"And then square things away with him and Cubby, yeah."

"Then he knows all about your father and me. And Lucille."

"Lucille?"

"Our trailer home, Theodore," I said.

He shrugged. "Oh. Well… he doesn't know it by
name
, or anything, but—"

"Don't stop me this time, Dottie," Big Joe said abruptly, his face as red and luminous as a stoplight. "When I grab hold of the boy this time to break him in half,
please don't stop me!
"

I was tempted not to, but I did.

"Pops, I told you!" Bad Dog cried. "I didn't have any choice! He asked me how I was gonna come up with that kind of money, and I told 'im the only thing I could think of—that I was gonna come out here and get it from you. What else could I do?"

"You could've taken your lumps like a man and left your mother and me out of this whole mess. That's what you could've done!" Joe started to pace anxiously about the room, his hands going this way and that as he ranted and raved. "Took forty-seven park rangers to get that man in the back seat of a car, he rips the heads off quarterbacks like I pop the caps on catsup bottles, and who's he out here looking for, thanks to you? Us, that's who! Two old people who couldn't stop him from wringin' our necks if you gave us a ten-minute head start and an M-sixteen!"

"Pops, I didn't know he was gonna follow me! The plan was, he was supposed to wait in L.A. for me to come back with the money."

"So why didn't he?"

"Well. I guess because…" He didn't—or wouldn't—finish the thought.

"Because he didn't know that
was
the plan," Big Joe guessed.

"No sir. See, he kept insisting on comin' along, I couldn't talk 'im out of it! But I knew if I brought 'im with me, and you guys refused to give me the money, well… somebody was gonna get hurt."

Joe stopped pacing. He pointed a giant finger at Bad Dog's face, glaring at him the way a Hatfield would glare at a McCoy, and said, "Somebody's gonna get hurt, all right. You were damn sure right about that!"

"Joe," I said, "take it easy, now."

"In fact, somebody's gonna get hurt right now, right this minute, unless they get the hell out of my sight by the time I count to three! One, two—"

"Joe!"

Bad Dog didn't bother saying good-bye. I felt a rush of wind behind me, heard the screen door of our cabin slam shut, and he was gone.

Had Joe decided to chase after him, I would've been glad to let him go, but he didn't. He just stood where he was and waited for his anger to dissipate, checking his no doubt accelerated pulse rate as he did so.

"Joe," I said calmly, almost demurely. "I wish you hadn't done that."

He scowled at me, unrepentant. "Yeah? Why?"

I smiled. "Because we still don't know why someone left a dead white man in our bathroom yesterday. Do we?"

My husband's chin fell to his chest, and his head began to turn from side to side in a dance of pure despair.

"Aw—"

"I know, baby.
Jeez Looweez
," I said.

5

We had to hear him say "I don't know" a hundred times before we were sure, but later that afternoon Big Joe and I came to be convinced that Bad Dog really
didn't
have the slightest idea why a corpse had turned up inside our trailer home on the same fateful day as he. His story was just too unwavering to be fake; Dog could always tell a lie well, but only if he didn't have to repeat it more than once or twice. Apparently, he'd discovered the late Geoffry Lamar Bettis in our bathroom just as he'd always insisted, and had never laid eyes on the poor man beforehand. Furthermore, it seemed, he had no idea what connection there could possibly be between Bettis and Dozer Meadows, short of the fact that Meadows had ostensibly come to the Grand Canyon hoping to commit a murder, and Bettis had already become the victim of one. We asked Dog if he thought his friend "the Doze" was deranged enough to have killed an innocent white man in his stead, just for the kick of watching Dog's parents freak out over finding a strange cadaver in their bathroom, but Dog said no, he didn't think so. The Doze, he said, was generally that sadistic only on Sunday afternoons, when such bloodletting had a direct effect upon the National Football League's AFC Western Division standings.

Big Joe and I were relieved to have reached the common conclusion that our son was not a murderer, of course, but that isn't to say that either one of us was satisfied that he had told us everything he knew. We both knew better than that. Because getting the truth out of Dog—even for me—is a lot like drawing water from an old, rusty pump: you never get more than a thimbleful at one time. And sometimes, the more you pump, the less you get. Joe and I shared a strong suspicion that there were parts of the whole truth that Bad Dog was still not telling, but after some discussion, we agreed that it probably had little or nothing to do with the actual circumstances of Bettis's death, so we decided not to worry about it. Experience had taught us that we'd find out what it was soon enough, in any case. All we had to do was watch the boy and wait.

It was a tactic I had more patience for than Joe, as you might expect, but that was just too bad. I hadn't brought Dog and his four siblings into this world alone, I reminded my husband; I had help. So Joe got to play our son's shadow first. I kicked him and Dog out of our hotel cabin only minutes after Dog's second interrogation of the day and told them both not to come back for at least two hours, so that I could nap in relative peace. I hadn't treated myself to a decent midday snooze in over three days, and exhaustion was catching up with me. I collected Joe's key to our room, tossed a handful of guidebooks and sightseeing brochures in his direction, and closed the door on all his and Dog's objections.

Two minutes later, I was asleep.

Less than ten minutes after that, however, I was awake again.

Somebody was knocking on the door, lightly but incessantly. Making a very polite nuisance of themselves. I thought it might be Joe, until I realized the knocking had been going on for some time now, and the door was still on its hinges. And I knew it couldn't be Bad Dog, because I had yet to hear a single "Yo, Moms! Wake up in there!"

So I got up to see who it was.

There was no peephole in the cabin door, but by peeking through the drapes at one of the windows flanking it, I was able to see two men standing out on the porch, young, well-dressed white men I did not recognize. One appeared to have a camera dangling from his neck.

"Who is it?" I called out, trying to sound like an angry grizzly roused from hibernation.

They both turned toward the window at the sound of my voice, and instinctively I withdrew from it. One of them actually came over to the window and pressed his face to the screen, trying to get a look at me, but when he realized he couldn't, he quickly backed away again.

"Mrs. Loudermilk?" someone asked tentatively.

"I asked, who is it?" I said again, turning up the grizzly in my voice.

"We're reporters, Mrs. Loudermilk. We'd like to ask you and your husband a few questions, if we could. Would that be all right?"

Reporters. Of course.

Ever since the news of Geoffry Bettis's death had begun to circulate about the Canyon's trailer park two days ago, Bad Dog, Big Joe, and I had been besieged by an army of these bloodthirsty, soulless media creatures. In the beginning, we accommodated each and every one of them as best we could, answering what questions we had the answers to and graciously declining the rest. We saw no harm in it; what did we have to hide? But then the questions became more and more invasive and crude, and all the attention we were receiving began to lose its charm. When one of the local papers finally ran a story on us with a headline that read, "CANYON MYSTERY COUPLE LIED TO AUTHORITIES"—making a federal case out of the fact that I had told Detectives Crowe and Bollinger I was fifty-one, and Joe had told them he once played varsity basketball with Elgin Baylor back in high school—that was it. We all stopped talking to reporters altogether.