Know Your Beholder: A Novel (25 page)

After he left I inserted the DVD into my laptop. It was a crude home movie of Bethany Bunch, shot in the Bunches’ apartment. Bethany is wearing light-blue footy pajamas. She is simply standing, staring at the camera.

“There she is,” Mary’s voice says. “She can stand like a big girl.”

Then Bethany teeters a bit, falls on her rump, and uncorks an infectious laugh.

“Can you stand back up?” This is Todd’s voice now. “Can you stand for Daddy?”

And then Bethany pushes off the floor, her bottom high in the air, and manages to achieve verticality. She whirls her arms a bit, teeters again, and then comes to rest, standing successfully. Mary begins singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Upon hearing her mother sing, Bethany flails her arms again. She screeches with joy. Mary and Todd laugh, and then Bethany face-plants, giggling.

The home movie continues this way for eight minutes and forty-two seconds.

After watching it I realized I might very well have taken from the Bunches one of the last remnants of their daughter’s existence.

March 24.

Though the sun is noticeably brighter, not much thawing has taken place. No, not in Pollard. The snow that first arrived in January and grew from there still covers the cold ground with a dirty, willful crust. The pavement in front of the house is now finally visible, though it’s plagued with scores of salt rime that resemble the archaeological markings of a vast school of prehistoric jellyfish.

I’ve been having a crisis of conscience, in turmoil about my part in the displacement of Glose. I haven’t been sleeping much. I wake in the middle of the night, fearing someone’s in the attic. Glose or some shade of Glose. A silent figurant approaching my bedside with a knife, ready to flay me, to delicately, surgically remove one of my kidneys and force me to eat it.

I had planned to simply let the inevitable take its course. After all, I reminded myself, I detested everything about Glose: his smell, the maddening unconscious weeping he had brought upon me, the possibility of petty and non-petty theft, the malicious damage to my boyhood home. I only had to stay out of the way, go on with my daily routine, to continue to enact my simple life in the attic, and his departure would be accomplished. But I couldn’t help myself. The guilt was too much. I began to want to pull the plug on the whole operation. As his abduction neared, I felt as if I’d been swallowing sand in little spoonfuls. I couldn’t eat anything else. There was nowhere for the food to go. But I didn’t contact the Concierge. The date was set, and despite my misgivings, I just let it come, like some slow, persistent green-eyed demon moving toward me through the fog.

Exactly four days ago this is what went down:

It was the day of reckoning, the advent of spring. Just before the appointed hour, I keyed into Baylor Phebe’s apartment, having lost my nerve and come to save Glose before it was too late.

He was in the bathroom with the door closed, likely on the toilet, singing along to the Doobie Brothers’ “What a Fool Believes,” likely coming from some small radio Baylor kept atop the toilet tank. Glose was actually matching Michael McDonald’s impossibly high, soulful falsetto. It occurred to me that I had always underestimated Glose’s singing abilities. When we recorded
Argon Lights
he always nailed overdubs on his first take.

Baylor’s apartment was neat, as usual, and smelled of shoe leather. The Concierge was scheduled to arrive in ten minutes. Per my last and final phone conversation with her (“We will never speak again,” she said in her soothing GPS voice), I had sent to the designated Pollard post office box a copy of both the front door key and Baylor’s apartment keys, along with half of the agreed fee, in cash, which I took from the secret stash that I keep in the attic to pay Haggis for the drugs and any contractors for the work they do on the house. The next wave of communication with the Concierge would also be via mail, when I would receive proof of the completed job with a photo essay and a short report, at which point, as agreed, I would have seventy-two hours to send the remainder of the fee, plus expenses, to the same Pollard post office box. It had been very simply set up, elegantly even. (“For both our safety,” the Concierge had said.)

Rodney Daniel Glose, the former drummer of the late, once-promising south-central Illinois indie-rock band the Third Policeman, would soon be out of my house and out of my life, hopefully forever.

Except I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before. I’d tossed and turned. I’d assumed the fetal position. I’d lain on my stomach. I’d tented my knees and done deep-breathing exercises. Nothing had worked. I kept imagining Glose being chased by bear, elk, wild boar, hunted by backwoods rednecks with slingshots and eighteenth-century muskets. I saw him being attacked by eagles or scorpions, envisioned him surrounded by crocodiles, or mauled by a shark after regaining consciousness and falling off a defunct oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

So now, after that sleepless night, here I was, in Baylor Phebe’s apartment, prepared to come clean and call the whole thing off. I was standing just under Baylor’s eighty-five-year-old cougar head, waiting for Glose to emerge, the Doobie Brothers’ late-seventies hit a tinny, distorted transmission from the bathroom, when I heard someone behind me at the front door. At the insertion of the key, I quickly crossed to Baylor’s coat closet and hid. Through a slat in the aluminum closet I was able to see into the living room.

A large man entered.

I assumed it was a man because of the size and the height, which I guessed to be around six-five. He possessed the broad shoulders of an NFL tight end. He was wearing all black—a sort of jumpsuit with a zipper down the front—and a black ski mask over his face, which I found to be wildly clichéd. When he saw the taxidermy coyote in the corner, his body snap-flexed into an impressive ready position, which he quickly released when he realized it wasn’t real. His movements were silent and efficient.

Glose was still singing along to the final phrases of “What a Fool Believes,” modulating a single line of Michael McDonald’s harmonies, pitch-perfect.

The only thing giving the large man away was a tuft of blond hair sneaking out from under the back of his ski mask. Was this in fact the Concierge? Or did the Concierge have an entire roster of minions, different specialists depending on the job requirements?

The Man in Black now held a small dark handgun, complete with silencer extension. The toilet flushed, and Glose entered from the bathroom.

He was naked from the waist down, wearing the familiar Girl Scouts of America T-shirt.

I farted without sound, a horrifying two-measure whisper that was so hot it burned my left testicle and I had to bite my lower lip to keep from sighing painfully.

When Glose saw the Man in Black he ceased singing and made a noise that sounded like
whuff
.

He hadn’t turned the radio off, and “What a Fool Believes” was now being followed by Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” This whole thing was going down to forgettable classic late-seventies and eighties pop rock—there was no way around it.

The Man in Black trained the gun on Glose.

Glose put his hands in the air like a bank teller.

“Turn around,” the Man in Black commanded. He was trying to disguise his voice. It almost sounded like one of those overemphatic, looped American English deliveries so prevalent in seventies kung fu movies.

Before Glose turned around—during that slow, inevitable one-eighty—his penis appeared to shrink into the insanity of his dark pubic wasteland, his three testicles bouncing in their scrota, then coming to rest.

The Man in Black fired the pistol, which was quieted by the silencer. It made a little
pim
sound, and a tranquilizer dart with red plumage blooming from the aft end of its silver shaft landed in the center of Glose’s sagging, dextral gluteal mass.

“
Fung
,” he said, followed by the far more accessible, classic pain expletive “
Ouch
.”

Literally “
Ouch
,” as if he’d stubbed his toe or been bitten by a horsefly. And with surprisingly little volume. As if the dart had both been painful
and
hurt his feelings.

Glose took to one knee, then the other.

Whitney Houston was joyously singing for her life, mostly just wanting to dance with any loser with two feet and a haircut.

The Man in Black holstered his gun and from his back pocket produced a nylon duffel bag, also black, which had been tightly rolled. With great efficiency of movement he unfurled and unzipped the duffel bag.

Glose attempted to stand and made it halfway, but that wasn’t going to work. He shuffled his feet, the world tilted on him, and he quickly returned to his knees. His arms swam out oddly, as if he were pushing through tall, snarly grass. Then he wheezed heavily and pitched onto his left side, no doubt unconscious as a sack of flour now, the silver tranquilizer dart’s brilliant red fletching protruding from his hairy right ass lump.

The Man in Black then impressively negotiated flocculent, half-naked Glose into the duffel bag, zipped it closed, and hoisted the large heavy form onto his shoulder. With relative ease, I might add, as though hoisting a bushel of apples. He exited the apartment and locked the door behind him.

It happened that fast and that simply. All within the context of the Whitney Houston song, which was still playing.

After the door closed I realized I had been holding my breath for some time. I exhaled and urinated hotly down my leg.

At times I think I can hear the house speaking to me. The joists groan like some ancient suffering giant incapable of making words, able only to release these long, dolorous vowels. The exposed truss support beams creak under the eaves like drunken women shrieking. The wind skirls off the steeply pitched gable and through the cracks of my finial window, a spirit child beset by madness.

I have taken down all the snowman drawings and stacked them neatly in a box under my desk.

The mystery of Bethany Bunch lives on, though her presence still haunts my life. The Bunches seem to be drowning…drowning without water, how awful that must feel. To get to that place where even oxygen turns against you. I don’t know how they keep going. I guess there is this will in us to continue clocking hours. This little bit of fight left.

Two days ago I was sanding Glose’s fork-scrawled words off the front of Kent’s bass when there was a knock on my door.

Every knock now stops my heart. If I’m going to be trafficking in criminal activities, however minor they may be, I need to grow thicker skin.

I set the bass down, counted to three, and opened the door.

It was Baylor Phebe. He looked troubled, with those sagging yellow oysters underneath his eyes and deep furrows marking his brow. Only he wasn’t wearing a Willy Loman costume this time. He was dressed as himself.

“Baylor,” I said, “everything okay?”

“Have you seen Rodney?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Why?”

Baylor said he’d been gone for two days, that he’d been pretty worried.

I told him that Glose and I were old friends and that he’d been known to occasionally up and vanish like that.

Baylor knew about our friendship and about the band, and said that “Rodney” had shared a great deal with him. He said Glose had even told him about his “condition,” which was the main reason he was so surprised that he would just disappear without a word.

“What condition?” I said.

“His cancer,” Baylor said. “You didn’t know about it?”

I had to cover my mouth to keep from screeching like a monkey. Instead I closed my throat and feigned shock and awe.

“The poor guy has stage-four prostate cancer,” Baylor continued. “He got it from working in that tire plant in Georgia.”

I was gobsmacked. “I had no idea,” I said.

“And they won’t even honor his medical benefits.”

Gobsmacked indeed. I offered that he might have gone to see his mother.

He said that Glose had never mentioned her and asked me where she lived.

“Up in Aurora,” I said.

Baylor thought for a moment, his worried expression cauliflowering into one of downright terror. “I have to call her,” he said. “Do you know her number?”

I told him that unfortunately I didn’t and that she and Rodney had suffered a falling-out some years back. “But if he’s stage four,” I said, “I could totally see him going to spend some time with her.”

“All he has,” Baylor said, “is that little bit of money the tire plant gave him to try and keep him quiet.”

“Did he say how much that was?” I asked.

“A thousand bucks,” Baylor answered. “But you can’t live on a measly thousand bucks when you have stage-four prostate cancer. You can’t even
die
right with a thousand bucks.”

A tire plant in Georgia? Glose was starting to get creative—downright imaginatively diabolical.

“But going to see his mother makes a lot of sense,” Baylor conceded. “Hopefully she’ll be able to help him. I pray to God I didn’t do anything to drive him away.”

I told him that I doubted that very much. Then, to change the subject, I asked how the play was going.

He said it had been going well and that they were scheduled to open in a few weeks. “Sometimes I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing,” he said. “Like I’m onstage for no apparent reason. Just another piece of furniture floating around. Other times I feel like I’m getting closer to Willy’s soul.” He looked down at his hands, the fronts, the backs, as if he wasn’t sure whom they belonged to. “Rodney helped me memorize my lines,” he continued. “He’s helped me so much.”

I told him I had no idea they’d gotten so close.

“We’ve only been together a short time,” Baylor said, “but his companionship has meant a lot to me. Poor guy didn’t even have any clothes.”

I told Baylor that I was sure he meant a lot to Glose too. “Maybe he’ll come back to see you in the play,” I offered.

Baylor said that that would make him very happy and added, “I really hope he’s okay.”